Myrddin's Shaman Blog

Moved to New Server

Slant — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:54:04 +0000

It’s been done! Last week I moved to a bit faster and better Server. Nah! Not in World of Warcraft! The Hardware that this Website runs on. Not like I have thousands of visitors, but now and then some major site links to this one and things start to get slow, really slow :D

The major issue of the server was its operating system that had end of life cycle 2 years ago and new features became more tedious to deploy.

Newer, Faster, Bigger

It was a good time for a general overhaul of running applications and to not daring to touch the core services. All in the sense of “never touch a running system”.

All these things have beenreworked, reconfigured and the site is running much faster now, despite the huge Cu3er Slideshow.

It seems somewhat odd to report Website related infromation on a WoW-themed Blog and thus I revived my old it-rhein-main.de domain for tech & admin talk.

If you like, you can head there and take a peek. At the moment the site is still “work in progress”, but it is starting to look good :D I’ll have to translate some pages to English and do the side bar.

Many Shaman improvements in build 12857

Slant — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:52:29 +0000

Holy! They for sure polished up Enhancement Shaman with the latest build. The issues I mentioned in previous posts have been mostly fixed and playing shaman turned out to be quite fun!

Glyphs

There are more Glyph Slots available: Prime Glyphs, Major Glyphs, Minor Glyphs
Some Major and Prime Glyphs seemd to be the same, but that could be caused I learnt all Glyphs before.

Glyphs of Healing Stream:
Your Healing Stream Totem also increases the Fire, Frost, and Nature resistance of party and raid members within 30 yards by 150
Lightning Shield:
Your Lightning Shield can no longer drop below 3 charges from dealing damage to attackers.
Arctic Wolf:
Alters the appearance of your Ghost Wolf transformation, causing it to resemble an arctic wolf.
Shamanistic Rage:
Activating your Shamanistic Rage ability also cleanses you of all dispellable Magic debuffs
Ghost Wolf:
Increases the Movement Speed of your Ghost Wolf by 10%

All these Glyph changes are kind of nice, Healing Stream + Resistance in 1 Totem, faster Ghost Wolf (remember we can use it indoors), Shamansitic Rage as our personal “Minicloak of Shadows” to remove magic effects. The Lightning Shield Glyph is also very nice, since you ar eno longer required to permanently check your buffbars if it is still active.

Abilities

Ghost Wolf has been changed to heal 10% of your max hp per 5 seconds and still works indoors (glyphed at 150%)!

Maelstrom Weapon is finally working as stated 2 patches before! 5 Stacks of MSW reduce mana costs of spells 0!!! This basically removes all the mana issues and I hardly go oom anymore. At the same time it is unlike Retribution who basically stays at 100% mana all the time.

As Announced before Maelstrom Weapon got an Power Aura like greaphic, when it reaches 5 stacks.

My Mana regeneneration is still at 600 mp/5 even while in combat.

Graphic effects for Healing Rain have finally been introduced!

More Information will be coming the next days!

Hidden Build (12857 Codename Ninja) – Thoughts

Slant — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:00:05 +0000

MMO-Champion has just released Information about a so far hidden build, codenamed Ninja. Boubouile claims that it appeared out fo nowhere and I can confirm that it is not on the Beta Servers atm.

It contains a lot of Guild and Archeology Achievements. You can look at the changes here.

Shaman Changes

Elemental

Magma Totem base damage increased by 33%.
Fire Nova base damage increased by 33%.
Rolling Thunder is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 4. Mana regeneration increased from 1% to 2%.
Improved Fire Nova moved to Enhancement.
Elemental Reach no longer increases the range of Thunderstorm, now affects the range of all your Shock spells. (Old – Just Flame Shock)

Enhancement

Unleash Elements now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
Totemic Vigor is gone.
Improved Fire Nova is now a Tier 4 Enhancement Talent – Increases the damage done by your Fire Nova by 10/20% and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 sec.

