Perspective

Two site related things first: 
1. Changed the site theme: Got tired of using the Drupal default. I really wanted to code and create a custom theme of my own, but I just don’t have time to do that anymore. There are lots of great Drupal templates out there anyways.

2. Added a link block to the left navigation, for my personal convenience and as a shout out to some of the WoW blogs that I enjoy reading (mostly paladin related). So, if anyone of those sites notices around a dozen hits referring from my site, that is probably me being ansty at work :P.

From the perspective of someone who is in charge of class and role balancing a raid: Let’s say that the raid has a protection paladin and a protection warrior of equal gear, skill, and experience. Against a boss that is not on farm status, I will choose the warrior for the sake of raid utility, unless there is a specific reason why the paladin should MT.

It’s nothing against tankadins, heck I am one! I would probably feel the same way even if both classes were dead equal in terms of tanking abilities, health pool, etc (paladin class problems would be another post all-together :P). In my opinion and experience, paladins offer more in a non-tanking role in terms of utility than a non-tanking protection warrior. Most of our performance honestly, is gear dependent. I can still heal, cleanse, take over main healing if one of the priests bites it, etc.

In all fairness, I’m probably an unusual case, in the sense that I don’t enjoying DPSing all that much. It’s fun, but I’ve raided on my hunter and as a full spec retribution critadin (30% crit fully buffed and potted pre-BC FTW), and found it boring after an extended period of time.

I enjoy tanking greatly, and will insist on tanking on many an occasion since I’ve invested a great deal of gold and time into chanting, gemming, and accruing proper gear. But, I will also gladly stand back and heal if appropriate. What I enjoy most about being a paladin isn’t specifically tanking or specifically healing, but the flexibility the class offers in terms of game play. That’s the reason why I rolled a paladin.

…ultimately, this entire post is just a nicer way of saying: “Keiya has the attention span of a flea” (true fact :P).

WTB: This Pattern

Boots of the Protector: This lovely item is crafted from a BoE pattern that drops in Serpentshrine Cavern and in The Eye. The boots though, are BoP upon craft (Blacksmithing FTW), and are fairly expensive to craft (requires 2 nethers, 12 primal waters, etc). Time to sell shit…when I have time to get on lol.

Edit: Time to farm primal waters and gold. Keiya is poor.

G15 Modifications

g15systemspecs

With a program called LCDStudio, you can customize your G15 to display nearly anything that you would ever want to see (Winamp information, system specs, CPU temperature, etc). The downside being, that you will need to keep the LCDStudio running in the background in order for the custom displays to function. In order to show your CPU/GPU temperatures and fan speeds, you will need to install SpeedFan (and keep it running in the background as well).

SpeedFan is more or less straight forward to setup. LCDStudio requires Microsoft.NET 2.0 on your machine before you can install it. After you download and install LCDStudio, you will need a license in order to run it. It’s free, click the link and fill out the online form when the popup shows.

  • G15forums is a great resource for downloading and seeking aid on starting templates. They aren’t too hard to modify either.
  • Good Winamp mod: Ray’s Mod. Visualizer, makes the LED’s flash, etc. In order to make the entire keyboard flicker: Go into the config screen, hold down both CTRL keys, scroll down to the bottom, enable both options.
  • WoW mod: G15 Bar. It gives you 18 extra buttons to move stuff to.

….changed the site theme. Hoping that it’s readable. I’ll make a custom logo, banner, or something one day.

Gone Fishin’

I spent a chunk of Sunday leveling fishing and cooking. No raider is complete without food buffs; Don't overlook them, the buffs are very nice. Don't buy food…just fish and cook it, it's cheaper. Before, I was mailing food materials over to a guildmate to cook, but it really is more convenient for me just to do it myself. Cooking isn't really that hard to level. Find the list if recipies on WoWWiki and buy out the meat on the AH.

So my favorite fishing hole: Zangarmarsh, at the lagoon near Cenarion Refuge. It's a good location because it's relatively close to Shattrath and it's near a mailbox (bags get full fast). It's also good because every fish cooks into something useful.

