Kill Boss MiniGame

Hey guys so there's a new minigame in my stream that lets you have a little more fun and have more interaction while you watch. Coded by Taelia_ and modified by Ayiga I have to thank these two so much for helping me with this awesome project. Make sure you check out both their streams and give them some love.

If you look in the top corner of my stream now you'll see a boss with an HP bar, this boss can change at any time so be ready for a new challenge. 

Now your job is to kill him. If you manage to kill the boss you will be rewarded with XP and Crowbucks, however you won't be able to kill him alone and if you die your XP multiplier will drop. If you party with your friends and the boss dies, he will come back even stronger so be careful because the more the boss level's the harder he will hit you.

So now what, how do I play? Okay so all you have to do to play is talk in chat. The more constructive your chat is the stronger your character will be. If you spam or type very short phrases your XP multiplier will go down. If you type well constructed sentences your XP multiplier will go up. There are 12 different classes you can play as to take down the boss, each with it's own flavor.

You start out as the Worker which is the basic class with the weakest damage and doesn't scale very well however this class has the highest crit % chance at 50% crit. The rest of the classes are the classes that are currently in World of Warcraft and Wildstar. 

The command to change your class is simple, all you do is type in chat. !class <class>. For example

!class DK

!class DRU

!class HNT

!class MAG

!class PAL

!class PST

!class ROG

!class SHA

!class WLK

!class WAR

!class MNK

!class WOR
!class ENG
!class ESP
!class MED
!class SPL
!class STA

These are the Level 1 values for each class:

<DK> the Death knight attacks between 5-10 has 2 attacks before the boss hits back, and has 500 HP

<DRU> the Druid attacks between 6-12 has 2 attacks before the boss hits back, and has 400 HP.

<HNT> the Hunter attacks between 20-25 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 250 HP

<MAG> the Mage attacks between 10-30 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 150HP.

<PAL> the Paladin attacks between 8-13 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 500HP .

<PST> the Priest attacks between 16-30 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 175HP.

<ROG> the Rogue attacks between 7-16 has 2 attacks before the boss hits back, and has 275HP.

<SHA> the Shaman attacks between 15-30 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 250HP.

<WLK> the Warlock attacks between 12-28 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 175HP.

<WAR> the Warrior attacks between 3-12 has 2 attacks before the boss hits back, and has 500HP.

<MNK> the Monk attacks between 8-15 has 2 attacks before the boss hits back, and has 300HP.

<WOR> the Worker attacks between 1-2 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 200HP.

<ENG> the Engineer attacks between 5-13 has 2 attack before the boss hits back, and has 450HP.

<ESP> the Esper attacks between 8-17 has 2 attack before the boss hits back, and has 210HP.

<MED> the Medic attacks between 20-28 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 200HP.

<SPL> the Spellslinger attacks between 15-35 has 1 attack before the boss hits back, and has 200HP.

<STA> the Stalker attacks between 7-17 has 2 attack before the boss hits back, and has 250HP.

Lets Boost! Monk 101

Okay guys so you've just used your lvl 90 boost and decided to pick a monk. Now what?

Well I'm glad you asked, here's everything you need to know about Monk 101 from a windwalker and brewmaster point of view.

First of all let me welcome you to the monk family, there's an awesome monk community out there and I'm glad you decided to come here for information. So I just boosted a windwalker monk and I'm ready to go fight and kill things what do I do, how do I pwn?

Slow down killer, you don't want to get hurt there's a few things we need to look at before we go rushing into combat, we do want to make sure we're ready right? Okay to make sure you can actually hit things in your fresh gear you're going to want to hit and expertise cap which for melee classes is 7.5%. So to make this process painless I recommend getting an add on called reforge lite which you can download here.

In game it looks something like this. The first button you're going to want to hit is in the upper right hand corner which are the presets for the class and you're going to want to select windwalker. From there all you do is hit the calculate button and it will do all the heavy math stuff for you, easy right, almost. To make sure it actually reforges your character you need to scroll down and hit the show button. this shows you exactly what's being reforged, from there just hit reforge and it will do everything for you.

