Versatility Sucks

Ko’ragh Down!

With the holidays and the revolving door of people, it feels like this week is the first “real” week of tries we have been able to put on Ko’ragh.  This time we went into it with a lot of proper research and managed to carve out a strategy.  This involved a lot of things, not the least of which was me glyphing Mocking Banner so that it functions as a misdirect and our rogue and hunter standing by to do the same.  Essentially Mocking Banner was available every other add phase it worked out, and it seemed to do miracle work of absolutely gluing the adds to our tank letting us burn them down faster.  The off phases when it was on cooldown went nice and smooth as our rogue and hunter worked together to pick the adds up.  We had a Deathknight available last night, but we wanted to sort out a method that did not rely on her since she is not an “every week” person in our raid and sometimes has scheduling conflicts.

It was amazing how different this set of attempts felt from the very start.  The first handful of tries we had made on him before felt like this chaotic mess.  This time around everything felt smooth and focused and while it took us a couple of attempts to work through the various issues…  we straight wrecked the boss in a method that felt extremely repeatable.  Additionally the entire raid as a whole felt better… even Tectus which is generally the most chaotic mess ever for us felt nice and smooth.  I am really damned proud of the progress we have made as a raid.  We have never been “cutting edge progression” but it feels nice to be doing well within the current tier with us sitting at 6/7 Normal and 2/7 Heroic.  Thursday night the goal is to get in and get us a few heroic kills, and maybe test the waters to see where we are on the DPS check that is Butcher.  Then hopefully we get some good solid attempts on Imperator Mar’gok.

Versatility Sucks

Yesterday twitter was a hotbed of long running conversations for me and various groups of people.  One of these conversations was with my friend Talarian about stat distribution on the items in Draenor.  As a Gladiator I have been focused on two things above all else…  Bonus Armor and Crit because both of these feed the goofy chain reaction that is the gladiator warrior.  In general Gladiators get 1.5 times the Attack Power from Bonus Armor per point of itemization than we do from Strength.  This makes it our number one stat for literally anything… because per point we are getting one and a half times the benefit.  The prime example of this is when you look at the Draenic Strength Potion and the Draenic Armor Potion.  When I pop a strength potion I get 1000 attack power during the course of its buff, when I pop the armor potion which feels counter intuitive… I gain 1500 attack power.  So yesterday I was complaining about getting items with the “wrong stats”.

Talarian chimed in with a well written post where he mathed things out and came up with the conclusion that relative ilevel is far more important than having an item with the “perfect” stat combination.  While I agree with this in theory…  it is nonetheless frustrating when you have to trade in an item with the perfect stat package with a “bigger” item with a rather shitty one.   I feel like Blizzard goes through these phases where they want to make “stats interesting” but I feel like their game design simply does not support this.  Raid encounters are in essence more about “throughput” than making “interesting choices”.  So long as they keep making “DPS Check” encounters, that is literally the only thing we are  going to care about, and we want whatever stat package gives us the most performance.  In these scenarios stats like Versatility lose out, because would you rather have the stat that passively and opaquely “makes things better” or would you rather have that stat that cascades a chain reaction of your abilities making your class “feel” better.

Right now Versatility feels like a failed experiment, because it is this phantom stat that “makes everything better”.   If we look at the definition on the wiki: Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example.  All of this sounds amazing… but the problem is it is also boring.  When I stack crit it directly effects my chances of abilities interacting with each other, since a Crit X gives me a free Y and a Crit Y gives me a free Z…  essentially my class FEELS better to play.  When I stack Versatility the benefits are largely transparent and feel something akin to “Mastery 2.0” but somehow more boring.

Thank You for Blogging

While I am in this mode of reacting to conversations from twitter… I have to single one out that happened with the Godmother of Faff herself…  AlternativeChat.  This comment itself is buried in part of a larger conversation about the effect of when we refer to someone on our blogs.  But it underlines a problem all bloggers have.  None of us think what we are doing is as meaningful and important as others seem to.  I am singling out AlternativeChat here because she has been a good friend for some time, and been every so gracious to follow me down a number of whims.  All of this said and all history aside…  when I wanted to have her on my Bel Folks Stuff podcast, I was quite literally afraid that she was going to say no.  I feel like the tiniest of ants compared to her when it comes to my impact on the blogosphere and my reach within our shared community.  Thankfully she graciously accepted and out of it came a really wonderful conversational podcast.

What I find hard to fathom is that I am sure there are people in the community that look at me the same way as I looked at AlternativeChat.  I feel like I do nothing important, I just do my thing but it is the act of me doing my thing that is the important thing.  There was a further discussion yesterday about numbers and statistics and all of that sort of thing.  In truth at the end of the day I would feel just as happy if I had 50 readers as if I had 500 readers.  All that really matters is that there is someone out there listening and reading and caring enough about me to keep doing it on a regular basis.  This is not a business for me, this is an act of love and caring… and all I am looking for is people to share that with.  So if you are out there blogging, I want to thank you deeply for doing whatever it is you do.  At the end of the day you can’t read a person daily without caring about the individual on the other side of the screen.  As far as the readers… I want to thank you all the most because you make doing this crazy thing each morning worthwhile because I know I am not alone.