Back and blogging...RL upgrades include: fatherhood, masters degree, and instructor status

I am back in action.  My blogging hiatus is complete.  I finished my masters degree in Theology (inadvertently boosting the "priest" element of this blog), completed the USAF's instructor pilot course in the C-130J, and (most importantly) we had our first kid, Molly.
This blog will henceforth be exclusively pictures of my adorable daughter.

Just kidding.

Fatherhood and instructorhood are treating me well, although my sleep-to-wake ratio seems to have changed forever.

I now play WoW and Clash of Clans, and only in-between time spent with my wife and daughter, and when I'm not on base.  I no longer raid, but I am an avid garrison developer, and I am leveling my fourth character to 100.

Remarkably, I recovered my oldest WoW account, the one I played when vanilla launched!  My original priest is still there!  That means I now have a character with full Tier 3 (Transcendence) gear and the ultimate priest mantlepiece, Benediction/Anathema.  I am in priest transmog nirvana.  So few priests can tout those old pieces, and almost none can claim that they got Tier 3 when it was the top gear in the game.  Ahh, the old days.

I will be blogging about gaming with sporadic schedules, mobile gaming with Clash of Clans, and a LOT of WoW strategies for "fire and forget" gaming.  "Fire and forget" is a reference to air-to-air missiles which a pilot can launch and then ignore due to autonomous guidance systems.  In WoW, this includes follower missions and garrison buildings.  In CoC, just about everything other than active attacking is considered fire and forget.

Stay tuned for more updates!  I'll be sharing about my first paladin, Smoogepal, which was my first character to hit 100 thanks to the free character boost which came with WoD.  I'll be talking about the fantastic crafted items which are making my hunter, Smoogehunt, a force to be reckoned with.  And, I'll be talking about the best ways I've found to capitalize on the WoW economy when you only have minutes to log in at a time.

And, in my normal fashion, I'll weave in parallels from my career as an Air Force pilot, where I am now an instructor, flight commander, and soon (hopefully) to be a Major.

Signing off...

Waddle

High latency DPS observations

The internet is down completely here in Afghanistan today, so I took this opportunity to write a few letters home and construct a new blog entry.

Since moving to location B on this deployment, my internet connection has been stable, running about 400ms latency with a cap of 128Kbps download rate.  This has been nice for applications like FaceTime, which seem to be optimized on the military and paid networks.  The internet costs $130/month for that “faster” speed, but over here I think that’s about as good as I could ever expect.  I've been able to communicate with my wife daily, and in some of my spare time I've been able to even do some light raiding in WoW.

My most recent enjoyment in online gaming has come from a surprisingly fun class to play in WoW, the hunter.  Mine has been 90 for a while, although I merely used that toon for professions.  However, I was relatively diligent in downing Ordos and Celestials each week for a total of 4 chances at high item level gear, and that paid off (this only takes about 10 minutes if you use oQueue, or accomplish it on a Tuesday after server reset).  I ended up with four pieces of “warforged” 559 gear, which tops out at 567 once upgraded using valor points.  For Smoogehunt, I started sensing that his DPS might actually be competitive in raids at a higher item level, even with the taxing latency that slows ability use.

And so, this is what I’ve learned about playing DPS classes with high latency…

BLUF (bottom line up front): Let your UI do some of the thinking for you, because you have less time to think.

In WoW, bandwidth is generally not your biggest limfac (limiting factor).  Your super awesome hacker university-level mega internet pipeline doesn’t necessarily perform any better than my in-home $50/mo cable internet.  In reality, latency plays a much larger role in your ability to complete raids or farm mobs.  (Don’t even try to compete in PvP with high latency, at least in arenas.)  As far as I know, there is no way to queue abilities for use, so every time you want to cast Explosive Shot, you have to press a button.  For every DPS class I've seen so far (DK, rogue, hunter, and warlock), this means your triggered abilities will always be delayed by your latency + reaction time + physical cast time.  So…with 400ms latency, it takes .4 seconds at least for my system to receive the notification that Lock and Load has procced, then I have to mentally react and decide to cast Explosive Shot, and then I have to physically push my “1” key.  Now, my reaction time is decent, but this delay is simply unavoidable over here.  How, then does a DPS player compete when he is at a near half-second or greater disadvantage?

Select the right spell at the right time.  i.e. Don’t bother with Serpent Shot when a lot of low-HP mobs are in front of you…use your Glaives.

The only thing I've found so far to help with that is User Interface improvement.  Simple addons such as TellMeWhen and SpellFlash will quickly cue your attention to upcoming and high priority abilities.  For instance, I found a pre-made string that I imported into TellMeWhen for my Frost DK.  It provides some centrally positioned icons that show when I can use an ability.  It does the checking to make sure I have adequate runes or energy, and it highlights procs when they happen.  For my DK this helps me anticipate which abilities I need to use.  Even with latency, if you are selecting appropriate abilities based on energy and procs, you will suffer less DPS loss because you are never capping in any of your resources. 

