This week on For Azeroth, Joce and Manny dip their toes in PvP to test the AI and have a look at the remastered Battlegrounds. They also discuss the upcoming Q&A, new esports toys in the store, go over how to get the most out of WoWAnalyzer, and take some community lore questions!
The Comp Stomp
This week’s Brawl is the anticipated Comp Stomp Brawl in the newly remastered Arathi Basin Battleground. How was it? In short, pretty good at first glance but despite one player taking a long time to realize the enemy team was bots, there is still a ways to go for the new AI.
- Fast queue because they don’t need to match teams on both sides
- Variation in strategies: Death Ball, Trying to hold 3 positions
- Superhuman abilities: map awareness, instant interrupts
- Exploitable logic loops: harassing or interruption when attempting to cap
- Ability use issues: not using some cooldowns or utility at all (ex: Death Knights never used Death grip and does the enemy team ever use Heroism?)
- https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/20564524
Developer Q&A
Tomorrow, March 21st, Ion and Josh will be holding another Twitch Q&A. No specific topic was mentioned in the announcement.
eSports Toys
For a short while two new toys are available on the in-game shop. These toys are part of the new crowdfunded prize pool for the Mythic Dungeon International and Arena World Championship tournaments. For a limited time 25% of the proceeds go towards the prize pool. There is a base prize pool of $250 000 for each event before any proceeds are added on top of this.
The toys are:
- The Transmorpher Beacon which changes your appearance into a boss character from WoWs past. Become Blackhand, Elisande and others! It work on anyone in your party or raid group.
- The Lion’s Pride Fireworks/Horde Might Fireworks which is used to desecrate the corpse of a freshly slain opponent of the opposite faction. The firework is from a selection of faction themed patterns.
- Both toys were priced at $12.50 CDN ($10 USD) proceeds from purchases on or October 15, 2019 count towards the prize pool.
- Both toys have extremely short CDs (The faction themed toy only 3 sec and the Beacon has a 20 min duration with a 1 hr CD.)
- https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22933274/support-wow-esports-with-your-toy-purchase
- https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/world-of-warcraft-toy-fireworks
- https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/world-of-warcraft-toy-transmorpher-beacon
Free Weekend
Welcome back Weekend on March 21st through to March 24th. All inactive accounts will be able to play throughout the weekend.
Community Resources/Add-ons
WoW Analyzer
WoW Analyzer goes through logs and reviews dps performance. Using logs it generates a report which identifies areas which can be improved in your general rotation. The Analyzer is maintained by different community members and so some specializations are not supported. However, unsupported classes might still be able to give you some information and point to a few areas for improvement.
- The report has six headings: The Overview, Statistics, Timeline, Death Recap, Cooldowns, Character and About
- Check the about page (Page 7) first. Though highly depreciated specs will have a splash page warning, the about will advise under which patch the analyzer was last updated.
- Page 1: The Overview will provide a general review of your performance.
- ABCs (Always Be Casting)
- Core Rotation
- Cooldowns
- Procs/Buffs
- Resources (Mana, Maelstrom Power, etc)
- Preparation
- Utility and Defensives
- Page 2: Statistic measure various points of information as infographics and provide additional information about each of those statistics.
- The 1st portion deals with notable statistics like DPS, HPS, DTPS
- The 2nd section is concerned with the use and benefit of items like Azerite Traits, Trinkets and Enchantments
- The 3rd bit gives particulars about resource usage.
- The 4th and final section gives points on all ability usage include CPM, total casts, and Time on Cooldown
- Page 3: Timeline lays out your ability usage as well as when you gained buffs, and when things came off of CD. This is digging in the weeds but if you know your spec you can see some mistakes that the analyzer will miss.
- Page 4: Throughput Cooldowns are analyzed for the effectiveness and also shows your cast behaviour for the duration of the CD. This is excellent to improve your rotation if a CD affects your normal rotation.
- Page 5: Character gives an plethora of information including:
- Advance armory snapshot
- Stats on pull
- Stats from the Top 100 Logs
- Trinkets
- Azerite Powers
- Talents
- Comparable Parses from the top 100 logs
- The analyzer does not access the fight style or other circumstances of your fight.
- https://wowanalyzer.com/
Podcast (faz-pod): Download (Duration: 1:38:38 — 90.3MB)
Recent Comments