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Microblog: Monetization

I don’t make any money off this blog. At least, not directly. When I started many years ago, the primary way to make money was through ads, which are ugly and obtrusive and don’t make enough money to justify marring my “artistic expression”. So I didn’t do that.

Now, there are things like Patreon which allow readers to directly give back to creators. And those are great. People should be able to get paid for their work, even if it’s stuff like blogging for video games. But I’m still not interested in turning this blog into a (minor) moneymaker, for my own reasons.

Because I don’t get money from this blog, I can do whatever the hell I want. I can avoid topics I dislike (like stats and legendaries), and write about passions not many people share (learning theory, transmog), all because I’m not obligated to please a paying audience. I can fail to update or write anything for two months straight, and I’m not letting any potential customers down.

“You could do all that, and people would probably still subscribe through Patreon!” you might say. That that might be true, but for me it still feels like it would warp my selfish goals. If I have an audience that’s actually spending money out of appreciation for my stuff, I feel obligated to do something for them; to reward them for their patronage. A lot of people who subscribe on Patreon might have questions, and I probably should answer them, right?

I feel like if this were a job, it has to come with responsibility. If you’re being paid to do something, that includes doing the things someone else doesn’t want to do. And I don’t think I could make enough money through Patreon to convince me to write about boring things.

Now, indirectly I have made money off of this endeavor. Bigger sites like Wowhead pay for guides, though it’s usually just enough to cover my costs to play WoW. I wouldn’t have gotten those jobs if not for this blog. What’s probably a bigger, if more subtle, payoff is the marketable skills I’ve learned through this blog, like CSS, documentation, and learning how to answer frustrating questions in a nice way.

I’m pretty privileged to have a well paying job, and the skills I’ve learned from maintaining this blog actually contribute to my job, so that’s all the payment I need.

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Vengeance and Brewmaster in Emerald Nightmare

I’ve cleared all of this raid on both vengeance and brewmaster, enough offer a decent comparison of the two specs I main. Both are roughly the same ilevel, with experience on the same bosses.

For Emerald Nightmare, I started bosses on my DH and took my brewmaster on farm. Originally this was because I am far more comfortable on my monk and I wanted to force myself to learn my demon hunter. It ended up being handy because the way a DH times their AM can more easily apply to the way a monk applies AM than the other way around. I can learn to time my Demon Spikes around an event, and that maps to Ironskin Brew pretty well. In contrast, a brewmaster is much more flexible, and can potentially use Ironskin much more often than a DH could do with Demon Spikes.

Continue reading “Vengeance and Brewmaster in Emerald Nightmare”

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Microblog: Stagger is a Hell of a Drug

Tanking something that hits hard feels so damn good on a monk. When I see my stagger reach really high numbers, and I purify it mostly away, it’s like a drug. I get a little surge of happy brain chemicals, like you get with most games, but it’s built into the class.

On any other tanking class, you can imagine how much damage you just reduced. Maybe you got hit by the same attack without active mitigation up before, and now you see just how much more health you have remaining when you got your timing right the second time. But the feedback is nowhere near as obvious as on a brewmaster. You can see exactly how hard that hit was in how much stagger you have. And then you can see exactly how much damage you’re throwing off with every purify.

I always want more of it. When I see my stagger start to rise, I want to Purify at the highest point, before it goes back down. There’s some gambling there, trying to get the pool high before cashing out, or before losing it all. I crave that big purify.

Whenever I fight weaker bosses, that low level of stagger leaves me unsatisfied. Why should I ever purify such a small number? It’s such a chore, to have to purify in a dungeon when I just faced off against Guarm, a tiny 10% stagger compared to my earlier 110%. It’s like I built a tolerance to it, always craving a stagger that’s higher than the one before.

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Microblog: Talent Experimentation

It’s funny. I love talents more than the average joe. Like, a lot more. I get frustrated when people who don’t change talents for like I do (that’s basically everyone). I quietly rage at people who aren’t open to talent variation. But I also hate spending gold. I’m frugal to a fault. So I rarely change talents in raids unless a) it’s something vital to our strategy, b) there’s a tome set out for everyone, c) we’re on a break so I have time to visit a city, or d) I’m on my monk and I can Zen Pilgrimage to quickly get out and back.

This can be really frustrating when I want to experiment. I love experimenting, especially in those early progression pulls where you have no chance of actually killing a boss, so you might as well learn as much as you can about your talent choices. But I have to really really want it to spend that much gold on a tome. (And I’m not actually spending that gold, I am a herbalist and a scribe for the one reason: making my own tomes. But just knowing how much they sell for stays my hand.)

