Illustrious Leveling

Source: The Daily Blink

So Cataclysm is finally upon us and those that played all the way through till the expansion can tell you it’s worth it! With a new expansion comes the inevitable questions and I’ve taken to giving glib silly answers to my guildmates that I’ll share with my readers. Don’t worry about my guildies, they give me silly glib answers back as I’m known in guild for my bad puns.

What happened to the portals?
Deathwing ate them!

Can I fly in Old World now?
I don’t know. Does your mouse work?

How do I learn to fly in Old World?
Same way you did at levels 60 and 80.

How do I get to Twilight Highlands?
Go to Northwest Washington state, but beware of the Vampires.

How does Archeology work?
Like the real profession, you survey dig sites.

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So I’m sure everyone is out leveling either their main or a new Goblin/Worgen… for me I’ve been leveling my Druid U. I started with 19% of the way to level 81 due to leveling Herbalism (yes, I went for a Realm First). I’m also most of the way to maxed Alchemy, I’m just stalled at transmutes. A great blog I’ve recently found on resources for understanding the new Cataclysm level professions is Kaliope’s Crafting Blog. Check it out!

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I’m now level 85 and I’ve seen most of the new instances with guild groups. They have some great new mechanics and I’ve enjoyed being surprised by each new boss we encounter.  Although, a good glib silly response whenever anyone asks how this boss encounter goes is: Kill the Adds and Don’t Stand in Anything Not Put Down by the Healer. With a little more practice over the next week I’ll be able to post some Healing 101 guides to the new encounters and have a little advice about the heroics. I’ll be providing this info from the perspective of someone who is in a guild with no pressure to level and gear up for raiding within 2 weeks of an expansion.

Reading Between the Lines

So how does a beginning healer learn about their class outside of asking people in-game? Blogs, forums, and websites such as found on my blog reading list. Now, why do I bring this up? Due to some recent down time I’ve done a lot more reading of various blogs and forums.

Now, most of us read blogs through a feed reader, but if you post a picture to describe something, sometimes that doesn’t show up in the feed, so now the reader has to click over to the actual blog. When I get to a blog that has a black background it immediately gets an “x” mark in my mind and I’m a lot less likely to browse through the pages.

Any readers that have stuck with me may realize from previous posts that the usability of my UI is a big factor, and this translates into blogs and websites. What this means, is that I’m familiar with the research on text legibility and readability. You’ll notice on my own blog I try to use a single (accessibility friendly) palette. Additionally, any colored text I use is dark saturated to be almost indistinguishable from black or is a content header with appropriate text size and spacing to make it more legible.

Please will folks stop with the horrible colored (or white) text on black/dark background designs for their blogs! Using light text on a dark background, reduces the readability by 10% or more (Nielson, 2000). That means there is a LOT of empirical research demonstrating that reading white or *shudder* colored text on a dark or black background is more difficult, slower, and will produce eye discomfort for the reader.

For a good (colorful) demonstration of what not to-do see: Systems, Applications, and Products (SAP) Information

And here is a list of research to demonstrate that I’m not pulling my hair out in frustration without a reason:
Publications:
Arnheim, R., (1974). Art and Visual Perception, University of California Press, Berkely.
Bruce, M. & Foster, J. J. (1982). The visibility of colored characters on colored backgrounds in viewdata displays. Visible Language , 16 , 382-390.
Clarke, J., (2002). Building accessible web sites, Boston, MA: New Riders.
Farkas, D. K. and Farkas, J. B., 2002, Principles of web design, New York: Longman.
Coren S., Porac, C. & L. M. Ward (1978). Sensation and Perception, Academic Press.
Hall, R.H. & Hanna, P. (2003). The effect of web page text-background color combinations on retention and perceived readability, aesthetics, and behavioral intention. Proceedings of The Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), 2149-2156.
Hill, A. L., & Scharff, L. V., (1999). Legibility of computer displays as a function of colour, saturation, and texure backgrounds. In Engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics, edited by Harris, D. (Sydney: Ashgate), pp. 123 – 130.
Jackson, R. MacDonald, L. & K. Freeman (1994). Computer Generated Color.
Nielson, J. (2000). Designing web usability: The practice of Simplicity. Indianapolis: New Riders.
Pastoor, S., (1990). Legibility and subjective preference for color combinations in text. Human Factors, 32 , 157-171
Priester, G. W. (1995). Looking Good in Color, Ventana Press.
Ridpath, C., Treviranus, J., & Weiss, P.L. (2003). Testing Readability of Web Page Colors. Aprompt Web Site.
Wichmann, F. A., Sharpe, L. T., & Gegenfurtner, K. R.  (2002). “The contributions of Color to Recognition Memory for Natural Scenes”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, American Psychological Association (APA), 28(3).

