avoidance
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Apple formally challenges the EU's tax demands
Apple is about to fight the European Commission's claims that it must pay the €13 billion in back taxes ($13.6 billion) it allegedly owes from its deal with Ireland. The American firm tells Reuters that it's planning to appeal the ruling this week on the grounds that it not only can't abide by the decision, but that the figures don't make sense. To start, Apple argues that the EC falsely determined that two of its business units existed solely on paper, and thus didn't justify their untaxed profits. They were real, actively managed companies, the company claims. Also, Apple reportedly can't comply with the decision without making Ireland violate past tax laws that had different rules for residents and non-residents.
EU Commission: Apple must repay its $14.5b Irish tax break
The European Commission has ruled that Apple was given up to €13 billion ($14.5/£11.1 billion) in an illegal sweetheart tax deal with the Irish government. The amount of money involved here dwarfs the EU antitrust penalties handed out to Google, Microsoft and others, but this is effectively a backdated tax bill, rather than a fine. Officials opened the investigation into Apple's tax affairs back in 2013 and soon found that the agreement that it had signed with Ireland was illegal.
Facebook changes how it pays tax in the UK
Facebook has announced that starting this April, it'll radically simplify its business arrangements in the UK. Boor-ing, right? Except this means that the social network's tax dealings will now be much more transparent. It's a big deal because, until now, the company has been accused of avoiding paying its fair share. After all, in 2014 it paid less than $7,000 despite the UK being its biggest overseas market. It somehow managed to pay a rate of just four percent on its operations, despite the going rate for businesses being 20 percent, so you can see why people were angry.
Apple fined $347 million for Italian tax... irregularities
Apple's Italian subsidiary has reportedly been slapped with a €318 million ($347 million) bill for failing to pay tax in the country. According to the BBC and La Repubblica, authorities found disparities between the amount of money it brought in and the amount it handed over between 2008 and 2013. In that five-year period, it's believed that the firm paid just €30 million ($33 million), significantly less than the €880 million ($961 million) it's believed to have owed.
Ireland will eliminate Apple's sweet tax deal within four years
Apple and other tech giants had better not lean too heavily on Ireland's super-favorable tax environment; at least one big perk is going away. Finance minister Michael Noonan has detailed a new budget that, among other things, will phase out the "double Irish" system that let companies operating in Ireland (including Apple) move their revenue to an Ireland-registered offshore tax haven. As of 2015, companies incorporated in the country will have four years to make sure that they're also tax resident -- that is, they'll pay the same as any other corporation operating on the Emerald Isle.
EU says Apple's Irish tax deal is illegal
An EU commission has accused Ireland of granting "state aid" tax breaks to Apple that may break market rules. That was the result of an investigation by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over Irish deals brokered in 1991 and 2007. It has now asked Ireland to provide more information about its tax arrangements with Apple and other companies, including Fiat and Starbucks. The OECD also looking into Luxembourg and the Netherlands as part of a larger probe to find out if certain EU nations help multinational companies swerve taxes. At 12.5 percent, Ireland has a lower tax rate than any other EU country, and Cupertino's complex tax deals there have been questioned before. As the US Senate saw recently, shuffling money around countries helps Apple avoid nearly $20 million a day in taxes -- and the EU seems to have a dimmer view of its strategy than the SEC did. [Image credit: pieceoplastic/Flickr]
Norrathian Notebook: So you aren't Landmark's greatest builder
The walls are lumpy. The stairs are crooked. You couldn't make a statue of a blob if your virtual life depended on it, and everyone comments on your creative Koi pond that's actually a fireplace. So you aren't Landmark's greatest builder. Join the club! Despite how it may appear at times (especially when you see majestic jaw-dropping creations plastered all over Twitter and featured in livestream tours), there really are a number of us. So who cares if you can't build a voxel replica of the Taj Mahal with the Bronx Zoo on the side? Well, you do if your perceived lack of skills is keeping you from enjoying the game! It can be hard when you see such amazing builds springing up around you; it's easy to get discouraged if you are one of the skill-impaired. I already know of players who have lost hope and even some of their interest in the game because they feel their skills are not quite adequate. But I'm here to tell you that you -- yes, you -- are indeed a valuable member of Landmark's community and we need you. So for those without any leet building skills, here are some tips for avoiding creative frustration and ways to more fully enjoy the game.
