First, let me say how weird it is to be playing MoP again – it’s kinda the same, but not really?
Tl;Dr: So, disc has been nerfed a lot but I frankly don’t think it’s an issue unless you’re pushing cutting edge content.
Sidenote: we’re painful in arena and I do think we need a hot fix to address how rough it is for us ATM in pvp, specifically arenas.
Anyways…
I somehow stumbled into raid leading a group on classic. We’re not amazing, but we’re not terrible. We’re currently still on normals, but damn have I been proud at the group killing bosses well – 1-shot spirit kings, 2-shot final MSV boss. We were waiting for a tank and tried out the first boss of HoF and got it to 15% with 9 people. Grabbed another DPS and downed it quickly.
So let’s talk about disc nerfs. I personally think they’ve been overblown because what we excel at is mitigation. Who cares about throughput right now?
We eat the damage before it arrives – I’ve been arranging a lot of pug world boss fights, beyond my own weekly lockout, and it’s amazing practice for spirit shell due to stomp timing. We run as many healers as we can but I am basically doing 50% of the healing for Garelon due to spirit shell.
He’s great practice.
So back to MSV and HoF:
To maximize spirit shell absorbs, you want to be using inner focus and all of your archangel stacks. This will make your next prayer of healing incredibly strong and build absorbs.
Actually timing effects well will mitigate damage your team is taking, so your healing numbers will then shoot up. Avoid any team focused on these sort of numbers – you’re just doing absorbs. Someone like a resto shaman will pair well and shine because their mastery will pop off (they’ll heal more when people are low health).
Could disc be better? Definitely.
Is disc as bad as people are claiming? Imo, maybe they aren’t playing disc as it’s intended to be played…
Let’s get the raw numbers just out there – total profit: 35,000
It’s obviously not a great income stream.
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I used to multibox (not the druid spam moon fire, just multiple accounts doing different things at once) and now I’ve got 3 extra accounts I’m leaving on free and seeing what I can do with them while I play my main. I’m sitting on a free month due to recruit a friend (which I highly recommend if you’re playing more than one account, you get free game time) so I’m currently playing with ways to make money with these other accounts I have with minimal investment before I resub.
This honestly doesn’t seem too bad, combined with my panda farms and transmutes. It’ll add up and when I finally sub that account it’ll be free gold.
This is a card you can make with Draenor inscription. Flipping (eg using a cast to use it) generates another card which you can sell. The sell prices range from coppers to thousands of gold – it’s basically gambling, crafter-style.
Crafting it requires War Paints which you can craft once each day as your Draenor cooldown as an inscription crafter.
Here’s where it gets fun because I obviously didn’t wait 6500 days…
Once you have a level 3 town hall, a traveling merchant will appear in rotation potentially each day. They will sell a pattern to make War Paints at will using primal spirits…and also let you trade raw comms for primal spirits.
Note: even if it’s not your profession trader, you can still do the weekly quest for primal spirits AND trade in excess mats for primal spirits. This means you can trade in all that ore from your mine, for example!
So, once you have these grabbed, you’ll want to maximize your passive primal spirit generation – this means shipyard missions as there are often ship missions which give 50 primal spirits.
If you’re going fully passive generation (I accrued these mats for the 6500 cards just from missions and daily CD), you’ll want to focus on buffing your Inn to let you recruit extra resources: your goal is to have extreme scavenger and scavenger stacked as traits on most of your followers – this will let you rack up tons of resources which you can cash in for mats at the Trading Post. Once you level your Inn, you can recruit a follower each week with a trait you select, so this will let you focus on generating resources.
Notes:
– starter accounts can stock up to prepare for this. They CANNOT use the primal spirit trade as they can’t access the higher level garrison needed.
– it’s basically all free passive mats. If you want to grind this, primal spirits can be obtained through killing rares in Draenor but I don’t suggest that method for a starter account as it’s tedious, slow and unreliable. Better to focus on panda farms and xmute. See my other posts about old expansion money making: garrison, general, living steel
– using a mage or shaman lets you time warp to speed up flips. Any haste buff will speed up flip cast time!
– all flipped cards you don’t have room for will go to mailbox. Mailbox will also reach max (unsure if there is overflow protection here), so you can go afk and “loot” mailbox for a bit
– free accounts can use the mine to quickly gather more resources to increase potential trade ins (use the trading post work order when it’s ore to generate more garrison resources)
– this is straight gold, eg no reliance of auctions selling, which is a nice guarantee if you have limited time to make stockpiled gold conversion count (eg getting a few days free via a request)
– You need to wait to subscribe before you do the flip spam as starter accounts have a gold max. Save up the mats to do this for your push to get a token during subbed time. You can sometimes get a free few days by asking nicely via a support ticket and spamming craft/flip can get you a decent way towards a token.
Summary:
If you’re like me (and I doubt you are because why would you be, I’m a bit crazy trying this out) and have several extra accounts set to free, this seems like a decent potential way to stock away a burst of gold influx for a token.
