theorycrafting
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The Daily Grind: Do you theorycraft or do you heed others' advice?
I've been playing with various skill builds in ArcheAge lately, and I think I've narrowed down one, maybe two, that I'm going to play for the duration. For the first time in a long time, I haven't looked at forum discussions or heeded flavor-of-the-month advice and am opting instead to test things out and arrive at some sort of personal happy medium between PvE viability, PvP survivability, and looking badass in my armor. What about you, Massively readers? Do you do your own class or skill testing in your favorite game, or do you make use of theorycrafters and their research? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Stick and Rudder: How complex is too complex for Star Citizen?
I've taken a little while to let Chris Roberts' recent flight model manifesto marinate. In that time, my opinion has run the gamut from "funk yeah, simulation!" to "hmm, I hope I'm able to enjoy this title" and back again. I waffled because as much as I'm salivating over Star Citizen and everything it represents, it's still one game out of dozens that I'm following. And as much as I'd like to, I can't realistically devote all of my free time to a single title!
Warlords of Draenor: High level characters vs. lower level content
In the new theorycrafting sticky on the Warlords of Draenor Alpha forums, there's a big post by Celestalon that explains how we're going to be able to solo old raids and such with the item squish making us proportionately less powerful in those raids. It's worth breaking down here, for those of us (like me) who enjoy that sort of thing for either fun or transmog. First up, all players will gain a damage reduction factors when attacked by creatures that are lower level, starting at Cataclysm content and heading down from there. Creatures from Mists of Pandaria and, presumably Warlords of Draenor will not be affected by this. So once a creature from Cataclysm content or below (Wrath, BC and Vanilla) attacks a character that outlevels them, there will be a formula that determines how little damage the character takes. Celestalon presented it as such. LevelDiff = PlayerLevel - CreatureLevel if (CreatureExpansion < Pandaria) then // 10% DR per level diff, with a floor of 10% DamageTakenFactor = max(1.0 - 0.1 * LevelDiff, 0.1) else DamageTakenFactor = 1.0 end What this means is that, when your level 100 character goes inside a level 80 Wrath raid, they'll have a very large reduction in how much damage they take.
Professions divorced from combat in 6.0
The Warlords of Draenor 6.0 patch notes brought many surprises, but one of the biggest is that professions will no longer provide bonuses that affect combat. Amidst the endless sea of notes, it's easy to miss these two sentences that will forever change the role of professions in WoW: Warlords of Draenor: Alpha Patch Notes Some of our goals with Professions in Warlords of Draenor are to make them more of a personal choice, and less of a mandatory "min/max" selection. To that end, we're removing the direct combat benefits of Professions. source For many years, theorycrafters and min/max'ers have baked profession bonuses into their calculations. The crit from skinning, the Synapse Springs of engineers, the eye gems of jewelcrafters, the warmer wrists of leatherworkers, etc. -- all of them have affected which professions are "best" for certain specs. In recent expansions we've seen Blizzard try to make the bonuses more or less even across specs, with mixed success. Now, all of these bonuses are headed to the chopping block in patch 6.0, at least in their current incarnations. Maxed-out professions will no longer be essential for high-end PvE or PvP activities. We will no longer need to weigh our personal preference against possible combat advantages. In fact, players will be able to skip leveling professions at all, if they choose, without penalty to their character's performance. This strikes me as a good change. Will professions only provide an economic advantage from 6.0 on? Or will they give us other bonuses, such as extra lesser charms, bonus pet battle XP, or faster garrison construction? Will Blizzard tweak the existing combat-related recipes to provide different bonuses? Or will the developers remove them entirely? Many questions remain to be answered as the alpha progresses!
What If: Clash of the Frozen Thrones
I love doing lore columns, and I really enjoy doing Tinfoil Hat Editions of Know Your Lore -- I like the process of finding all the loose threads from expansions past and pulling them together in a way that is just weird enough to feasibly work. Sometimes, however, I come up with ideas that are just a little too far out there for a Tinfoil Hat Edition. Certainly they're interesting enough, but feasible? Not in the slightest. When it comes to Warlords of Draenor, there are a lot of questions that haven't been answered. This is to be expected. We haven't even seen the beta for the expansion yet. We have absolutely no idea where that story is going to lead, other than commentary at BlizzCon suggesting that it will directly feed into the expansion following. Yet that tiny little comment, along with some thinking about Warlords itself gave me a theory regarding the next expansion. No, not Warlords -- I'm talking about the expansion after that. It's entirely implausible of course, which is why I'm not sticking it in the Know Your Lore column. But what the heck, let's take a moment and ask ourselves what if -- and consider the possibility of Azeroth's greatest villain reborn.
