2010-12-15

Farm mode = on

New expansion, new stuff to farm, new reputations, new professions to level.

Overall: farm time.  Which I don't particularly like, with the exception of running instances.   Reputation dailies are still boring and idiotic and I'm avoiding them like the plague.  Luckily all the faction reputations can be raised via the appropriate tabard.  Of course one is missing: Tol Barad faction.  Which I've decided to ignore: sure the trinket is ilvl359, but I just hate the idiotic quests which I'm forced to do in a no-fly area (I don't even understand why, since I'm not PvP flagged in there....).
Strangely Herbalism/Mining farming is turning out nice: I like to fly around with my weak DK in Twilight Highlands.  One mob means instant death, but there are not many aggressives around, and I know how to avoid aggro.  I really like the new and revised world, flying around is not (yet) boring.  I've not yet touched archeology: when I'm on my main I usually run instances, but I'll (slowly) level it just to waste time.

RWF is not advancing, I'm waiting to see if the aura thing gets fixed, but from the logs of our first raid it's clear that they are not.  We didn't have a DK, but we had a hunter with Hunting Party.  It's nowhere to be seen in the log....
I don't know if to go for a workaround or just ignore the problem and focus on health tracking / tanking analysis.

Optimization has become easy: agi > mastery > everything else.  Considering that I play hybrid, I'm focusing on hit/experise as well (expertise in particular), they may be average for a cat (but not much worse than crit/haste), but they are a lot more useful when you're tanking.  Since I plan to test a "real full hybrid" build (same spec AND same stuff as much as possible), I'll try to be capped.  Of course people at EJ are working hard to see how to increase your dps by 0.01%, which will be completely useless in real fights, being swamped by positioning and RNG, but optimization is a game in itself, I can't blame them for trying to get the highest DPS in Mew/simulationcraft.  Overall, as much as I'm having a lot of fun playing cat DPS, I find that dps optimization right now is boring and mostly irrelevant.  Execution ruled in ICC and it does even more in Cataclysm.  Which is something that I actually like....

2010-12-04

Still no auras

Seems like Improved Icy Talons is still not in the log :(

I'll wait some more time before going for the messy workaround.  In the meantime, I'm deciding what kind of numerical data to show.  Duplicating what can already be seen on World of Logs (or similar) is useless, what I'd like to display are estimates of DPS loss due to errors, but while this may be doable in a single-target fight, it's very very complex in a multi-target scenario.
Something which I'll definitely add are scaling coefficients based on the actual damage distribution across abilities, this is easy.  Agi/Crit will be slightly underestimated due to ignoring the extra CP generation, but for small changes, the effect is irrelevant.

I also need to have a look at WoWCardioRaid, which does some nice visualization of events.  It's raid-oriented (contrary to RWF, which is player-oriented) and it looks like a WoL on steroids.  Too bad it only runs on windows....