I don’t advise this for anyone actually leveled and strong at the game but for people trying to eke by on free accounts, it might be a decent way to stockpile potential gold for that month when you sub the account.
This is an easy way to obtain a lot of trillium (and living steel).
On a gatherer, set your hearthstone to your faction’s Pandaria capital city.
Fly around and gather (gathering resets the nodes in the area) until you find a golden lotus node. Harvest – note the buff it gives you! For 15 minutes, anything you kill has a chance to drop a treasure chest, which has a high chance of containing ghost iron, black/white trillium and spirits of harmony.
Head to Loremasters and queue for LFR. Clear trash up to first boss. Leave raid, reset, rinse and repeat. The large packs mean you will get tons of treasure chests.
Smelt trillium and ghost iron, send that + spirits of harmony to your alchemist with transmute spec (for extra procs). Turn ghost iron into trillium, turn trillium + SoH into living steel using riddle of steel (or do this every now and then and always have a nice stockpile for daily transmute).
This is infinitely repeatable as long as you don’t kill any bosses in HoF – with LFR, you will hit a limit of number of times you can enter. The biggest bottleneck is finding golden lotus nodes. Augment it with the Halfhill farm for easy daily trillium and/or SoH. I usually do a lap after doing my farm – the monkey village, bamboo forest west of halfhill and Kun Lai summit are all node rich and this path will let you get a kill in on Sha of Fear as well as some rare kills. You’ll also get a ton of lesser charms which you can convert into bonus rolls.
Bonus optimisation options:
– Darkmoon fire-water for increased gathering speed – Pandaria herb gathering speed bonus gloves (chance to drop from rares). I am pretty sure this stacks with fire-water, but haven’t properly tested, I just know it’s hella fast with both. Edit: these do NOT stack – Mist-veiled goggles (MoP engineering craft) to see extra nodes – Ancient Pandaren mining pick (from Jade forest mine) for free gems when hitting ore nodes (unsure if this is still obtainable) – +speed gear set + bear tartare + druid for movement speed to make trash farming faster
If you just want ghost iron, head west of Shrine of Two Moons until you find the area where quillian spawn in an endless swarm. Kill them, mine them. You don’t need to move, just lay down aoe and mine. I prefer a paladin for this as consecration basically instakills everything running by.
Any other good tips?
Update Sept 2022:
– Make sure to harvest herbs as you go. Harvesting a herb clears it out so golden lotus can spawn – golden lotus has a random chance to appear when each node repopulates. DE-populating the nodes by harvesting them forces them to repopulate. If you don’t harvest, then you are just hunting for existing ones, which are much more rare.
– If you have multiple accounts, you can fly around together (eg vial of sands mount) and both harvest the nodes, which makes golden lotus spawn 2x, 3x (X = characters) as fast. Logging out preserves the buff!
– You can use LFR for trash. I don’t know if the raid/LFR is quicker.
Hiya, here’s an easy guide to setting up selling pets on multiple servers!
1. Optional: Make a vulpera. This isn’t mandatory, but it makes it SO much easier. They spawn with some gold to cover listing fees and they have extra bag space. They also spawn at the back of Org, close to AH and bank.
2. Optional: when spawned, run to the Tauren AH area (nice close bank/AH). Stop at the enchanting trainer and learn enchanting and buy the strange dust/lesser magic essence from the mats merchant. These can be sold for seed money.
3. Cage extra pets. Useful macros, can run these as moving to Ah area (they won’t dismount you):
Cage for sale (this macro cages any pets you have 3 of, leaving 2 behind. You can tweak it to your preference, eg sub 2 for 1 to cage any pets above 1): /run local t,p,j={},{},C_PetJournal for i=1,j.GetNumPets() do p={j.GetPetInfoByIndex(i)} t[p[2]]=(t[p[2]] or 0)+1 if t[p[2]]>2 and p[16] and p[1] then j.CagePetByID(p[1]) return end end
Add to journal (this will fail if it hits journal full for a pet, so put extra pets at the very bottom on your inventory) : /use pet cage
TSM: Use TUJGlobalMean to price pets based on overall region prices. This lets you buy pets cheaply on one region and sell them for a profit on other regions. You will need the undermine journal addon for this price source.
Seed money tips:
– Use TSM “vendor” search to buy/sell items listed lower than vendor price – Sell enchanting mats from vendor – Buy and DE cheapo greens and sell mats – Buy/smelt ores and sell bars – Mail guild tabard: buy cost is 250g, sell cost is around 60g. You eat a loss but can essentially transfer money to another server to finance posting auctions.