So you want to be a theorycrafter
Theorycrafting. If you're anything like me, just reading that word filled you with a sudden sense of intimidation, inferiority, awe ... and, whoa. Wait a minute. What's that other emotion huddled there in the corner, being beaten up by our fear of failure? Is that curiosity? If you've ever used Ask Mr. Robot and asked yourself, "How do people determine which of our stats are better than others?" If you've ever played a healer and asked yourself, "How do people figure out which spells are the most efficient to use at which times?" If you've ever played a DPS class and asked yourself, "How do people figure out what my spell priority should be?" Basically, if you've ever wondered how some of our game's brightest players find the answers to our most pressing questions about game mechanics, then there's at least some small part of you that's interested in theorycrafting. So, great, you're interested. Now what? How the heck does a person get started, especially when theorycrafting seems so complicated?
Scattered Shots: Hunter Theorycrafting 101
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing how to maximize your performance through theorycrafting. Whenever someone asks me what my secret is for topping the meters, I always tell them it's because I push my buttons harder than anyone else in the raid. Most of them think I'm joking, but it's the truth. High DPS players are keyboard abusers who don't miss a single global cooldown. This is the biggest factor in your DPS, but optimization through theorycrafting still matters -- it's like icing on the cake. If you're scared of a little math, then don't be. There are fancy tools that do everything for you now such as Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer, Simulation Craft and Ask Mr. Robot. Aside from squeezing out a little bit of extra DPS, theorycrafting will help you understand your abilities and how they contribute to your DPS which is going to result in better damage in the real world.
Scattered Shots: Hello, old friend
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the black sheep of the hunter family. To the hunter pariahs who still religiously play marksmanship, all four of you, I salute your dedication to our forgotten specialization. You've kept the spark of hope alive in our hunter hearts. The hope that someday marksmanship will make its triumphant return to the top of the damage meters, just as it was in the armor penetration glory days of Icecrown Citadel. Perhaps I'm being a teensy bit dramatic, but as a 8-year (soon to be 9-year) hunter, I do have a soft spot for marksmanship. That's why I was happy to hear about the recent hotfix to boost Chimera Shot's damage by a whopping 50%. I wondered if this was enough to make marksmanship competitive, so I decided to shun my traditional beast mastery and survival specs for a week to give marksmanship its fair chance.
EVE Evolved: Fitting battleships for PvP in Odyssey, part 2
Battleships used to be the backbone of every major PvP fleet in EVE Online, but recent years have seen them increasingly overtaken by more mobile Battlecruisers, Heavy Assault Cruisers, and tech 3 Strategic Cruisers. Armour buffered battleships are still used in carrier-supported fleets and for a while nullsec played host to huge missile-spamming Maelstrom blobs of unholy death, but many of the battleships just haven't been worth using. Developers saught to rectify that in the recent Odyssey expansion with a complete balance overhaul of the standard tech 1 battleships, and it's starting to pay off. In last week's EVE Evolved, I looked at how Odyssey buffed the tier one Dominix, Scorpion, Typhoon, and Armageddon beyond all recognition and experimented with new PvP setups for each of them. This week I've turned my attention toward the tier 2 battleships, which turned out to be equally versatile and deadly. Now officially falling under the umbrella of "Combat Battleships," the Megathron, Raven, Apocalypse, and Tempest have become powerful damage-dealing platforms for fleet warfare. Each of them can now fulfill sniper or close-range damage roles and carry a spare flight of Warrior II drones to bat off tacklers, but what's impressed me the most is the sheer level of damage and tank they can achieve. In this week's EVE Evolved, I experiment with setups for the recently revamped Megathron, Raven, Apocalypse, and Tempest tier 2 battleships. These setups may require Advanced Weapon Upgrades 4 and a cheap 1-3% powergrid or CPU implant.
Breakfast Topic: Is WoW losing the romance by focusing on the numbers?