*Beware if you do not have gold on this account and it's totally fresh this will use most of the 150g you are given to start with*

Okay now that you're reforged for hit and exp cap you're ready to go, so what next right? Lets queue up for a dungeon or LFR and get some of that cash you just used back. Okay Crowbar I'm in lets punch stuff, but wait... which buttons do I hit.

Lets look at talents and show you what will help you with most encounters in LFR and the basic heroic dungeons because this is what you should be grinding for gear and experience playing the class.

I like to run Tigers Lust because it's a nice speed boost as well as breaks roots when you need it, you can also cast it on a friendly target if they need help, this skill is very very useful don't underestimate it. the lvl 30 talent I use is Chi Wave because it provides a nice damage output as well as heals when you need it. You can make a marco to use this skill to always target yourself first making it a guaranteed heal, but that's something more useful for Brewmasters than it is for windwalkers, we like the damage.

I'll tell you what's more important, this next talent. Chi Brew is by far your most useful talent and is a must for any windwalker monk, I know what you're about to say and just no. Okay lets look at what this spell does. 

Now as a general rule of thumb you're going to want to spam Expel Harm before a boss fight to start off with full Chi on a fight(Note: This process takes about 45 seconds and can be very annoying). Now once you've spent your chi and the fights started you're going to want to use both charges of this right away. Okay Crowbar but what does this do? If executed properly you'll start the fight off with almost 9 stacks of Tigers Eye Brew which is one of your strongest buffs.

Meaning you can start off the fight with 60% damage, which is the perfect time to use this as most fights start off with pre pot, blood lust and you can combine this with Xuen giving Windwalker Monks what they desperately need. BURST!!! Which at this gear lvl single target you'll be bursting if all is done right upwards of 300k which is crazy. If you reach optimal gear lvl's this can go upwards of 1mil dps.

Okay moving on with talent selection I swap between ring of peace and leg sweep, it's really preference at this level and doesn't really matter what you choose. Next for defensive cooldown, Diffuse Magic is by far the most useful for windwalker monks as it's a magical dispell and magic damage reduction which is useful for so many fights in SoO. Dampen harm isn't that useful as we don't normally take enough damage for it to proc even though the effect is longer. Healing elixirs can be a lifesaver but we pop so many brews that it's not worth it because the proc will most likely be down when you need it.

Now that we've learned not to hurt ourselves lets look at our final choice. Now you're going to bounce around between two spells which has a very simple rule. Xuen for Single Target fights, Rushing Jade Wind for AoE fights. You'll get more damage output and effectiveness from Rushing Jade Wind on fights like Fallen Protectors and Galakras, where as for a fight like Sha of Pride Xuen becomes more useful as most of your time is spent single targeting one mob.

Okay now that you have the talent rules for success it's time to start punching things. Let me give you a basic rotation to success. Monks, like most melee classes follow a priority system on which spells you should be using.

Don't worry you're ready I promise. The fist spell you're going to want to cast, if you've set up the fight correctly by using expel harm you should have 4 chi to start off the fight, is Tiger Palm to get the buff up so you do more damage to your current target.

This should leave you with 3 chi left over, the next spell you want to cast is Rising Sun Kick to put the debuff on your target making your attacks hit even harder. 

You're going to want to maintain 100% uptime on this buff and debuff on your target for maximum damage. Now this leaves you with 1 chi, not much you can do with that so now it's time to use the first stack of Chi Brew bringing you up to 3 chi, just enough to cast your first Fists of Fury.

Now I will say you're going to want to keep this skill off cd almost 100% of the time for maximum damage, the problem is not many fights let you do that because it is a poorly designed spell. It's one of our most damaging abilities but keeps us rooted and stuns mobs, which on fights where you need to stun adds or where there's mc's becomes very annoying for your group as you're constantly putting things on stun DR for them. If you can keep high uptime on this spell though you'll see your damage sky rocket.