Strategy:
– Buy pets listed heavily below regional prices and relist on other servers. You’ll begin to notice patterns, such as farmers flooding a server market and listing a ton of the same pet for cheap or timewalking driving down the cost of pets associated with turnin area (example: Bemax during Pandaria timewalking, price will tank and then slowly rise once Timeless Isle is less common to visit). – Augment with pets you create via crafting. – Keep an ear out for content creators sharing farming tips. These pets will tank in price as people jump on the bandwagon and will go up in value once a new farm becomes popular. – Learn which pets are bought from vendors and avoid these. As the supply is constant, their price will not fluctuate as much and one dedicated idiot can keep the price low. Place an alt at vendors to easily keep them supplied for yourself. – Buy FOMO and timegated pets during events which make them common, eg holidays or Darkmoon Faire. Resell later when they are temporarily unobtainable and price has gone up. – Create a pet dungeon alt to farm rare pets for resale. Legion petshop in Dalaran will let you easily teleport alts to pet dungeons if you’ve already cleared them, just talk to the NPC in the pet shop for a teleport. This will let you easily set up an alt at each pet dungeon entrance (pick Legion for Chromie time and do the intro quests/scenario). These are some of the most expensive pets, but will have lower sale rates so spreading them among multiple servers is really useful.
As a crafting middleman, you basically are supplying other crafters with what they need. You’re the dude making sure there are enchanting mats on the AH or the gal offering end results of annoying assemblies.
Your goal in this role is to basically turn raw mats and items into stuff people want to pay for.
For example, for enchanting, search for weapon or armor and sort by price. Buy anything under 1-5g, as a rule of thumb – the expansion the item sources from will affect value. Cataclysm breakdowns, for example, are more rare while nobody wants spirit dust from Pandaria. You can almost always disenchant the mats for a profit or snag some transmog to flip. You can do this with the base AH UI very quickly (TSM chugs too hard on my computer for searches as big as this).
(Side note: The next step to making this loop self sustainable is using your own production skill to produce the things to DE, eg making a bunch of bracers with a tailor to DE for dust. This is what’s known as a shuffle)
You can apply this same concept to ores: you’re taking one thing and crafting it to add value. Buy cheap ores, smelt them to sell more expensive bars.
With tailoring, you have stuff like enchanted frostweave, soulcloth, basically turning mats into more valuable mats. Leatherworking lets you upgrade hides. Enchanting + Shadowlands legendaries is a great example of this middle market.
Herb fragments, leather scraps, ore nuggets, shattering enchanting mats, etc can all work with this concept – you can often sell or use them, once transformed. Do the math – sometimes things sell for very inflated values.
Be aware that there is a limit to when the crafting middle market mats stops becoming profitable. For some things, people won’t pay a middleman for – they might make those mats themselves as part of the end goal of their crafting or the process to make it is so easy that it’s not worth your time.
Also learn which mats help boost this sort of crafter. For example, a bunch of frozen orbs cheap on the AH means you get to make a ton of different cloth. Someone dumping a ton of crystals means DE profit. Timewalking dungeons means X ore, cloth, elemental is super common atm. Etc.
In addition to making money, playing this role will teach you about the flow of mats from raw to crafted, which are very important concepts to understand if you want to tackle goldmaking on a larger scale.
This will not make you tons of gold, but it will make you consistent gold.
Ok so these are really old but there is still profit to be made via using resources. How? Well that come comes down to your choice of skills. I’m just going to tackle optimising resource gain, so we can talk about tradeskills in comments.
– Inn to level 3. This gives you the huge resource missions
– Inn to level 2. This lets you recruit followers each RL week. You want to recruit for the extreme scavenger trait. Select a green follower instead of blue ones – getting two traits sounds fun until you realise you have locked into a nonoptimal trait. Your endgoal is scavenger AND extreme scavenger as follower traits. Unless that blue follower has both (and it can be procced, just got one with both from my Inn this week!) pass over them to get more rolls at scavenger as a secondary trait.
– Also Inn: if you want transmog, you need to do the quests given here. You can complete these quests in WoD Timewalking as well as by soloing them. Timewalking makes it easy to be lazy.
– Salvage yard to level 3. This takes a quest to unlock. Worth it. This gives you a chance for drops on missions. These drops give extra resources, follower upgrades (very much needed with the push you are doing via Inn) and extra coin via DE/vendor.
– Stables to 1. You only need it at level 1 to get action while mounted, which is the huge benefit it gives. While in your garrison you aren’t dismounted while doing actions like farming herbs.
– Ogre tower to level 2+. This unlocks work orders – mage tower work orders create rush orders for your comm producing buildings. This is NOT self sustaining, and you will need to go farm ogre waystones now and then. Fortunately there is a LFR queue mob right next to where you gather your resources. Highmaul is the LFR for these tokens, alternatively go fly there and AoE for a bit. This one is an elective…build it because you have space but do a tiny bit of work now and then to keep it maintained. It basically just adds to your income.
– Trading post at minimum level 1 for alt trades. Check what is cheap, sell/craft.
– Herb garden + mines: gives xp up to level 50, so a great option for passive leveling while building gold. Can use seeds to buy a pet to resell.
-Lumber mill: a good option for raw resource generation, I only advise if on alt and actively leveling through WoD. This setup involves active collection but it can be really nice to boost early resource generation.