Restoration

Improved Water Shield now also procs from Greater Healing Wave.

Conclusion

It seems that Blizzard wants Earthquake as Elemental AoE and Magma Totem and Fire Nova as Enhancement cleave. Right now Fire Nova and Magma Totem hit only for about 1500 and 500 damage at level 83. I suppose with more mastery (Elemental Damage Bonus) it might become semi useful again as masses of monsters. Nevertheless our Mana regeneration will prevent to make proper use of this.

This build seems to be a good indicator though that Earthquake will be elemental and Fire Nova an Enhancement ability. Personally I’d prefer that Enhancement gets Earthquake (as fire Nova now) since it fits to the Enhancement physical abilities :D And in Return channel Fire Nova for Elemental Shamans.

No idea what use Unleash Elements will be for Enhancement Shamans. No other ability has even remote the range.

Screenshot of the Current Magma Totem & Fire Nova Damage

Heroic: Lich King (25 player) killed by PuG

Slant — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:44:03 +0000

Light of Dawn

The Treebearman Pick up Group on EU-Ravencrest has completed another Milestone, Arthas – The Lich King has been defeated on heroic difficulty in 25 player mode.

The group’s raiding schedule, Fridays & Saturdays from 15:00-18:00, did not leave much time for practice.

3-4 weeks ago I had been complaining to a friend that we would never kill this Boss, especially with this group. I complained about the focus and the lack of killing spirit. Apparently I was proven wrong and everyone pulled themself together and improved focus many times over.

It was a bit frustrating at times to have to learn to kill the Lich King a second time, as it seemed that people weren’t serious enough about it. Even 2 weeks ago, due to the nature of a pick up group (PuG), we had new to the fight players triggering shadow traps many times or sucking with plague.

Last week though everything seemed to go much smoother than the weeks before, we had some phase 3 tries and one wipe to enrage at 13% with a few early deaths.

Awesome Raid

Today’s raid was terrific, even though we lost a few people here and there :D We had not a single wipe and every boss died fast. After 2 hours we stood face to face with Arthas.

Despite someone stepping on a shadow trap and some deaths the fight went surprisingly smooth. It is a good sign when you see Valkyrs being stopped quite fast or you see raging spirits during second remorseless winter die fast. In fact, when we got sucked into the Frostmourne room we had only 1 Raging Spirit left, which is usually a good mark to judge dps.

So far so good!

We lost some more people to first Vile Spirit Phase, but we were unstoppable, everything went almost too good. Then Arthas was defeated.

Not the average PuG

Do not get me wrong, this is no average trade chat pug. This PuG’s core is made of Alts from experienced players or former raiders. The past achievements assured a steady flow of new players to fill the raids. This brought the PuG over time to a pretty high standard. In fact, this is only the third raid to kill the Lich King on heroic difficulty on Ravencrest, a Realm with a good 16k Characters :D

Congratulations Treebearman and the rest of the Pack! This is really well done! When will we see your Halion Heroic 25? :D

Myrddin.de: Improved Performance, basics

Slant — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:44:23 +0000

For a couple of months I have been moody about this site’s performance. This server serves only a couple of domains and this is by far the most visited of them – yes, really :D

This server is a vServer from a mass hoster running on ancient hardware shared with other people and I assumed it was one reason aside a bloated WordPress install with loads of plugins that raised response times to an unendurable degree. We had like 5 seconds on a cached page before anything was even served.

Increasing memory for php, mysql, apache worked only to some point, but as soon I got visitors from mmo-champion, wow.com or had other popular posts this site broke down.

Time for Action

About 1 year ago a 3D model of my World of Warcraft Enhancement Shaman loaded on the front page, this took alot of time … and bandwidth … lots of http requests … css .. javascript … delay from outside servers, etc.

Once the 2.1 megabyte and 160 objects were loaded it looked amazing :D However the lack of widgets and other – tedious to customize – content made me want to rework the site with a nice, custom, self made theme.

