Today we killed heroic malygos and I was paid a huge compliment by my heal leader.
I am awesome.
Sarth +1 down, hopefully +2 on Tuesday.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Druid for mage
Jive has a mage friend asking how healing differs from DPS
---
Hey there. Snap, I played frost all through MC-T5! I'm a warlock now with priest and druid alts who tend to get called into BT for Gertie + Council.
The main difference between DPS and healing is that when healing, your output is capped. There's only so much healing to do, but you have to do it FAST.
On a basic level, healing is reactive. Raid-regrowth tends to be like this, eXtreem whack-a-mole. This mode is not about high heal-per-second (HPS), it's about people not dying RIGHT NOW.
As you get more experienced you'll be able to watch the field more and predict who'll take damage. This is how those paladins get anywhere raidhealing - they're casting before damage even happens. You don't have to be psychic to heal, but it helps :D
Druids have an extra little thing you may have heard of, called HOTs. These are a lot more like a standard DPS cycle, especially if you have experience keeping up DOTs or debuffs. It depends on your assignment, but usually you want to have between one tank lifebloomed, up to full hots on two tanks. HOTs give awesome HPS+HPM and cushion spikes but have to be put up ahead of time.
Great druid healing comes from being able to flow between reactive OMG healing and stabilising the fight through the insane HPS of HOTs.
Ideally you also need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your other healers. That's a whole extra subject though :)
This is all for 25-man raiding. Frankly, for 5-man, there's a much simpler plan. 1) Get 1600 +heal, 2) roll lifeblooms on 4 people, 3) cackle wildly.
---
Hey there. Snap, I played frost all through MC-T5! I'm a warlock now with priest and druid alts who tend to get called into BT for Gertie + Council.
The main difference between DPS and healing is that when healing, your output is capped. There's only so much healing to do, but you have to do it FAST.
On a basic level, healing is reactive. Raid-regrowth tends to be like this, eXtreem whack-a-mole. This mode is not about high heal-per-second (HPS), it's about people not dying RIGHT NOW.
As you get more experienced you'll be able to watch the field more and predict who'll take damage. This is how those paladins get anywhere raidhealing - they're casting before damage even happens. You don't have to be psychic to heal, but it helps :D
Druids have an extra little thing you may have heard of, called HOTs. These are a lot more like a standard DPS cycle, especially if you have experience keeping up DOTs or debuffs. It depends on your assignment, but usually you want to have between one tank lifebloomed, up to full hots on two tanks. HOTs give awesome HPS+HPM and cushion spikes but have to be put up ahead of time.
Great druid healing comes from being able to flow between reactive OMG healing and stabilising the fight through the insane HPS of HOTs.
Ideally you also need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your other healers. That's a whole extra subject though :)
This is all for 25-man raiding. Frankly, for 5-man, there's a much simpler plan. 1) Get 1600 +heal, 2) roll lifeblooms on 4 people, 3) cackle wildly.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Best Practices
http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2008/06/30/best-practices-part-2/
I’m sure some of these will seem naive or cookie-obvious. Maybe a different few to each reader.
Read books. The Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month, Refactoring. Learn a new language, methodology or framework every quarter.
Cycle people, don’t let them overspecialise or silo. You’ll get broader more useful employees. Their CVs will look nice, which should compensate for the extra challenge. Maintainability will be closer to the hearts of every developer. Consider how resilient your schedule is to a double-decker (”bus impedance”).
Overtime takes a toll. After eight hours you are not doing your best work. An overtime culture will cause employee throughput, fragmented design and many bugs reaching production. I bet Tseric put a lot of hours in. Having said that, a release push won’t kill you. Just not constantly.
Users are great at describing problems, not always so great at picking solutions (not that you should ignore those). Listen, bring in requirements, write usecases, iterate, run the tests, release, reexamine. Anyone should envy Blizzard the Elitist Jerks forum.
Admit mistakes. Confirmation bias is the root of evil. Identify the drivers and facts, don’t allow elegance as a driver but do allow maintainability and flexibiliity.