– Holidays: look into using Holidays, eg I have turned in Halloween tokens to spawn spiders which means I have a boss up constantly which gives a potential valuable drop.
– Trader: if you have a level 3 garrison, each week you’ll get a trader. You can move to an alt’s garrison to capitalise on this, if you have 2 accounts, eg using a herb trader instead of a fur trader. The trader will ask for resources which you can trade for primal spirits. This lets you easily exchange excess resources for primal spirits, which can be used for purchasing mats or accelerating tradeskills.
– Wandering vendors may visit you. Depending on your server, the items they sell may have resell value.
– Battle pets setup lets you farm token and stones.
I am writing this off the top of my head, so I expect I’ve forgotten stuff. Please chime in with details!
Wrote this up for a comment, thought I’d share as a whole post. Here’s what I can think up off the top of my head. Please share your own suggestions!
If you don’t have Shadowlands, I suggest trying several of the following – the key is diversifying into different markets, as old world stuff sells more slowly. This is meant to be a jumping off point, not an exhaustive guide, so you’ll notice a lot of the suggestions involve further research on your own part.
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*Daily Chores*:
– **Pandaria farm**: this takes a few days to set up, but you can grow mats each day. There is also a rare chance for a cageable pet to spawn. You can sell the mats raw or smelt the ore into bars or transmute it into trillium/living steel, or use it to craft items to sell. Engineering has a lot of evergreen items.
– **Garrison**: this also takes a little setup. You get passive resources and node spawns each day and you can use those resources to buy comms. You can sell the comms or use the profession buildings + profession cooldowns to make pets, goblin glider kits, toys, bags, transmog gear, drums or cards of omen (each one is randomly worth values from copper to thousands of gold). The menagerie unlocks daily pet battles for tokens, while the herb garden lets you gather seeds for a pet you can sell. The mines also have a potential pet drop, but you can’t upgrade past level 2 (that removes the mobs it drops from). See this post for tips on maximizing resource generation: https://wp.me/sON4N-garrison
– **Mission tables** from Legion and BfA. These still have some rewards but they are more of a background supplement versus something to focus on.
– **Crafting cooldowns and transmutes**. A lot of more profitable stuff is locked behind these (eg tailoring’s imperial silk) or they create valuable items (eg living steel). Consider making several characters to have multiple cooldowns available per day.
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*Farming*:
– **Golden lotus buff**: picking a golden lotus in Pandaria will give you a buff for 15 minutes that gives a chance for a loot box on a kill. When you get the buff, travel to the Lorewalkers (near your faction’s city, there’s a person who will fly you up to them if you don’t have flying) and queue for Heart of Fear LFR. Clear the entry transh, leave raid, queue again, etc, until buff runs out. This will give you lots of Pandaria mats to sell or craft with. See this for more details: https://wp.me/pON4N-eg
– **Cataclysm herbs, ore, volatiles, enchanting mats**. These are used in the vial of the sands mount and enchanting and are in constant lowish demand. You can use the Cataclysm potion of treasure finding to obtain extra drops while farming mobs, similar to the golden lotus buff, and the Bastion of Twilight’s entry is the best place to farm with it.
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*Crafting*:
– **Mage tower, twink, farming gear**. Look at which items can have a crafter’s mark applied to make them legion-level and craft ones which will benefit someone in the mage tower. Look for set bonuses and gem slots. Apply the same logic to level 20 players (xp locked twink bracket). These won’t sell super fast but they do sell and there tends not to be a ton of competition.
– **Mage tower, twink, heirloom, farming enchants/item enhancements**. Heirloom ones will sell the most, but these all sell. You’ll need to do research and look at sale rates to decide which ones to make.
– **Mage tower, leveling, farming buffs**. Things like drums, scrolls, certain potions and flasks, certain foods like bear tartare. You’ll have to figure out which ones sell and don’t have a lot of competition.
– **Crafting/farming transmog.** You need to have a ton to see high returns, but it doesn’t hurt to add it to your mix if you find or make it easily. I suggest using a second auction alt for this so you can just skip it for a few days if you’re not in the mood to post all the listings.
– **Old glyphs**. Check your unlearned tab. There are a ton of ways to learn how to make new glyphs and these sell for much higher than the ones everyone learns by default.
– **Other old crafting:** lots of older stuff does still sell. Pets, mounts and toys sell the best, but there are also slow sales for things like contracts, pet name change, bags (especially the larger profession ones). Check sale rates of items. Obtaining more rare or gated recipes will give you access to more profitable items. Check your unlearned tab.
