Guild leveling and lack of achievements.

I remember when achievements were first introduced, at the end of the Burning Crusade cycle.  The morning after the patch as each person logged on we all got blasted with achievement spam.

When new achievements are introduced, there are always some that you had previously completed.  So you “earn” those achievements retroactively, and they appear the first time you log on, and also informing everyone in the guild.

Today I logged on and expected to see both personal achievement spam as well as guild achievement spam.  I mean, I play a lot and have done a lot in the game and so do a lot of my guildies.  There must be something in the new achievements that we have already accomplished.

Nope.

Logged on and saw not one new achievement for me, and not one achievement for my guild.

That’s good design.  We’re going to have to work for those achievements.

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As far as guild leveling goes, as of 6:30 AM today we had already almost reached the daily guild XP cap.  That’s a low cap and could seriously slow down the guild leveling process.

Except that guild achievements don’t count toward the cap.

So I have a new plan.  Rather than fly right into the new zones, I want to put together a guild team and go run a lot of old content to hit the guild achievements.  We can level up quickly that way and get some perks.

Now, the question is… will I be able to find a few people to pull themselves away from the new shiney stuff into order to blitz through old instances?  We’ll see.

 

Rogue Hit caps in Cataclysm at level 85

This page was for the Cataclysm expansion.  It is out of date as of August 28, 2012

To see the hit caps for level 85 Rogues during patch 5.0.4 (pre-Mists) go here

 

This is an update of my post on hit rating from way back in 2008.  I’ve reworked the numbers to reflect the new figures at level 85 and the Cataclysm changes.  The discussion of the mechanics of hit rating is still the same.

If you read the mechanics post back in 2008, or if you just want the numbers, then scroll to the bottom where there is a chart.

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When looking at relative weights of stats, the first priority for any rogue is to get to a point where their attacks will hit reliably.  Since we dual wield, we suffer a significant hit penalty.  We likely won’t get to a point where we never miss.  However, it is possible to get our stats so that our special attacks (e.g. sinister strike, mutilate) never miss and our poisons are never resisted.  That is vitally important, because our special attacks give us our combo points, crits, procs, and energy return, and poisons (especially for assassination rogues) are a huge portion of our dps.

While leveling, its nice to get some hit rating, but you don’t need to focus on it. Once you get to 85 and you are doing endgame heroics and raids, then you will want to find gear with hit rating. How much do you need?

Rather than just throw numbers at you, here is an explanation of how hit rating works, along with the numbers that we need to aim for.  (FYI – I am a teacher in RL.. I can’t help it)

Warning, some math to follow. Pass this point with caution.

There is no magic number. Some classes try to be hit-capped, meaning that they will never miss. For rogues (and fury warriors, ret paladins, and dual-wielding shamans) that’s out of reach for now. Get as much as you can without making huge sacrifices to Agility, Crit Rating, Haste, etc..  Lets look at the “caps” in our ratings.

There are three separate miss chances – one calculation for white damage, another for special attacks, and a third for poisons (treated as a spell).

Special Attacks

For special attacks, the chance to miss is 8% against tier 11 raid bosses.

White Damage

For regular attacks (white damage) at level 85, the chance to miss when dual wielding is

   23% + (mob level - your level)*.5%

Unless the opponent is more than two levels higher than you. If that is the case then the equation is

   21% + (mob level - your level)*2%

Translated to simple percentages, that will mean a 23% chance to miss against a level 85 foe, a 24% chance to miss against a level 87 boss (heroics) and a 27% chance to miss a level 88 T11 raid boss with your autoattacks (white damage). So, to be completely hit-capped you would have to have enough hit rating to reduce your chance to miss by 27%.

Poisons

Poisons are treated as a spell.  The hit rating calculations are different.   At level 85, the chance to miss a level 88 tier 11 raid boss with a spell is 17%.

Pause, take a deep breath. More math coming.

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The amount of +hit% that you get from hit rating changes with level. That’s one way that Blizzard scales the combat system. The numbers that you got used to pre-Cataclysm are no longer valid.

The conversion from hit rating to hit % is now this: For a level 85 character, 120.109 hit rating = 1% reduction in chance to miss for melee combat.  (compared to 30.7548=1% back in Wrath)

Here are the +hit numbers to look for:

1. The first +hit milestone is to reduce your chance to miss by 8%. That will mean that your special attacks never miss on raid bosses. To do that you need  961 hit rating. However, many (if not all) rogues will take points in Precision. If so, it reduces that required hit rating.  One point in Precision brings it down to 721, Two points makes it 481, and three points makes it a very manageable 241.  We’ll have that much from leveling green gear, I’d guess.
2. Next is the Poison cap. This means that your poisons will never miss (be resisted). You need 17% for that. However, this uses the hit rating conversion for spells rather than melee. That conversion is 102.446 hit rating = 1% at level 85. So we would need 1742 hit rating without anything in Precision, 1537 with 1/3 Precision, 1332 with 2/3 Precision, 1127 with 3/3 Precision.
3. The next one is to never miss with auto-attacks (white damage). You would need 27% for that, which is a whopping 3243 hit rating if you have not taken any points in Precision. With 3/3 Precision talent factored in, it drops to a still-high value of 2523.  You could eat some +hit rating consumables to get that figure down, but you still aren’t going to be hit-capped any time soon.