I usually take down notes between pulls of what talents I’d like to spec into during our next break. We only get one break in the middle of three hours, so sometimes that’s a long period of thinking really hard about how much I want a talent instead of experimenting with it.

I know a lot of people make their talent decisions before a fight by researching what other people do. That’s the smart thing, but it’s not what I enjoy. And with how communities tend to cling to certain talents, I don’t quite trust that other people are making decisions based on experimentation over what’s viewed as the only acceptable choice by the group.

I find a lot of joy in swapping talents even if I don’t have a specific plan in mind, because all the time I’m accidentally finding creative solutions I never thought of. I would love to also use farm raids as an opportunity to experiment, though that’s even less likely to be worth the gold cost of a tome.

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Brewmaster 7.1.5 Talent Changes

Throughout Mists and Warlords, our level 75 defensive talents have been exemplary. The choice between the three talents was always compelling and varied; the universally useful (but minor) Healing Elixirs, the strong damage reduction (but restricted uptime) of Dampen Harm, and the impressive magical damage reduction (but situational use) of Diffuse Magic.

But when the tanking paradigm changed in Legion, these talents suffered. In a world where big defensive cooldowns were neutered, and active mitigation was molded to fill that role, Diffuse Magic and Dampen Harm fell into disuse. Compared to Ironskin Brew, both abilities were ineffective. Diffuse Magic could reduce magic damage pretty well, but why waste a talent on it when Ironskin Brew is nearly as good, and most boss burst magic were designed to be countered by frequently usable active mitigation anyway. Dampen Harm could be used to reduce those giant physical attacks, but if it was used at the same time as Ironskin it was unlikely to even trigger. These two talents were built in a time when infrequent defensive cooldowns were necessary, and clung to that ideology even when tanks changed to value frequent defensives much more.

But, in 7.1.5, that’s all going to change!

Continue reading “Brewmaster 7.1.5 Talent Changes”

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Microblog: Talents as Identity

There are some talents I feel an emotional attachment to, like this is how my character is. For my dh, that includes Felblade, Fel Devastation, Fallout, Feed the Demon, and Soul Barrier. I’ll change them around sometimes, but I just really like the way those talents are and what they add to my perceived playstyle.

I don’t have quite the same attachment to brewmaster talents. Most of their talents are a choice on what tool solves a problem. Do you need aoe? Hard crowd control? Raid healing? (The one exception is the level 100 talents, which are my favorite for this reason.) But vengeance talents do things like change how you value soul fragments, how you layer your active mitigation, how you generate or spend your mixture of various resources. Choices that enable you to create completely different types of demon hunters, leeching demon hunters, soul fragment demon hunters, cooldown demon hunters, etc.

Brewmaster 100 talents are similar. There’s only that one tier, but that tier allows you to be a damage reduction monk, a smooth monk, or a complicated monk. It’s a beautiful tier! The key difference is that the entire tier has three interesting choices that increase complexity in different ways, whereas demon hunters rarely have three interesting choices on the same row. They’re all spread out so that each row might have one complex choice and one simple choice and something else.

Since I see so many of my DH’s talents as identity talents, I tend to not change them much. Sure, there are cases I will find Last Resort more useful than Soul Barrier, so I’ll change. But if there’s not a clear winner, I want to go with the choices that define the playstyle I want.

On my brewmaster, with their mostly-straightforward talent tiers, I change things around more. Sometimes I need RJW or sometimes Special Delivery, and I don’t particularly love one over the other because they don’t carry an identity with them. I am not the RJW monk like I’m the Felblade DH. I don’t feel deeply unhappy when I spec into Special Delivery like I would if I had to spec into Razor Spikes.

My identity talents add fun to my game. I don’t like speccing out of them because the other options are less fun for me. Fun can come from finding the right tool for the job, as it does when I play around with brewmaster talents, but it also comes from regularly using tools I enjoy the most.

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Microblog: Time Management

This expansion has forced me to practice self control. At the beginning, I felt compelled to do everything. All the artifact power dailies, the daily heroic, all mythic 0s, etc. It wasn’t driven by a competitive drive, but that little voice in my head that loves to fill bars (that’s so helpful when it comes to meeting my fitbit goals). It would not shut up until I completed it all.

But it was too much, especially on two characters. Late one night, doing world quests long after raid, it occurred to me that I need to manage my time. That final world quest that awards 1/3 the amount of artifact power I’d get from my daily heroic is not going to get me any closer to my personal goals (which are simple, it’s all about fun for me).