– **Shuffling and transforming mats**. For example, buying a bunch of super cheap cloth, crafting something cheap like bracers, and then disenchanting to sell or use the enchant mats. Transforming might be something like creating enchanted leather or turning light leather into heavy leather. You can also buy cheap greens to disenchant. This will involve research into different material values to determine what’s currently profitable on your AH. See this post for more details about being a crafting middleman: https://wp.me/pON4N-ed
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*Quests, Exploration, Dungeons*:
– **Legion archaeology quest**. Gives a grey worth 5k, can do this on each character and with allied races you can start at level 10, pick Legion Chromie time, skip the intro, hearth to Dalaran and begin the quest in a few minutes. You won’t have flying, though, so the quest will be a slog on a newbie without a 2nd account to help. This quest only shows up in rotation, so it might not be up. Quest: https://www.wowhead.com/quest=41174/worth-its-weight
– **Rare recipe/item resale**. Some vendors sell recipes or items which appear only rarely. You can usually resell these on the AH for some profit.
– **Rare hunting**. Get an add-on like Silver Dragon and check out rares you see on your map. Killing these usually rewards you with something and sometimes those somethings are profitable to resell or useful (eg faster harvesting gloves in Pandaria).
– **BfA island expeditions**. Drops transmog, pets.
– **Old dungeons/raids**. This will net you mats, greens, blues, purples, soulbound items you can DE, maybe pets or mounts…. Basically just think about ways to maximize profit after doing old content, such as by turning the results into enchants or a crafted pet to sell. ***In general, items that are crafted sell for more but sell more slowly than the raw mats.***
– **Pet battle daily quests.** This takes a lot of setup to unlock, but there are pet battle quest chains for each continent. Once finished you unlock daily pet battle quests for that region. Quest completion gives you a bag of pet supplies which can include pets and tokens to buy pets.
– **Fishing**. There are a few ways to make money with fishing, such as fishing up volatile fire outside Firelands. Research which fishing items can be profitable.
– **Archaeology**. This one is rough, but the vial of the sands does sell for a lot. It’s just takes a LOT of work to get. Research the Lorewalkers and Klaxxi trick to make it easier. More casually, it’s a great profession to snag on an alt if you enjoy leveling casually or exploring a lot. You get extra xp as you level and you can sell keystones on the AH if you aren’t interested in leveling it up. You can also exchange fossil fragments at the Darkmoon Faire.
– **Garrison Auction House Pieces**: These can be farmed from specific places in WoD. They are a fairly slow seller but they sell for a few thousand, more if you have enough to assemble a module.
– **WoD Pickpocket Daily**: Look into the quest chain with Griftah. Rewards around 2k gold.
– **Legion Pickpocket Weekly**: rewards 5k gold.
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*Hubs, Events*:
– **Dalaran Underbelly.** There’s a variety of things to do here and you can buy recipes, pets, etc with the currency as well as elixir of tongues to resell.
– **Darkmoon Faire**. Tons of stuff to buy/earn and resell, most notably pets and transmog. Make sure to get inky black potion from the cannibal witch in the woods. Doing special events like Moonfang, the heavy metal show and the rabbit can get you more expensive things to sell.
– **Old Patch Hubs**. Pretty much every one of these is deserted but has pets, recipes, toys, etc. It’s quick to blast through the dailies and gradually accumulate currency to buy things to resell. Examples: Argent Tournament, Molten Front
– **Holidays**. Every holiday creates a new temporary market for whatever people need for the event, as well as a way to earn items to resell like mounts or pets.
– **Timewalking**. Use Timewalking tokens to buy pets/toys to resell, increase rep (for factions you need access to for buying/selling their items) or buy mats to craft with or resell.
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*Other*:
– **AH Flipping**. This one takes lots of research and can be risky, but also profitable.
– **Pet Arbitrage**. This involves selling pets across multiple servers. See this post for more details; https://wp.me/pON4N-ef
I work in QA. Yes, I’ve done video games – 4 years for Sony/Playstation, 1 year for Microsoft Game Studio, but I do android/iOS/website now. In any case (haha that’s a pun), I do testing every day, so I figured I’d write up a quick and dirty guide for useful tips and tactics for testing. Every company is different, obviously, so some of this stuff won’t be relevant elsewhere.
Types of testing
There are many types of testing, all with specific goals. I’m going to outline a few, core types here to help make it easier to figure out what you should be doing at a specific stage in a test cycle.
1. Exploratory
This type of testing is basically the run-around-and-try-everything testing. This is when you go through all the commands, trying out weird as heck stuff to break whatever you can. Start with the “good path” (ie, basic user functionality) and then radiate outwards. Advance to common mistakes (typos, inverted command syntax, being in the wrong state) and then finally push the boundaries. Pretend you are drunk, or a 5 year old, or a total newb, and do unexpected stuff.
2. Test casing/Regression testing
This type of testing follows a template of expected results. You are basically ensuring things work when the necessary steps are executed. For example, a test case might include a test to verify that using x command produces y result. You would then verify that passes or fails or is blocked by some other issue.
“Smoke tests” are a sub-genre of this, where you do a quick once-over for core components to make sure stuff is a-ok.
3. Halo/Directed exploratory
This type of testing is a melding of the two above. Using a test case or design specs as a basic template for features to test, you explore around those features and poke at stuff, starting first with the core functionality and then advancing into outlying conditions and circumstances. For example, there might be a skeleton design doc saying that the LEARN command has changed. You would first play with LEARN in a variety of ways, and then try associated stuff, like TEACH or STUDY.
