Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

Breaking the 2000 Heals Per Second Barrier

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2000hps

The time: 2230
The place: Tempest Keep
The objective: Infiltrate, search and destroy the Voidreaver prototype
The crew: Fallen Heroes lead joint operation

I had finished an excursion into Botanic in the hopes of procuring me a Bangle. Boy did that not work out. Shortly after I finished, I received a tell from a mission commander in Fallen Heroes.

Apparently, one of their heroes had… fallen.

Since I happened to be in the area, I agreed to lend what assistance I could. I entered the area and the entire complex was picked clean. All the Elven guards were dead or no where to be seen. Halfway in and a glance upwards showed that the team inside had a giant roast turkey for dinner at some point.

In any case, we’ve cleared out the room in Voidreaver and a new strategy was devised. I didn’t know what was up but when I heard ranged won’t have to move I straightened my back and listened.

The idea

A group of hunters would run laps around Voidreaver while the rest of the group stayed directly underneath him.

All that’s necessary for me to do is spam CoH (pronounced Coe, like toe. None of this See Oh Aech business) and PRoH (pronounced Prow). Yes, I’m setting a precedent.

The execution

Oh it was glorious! That’s all I did the entire fight! I sat directly beneath him and did nothing but spam those two AoE spells the entire night. If the pounding timers are on the mark, I can time my prayer down to the split millisecond that it begins and it’s as if no one loses any health at all.

And after the dust settled and the smoke cleared, there were only 5 or so casualties. I got nothing but a Fel Reaver’s Piston for my effort. No one rolled on it and I wasn’t about to just leave empty handed. At least I have a void crystal now.

Obviously in order to sustain that kind of healing output, you’re going to need gas and lots of it. If you ain’t outta gas, you ain’t tryin’! Resto Shamans have good mileage there’s no doubt about that. I guess you could call them hybrids. But what does Tim Taylor need? More power! Therefore, I take pride in being the suburban SUV of healers everywhere with Druids as my mobile gas stations.

…

*ducks*

The World is Not Ready

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Do not let the others mislead you. This is not the case. The first rule of BA chat is whatever is said in BA chat stays in BA chat. And this is for good reason, I assure you.

Why?

Because the world isn’t ready. The public isn’t ready. What about the kids? They’re not ready! The discussion, the drama, the stories, the tales, the classified information, the pictures are shared in an isolated and contained environment. Should it be publicized, the chaos and damage that would ensue would reach proportions of an epic scale rivaled only by the Sundering itself! I have always considered BA Chat “Off the record” where anything could be said at any time for any reason. Now I’ll have to self censor what I say under fear that it could be used against me at any time without notice.

How many casualties have we suffered? How many eyes have been gouged? Oh the humanity!

How to Successfully Pick up a GM

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Image courtesy of dbking

Making the first move and first impression counts when you’re looking to join a Guild. Excellent Guildmasters (I prefer General Managers) have a way of cutting through the random crap that applicants throw at them. They’re able to translate what applicants say and interpret them in a more precise way. As my Guild’s first line of defense against “R-Tards”, I’ve seen my share of bad opening introductions from players that were interested. Here’s 10:

  1. You say: “I can maintain 100% attendance.” GM thinks: “Even if he does make 100% of the raids, he’ll probably afk for a good portion of them.”
  2. You say: “I am willing to listen and pay attention all the time.” GM thinks: “Good, because my guild is full of players who do whatever the heck it is that they want at will.”
  3. You say: “I’m not quite sure what level your Guild is at in terms of progression, but… ” GM thinks: “No homework or research done and you’re applying for our Guild blindly? If you can’t research Guilds then we can’t expect you to research boss strategies.”
  4. You say: “I can lead PvP battlegrounds and form a top notch arena team within the Guild.” GM thinks: “We’re a frackin’ progression guild, not a PvP guild! Besides, this Guild can’t handle more than 1 emo BG leader.”
  5. You say: “I’d like to see end game raiding and experience it.” GM thinks: “You willing to die for it?”
  6. You say: “I don’t think my gear is good enough, however…” GM thinks: “Nope, probably not.”
  7. You say: “There’s not much time left before the expansion comes out, so…” GM thinks: “We’re not a sightseeing operation.”
  8. You say: “I’m willing to sit on the bench for a while and stay as a trial if you’re full.” GM thinks: “Great, someone whose not even going to try and compete for a raid spot.”
  9. You say: “You’ve made these mods mandatory for use in the Guild, but I don’t think I need them because…” GM thinks: “You can’t even pass a simple test of just downloading and installing mods. How will I know you will do as I instruct during a raid?”
  10. You say: “The only way for me to get better as a player is to get better gear.” GM thinks: “A million dollars to anyone who invents a device that allows for strangulation across the internet

The best opening lines to make to a GM or their representative is to say something similar to:

Hi, my name is __________, I would like to raid as a __________ spec and I have experience up to this encounter in the game.