Hit rating is immensely important up to the special attack cap (+8%).  That’s called a “soft cap” because you can still increase dps by going above it.  Hit rating is still extremely important up to the poisons cap (+17% spell hit).  That’s also a soft cap because you still gain dps if you exceed it.  However, any hit rating above the poisons cap only helps your white damage, so its not as important.

The white cap is called a “hard cap” because there is no benefit at all if you exceed it.

These numbers seem very high to us compared to what we are used to in Wrath.  A quick skim over some of the level 85 gear in the WoWhead database shows that some armor pieces have upwards of 180 hit rating on them per piece.  I think that the poison cap might be tough to reach at first, but the specials cap will not be a problem.

The best advice is make sure you are above the “special attacks” cap, and try to be as close to the “poison cap” if possible (especially for Mutilate rogues). After that, you’re probably going to want to work on agility, mastery, and haste rather than hit rating, because you don’t get as much benefit from stacking hit rating.

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TL; DR Summary:

	0/3 Precision	1/3 Precision	2/3 Precision	3/3 Precision
Specials Cap	961	721	481	241
Poisons Cap	1742	1537	1332	1127
White Cap	3243	3003	2763	2523

Note: In Burning Crusade and WotLK, we almost always had a Draenei in our group to give us a tasty 1% buff to hit. That racial ability has been changed to self-only, so rogues will no longer get that bonus hit.

Also note: these numbers are only for the first tier of Cataclysm raiding.  As further tiers are added, the equivalent level of the bosses will increase, requiring even more hit rating on our gear to maintain the soft caps.

My First Midnight Release

I had already ordered the Collector’s Edition several months back, before the digital download option was announced.  Last night I braved the chilly temperatures to see my local Gamestop.  This is the first time I had ever done this – my previous WoW expansions were all ordered from Amazon using release-day delivery.

I hit the GameStop in Lake Mary, Florida at around 11:10 PM.  There were a handful of people outside, but not a very large crowd and nothing exciting seemed to be going on.  So I stayed in my car.  It was pretty cold for Florida.  I think it was around 40 degrees.  At 11:25 I decided to see if there was anything fun happening, and I left my car and braved the cold night air.

I went into GameStop and paid for my purchase, and then went back out into the night to hang with my nerd companions.  People were chatting about the game, of course.  It was a pretty friendly group, comparing in-game accomplishments, plans for the expansion, and bets on whether the game would actually be playable at midnight PST as we were promised.

Despite the cold it was an enjoyable half hour that I spent outside.  It was a very small sample size (less than 25 people) but I will say that I noticed two things about this particular group of die-hard gamers:

• A lot of them smoke.  That surprised me.  I’m being a bit judgmental here, but I always think of smoking as something the less educated do and the more educated avoid.  Sticking a tar-nicotine-and-cancer lollipop in your mouth seems like an activity smart people would think twice about.  Since WoW players tend to be more educated than the general population, I was surprised at all the smoking.
• They swear.  A lot.  Again, I am being judgmental.  I consider swearing in normal conversation as something people do when their vocabulary is not broad enough to express themselves properly.  So I was a little disappointed when this group of “my people” was swearing up a storm, dropping the f-bomb every third word it seemed.

Still, they were geeky and pleasant and fun to hang with for a short time.  There were several older players, although at 42 I think I was the oldest.  There were a couple of military guys there.  Most of the group seemed to be in their early to mid twenties.  These were the die-hards so they talked about the difficult achievements they had earned and the amount of time they had played.  I gravitated toward the ones who could hold a conversation without criticizing me for playing alliance.  That said, there were far more horde players there than alliance.

As part of the event, GameStop held a raffle.  I had purchased four copies of the game so I had four entries out of the 25 or so people, and with the odds in my favor I managed to win a boxed set of Art Cards from the Trading Card Game.

I was home by 12:10 AM, game in hand, computer powered-on and ready.  The expansion installed smoothly and quickly.  I didn’t try and log on right away because I am three hours ahead of PST so Cataclysm wasn’t going live for another couple of hours.  So off to bed I went to get a few hours of shut-eye before work.

I think that the digital download option will eventually kill the big midnight release parties.  My GameStop is small, but even so with less than 25 people there it was very subdued and quiet.  I’m sure that future releases will be even more quiet as a larger fraction of players make use of the digital purchase.  At least I got to go to one release event for the experience.