So... Blog time

So, after famously "going emo" and spawning several months of keylogger threads commemorating the fact, Fallenman has retired from raiding, and thus from doing warlock PVE guides. No doubt there's going to be no small number of blogs ready to take his place, and no doubt this isn't going to be the best of them.

I'm going to kick off a blog with a flashback to that famous "going emo" post.



So, what sparked it? Well, it was a lot of "Why not take [talent]" and "I think it would be better to have [talent] than [talent], and why not maintain full uptime on [buff]?" and, I think, the kicker, people who know little or nothing about simcraft making poorly reasoned arguments about why it's wrong. Fallenman, and just about all of the informed posters on warlock venues dealt with such posts repeatedly, and many were followed up just like he says.

So, is he right? Well... Mostly. His pet peeve was people challenging the EJ cookie cutters on poorly reasoned grounds, and he was right. More than just simcraft goes into those cookie cutters. Simcraft numbers have always been weighed against real performance, and there are some predictable (and consistent) differences between real use and simcraft. That far from invalidates simcraft, and real application has throughout Wrath of the Lich King generally supported simcraft's results. In the specific fights where the current "top" build wasn't performing top, it was always easily explained by fight- specific mechanics.

Is the other way better? No. Like any RPG, WoW can be reduced to mathematical representation - just like it's fairly straightforward to set up the ideal stat rolls and feat selection for a character in Dungeons and Dragons (much to the bane of DMs everywhere), it's not that difficult, especially now that most game mechanics are no longer hidden from players as they were back in vanilla raiding, to weigh talents against each other and make the "best" builds. You see this from Dungeons and Dragons to Pokemon, it never takes long for the metagame (the general term used for what WoW calls Theorycraft) becomes just as real as the game itself.

Is there no place for the other way? Actually, sometimes... there is. I generally think Fallenman was a bit too aggressive defending the status quo, but he was right. The thing about going outside the lines is that you have to recognize that you're going off of an ideal, and a lot of work goes into finding that ideal. You have to weight what you gain against what you lose, why you're making that trade, and then deciding if it's worth it. That decision is something that can't really be answered by somebody else, your entire guild's performance, their attention to raid composition, their needs and failings all factor into this.

This is going to be a bit of a theme for the blog - when, if ever is it appropriate to break the cookie cutters? One point that comes up a lot is improved shadowbolt in destruction builds. On the one hand, it comes at a very high cost compared to mage equivalents (including the cost of being fire instead of arcane, despite arcane's strength right now), and ends up leaving the warlock at lower DPS than he would be if he went affliction, which provides the support passively.

But lots of fight mechanics in Ulduar (which is still serious business for a lot of guilds) heavily favor destruction over affliction, and we have no mages in our 25 man raids! Well, then, at least from a pre-3.3 perspective, it might just be worth it, at the very least you can claim team player points for taking one to the nuts. I would still say your raid needs to take a stronger look at raid composition as a whole and should really look into recruiting a few mages, but in the short term, it's probably worth it, lacking any viable alternative.

There's lots of smaller things - shadowfury, soul link, 2/2 destructive reach, even dark pact - that may, depending on circumstances, be worth breaking the cookie cutter. All these things come at the cost of DPS, though, and it's important to remember that. DPS is important, it's what brings encounters to completion, and it's not to be sacrificed lightly, but it isn't the only consideration.