Tos

I *love* Trial of Style. It lets me show off fun transmog, get new stuff and boosts my transmog sales on the Auction House. Here are some thoughts on how to improve the concept:

First, make it more regular or even permanent, based on participation numbers.

With this, add some sort of overall faction or even several. There is a lot of potential here for fun NPC personalities we don’t see usually much of: goblin stylistas, a bespectacled gnome who hates capes, a range of crafters, Ethereals. Earn favor with them to obtain things like recipes, pets, gear, on-use effects like the summonable transmog tool. The typical faction setup.

Introduce a pool of broad themes that rotate either weekly or each time the event is held. In addition, add multiple venues which are each themed, eg the current one is Silvermoonish. Pull the current competition category from a pool of prompts from generic themes + rotation theme + location theme. This gives us a fresh rotation while also maintaining variety and the potential for favorite classic themes.

Having a rotating theme opens the door to more varied gameplay with transmog as the motivation. For example, if the theme was fire, you might find yourself visiting Molten Core or Firelands to get specific pieces. Lean into this by adding global buffs that match the theme, eg things like increased cloth, leather, ore, herbs or legacy loot drops in zones associated with that theme. This would add excitement and directed gameplay variety to running old raids and old world crafting.

The trial itself could be revamped a bit. First, it’s far too slow. Each voting round should be 1/4 the length it is. Ranked choice is another alternative to consider – maybe display each player on the stage and let us inspect them ourselves, and then rank them from first to last.

The voting itself is inherently flawed because some folks will always try to game it to ensure the nicer transmogs don’t beat them – it’s why you often see the lower quality ones win. Why don’t we have voting be for a team the player *isn’t* competing against? Match up 2 parties against each other and have them vote for the other party. There’s nothing be gained from tanking ratings in this scenario, so the end result will be more genuine voting.

There’s plenty more we could add in to make the event more fun AND help stimulate the economy in a sector that’s been neglected. Examples include ideas like:

– Make the prompts more evocative and varied. Some of them are a bit too vague and there aren’t enough in the pool. As an example, an overall Fire theme could have prompts like: Fire’s Wrath, Cleansing Fire, Extinguished Flames, Firehawk, Elementals, Too Hot To Handle, Chilled Flames, Hot Stuff, Fiery Memories. This gives a range of potential interpretations and designs with each prompt which helps ensure replayability.

– Make it super easy to share/copy/save transmogs you’ve seen. Find a way to plug this into the auction house, collection tab and explorer journal. Basically breadcrumb buying or farming.

– Upgrades to existing transmog, which use crafted or found base items and morph them into a new or recolored or updated design. This will help with the economic issue of transmog becoming less needed as player collections become filled. It could be tied into old world crafting patterns to help ensure a slow and steady demand, which would uplift old material prices as well, ensuring more types of gameplay can be profitable. It would also help push down extreme prices because a larger market means it’s harder for one person to corner.

– Drops off old bosses for items usable in trial of style, like cheer squads and spotlights in different colors

– Crafted recipes to make things like a sonic enhancer that plays a theme song you pick (engineer creates enhancer, scribes make scrolls to play for riffs?), a red carpet to walk down, a stampeding swarm of spiders – all of these are silly fun but if there’s enough variety players can use visual effects to help enhance their transmog display, such as a red spotlight and flames at their feet for a fire-themed competition

– Let us display a battle pet, mount and title along with the transmog

– More minigames beyond just the judging. Match up colors or gear to a displayed transmog (see dress up games for gameplay like this). Have a timed trial to make an outfit featuring X color. Have a quiz about where different items are sourced from.


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Anyways, this is quite long. What sort of updates would you like to see in trial of style?

Living steel

This is an easy way to obtain a lot of trillium (and living steel).

On a gatherer, set your hearthstone to your faction’s Pandaria capital city.

Fly around and gather (gathering resets the nodes in the area) until you find a golden lotus node. Harvest – note the buff it gives you! For 15 minutes, anything you kill has a chance to drop a treasure chest, which has a high chance of containing ghost iron, black/white trillium and spirits of harmony.

Head to Loremasters and queue for LFR. Clear trash up to first boss. Leave raid, reset, rinse and repeat. The large packs mean you will get tons of treasure chests.

Smelt trillium and ghost iron, send that + spirits of harmony to your alchemist with transmute spec (for extra procs). Turn ghost iron into trillium, turn trillium + SoH into living steel using riddle of steel (or do this every now and then and always have a nice stockpile for daily transmute).

This is infinitely repeatable as long as you don’t kill any bosses in HoF – with LFR, you will hit a limit of number of times you can enter. The biggest bottleneck is finding golden lotus nodes. Augment it with the Halfhill farm for easy daily trillium and/or SoH. I usually do a lap after doing my farm – the monkey village, bamboo forest west of halfhill and Kun Lai summit are all node rich and this path will let you get a kill in on Sha of Fear as well as some rare kills. You’ll also get a ton of lesser charms which you can convert into bonus rolls.

Bonus optimisation options:

– Darkmoon fire-water for increased gathering speed
– Pandaria herb gathering speed bonus gloves (chance to drop from rares). I am pretty sure this stacks with fire-water, but haven’t properly tested, I just know it’s hella fast with both. Edit: these do NOT stack
– Mist-veiled goggles (MoP engineering craft) to see extra nodes
– Ancient Pandaren mining pick (from Jade forest mine) for free gems when hitting ore nodes (unsure if this is still obtainable)
– +speed gear set + bear tartare + druid for movement speed to make trash farming faster

If you just want ghost iron, head west of Shrine of Two Moons until you find the area where quillian spawn in an endless swarm. Kill them, mine them. You don’t need to move, just lay down aoe and mine. I prefer a paladin for this as consecration basically instakills everything running by.

Any other good tips?

Update Sept 2022:

– Make sure to harvest herbs as you go. Harvesting a herb clears it out so golden lotus can spawn – golden lotus has a random chance to appear when each node repopulates. DE-populating the nodes by harvesting them forces them to repopulate. If you don’t harvest, then you are just hunting for existing ones, which are much more rare.