By now your Rising Sun Kick should be off cd or close to it, if not use your second tick of Chi Brew and cast a Blackout Kick if RSK is still on CD. Now what should have just happened is you've used no energy to gain chi and should have a nice burst going. If you're at 10 stacks of Tigers Eye Brew at this point pop it with Xuen and start using your Jab to gain chi to cast RSK and Blackout Kick, only cast Jab twice if FoF is coming close to being off CD so you can FoF, until then use Jab sparingly to keep your energy high and to maintain the buff and debuff we talked about earlier.

Okay for the TLDR your priority should be as such. Tiger Palm Buff>RSK Debuff>FoF>Jab for Chi>Blackout Kick and pop TeB at strategic times to get the most out of your DPS such as a trinket proc.

So those are the basics for windwalker. In my next post I'll be going over the same thing but for Brewmasters. So get your tanking shoes ready because you're in for a hell of a ride, until next time friends, and don't forget you can catch my stream every day at 5pm PDT/8pm EDT http://www.twitch.tv/crowbarx

See you online.

I Lost My Job

I'm sorry I haven't made a post in awhile, I've been rather busy and things haven't been going so great for me. I'll be more active from now on I promise.

So recently the company I was working for had to let me go for overstaffing issues, or so they told me.

So Crowbar what are you going to do now? Well I'm glad you asked, I'm going to attempt to become a full time streamer on twitch.tv. For those of you that are not familiar with Twitch, it is a website where you can broadcast gameplay videos live for everyone to watch. My twitch channel is http://www.twitch.tv/crowbarx I would appricate it if you stop by and check it out.

Now World of Warcraft is a very popular game on this website and yes my blog mainly is based around World of Warcraft and theorycrafting but that's not the only game I'll be streaming in fact I'll be streaming very little of world of warcraft, probably only 2 days out of the week because I plan to stream every day.

So Crowbar what games are you going to play then? I'll be kicking off the "relaunch" of my stream on March 24th at 9:00PM PDT/12AM EDT which coincides with the launch of Diablo III Reaper of Souls.

 I'm going to start things big by streaming for 24 hours straight, and not only that I'll be giving away not one but TWO copies of Reaper of Souls to the stream so please make sure you tune in for your chance to win. After the 24 hour stream I will start a 30 day challenge where I'm going to stream every day in hopes that I can supplement my income with donations, meaning if you would like to support me please stop by the stream and donate. My goal is to reach $1000, which was about how much I made at my previous job, any money I make beyond that will be donated to the charity ACT Today which works with children struggling with Autism.

If you're a gamer and you buy a lot of games I've recently been partnered with G2A which offers the latest and greatest games and super low prices. So you can support me by purchasing your favorite games for cheap! Check out my link by clicking here. G2A Fan Shop

If you can't do any of these things don't worry you can still support me. If you go to my stream page at http://www.twitch.tv/crowbarx and just stay in my stream even when I'm offline it helps me more than you know, if you really want to show your support click the follow button on my page to be notified everytime I go live.

I've set up a bot on my stream called Crowbot and what this does is every 5 minutes you spend on my stream you gain 2 Crowbucks. Crowbar, what the hell are Crowbucks? I'm glad you asked. Crowbucks are a currency used on my stream for giveaways and benefits to long time viewers, the longer you stay in the more crowbucks you gain, even when I'm Offline. There are minigames you can play with Crowbot which allow you to gamble and gain even more Crowbucks or recklessly throw them all away. So far for the few viewers I do have it's been a big hit. The way my giveaways work is like a raffle system where you buy tickets for a chance to win, but instead of using real money you use Crowbucks that you've earned just by being in my stream. So when I giveaway the two copies of Reaper of Souls you'll have a better chance to win just by being in my channel and watching. So stop by and check it out, go into my channel and type !crowbucks to see your current balance at any time. Remember you gain points even when I'm not streaming.

Anyways this will probably be my only off topic post but I hope you'll support me and my goal of becoming a streamer full time. Please stop by and say hello and get ready for the party on March 24th at 9:00PM PDT/12AM EDT. It should be a blast, we'll be going for 24 hours so I hope you're ready!

Simcraft, Math, Numbers Monks...Wait What? o.O

Hello everyone, so this is the way this blog is going to work. There is going to be a video to go along with every blog for those of you that don't like to read. The video is merely an accompaniment that is going to go over everything in the post, so I guess you can say it's a written podcast.