Japanese robot gets better at not running into people
Hitachi is taking Asimov's I Robot law about not harming humans more seriously with new tweaks to its wheeled Emiew 2 bot. The 30-pound humanoid now packs a sensor that'll measure walking speeds (in an office, for instance) and generate mapping data to predict where someone might pop up unexpectedly. It'll then avoid those areas or slow down so as not to roll into your kneecaps. Given Emiew's 31-inch frame and 4 mph speed, we weren't too worried anyway -- there are other, decidedly more terrifying robots to avoid.
Something needs to be done about avoidance
I've had a bit of a chip on my shoulder lately about avoidance stats in WoW. For the duration of the expansion plate tanks of all stripes have been spurning pieces with dodge or parry -- or heavens forbid, both -- in favor of more interesting stats like hit, expertise, haste, and mastery, which all provide some sort of hook to the new active mitigation paradigm. It's weird, but in this case, Blizzard is a victim of their own success. They've designed a fantastic new way for tanks to perform their job, which has had the unfortunate side effect of neutering two of the oldest tanking stats in the game. Yet, Blizzard seems convinced that this is a situation that needs fixing, rather than a blessing in disguise, and across the various patches of Mists they have been making tweaks here and there to make avoidance stats more attractive for each plate tank. I believe that this is an incorrect approach; they should instead embrace this happy accident. Much as how leather tanks get to enjoy DPS stats like haste and crit as their bread and butter, so too should plate tanks be freed from the oppressive yoke of bygone, obsolete stats like dodge and parry. The game has finally left those broken stats behind and this is the opportunity to usher in a new, more-perfect system of tank gearing.
Where does the pressure lie in healing?
I used to be a healer, once upon a time. It was in the days of vanilla, when being a healer consisted largely of staring at 40 bars, pressing Flash Heal, and occasionally mixing it up with a bubble or Heal Rank 4 while swigging potions like they were going out of style. It was a very different time, and healing was by and large much less complex than it is today. My guild didn't use Vent, so I did all the healing rotation calls via macros on my keyboard -- that's how easy healing was. I had time to press macro buttons and pay attention to calling things. But at some point that guild fell apart, as guilds are wont to do on occasion. And since server transfers weren't even a possibility at that point in time, I simply rolled another character on another server, vowing to take a break from any and all raiding. It lasted until paid server transfers were added as a feature, at which point my priest was promptly moved to my new server and I began healing again -- this time, in battlegrounds. I helped a lot of friends by healing them while they tried their hardest to get High Warlord in the original honor grind. So what happened? Well ... healing happened.
A look at avoidance balancing in Mists
Theck, the paladin tank theorycrafter, has recently finished a series of posts at his blog looking at the state of avoidance in the upcoming expansion. He examined every aspect of the system with the help of a deluge of formulae to come up with some very helpful information for tanks to brush up on while waiting for Mists and all its new content to launch. In particular, in the earlier parts of the series, Theck discerned the new formula for working out each avoidance stat after diminishing returns. As a result, he was able to plot out (for plate tanks in particular) the proper ratio that dodge and parry should be balanced at. Right now, on live, we want to keep parry and dodge as absolutely close as possible. The two have the same diminishing returns curve, which means that x points of parry will be diminished exactly the same as x points of dodge. As such, if you have 3% more parry than dodge, you're losing a non-zero amount of avoidance to the gaping maw of diminishing returns that you might otherwise keep if it was reforged to dodge. However, as Theck has discovered, the DR curves were bent significantly apart in Mists, to the point that we'll want much more parry to keep an even ratio with dodge -- about three times more parry, to be exact.