– If you have multiple accounts, you can fly around together (eg vial of sands mount) and both harvest the nodes, which makes golden lotus spawn 2x, 3x (X = characters) as fast. Logging out preserves the buff!

– You can use LFR for trash. I don’t know if the raid/LFR is quicker.

Pet arbitrage

Hiya, here’s an easy guide to setting up selling pets on multiple servers!

1. Optional: Make a vulpera. This isn’t mandatory, but it makes it SO much easier. They spawn with some gold to cover listing fees and they have extra bag space. They also spawn at the back of Org, close to AH and bank.

2. Optional: when spawned, run to the Tauren AH area (nice close bank/AH). Stop at the enchanting trainer and learn enchanting and buy the strange dust/lesser magic essence from the mats merchant. These can be sold for seed money.

3. Cage extra pets. Useful macros, can run these as moving to Ah area (they won’t dismount you):

Cage for sale (this macro cages any pets you have 3 of, leaving 2 behind. You can tweak it to your preference, eg sub 2 for 1 to cage any pets above 1):
/run local t,p,j={},{},C_PetJournal for i=1,j.GetNumPets() do p={j.GetPetInfoByIndex(i)} t[p[2]]=(t[p[2]] or 0)+1 if t[p[2]]>2 and p[16] and p[1] then j.CagePetByID(p[1]) return end end

Add to journal (this will fail if it hits journal full for a pet, so put extra pets at the very bottom on your inventory) :
/use pet cage

TSM:
Use TUJGlobalMean to price pets based on overall region prices. This lets you buy pets cheaply on one region and sell them for a profit on other regions. You will need the undermine journal addon for this price source.


Seed money tips:

– Use TSM “vendor” search to buy/sell items listed lower than vendor price
– Sell enchanting mats from vendor
– Buy and DE cheapo greens and sell mats
– Buy/smelt ores and sell bars
– Mail guild tabard: buy cost is 250g, sell cost is around 60g. You eat a loss but can essentially transfer money to another server to finance posting auctions.

Strategy:

– Buy pets listed heavily below regional prices and relist on other servers. You’ll begin to notice patterns, such as farmers flooding a server market and listing a ton of the same pet for cheap or timewalking driving down the cost of pets associated with turnin area (example: Bemax during Pandaria timewalking, price will tank and then slowly rise once Timeless Isle is less common to visit).
– Augment with pets you create via crafting.
– Keep an ear out for content creators sharing farming tips. These pets will tank in price as people jump on the bandwagon and will go up in value once a new farm becomes popular.
– Learn which pets are bought from vendors and avoid these. As the supply is constant, their price will not fluctuate as much and one dedicated idiot can keep the price low. Place an alt at vendors to easily keep them supplied for yourself.
– Buy FOMO and timegated pets during events which make them common, eg holidays or Darkmoon Faire. Resell later when they are temporarily unobtainable and price has gone up.
– Create a pet dungeon alt to farm rare pets for resale. Legion petshop in Dalaran will let you easily teleport alts to pet dungeons if you’ve already cleared them, just talk to the NPC in the pet shop for a teleport. This will let you easily set up an alt at each pet dungeon entrance (pick Legion for Chromie time and do the intro quests/scenario). These are some of the most expensive pets, but will have lower sale rates so spreading them among multiple servers is really useful.

Useful crafted pets:

– Pandaria engineering dragonling
– WoD garrison elekk plushie
– WoD garrison engineering pets
– Enchanting lantern


Any other tips and hints to share about this method of gold making?

Middleman

As a crafting middleman, you basically are supplying other crafters with what they need. You’re the dude making sure there are enchanting mats on the AH or the gal offering end results of annoying assemblies.

Your goal in this role is to basically turn raw mats and items into stuff people want to pay for.

For example, for enchanting, search for weapon or armor and sort by price. Buy anything under 1-5g, as a rule of thumb – the expansion the item sources from will affect value. Cataclysm breakdowns, for example, are more rare while nobody wants spirit dust from Pandaria. You can almost always disenchant the mats for a profit or snag some transmog to flip. You can do this with the base AH UI very quickly (TSM chugs too hard on my computer for searches as big as this).

(Side note: The next step to making this loop self sustainable is using your own production skill to produce the things to DE, eg making a bunch of bracers with a tailor to DE for dust. This is what’s known as a shuffle)

You can apply this same concept to ores: you’re taking one thing and crafting it to add value. Buy cheap ores, smelt them to sell more expensive bars.

With tailoring, you have stuff like enchanted frostweave, soulcloth, basically turning mats into more valuable mats. Leatherworking lets you upgrade hides. Enchanting + Shadowlands legendaries is a great example of this middle market.

Herb fragments, leather scraps, ore nuggets, shattering enchanting mats, etc can all work with this concept – you can often sell or use them, once transformed. Do the math – sometimes things sell for very inflated values.

Be aware that there is a limit to when the crafting middle market mats stops becoming profitable. For some things, people won’t pay a middleman for – they might make those mats themselves as part of the end goal of their crafting or the process to make it is so easy that it’s not worth your time.

Also learn which mats help boost this sort of crafter. For example, a bunch of frozen orbs cheap on the AH means you get to make a ton of different cloth. Someone dumping a ton of crystals means DE profit. Timewalking dungeons means X ore, cloth, elemental is super common atm. Etc.

In addition to making money, playing this role will teach you about the flow of mats from raw to crafted, which are very important concepts to understand if you want to tackle goldmaking on a larger scale.

This will not make you tons of gold, but it will make you consistent gold.

Garrison

Ok so these are really old but there is still profit to be made via using resources. How? Well that come comes down to your choice of skills. I’m just going to tackle optimising resource gain, so we can talk about tradeskills in comments.

https://www.wowhead.com/guides/garrisons/buildings/guide-to-the-garrison-lunarfall-inn-frostwall-tavern

Ok so:

– Inn to level 3. This gives you the huge resource missions

– Inn to level 2. This lets you recruit followers each RL week. You want to recruit for the extreme scavenger trait. Select a green follower instead of blue ones – getting two traits sounds fun until you realise you have locked into a nonoptimal trait. Your endgoal is scavenger AND extreme scavenger as follower traits. Unless that blue follower has both (and it can be procced, just got one with both from my Inn this week!) pass over them to get more rolls at scavenger as a secondary trait.