Websites on the Topic:
“Hyperphysics” by Carl R. (Rod) Nave, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Georgia State University (site), Section “Light and Vision” (site)
“The Joy of Visual Perception: A Web Book”, by Pete Kaiser, York University (site)
“Psychology and Biology of Perception Psyc/Biol 240” by Anne Sutter, LUC (site)
“Topics in Perceptual Organization” by Edward H. Adelson, MIT (site)

Thanks for the Shattering

Last week was busy both in and out of the game. Family, food, and a big fire breathing internet dragon visited us last week. This healer ran around cooking up a feast to feed all of the undead, I mean family. I also did a little bit of exploring the new land and walking off the food. As for the results of the big fire-breathing internet dragon, the patch notes had some interesting morsels.

Respec your healers… did you notice that?

Due to several talent revisions for select classes, druids, paladins, priests, and shaman have had their talent trees reset.

Yes, I had to log into all 5 of my currently active characters and learn their talent trees again.

Fortunately none of the healing classes received the 12% or 17% shattering to their spells and talents that warlocks and warriors received. There must have been a coding error = if class name starts with w, then multiply ability by .12 or .17. What did change, though?

General
Healing Rain, Efflorescence, Holy Radiance, Holy Word: Sanctuary now have a diminished effect when healing more than 6 players at once.
Re-summoning pets in Battlegrounds should no longer count towards a player’s total healing done.

Druid:

• Nourish no longer consumes Omen of Clarity.
• Rejuvenation has had its mana cost increased by 30%.
• Empowered Touch now procs from Healing Touch as well as Nourish.
• Malfurion’s Gift no longer has Fury of Stormrage as a prerequisite talent.
• Natural Shapeshifter now also increases Tree of Life duration by 5/10 seconds.
• Revitalize is now a 2-point talent, down from 3. It provides a 20% chance to return 1/2% of the druid’s total mana on periodic heals from Lifebloom or Rejuvenation. This effect cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds.
• Swift Rejuvenation is now a 1-point talent, down from 2. The global cooldown reduction this talent provides to Rejuvenation remains 0.5 seconds.
• Symbiosis: heal-over-time spells (Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Lifebloom) can no longer benefit from this Mastery merely by refreshing themselves. A different heal-over-time spell must be present.
• Glyph of Healing Touch now reduces the cooldown on Nature’s Swiftness by 10 seconds after using Healing Touch, up from 5 seconds.
• Glyph of the Treant (new) allows druids to keep the original treant Tree of Life look.

Paladin:

• Holy Radiance now has reduced effectiveness on targets over 8 yards away from the paladin.
• Beacon of Light now lasts 5 minutes, up from 60 seconds.
• Blessed Life: the effects of this talent cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds, up from every 2 seconds.
• Illuminated Healing absorb shield now absorbs 10% of the total amount healed, up from 8%. Each point of Mastery increases the effect by an additional 1.25%, up from 1%.
• Light of dawn has been redesigned. It no longer has an enforced cooldown, now costs Holy Power instead of mana, and scale in direct proportion to the amount of Holy Power used. In addition it now heals the 5 most injured group targets (including self) in a 30-yard frontal cone.
• Protector of the Innocent no longer triggers from self-heals.
• Glyph of Beacon of Light now makes Beacon of Light free, instead of increasing the duration by 30 seconds.
• Glyph of Divinity has been redesigned. It now grants the paladin 10% of maximum mana upon use.
• Glyph of Light of Dawn now increases the total number of most injured targets healed by 1.