You get three types of fish from Zangarmarsh: Zangarian Sporefish, Huge Spotted Feltail, and Barbed Gill Trout. Which can be cooked into: Blackened Sporefish (20 sta & 8 mp/5), Feltail Delight (20 sta & 20 spi), Blackened Trout (4320 health over 20 seconds. Pet food). It's a great place to level fishing if you aren't quite at 375 (I'm not high enough to fish or cook the crawdays :P).

Logitech G15: Initial Impressions & Experiences

Yeah, so Saturday morning I knocked a cup of coffee clear over my keyboard, ruining half of the keys. I took at as a clue from the gods of geek consumerism and hit Fry’s that afternoon to purchase a $99 keyboard: The Logitech G15 (the one with the LCD screen).

It was a decision between the Razer Tarantula and the G15. I preferred the way the Tarantula looked, but the LCD functionality won me over. I know that there are probably hundreds of reviews for it out there, so I will try to focus on the little nuances and quirks that aren’t commonly mentioned. I’ll take pictures and include them later if I remember.


Construction & Features
The G15 is a nice looking (every key is backlight with a blue glow) and solidly built keyboard. It’s relatively large, at around 1.5x the size of a standard board. So, if you use a small tray or have a desk with limited room, check to make sure that there will be space. It’s also significantly heavier than other keyboards, which is nice. I like a device with some weight to it. The keys are relatively soft, quiet (not clacky), and feel great to type on, but that’s based off of my personal preference. I would recommend finding a store with one on display and testing it out first before considering a purchase.

In addition to the standard keyset and the LCD screen, there are 18 keys to the left, broken up into three 6-key chunks that can be customized using a macroing system. Above the extra keys are 3 togglable states, adding up to a total of 54 extra buttons.

General word of caution: The software allows you to record complicated macros. Be careful because people have been banned for misusing them. As a general rule of thumb, if you can’t do it using WoW’s in-game macros, than it probably IS an exploit. I would stay away from the timing macros (bypassing the global cooldown for example is against the EULA).

There are two USB ports on the top of the keyboard. Unfortunately they are USB 1.1 and somewhat underpowered. Though sufficient for running devices like thumbdrives, you probably won’t be able to connect your iPod or web cam.

The wrist rest feels sort of cheap (it’s a plastic attachment). It is adequate and comfortable, but it would have been nice to say, have something more solid and permanent, similar to what I had on my old keyboard (Microsoft Ergonomic 4000). The cable management grooves on the underside of the keyboard are also marginally useful, since they aren’t large enough to fit thicker cords (my gamepad mostly).


The LCD Screen and Profiles
By default, the LCD will rotate between 5 displays: A clock showing time & date, a system performance meter showing CPU & RAM usage, a stopwatch, a media player controller (start, stop, pause, forward/back), and a POP3 email monitor. You can customize what to show and not show as well as disable/enable the auto-rotate in the settings. It’s worth noting that you cannot directly bind the G keys to things outside of the Logitech software (they don’t function like normal keys).

  • The POP3 applet doesn’t natively work with Gmail because it doesn’t support SSL. In order to get it to work, you will have to install an SSL Wrapper (Stunnel or whatever, google it).
  • Most popular media players support the G15. If it doesn’t work out of the box, there’s usually a plugin/driver available.
  • In order to get the media buttons to work in Winamp: Go into preferences and enable global hotkeys.
  • You will need to keep iTunes unminimized in order for it to work with the controls (not docked into the system tray/taskbar that is).
  • The WoW applet displays basic character information, battlegrounds statistics, and whispers received. The character information is marginally useful. It shows basic stats, melee stats, durability and bag slots. It would be nice if there was a way to customize it (to say, display caster and healer relevant information). Betting that there’s a mod out there somewhere.
  • I haven’t tested the battleground support, didn’t get any PvP time in this weekend.
  • The whisper logging is awesome. I’ll usually leave WoW logged on, with all sounds off, and minimized while working on other things at home (working includes watching DVDs and surfing). The G15 will list the names of the last 4 people who sent you a tell, so I don’t have the urge to check WoW every few minutes for whispers.
  • The LCD will display a list of people who have tried to contact you. I get a fair amount of whispers and frequently go AFK, so the tell logging was nice!
  • Ventrillo 2.3.3 Beta adds G15 support! No more, “who the hell just SAID that?” situations.
  • There are a good number of G15 mods available now. I would check out G15 Forums, by far one of the best mod communities out there.