– Also Inn: if you want transmog, you need to do the quests given here. You can complete these quests in WoD Timewalking as well as by soloing them. Timewalking makes it easy to be lazy.

– Salvage yard to level 3. This takes a quest to unlock. Worth it. This gives you a chance for drops on missions. These drops give extra resources, follower upgrades (very much needed with the push you are doing via Inn) and extra coin via DE/vendor.

– Stables to 1. You only need it at level 1 to get action while mounted, which is the huge benefit it gives. While in your garrison you aren’t dismounted while doing actions like farming herbs.

– Ogre tower to level 2+. This unlocks work orders – mage tower work orders create rush orders for your comm producing buildings. This is NOT self sustaining, and you will need to go farm ogre waystones now and then. Fortunately there is a LFR queue mob right next to where you gather your resources. Highmaul is the LFR for these tokens, alternatively go fly there and AoE for a bit. This one is an elective…build it because you have space but do a tiny bit of work now and then to keep it maintained. It basically just adds to your income.

– Trading post at minimum level 1 for alt trades. Check what is cheap, sell/craft.

– Herb garden + mines: gives xp up to level 50, so a great option for passive leveling while building gold. Can use seeds to buy a pet to resell.

-Lumber mill: a good option for raw resource generation, I only advise if on alt and actively leveling through WoD. This setup involves active collection but it can be really nice to boost early resource generation.

– Holidays: look into using Holidays, eg I have turned in Halloween tokens to spawn spiders which means I have a boss up constantly which gives a potential valuable drop.

– Trader: if you have a level 3 garrison, each week you’ll get a trader. You can move to an alt’s garrison to capitalise on this, if you have 2 accounts, eg using a herb trader instead of a fur trader. The trader will ask for resources which you can trade for primal spirits. This lets you easily exchange excess resources for primal spirits, which can be used for purchasing mats or accelerating tradeskills.

– Wandering vendors may visit you. Depending on your server, the items they sell may have resell value.

– Battle pets setup lets you farm token and stones.

I am writing this off the top of my head, so I expect I’ve forgotten stuff. Please chime in with details!

Old content

Wrote this up for a comment, thought I’d share as a whole post. Here’s what I can think up off the top of my head. Please share your own suggestions!

If you don’t have Shadowlands, I suggest trying several of the following – the key is diversifying into different markets, as old world stuff sells more slowly. This is meant to be a jumping off point, not an exhaustive guide, so you’ll notice a lot of the suggestions involve further research on your own part.


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*Daily Chores*:


– **Pandaria farm**: this takes a few days to set up, but you can grow mats each day. There is also a rare chance for a cageable pet to spawn. You can sell the mats raw or smelt the ore into bars or transmute it into trillium/living steel, or use it to craft items to sell. Engineering has a lot of evergreen items.

– **Garrison**: this also takes a little setup. You get passive resources and node spawns each day and you can use those resources to buy comms. You can sell the comms or use the profession buildings + profession cooldowns to make pets, goblin glider kits, toys, bags, transmog gear, drums or cards of omen (each one is randomly worth values from copper to thousands of gold). The menagerie unlocks daily pet battles for tokens, while the herb garden lets you gather seeds for a pet you can sell. The mines also have a potential pet drop, but you can’t upgrade past level 2 (that removes the mobs it drops from). See this post for tips on maximizing resource generation: https://wp.me/sON4N-garrison

– **Mission tables** from Legion and BfA. These still have some rewards but they are more of a background supplement versus something to focus on.

– **Crafting cooldowns and transmutes**. A lot of more profitable stuff is locked behind these (eg tailoring’s imperial silk) or they create valuable items (eg living steel). Consider making several characters to have multiple cooldowns available per day.


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*Farming*:


– **Golden lotus buff**: picking a golden lotus in Pandaria will give you a buff for 15 minutes that gives a chance for a loot box on a kill. When you get the buff, travel to the Lorewalkers (near your faction’s city, there’s a person who will fly you up to them if you don’t have flying) and queue for Heart of Fear LFR. Clear the entry transh, leave raid, queue again, etc, until buff runs out. This will give you lots of Pandaria mats to sell or craft with. See this for more details: https://wp.me/pON4N-eg

– **Cataclysm herbs, ore, volatiles, enchanting mats**. These are used in the vial of the sands mount and enchanting and are in constant lowish demand. You can use the Cataclysm potion of treasure finding to obtain extra drops while farming mobs, similar to the golden lotus buff, and the Bastion of Twilight’s entry is the best place to farm with it.


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*Crafting*:



– **Mage tower, twink, farming gear**. Look at which items can have a crafter’s mark applied to make them legion-level and craft ones which will benefit someone in the mage tower. Look for set bonuses and gem slots. Apply the same logic to level 20 players (xp locked twink bracket). These won’t sell super fast but they do sell and there tends not to be a ton of competition.

– **Mage tower, twink, heirloom, farming enchants/item enhancements**. Heirloom ones will sell the most, but these all sell. You’ll need to do research and look at sale rates to decide which ones to make.

– **Mage tower, leveling, farming buffs**. Things like drums, scrolls, certain potions and flasks, certain foods like bear tartare. You’ll have to figure out which ones sell and don’t have a lot of competition.

– **Crafting/farming transmog.** You need to have a ton to see high returns, but it doesn’t hurt to add it to your mix if you find or make it easily. I suggest using a second auction alt for this so you can just skip it for a few days if you’re not in the mood to post all the listings.

– **Old glyphs**. Check your unlearned tab. There are a ton of ways to learn how to make new glyphs and these sell for much higher than the ones everyone learns by default.

