How to improve character and have a direction to improve for noobs

Ok.

There have been some posts and discussions over the few weeks in the WoW blogosphere about the difficulty of gaining enough information on how to improve your character. General consensus seems to be that the game gives you quite enough information on how to gem and enchant your character, but to me this is utter bull. The information is scattered and not concise, and sadly you have to resort to the internet resources.

To be quite honest, the mere basics of a character improvement are pretty easy to come around. To get the talents, glyphs, gems and enchants to at least tolerable level you can use WoW Popular in which you just choose the class, main specification and push button. The listing shows the most popular builds, glyphs and all in a very concise manner and thus gives a solid basic set up for your character. If you are clever enough, you can also see what these suggestions really aim to.

I'd say WoW Popular is the first place to go to just to get the basics right.

After hitting the magical 80, you find yourself grinding for gear and emblems. This is the part where things start to get ugly, as the gear contains so many stats and variables to take into account. Generally you should check Elitist Jerks or a dedicated blog about your class to see the main stats to concentrate on. For some classes MaxDPS gives excellent recaps on both the stats, rotations and specs, but not all. The rotations are a generalisation and you should -no, I should say you MUST- practise the rotations on a dummy to get them right.

To select the right gear or see if this goes above that you can use the MaxDPS's fine gear selection tool, for which you can even restrict the instances or raids you can attend to to see what would be best from that area. On the other hand, if you want to see what you SHOULD have on your character, you should see Gear-Wishlist which just ranks the gear for your character based on its spec: the beauty of this wishlist is that you can see where to acquire the gear, if it's sold or crafted and how it relates to other gear.

Caution should be advised, though. Gear-Wishlist is just dumb ranking system, and some of the suggestions will not endure a real stress test with all classes or specs! Running stuff like Rawr (highly recommended later on!!!) may well show the lack of finesse in the Wishlist ranking, but it's a solid way to build your character upwards.

For normal instances you are ok with the gear you have acquired from questing: in fact, some of the pieces hold as high as the entry raids (which are now defunct as everyone and their cousins are running ICC). Heroic instances require some normal instance gearing, but not much as long as you stay out of Halls of Reflection. To enter raiding you'd most definitely need at least the tier 9 equivalent gear, say almost full set of Emblem of Triumph gear with some random epics from heroics and perhaps that first piece of Emblem of Frost gear you should be able to get after all that daily heroic grind.

And you should put most emphasis as soon as possible in grinding the IC5 man instances: the loot and emblems really make it worth the while.

I hope this helps the newcomers and people with life to get their characters into shape and accepted in PUG raiding and/or guilds raiding. Just check your Gearscore for the nerds out there and be prepared with the strategies.
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The effort in taking the effort...

Most players will agree on the fact that it should take some effort to get to the more 'valuable' rewards in a game. But what can be categorized as being an effort?

Defenition of 'effort': 1. The use of physical or mental energy to do something; exertion.

When you look at this definition almost anything can be seen as an effort. Starting up the game can be seen as an effort, or even moving your mouse from left to right can be seen as an effort. So this general definition does not provide that well of a description for what is seen as an effort in-game.

In general, things that are seen as normal activities, and thing belonging to everyday life are not seen as an 'effort'. So maybe we can translate this to the game world, lets give it a go...

'Regularity thesis'
Walking around is seen as normal, questing is seen as normal, but a quest involving elites is less standard. Another example, heroic 5-mans are seen as standard, but do result in higher rewards. Raids can also almost be seen as standard (the majority of the WoW population raids as far as I know, be it pugging or fixed groups).

So, 'things not regular' is also not really a measure of effort. So what is it then? Time? Is the time required to get to a certain point/item/reputation the only thing that is seen as an effort?

'Time thesis'
Heroics take more time (more than a standard quest in general). Raids do not take time, but absorb time so can also be placed in that category. Grinding for that special item takes time (not skill). Taking 20 days to get the venomhide ravasaur takes time (also no skill).