Lichborne: The effect of the new stat changes on death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. We're still a couple of weeks away from the dam burst that is the Mists of Pandaria press event, but in the meantime, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted a new Dev Watercooler. He listed some stat changes coming in Mists that, while ostensibly not as complicated as those in Wrath, still hold some interesting and possibly major implications for class balance in the coming expansion. Let's dive right in and see what they mean for death knights. Blocking takes a week While it doesn't directly affect us, the blocking changes will certainly shake up the tanking hierarchy that we're a part of, so it's worth pointing out that the usual single roll combat table for dodging, parrying, or blocking a hit is gone. Instead, the chance to block will be calculated only after the dodge and parry chance is calculated. This essentially means that being unhittable is gone. You can't just stack to 102.4%. Of course, death knights and druids have never been able to do this, but they will now be joined by the shield tanks.
The Daily Grind: Do you make stealth alts?
If you've spent any kind of time in MMOs, you've undoubtedly run into at least one person who drives you completely insane. Perhaps your boss heard you mention World of Warcraft at the coffee machine one day and popped up in your guild shortly thereafter, ensuring that you'd never have a moment's peace in-game ever again. Maybe one of your real-life friends is the sweetest person face-to-face but when gaming becomes an unapologetic, egocentric loot-fiend prone to throwing tantrums if he can't gear up his alts over other people's mains. Or you could pick any of the many nerve-wracking examples that Justin so thoughtfully provided us in yesterday's MMO player hell top 10 list. Most of the time, you have three ways to deal with these types of people. First, you can tell them to sod off. That's not so popular, and in the case of RL friends or bosses, it can be downright dangerous, but it works. Second, you can simply quit playing the game altogether. But that option sucks if you enjoy the game when you're not around the annoying people, and it can cut you off from other good friends you want to spend time with. That leaves you with the third option of the seasoned MMO vet: stealth alts! You know, the alt characters you don't put in-guild, the ones you keep secret purely to enjoy the game with friends who are similarly sick of certain situations. This morning we wondered, with flashbacks of MMO player hell fresh in our minds, if you too have made stealth alts to avoid people -- and if so, whom? Don't worry, we won't tell them!
Lichborne: The great death knight Cataclysm tanking stat weight debate
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label. So here's the thing about figuring out your tank stat weights as you go into raiding: They're all subjective and likely to stay that way for a while. Between Blizzard's redesign of the way stats work, the way boss fights work and the newness of expansion, we're still trying to get the data we need to figure out the best exact way to min-max our gear. Right now, there are a few specific schools of thought on how to gear yourself for raid tanking, and right now, they all seem to be working for specific raid groups. Today, we'll take a look at the major tank survival stats and discuss the new quirks, benefits, and drawbacks of each of them as you start gearing up in earnest for the raid game.
The Light and How to Swing It: No more avoidance caps
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Oh, and I still love the Grand Crusader proc graphics even though they're unrelated to today's article. One thing that we've been taught as tanks throughout most of World of Warcraft is that you had to be capped at something in order to not be insta-killed by bosses. Back when I started playing, this was referred to as reaching uncrushable. You would have to stack up 102.4 percent avoidance in order to push the dreaded crushing blows off of the boss's list of possible attacks he could hit you with. This also meant that all incoming hits were avoided or mitigated in some way, shape or form. That primary form was blocks, and abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield at that time were custom tailored to this environment. With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, crushing blows were deemed a thing of the past and bosses would no longer be employing them against tanks. However, we quickly had a new cap to deal with instead of that called the defense cap, aka reaching uncrittable. This meant accumulating 540 defense skill against raid bosses in order to remove bosses of being able to hit us with a critical melee attack. In early raiding tiers, this was a constant balance between gems, enchants and trinkets, as each piece of gear we accumulated could change how the scales tipped.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mastery, threat decay and Cataclysm tanking
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy. Last week we talked about tanking and Cataclysm beta patch 13033, which was superseded almost immediately by patch 13066. Hard upon the heels of that comes patch 13117. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that there will be more beta patches that will bring with them more mechanical changes to the class. But I wanted to take this time to cover a couple of interesting recent posts about the way the class is shaping up. We'll cover the patch 13117 changes first, the move on. Arms Mortal Strike now costs 25 rage, down from 30 rage. Obviously a nice little quality of life change but not a major dealmaker, I would think. Fury Slam now costs 20 rage, up from 15 rage. Bloodthirst now restores 0.5% of max health, down from 1%. I'm honestly not sure why these changes were made. I guess Bloodsurge was too easy to use? Or it's aimed at arms warriors using Improved Slam in their builds. The Bloodthirst change must be aimed at Field Dressing making it too good. Protection Defensive Stance now increases threat by 125%, up from 100%. Not much to say, other than it's a welcome buff. More would be better, as initial threat is still somewhat wonky (once Vengeance stacks up, it's not a concern, but the initial seconds of a pull can be rough for a warrior without Bloodrage, shouts just aren't making up for the loss of that ability) especially if trying to hold more than one.