– **Other old crafting:** lots of older stuff does still sell. Pets, mounts and toys sell the best, but there are also slow sales for things like contracts, pet name change, bags (especially the larger profession ones). Check sale rates of items. Obtaining more rare or gated recipes will give you access to more profitable items. Check your unlearned tab.

– **Shuffling and transforming mats**. For example, buying a bunch of super cheap cloth, crafting something cheap like bracers, and then disenchanting to sell or use the enchant mats. Transforming might be something like creating enchanted leather or turning light leather into heavy leather. You can also buy cheap greens to disenchant. This will involve research into different material values to determine what’s currently profitable on your AH. See this post for more details about being a crafting middleman: https://wp.me/pON4N-ed



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*Quests, Exploration, Dungeons*:



– **Legion archaeology quest**. Gives a grey worth 5k, can do this on each character and with allied races you can start at level 10, pick Legion Chromie time, skip the intro, hearth to Dalaran and begin the quest in a few minutes. You won’t have flying, though, so the quest will be a slog on a newbie without a 2nd account to help. This quest only shows up in rotation, so it might not be up. Quest: https://www.wowhead.com/quest=41174/worth-its-weight

– **Rare recipe/item resale**. Some vendors sell recipes or items which appear only rarely. You can usually resell these on the AH for some profit.

– **Rare hunting**. Get an add-on like Silver Dragon and check out rares you see on your map. Killing these usually rewards you with something and sometimes those somethings are profitable to resell or useful (eg faster harvesting gloves in Pandaria).

– **BfA island expeditions**. Drops transmog, pets.

– **Old dungeons/raids**. This will net you mats, greens, blues, purples, soulbound items you can DE, maybe pets or mounts…. Basically just think about ways to maximize profit after doing old content, such as by turning the results into enchants or a crafted pet to sell. ***In general, items that are crafted sell for more but sell more slowly than the raw mats.***

– **Pet battle daily quests.** This takes a lot of setup to unlock, but there are pet battle quest chains for each continent. Once finished you unlock daily pet battle quests for that region. Quest completion gives you a bag of pet supplies which can include pets and tokens to buy pets.

– **Fishing**. There are a few ways to make money with fishing, such as fishing up volatile fire outside Firelands. Research which fishing items can be profitable.

– **Archaeology**. This one is rough, but the vial of the sands does sell for a lot. It’s just takes a LOT of work to get. Research the Lorewalkers and Klaxxi trick to make it easier. More casually, it’s a great profession to snag on an alt if you enjoy leveling casually or exploring a lot. You get extra xp as you level and you can sell keystones on the AH if you aren’t interested in leveling it up. You can also exchange fossil fragments at the Darkmoon Faire.

– **Garrison Auction House Pieces**: These can be farmed from specific places in WoD. They are a fairly slow seller but they sell for a few thousand, more if you have enough to assemble a module.

– **WoD Pickpocket Daily**: Look into the quest chain with Griftah. Rewards around 2k gold.

– **Legion Pickpocket Weekly**: rewards 5k gold.


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*Hubs, Events*:



– **Dalaran Underbelly.** There’s a variety of things to do here and you can buy recipes, pets, etc with the currency as well as elixir of tongues to resell.

– **Darkmoon Faire**. Tons of stuff to buy/earn and resell, most notably pets and transmog. Make sure to get inky black potion from the cannibal witch in the woods. Doing special events like Moonfang, the heavy metal show and the rabbit can get you more expensive things to sell.

– **Old Patch Hubs**. Pretty much every one of these is deserted but has pets, recipes, toys, etc. It’s quick to blast through the dailies and gradually accumulate currency to buy things to resell. Examples: Argent Tournament, Molten Front

– **Holidays**. Every holiday creates a new temporary market for whatever people need for the event, as well as a way to earn items to resell like mounts or pets.

– **Timewalking**. Use Timewalking tokens to buy pets/toys to resell, increase rep (for factions you need access to for buying/selling their items) or buy mats to craft with or resell.


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*Other*:



– **AH Flipping**. This one takes lots of research and can be risky, but also profitable.

– **Pet Arbitrage**. This involves selling pets across multiple servers. See this post for more details; https://wp.me/pON4N-ef

– **Camping**. This is when you park an alt somewhere useful, such as where Poseidus spawns, the clickable nest for [leaping hatchling](https://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pets/beast/raptors/leaping-hatchling/) or a vendor who sells something rare.

What is Fun? – Part 1: Player Types and Game Design

One of the things I do at one of my jobs is analyze how users experience the game, and if it’s “fun” – this is an incredibly complex topic, which I will attempt to tackle in a series of posts, addressing the various ways games are “fun” to users.

This first post will look at the underlying player perspectives which drive what people view as “fun.”

Fun for Who?

At first blush, “fun” may seem self-evident and obvious to a gamer or a new designer. Stuff is fun or it isn’t! It just IS FUN! That view, however, is not useful when you are dealing with design or analytics – you want quantifiable data and clear design strategies – and it tends towards the myopic. People tend to gravitate towards what they find fun, and that will help define their own view of what fun is. If I can impress one thing upon you, readers, let it be this – there are MANY types of game players who find a HUGE range of things fun. Far too many new designers (or armchair analysts) cater to their own view of what’s fun, instead of realizing the vast range of interests among potential players.

Realizing, recognizing and designing for that range is what makes a truly stellar game.

Now, by range, I do not mean “Shooters vs Facebook Games” or “Sci-fi vs Fantasy.” Interest types come in many flavors, and genre is only one of the ways you can tap into someone’s concept of “fun” – obviously, I am not suggesting that designers change their genre or core concept or theme. Instead, I am stressing the importance of recognizing that people play games for a variety of reasons, in a variety of ways, and find a variety of things enjoyable.

Bartle Types

One of the core ludology studies from the early days of online gaming is the Bartle Test. The concept is basically the gaming world’s version of the Myers-Briggs personality test – basically, each person plays games a different way, with many players falling into specific categories. Many quizzes and tests have sprung up around this concept, letting gamers quickly assess their “type” – results range from a Killer to an Explorer to an Achiever. In recent game development, the MMO Wildstar based their character classes off this concept.

