Archive for the 'Theorycraft' Category

28
Feb

epic feral weapon buyer’s guide

By angryraider 4 Comments
Categories: Theorycraft

Feral druids will tend to agree that weapon itemization for us has been somewhat weak in the past. But over the past year since TBC was released, our options have expanded quite a bit, affording many choices for weapons to cover tanking, DPS, or both.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to feral weapons lately as I’ve begun to focus on 25 man tanking and DPS. So I thought I’d create a little guide to epic weapons for feral druids. This isn’t necessarily a comparison of which weapon is better; it’s up to the individual druid to decide what’s best for him. Strictly speaking, any feral weapon can be used for tanking and DPS.

The weapons are ordered by difficulty to obtain, at least in my opinion. Your mileage may vary, of course. I’ve left off an analysis of the PVP staffs for this discussion as I wanted to focus solely on PVE content.

Now, on to the show.

Staff of Natural Fury - Auction House
This is by far the easiest epic feral weapon to obtain. Simply go to the Auction House and search for it. It has good stats, despite lacking agility, and the 320 armor makes it a sound choice for a freshly-minted level 70 feral druid, but it’s better for DPS. This is a great staff for PVP due to its Equip bonus.

Earthwarden - Reputation
This mace is pretty easily obtained via grinding Cenarion Expedition reputation to Exalted. It’s expertise rating, defense, and armor make it an excellent choice for bear tanks. The attack power bonus makes it a decent DPS staff. A 35 agility enchant will help for both DPS and tanking. Get this mace: you’ll have it for a long time.

Feral Staff of Lashing - Heroic Botanica
One of the few feral weapons that suits both tanking and DPS, this staff has decent armor and good agility, but lacks the +defense and +skill rating sported by Earthwarden. The raw strength and agility on this staff, coupled with its attack power bonus, make it far better suited to DPS.

Terestian’s Stranglestaff - Karazhan
Terestian’s is one of the most popular DPS weapons for ferals. It’s relatively easy to acquire, the stats are amazing, and it has hit rating. Most druids won’t replace this staff for quite a while.

Wildfury Greatstaff - Serpentshrine Cavern
This is the staff that replaces Earthwarden for bear tanks that have moved into 25 man content. This staff gives 2750 armor and 1036 hit points, as well as 2.6% dodge. With a 35 agility enchant, this staff is simply amazing.

Staff of Primal Fury - Zul’aman
The spiritual successor to Terestian’s, this staff sports outstanding DPS stats with the additional benefit of armor penetration. While a bear tank at the armor cap could use this for tanking, the Wildfury Greatstaff and even Earthwarden are better suited for that role.

Pillar of Ferocity - Mount Hyjal
Offering stats that suit both DPS and tanking, this staff is a great choice for feral druids who don’t already have one of the staffs previously mentioned (specifically Wildfury Greatstaff for tanking and Terestian’s for DPS). With a 35 agility enchant, this weapon would be well-suited for both roles. The lack of agility on this staff makes it less suited for DPS. It is heavily weighted toward tanking.

Now let’s take a look at the feral weapons available in 2.4.

Staff of the Forest Lord - Badge Reward (150 badges)
As the kids say, OMG. This is an outstanding DPS staff, with exceptional stats (both strength and agility) and an insane amount of stamina. It’s better suited toward DPS than tanking, so you might want to keep your Earthwarden around unless you’re at the armor cap.

Stanchion of Primal Instinct - Sunwell
With the +35 agility enchant, this staff gives 1547 attack power in cat form and >5% crit. It is an exceptional DPS staff, even better than the Staff of the Forest Lord. But as with that staff, you’ll probably want to keep Earthwarden or Wildfury Greatstaff on-hand for tanking.

That’s it for now. In my next post, I’ll take a look at Superior quality (aka “blue”) feral weapons.

05
Jan

Raid ontology sneak peek

By angryraider 1 Comment
Categories: Theorycraft

I’ve been working on an interesting project related to WoW in my free time. Today I made the first breakthrough in the effort, and the rest of it should come to me quickly over the next couple of weeks. I need to get some input from raiders.

So what is it?

Quite simply, I’ve created a World of Warcraft guild ontology and raiding knowledgebase. The gist of it is that raid leaders can use the ontology to describe their current raid roster (as well as alternates and recruits) to get a snapshot of their core raiding capabilities. This roster takes the form of high level classes (not WoW classes, but ontology classes) that define the roles in the raid.

For example, you’d have a class for healer, class for tank, class for dps, and so on. The ontology I’ve created is extensible, so if you want a more granular way to define roles, you’re able to. The raid leader can then create a knowledgebase through the ontology by defining the actual implementations of the classes.

In other words, for each class “Druid” the raid leader can create instances of druids in the knowledgebase. Say you have druids named “Karl,” “Leonid,” and “Feifei” in your regular raid roster. You would add these three to your knowledgebase as instances of the Druid class.

Then what?

Well, the Druid class has several slots (i.e., attributes) that you use to define the individual instance. If Karl is a resto druid, then you give him the Healer attribute. If Leonid is a boomkin, you give him the Magic Damage attribute. And so on.

Now you might be saying, “Ok, sounds like a database.” And in a manner of speaking, it is. But this goes further by letting you query your knowledgebase with questions like, “How many healers do I have that can do HoTs?” “How many melee DPSers do I have that can heal?” That is its power.

So let’s take a look at some screenshots.

First, we have the Protege tool open and we’re looking at our ontology. On the left is the list of classes I’ve defined, and on the right is the detail for the class.

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This is the view of the Slots (attributes) that are defined for the classes. You can see that I’ve defined two damage roles for druids, Melee and Magical. (Since this is still a work in progress, the healing stuff isn’t in there yet.)

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Let’s skip past the rest of those details for the moment and look at the really cool stuff: visualizations. Protege lets you visualize the ontology and the knowledgebase in ways that are truly amazing. These visualizations give you a birds eye view of your raiding situation. The first one is a static visualization that shows the hierarchy of the Druid class.

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And finally, we have another visualization of the Druid class in the form of a TouchGraph. This graph is interactive, allowing you to click through the graph and dive deeper into the details of your ontology and knowledgebase. Here is a TG visualization of the Druid class.

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You can see in this image that the Druid class (highlighted in green) is connected to the Damage class, which in turn is connected to the Magical class, and so on. You can also see that Mage, Rogue, and Hunter are connected to Damage as well, as are Priest, Paladin, Shaman, and Warlock. If you take a closer look at the graph, you can also see that Priest has a connection to Healer, while Rogue does not. At a simple level, that gives you an idea of what you can use this graph for.

The next step is to finish the ontology and create a working knowledgebase of my guild. I will work with a raid leader to define the knowledgebase for our specific raid core. I think that process will reveal much more about what belongs in the ontology.

I know BigRedKitty will love this. ;)
Stay tuned!