I'm going to talk about things I find interesting and I hope you learn something. Today I want to talk about Simcraft, what it is, why you should use it, how to use it and then put it into action. I hope you guys are ready to do math.

OMG Crowbar not math!! Numbers are difficult, can't you just do it for me? Honestly it's not that bad, I'm going to show you how to get the most out of your character. I'm not going to tell you how to build your character or that you need to hit this cap and have you just take my word on it.

So lets get into it, first of all what is simcraft? Well to put it in their words "SimulationCraft is a tool to explore combat mechanics in the popular MMO RPG World of Warcraft. It is a multi-player event-driven simulator written in C++ that models raid damage. Increasing class synergy and the prevalence of proc-based combat modifiers have eroded the accuracy of traditional calculators that rely upon closed-form approximations to model very complex mechanics. The goal of this simulator is to close the accuracy gap while maintaining a performance level high enough to calculate relative stat weights to aid gear selection"

But Crowbar what does it mean? Basically simcraft is a tool to measure DPS in a raid environment meaning you can test different gear pieces or stat caps for your character to see if it would result in a DPS gain. This tool is what's most used to create the BiS or Best in Slot lists you find on the internet.

So Crowbar if these best in slot lists are already online why do I need simcraft? The information is already out there.

That's a good point, but the reason we're doing this is to promote free thinking. If you understand how these tools work and why they work then you can adapt your play style to them. Lets say you like to use Fists of Fury(lol, really FoF, you like that spell?) and you want to find a way to get the most out of the ability. With simcraft you can simulate what will happen to Fists of Fury when you run lets say 16000 haste.

But Crowbar the Fists of Fury build is built around low haste points, why would you ever want to do that, you're just going to lower your DPS? Well I'll show you what happens at high haste points with fists of fury using Simcraft.

Now that I have you interested, lets actually look at the tool. Where do you get Simcraft? The latest version of the tool can be found on http://simulationcraft.org/ or you can download it directly by Clicking Here. Okay now that you have the tool downloaded lets take a look and see how it's used.

This is what it looks like when you open it up. So now what? Well you can see there are several tabs and a lot of options. We're going to leave everything at the default settings and open the import tab.

You'll see it takes you to the wow website and at the bottom you'll see an address bar. If you want to work with your character then simply enter your armory link at the bottom and hit import. We're going to just work using my armory for testing purposes here, feel free to follow along and use your own character for reference. There is also sample profiles and other ways to import characters so if you wanted to import your character with a different gear set you can, but we'll get into that later. For now import http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-hand/Crowbarx/advanced into the address bar at the bottom or use your character.

OMG Crowbar I'm lost, what does it all mean? I don't get it? I give up!

Don't be intimidated, yes it's a lot of information and it can look like text that doesn't make sense, but here's the easy part. You don't have to do anything but hit the Simulate! button in the lower right hand corner, go ahead click it, I promise you'll be happy in a second.

Look at that, you just did your first simulation on SimCraft! Good job! You did awesome!

So.... now what? Well if you look at this page and scroll down you'll see various statistics. It shows you what your damage output would be on a Patchwerk(Tank and Spank fight from Naxx) style encounter. So with optimal rotation on a single target fight this shows I should hit 406543 DPS with my current gear. So does it work? Can you really hit 400k DPS? Well lets figure out by putting it into practice. The sim above was run for a 7.5 min encounter. Since I'm going to be running several of these tests I'm going to change that option to 200 sec or 3.3min and see what happens to our dps.

If you go into the options tab you'll see all the different options you have for changing the style of the encounter you want to simulate. So lets say you want to improve your DPS for proving grounds or challenge modes you can do so with this tab right here. You'll also see that you can change raid buffs, the other tabs are for scaling stats and breakpoints, I don't recommend messing with those tabs your first time using the tool. So lets change the length of the fight to 200 sec and remove all buffs except for stats and crit since those are the two that windwalkers can do, don't forget to remove all the debuffs simcraft offers as well. From there lets hit the simulate button and see what happens.