Virtually every player eagerly embraced the advent of facts, figures, and formulae driving the game when they first began to trickle through to the player base some years ago. We scoured forums, fan sites, and data-driven websites like Wowhead. A way to tell which gear worked best for your character? Sweet. Community managers and devs who actually explained and discussed game mechanics? Utterly amazing. It was a brave new world and an entirely new way to play. Gone were the days when players murmured longingly of eloquently named pieces whose names evoked the epic locations they came from. Now, it was all about tiers. We argued endlessly over the correct numerical sequencing of armor sets –- remember the etymological debate over "Dungeon 2" vs. "Tier 0.5"? A little bit of knowledge about how to tinker under the hood is absolutely a positive and helpful thing. Today, we expect free access to ability and spell mechanics and a point-by-point road map to gearing up. But at some point, overachievers that we humans are, so many numbers can make the game feel more like a checklist of benchmarks than a storied progression of fantastic encounters and arcane gear. Whether or not all the analysis gets under your skin, it's easy to see how this emphasis on precision and analysis evolved. The question is, do you think that this is merely a subjective matter of roleplay immersion in the fantasy aspect of World of Warcraft, or do you think the attitude actually reduces the game in spirit and heart? Do the vistas and horizons of Azeroth ever seem uncomfortably closer when every step is paved with a formula pointing to your destination? Where do we stand on the balance scale of pre-analyzing and measuring how the numbers stack up vs. gaining a feel from experience for how things work in the world of Azeroth?
Chaos Theory: Perfecting your build in The Secret World
After discussing last week that build creation was on the minds of many a Secret World fan, I promised to provide some hints and tips on how to better maximize your performance in game. It truly is a topic relevant to all players, even those who aren't focused on or interested in endgame. After all, even folks (like yours truly) who are in it mainly for the awesome story may find their ability to continue with said story hampered at some point by an insufficient build. With a limit of only seven active (eight if you have an auxiliary weapon) and seven passive skills available to use at any time, creating a build in The Secret World is not quite like most other MMOs, so you can't just automatically throw on gear of a higher level and call it good. Sure, you can eventually pound your way through many things, but you can save yourself some time and frustration by understanding a bit about how the gear works together with your skills. That's where today's Chaos Theory comes in. What better way to inform and entertain you than to open myself up for some theorycrafting by someone who has a better knack for it? Using my little Illuminati as our guinea pig, I've bared her gear for all to see and learn what can be done to improve. With that, I welcome you to the first episode of "What Not to Wear in TSW"!
Chaos Theory: Exploring The Secret World's endgame
Throughout my tenure as the Chaos Theory author, I've ruminated on a number of Secret World subjects that personally interest, intrigue, or otherwise affect me. I've covered ARGs, different issue updates, sabotage quests, the conversion to buy-to-play, ambiance, and more. I've even expounded on things I'd like to see in game, like housing and vehicles. But one thing I haven't covered with much detail are areas that don't have much personal relevance to me... yet. While it makes sense to talk most about my personal experiences, The Secret World offers so much more than what I have delved into. There really are different strokes for different folks, all wrapped up within the one world. So this week we are exploring an area that captures the attention of others if not mine: endgame.
Breakfast Topic: Have you given up metagaming?
Simpler. Streamlined. Better. Most of us would agree those terms play nicely together, as Blizzard trims the fat from WoW's game systems to make today's game the most accessible it's ever been. When you want to figure out the best way to do something in game, you'll quickly discover there's a website (and usually an addon and frequently an app) for that. Someone's probably already theorycrafted that gearing, made a video of that encounter, or written up a step-by-step how-to guide of that process. Of course, you could keep working through all the details yourself. For many players, figuring out what to do and how to do it is the best part of the game. But others are plenty glad to wash their hands of all those lists and numbers. In today's game, alt-tabbing, second monitors, and playing with a tablet handily logged in to Wowhead are more than rule than the exception. Do you do less metagaming and theorycrafting than you did once upon a time? If so, is that because the game simply doesn't demand it, because you turn to other resources to do it for you, or because that aspect of the game no longer feels compelling? What resources fill your metagaming needs these days? Or are you still cooking up spreadsheets and calculating formulae with the best of them?
The Guild Council: Why you should diversify your guild roster
More than once in this column, I've tried to hammer home the point that it's important to recruit players who match up well with your guild. So much guild drama spawns from a situation in which one player just doesn't fit in with the culture of the guild. But you don't want to lead a bunch of sheep, either, and while there are certain traits that you want to see match up (like playtimes, game style in general, and chat preference), it's worth it to carry a roster with some diversity. In the past, we've looked at a few good player types to seek out, but in this week's Guild Counsel, I'd like to look more closely at some of the more subtle personalities that are good to have on board.