The concept itself is somewhat archaic (it’s from 1996, which is forever in the game industry timeline), and a bit rigid (if I spent a day training people and sitting in meetings at work, I may be far less inclined to be my usual Socializer persona, and might just want to mindlessly play a Killer all night)…but it’s a solid idea to consider when designing games and considering the people who will play them. Audience is, afterall, a huge thing to consider during development.

In my personal opinion, a good game hits more than one player type – and a great game appeals to all of them. A solid designer should, at the very least, acknowledge the different types, and consider if his or her game can include elements which will appeal to that gaming style. In future posts, I will dive into the individual types, for more concrete examples…

 

How to Cheese Meters as a Disc Priest (if you really want to be a jerkface)

First, a big ol’ disclaimer – I do NOT endorse meter cheesing. This is simply NOT productive to a good raid team. Numbers, on the whole, mean very little without context, so getting “high” numbers are a healer are not nearly as indicative of performance as they are for a DPS – and even for DPS, raw numbers don’t illustrate the whole picture of performance. For healers, this is even more true, as there is a lot of context to bear in mind: does the healer have an assignment (ie tanks), is one healer absorb-heavy (which will eat heals first), who’s using CDs well, etc. In short, there’s a lot more that goes into analyzing what a good healer is beyond meters.

That being said, sometimes you just want to blow everyone else away. Here are a few tips to help with that. Also…a bit of analysis into why meters are a sneaky and dangerous metric (I might make a longer post about this later).

First, a few circumstances in which it’s debately ok to play the sniper:

• A really out-of-touch guild recruiting. Sadly, this still does happen, so sometimes you need to make your numbers look baller to get a spot on the team. I’m so fortunate in that my team’s leaders listen to my input about healers instead of looking at raw numbers – my analysis always includes CD use and spells, and I’ve actually rated “top” healers lower than others because they were doing things like blowing CDs early to make themselves look good, number-wise, which meant they didn’t have the CDs available when we really needed them.
• Trash and/or farm night. Sometimes you just want to look good or push yourself to see what sort of numbers you can pull. Try to chat to your other healers to get them on board with padding.
• Ranking attempts. Same as above – talk to your healer-mates to get them on board with this. If you all can take turns trying to rank, then everyone is happy. As a side-note, the ability to cheese also means that people tend to not take healer rankings as legit pretty quick after a tier is released.

My only legit (non-cheesed) ranking. My team is a social guild, be nice, we go a bit slow!

• LFR HERO TIME. Sometimes it’s just one of those bottle of wine and “I NEED VALIDATION DAMNIT!” nights. Sorry to everyone else, but I totally get this, and this is the main factor I’m writing this article. You, too, can blow through LFR and feel like a hero!

Just to balance that out, here are reasons to AVOID meter cheesing:

• To be the “best” healer. I don’t want to derail my own post, so I won’t go into the many, many reasons why simple meter numbers (especially when a disc priest is in the mix) aren’t indicative of performance, but suffice to say that good healing is a combination of many factors. Raw numbers only go so far. If you are a disc priest, especially, there is a very dangerous line you can walk where attempting to cheese meters to get “top” numbers will OOM you and DOOM the raid (see the letter containment! Clearly not a coincidence!).
• To shut down another healer. Never never never never ever fucking do this to another member of your healing team. Healers are a TEAM. We have to be able to work together. If you’re in a big enough raid that is running two discs, don’t you dare try to double-dip into their zone and hinder their healing to make yourself look good. That’s just not cool and not what a team player does. I’ve heard of this happening, and it’s just really uncool. Don’t be that guy.
• To prove your worth. Again, some raid teams are not enlightened. Instead of throwing your other healers under the bus (again, we’re a team!), try to illustrate how your healing works – the sorry truth is that most people just don’t understand unless they are a healer. For example, our raid team thought our shamans weren’t very good because my numbers were comparatively much higher, especially on farm. I had to make it super clear them that shamans are not gonna shine unless the raid is fucking up or we’re taking a ton of damage, but once they do, we’re blessed to have one – they were simply unaware of how the mastery worked, especially with absorb interplay, but once they got the concept they were like omg shamans are amazing with disc. Yes, my padawans, they are.

Right, all that being said, here’s the nasty trick section. You’re a terrible person for using these. Enjoy.

Talent Choices

First thing you want to assess is your talent choices. Here are a few rules of thumb, going down the tree:

• Tier 1 (level 15): Desperate Prayer. This is an easy, one-touch heal. See below about self-damage for how to use this best.
• Tier 2 (level 30): Body and soul. Unless you are great at laying down feathers, pick B&S for extra mobility to squeeze out as many heals as you can before having to move (with a super fast run speed). If you can lay down feathers on your route, power to you. I’m not the best at it, and I prefer the free speed boost with the shield I’m already going to cast (again, see below for self-damage), so I’m not wasting GCDs.
• Tier 3 (level 45): Surge of light. Take this talent if you don’t need mana regen. Free instant heals! This works ESPECIALLY well with Divine Star. Gauge this on an encounter-to-encounter basis. If your team is wiping a ton early on, definitely go for it, as you aren’t running out of mana. If it’s a fight you know (or assume) the group will finish, gauge your own mana use (see mana regen below). If you’ve not got much spirit gear, go for Power Word: Solace. Only use mindbender if you know the fight is super movement heavy and that you won’t be able to use PW:S effectively.
• Tier 4 (level 60): Do NOT take Dominate Mind. That’s healing uptime lost. Beyond that, not relevant for meter cheesing.
• Tier 5 (level 75): This one is a highly variable one and will shift from fight to fight. Some good tips:
  • If the fight does PREDICTABLE damage *and* you know there will be a group of people together within range, take Spirit Shell.  Remember, this spell is based on GROUP casting, so if your team is spread, it’s fairly useless.
  • If you are progressing or the damage is super high (or your team is just really bad) go for Twist of Fate. It’s a free 15% boost to everything. When my team is progressing, the uptime is around 50-80% (also, tip: adjust skada/recount to have a display showing buff uptimes, so you can easily see if a spell’s effect is worth using!).
  • Power Infusion is legitimately useful in a real raid scenario, but if you’re cheesing right you don’t need the mana reduction (see mana use below), and the haste buff doesn’t compare to Spirit Shell’s cheesing potential. If you’re in a situation where the damage is meh and groups are spread, then take it.
• Tier 6 (level 90): Like with Tier 5, this one will vary on the situation:
  • Cascade: Everyone is spread out pretty erratically, or in clumped groups, and/or your team is pretty small. A melee/ranged group with a small team is the perfect situation for cascade to shine. Cascade is limited in bounces, so it’ll shine more in smaller teams.
  • Divine star: Everyone is grouped. This spell scales in awesome the bigger your team is. This spell also generates lots of nice FDCL procs!
  • Halo: Huge spread and large team means more effectiveness for the spell.
• Tier 7 (level 100): As with the other talents, this one varies per fight:
  • Clarity of Will: Do you have time to reliably cast this repeatedly (sup Hans and Fraz)? Are tanks taking continual damage? Is there another disc priest in the raid? If any of these boxes are checked yes, select this.
  • Words of Mending: If you’re moving yer butt a lot, take this, but if you’re trying to cheese hard, I advise against it, unless it’s a fight you literally cannot find a time to get the cast off in. Again, this post is about the cheese, so, while I would advise it in legit raids, in cheesing, it’s nearly as bad as…
  • Saving Grace: Hahahahahahahhaha no.