Blood Pact: Meet the minions, Part 6 - the felguard
Each week Dominic Hobbs brings you Blood Pact. "You gotta be a moron... you gotta be a moron to wanna be a fighter. " ~ Rocky Balboa Over the last few months Blood Pact has had a mini-series running to introduce the various demonic accessories. "Meet the Minions" has covered imps, voidwalkers, succubus and felhounds as well as infernals and doomguards. Along the way we have also covered such game-play lessons as pet-use, threat, crowd-control and mage-hate. So that only leaves the one minion to cover, the mighty felguard. Unlike almost all the other minions there is no quest to gain the ability to summon the felguard -- you simply pop a point into the talent and this demonic knowledge is dropped into your brain. The talent is currently on the ninth tier of the demonology tree, so you will need to be level 50 before you can learn it. Even at level 80 you will need to invest almost 60% of your talent points into demonology just to reach it, leaving little room for anything in the other trees. Because of this the felguard is pretty much only seen with demonology-build warlocks. Hybrid builds were popular at the start of Wrath, but changes to spell mechanics have meant that they are rarely used these days.
The Light and How to Swing It: The low level tank part 1
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. For the next couple weeks we'll be taking a look at low level dungeon runners. Cross-realm instancing is coming in patch 3.3 and along with it will be the ability for low level characters to finally find those level appropriate groups for old world dungeons. Being that those parties will need tanks, we thought we'd take a look at what an up and coming paladin needs to know about dungeons as well as what types of gear and stats to be on the lookout for. We're going to start with tanking and then move on to healing and damage-dealing in the weeks to come.
A macro for stacking parry or dodge
I haven't played a tank in a while, so I haven't had to mess with stats at endgame for a long time. Though my paladin is slowly getting there, so this little macro over at Honor's Code might come in handy. Parry and dodge are very similar abilities -- both of them help you to completely avoid damage from bosses as a tank. But they do have a very few important differences (Parry speeds up your next attack swing, and is affected by diminishing returns at higher levels of the stat), so when you're gearing up at endgame, you want to make sure to balance them out in the right way.
Arcane Brilliance: Patch 3.3 PTR changes for mages
It's the weekend, and that means it's time for another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column where the boys are boys, the girls are girls, and the warlocks are smoking husks that only vaguely resemble the humanoid shapes they once assumed.We're taking a small break this week from our ongoing leveling guide parade. There are some things we need to discuss, you and me. We need to have a talk. Don't worry! It's nothing bad! We're getting a pretty sweet buff, actually. Well, arcane mages are, anyway. We just wanted to discuss it with you, that's all. Oh, we're sorry! Did you think Arcane Brilliance was breaking up with you or something? No, we'd never do that! Arcane Brilliance still thinks you're sexy.See, it's this whole patch 3.3 thing that's happening right now. It's got Arcane Brilliance all hot and bothered. The other columns are too busy to talk to Arcane Brilliance about it. Totem Talk is all excited about "new totems" or some other such nonsense, Lichborne is too busy being overpowered, and Bood Pact... well, you didn't hear it from me but Blood Pact is written by a warlock. I know! Right here at this otherwise reputable website! Also, Blood Pact smells funny. I think it's a gland problem. It's very embarrassing. I shouldn't be telling you this. And Blood Pact drinks its own pee. Okay. That's enough. I'm done now. I've said too much. Keep this to yourself, all right? Loose lips sink ships and all that.Jump on past the break and we'll discuss the patch 3.3 changes for mages.