Bucket Guild | FUBU BH Forums

I appreciate the user community there, especially when 4.0 hit, posting logs of different configurations and setups.

That's how I was clued in that KS might not work with BG... something I did some basic testing on last night and seems to be true (5 rounds of KS per level of insight, all 10 hits 0 misses 0 crits to take out spikes in either direction, all hitting for roughly the same).

What I don't appreciate there is the... well, elitist jerks that will say "your quick test is meaningless!", then test it and confirm it and never give credit.

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face

The sticky knowledge base is useful as a guideline.

The BiS lists are basically arrogant assumptions, and the discussions are mostly preening.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

What I especially hate about BiS lists is that they lead people to ignore what is best available. A mathematically BiS configuration might fall apart with a key piece missing, and that piece might be much more difficult to obtain.

For example, if your class heroic 4pc is BiS, but there are just-slightly worse offtier pieces that are much easier to get your hands on than the heroic tokens, a lot of people will eschew the offtier pieces entirely, let them be repeatedly disenchanted or taken for offspecs rather than take anything but the BiS piece.

I see this a lot in the rogue community. People don't seem to grasp the difference between BiS and BiB (best in bags).

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face

a lot of the time i base BiS for me on whether or not the set bonuses are worth it.

ret paladin yes.

dk tank meh.

bis means take care of your hit then stack haste

-affliction warlock

I learned a very long time ago that EJ is great for finding infomation about stat caps (hit, haste, poisons, whatever) and that the spreadsheets are good ways to save time and gold when it came to gemming and enchanting. However, after that you get alot of people spamming about rotations and builds that assume that everyone is in heroic 25 ICChm gear and if you are not you should die in a fire because you suck. The vast majority of the resources people provide to WoW players are very helpful, including EJ, but it is titled Elitist Jerks and alot of the posters tend to think that way. Sucks you got banned, I dont think I have ever posted there, maybe once on the lock forums but I dont think so.

9 level 90s and 10 85s, Damn I need another hobby.

I disagree here. How are they arrogant assumptions? If you can get all the best gear, it would make sense that there is a combination of gear that gives you the most of the most valuable stats for your class. Maybe with some classes it isn't as applicable, but for some it is. Now I agree you shouldn't follow something blindly that you haven't taken the time to understand yourself, and for some players, getting all the gear isn't an option to them. You can then apply the logic that was used to select those BiS pieces to what you have available to you, and come up with something that suits you.

And what do you mean the discussions are mostly preening?

Not really, I've been banned from many a forum in my day.

I was just shocked, I wasn't even trolling. I was actively trying to be helpful.

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face

Man, I liked making my own BiS lists, mostly because I made them with the assumption that I'd never get primarily 277 stuff.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

/agree.
One of my favorite parts about leveling a new character is just to get to 80 so I can make those lists.

First off, it's not really applicable given the realities of loot for the reasons Dek described. Past that, often the scaling is difficult to model and the margins between divergent choices are subjective and small. Most classes revolve around taking the 4pc and one offpiece, and the difference between one offpiece and another is often grossly marginal to the point that scaling blurs. A lot of encounters involve cleaving or mobility and the margins associated with those sorts of real conditions are often greater than the determination that so much crit or haste is better than so much AP/SP.

That's for DPS. For tanks and healers the picture becomes even more subjective and blurry. EJ throws around stat weighting/item scoring systems or supposed BiS lists for those roles too but they're totally specious for obvious reasons: whether you value haste or SP, mitigation or EH or utility, is a situational and personal judgement based on too many variables to model consistently through all encounters.



Every thread on EJ has a slew of veteran posters who come in and make pretentious posts that begin with rhetorical flourishes like "It seems that..." or ask dumb academic-like questions that don't actually "contribute to the discussion", but despite their own rules (i.e., Dek's experience) they'll be happy to banhammer posters who make observations but don't action this sort of garbage, elitist postings that bring nothing of value to the discussion.

Example: a while back I posted in a thread about the G15 that I thought it was great, and described how I used the binds. "Infraction: This is not a place to talk about binds." So...a thread about a keyboard whose main appeal is that it gives extra binds (I also described my experience with the usefulness of the ventrilo monitor) ...isn't the place to talk about how to use those binds? Wat?

There's also these interminable discussions that revolve around people making absurd or specious arguments and engaging in what amounts to passive-aggressive trolling by maintaining their untenable position in a highly legalistic fashion. They don't get banned, again, for the same reason. So EJ has these retarded monster threads written in pretentious, unnecessarily meticulous English grammar by immature and not-too-bright individuals, featuring some of the lowest informational density in the entire Internet.

But then again if a player with common sense and a nominal level fo intelligence just got some hands-on experience, he could make the obvious conclusions - the Cat's Speed discussion, for example.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Sorry for the essay. If you don't care at all about druid mechanics dont read the first three paragraphs.

I understand what you are saying, but I don't think its unimportant. While marginal upgrades may be small, they can still be upgrades. I am obviously most familiar with a resto druid's situation, as that is what I play, so I will speak to that end. You want 4 piece, but which piece is your offset piece seems to be a bit up in the air. Crit is far less valuable to a resto druid than spellpower/haste is (I'm speaking in pre 4.0 terms here, the whole picture has changed now) so you want to keep the set pieces which have haste, and sub out a set piece which has crit, for an offset piece which has haste. The two slots which fit this criteria are the shoulders, and the chest. The leather shoulders from BQL (I think) have SP/Haste, exactly what you want. The cloth chest from Blood Princes has SP/Haste as well. So which do you take? Well, turns out, with gem slots, and the pure numbers, you end up with around 10 more haste and like 10 more sp by taking the cloth chest over the leather shoulders as your offset piece. (I dont remember the exact numbers off the top of my head). You could argue thats marginal, but its still an upgrade, and makes the selection of gear a viable topic of discussion.