I need to focus on the rewards that are the biggest bang for my time-buck, things like the rare world quests with huge AP rewards, or only doing mythics when I want to. Once I got over the urge to complete everything, I found time to do stuff I like more. It’s been a long time since WoW drove me to reevaluate my schedule like Legion has.

I find myself thinking about my WoW schedule like I do my work schedule. There are all these little things of varying priority, size, and requiring different skills, and a good schedule has to sacrifice some things if you want it to be maintainable in the long run.

My priorities are all about taking care of my two mains, meeting social obligations, and having time for other things like alts and transmog. When I decided to have two mains, I knew that I would not be able to min-max both. I don’t have the time to do that. But I can still get 80% of the way there for 50% of the effort.

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Microblog: Actually Terrible

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

I’m not sure what the context of that quote is, but when I apply it to myself I find it funny. The whole reason why I maintain this blog is to teach myself, because I struggle with a lot of things. I struggle with learning and paying attention, with reaction times and memory, with verbal communication.

It’s true that once had the trappings of a competitive player, when I was in one of the first US guilds to clear Cataclysm raids. I attribute that to a) unemployment and b) tanking Dragon Soul wasn’t the most difficult thing in the game, and c) I lucked out in joining a guild that had three arcane mages with the legendary staff.

Whenever someone complains about bad tanks, I think “yeah, that’s me”. I pull too cautiously, I do terrible dps, I don’t communicate well verbally. I forget to use cooldowns, zone out, and get defensive (and not in the tanky way). I take forever to pick up on mechanics. I balk at spending gold of any magnitude on consumables.

But I’m okay with my mediocrity. There was a point in my life I wasn’t okay with it, and I got to experience being good at something. But I don’t need that anymore, and I’m having fun in a place where my mediocrity doesn’t hurt too much.

So when I adopt the tagline on my blog “Actually Terrible” that’s my way of just being honest. I don’t want people coming here thinking they’ll get good advice from a top raider. My hope is that average people will come here looking for average advice from an average raider.

Actually terrible, totally fine with it.

 

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Microblog: Words Without Conclusions

Usually when I write posts on this site, it’s with a goal in mind. At least, the only posts that make it to the public eye have to have a point. It’s sort of an unconscious rule of mine, along with presenting everything constructively, even if it’s something I’m particularly peeved about, or decorating everything with meaningful pictures.

I also tend to edit obsessively. It can take me a few days to get something from “nearly done” to “actually published” because I don’t want to put something in the public light if my word choice and sentence structure isn’t polished to the best of my ability.

But there are still things I’d like to write about, things that aren’t important but that I still have some words to write. Things that don’t necessarily have big conclusions or arguments, words that aren’t guides.

I often fill text documents with little tangents. My Google documents are full of them, stuff I find years later that I’m a little sad never left the safe harbor of my private internet. Sometime someone says something on Twitter and I have thoughts about it. Usually more than 140 characters, but usually random enough that I can’t justify a full blog post.

So I’m going to try to write a couple hundred words about these random thoughts once a week (twice this week, since this post is boring by itself). Few pictures, limited editing, just short and sweet all around. I have a couple written up already on topics like talents, transmog, branding, and a few more ideas. We’ll see how long I can go.

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New WeakAuras for Brewmaster and Vengeance

I’ve been iterating on my auras for both my characters to be more useful to me. The old auras are still available if you look at the WeakAuras.online change log, I just won’t be updating them.

Brewmaster WeakAuras


Vengeance WeakAuras


The biggest changes you might see if you import these are:

  • Health and reactive mitigation:
    • Soul Cleave prediction is now a bar that displays your estimated Soul Cleave compared to your max health. It’s designed to sit on top of the health bar so you can easily compare the two.
    • Stagger is still a bar, but it’s no longer color coded (since you typically don’t decide when to Purify based on color in Legion). It’s designed to sit on top of the health bar so you can easily compare the two.
    • I made these changes because in my experimentation, I found it incredibly useful to see the abilities whose relative importance depends on my current or max health displayed in the same way.
  • Proactive mitigation:
    • Ironskin (& Purifying) Brews are now displayed as “pills”, one icon per charge.
    • Demon Spikes, Empower Wards, and Soul Barrier are now grouped and displayed as “pills”, with Demon Spikes getting one icon per charge.
    • I made these changes to emphasize when I am full on charges of active mitigation, or when I am about to run out completely. Charges having their own icons emphasizes the psuedo-resource state of these abilities.
  • Item cooldowns have been moved to their own group (trinkets, artifact spells). I did this because the main defensive cooldown group was getting too busy, especially on the demon hunter. Also, since this group is made up of mostly trinkets, I can easily share it between my tanks.
  • Changes in style and position.