Capping your resource is an automatic loss of DPS.  For a DK, you have two resources (runes and energy).  Rogues simply have an ever-regenerating energy bar, just like a hunter, and casters have mana.  My warlock also has an energy resource that can be spent to transform, which is less time critical, and my priest stores up charges that I can consume to increase my healing throughput.  If you ever have 100% energy or all of your runes (rogue/hunter/DK), and an enemy is standing, you are losing DPS.  If you capped your focus as a hunter because the game was ticking away while your connection slowly registered your actions, you lost DPS due to latency.  However, if you have 500ms latency, you can still keep your focus below 100% almost all the time.  The only exception I occasionally see is when a Lock and Load procs when I already had about 50% focus.  I might hit 100% focus while I’m dumping Explosive Shot, but the next ExS that requires focus always brings me down quickly.

The universal cooldown seems longer when you have higher latency.  OK, maybe not mathematically correct, but I can tell you that you have to wait for the UCD (the natural recharge rate before you can cast any other ability) before you can select your next attack.  With high latency this often means that you accept an additional delay between instant casts.  I notice a much faster attack pace on a faster connection with my rogue and hunter, because each of those occasionally spams instant attacks to dump energy/focus.  The good news here is that most of the time you will be selecting abilities based on procs and cooldowns, not just spamming one key waiting for the UCD.  When I do need to dump energy/focus, it simply takes me longer than a player with 30ms.  Best advice here: don’t fixate on spam abilities…the chances are that you have a proc or a cooldown you can use to fill that time instead.  Try not to ever cap an infinite resource when in combat.

Targeting makes a huge difference.  In some fights, such as Garrosh, I have noticed my DPS goes far below normal.  That’s because I don’t have a great way to target new enemies when they pop up.  I still use my mouse wheel “up” as my “target next enemy,” which I’m finding to be entirely inadequate.  I’m rarely selecting my intended target on the first single scroll, so entire seconds are lost just trying to find something new to shoot.  This is not good, and it’s even worse if you are on a melee character such as a DK or rogue!  With a hunter you should have almost zero downtime because you attack at range and you can cast all of your shots while moving.  No excuses for a hunter, so I’m going to try to find a good addon for target selection, perhaps in the form of nameplates.

Be ready to use your big abilities.  Know which key to hit when your 2-minute DPS cooldown is up, and quickly fit it into your rotation.  I now use “Q” “E” “R” and “V” more than I ever used to, because they are relatively quick to strike.  The primary numbers I use are 1, 2, and 3, and I do use shift some.  I currently have some cooldown abilities tied to the F-1 through F-5 keys at the top of my keyboard, but I find myself reaching for those and using my cooldowns a lot less frequently than I otherwise would.  I am not sure where to fit those abilities, since I also don’t naturally use the Ctrl button.  I’m constantly looking for good keybinds to improve my speed when it comes to ability selection.  The first step is definitely getting to know which spells are your character’s most important.

I recommend Icy-Veins as a great first stop.  I probably spend about 15% or more of my time “gaming” actually reading forums, tutorials, and other people’s advice.  I have been told that Noxxic is grossly inaccurate, so I went back to Icy Veins for my theorycrafting and to simply learn basic rotations on new specs.  This is where I figure out what my important spells are, and I assign the most common ones to the easiest keys to reach.  For instance, Explosive Shot is “1.”

New base, new options, new problems

So, as we transition to a new location, I am fortunate to now have a few different internet options available to me.  So far, the free network seems about the same as the expensive paid network, in bandwidth and latency.  While I seem to no longer have to worry about disconnects due to router hopping, I now have to contend with a very consistent 300ms latency.  And, from the limited time I've had to log on so far, I can tell that bandwidth will make that even worse in raids for some reason.  That being said, I'm always impressed by how little bandwidth WoW actually requires to be playable.

Now that I have tasted the flex and LFR raids, I am usually disappointed when I don't have enough time to actually log on for a couple hours and join raids.  My recently leveled DK is specced for DPS, so the queues can be upwards of 30 minutes.  I don't have a high enough item level to join flex raids using oqueue yet, so I'm in the middle area of limited loot and long waits.

Every week I use a bonus roll for both Ordos and a Celestials boss, on each of my four level 90 characters.  Including the default drop, that comes out to 16 chances to loot a high level item off those bosses.  Two weeks in a row I have stuck out entirely.  RNG is quite frustrating.

Flying IRL, flying not IRL, achievs, and race change

OK, it was a slow week for gaming, fast week for flying.

Almost done with another air medal (20 combat missions flown).

But in my off-time I had the chance to do a few cool things.  I was invited to help clear SoO on normal difficulty, which is one step harder than Flex.  We did great!  I was present for the first 7 bosses, and was ranked well in healing, usually near the top if absorbs are counted.  A big shout out to the folks at Genetically Superior for offering to give me a shot.

I got a 553 ilvl staff off Galakras, which is a level of loot I never even expected to have.  After 2 upgrades, that's a 561 weapon!  I have a few new good lessons learned about healing on this network, which is notorious for hopping routers without warning, therefore disconnecting all connectivity.  This almost always occurs in the middle of a boss fight.