Tackle risk early, do design carefully but don’t gold plate. Identify the most likely causes of change and allow for those, instead of making the most general solution possible.
Keep people motivate through attention and constructive feedback. Bored/frustrated people cause problems, responsibility can transform them.
Keep visibility through the management chain, ensure those you lead understand your drivers clearly.
When appropriate, praise employees cc your manager. Help overcome challenges privately.
Ask employees to mail you about their successes or those who especially helped them and keep a record.
Don’t use stack ranking for more than two years.
I’m sure some of these will seem naive or cookie-obvious. Maybe a different few to each reader.
Read books. The Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month, Refactoring. Learn a new language, methodology or framework every quarter.
Cycle people, don’t let them overspecialise or silo. You’ll get broader more useful employees. Their CVs will look nice, which should compensate for the extra challenge. Maintainability will be closer to the hearts of every developer. Consider how resilient your schedule is to a double-decker (”bus impedance”).
Overtime takes a toll. After eight hours you are not doing your best work. An overtime culture will cause employee throughput, fragmented design and many bugs reaching production. I bet Tseric put a lot of hours in. Having said that, a release push won’t kill you. Just not constantly.
Users are great at describing problems, not always so great at picking solutions (not that you should ignore those). Listen, bring in requirements, write usecases, iterate, run the tests, release, reexamine. Anyone should envy Blizzard the Elitist Jerks forum.
Admit mistakes. Confirmation bias is the root of evil. Identify the drivers and facts, don’t allow elegance as a driver but do allow maintainability and flexibiliity.
Tackle risk early, do design carefully but don’t gold plate. Identify the most likely causes of change and allow for those, instead of making the most general solution possible.
Keep people motivate through attention and constructive feedback. Bored/frustrated people cause problems, responsibility can transform them.
Keep visibility through the management chain, ensure those you lead understand your drivers clearly.
When appropriate, praise employees cc your manager. Help overcome challenges privately.
Ask employees to mail you about their successes or those who especially helped them and keep a record.
Don’t use stack ranking for more than two years.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Healatica Principia
This started as a response to an Ego post on downranking, but grew well out of scope. The short version:
For raiding, you do have to offset damage taken against the healing you expect them to receive from other healers.
---
For raiding, the key points are:
#1. There is a minimum amount of overheal required to keep a raid tank alive
#2. The goal is to run out of mana exactly at the end of the fight
#3. Mostly, healers have SICK amounts of regen now. We aren't in MC any more. Eldr has nearly 600 mp5 oo5sr and he's far from leet.
Healing by prio is very effective:
#1. Can you CoH 3+ people?
#2. Does anyone need a shield+pom?
#3. Does anyone need a flash?
#4. Is PoM on CD? If not send to tank.
#5. Is a tank healer having trouble keeping up? GHmax
#6. Is renew up on tanks?
#7. Do you have <10% mana? Take a spirit break
#8. Chaincast GH1, even if the tank is full
Besides this, there has to be awareness of the other healers. Paladins are spike saviours, let them do it. Druids prevent spikes, Shaman spam CH4 - help with spikes more. Even if you have paladins, if there's spiky damage on ranged they may be FoLing, watch where others are healing and be cautious - better to waste mana than lose the tank.
We rarely allocate dedicated healers (and my priest is an alt), so I prefer to help out all over rather than try to muscle in on a specific area. Everyone is better at something than priests, I see it as my job to keep the toys going (coh, pom, renew) and help out as necessary. When flashing, I often target the person second-most in need of a heal, as my heals are smaller than others' and the other healers are very, very fast!
For raiding, you do have to offset damage taken against the healing you expect them to receive from other healers.
---
For raiding, the key points are:
#1. There is a minimum amount of overheal required to keep a raid tank alive
#2. The goal is to run out of mana exactly at the end of the fight
#3. Mostly, healers have SICK amounts of regen now. We aren't in MC any more. Eldr has nearly 600 mp5 oo5sr and he's far from leet.
