Lazy Sunday reading

I liked having the afternoon off last Sunday I’ve decided to make it a regular thing. Here are links to some of the things that have provoked me or kept me entertained this week. Oh, and I put in a new threaded discussion widget, linked out of the header panel. Anyone is free to create or reply. Try it out; let me know what you think.

Rohan at Blessing of Kings asks Is spell haste bad for the game? I tend to think that it is. I was thrilled to see someone out there who didn’t just agree, but came up with a series of solid arguments why.

Have you seen the outrage over the GearScore addon recently? People are getting downright angry about exclusionary group building tactics. “LF Healer H-AK, iLvl 245 only plz.” I’m on the fence about that. I mean, if that guy doesn’t want to run with good players’ alts, that’s fine. Why would you want to run with him anyway? I don’t think the yelling was as loud as it is now, though. I’m guessing that has to do with the upcoming LFG tool. But before that comes, Karatheya of Cold Comfort has an alternative player evaluation tool.

In the last year, the gang at RockPaperShotgun have turned that site into my favorite general video game resource. Two articles have jumped out at me recently. First, if there are any budding game makers out there, the Unity 3d engine has gone free for indie games. There’s some remarkable stuff out there built in Unity, including the remarkable PuzzleBloom. And then, they introduced me to Small World — the finest browser-based game I have ever played.

Miss Medicina’s healer survey is blowing up huge! There’s no stopping this thing. Eventually it will paper all of us. Rather like the great zombie plague of ‘08.

Azeroth United’s Child’s Play charity work is getting into high gear with the year end approaching. This one is talking about something called a Twibbon, which I’m sure cooler people than me knew about long before that article. And Sideshow & Syrana have come up with a way to both dodge blame and help sick kids in a single shot. They’re asking for whatever help people can give, which can come in as small a flavor as tweeting about it. Or, chip in directly with the widget below.

Comments

[Coral]

I wouldn't mind seeing a de-emphasis on haste as well though I'm not sure I'd want to see it go away entirely. It does seem intuitively like more haste = more lag (more spell effects faster).

And I don't really like how it interacts with static spell CDs. For example, pvping as resto, grounding totem is a fairly long CD, and wind shear is a 6 sec CD that creates a 2 sec lockout. Those static CDs mean my defensive capabilities are static while the offense is benefitting more from their haste because they can do more in that 4-6 sec window between interrupts.

It makes me more reliant on healing myself through damage rather than supporting a more interactive style when I can either heal thru or mitigate. Mitigation/prevention now is just a drop in a big bucket for most fights. It can still turn the tide if timed well, but haste turns the advantage to the dps imo.

For pve elemental, as it stands, I have so many abilities/procs/trinkets that impact haste on a non-static basis such that the most useful add-on for me as elemental would be a HUD that would show the current cast speed for both LB and CL, particularly if you could pair that with an HUD countdown timer for LvB (I know the latter exists, just have never seen the former). I can mouseover my spell bar to see the cast times, but that's not a particularly easy task when I'm doing several other things.

Missing out on a change in cast time (either trying to fit an extra spell just after a haste effect drops off) or not getting another one in has a pretty significant impact on my dps, and my cast times are jumping all over over the course of a fight.

Anyway, if there is such an add-on, or if someone wants to write one, I'd be your biggest fan.