Mana Regen

Remember, you’re cheesing. When cheesing, you don’t work as a teammate, you don’t coordinate with other healers, you are just in it for yourself. Mana regen is just part of that equation.

• Regen rule of thumb: Aim to play as fast and loose with mana as you can. If you heavily suspect your team is going to wipe, don’t bother with any regen concerns – they’ll be dead before mana becomes an issue. In general – even with good healing – you should be pushing to be near low to none mana by the time the fight ends, imo, as any mana you have left means those are spells you didn’t cast. If you can scrape through a fight with mana actively leftover for spells, then direct your talents to throughput spells like FDCL.
• Regen Channeled Pots: These give significantly more than a chuggable mana potion, but put you out of the action while you’re drinking one. As a cheeser, the strain this puts on other healers should not bug you – in fact, it’s a benefit, in a way, as it ensures they pump out mana while you’re inactive and then leave more things for you to heal once they are struggling with mana. Just make sure that no ground effects are about to go out before you drink!!! Do it when the healing is most light AND after you’ve blanketed the raid in absorbs (if you do really want to play fair with other healers, though, announce when this is about to happen, so they can be prepared – ideally during a downtime, eg after a clean transition in Blast Furance).

Self Damage

Right, it’s bad, but every healer aiming to tops the charts does this. As a disc, it’s super easy. That being said, there is an art to it.

• Self damage: The most basic form of this is standing in shit after bubbling yourself. It’s simple yet effective. It’s free healing numbers. Dip in and out to pad the meters.
• Using CDs: This is a bit more sneaky and clever, and I’d honestly advocate it in a raid, period – if you know that you can survive the damage, use something like desperate prayer or a health potion to keep you alive while you attempt….
• Damage Eating: Sometimes, taking damage isn’t really that bad a thing. If you can survive it, as a cheeser, it’s worth it, especially if you get to cast some spells.
• Damage Analysis: This is actually solid healing, so no judgements! When spells are coming at you, as a disc priest, you should always analyze your effectiveness from casting the spell vs your personal damage from it – sometimes it’s better to simple just sit and take the damage, if you KNOW you will live. As a cheeser, this is doubly true!

Maximizing Your Own Numbers

Again, as before, when you’re cheesing, you’re in it for you. Don’t worry about coordinating stuff. Some tips:

• Actively call for buffs: If you are out for yourself, and to increase your numbers, call for buffs in conjunction with heavy healing you’ve got setup. People often will pop spells like amplify magic if they hear it called out.
• Don’t use shit that doesn’t show on charts: If it’s all about the bass bout the bass (ie the meters), don’t use Pain Suppression or Power Word: Barrier. Sadly, I’m being 100% honest here – if your goals are chart topping, these SUPER USEFUL spells don’t reflect anywhere on meters, so using them just means you’re siphoning off damage but your mitigation efforts won’t be recognized. If you’re trialing with a shitty guild who doesn’t recognize CD use like this (or going for LFR glory) , don’t use them. Yes, it hurts my soul to write this.
• Snipe like a fucking pro: Oh, yes, this needs its whole own section….

Sniping Like a Pro:

Right, so, here’s where the whole meat and potatoes of disc priest cheesing comes into play. Talents and whatnot are just icing – the gameplay itself is how you steal top numbers. AGAIN, I JUST WANT TO MAKE THIS CLEAR, I DO NOT CONDONE THIS FOR A COORDINATED RAID TEAM – but if you’re in LFR, and your man just dumped you, and you need a feel good, you go girl. You use these tips. I’m not judging.

• If you liked then you should’ve put a bubble on it: Disc priest is soooo potent in that we can absorb incoming damage. For someone new to the role, that concept may seem a bit weird – but this is the entire reason I am writing this guide. End of the day, us discs are all about stealing everyone’s heal. It might be a bad design, but that’s the design we’re given. If you know there is damage coming, you pop up those absorbs.
• Raid damage: If you know there’s a mechanic that’s going to deal damage to the raid (think…everything Blackhand)…bubble as many people as you can.
• Tank damage: Always be bubbling the tanks. Always be using Clarity of Will on the tanks (especially if there is another disc priest, this expac has us going full hunger games on each other).
• Derp damage: If someone is taking damage, do your best to assess WHY. If it’s continuous, bubble them. They are standing in fire, but whatev, who cares, you are here for the numbers. If it’s just a single spike, ignore them. You’re wasting a bubble on them. Don’t touch them unless you have a flash heal or penance free.
• Bonus Rounds: You can use spirit shell to blanket an entire group from damage before it happens. You can ALSO smash shit a few times and build up atonement procs and then activate archangel – when you cast Prayer of Healing, with your first archangel cast, it’s an automatic crit, so everyone gets Divine Aegis. This means they will be sitting with absorbs before the damage even goes out.
• It’s all about the snipe: Remember that most of our casts take time. Start a prayer of healing and be prepared to jump to break the cast if nobody takes damage. Cast holy nova or cascade 1ish seconds before the damage is due to go out – as disc (sniping or otherwise) it’s key that you know when damage is coming. If you can constantly be the one with the heal finishing right when the damage lands….it will break them down. That’s the ultimate fealty you can ask for, as a disc priest – your other healers bowing to you, crying, and asking you to just let them heal.