4. Balance testing
This type of testing is an analysis of the content itself, gauging its impact on the game. This is a much more subjective type of testing, with the focus on analyzing the game system and how new changes will integrate into it. Testing in this category should focus on core gameplay and functionality first, and then expand out to consider outlying situations, with a keen eye directed towards things like exploits and overpowered/underpowered balance. Remember that this sort of testing is NOT just about finding OP/UP scenarios, but also about finding core functionality and balance.
Bug Finding
If you find a bug while testing, try to globalize and generalize it. This means don’t just go x thing is broken and step away – instead, consider what facets of the game x thing relates to and analyze those as well. If a pair of lime green boots breaks the game when you probe them, try probing purple boots, try probing lime green pants and try equipping lime green boots. The bug might not be based in the specific circumstances that you found it in, so check related conditions.
Note time stamps. Some bugs are weird and can be tied to time tables, especially if they have to do with things like resetting items/quests.
As mentioned earlier, if you are exploratory testing, don’t just play like a normal player. Play like someone new, or derpy. Try out stuff that YOU know won’t work. Ensure it fails. It doesn’t always.
Don’t pigeonhole – don’t just test on one account, or one platform. Make a newb, play an alt, run another client. Something that works for one character or one client or one device may not work for another. With playstation, I once found a pretty fatal error for Killzone, where the ENTIRE game wouldn’t work with non 6-axis controllers – it’s imperative you test all scenarios that ANY player might encounter, so try stuff out in a variety of situations.
If you have access to code, use echoes to spit out values of variables, tables, etc to help you conceptualize where things are breaking. If I have a script that’s being a bitch, I’ll code in an echo to shout out WORKING #1, 2, 3 etc for each step to help pinpoint where stuff is going bad.
Test limits – outliers are where tons of bugs occur. Min/max, check scaling, investigate weird and cusp situations/numbers. Good numbers to test around: 255; 65,535; 4,294,967,295 and multiples/divisions of those (integer overflow). Iosyne’s order just saw a bug from this in action kill all our shrines when we hit overflow.
Be efficient – you don’t need to test every single condition ever. Analyze what could make bugs, and then test representative samples within each potential condition. Eg, don’t test 1-100 if 1 and 99 are the things that are going to bring the bug up. Just test those boundaries.
Identify patterns. If you see a common element between unrelated bugs, start investigating more. Odds are, there’s something in common – you just haven’t found it yet.
No bug is random. The conditions that make it happen just aren’t known yet.
Testing Tools
Most testing likes bug reports. In these include, if possible, steps to reproduce or an excerpt of your log/screenshot/video illustrating the issue.
Many games now have in-game bug reporting. These often have crash dumps automatically linked to them (crash dumps are a spit-out of all the code that was executing right before the crash) so it can be really helpful to write up a report asap.
When testing, some sort of recording of your methods is highly advised. Automatic logging upon session login, echo commands turned on, and/or fraps are all useful tools. When I exploratory test at work, I write up charters – this is a document that declares what I am doing to test, and then journals each step I’ve taken. You’d be surprised how hard it can be, sometimes, to remember the precise steps you’ve taken, so ensure you are documenting what you do for easier reproduction.
Google doc spreadsheets are great for collaborative, on-the-fly test casing software.
Have fun – testing is all about enjoying problem solving! You’re a code detective and enjoying the investigation is paramount to doing it well!
This song encapsulates my feelings about disc: what, how, what, how, wtf, rage, what.
I haven’t really commented about the changes yet – I understand that they are only a stepping stone between here and the new expansion, but after playing (and raiding and PVPing) for a few weeks, I know enough to know that disc has been gutted.
My favorite moment from the past expansion was healing Shamans our first few times fighting them: there were two tanks to keep up. On weakened soul clear, both tanks got a bubble. I was rolling penance on CD to ensure I had a free bubble to use to kill that weakened soul on whoever had the HIGHEST weakened soul CD. The other one got FDCL flash heal procs – unless penance was on CD and that CD was 6+ seconds. In that case, greater heal, yo. If under, flash heals. Keep up grace on both tanks as well, using that penance smartly and those flash heal procs cleverly to reset the 3-stack CD. Weave in prayer of mending and holy fire/smite for boosted heals via archangel. Get that spirit shell in and time a halo or cascade to land when meteor lands. Fucking exhilarating.
Now: BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA.
Obviously, our mana pools and regen will be changing, and we’ll be getting buffs from leveling and new talents, so I won’t comment on the balance – but the balance isn’t what upsets me. I trust that Blizzard will balance things. What I am concerned about is the deeper issue here: disc has been completely gutted and lost its complex interplay of skills. Disc was incredibly exciting to play – you had to know the fight, and you needed to use your skills well in conjunction with each other. You could do “OK” without maximizing that, and you could even do pretty good (which is a balance issue which should have been tackled) but to truly do great you needed to know every skill and know how to use them in conjunction with each other.