You'll see that my DPS drops to 338,825. A big difference, so lets go to a target dummy and hit it for 3.3min and see how accurate this tool is. So after 3 min on the targeting dummy here are my results.

and here is my breakdown of the damage during this 3min test.

So 305.8k is not 330k. What happened? Well to put it simply that's where human error and RNG come in. I didn't have the perfect rotation, I missed my pre pot, my trinkets didn't proc as much as I would have liked them to, but 300k is in the ballpark. 

Okay that's great, you taught us that simcraft lies and you suck at monk, now what? 

Well now lets do some work and see what we can do to make that number bigger. How are we going to do this? Now the work/math comes into play, lets start taking a look at breakpoints and caps and put those to the test. 

Lets start with Crit, Monks like it and we like to stack a lot of it, but did you know there's a cap to crit? What this is news to you, okay well let me try and explain this the best way I can. Auto attacks from dual wielding have a 24% chance to be glanced off the mob doing reduced damage, even when attacking from the back, for this reason anything beyond 60% crit isn't beneficial. 

Crowbar is this true? How do you know this? Where is this information from? Well lets take a look at this article from WoWWiki about glancing blows. http://www.wowwiki.com/Glancing_blow 

"The fact that 24% of all white-damage melee attacks made against a Boss Mob will be Glancing Blows, no matter what you do, has implications when choosing how much Crit Rating gear to use. Due to the table-based nature of WoW's attack resolution system, Glancing Blows take precedence over critical hits. If your combined miss, dodge, parry, block, glancing blow, and crit chance against a mob is 100% or higher, you will never see a normal white-damage hit made against that mob (all your hits will be either glancing blows or critical hits). If it exceeds 100%, it is your critical hit chance that gets "pushed off the end" of the table. Any Crit Rating gear added past this point will not improve your critical hit chance with white-damage melee attacks at all. This is sometimes called the "Crit cap""

Okay well now that we know Monks should only go for 60% crit, what happens if we go past that cap? Do we still gain DPS from it, or should we stop at 60% raid buffed crit. Lets test it out. Before we head back into SimCraft lets take a trip over to our favorite site to play with reforge and gem results http://www.askmrrobot.com/ 

This is what the page will look like after you've loaded your character from the armory. Some people say that ask mr robot is a terrible tool and that you shouldn't use it. I say they are just using it wrong, it's a great tool if you know what you're doing with it, so let me show you how I use it. If you're new to a class it gives you what it thinks the optimal stats for your class/spec should be. If you click the optimize button it will tell you how to gem/reforge your gear for the best results.

This is what it looks like when I just hit the optimize button. It tells me that I'm gearing my monk totally wrong and I should change a lot of things. However if you look this tells me to drop a lot of agi, a ton of haste and pick up a bunch of crit. Is this really a DPS gain? Lets take it to simcraft and find out. You'll notice this button on the right hand side that says SimC.

Lets click it and see what happens.

Oh no another box with lots of confusing text! What does it mean?

Don't be afraid, remember how easy it was last time we saw text like this. What you want to do next is copy the text that ask mr robot gives you and then open up SimCraft. Now click on the simulate tab at the top.

Now in this tab click on the blank tab to open up a new window in SimCraft.

Finally paste the text you got from ask mr robot and hit simulate.

333,100 DPS, Crowbar that's not an upgrade from what we did before. Correct, but what you'll see is that we tested simcraft using different stats and we didn't have to change or reforge a single piece of gear. Lets go back to ask mr robot and customize it a bit more and see if we can get better results and answer the question to our crit cap dilemma.

Look at the edit weights button on ask mr robot. Click it and lets see what happens.

Oh no options, confusing, HALP! Okay, but first do me a favor and click on the show advanced button on the top right. 

Confusing yes I know, but trust me we'll get through it together and I promise you'll thank me, and if you don't, well then I'm sorry and you probably shouldn't read my blog anymore. This is how ask mr robot thinks a Windwalker Monk should prioritize their stats. I don't like it, so lets change it, we found out from our lesson on glancing blows that we want to go for a 60% crit cap so lets enter 60% in the box. For haste lets enter 11,500. Most heroic raiding Monks run between 10k-12k haste so lets meet in the middle at 11.5k. Now if you can't hit these ratings don't worry enter them anyways and ask mr robot will get you as close as it can to these caps as possible. One more thing you'll notice is that it has mastery at a rating of 1.35, below strength, now our mastery isn't good, but it's not so bad that you want to prioritize strength over mastery so lets change that number to a 1.9 and hit save.