Polish up your Site

This was a long process with a lot of trial and error. At first I massively reduced the images used by the template. A Game Blog doesn’t live from walls of text alone – the idea was to cut lower the amount of images but keeping an appealing look.

Images

Avoiding gradients in articles, buttons, backgrounds and glare effects reduce the docmument size significantly. Not using icons in front of headers, date, categories, tags help to reduce the amount of http requests. Also you can easily scale down the quality of an image. Most image processing software will provide a preview, including filesize, making it easy to choose size versus quality.

Header

Instead of slicing a header image into pieces and thus creating a lot of additional files I moved the whole sheet (content) down and placed the picture in the background. With a an added transparency effect this saves a lot of work effort. Pesonally I like the look a lot, even though addmitedly it is kind of big.

Compression

The HTML (or generated PhP code) , Javascript and CSS are plain text files. You can shrink these by removing comments and other formatting that that ease legibility. In adition you can instruct your server to send these files compressed, reducing their size even more.

In terms of pure bandwidth optimization this was even the biggest gain. The document size was was reduced from 1.7 mb to 1.1 mb.
If you have many features on your site, your theme/plugins may come with individual java script and css. It is a good idea to combine them into single files. The compression will become even more efficient. More about that later!

Plugins

Plugins play a huge role in WordPress success. It is amazing how a few simple clicks provide new functionality to your site and its use. WordPress provides a search function in the admin area and lets you add plugins on the fly.

On the other hand plugins are often overused. Even well documented functions that you can easy add manually are served by widgets and not all of them conserve your resources.

Removing plugins that serve the same purpose or overlap functionality are a great way to scale down the document size.

I used to have “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” and “Search Engine Query in WordPress”. They provided similar results, lacked customization and were requesting active queries and thus server load.

Efficient Related Posts is my replacement for them. A plugin that shows related links at the end of a post to help the visitor find more interesting information on your site. ERP calculates related posts only once when a post is published instead of each time a client requests the information.

Bottom Line

Aforementioned suggestions help reduce a big chunk of the a website document size by a lot. the first move to optmize your website. After these steps I was at only 700 kb and 60 objects.

Shortly I’ll write a followup where I’ll elaborate in tech detail cache installation, server tuning and furhter opmtimization.

Cataclysm: Epic Ride into the Maelstrom

Slant — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:50:44 +0000

A few days ago I uploaded this video to YouTube. After completing Hyjal or Vashir you will reach Level 82 and be eligible to help Thrall at the Maelstrom.

When this area first opened players complained that this experience wasn’t epic enough and that they were disappointed. Then the Top people at Blizzard had a meeting on how to increase the epicness of the Maelstrom.

Enjoy this, you will be able to visit Thrall only once. I haven’t found a way to get back there again.

Blizzards Response

[...] Maybe I missed the memo on levels of “epicosity” or something, but I’m pretty sure the Maelstrom is a CLASS 10 epic zone. Though I guess it is missing sharks with laser beams patrolling the waters and Arthur Fonzarelli jumping
[...] After reading this post I called for a meeting with TOP TOP MEN (that’s two tops) in order to figure out a solution to the problem at hand. Frankly, I think we hit a home run. The next 4.0 build (or the one after) should have a Maelstrom that’s between 10 – 50x more epic than what currently exists.
Valnoth

[...] I’m on a shark.
Ghostrcrawler

Anyway here is the video! Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cataclysm: Glyph Changes

Slant — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:54:03 +0000

The current Cataclysm Beta build shows some very interesting changes to the glyph system.

On live Realms you need to use a fresh glyph each time you want to change glyphs. However the most recent changes allow you to learn a glyph and add it to your character’s spellbook instead.

To swap a glyph you just use the ability in your spellbook and after a 5 second cast it will add or replace a glyph in your characters currently active dual spec.

