Help Graylo Get A Legendary!!!

I've exploited this blog for personal gain before. It has played some part in me getting accepted to 7 different guilds. I got into the Cataclysm beta because someone knew me from the blog. My family views my gaming with a tiny bit more respect because I also write about it. I've even made a tiny bit of cash in the process, and none of this includes all the wonderful people I've gotten to talk to all because I write this blog.

Yes, I have benefited greatly from writing the blog (probably more then my readers have from reading it), but the introduction of Cross-Realm raiding begs a new question. Can I take my blog exploitation to a new low?

Can exploit my readers to help me get a Legendary Staff?

All tongue-in-cheek aside, I don't have high expectations for this, but it's worth a try. Also, I am in no way expecting anyone to go out of their way to create a raid for me. However, if are making runs for Mounts, Achievements, or Alts, and have an opening I would love to come a long if I can pick up the legendary quest items. Here are the more formal details:

Project: Help Graylo Get A Legendary!!!

Current Status: I am currently collecting [Seething Cinders] for the Time Grows Short quest. I need 490 cinders to complete the quest along with all 250 Essences after that and the Rag kill.

What I Offer: I am a Heroic DS geared moonkin (armory link) that has killed every boss in Firelands on heroic mode. I will come prepared to do my absolute best with flasks, food, and potions. Plus, I will pass on all loot and mounts that drop in the raid. Finally, depending on the consistency of the group, I would be willing to continue to run FL to help other people get there staff or mount after I've finished mine.

My Scheduling: I am available on a consistent basis Friday through Monday after 9pm CST. I may also be available before 9pm on Saturdays and Sundays, but I can't comment to those times on a consistent basis.

What I'm Looking For: Ideally I would like to run heroics with a consistent group at the same general time each week. However, I would be willing to run normals or with an inconsistent group. Also, this goes without saying, but I am US-Horde so the group would need to be US-Horde as well.

Contact Information: While I am happy to discuss the possibilities in general terms in the comments below, I would recommend that nobody put their RealID email address there. My blog email address of graymatterwow (at) gmail (dot) com is the best way to discuss the more private details, but you could also send an in-game mail to Graylow (with the W) on the US-Stonemaul server.

My MoP Wish List - Part 4: A Better Legendary Solution

This is part four in a now five part series I'm writing about my hopes for Mists of Pandaria. In part one I talked about a gem overhaul, part two focused on Moonkin issues, and part three looked at 10man vs 25man raids.

I hate the existence legendary weapons.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a Legendary staff on my moonkin, or the daggers on my rogue, but even if I had either of those I would still hate the concept of legendary weapons or at least the ways that Blizzard has chosen to implement them over the past 7 years. The problems are already well documented, but let me go over them again.

The Problems:

• Group Effort/Individual Reward: Every legendary implemented so far has required a group effort to acquire it. Even the random drops of TBC required a group to clear the instance. There are literally thousands of tales of players getting their legendary and then quitting the game a month later or leaving to join another guild. So, the guild works for something over an extended period of time but loses it because the individual has to make an individual decision rightly or wrongly.



• Lopsided Results: When I first joined my current guild we were working on Yor'shaj and I was whispered by another player that I was doing significantly less then the WoL ranked logs. My response back was that I didn't have top 200 gear. There were other issues with my DPS strategy at the time, but a significant part of the difference is that I don't have a legendary staff. Legendarys are such a performance boost that players without them are penalized because they can't get one. How many recruiting posts have you seen where it says "1 ranged DPS (with Legendary)?"
  
  The fact of the matter is that Legendary weapons create lopsided results that are based more on the gear a player has then the skill of the individual. Given Blizzards mantra of "Bring the Player, Not the Class," this doesn't really seem to fair.



• Unfair Distribution: Every time Blizzard announces a new legendary, there is always some argument of "why does class X get the legendary instead of class Z". But to be honest, much of the time the complainers have a point. Blizzard has implemented nine legendarys in WoW's seven year history. So far, five of the nine have been melee focused, three are caster focused, and one was a ranged weapon. There has been a melee legendary in every stage/expansion of this game and four of them have been usable by Warriors. I would also point out that there has been only one healing legendary, one of the caster legendarys was only available for a few months before the content was obsolete, and that feral druids after seven years still haven't gotten a legendary.
  
  I don't think there is some Blizzard conspiracy that loves melee and more specifically warriors, but hates ferals. However, it's clear that their decision making process is more dominated by lore which favors pointy metal sticks than fair distribution.
  
