Being Saleh: Alt Invaders

As my friends are knee-deep in mythic progression and my online time become less and less dedicated. I found myself veered once more into my altholicism, at first I max leveled my troll warlock, as I realized many people specced destruction I quickly swapped my artifact to affliction but then blizz changed how unstable affliction works, which doesn't bode well to long time warlocks, but as I only played affliction like two days I can adapt to that, got into heroics in several days then I moved on.

And have a sweet scythe as a souvenir

For me Mists of Pandaria will always be the most memorable expansion ever (proved by my Wakener title) and monk still become my greatest failure of class (due to their drastic rehaul on Warlords of Draenor) but I have a sudden urge to tried out the class once more, and so armed with my renewed determination (but still zero skill-playing, and zero f*** about me as an abysmally bad tank) my Mistweaver becomes a Brewmaster

The keg comes for free

Cruising through Draenor (and Garrison) once again for leveling 90 through 100 is  not a welcomed throwback thursday (or in my case: monday) but somehow I did it in mere 10 hour-ish, by spamming dungeons, questing, mining, and (beyond my belief): pet battling.

Brewmastering in legion is radically different from other tanks, while warriors and paladins rely on damage mitigation, druids on dodging and reflecting damages, Death Knights and Demon Hunters on repleneshing lost HP, Monks are all about managing the stagger stack and a little bit of everything else, every damage dealt on the Brewmaster was mitigated by 40% but with a catch that the mitigated damage will be dealt slowly over time, more damage received means more will be transferred to the stagger stack, there are several skill built on the brewmaster to manage this stack, from delaying the damage for some seconds, or even cut it up to 50% of the damage still on the stagger stack, all these skills are brew-based making a brewmaster the real drunken fist class, Monk also deploying dodge as their mastery increasing their haste for the cooldown of those brew-based skills, or (depending on your talent) relying on their mastery gift ot the ox to a chance of self heal. In my case I choose to rely on brew skills, relying on the ox brew talent to instantly refilling any brew and my energy, which means my HP is goes slowly and steadily down when I'm tanking a dungeon, making some healer probably struggling to keep my HP full, you can't do that I'm sorry, I'm not speccing that talent :D

In like a week my brewmaster already entered the heroic dungeons, while learning my class I found the fact above and somewhat giggling, most people made monk to become a windwalker which is one of the highest damaging melee dps class at this moment, playing a windwalker somewhat reminding me of rogues (without daggers) and it's also one of the fun melee dps class (with their shoryukens and hadokens if you specced those), mistweaving is also fun but requiring more concentration than before (MOP xpac) as I lost most of my hugging AOE healing (healing spinning crane kick is no longer available), also my new area healing requires me to consume more MP with random targets but at least they also apply heal over time

Legion expansion still draws me in but as I one class away from my quintessential quintet achievement I decided to take a short break and return to (again to my surprise) Guild Wars 2, why? Because of my friends (again). So I'm looking forward to bash them (and the game) in my next blog post :P

Also: I'm in hell, plants hell

Being Saleh: Woe of DPS

Damage per second (DPS or dps) is a measure of the damage dealt by a person or group over one second. DPS is a more practical measure of damage output than plain damage, as it allows characters of differing levels and classes to effectively compare their damage output. The term dps is also sometimes used to describe the act of applying damage to a target (as in "all dps on the boss" or "stop all dps"), or to refer to a class whose primary role in a group is dealing damage (Wowpedia)

In my previous MMO (a.k.a WoW) DPS is essential, most of WOW's raid boss have enrage timer that increases their attack speed if they don't get killed in a set of time which will cause a wipe, some Raid Boss have something called DPS Race which when the boss have extremely large pool of HP and set of attack that has increasing damage per rotation or per phase or when it's HP gets low, so DPSers must try to maintain a as a steady DPS and pull everything they got before the healer ran out of mana or the tank can't stand the heat, as a dedicated DPS myself I know how DPS is essential on Raids and Dungeons, and DPS meter become a necessity for raiders.

Enter Guild Wars 2 where holy trinity is nowhere to be found and all damage have one attribute: the damage itself, and when it come to dungeon bosses (and some legendary enemies) DPS becomes unnecessary because depends on how you mitigate or evade the bosses attacks and also healing you won't be damaging the boss unless you have some kind of traits or condition on it, and so come the sweet taste of variation that's been lacked on WoW and other 'holy-trinity' MMORPG.

Unfortunately, variation isn't what some people looking for, as a mesmer I enjoyed dodging, lasergunning, and stabbing my enemies, a warrior however prefer to up close and personal with an enemy and brutally cut it down with greatsword skills, we both managed to kill an enemy but what differs us is time of the killing, I need 10 secs of evading and slashing, while the warrior can hack'n'slash it in 4. And so the segregation begins, on Citadel of Fire a level 75 dungeons it's explorable path one has become so easy and people are starting to farm it, of course there is always a catch in form of dinimishing returns where your loot rate and rewards diminished as time goes by when you're in the dungeon, or when a path is taken repeatedly, and so the zerg against time begins. This is when DPS term returns, most of the PUG party prefers hard hitting heavy armorer like warrior clad in berserker armor and have their offensive traits maxed out because the bosses don't have hard hitting AOE or skills to compensate with the player's DPS output, and the hard hitting trash mobs are entirely skippable.

Well, it happens before in Ascalonian Catacombs, and Anet buffed it, made it harder and even deadlier than before, and so...people stopped doing it, of course some dedicated people are still cool with it, especially the token collectors, and so AC's back in their respectable niche of players. I always complained that 'dungeons r hard' before but now I started to see the silver lining it of it, if dungeons are easy people are gonna start farming it, the class becomes segregated, chats are filled with "LF WARRIOR/GUARD COF", have their own DPS meters, gear checks and stuff and make DPS a necessary factor of the dungeon game again.

Damage Per Second isn't a term fit for Guild Wars 2, because instead of pulling 10k per sec you have to dodge, heal yourself (and allies), debuff, create combo fields for your teammates, buff yourself and others, switch weapons, ress downed characters, and of course all the while damage the boss. Sometimes you'd heal more than you damage, sometimes condition is your only weapon, sometimes kiting while evading is the only way to lure the boss from your friends and sometimes you just strive for not dying because zero HP means zero DPS and when your teammates tried to resuscitate the defeated you, the situation can quickly become -1 DPS.