If you disagree on the stat values, say for a resto druid crit being near worthless while SP/Haste are close to tied up to a certain point, you will not agree with the previous analysis of gear choice. However, through number crunching, and just straight up logic, you can determine these stat values to be true in the vast majority of situations. In the case of druids, we don't have spells we typically cast in vast quantities that crit. If you do end up casting nourish, talents make it crit like christmas anyway. After the T9 set, which allowed rejuv to crit, that stat became effectively worthless.

The main strength of druid healing is the ability to buffer incoming aoe damage on a wide variety of targets, aka spamming the shit out of rejuv. Clearly this isn't all you do, but many of your GCDs are spent on casting the rejuv spell, and you want to put rejuv out as fast as possible. Hence, haste is the most valuable stat for a resto druid until you can hit your haste cap, the magical number where you lower the GCD to its minimum amount, 1 second. After that, spellpower. Haste beyond the haste cap for a resto druid can still be somewhat useful if you glyphed rapid rejuv, which would make the rejuvs tick faster, but at that point you see so much more of a benefit from spellpower.

This knowledge came from people talking about it, and yea, maybe several of them were pretentious pricks, but a knowledge base is a good thing to have around. Again I can only speak this strongly about resto druid, but other classes can follow similar thought patterns to determine the value of stats/specs/etc. Yes, there are always special cases due to encounter mechanics, but often times you find a general best case scenario, with tweeks in areas that need special considerations. I also think that you will find that the higher skilled players operate at near maximum potential even when mechanics would normally put that class or the general best case build/spec/whatever at a disadvantage.

Places like EJ are not something to be followed blindly, but a good place to find people talking about numbers, sharing what they are observing and their findings. Then you can take that information and do what you will with it. I have no problem with putting up with somebodies pretentious, snobby shit if I know I have a chance to take something worthwhile out of it. You'll find ignorant cockbags on any forum, doesnt mean that the place is automatically just a worthless pile of shit.

Trial and error has always suited me fine, just ask my ex's.

Haste and SP are eminently superior for a resto druid to a far greater extent than most stats are for most classes, for reasons that no one needs to play a resto druid to understand.

Crit/haste/AP-SP/ArP/MP5 are in far closer parity for a rogue or holy priest or ret paladin than haste and crit or mp5 are for a resto druid. My point about the futility of BiS lists was in the context of normal progression and classes with a greater diversity of stats in relative parity, and regarding healer classes, druids are in something of a unique position so far as min-maxxing goes given their exceptional lack of mana supply issues.

When you talk about "higher skilled players", you aren't speaking about something particularly alien to me or many patrons on this forum: this isn't trade channel and we aren't naive or inept, and quite a few of us have experience on that level. I also know that "higher skilled players" don't have a crystal ball when it comes to theorycrafting, and execution is quite discrete from theorycraft: one player might itemize completely correctly and have an intellectual understanding of the mechanics, but fail at execution; another might not know, care, or be intelligent enough to understand theorycraft, but has the pure skill to execute efficiently by pressing buttons better. Obviously the apex of player ability is to excel in all regards, but its not so simple as to equate "higher skill" with "better theorycraft".

It's easy enough to pull up armories of players well progressed in PvE and PvP and see clearly they are doing something wrong in the strictly theoretical sense, but the error is marginalized because they have a faculty for execution. Conversely we have posters (on other forums) like Theck and Xayton who are piss poor tanks and don't ever analyze issues empirically but make their theorycrafting contributions of varying levels of utility nonetheless. My point in this and the prior paragraph: I don't agree with the connection you make between elitism and being dialectically sacrosanct when it comes to theorycraft.

My initial point, however, was more directed at the character of the moderation of the site and the nature of the discussions. I don't think anyone in this thread said EJ was without value or nearly. Implied in your viewpoint is that snobbery or pretentiousness and insight come hand in hand: you are mistaken. Snobbery is an impediment to meaningful discussion, and it is not an inevitable byproduct of ability but an attitude common to flawed individuals of all skill levels.

As I said, the stickies and knowledge base are useful, but the discussions are largely a swamp. I don't deny EJ is a useful resource and typically authoritative, but the information density is low and asinine moderation makes it a parody of itself and sharply caps its utility and relevance.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Well EJ kinda became one of, if not the most well known resource of its kind when it comes to WoW, and I think you see the human element coming out when it comes to moderation. People feel important because they are being paid attention to, and they powertrip. The moderation may indeed be laughable, but I think you'll find that with a lot of places.

And of course execution plays a big part. A very talented player can make up for theorycraft shortfalls, where as an utterly pisspoor waste of space of a player won't make up for superb theorycrafting. Yes, it matters. But I agree that having superb execution and superb theorycrafting is preferable. I did not mean to indicate that better theorycraft = better skill, my apologies for coming off in that manner. Its a piece of the puzzle, but not even close to all of it.

And yea, I agree its pretty cut and dry for resto druids, but I think you can make a compelling argument for many classes in terms of a stat worth order. I have not researched other classes to the degree I have my own, but I like to think I have a pretty solid understanding of many aspects of this game.

Anyway, works over. Peace!