  For example, why is there a rogue specific Legendary in Dragon Soul? Yes, it's a very cool quest line that allows rogues to use infrequently used abilities like pick pocket and distract, but if you're going to make a class specific legendary why not make it feral the spec that has yet to have a legendary? I'm sure the creative people over at blizzard could have made a similar story centered around a feral druid instead, where they use abilities like Soothe, Hibernate, and Seacow form.



• Individual Effort is Irrelevant: Finally, I have never taken a break from this game in 5 years. I ran Firelands almost every week from when 4.2 was released until 4.3 was released. I have the gold to buy the expensive vendor mats needed to create the Legendary. Yet, I do not have a legendary because I was in four different guilds during the Firelands progression cycle. I have done everything I can to get a legendary, but it's extremely hard to find nine other people that want to go to FL now that it's old news even though it would take me just 9 weeks to get the legendary and other people could get mounts.

Potential Solutions:

The proposed solutions to the legendary issues are just as numerous as the issues themselves. If you look around the official forums and blogosphere you will find a lot of suggestions. Let me take a look at a few of the most common and suggest a couple of my own.

• Bind On Guild Legendarys: This is probably the most common proposed solution, and it fixes the "guild effort, individual reward" problem I've described above. A player can't leave the guild with a legendary because it's the guilds legendary. However, this solution raises other questions and creates some additional issues. For example, is there only one legendary per guild or is it something everyone could buy from the guild rep vendor? If a guild has only one, many guilds will feel forced to trade it around so that every one gets a turn which seems a little silly and confusing. If everyone can get one, then it would be to common which Blizzard clearly sees as an issue. Finally, what happens to the player that need to transfer guilds for legitimate reasons who has a legendary? It's hard to expect the person with a legendary to have back up weapon, because the guild is likely to give those to players with out a legendary, yet you also can't expect them to be tied to one guild forever. Many guilds die or become unworkable for many legitimate reasons. Ultimately, I think this solution crates more problems then it fixes.



• Reward Individual Effort: Another idea, is to make the legendary process a completely individual process, that players can complete at the same time as other players. For example, if the FL legendary had all the same steps but allowed players to do them a the same time, you would see a lot less complaining about losing a legendary, because any caster who raided FL for three months would likely have one. However, this would make them extremely common, which I said above was not something Blizzard would like and it also would seem silly to give every caster the last weapon they would use in the expansion half way through.




• Get Rid of Legendarys: There's two things that make Legendarys great. First, most of the time they have come with a cool story. If you look at the last three, they were a major part of defeating the Lich King, naming a new aspect of magic, and helping the last pure black dragon. The second thing is someone gets an extremely powerful item that will likely last them the rest of the expansion. Both are very cool, but I Blizzard has proven that you don't need a legendary to tell a good story, and Blizzard has argued before that it's not always a good thing to have a player get an item they will not replace.
  
  So, why not get rid of legendarys. Yes, Blizzard would be getting rid of a cool element of the game, but it could easily be argued that this "cool" element has caused more problems and anguish then the reverse. I doubt a whole lot of people would miss them if they were discontinued because in reality, very few people have a realistic chance of getting them anyway.

My Ideal Solution:

The general design principle for legendarys is create a normal weapon, but add special proc that is powerful and somewhat unique. Currently, those proc have only helped the individual with the legendary, but what if the benefits were raid wide?

I think a legendary could be designed in such a way that, it is slight benefit for the individual to use a legendary, but a big benefit to the raid if someone in the raid has a legendary.For example, the proc on Dragonwrath is "When you deal damage, you have a chance to gain the Wrath of Tarecgosa, duplicating the harmful spell." That same buff could be applied to all the casters in the raid if someone in the raid has the staff. If done correctly this could fix most of the problems people complain about today, without big balancing issues.

• Individual players wouldn't be penalized severely for not having a legendary since the primary benefit to a legendary (the proc) would be raid wide.



• After multiple people get a legendary in a tier, losing one of them to real life or a guild transfer is less significant because the buff is covered by multiple players.



• Guilds aren't encouraged to recruit legendary users if they already have one in the guild.



• Also, the proc doesn't have to benefit just one type of player in the raid. It could be truly raid wide where a caster weapon could buff melee or a tank legendary could buff DPS.

I like this solution because it's the only one I've heard that truly rewards a group for a group effort without holding an individual hostage to a guild and keeping the legendarys in the game in a fair way.