For a much better insight into the application and mental thought processes of GMs, I strongly advise you read Chick GM’s post about the very same subject in more detail.

Post inspired by Guy Kawasaki

Addon: Instant Health is Pants Crappingly Awesome

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During this weeks Twisted Nether blogcast, one of the questions posed by Fimlys was what addons I currently favor the most. I said to him that I favoured Pitbull the most but there was another addon called Instant Health that was beginning to grow on me. I touched about it in some details on the blogcast and promised a blog post specifically on the addon and here it is.

The problem

WoW servers don’t update health bars instantaneously. The information is sent from a player to the server, then from the server to your UI. There are two interaction points where lag due to hardware or ISP issues can cause problems, and although this typically happens in regular intervals, it can take as long as 3 seconds to complete.

All healers have been in situations where their heals have gone off, yet the target still died. Cooldowns and trinkets were blown at the last possible moment to add more “oomph” to their heals. Our efforts were futile because even though it showed that we did cast our instants, it did not appear to have been tracked or anything.

The solution

I acted on a tip from Aylii and Lang, my main tank. They both advised me to take a hard look at an addon called Instant Health. The beta was released a little over a week ago. So what’s it about?

This addon updates the health of player/party/raid members and pets much faster than normal by using your local combat log data rather than waiting for the server to send updated health information to you.

It works with Blizzard’s default UI as well as ANY custom addon you might have installed. All you need to do is put it in your addons folder and enable it!
Notice, this addon only speeds up health updates for player/party/raid members and pets. (People that are recorded in your combat log.) Players/mobs that are not in your group will have their health updated normally.

The trial

Intrigued, I had to get a copy of the addon quickly and stress-test the sucker. I forwarded a copy to Wynthea as well, so we could compare notes afterward. So how did Instant Health stack up to our combined play?

In a word, scary. This mod updates health lightning fast. You’ll get a better idea by observing a protection Paladin tanking waves of trash in Mount Hyjal. By updating health on a much faster scale, I’ve found that I’ve been able to make decisions even quicker. Information is life for healers and the faster we get it the faster we can make choices. It’s an awesome addon for us twitch healers that rely on quick reactions. Non healers might think that it’s redundant for an addon that updates heath only a fraction of a second sooner than server updates but they wouldn’t understand. 9 out of 10 Matts agree that this addon is an absolute must have for any raiding healer (the other Matt passed out in shock and stress of watching health bars drop too fast).

-Matticus

I’m very impressed with the potential of this add-on. Personally, I heal less Whack-a-mole style, and more proactively – paying attention primarily to those with aggro – so the benefit to my reaction time on MT healing is negligible. Where this mod really shines is with tough decision-making: you can see which player’s health is dropping fastest and react with better information. The biggest drawback to Instant Health is that when it acesses the information, it somehow changes what is reported to any other combat log parser you may use. Recount, SWstats, WWS, and Recap will all be so dramatically skewed that they become unusable. If you feel like rolling up your sleeves, you CAN fix it yourself – rename the addon’s directory, LUA file, and TOC to ZZZ_Instant_Health, so that the order-of-access is properly aligned. (If you don’t feel completely comfortable doing this, DON’T!) There is also a minor issue affecting default UI Target-of-Target frames that cannot be corrected. Other raid-frames do not have this problem. These relatively minor issues aside, I think this is a great tool. Spell Haste is becoming more and more important as a stat, and anything else that can decrease the time it takes to get a heal on someone that needs it is huge.

-Wyn

The Voice Behind the Pen: Matt’s Podcasts Available for Download

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If for whatever reason you’re interested in hearing what sick Canadians sound like, be sure to check out the following two podcasts which I’ve participated in over the weekend:

I felt more relaxed on TN then the WI show, to be honest heh. When I first started blogging, I never expected of doing any kind of podcasting all with other people and players and I had a lot of fun doing it! Maybe I’ll do it again at some point in the future!

I completely missed the shoutouts on both podcasts. Ugh. I feel so terrible. If you listen carefully enough to the WI show early on, you might catch the sounds of GMail in the background. You can blame Wyn for embarrassing me live on the air =).

One more thing, on Twisted Nether I said something about there being snow at the end of May. I might’ve forgot to mention that my University is on top of a mountain and my sarcasm/jokingness may not have transmitted properly.

It’s my first foray into podcasting. With that in mind, I’d love to get some feedback and some grades on my performance. How did I do?