Tier 10 at last

Every other Shaman-related website and forum in the world has the picture, so here’s a picture of Graham Elliot Bowles instead.

From NBC Chicago. What you aren’t seeing in this picture are the itty-bitty boyshorts he’s wearing. I dare you to follow the link.My thoughts? Bowles looks likes he enjoys his lunches. And probably should invest some of his vast supplies of cash in fixing the buttons on that shirt. I hope he’s not in the kitchen like that.

As for the armor, I like it a lot. Very animalistic, which is in keeping with the real Shamans of the world. It looks like there’s some kind of stag head effect that will play on the shoulders periodically, too.

I’m even excited about the helmet. I believe that’s a first.

Ok, so consider the delay acceptable. It was worth it.

More about tier 10

The language used in the description of the Restosham Tier 10 four piece set bonus has been bothering me from the beginning. I believe now I understand what it is trying to say.

When I first saw it on Matticus’ site, it looked like this:

• 4 piece: Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over until cancelled.

Looking at that makes my eyes water. “Over until cancelled?” What does that even mean? Aside from the fact that they don’t proofread the text before showing it to the public. Until cancelled makes me think of a heal over time effect. Shortly thereafter, it was modified to:

• 4 piece: Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount.

That’s readable. It’s a sentence. But what it expresses could be stated much more simply. If it was trying to say that your chain heal crits for 25% more than the plain 150%, it could just say “Chain Heal critical strikes hit 25% harder.” There must be a reason it is worded so strangely.

The truth, I believe, is somewhere in between the two wordings. There was an update to the Priest 2 piece bonus that looks related:

• 2 piece: Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.

Between “healed… over…” and the other coincident elements imply to me that this is the correctly expressed phrase they are trying to say. The Tier 10 four piece bonus will be that a Chain Heal crit will place a 9 second HoT effect on the target for a further 25% of the healing done. Further, because the “amount healed” wording is just like that of Ancestral Healing, which was recently modified to include overheal, I expect this effect will as well.

Customized Gem Ranking

After yesterday’s wishlist discovery, I figured I could make a customized ranking of gems in a similar way. It’s easy enough to get lists of all the rocks out there, but it is harder to order them by a personalized ranking like the ones I’ve been feeding to Pawn lately. WoW Gem Finder, usably fast since ditching Ruby on Rails for Aspx (spit), will let you filter by criteria like “has haste rating” or “fits in a blue socket”, but to get the kind of tailored ordering that lootrank gives, I needed to look elsewhere. And while LootRank clearly knows about the gems, they aren’t exposed to the user anywhere.

(Would it be confusing if I started calling LootRank GuildOx? Because that’s who they are, and the old lootrank.com URLs redirect to the GuildOx website now. It just bothers me that it’s not as precise a name.)

To get what I was after, I turned to Wowhead. I owe that site so much. Their stat weighting system, tagged beta, is rougher around the edges than the dedicated sites. But their database is faster and more complete than any other in the business.

I started off with the following: http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=ub=7;gm=4;gb=1;wt=123:61:96:23:103:77:22:41;wtv=100:54:62:46:187:-100:10:1. It came from the Shaman_hep report I used in Pawn and for the wishlist. The page on the other side ranks gear, bucketed by slot. Useful, but not better than the wishlist.

To massage those results to work for gems just required some poking around on the form. Fortunately, everything is handled through HTTP GET operations, so it’s easy to pick apart what is going on. The portion that is the actual weight scale is wt=103:123:96:23:61:22:41:77;wtv=169:100:50:35:19:10:1:-100. wt= describes the stats included in the filter through a simple substitution code, and wtv= gives the values for those stats. To apply my weight scale to any item query in their database, I can just paste that clause into the URL.

From there it was easy enough to query their system for all Rare or Epic level 80 gems, add in my weight scale, et voila:

Llyra’s gem ranking or, alternatively, in buckets by color.