Conclusion
Though the WoW options aren’t all that super useful, I just can’t express how damn awesome it is NOT to have to lose WoW focus in order to check what song is playing, switch songs, unminimize Ventrillo to see who said what, etc. The G15 is a bit pricey, so if you are just looking for a vanilla keyboard, $80 to $90 might be a bit expensive. If you are in to new geek toys or are just looking for a way to pimp your desk, look no further: This is an excellent keyboard, two thumbs up!

WoW Update 6/14/07

I need to edit the site CSS whenever I have time because the links in my entries are too hard to differentiate from normal text. I also need to re-categorize most, if not all of the WoW entries since they are sort of tagged randomly. Netherspite, Curator, and Shade of Aran strategies were added to the Karazhan guide…keep forgetting to take screenshots so that I can edit in positioning diagrams for certain encounters.

This is a hodge podge entry, I figure that it doesn’t hurt to make a post tracking my in-game goals, progress, whatever every once in a while, even if they are devoid of any useful content.

Caved in and spent my 41 heroic badges on the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600, even though it is situationally useful. It’s great in heroics and when I am tanking against multiple mobs, but not really that useful against bosses that deal slow hard hits. With the trinket activated, my block is at around 710 (2 minute cooldown, not bad).

I have been at 265 rep off of exalted with the Keepers of Time for around a month or two. One evening I need to complete it, even though there really isn’t much of anything that I want. I can technically use the Bindings of the Timewalker for my healing set, until the Bracers of Justice drop of of Maiden in Karazhan. I can also craft the Blessed Bracers. Spell crit though, isn’t as valuable anymore since the 2.1 nerf, in addition to the fact that I have zero points in holy.

Speaking of reputation, finally dished out the gold and bought out the rest of my Scryer rep (cost me around 450g). Mostly wanted the shoulder enchants: Greater Inscription of the Knight & Greater Inscription of the Oracle.

Avenging Wrath and Seal of Vengeance

For the past couple of months, I have been inadvertently ignoring Avenging Wrath. I used to use it all of the time, not sure why it got moved off of my bar and why I didn’t notice…lol (probably when I was re-keying my spells a while back). Anyways, Avenging wrath is a level 70 spell that gives you a 30% boost to all DPS; Melee, spell, or otherwise for 20 seconds (it also blows your DS cooldown).

A 30% boost to DPS is a 30% boost to your threat. Avenging Wrath is an excellent spell for frontloading even more threat. I know I keep saying that threat isn’t really an issue, but the higher you can raise your threat bar, the more the rest of the raid can DPS without pulling aggro. As your guild’s DPS scales higher and they become more and more geared, your threat will have to as well.

This is what I will usually do: Blow Avenging Wrath, pull with Avenger’s Shield, Holy Shield, Judge Crusader, Consecrate, Spam SoR/JoR. If JoW or JoL is needed, I’ll rejudge it after AW fades. The extra threat boost is a nice cushion (so that the guild aggro whores don’t have to throttle their damage…you KNOW who you are!).