At the moment the glyphs still look somewhat messy and unordered and I suppose they will get their own spellbook tab or ui at some point.

What does it mean for You?

From a player’s point of view this change is awesome, a fast and extremely convenient way to quickly adjust on the fly for all your needs.

As auction mogul I am somewhat disappointed :D The Introduction of dual spec massively cut down glyph sales, but this will most likely turn out to become another big blow to sellers. Of Course it wills tart with a massive sale boom until everyone has each possible Glyph – prepare a huge stock – but after that, only alts and new players will need Glyphs.

A quick look at Ravencrest’s Auction House showed 51000 active auctions including the 12500 glyphs (my 3000 weren’t even up). I suppose this is one of the reasons to change these game mechanics. Easy profit, up to 2000% of crafting costs, overflowing auction house, massive mail load. 12500 glyphs are 1250 per class or 25 pages.

Fortunately I have been slacking with glyphs lately anyhow so I’ll be able to fully enjoy the positive side of this change, easy access to all glyphs.

Cataclysm: Fun Quest in Uldum

Slant — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:04:40 +0000

Even though Uldum is still closed in the latest Cataclysm Beta build it is possible to enter via the “back entrance” in south western Tanaris, close to the descent to Un’goro Crater.

It is clearly visible that Uldum is still “work in progress” and it is pretty much empty for now. However while poking around I found a single Quest and just had to test it out.

At first I though “WTF is this ?!?!?” as I turned into a glowing ball of fire!

Burn a little brighter now

There is a huge drill at the seaside entrance of Uldum and it is surrounded by a huge amount of crazed gnomes. The quest is not yet implemented, but you can race around as fiery sphere to burn them all. It is kind of funny to see them whirling around, their tiny feet sticking out and you can almost smell the delicious gnome barbecue!

There is no limit at the moment and you can even leave Uldum. No npc but the crazed gnomes are affected by the fire, but if you are patient enough you can actually reach Orgrimmar or Stormwind :D

Anyway here is the video, enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cataclysm: New Launcher!

Slant — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:55:00 +0000

One of the biggest improvements for Cataclyms in my opinion is the new Launcher blizzard introcudes. For people like me with slow connections it is a very good way to get back into the game as soon as possible, even while downloading a patch. With my awesome 70kb/s download here (don’t laugh) I had major concerns about this feature at first, but it turns out to be a very nice change.

How it works!

Basically there are 3 stages for the downloader.

“Red” stage: You cannot play, because essential game files have not been downloaded, yet.
“Yellow” stage: All essential files have been downloaded, a large amount of additional data is still missing, but you do not mind issues you can start to play!
“Green” stage: most of the content has been downloaded, there might still be some minor issues.

An Example

When downloading the Beta Client (~16 GB). Usually this would have meant 1-2 days wait until the client was available to me, but the new launcher allowed me to go into the game after only 600 MB download. This is just fabulous. I happened to have logged out in Hillsbrad foothills, not the major content area they’d expect us to be. Here is what happened!

As you can see upon logging in, nothing of the area was loaded, but I stood still for like 30-40 seconds and slowly the area around me appeared. The blue walls you can see are Areas you should not cross, as the content hasn’t been loaded, yet.

The Dalaran area seemed to have been mostly downloaded and was ready a few seconds after I hearthstoned, it looked like this with a slight blue wall towards the fishing daily, but it worked just fine.

Then I headed on to Stormwind. After a few seconds of a pretty “blank” surrounding the new launcher had all data for stormwind ready.

I suppose if you are questing or stay in one area, like Hyjal, Vashj’ir it won’t be an issue at all to download the game while playing. For me it received a thumbs up!

Ofc it may cause issues for people who have a strict and low traffic limit on their internet. While having p2p enabled there is surplus data sent to other wow clients which of course adds to your limit. On the other hand the same data would have been trnasmitted anyhow while doing a normal download, unless you deactivate p2p.