However, 'behind the scenes'of time is a far more important aspect: Perseverance. It takes willpower to endure the endless raid and HC grind, going back to Un'Goro each day for 20 days for the mount or fishing thousands of fish for the turtle mount.

This can be translated to (very roughly): The amount of time taken to complete one 'event', multiplied by the amount of time the event needs to be completed.

Testing the thesis
As a test: For a full set of HC-emblem gear one needs say 250 emblems (quick guess). With an average of 6 emblems each time, this equals to 42runs of 20 min average each. So 'only 14 hours of playtime total to get you 'raid ready' (not considering the crazy 5.6K GS requirements on some servers).

As a comparison, how many runs will it take you to get a full set of raid gear considering emblem of frost items. 405 EoF for a full set, 2 for each boss, meaning 203 boss-kills. On average 8 bosskills a week(spread over 2 raid days) means 26 raid weeks. Each takes about 4.5 hours (average of 1 or 2 raid nights) so that means a total of 117 hours spread over 26 weeks (thats half a year). And an average of 39 raid nights. (not taking into account weeklies)

Taking purely the amount of hours needed, getting a raid set takes more than 8 times the effort than getting a Heroic-5man set. (This would ofcourse be even more when considering the real time weeks needed instead of hours played)

So this appears to give atleast some kind of indication.

That's it?
Is that really all? If you take the time and stick with it, you will get everything you want/need? Is that what blizzard qualifies as an 'effort'?

To be honest, I think a lot of people actually do believe this. Put in the time and you will be rewarded. Afterall, it is a game which they pay for fun, not a game to be agonized by each and every step you want to take in gearing. So Blizz should toss them a bone every now and then, but it seems that the bone has grown into a full grown cow to be devoured whole within seconds of its 'magically' appearance.

So what should Blizzard use as their criteria to determine the value of the reward? Is it the 'epicness'of the quest? Or simply progression criteria which do not involve 'bones' or is it the amount of 'skill' needed?

No play (YAWP)

It's a bugger to have a life, you know. All time goes to commuting, work, kids and hobbies. Games -as strange as it may seem- take the backburner seat in my schedule when things start to get hectic.

That's what has happened lately. I had plans on doing clever posts, but got struck with severe case of life instead. Over the last weekend I played one CrossFire daily, and that's all. Didn't have even stamina to login to WoW to see my AH sales break new records.

Like I tweeted a moment ago:

All work, no play, makes a blog a very dry and uneventful place.

Sorry for that. Life just happens.
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One beast of a weapon (YAWP)

It seems that getting 25 Primordial Saronites was more strain to the wallet than to the playing. I mean, I bought the stuff from AH, spent some nice gold for that to gain my new dps weapon.

And now I have Shadow's Edge. It's perhaps the best Arms DPS weapon available before completing the quest for Shadowmourne, a quest line which continues from getting Shadow's Edge itself.

Am I happy? Yes.

That was actually all I did ingame this weekend, par few AH deals and two battlegrounds with my spriest. Won in Eye for the first time and of course lost in Warsong Gulch, which seems to be quite horde heavy fight anyhow. Well, to be honest, any daily bg is horde heavy and horde dominated in the battlegroup I'm in, so that's no news.

Hopefully I get time to dig into the gearing this week. Don't hold your breath, though. The background downloader is screaming red all the time, which makes playing -or surfing- a pain.

Play nice!

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Quick note from the front

As it happens, I'm a bit bound currently by work related things. I have in mind a post which would combine the last two ones, namely the one about gearing being too complex and Arms DPS, mostly from the point of view of the arms.

However, this will be postponed to next week, when I finally should have time to invest in WoWHead, Gear-Wishlist and Rawr. And writing it, of course. I might be tempted to go through some musty old pages of EJ, too...

Till then -unless Az comes up with a topic- Play Nice!
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