Customized Gear Wishlists

So here’s a cool thing. Gear Wishlist is a Google app engine system that can list your upgrade targets for each gear slot. By default it does so using the canned and questionable Wowhead weightings. But there’s a dropdown for picking other weighting systems. Among them is Custom, which lets you feed it a Lootrank URL of your design.

Well, it so happens that Shaman_hep outputs Lootrank URLs. Using that, I can see exactly what to look for, where, and how much of an upgrade each item is. Sassy!

Resto Gear Ranking with Shaman_hep

The final stop on my whistle tour of gear ranking updates is Shaman_hep. You might say that I saved the best for last. In truth, though, I just needed to collect more data before I was ready to do a report. And to do that, I needed to raid. This week I have been to Onyxia 25, VoA 25, ToC 25, heroic ToC 25, ToC 10, and Ulduar 25. I think I’m ready.

Shaman_hep is different from most addons in that it does not run in game. It is a free-standing program (Perl script, technically) that analyzes your combat log, to see what statistics matter to you. After a night’s raiding, you pull the WoWCombatLog.txt file from your game’s Logs directory and feed it to Shaman_hep. In just a few moments it will spit out a comprehensive analysis of what you did, uptimes on all your procs, how much oomph you’re getting from your talents, trinkets and glyphs, and what you should be looking for in gear.

It’s a lot of data. But it’s remarkably easy to read, concise where it needs to be, verbose where it helps, simple to configure, and authoritative in its results.

You may recall that I had some experience with Shaman_hep back in May. At the time I was suspicious about the variability of its results, especially when compared with other Ulduar-healing Shamans. I now understand that I simply took a different road through that raid instance than most of my brethren. My current results are much more in line with expectations.

So let’s set it up.

1. You need to make a config file to tell the program who you are. Make a copy of shaman_hep.cfg, and open it in your favorite text editor.
2. From the top of the file to the bottom read through the comments (lines beginning with #) and fill in the information requested. Any values it needs from your character sheet should be unbuffed. When you come to the CALC_MP5 field, you’ll have to make a decision. When set to 1, the program will calculate an ideal SP/MP5 ratio for your healing. Alternatively, you can set it to 0 and specify your own ratio. I recommend trying some of both to see what kinds of results you get. High volatility in this ratio resulting from different bosses can lead to unsettlingly wild gear ranking changes from run to run.
3. In game, during a raid, capture your combat log. There’s a command you can type to enable logging, but I recommend getting the addon Loggerhead to automate the procedure.
4. What? Your operating system didn’t come with Perl installed? I guess you’ll have to pick up some aftermarket solution. (Hahahahaha!)
5. On the command line, invoke the program, feeding it both the config file and combat log. There’s an example.bat showing you what the command line looks like. Use your local file names and fire away. The right angle bracket (>) redirects program output to a named file. I suggest giving that file a more meaningful name than “report”. Pick something like “HTOC25.txt” that you’ll be able to identify later.
6. Open up the report file to reap the benefits.

The report will be broken down into 3 major sections. The first is simply a recitation of every heal it sees from you in the log. This is noise data and you can delete it. The second section, possibly many thousands of lines later, provides analysis of the log. This can get pretty beefy with useful data, so take some time to explore and familiarize yourself with what it says. For instance, when it tells me that Replenishment had a 31.85% uptime in my hardest fight, that’s a vital deviation from the assumed 100% uptime in the various theorycraft formulas.

The third—and smallest—section gives the Gear Ranking Report. Here is where everything comes together. After it has figured out how much mana you went in with plus how much you regenerated and comparing that with how much you used, on each fight, it can asses how important it is for you to gather more regen gear. Remaining budgeting can be spent on throughput. These budgets are cooked down into 3 gear weighting formulas: Max HPS, Mana Regen, and a balanced build that is a blend of the two.

Simple as pie. A word of caution, however. The results you get are representative only of the healing you feed it. Don’t rebuild your gear based on report from pugging Naxx 10 and expect it to serve you well the next night for hard mode Freya. Rebuild only when you’ve got a report for the hardest healing you’ll be doing. Where there is pain, this way will point to growth.