I absolutely love the new Loader at least.

Total Gold Acquired: August 2010

Slant — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:10:36 +0000

It has been a while since the last summary. Concedingly I slacked with auctions, lost mats worth a 100-200k in expired mails on Magtheridon and Ravencrest. In addition there was the Lich King progression, soccer championship, hot summer, etc. Once you get to a point where gold becomes pointless it is becoming increasingly difficult to be motivated to have auctions up, etc :D

Ok, how much is it?

As you can see Myrddin and Daisan have negative statistic values now. Once you breach 214k gold and you earn 1 gold more the number changes to -214k gold
Then each gold increased the number back to 0.

If you look at Daisan he gained 214k and then from -214k to -34k = 394k gold.

Here is a screenshot of the latest sales:

Summary August 2010:

Total gold acquired: 1 289 315g (old 966109g)
Average gold earned each day: 2 045g (old 1964g)
Gold looted: 162 266g(old 112020g)
Gold from Quest rewards: 74 324g (old 65175g)
Gold earned from auctions: 958 821g (old 783381g)
Auctions posted: 551 410 (old 463689)

As you can see I mostly improved on looting gold. I kind of got tired of all the spam in Dalaran, so I decided to camp in SMV, and just look out for Doomwalker, Kazzak and Azuregos.

I have completely abandonded Glyphs since it just takes forever to put them up and retrieve the mails. Likewise I started to slack with Infinite Dust since it takes equally long to auction them.
The amount of gold I have now makes it kind of pointless to put a lot of effort in earning more and I focus on lucrative stuff only.

You can find the summary for March here.

Borked: Halion (Heroic Ruby Sanctum 25 player)

Slant — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:02:04 +0000

This summer wasn’t particulalry nice to us :D Soccer World Championship, hot hot summer, vacation, unstable realm Ravencrest – Ravencrest locked down each day during prime time for a couple of hours for 1.5 months, which made progressive raiding impossible.
But last night we finally had a full team and downed Halion.

Borked: Halion (Heroic Ruby Sanctum 25 player)

We did not have many evenings on Halion before and had to kill him normal mode due to above reasons. Last night however it was going good after a few tries and a kill suddenly seemed in range.

Early low percentage wipes were a good sign of progress and we optimize handling of adds in Phase 3. Spurred on by further decent tries, apart from occasional Twilight Cutter fail, we finally managed to wipe at 1% with some early deaths :D

Everyone raised focus and then the fat dragon died.

A big grats to Borked for this kill.

Cataclysm: Enhancement Shaman, Mana Pool

Slant — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:19:31 +0000

Finally I got invited to Cataclysm Beta and leveled my Enhancement Shaman Myrddin to level 83. One of the first changes I noticed was the very low mana pool.

Mana

The first thing that struck me, was that we are only running around with 5.6k Mana – at level 80. Pretty much like Retribution Paladins.

With improved Stormstrike gone and Shamanistic Rage changed we do not have any way to regain our mana pool fast. Of course we have Primal Wisdom now, which gives each Hit a 40% chance to restore 5% Base Mana, roughly 220. But as soon as we are away from something to hit we run oom really fast.

In case you die and heal up you’ll end up at 90% hp and 0% mana. It takes an average of 2 mob to get to full mana again.

Especially in instances it seems to be an issue atm, we are running oom from placing totems or doing an AoE rotation. Especially if there is a boss like neptulon that requires a lot of movement.

However it seems a bit better at Level 83, with 14000 Mana and 660 mana per swing. Also the latest build introduced something weird, I seem to have 600 mp/5 while in combat, it remains to be seen if this is a bug or feature.

Blues touched the issue recently:

It’s not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It’s a model we’re still adjusting. We haven’t quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we’re happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren’t really supposed to be mana-constrained.Ghostcrawler

Remember the level cap is still 83 on Beta, maybe it is all different at Level 85. I’ll post if I know more.