Now your character should look something like this on ask mr robot.

Now because I'm going to export to SimCraft and take the results in game I don't want to spend the money regemming/reforging a bunch of times so what I'm going to do is hit the Enable Reforge-Only button on ask mr robot before i send the results to simcraft.

This you'll see from looking on the right hand side shows that I'm going to be dropping a lot of haste and picking up a ton of mastery since my character is already at the recommended crit cap.

Now lets export to SimCraft like I showed you before.

You'll see the results are lower than the default build that ask mr robot gave us. Does this mean mastery is bad and I need to stack more haste? Lets find out by going to the targeting dummy again and doing our 3min test with the reforge recommended by ask mr robot.

You'll see this time we got much closer to the target DPS that SimCraft provided. Does this mean more mastery is a good thing? Maybe, but lets try some more tests and figure out what is considered optimal for my playstyle. Lets go back to this crit question, lets see how much crit we can stack using ask mr robots tool. 

Entering crit as the most important stat in the Edit Weights tool I see that my current gear can only push 0.86% more crit, not what we were hoping for but lets give it a shot anyways, this takes away even more haste and puts a lot more into mastery and puts us over hit cap. What does Simcraft have to say about this?

You'll see SimCraft says that the more mastery we stack the more our DPS will drop. Is this the case? Lets find out. Here comes another 3min test.

Okay closer to target DPS but still lower than our last test. So we've tried mastery and can't do a proper crit test at the moment so lets try stacking as much haste as we can and see what happens.

Ask mr robot says we can add a ton of haste from our previous build, what does SimCraft say about this?

Now that's interesting, stacking haste gave us our highest output so far, lets see if it has any effect when we try it in game. 

Very interesting, with more haste we were much closer to the target DPS ask mr robot said we should be at. Does this mean all monks should stack haste and forgo mastery and crit? Lets try one more test doing a middle ground between crit, mastery and haste.

This is a more balanced build that you'll see Monk's running, this is about 12k haste, 60% crit fully raid buffed and about 60% mastery, lets see what SimCraft says.

Lower than our last test, lets see if it translates in game with our final 3min test.

The balanced build didn't do as well as a pure haste build, still we're close to the numbers SimCraft gave us. Please remember that all these tests RNG is involved in trinket procs and cape procs. What I'm trying to show you is that you can try out builds without testing them in game. You can build around your playstyle, if you feel your energy is running low and you can't do anything, try doing a  haste build and compare it in simcarft to see if it will result in a dps increase at your current gear level. 

Please note that I'm at a very high ilvl 578, but please don't let that stop you from trying this. Impress your friends and guildies by trying different things out to increase your dps. You'll notice there's not much difference between the different spec's I tried at my gear level, mostly because I didn't change my gear, gems or enchants at all. I think the tests could have be wildly different if I regemmed/enchanted and changed pieces out for each test, but I learned something about my character in doing these tests. With my current gear set and style of play stacking haste works best for my personal DPS. If you try this your results may be wildly different. I'd be interested to know. I hope you learned something about simcraft, and even if you just hit 90 on your monk and you're at an ilvl of 430 try this, what have you got to lose, you can build a guide for your character and what you want to do with it.

I'm not here to tell you stack haste, stack crit, I'm here so you can learn from my experiences. Next time we'll be going over my gear, rotation, keybinds, and style of play. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, I hope you found it interesting, or maybe you got this far and the whole time you've been saying "this guy is an idiot, l2p n00b." Even if that's what you were thinking reading this I hope you learned something. I'm still learning this myself, but my goal is to get better and if tools like this continue to help me be a better player you'll be damn sure I'll use them, I'll make sure I show them to you along the way and you can learn from my successes or failures.

Until Next Time,

-Crowbar