Healing by prio is very effective:
#1. Can you CoH 3+ people?
#2. Does anyone need a shield+pom?
#3. Does anyone need a flash?
#4. Is PoM on CD? If not send to tank.
#5. Is a tank healer having trouble keeping up? GHmax
#6. Is renew up on tanks?
#7. Do you have <10% mana? Take a spirit break
#8. Chaincast GH1, even if the tank is full
Besides this, there has to be awareness of the other healers. Paladins are spike saviours, let them do it. Druids prevent spikes, Shaman spam CH4 - help with spikes more. Even if you have paladins, if there's spiky damage on ranged they may be FoLing, watch where others are healing and be cautious - better to waste mana than lose the tank.
We rarely allocate dedicated healers (and my priest is an alt), so I prefer to help out all over rather than try to muscle in on a specific area. Everyone is better at something than priests, I see it as my job to keep the toys going (coh, pom, renew) and help out as necessary. When flashing, I often target the person second-most in need of a heal, as my heals are smaller than others' and the other healers are very, very fast!
Monday, June 16, 2008
leetspeak
response to another of shamus' posts.
Slang serves many purposes and leetspeak is a fine example of all of them. It's being studied. The key driver imho is not technological change per se, but the availability and routing of comm channels. Rigid language is a form of redundancy which helps the language survive long journeys or periods of isolation. "Rosy fingered dawn arose above the wine dark sea".
The internet, dictionaries and the vast body of modern literature available make this redundancy unnecessary, so language is naturally evolving to a more portable, rich, fluid form.
I use a lot of spoken leet, but usually for effect. I like the subtleties of emphasis it allows. For example:
lol: just funny. Generally people say 'hehe' now.
lul: funny because someone's being stupid or a dick which is what lul means in Dutch.
kek: Alliance side, this means kk (ok) but also that I think you're telling me to do something dumb
lolwut: like wtf but less offensive
Most people probably don't get these subtleties, but that's the point of slang.
WTF is pronounced wuh-tuh-fuh. Pwned is powned or owned, I honestly couldn't care less. Anyone who says pee-owned is an outsider.
I do sometimes find it difficult speaking to work colleagues who still have a tenuous idea of what the tubes are about. Most of the little jokes, references and asides I usually pepper my conversation with I have to omit or expect to be ignored. This probably makes me seem kinda boring, when in fact I'm trying way harder to understand their hobby than they are mine. crai crai. (self-aware emo)
I met a work colleague who didn't understand emo the other day. After a pause, we silently agreed this was an unbridgable chasm and we should just move on.
Slang serves many purposes and leetspeak is a fine example of all of them. It's being studied. The key driver imho is not technological change per se, but the availability and routing of comm channels. Rigid language is a form of redundancy which helps the language survive long journeys or periods of isolation. "Rosy fingered dawn arose above the wine dark sea".
The internet, dictionaries and the vast body of modern literature available make this redundancy unnecessary, so language is naturally evolving to a more portable, rich, fluid form.
I use a lot of spoken leet, but usually for effect. I like the subtleties of emphasis it allows. For example:
lol: just funny. Generally people say 'hehe' now.
lul: funny because someone's being stupid or a dick which is what lul means in Dutch.
kek: Alliance side, this means kk (ok) but also that I think you're telling me to do something dumb
lolwut: like wtf but less offensive
Most people probably don't get these subtleties, but that's the point of slang.
WTF is pronounced wuh-tuh-fuh. Pwned is powned or owned, I honestly couldn't care less. Anyone who says pee-owned is an outsider.
I do sometimes find it difficult speaking to work colleagues who still have a tenuous idea of what the tubes are about. Most of the little jokes, references and asides I usually pepper my conversation with I have to omit or expect to be ignored. This probably makes me seem kinda boring, when in fact I'm trying way harder to understand their hobby than they are mine. crai crai. (self-aware emo)
I met a work colleague who didn't understand emo the other day. After a pause, we silently agreed this was an unbridgable chasm and we should just move on.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
The content
After Ego's visit, I'm all starstruck and concerned someone might actually read this blog. Or try to. Doesn't look like there's much here, hm?