SWTOR devs answer community's PvP-related questions
The Star Wars: The Old Republic community team was understandably late getting to the Community Q&A last Friday, but it certainly delivered today. As usual for the SWTOR players, PvP topped the list of concerns. For one, why don't cooldowns reset after death in a warzone? BioWare's new favorite son, Senior Designer Austin Peckenpaugh, explained, "The decision of 'going all out' should be a strategic and tactical one rather than a no-brainer that you squeeze in before each death." To a seasoned player, that makes sense; you don't want what we old-school PvPers call "suicide bombers." Number-crunching theorycrafters deduced that some classes are better off carrying PvP relics than PvE relics. A new voice spoke up to answer this concern. "In the long run our intent is to make sure PvP gear is never competitive in end-game PvE situations," replied Senior Game Balance Designer Jason Attard. But for now, he explained that, "in theory the active abilities on the PvE relics do not provide quite as much sustained damage-per-second as a passive relic at the same item level." Take that as you will. The BioWare community team has consistently been able to snag the appropriate designers to answer the top player questions. If you have a burning question that you'd like to have answered this week, stop by the official SWTOR forums.
The Daily Grind: Are you a theory-crafter?
God bless MMO theory-crafters. They've saved me so much time and irritation over the years that I can't possibly overstate my gratitude. Did you know there are guys (and gals) out there who literally log into MMO test servers and spend precious hours poking at combos, abilities, builds, and strategies? Did you know that they typically chart their results, publish spreadsheets, and then write exhaustive guides about how to get the most from your game/class of choice? Prior to a couple of weeks ago, this mindset was utterly alien to me, and the work itself sounded quite like the statistics classes I slept through in school. With the release of The Secret World, though, I find myself actually doing these things. Funcom's skill- and ability-point systems are incredibly dense, and figuring out build synergies adds another layer of satisfaction onto the game. What about you, morning folk? Do you just look up builds and strategies in your MMO of choice, or are you a theory-crafter? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
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.
The Light and How to Swing It: New tools for evaluating holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. DPS classes have it easy. Their only goal is to deal more damage than the other guys. Their existence revolves around a single, immutable metric: DPS. There's no ambiguity when comparing two damage classes, as their DPS speaks for itself. As a DPS player's gear and skill improve, it directly increases their damage done, allowing them to evaluate their performance clearly and instantly. Evaluating a healer is much more difficult. As their group's damage and skill improve, their healing numbers will actually go down. Healers are relied on the most when a raid is attempting a new encounter and gradually become marginalized as the fight moves toward farm status. As a healer, your best HPS performance might be the very first time you down an encounter. If you're killing heroic Ultraxion in four minutes, your raid simply isn't taking enough damage for you to parse highly. In order to properly evaluate a holy paladin's play, you have to dig deeper.
Encrypted Text: The economics of energy capping
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. I'm not an economics expert, and in fact, I never even studied it in college. World of Warcraft is what drove me to stay up late at night reading articles on Wikipedia about game theory and the invisible hand of the market. A plethora of interesting mathematical models are at play in WoW, spanning everything from zero-sum DKP systems to diminishing returns on tanking secondary stats. Energy capping is a big deal for combat rogues right now, as our shiny Dragon Soul epics have us swimming in more haste than ever before. Both of our current tier set bonuses further exacerbate the issue by reducing our energy expenditure and extending our energy regeneration cooldown. There's an economic solution for the problem that we're facing, and understanding what an opportunity cost is will help us make the right decisions.
Some Assembly Required: An early look at Dawntide
Hey folks, and welcome back to Some Assembly Required. The column's been around for a little bit now, and we've done everything from developer interviews to opinionated rants to sandbox and player-generated content feature spotlights. One thing we haven't done is an impressions piece on new sandbox titles, and I aim to fill that void today with an early look at Dawntide. The title is an open-world fantasy sandbox under development by Working as Intended, an indie outfit that calls Copenhagen, Denmark home. Dawntide has been under construction for quite a while now (we first spoke with the devs way back in the summer of 2009), and after a series of funding and development challenges, the end of the long beta journey is in sight.