Priest:

• Binding Heal now provides roughly double the amount of healing.
• Prayer of Healing has had its mana cost reduced by nearly 30% and its base points and Spell Power coefficient increased by 20%.
• Divine Aegis is now always triggered by Prayer of Healing in addition to critical heals from all other spells.
• Grace has been increased to 4/8% stacking 3 times, up from 2/4% stacking.
• Inner Focus now works with Binding Heal, but no longer works with Heal.
• Power Word: Barrier has been redesigned. It no longer acts as a shared absorb shield. Instead, all affected friendly targets take 30% reduced damage for the duration of the shield, which is now 10 seconds, down from 25 seconds.

Shaman:

• Chain Heal mana cost increased from 17% to 20% of base mana.
• Earthliving Weapon now only has 25% of its full chance to proc from a single hop of Chain Heal.

On a final note, I updated my druid page here with newer information because that’s what I’ll be going forward with on December 7th. Don’t worry though, the other healers will be following in quick order.

Autoblography: A Shared Topic

Memes are like Kryptonite to me, so a forum like Blog Azeroth is just icing on the cake. I’ve refrained from registering because I knew I’d eventually get sucked into reading way more blogs than any one person can manage. However, the topic Your Autoblography last week was awesome to read about; the stories behind the blogs are great. As per usual I really enjoyed The Bossy Pally’s post, it kept me amused and motivated my thinking… and writing. So I figured I’d add my story (albeit the week after the topic) and of course register for Blog Azeroth.

My Blogging Beginnings
My blog actually began with the guild and the name… I’m part of an amazing guild that absolutely defies most accepted norms of guilds. This is the guild I started playing WoW with in September 2008 and I’ve enjoyed every moment playing with them.  These guildies are all friends in person so when we are in a raid or just hanging out on VoIP we frequently joke and talk about local activities, etc. One evening while I was leveling a new paladin (4th healer) and hanging out on vent, one of my guildies asked what spec my paladin was currently and what I’d have at level 80. I indicated yes, it was going to be another healer, and of course another guild mate jokingly said  “what do you think?! she’s green bar spec’d!”. Since all of my characters healed and I had multiple healers I was considered the guild healer. In fact, if anyone in the guild had a healing question they had started asking me to the point that I was basically in charge of organizing and explaining the healing in raids. So suddenly I thought, ah ha! that sounds like a blog/website name to describe me.

In the meantime…
Long before I started playing WoW I’d been an avid reader and was pretty active on author blogs and various reading/writing groups. At the time I started a blog on my personal website to review and talk about various books I had read. So I was pretty familiar with blogging in general from my bookaholic days. Once I started to play WoW I’d begun to read websites and forums about the game to learn about my favorite activity of healing. I’d even joined a community called wow_ladies to read about other ladies’ experiences with this game. So I had a lot of WoW blogging role models to inspire me.

Thus Began Green Bar Spec!

The Blogging Challenges
I’ve encountered two very big challenges with blogging about WoW: reliability and privacy.

As with any project or hobby type activity such as WoW, real life comes first; work and family have a higher priority  for me. I have a professional job with an unpredictable schedule. I’ll have a regular week at work and then find myself all over the country for several weeks. This kind of schedule is definitely a challenge to writing a blog. I’m also very close to my family and recently had a good reason to participate in events sponsored by Big Bear Butt.  So, no, I’ve not been very reliable with my blogging.

As for my guild, I don’t usually talk about them specifically in my blog because 1) any character names I mentioned would most likely be the only character with that name on the armory, and 2) I know all of my guild mates by their full real name. In fact those two factors are part of what makes the guild unique. So to keep the privacy of my guildmates intact I try to keep character names of myself and my guildmates reduced to an initial if/when they are mentioned. This is often difficult to hold true to because my guild has a lot of fun stories and people that I could write about.