Now, I just play whack a mole and bubble spam.
…And the thing that frustrates me is that isn’t going to change. I’m going to passively get better at basic healing simply for levelling up and having gear, but that does not do anything to ameliorate the sting of losing all of my complex and engaging gameplay, nor do I want it to. I don’t want to be OP. I want to be CHALLENGED. I understand that simplifying things makes the game more accessible to more people….but does Blizzard even understand the ramifications of these changes?
I don’t want to get too heavily into the problems with PvP, but I’ll give this a short bit. First, self peels are super vital to healers. Who cares if we have silence? That’s very potent for arenas, yes – but most of us don’t play arenas. As someone who primarily just plays battlegrounds (because I’m a healer and love healing) god does stuff suck hard atm. I lost a self peel. I have a grand total of two instant casts (bubble and holy nova – both of which I already had). I lost my strategic and tactical stun interrupt. Hell, my freaking 4-set has even been nerfed. My hot has vanished. My strong prepared heal (glyphed Prayed of Mending) has been made a cast. On top of this, I lost my tiny hybrid potency (Shadow Word: Death), I’m physically weaker (lost Inner Fire glyph to increase armor), and now my shield glyphs are mutual exclusive – let me just reiterate this last part: I can either have a slightly less shitty bubble, I can have one that helps heal, or I can have one that deals damage. I am the class that basically just has bubble, but I can’t actually soup my bubble up to make it potent. That’s so damn depressing.
I think disc definitely had problems. Absorbs as a concept reward skilled healers way too well – if you know the fight, you can gimmick it to really just trivialize it and make things frustrating to your fellow healers. Absorbs really aren’t very fair as is, especially once you calculate in a good disc doing things like spirit shelling before big AoE pulses. My team didn’t like it initially, until we chatted out why I was nomming heals and making it clear that numbers meant NOTHING unless there were clear issues. I don’t expect every raid team to do that, and I’ve had to step in and go WHOA STOP to multiple pugs bitching people out for not competing with a 585 disc priest. Healers: you’re beautiful, keep on keeping on. You each have a special job to do. Raid leaders: Heal meters =/= dps meters so please stop citing them. Anyways, yes. Absorbs make other healers feel bad and unbalance fights, and disc was definitely due for a change.
Blizzard, however, cut the wrong things: aegis + crit gems + reforging + atonement were the big problems here (basically 50% of everything I did made an absorb), not the complex interplay around weakened soul and grace. Those things let anyone mindlessly stack absorbs without any skill, blanketing a raid without much thought, especially with this tier’s 2-set increasing crit. Seriously, most of us were doing fights with 30-50% of our healing coming from aegis. If you’re going to fix disc’s disparity, make it so absorbs require thought and pre-planning – and I’m baffled at why the more complex skillplay has been removed but mindless and RNG absorb procs have been left in. This isn’t smart gameplay. This isn’t rewarding clever players. Aegis is a fun concept, but its current iteration is the big reason why disc pisses people off. People do NO thought about aegis, it’s based on RNG, it can proc off anything, and derpy smart heals proc it….and as a nice toss of salt in the wound, it’s been kept in, while the actually engaging and intelligent aspect of the class has been gutted. Changing aegis to be a talent, making it be a buff you activate for x amount of time, or even just flat out removing it – these would have done a significantly lot more to fix disc than the changes we’ve seen.
I really don’t want to think that Blizzard is just slashing stuff to cater to the least common denominator – partially because I think that will backfire badly. Let me draw it out.
Mythic raids: people are min-maxxing. They’ll bring 1, maybe 2 disc healers. The disc are frustrated but play and do ok. Thing is, this is NOT where the problem is.
Every other (ESPECIALLY LFR) raid difficulty: You roll in via group finder or automated match-making and there are 3-5 other disc priests (according to the wow census priests are BY FAR the most popular healer class). One priest bubbles some people. The other priests can’t kill that weakened soul, so they are stuck unable to use their most potent (and in WoD, prime) skill. The top geared healer sees their numbers dropping to shit* because weaker absorbs are eaten first, and are ridiculed by clueless derps (this is already happening), and subsequently loses interest in trying to help out lower-geared people. Healers start sniping or recklessly healing to raise their numbers. Newer healers feel heavily discouraged. The new AoE skill invites mindless spam. It really just creates a shitty environment.
* Note, I do NOT promote heal chart number linking. You should only ever refer to heal charts as a tool for analysis. Heal chart numbers on their own mean nothing. See this article for more enlightenment.
In short, I am really unhappy with where disc is now. I used to enjoy healing. I don’t anymore. Numbers can be tweaked. Skill interaction and a dumbing-down of healing is a far huger task. I am worried about the expac.
I haven’t posted in a while, and this post is going to be a fairly serious one – I am not going to write about gameplay or mechanics or design today, but instead talk about a curious facet of multiplayer gaming most of us have experienced but rarely are comfortable looking directly at: the complex emotions driving the players behind the avatars.
