Too Many Annas

Seals, Judgments, and Holy Pally Handwaving

16 Written by Anna on August 18, 2009 – 5:46 am

I got a heads-up after my big 3.2 mana regen post that I’d missed a major source of regen that a fellow paladin, Nahyomi, had been using to good effect.

And then I went to test it out… and absolutely nothing happened.

So I was very puzzled.

Here’s the scenario:

• Nahyomi was receiving a TON of regen from using Judgment of Wisdom regularly – every 6 seconds if possible.
• When doing so, she was proccing what she called Seal of Wisdom, and was gaining back GOBS of mana – enough to not have to use Divine Plea nearly as often as previously.
• The change to Judgments with 3.2 makes any Judgment have the same proc chance as any other ranged/melee attack to proc Seal of Wisdom.  Hence my utter confusion – and lack of available regen, since this was totally random and in NO way getting close to the kind of numbers that Nahyomi was talking about.

So there are a few options.  Nahyomi could be lying – but I highly doubt that. She could be seeing the greater mana longevity because she was using a GCD every six seconds to cast a Judgment – which costs less than a big heal. But she also had some concrete regen numbers from a webstats parse – so I decided to dig a little deeper, since in reality, this /should/ be based on Math and Numbers and Stuff Like That.

So I enlisted the help of The Amazing Macmoran (who is one of the best Paladins I know) to see what was up.  He was also summarily confused, but we did some testing anyway, and discovered that, amazingly enough, he WAS getting extra mana regen from Judging.  And I still definitely wasn’t.

/me scratches her head, puzzled.

So Mac respecced, dropped all of his talents, and tried again.  No regen other than the expected, random Seal of Wisdom procs from Judgments as normal attacks.

NOW we’re getting somewhere.

So he applied a few judicious talent points (10 in Retribution, just to get Heart of the Crusader) … and discovered that it wasn’t that Judgment of Wisdom was now proccing Seal of Wisdom – but that if he already had Judgment of Wisdom up on a target, and he Judged it again – which caused Heart of the Crusader to re-apply itself – not only would Seal of Wisdom proc, but the ORIGINAL Judgment would proc off the HotC proc.

Magic!  Double regen!

So we did some more tinkering.  Turns out Vindication and Righteous Vengeance can ALSO proc the extra regen.

Now – it’s entirely possible that this is an unintended bug (there are a pile of bugs right now with Judgments and Seals – including one where Seal of Righteousness can double proc off itself). It’s also entirely possible that this is working as intended as a method of Ret Paladin regen – though unlikely, since Heart of the Crusader is so far up in the Ret tree as to be available to most Prot and Holy pallies as well.

So what’s the difference?

I don’t have Heart of the Crusader.

I’m running a 54/17/0 “Bubbledin” spec right now – and as such, I wasn’t seeing the extra regen. And I couldn’t Judge every 6 seconds anyway, but only every 10. As soon as I swapped to my Retribution spec, I magically got more regen from judging – frequently double procs on Judgment of Wisdom.

What does this mean?

Well, it means now that I no longer have 4 piece T8 (since I got The Pants of Awesometacular in 25 man Trial of the Champion), there is a lot less pull to stay with a 54/17/0 spec – right now.  If this is, in fact, a bug, we can expect it to get hotfixed shortly, as they hotfix all paladin problems quickly and often with little actual testing (… but that’s a rant for another day.  moving on).  If it’s NOT a bug, then there’s a little more benefit to the 51/5/15 spec, as it picks up Heart of the Crusader, as well as makes me take another look at the Paladin Tier 9 two piece set bonus.

Why?  Well, the 2-piece set bonus is as follows:

Increases the duration of your Judgments by 10 seconds.

Since this actually increases the duration of the Judgment on the target, that means we have an extra 10 seconds during which a re-cast Judgment can proc Heart of the Crusader, which will then double proc our regen. Is it suddenly awesometacular?  Not really – but it kinda sucks a little less. Maybe.

Anyway – this is all a lot of speculation, but it’s something interesting to try out, especially if you’re still running with the standard 51/5/15 build. Try it and see what your results are. From my experience, it’s a little more sporadic than “every time” – but it’s definitely a good way to stretch our now more limited mana pools after the patch!