Hopefully I’ve helped you out in your task to destroy other healers and win LFR. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. Happy healing!

How to break things like a boss

I work in QA. Yes, I’ve done video games – 4 years for Sony/Playstation, 1 year for Microsoft Game Studio, but I do android/iOS/website now. In any case (haha that’s a pun), I do testing every day, so I figured I’d write up a quick and dirty guide for useful tips and tactics for testing. Every company is different, obviously, so some of this stuff won’t be relevant elsewhere.

Types of testing
There are many types of testing, all with specific goals. I’m going to outline a few, core types here to help make it easier to figure out what you should be doing at a specific stage in a test cycle.

1. Exploratory
This type of testing is basically the run-around-and-try-everything testing. This is when you go through all the commands, trying out weird as heck stuff to break whatever you can. Start with the “good path” (ie, basic user functionality) and then radiate outwards. Advance to common mistakes (typos, inverted command syntax, being in the wrong state) and then finally push the boundaries. Pretend you are drunk, or a 5 year old, or a total newb, and do unexpected stuff.

2. Test casing/Regression testing
This type of testing follows a template of expected results. You are basically ensuring things work when the necessary steps are executed. For example, a test case might include a test to verify that using x command produces y result. You would then verify that passes or fails or is blocked by some other issue.

“Smoke tests” are a sub-genre of this, where you do a quick once-over for core components to make sure stuff is a-ok.

3. Halo/Directed exploratory
This type of testing is a melding of the two above. Using a test case or design specs as a basic template for features to test, you explore around those features and poke at stuff, starting first with the core functionality and then advancing into outlying conditions and circumstances. For example, there might be a skeleton design doc saying that the LEARN command has changed. You would first play with LEARN in a variety of ways, and then try associated stuff, like TEACH or STUDY.

4. Balance testing
This type of testing is an analysis of the content itself, gauging its impact on the game. This is a much more subjective type of testing, with the focus on analyzing the game system and how new changes will integrate into it. Testing in this category should focus on core gameplay and functionality first, and then expand out to consider outlying situations, with a keen eye directed towards things like exploits and overpowered/underpowered balance. Remember that this sort of testing is NOT just about finding OP/UP scenarios, but also about finding core functionality and balance.

Bug Finding

If you find a bug while testing, try to globalize and generalize it. This means don’t just go x thing is broken and step away – instead, consider what facets of the game x thing relates to and analyze those as well. If a pair of lime green boots breaks the game when you probe them, try probing purple boots, try probing lime green pants and try equipping lime green boots. The bug might not be based in the specific circumstances that you found it in, so check related conditions.

Note time stamps. Some bugs are weird and can be tied to time tables, especially if they have to do with things like resetting items/quests.

As mentioned earlier, if you are exploratory testing, don’t just play like a normal player. Play like someone new, or derpy. Try out stuff that YOU know won’t work. Ensure it fails. It doesn’t always.

Don’t pigeonhole – don’t just test on one account, or one platform. Make a newb, play an alt, run another client. Something that works for one character or one client or one device may not work for another. With playstation, I once found a pretty fatal error for Killzone, where the ENTIRE game wouldn’t work with non 6-axis controllers – it’s imperative you test all scenarios that ANY player might encounter, so try stuff out in a variety of situations.

If you have access to code, use echoes to spit out values of variables, tables, etc to help you conceptualize where things are breaking. If I have a script that’s being a bitch, I’ll code in an echo to shout out WORKING #1, 2, 3 etc for each step to help pinpoint where stuff is going bad.

Test limits – outliers are where tons of bugs occur. Min/max, check scaling, investigate weird and cusp situations/numbers. Good numbers to test around: 255; 65,535; 4,294,967,295 and multiples/divisions of those (integer overflow). Iosyne’s order just saw a bug from this in action kill all our shrines when we hit overflow.

Be efficient – you don’t need to test every single condition ever. Analyze what could make bugs, and then test representative samples within each potential condition. Eg, don’t test 1-100 if 1 and 99 are the things that are going to bring the bug up. Just test those boundaries.

Identify patterns. If you see a common element between unrelated bugs, start investigating more. Odds are, there’s something in common – you just haven’t found it yet.

No bug is random. The conditions that make it happen just aren’t known yet.

Testing Tools

Most testing likes bug reports. In these include, if possible, steps to reproduce or an excerpt of your log/screenshot/video illustrating the issue.

Many games now have in-game bug reporting. These often have crash dumps automatically linked to them (crash dumps are a spit-out of all the code that was executing right before the crash) so it can be really helpful to write up a report asap.

When testing, some sort of recording of your methods is highly advised. Automatic logging upon session login, echo commands turned on, and/or fraps are all useful tools. When I exploratory test at work, I write up charters – this is a document that declares what I am doing to test, and then journals each step I’ve taken. You’d be surprised how hard it can be, sometimes, to remember the precise steps you’ve taken, so ensure you are documenting what you do for easier reproduction.

Google doc spreadsheets are great for collaborative, on-the-fly test casing software.

Have fun – testing is all about enjoying problem solving! You’re a code detective and enjoying the investigation is paramount to doing it well!

Let’s talk about disc, baby

This song encapsulates my feelings about disc: what, how, what, how, wtf, rage, what.

I haven’t really commented about the changes yet – I understand that they are only a stepping stone between here and the new expansion, but after playing (and raiding and PVPing) for a few weeks, I know enough to know that disc has been gutted.