All the links are in my shared items, so as not to clog this blog. I read a lot of news, mainly slashdot and lolcats, but now and then I stumble on something like findlaw or ethicalcorp.
All the links are in my shared items, so as not to clog this blog. I read a lot of news, mainly slashdot and lolcats, but now and then I stumble on something like findlaw or ethicalcorp.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
More
Second comment on the same post. I'm gonna have to start paying Shamus for storage.
-
@DevNull: yay I'm not alone! I feel less dirty for liking WoW now. A little anyway.
Are cookiecutter builds so bad? With scarce resources, not many people will actually achieve the perfect build. It gives people an easy point to aim for, letting them get 'on the path'* without a statistics degree. A rich, well-balanced system will allow playstyle differences to make deviation profitable. So newbies can get on the path to cookiecutter easily, then when they get there they're pro enough to understand the deviations they want to make. I raid felguard.
I actually love the idea of legendary weapons, which provide 50-75% of your character's power. I would like to be able to name my weapon, pop different mods in and out, upgrade the core weapon down multiple trees and so on. I'd be happy to get 1 new weapon every 20 levels, that would require a LOT of work (or some work and the gutting of my current weapon) to bring up to a reasonable level. Each weapon would give my character almost entirely different abilities.
Of course what I'm talking about is a mech game that isn't a frackin mech game**. I've hated every one I tried, totally unapproachable, no story, post-apoc setting. Don't they like selling games?
HG:L screwed the pooch on this one by not allowing you to remove enchantments. You could screw up your uberweapon, forever. In short: no respec button. So close, but no cigar. I'm not Korean, nor am I unemployed, therefore the chances of me ever getting a really good weapon are nearly nil.
That's really demotivating. CRPGers will put up with a hell of a lot if they're on the path. HG:L tips you off the path at every opportunity, one misstep and boom you're dead. Call me obsessive but playing without a respec button is like hardcore mode to me.
* 'on the path' is not my idea, but I wish it was.
http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2008/05/being-on-path.html
** Click my name.
and yeah, I did mention I like obsessive analysis right?
-
@DevNull: yay I'm not alone! I feel less dirty for liking WoW now. A little anyway.
Are cookiecutter builds so bad? With scarce resources, not many people will actually achieve the perfect build. It gives people an easy point to aim for, letting them get 'on the path'* without a statistics degree. A rich, well-balanced system will allow playstyle differences to make deviation profitable. So newbies can get on the path to cookiecutter easily, then when they get there they're pro enough to understand the deviations they want to make. I raid felguard.
I actually love the idea of legendary weapons, which provide 50-75% of your character's power. I would like to be able to name my weapon, pop different mods in and out, upgrade the core weapon down multiple trees and so on. I'd be happy to get 1 new weapon every 20 levels, that would require a LOT of work (or some work and the gutting of my current weapon) to bring up to a reasonable level. Each weapon would give my character almost entirely different abilities.
Of course what I'm talking about is a mech game that isn't a frackin mech game**. I've hated every one I tried, totally unapproachable, no story, post-apoc setting. Don't they like selling games?
HG:L screwed the pooch on this one by not allowing you to remove enchantments. You could screw up your uberweapon, forever. In short: no respec button. So close, but no cigar. I'm not Korean, nor am I unemployed, therefore the chances of me ever getting a really good weapon are nearly nil.
That's really demotivating. CRPGers will put up with a hell of a lot if they're on the path. HG:L tips you off the path at every opportunity, one misstep and boom you're dead. Call me obsessive but playing without a respec button is like hardcore mode to me.
* 'on the path' is not my idea, but I wish it was.
http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2008/05/being-on-path.html
** Click my name.
and yeah, I did mention I like obsessive analysis right?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)