Favorite Posts
I think one of the best things to happen to my blog was to get some link love right after my Healing Survey Post. I’d love to go back and update it with “Lessons Learned” since I’ve level capped all four classes and have taken them all through at least the first wing of ICC. I had an amazing reader hit count on what was basically a brand new blog from that post alone. Then shortly after that I got some link love from a totally unexpected (but awesome) source Gnomeagggedon, which resulted in another reader spike. Unfortunately, as per usual, the ‘real life’ challenge reared its ugly head and I had a slow period on my blog. I’ve since dropped to 5 regular readers…

Thanks for Reading!

Snippets: Week 46

My second post filled with the partial drafts from this past week. I’ve managed to clean them up and organize them into some semblance of order, but the order may just be arbitrary.

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Target selection
Recently I read a post asking melee players how they select targets efficiently in a multi-pull trash situation. This post reminded me about a recent Cataclysm event experience. During the elemental invasion of the city, a raid or two worth of players arrive in the city to defeat the elemental and close the rifts. Now, as all of my toons are healers, I’m most likely in a healing spec when I arrive to assist. Since I usually arrive late and my toons tend to have weirdly spelled names, I don’t always get an invite into the “city defense” raid (assuming there is one already organized). So how do you proceed to select your damage or healing targets?
 
Method A: “Tab” to select the next enemy target or “T” to select the next friendly target.
Method B: Place the tank as focus (right click target menu selection) or target tank nameplate and select “F” for assist.
Method C: Click the next target nameplate (shown with “V”) or the friendly target name plate (shown with “Shift+V”).

Since I’m in the situation in which I’m trying to target friendly players not in my group or raid, this reduces me to using Method C. It was like playing that amusement park game of whack-a-mole trying to heal during the elemental invasion event.

As a side note, I discovered while putting my thoughts together that there are no guides/pages/sites on the default key bindings. I’ve long since rebound “V”, “T”, and “F” to spells so remembering what they were originally bound to is a result of memory and any mistakes are apologized for in advance.

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Blizz Cookies

We get a *pony*! or at least a crab…
Ghostcrawler is a level 85 rare elite crab in the Abyssal Depths of Vashj’ir

New WoW Armory Character Sheets
Seen on the Battle.net site for Cataclysm. Just type in <Character Name>@<Realm> in the “search” box.

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Haste for Druids
If you haven’t heard, haste provides a unique “value added” for druids… The current design speeds up the HoT ticks with the addition of certain amounts of Haste. Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket provides the maths (with Tables!) so I’m just going to point you there.

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Blizz*con Pickup Lines
Apparently Blizz*con pickup lines were pretty popular on Twitter as Tastes Like Battle Chicken compiled a list of favorites. Check them out for the laughs!

Invasion of the Blog

With the cataclysm occurring within the game, my blog will shortly be succumbing to a cataclysm with respect to the design. I’m reviewing and working on a new design/theme for the blog that will hopefully bring a fresh breath of air to the blog and motive a more regular post schedule. I’ve also got the snippet posts piling-up in my drafts, so look forward to a lot more of my posts in that style.

As an altaholic, I find myself jumping back and forth on my different toons. During a single play session, depending on my mood and who else is online in my main guild, I’ll play multiple toons. For example, I’ll play on my lowbie alliance druid (level 52 now!) through about 50% of a level, run 1-2 dungeons, and 1-2 battlegrounds if I’m in the second half of the bracket level range. Next, I’ll switch to my main horde druid to chat with my guildies while I do 20 or so quests toward loremaster. Then, my priest gets some play time in 2-3 battlegrounds if another pvp guildie is online; otherwise, I’ll try to find a weekly raid or run a couple of random heroic dungeons on my paladin or shaman. Except on Monday nights when I run with a regular 5-man group from my guild on either my priest or paladin doing various achievements or activities. Finally at least once a week, I’ll switch over to my bank toon and go through the mail I’ve collected and clean out any extra stuff still sitting around. I’ve created a graph below to show the percentages of my time on each toon.

Snippets: Week in Review

I’m combining all of my draft parts into a single post since none of them really fell into place as a full post. Here is what I’ve read, done, and thought in the past week…

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For anyone wondering, a form of class specific quests will be available in Cataclysm. They just won’t be what we are used to, although it looks like they will vaguely resemble the paladin class quests.

