Blog Archive by month: June 2008



Word salad with Wordle

by Tachyon on Fri. 27. June 2008, 11:12

Filed under: offtopic, blogging

Offtopic, but interesting nevertheless: Wordle creates beautiful word clouds from walls of text. For testing purpose, I used the current content of this blog; here's the resulting cloud:



Wordle currently runs as a Java-Applet, but in principal this technology could be used to generate Tag Clouds on the server side (as image with an image map for the links, or as simple variant with CSS to layout the elements, which on the other hand would exclude vertical text elements).

The algorithm is challenging but no rocket science, maybe I'll include something like that for this blog, let's see

Brutallus

by Tachyon on Tue. 10. June 2008, 23:30

Filed under: brutallus, raiding, sunwell, mage, dps

Actually I intended to just play a few rounds of battleground PvP, and look for any groups seeking for a mage for the last couple of bosses in Zul'Aman (desperately need the trinket from Hex Lord Malacrass!), which is the usual things to do for me on half play evenings (I came online shortly before 22:00).

So I was quite surprised when recieving a whisper of Schayol in midst of a battle in Arathi Basin, if I'd feel like doing some learning tries on Brutallus. I didn't hesitate for a second, learning a new boss fight I never encountered before is always a challenge for me, although I'm convinced that my gear is yet not quite sufficient for sunwell bosses, especially for Brutallus.



Brutallus is the second boss in Sunwell Plateau (after Kalecgos). He's got 10 Mio. HP, and a Enrage-Timer of 6 minutes, which basically means that the raid has to deliver 27'777 DPS sustained to kill him before he runs havoc. Divided by the usual number of 16 DPS classes, this means that each one of them has to provide an average of 1736 DPS sustained, given that no one of them dies during the encounter. Quite a challenge, that is, so advantage of each and every DPS buff has to me made, from Destruction Potions, Flame Caps to Drums of Battle, to live up to such a high DPS score.

My mage's equipment consists of a wild mix of T6 (robe, shoulders, 2 rings), T5, heroic badge rewards, PvP items and further items of dubious origin (Karazhan, Zul'Aman, crafted BoE), not quite at the level of a T6 mage. What especially hurts is not having the 4x T6 bonus (5% increased damage for Frostbolt and Fireball), gimping my damage output compared to the other DPSers in the raid.
At the moment, I'm at 1206 spell damage, 126 spell hit rating (capped for frostbolt), 69 spell haste and a mere 187 crit rating, that's quite below the stats I think I ought to have for Brutallus.

But as the raid's main goal was not to kill the boss by hook or by crook, but rather gather a solid feeling for the encounter and learn to handle the tactic and timing, it didn't matter that much, so I enjoyed the wiping and checked how well I'd do in terms of DPS.

The entire raid DPS was very low, as we did the tries unbuffed (half of the raid at least used some flasks/elixirs/buff food to check where in the DPS spectrum they lie). The group setup wasn't ideal either (I did have a shaman in my group, but the moonkin with the tasty 5% crit aura was in the other two mages' group), and we didn't use the Destruction Potions and Drums of Battle yet, but nevertheless the DPS was to weak overall.

I managed to settle on 1650 DPS, not really bad, but there's definitely some room for improvement (4x T6 bonus missing), but at least I was among the 4-8 top DPS in the damage meters.
One point that amazed me was our warlocks' DPS, they were the only ones to make more than 2000 DPS. It's sick how they scale with gear, compared to us mages...

The low DPS wasn't really a problem at that evening, as we happened to wipe always long before reaching the enrage timer (best try was 4:30 min), so we first have to learn how not to bite the dust before the damage issues get addressed.

I assume that the raid will manage to beat Brutallus within the next 1-2 weeks; the gear is more than on a ok level for almost everyone in the raid, and once we manage to keep our damage dealers alive until the enrage and learn how to maximize our DPS, the boss shall finally fall...
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