…and speaking of ignored spells: Seal of Vengeance. SoV is an alliance only paladin DoT. It stacks up to 5 times, doing 120 holy damage over 12 seconds per application. There are two problems with SoV:

  1. It takes a while for all 5 applications to stack. Like SoC, it has a flat ppm application rate (which is 20, unless it was changed in 2.1). So with a 1.8 speed tanking weapon, it has around a 60%ish chance of applying per swing. It can take anywhere from around 10 to 15 seconds to fully stack if you are unlucky. That’s a lot of time.
  2. If SoV fades, you will have to re-stack it all over again. As long as you can keep meleeing uninterrupted, it’s relatively easy to keep 5 applications up on the mob. Against bosses and mobs that knockback, fear, whatever frequently, SoV isn’t really useful because it takes too long to reapply.

Keeping that in mind, in the long run, SoV and JoV does more holy damage with a 1-hander than SoR and JoR, as long as you are tanking a mob that doesn’t interrupt your swinging for too long. I was playing around with it in my spell damage set the other day and SoV was doing quite a bit of holy damage…unfortunately I don’t have time to look up the formulas at the moment or to examine how well it scales.

Level 70 Tanking Stats

Unless I made (another) error or typo, these calculations should be correct for patch 2.1. If you don’t know what a Crushing Blow or the Attack Table is, you might want to read this guide. Recall that Dodge and Parry are avoidance stats, meaning that they allow you to avoid an attack completely. Block is a mitigation stat (you still recieve damage).


Cheat Sheet
The amount of defense, block, dodge, parry and agility needed to push Crushing Blows off by 1%.
Defense: 14.81
Block Rating: 7.88
Dodge Rating: 18.9
Parry Rating: 22.4
Agility: 25 for Paladins, 33 for Warriors


Defense
Defense does two things: Each point in Defense Skill adds 0.04% to Miss, Parry, Dodge and Block. Each point in Defense Skill over a mob’s Weapon Skill reduces the chance that you will recieve a Critical Strike by 0.04%.

  • 2.37 Defense Rating = 1 Defense Skill
  • 490 Defense Skill to be uncrittable
  • 6.25 Defense Skill to decrease your Crushing Blow chance by 1%
  • 14.81 Defense Rating to decrease Crushing Blows by 1%

According to a post made by Tseric, in regards to Critical Strike mitigation: “At 490 defense, the math caps out. Defense won’t mitigate beyond that.” Your Miss, Parry, Dodge, and Block will still increase past 490, but your Critical Strike mitigation will not, so collecting Defense past the “cap” is still worthwhile in that sense.

Block
Remember that Block Value refers to the amount of damage mitigated with each block. Block rating refers to the percent of incoming attacks blocked. Block percentage can be raised by Block Rating and Defense.

  • Block % = 5% Base Chance + % from Block Rating + Talents + ((Defense skill – Mob’s Weapon Skill) * 0.04)
  • 1 Point in Defense Skill will increase your chance to block by 0.04%
  • 1% Block Chance per 7.88 Block Rating
  • Damage mitigation: (Block Value) + ((Strength / 20) – 1)
  • Damage mitigation with Imp Block talents: (Block Value * 1.3) + ((Strength / 20) – 1)

Dodge
Dodge percentage can be raised by Dodge Rating, Agility, and Defense. The agility ratio varies per class, I’ve listed the level 70 conversions for warriors and paladins below. It’s also worth noting that Agility scales with buffs like Blessing of Kings.

  • 18.9 Dodge Rating will increase your chance to dodge by 1%
  • Defense: Each point that you have over a mob’s Attack skill adds a 0.04% chance to dodge.
  • Paladins: 25 agi to increase your chance to dodge by 1%
  • Warriors: 33 agi to increase your chance to dodge by 1%

Parry
Parry percentage can be raised by both Parry Rating and Defense. (According to WoWWiki) Parry decreases the swing timer for your next attack by 40%, but no less than 20% of your weapon’s base swing delay.

  • 22.4 Parry Rating will increase your chance to parry by 1% (cost reduced by around 25% with patch 2.1!)

Miss
Increased by Defense.

  • Base 5% + 0.04% * (Your Defense – Mob’s Attack Rating)
  • 0.04% Miss for each point in Defense Skill.