A note about networks...

This is what you want to see if you're using a wireless adapter.  

This shows you how many routers I can pick up at one time, however.

The network we use here is configured, perhaps inadvertently, to swap your router to a "stronger" connection upon any background scan, which Windows insists on doing no matter how much I try to avoid it.  So, when that happens and my primary "good" router has a lapse, I get reconnected to a "lesser" router that effectively kills the internet.  Everybody has this problem here, and it's common for folks to complain about skype cutting out at interval or for facebook to simply stop loading.  That's because, in the background, their wifi connection is going to something like this:

My only solution so far is simply to initiate the background scan on my own and choose my primary router, forcing the connection to the good one.  How long it will stay on that router is anybody's guess...I would say I get about 15 minutes before it hops, if I'm lucky.  It's not unusual for me to literally reconnect to my router in the middle of a raid boss fight, so for a period of 10 seconds or even more, my guy is standing there uncommanded.  Fortunately, I'm usually so quick that the game doesn't even boot me off.  I have tried programs such as WLAN Optimizer to cancel the background check, but it seems to have no effect whatsoever.  That tells me that the mil routers themselves may be the culprits.  One way or another, we'll be at a different base in a few weeks, so perhaps their internet will be structured differently.

In other news, I transferred my pandaren toon over to blood elf, primarily for raiding and transmog reasons.  I like the pandaren character model in theory, but in reality it looks awkward on most mounts, terrible in most good transmog sets, and the area consumed by the player in the middle of the screen is less than ideal for healing.  My first 7 years, I played an undead character model when healing, and never had to deal with large character types crowding out my monitor before.

Oh, and I finally got the achievement in ICC10 I've been working on for 3 weeks.  Check out the new look of Smooge.  Notice the subtle glowing skeleton death dragon mount:

Still here in Afghanistan...transmogs and leveling

That about sums up how we feel about deployments!

OK, I'm really enjoying the transmog thing.

Running Flex raids with this set is just cool to watch.

Also, I have two new toons joining the fight at 90.  My first tank ever, and a hunter.  I am enjoying the druid tanking style, and even tanked my first level 90 raid successfully with no wipes!

The hunter seems to be a little lackluster in dps, but he's only 480-ish itemlevel.  The queues are considerably longer for dps than for tanks, of course.  My druid will pass my hunter with help from Timeless Isle and quick raid queues.  However, leveling a druid as guardian was a total pain in the rear.

Tier 5 transmog, a quick trip for a great set

OK, so for those of you who missed the tier 5 raids, you'll be pleased to learn that they are each soloable at level 90, although the final bosses in Serpentshrine and The Eye will each require more strategy than the lesser bosses.  I now have 4/5 pieces of the tier 5 transmog set, after just 1 run in each of those instances.  I did die once on Kael'thas, the final boss in The Eye.
Also, it's worth noting that Kael'thas also has a small chance to drop a coveted phoenix mount.

Here are some shots from recent boss kills, and I have to add that it was a lot of fun, and quite lucrative, to run these level 70 instances.

Tier 5 gloves!

Fathom-Lord stuns a LOT.

Lady Vashj was here!  Tier 5 helm!

Void Reaver silences a LOT.

Kael'thas was a proper challenge!  Tier 5 chest!

A disc priest can solo serpentshrine cavern, lady vashj, tempest keep, and Kael'thas at level 90!  It is definitely possible to get your tier 5 transmog set in 1 week.  The belt, Belt of the Long Road, must be crafted by a tailor who has the BOP pattern, so you may need to spam org chat.  A very nice player crafted mine for free when I provided the mats, which I bought on the AH.

Tier 1 and 2 level 60 instances all soloed as a disc priest

Any vanilla players will remember this scene...Ragnaros down once again.  He drops the Tier 2 legs, btw.

Well, this went remarkably faster than I expected!  In a short amount of time, I cleared all of BWL, Onyxia, and Molten Core.  That means I have proven that it is possible to solo all of the bosses that drop the 8 pieces of Tier 2 Transcendence gear.  Since killing the bosses goes quite quickly, and since you can only do those instances once per week, I have decided to also work on Tier 5.  My favorite priest tier set, tier 3, is no longer available in the game, unfortunately.  However, Tiers 2 and 5 are each remarkably distinct sets that look fantastic on a priest.

Here are clips of my Tier 2 solo tour:

 
 
I got the boots off Broodlord Lashlayer!

The 5 bosses following Razorgore were not hard.  Vaelstraza, the second boss will cause you to die after you beat her, because of a debuff.  At 90, DPS was not a problem at all.

Use the sand and dispel or you will get MC'd, he heals to 100%, and you have to wait 5 minutes.  Trust me.

 Chromaggus took a little longer, because I forgot about his mind control, but I got the shoulders!!!  These Shoulders took me months to earn when I used to raid with a DKP system.  How ironic I should pick them up on my first day of trying.

Nefarian turned out to be just as easy as the lesser bosses.

Onyxia was easy to find and simple to kill.  Divine Star helps with the adds.  She drops the Tier 2 helm, btw.