Legendary Mechanics

Since it was announced that the first legendary of Cataclysm would be a caster weapon people have been asking questions and speculating about it and wondering what the proc would be. When the tool tip became available during 4.2 questions we finally got to see the proc. "Equip: When you deal damage, you have a chance to gain the Wrath of Tarecgosa, duplicating the harmful spell." While this answered one question, it created a thousand others for obvious reasons. Now that we are a month and a half into patch 4.2 the Legendary Staves are starting to come out and we are starting to get some answers. Siiz of Premonition was the first to get one on August 10th, and luckily for us a moonkin Happyjojj was able to get one a day later and has been posting some of the results from his testing of the proc on the European forums. You can find Happyjojj's thread here and Siiz's post is here. Also, I want to say congratulations to Happyjojj and Siiz on completing the legendary and thank you for doing the testing and posting the results.

The Highlights:

• The Basics - As the tooltip says, when you deal damage, the Wrath of Tarecgosa (WoT) proc has a chance to duplicate the harmful spell, but this means different things for Direct Damage spells and DoTs. According to Siiz, when WoT procs on a DD spell the duplicate acts like a completely independent spell and with its own damage calculation. It's possible for casted spell to proc but the duplicate to not and vice versa. DoTs on the other hand do not behave the same way. When WoT procs on a DoT tick it does not refresh the spell. It only duplicates the DoT tick and has the same damage as the original tick.



• The Proc Chance - Happyjojj didn't address this directly but I did look up the log he did while testing on World of Logs. You can see the results in this CompareBot report.
  
  According to Siiz, duplicated DoT's are listed as Wrath of Tarecgosa rather then the spell that caused the proc. In an effort to calculate the moonkin proc rate I divided Happyjojj's Wrath of Tarecgosa hits by their total number of DoT tick. According to that math the proc rate is around 11.2% (38/340=0.11176) give or take a couple percent. It's important to note that this is a fairly small sample and the actual proc rate is probably a percent or two above or below this number. So, please don't go quoting the 11.2% number I quoted as a fact. We need to get more data to say what the proc rate is more definitively.



• Duplicate Nuke Energy - When Wrath of Tarecgosa procs off of moonkin nukes the WoT procs will generate lunar or solar energy. For example, if you proc when casting a Starfire that generates 20 energy, the WoT proc will generate at least 20 energy also. It is unclear if the WoT proc can benefit from Euphoria, but Happyjojj has confirmed that the original and duplicate cost do not necessarily generate the same amount of energy.
  
  My Thought: This is huge! Getting duplicate casts is significant enough as it is, but generating energy with the duplicate casts makes this proc even more amazing. It basically makes the proc behave like a haste buff without the mana consumption. Moonkin that are able to get the staff will transition between Eclipses even quicker. This will allow for more Eclipse buffed DoTs and greater Nature's Grace uptime. I'm jealous.



• Moonfire and Lunar Shower - When WoT procs on the Direct Damage portion of Moonfire, the duplicate Moonfire will not stack Lunar Shower or generate energy.
  
  My Thought: I know a lot of moonkin don't use Lunar Shower regularly anymore, but I'm happy that it works this way. Having the duplicates stack LS in movement heavy situations would be helpful, but I think that is the exception rather then the rule. Most movement is usually done in fairly short bursts and probably insignificant when compared to the possibility of having MF generating energy when you don't want it to due to WoT procs.



• Wild Mushroom - Each mushroom that is placed is treated as an individual spell, but if a mush room is duplicated it is duplicated for all the targets hit by that mushroom. For example, if three mushrooms are placed and each mushroom can hit three targets, normally you would see a total of nine hits. If one of those mushrooms procs WoT then you would see a total of 12 hits.
  
  My Thought: I'm not surprised by this. I'm sure some people would rather that it duplicated all of the Mushrooms placed, but it probably doesn't matter mathematically. Yes the damage of an individual mushroom will be less then if all three were duplicated, but you are probably three times as likely to get a proc with each of the mushrooms treated as individual spells.



• Starsurge and Shooting Stars - Duplicate Starsurge casts will consume a Shooting Stars proc that occurs while you are casting Starsurge, but will not put Starsurge on cooldown. To put it another way, in rare occasions your Starsurge casts with Shooting stars will not be instant casts.
  
  My Thought: This is the one negative I saw from Happyjojj's testing. It sucks but it should be rare enough that it isn't significant.



• Hurricane - Damage from Hurricane behaves like a DoT when it comes to Wrath of Tarecgosa, and when it procs for a Hurricane tick it duplicates the damage for all targets hit by the tick.
  
  My Thought: Hurricane isn't used that often by moonkin anymore and probably isn't mathematically significant either way, but this is nice to know.

Thanks Again:

Once again, I just wanted to say a quick thanks to Happyjojj and Siiz for doing the testing and posting their results on the forums and in World of Logs.