My favorite moment from the past expansion was healing Shamans our first few times fighting them: there were two tanks to keep up. On weakened soul clear, both tanks got a bubble. I was rolling penance on CD to ensure I had a free bubble to use to kill that weakened soul on whoever had the HIGHEST weakened soul CD. The other one got FDCL flash heal procs – unless penance was on CD and that CD was 6+ seconds. In that case, greater heal, yo. If under, flash heals. Keep up grace on both tanks as well, using that penance smartly and those flash heal procs cleverly to reset the 3-stack CD. Weave in prayer of mending and holy fire/smite for boosted heals via archangel. Get that spirit shell in and time a halo or cascade to land when meteor lands. Fucking exhilarating.

Now: BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA.

Obviously, our mana pools and regen will be changing, and we’ll be getting buffs from leveling and new talents, so I won’t comment on the balance – but the balance isn’t what upsets me. I trust that Blizzard will balance things. What I am concerned about is the deeper issue here: disc has been completely gutted and lost its complex interplay of skills. Disc was incredibly exciting to play – you had to know the fight, and you needed to use your skills well in conjunction with each other. You could do “OK” without maximizing that, and you could even do pretty good (which is a balance issue which should have been tackled) but to truly do great you needed to know every skill and know how to use them in conjunction with each other.

Now, I just play whack a mole and bubble spam.

…And the thing that frustrates me is that isn’t going to change. I’m going to passively get better at basic healing simply for levelling up and having gear, but that does not do anything to ameliorate the sting of losing all of my complex and engaging gameplay, nor do I want it to. I don’t want to be OP. I want to be CHALLENGED. I understand that simplifying things makes the game more accessible to more people….but does Blizzard even understand the ramifications of these changes?

I don’t want to get too heavily into the problems with PvP, but I’ll give this a short bit. First, self peels are super vital to healers. Who cares if we have silence? That’s very potent for arenas, yes – but most of us don’t play arenas. As someone who primarily just plays battlegrounds (because I’m a healer and love healing) god does stuff suck hard atm. I lost a self peel. I have a grand total of two instant casts (bubble and holy nova – both of which I already had). I lost my strategic and tactical stun interrupt. Hell, my freaking 4-set has even been nerfed. My hot has vanished. My strong prepared heal (glyphed Prayed of Mending) has been made a cast. On top of this, I lost my tiny hybrid potency (Shadow Word: Death), I’m physically weaker (lost Inner Fire glyph to increase armor), and now my shield glyphs are mutual exclusive – let me just reiterate this last part: I can either have a slightly less shitty bubble, I can have one that helps heal, or I can have one that deals damage. I am the class that basically just has bubble, but I can’t actually soup my bubble up to make it potent. That’s so damn depressing.

I think disc definitely had problems. Absorbs as a concept reward skilled healers way too well – if you know the fight, you can gimmick it to really just trivialize it and make things frustrating to your fellow healers. Absorbs really aren’t very fair as is, especially once you calculate in a good disc doing things like spirit shelling before big AoE pulses. My team didn’t like it initially, until we chatted out why I was nomming heals and making it clear that numbers meant NOTHING unless there were clear issues. I don’t expect every raid team to do that, and I’ve had to step in and go WHOA STOP to multiple pugs bitching people out for not competing with a 585 disc priest. Healers: you’re beautiful, keep on keeping on. You each have a special job to do. Raid leaders: Heal meters =/= dps meters so please stop citing them. Anyways, yes. Absorbs make other healers feel bad and unbalance fights, and disc was definitely due for a change.

Blizzard, however, cut the wrong things: aegis + crit gems + reforging + atonement were the big problems here (basically 50% of everything I did made an absorb), not the complex interplay around weakened soul and grace. Those things let anyone mindlessly stack absorbs without any skill, blanketing a raid without much thought, especially with this tier’s 2-set increasing crit. Seriously, most of us were doing fights with 30-50% of our healing coming from aegis. If you’re going to fix disc’s disparity, make it so absorbs require thought and pre-planning – and I’m baffled at why the more complex skillplay has been removed but mindless and RNG absorb procs have been left in. This isn’t smart gameplay. This isn’t rewarding clever players. Aegis is a fun concept, but its current iteration is the big reason why disc pisses people off. People do NO thought about aegis, it’s based on RNG, it can proc off anything, and derpy smart heals proc it….and as a nice toss of salt in the wound, it’s been kept in, while the actually engaging and intelligent aspect of the class has been gutted. Changing aegis to be a talent, making it be a buff you activate for x amount of time, or even just flat out removing it – these would have done a significantly lot more to fix disc than the changes we’ve seen.

I really don’t want to think that Blizzard is just slashing stuff to cater to the least common denominator – partially because I think that will backfire badly. Let me draw it out.

Mythic raids: people are min-maxxing. They’ll bring 1, maybe 2 disc healers. The disc are frustrated but play and do ok. Thing is, this is NOT where the problem is.

Every other (ESPECIALLY LFR) raid difficulty: You roll in via group finder or automated match-making and there are 3-5 other disc priests (according to the wow census priests are BY FAR the most popular healer class). One priest bubbles some people. The other priests can’t kill that weakened soul, so they are stuck unable to use their most potent (and in WoD, prime) skill. The top geared healer sees their numbers dropping to shit* because weaker absorbs are eaten first, and are ridiculed by clueless derps (this is already happening), and subsequently loses interest in trying to help out lower-geared people. Healers start sniping or recklessly healing to raise their numbers. Newer healers feel heavily discouraged. The new AoE skill invites mindless spam. It really just creates a shitty environment.

* Note, I do NOT promote heal chart number linking. You should only ever refer to heal charts as a tool for analysis. Heal chart numbers on their own mean nothing. See this article for more enlightenment.

In short, I am really unhappy with where disc is now. I used to enjoy healing. I don’t anymore. Numbers can be tweaked. Skill interaction and a dumbing-down of healing is a far huger task. I am worried about the expac.