(I’ve not yet respecced out of my 54/17/0 build, because I’m stubborn and I like it, but if this particular gem hangs around after today’s patch, it may be time to switch back to a cookie-cutter 51/5/15 build)

Muddy Monday

3 Written by Anna on August 17, 2009 – 8:28 am

• Anyone ever thought about what it must be like inside that Coliseum by now, with as many fights as take place every day?  What a mucky, muddy, bloody mess.
• I’m still reeling from a bout with either food poisoning or the stomach flu (though fortunately I’m actually feeling much better).  Not much fun, really.
• The combination of leveling speed changes with the bind on account shoulders/chestpiece is… almost disturbing, even at level 54.  Annie Mae completed level 53 in less than an hour yesterday.
• I’m largely disappointed in the Crusader’s Coliseum – not because it’s easy (which it is, so far) but because the gear in it so outstrips anything that drops in Ulduar that the only reason to really go back there is that there are only a few bosses in the Coliseum, and so gearing up a raid just doing that will take too long.  It’s a little frustrating.
• The option to extend raid lockouts based on the instance is quite nice, though, in that we can now do Ulduar over two weeks but let the Coliseum reset every week.
• Aely is not too far off getting her new paladin mount – the only real motivation I have right now for doing any dailies.  I’ve not even started doing the “aspirant” dailies with Annorah.
• As a reminder – I have no desire to discuss any of the “leaked” changes from anywhere.  I likely won’t even discuss them after Blizzard announces whatever they’re announcing at Blizzcon.  It sounds really grumpy of me (but hey it’s Monday, right?) but I have too many other things going on right now that I need to spend my mental energy on to worry about that kind of thing!

Sources, Belief, and Credibility

11 Written by Anna on August 13, 2009 – 1:38 pm

So there has been some “leaked” information from “reliable sources close to the subject” running around the WoW community lately.  Matticus has an excellent post on why it is that sometimes you just can’t name your source – whether that’s because they will lose their job if it gets back to them or because they’ve simply asked you not to squawk.

Heck, I follow the same guidelines here, more or less.  If you email me with a question, and ask me not to mention your name and server – I won’t.  You’ve asked, and your privacy as a gamer is important to me.

Of course, it’s a little different when you’re dealing with news and not Ask Anna’s Advice Column, but hey – the basic premise is the same.

That said, regardless of the ethics of preserving source confidentiality – nobody is /required/ to buy in to what is posted until it is posted with a defined source. Nor is a blogger /required/ to post that information until it can be decidedly sourced.

Now, I know that things are different for those folks that actually try to break the news.  I don’t (and that’s no surprise to those of you that’ve stuck with me for… what, nearly a year and a half now? eesh…) and so I don’t run into this problem very often. If the Warcraft Head Developer were to email me this week and say “Anna, in the next expansion, Paladins are going to have summonable angel pets as their form of raid healing, but you’re not allowed to use my name or credentials at this time” I’d do a tiny little happydance… and shut up about it.  It’s not my blog’s business to break news.

However – it /is/ the business of other sites to break news.

And if they so choose, they have – like every other journalistic source – the right to publish news with unnamed sources.  It’s a standard practice in journalism.

I, as Jane Peon the Site Visitor, have a different right.  And it’s a right I exercise on major world news sources, gaming news sources, craft news sources, and whatever other sites I frequent.  And that is what I call the Right of Disbelief.

The Right of Disbelief doesn’t entitle me to bash, hate on, flame, or otherwise be an asshat to the person that posted the potentially un-believable subject matter. What it entitles me to is simply this – I can choose to say “that’s nice, and I’ll wait to form an opinion on the subject until we have a qualified source close to the subject that’s willing to pony up the accountability for this”.

Why?

Well it’s simple. If the Blizzard lead developer sends me that email about Angel Aoe Pets, and then sometime between now and whatever the heck the next expansion is the entire Dev team shoots that developer down, and the plan changes to giving Paladins little cherub babies as mana regen instead… nobody’s ass is on the line… except mine.  My choosing to report on that (with an anonymous source) only gets MY ass grilled if it’s wrong.

However, if that same developer allows me the privilege of using their name and title, THEIR ass is now on the line as well.  This is why in the early stages of these “releases”, an accredited source is very rare.

And so, I maintain my Right of Disbelief for many many things about WoW.  I don’t freak out about early, leaked Patch Notes, or pre-Blizzcon special “mined” releases. I’ll believe it when I see it.  When, as Matt’s E1-E5 rating would suggest, I have at least an E4, if not an E5 rating on the source.

That doesn’t make a site that is willing to publish E1 information any less valid.  It simply means they’re willing to take the grilling if the source data falls through – a risk I (and my tiny little insignificant website) am not willing to take just yet.

A Few Bits of Business

Comments Off Written by Anna on August 13, 2009 – 11:01 am

First – Thank you to everyone that has participated in the gender discussions. It’s been a really insightful bit of reading (and I’m sorry I was mostly afk for all of it, I’ll be going back to several comments in a later post I think – fantastic stuff there) and nearly everyone was civil and thoughtful.  You guys are awesome.

Second (and less awesome) is that I’m… more or less jobless at the moment. I’m still waiting on the last bit of info about it, but I’m full time in the job search now. It’s not a horrible situation, but it will put a kink in things. 

Third – I’m having a bit of technical difficulty with a few parts of the site lately. Apologies! I’m working on figuring out why random things are disappearing when the code for them is still intact and unchanged. Hopefully I’ll have things back to normal later today – fortunately the actual site function and layout aren’t affected!