one-percent
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Breakfast Topic: Sweet relief and sour percentages
There is something about a 1% wipe that simultaneously galvanizes me and infuriates me. It proves to me that a fight is within the group's grasp, but it also says to me that something trivial needs to be fixed, and often that trivial thing is hard to discover and we'll have to wipe several more times until we figure it out. It's like a thumb in the eye, and yet it's a necessary step on the road to killing a new boss. Frankly, once I hit the 1% wipe, I know the boss will die. There's no way around it. If we can get a boss to 1%, we can kill it. So often, I blame the wipe on the excitement of knowing just how close you are. It's so tempting to lose your composure at that moment, when you see the health drop to that precipice. You can taste the kill. Galling as it is, I myself have screwed up in that rush of here it is, here goes and found myself saying "Yeah, that was me, my bad." For example, last night instead of Shield Wall, I hit Challenging Shout at a crucial moment. I'd say my face was red, but after everything got done smashing me in said face, it wasn't so much red as gone entirely. Still, we got the kill. One of the things that's made the transition back to tanking worthwhile is getting to see the same fights from a new perspective, and for that reason, last night's heroic Spine kill was pretty sweet even through that 1% wipe. The focus was high, everyone did their job, and we won. Maybe the 1% actually enhanced the end. How about you? How do you push past that last 1%? World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
The math behind random drops and rolls
Reader Sekhar P. sent us an interesting story of a strange roll seen in Naxx recently: Haunting Call dropped, and four people needed. The rolls came up, in order: 1, 2, 3, 4. The raid boggled at how unlikely that must be. Sekhar's tip set off a round of discussion among our WoW Insider staff: while it seems unlikely that four numbers would come up in sequence, the math on it isn't any more likely than any other four numbers (3, 69, 82, and 95, for example, or even 4, 8, 15, and 16). The odds come out to 24/100^4, about 0.00000024%, or about two chances out of 10 million. Of course, probability is tricky, so the chances that any one of those rolls would come up is still one out of 100 -- just like coin flips, previous die rolls won't affect the current die rolls (mistaking that is often called the gambler's fallacy) But the chances that any specific four numbers would come up are the astronomical chances above.Of course, math aside, that still doesn't keep us from trying to predict how random rolls might work. We also recieved word from reader Emily about a site she and some friends are working on that is trying to predict just how much you'll have to run a certain instance to pick up some of the rarest items in the game, like Baron Rivendare's mount. Unfortunately, it's not a relevant indicator -- it looks like all they're doing is "simulating" runs on the item, and then tracking when it drops in their simulator. They're putting the math behind the chance into practical numbers.