We are looking forward to offering new quests, quest lines and rewards as players level through World of Warcraft: Cataclysm instead. For example, we plan a level 20 dungeon based quest which will offer weapon rewards appropriate to all classes. There will also be a similar level 50 dungeon quest which has a headpiece reward. Source: Forum: Draztal

We heard directly from Ghostcrawler at Blizzcon that this was the plan as well. So I hope it pans out to be a decent replacement for some of the awesome class quests we were used to.

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I’ve recently discovered that the reforging on equipment is not showing up on the Armory, but the change in your stats is shown in your spell stats. So if you are a healer applying to a new guild for Cataclysm and you’ve reforged your equipment to add more haste or mastery make sure you point that out in your application!

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There’s been some concern among the interwebz that Discipline priests’ bubbles are not adjusting well to the new mastery stat and Archangel talent. I’ll be following the forums to see what Blizzard does: [BUG] Archangel not affecting PW:Shield.

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Cynwise does not disappoint and has a great post this week on preparing your PvP gear before Cataclysm. I recommend anyone interested in PvP to check his site out: Pre-Cataclysm Honor Grinding

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In an effort to finish up my bucket list before Cataclysm 4.0.3 drops, I’ve been trying to finish up leftover achievements. I don’t want to find myself 396/400 skill points away from having the unarmed skill achievement finished and have 4.0.1 drop (or the 4.0.3  equivalent). So my priest finished up with

New Content: Talent Specs for Healers

Disclaimer: This post covered Talent specs for Healers right when Cataclysm came out. Refer to each class page for more up-to-date talent specs.
Yes, I know it may seem like I quit blogging, and yes, I stopped posting for a long stretch of time. Sadly, real-life crit for 9000 and I didn’t have the ability to post regularly. Furthermore, due to how I like to post, I also didn’t have the access that I felt necessary to compose my posts. Interestingly, one of the things all of my time away from blogging (and reading blogs) has identified is that I like to add an image (or several) to my blogs. Yes, that did contribute to my lack of posts, and I have a few ideas on how to prevent this in the future. So what brought me back? IT’S PATCH DAY!

On a related note… another interesting point about my blog is the fact that I cover what amounts to four different classes (5 specs) whereas most other blogs focus on a single or two different classes. That makes it very difficult for me to provide theory crafting that I’ve performed myself or the latest class changes for all 5 specs. However, with the changes to the game that are being introduced with Cataclysm, I like many others will be looking at and for new talent spec, gearing, and general healing advice. …and that is why I’m posting today…

Cataclysm is just around the corner, so I have and will have a lot to post about it. With the new patch going up today, the biggest effect to my characters will be the need to respec all of them. I have 4 level 80 healing classes, a level 23 disc priest, and a level 32 druid who will all need new specs. Since I’m collating (collecting) this information together anyways I thought I’d share my sources and information with my readers. I’ll list by class/spec below the information I’ve gathered as well as updating my class pages over this coming week. As always I’ve adjusted some of the recommendations to suit my play-style, however, I’ve provided the source(s) so those interested can look-up the theory-crafting to suit their own play-style. To ease the transition I’ve also used the MMO-Champions WoW talent calculator so that you can import these specs right into the game.

Druid
Keeva over at Tree Bark Jacket actually inspired me to return to my blog with her amazing 4.0 guide for resto druids, and I had very little I changed about her spec advice.
(2/0/34) Resto spec

Paladin
My own alteration of the build by Chase Christiansten at WoW Insider based on some of the conversation at the Plus Heal Forums (e.g., here) and Elitist Jerks.
(31/3/2) Holy PvE spec

Priest
I keep my priest dual spec’d for PvE and PvP right now because I like having a toon that I can jump into a BG with at any given moment and actually be competitive. So first my adjusted Discipline PvE spec then my PvP spec. I’ve also included a holy spec, but since I’ve never gotten much practice with holy, I just imported the source site(s) recommendation. These specs are based on the recommendations by Dawn Moore at WoW Insider.
(31/5/0) discipline PvE spec
(31/5/0) discipline PvP spec
(5/31/0) holy PvE spec

Shaman
I’ve mentioned before, Vixsin provides great info for Resto shaman, and he did not disappoint for 4.0.
(2/3/31) Resto PvE spec

Happy Respeccing!