You’ve seen it before – hell, it may have happened to you: someone loses an event or contest, they’re replaced in a leadership role, or maybe they just slip up and wipe the raid… and then, suddenly, they react, disproportionately upset. It seems irrational. It’s a clear overreaction to a simple setback.
And so, you tell them, “Hey. Don’t worry. It’s just a game. Relax. Don’t be upset over it. It’s just a game.”
Stop. Doing. That.
If you went bowling with friends, and someone got a gutter ball and suddenly burst into tears, you wouldn’t just tell them to “Shut the fuck up, Donny!” (obvious exceptions excluded) – you’d go “Holy shit, what’s wrong?” or you’d hug them or ask them to talk about it. You’d instantly realize it’s not that gutter ball that’s upsetting them – obviously it’s something far more. The gutter ball was just the catalyst, simply the last straw on a pile of other problems – and that’s a connection we can mentally make, in a split-second, when the person is right there, in tears. They are hurting, and there are clearly deeper issues at the root of it.
Somehow, in online gaming, that instant, obvious realization is muddled.
Maybe it’s because we’re all remote. We can’t physically see the tears. The pain in their voices is muffled by the static of vent, or sanitized into choppy text. Maybe it’s because our chosen games, themselves, can loom large – dramas can seem more important than they are, and part of us thinks maybe the game itself and solely the game could be the source of someone’s emotional issues. Or maybe, maybe it’s because we play games for our own distraction. We don’t want to login every day to deal with someone’s personal, real-life crisis. We just want to kill monsters and roleplay being a hero and escape.
And that’s ok – you don’t have to fix everyone’s problems. It’s absolutely fine to recognize that you don’t want to – or can’t – invest that emotional energy to help someone. Most of us who game have stuff we’re struggling with, on our own. It can be exhausting and depressing to face those things, even in other people, during our happy-escapism time. AND. THAT’S. OK.
What’s not ok, what’s harmful and painful, is minimizing the experience someone else is going through. When you are hurting, you are hurting. Telling someone that it’s not a big deal will just push them away and make them feel ashamed for being upset. I know, I know, you’re trying to be helpful – but that’s not helping. Neither is demanding them to tell you what about the game in particular is upsetting them. If the game is merely a catalyst, they aren’t going to have a logical, clear answer…and they will feel even more frustrated and ashamed for that.
So what CAN you do?
– Be insightful. Recognize that there’s almost always something else going on with this person who is upset, and the game – or the gutter ball, or the broken dish, or that stuffed animal they found cleaning their room – is merely the catalyst. Don’t minimize what they are feeling by dismissing the catalyst. More than that, recognize that people are passionate about their hobbies – and for many, gaming is a social outlet, with aspects of our real life persona tied into it. It’s a tangled mess, and for many people, it’s hard to draw a black and white distinction.
– Be constructive. Instead of asking for specific game examples, instead ask how the setbacks or negatives in game are making them feel. This can be incredibly helpful to assist them in pinpointing the root of their frustrations and painful emotions. Maybe losing contests is highlighting how they feel like they can’t win real life. Maybe a roleplay arc involving losing a loved one is poking at buried feelings they have about an incident that happened a while ago. Emotions aren’t easy, and they don’t play nice – sometimes they are insidious and sneaky and creep in corners we aren’t watching, and identifying the underlying causes can be so useful to healthily addressing them.
– Be flexible. Not everyone responds to the same things in the same way. Once, right after my boyfriend and I broke up (Heeeeey, I’m back on the market, wink wink), I was having an absolute mess of a night online – and my friends in game thought the best thing for me was to log off so I didn’t do anything rash. They were harsh, thinking I needed tough love – and that might have been a good answer, except the reason I was so upset was that I was feeling ALONE. Being told to log off, when, at the time, the internet held the only people I had to talk to…that was fairly devastating and the most wrong thing I could have heard. It only amplified my feelings of rejection and loneliness. Be flexible in how you help someone. Try to assess where they are at and what the root causes of their emotions are. What works on one person, or in one scenario, is not going to be the universally best answer.
– Be supportive. Sometimes you won’t know what to say. Often you won’t know what to say. You’re not a therapist – you’re a friend…and that’s fine. Sometimes, all you need to say is “Want to talk about it?” or “Hey, I’m here.” They might not even take you up on that offer…but trust me, they hear it. Sometimes, all someone needs to know is that there are people there for them.
In short, don’t minimize what someone is feeling – to them, when they are experiencing it, it’s incredibly powerful and painful and hard and there are often underlying causes. If you can’t help them tackle that right now, let them know that you still care, despite being unable to help. If you can help, be insightful, constructive, flexible and supportive: understand that there are almost certainly bigger root causes, address their feelings about things versus just the things themselves, be flexible in how you deal with them, and, most importantly, at the very core, be supportive.
Let people know you’re there for them. I can’t emphasize how important this can be.
a little bit of everything all of the time 