Raid Design in Cataclysm

In going through and catching up on my blog reading I came across a couple of well articulated articles by Vixsin on Raid Design and by Graylo on Raid Equity with an analogy that I want to build on to give readers a better idea of the constraints imposed on 10-man raiders in the current raid design and why the new design will be a great improvement.

In Vixsin’s analogy, the  comparison was of raiding to a marathon, I will extend this analogy to the loot being equivalent to athletic shoes. While Vixsin breaks the argument into three categories of accessibility & longevity; cost & reward; and challenge & sizing, I’m going to concentrate more on cost & reward and sizing as they contain the meat of the matter.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

THE hot topic right now, RealID, has many folks upset and a few willing to give it a try; but let me give you a slightly different perspective.

Let me start with the initial implementation of RealID for cross-game communication…

I waited about a week before I accepted my friend’s requests, because as I explained to them, I use a lot of Addons and I didn’t want to be the source of a hacked guild bank. Two weeks later, after I’ve already taken the plunge because no evidence was immediately shown that the RealID could be hacked, I read about the Addon access  over on wow.com. I’ve since passed this on to my guild and instructed those who may be concerned how and what can be done to protect ourselves at this time.

In an evaluation of RealID pros and cons for “cross-game communication” I believe that the ability to chat with my friends while I’m on an alt on a different server is a really nice “perk”. However, while the ability of my friend’s friends to see my name does make me uncomfortable the nature of my fiends in the game who have my RealID are folks I trust with my Full Name, Phone Number, Email address, etc. so it’s not like they couldn’t mention my name to their other friends anyways. Overall, though I think the feature is awesome as it provides me and my friends the ability to whisper a guildie on another server to join us for guild activities or even just chat with friends that have characters they play more often on another server. The folks that I play with in my guild ALL know each other face-to-face so I am in a VERY unique situation anyways, in fact I think I have over a dozen of my guildies/friends added.

This brings us to the recently announced change to the forums…

It basically has no impact for me since I don’t read the official forums in any serious capacity nor have I ever posted on them anyways. However, the extensive breach of privacy and security that RealID visibility on the forms will bring about is a concern to me as it suggests that Blizzard-Activision (B-A) is rapidly heading toward a very open security policy for their entire business model. I’ve read enough further information on this change that I think I understand the marketing model that B-A is going for, it still seems like a rather daring choice overall.

And now for the opinion and rant part…

I predict that the official forums will get used rarely if at all for the effective discourse that they state as the reasoning behind this change. Most  educated people who actually understand the security and privacy concerns would NOT use the official forums with this feature active, as seen in the reasoned and extensive post over on wow_ladies. Therefore, no reasoned and educated comments will appear on the official forums thereby defeating the whole purpose of the feature (as stated in the original comment on the forums). Do none of the decision makers at B-A realize that the “useful comments” they expect on the forums with this feature will not occur? I say this because I suspect that only really brave people with no concerns about security and privacy will use them, which to me suggests that they either are already “outed” in the community or are and I hate to say it too stupid to know any better about the security concerns. So the only people now posting on these official forums are the people who we already know their name (e.g., Matt Lowe, Mathew Rossi, etc.) from within the industry or the type of folks who wouldn’t mind being on a reality tv show and/or in the tabloids. Maybe those two sub-sets of people will bring the positive forum comments that B-A is expecting, so I’ll definitely be interested to see how all of this unfolds.

As I’ve never posted in the forums before and I’m not likely to in the future, I doubt that this controversial situation will have any effect on me so I will continue to play this amazing game. However, if this trend continues to the point at which my Full Legal Name is visible to anyone other than who I choose to display  my name to I may have to re-evaluate my interest in World of Warcraft.