Craziness

Well! This past couple of weeks has been interesting both in the world of Physics and of Warcraft! I’ve been extremely busy, so that should explain the lack of updates. Things are coming though, never you worry.

Warcraft

With roster problems and tank shortages, AWOL DPS and miscellaneous router outages, you’d have thought <The Silver Raven> wouldn’t have had any progress whatsoever! However, tonight on our second night at Feng the Accursed we killed him! That’s nice fast progress for us in terms of overall raid time, even if it’s been weeks since our last proper progress. Feng was really easy once we managed to co-ordinate healer cooldowns properly and the tanks got the hang of Shroud. Our killshot:

We’re also pleased that Gara’Jal the Spiritbinder is already getting down to the low teens before the enrage timer hits. We expect to have him down next week!

Physics

My paper is progressing apace, but simultaneously I have to juggle writing an 80 page dissertation (fun fun fun) and also preparation for my return to Uni and pre-reading for potential PhD positions. That’s a lot of work (to somewhat understate it).

I’m also excited to be going to the NI Days conference for LabVIEW users in London two weeks from now. While I’m not presenting (thank god!) I will be listening intently and I’ll have to prepare myself to learn the most I can from it.

On top of all that, I’m starting to look for PhD positions. It’s not a fun activity, but it’s exciting when I get responses. Hopefully I’ll eventually convert the responses into real applications.

Sadness

It’s because of the above reasons in real life that I’ve got to skip a couple of weeks raiding. I realised that it’s a true indicator of a good raid team when you’re genuinely sad to have to skip nearly a month of progress with them. I was genuinely gutted to have to tell our Raid Leader that I wouldn’t be around. Ahwell, as they say “real life is more important,” and I agree in this case.

Theorycraft

I’ve been interested in discussions about Healing Stream Totem and Healing Tide Totem recently. Binkenstein et al. seem to think that it’s bugged because“both follow what we’re expecting to see, except for randomly adding extra ticks, which is an outstanding bug”. I would contend that if the model isn’t predicting the behaviour and Blizzard haven’t confirmed it as a bug (they’ve had a lot of time) then there’s something wrong with the theory.

My intention would normally be to test it myself and find out, but I have no time for that at the moment due to the above reasons. In that case, I’m going to lay out more or less what I think is happening and hope someone can pick up from here.

My theory is that HST behaves in a strange manner. Within certain Haste ranges, the exact number of ticks is predictable and sensible according to current theory. When Haste approaches a breakpoint, however, I think that the number of ticks becomes probabilistic! That is to say; there is a well defined probability of getting X ticks, and there is a similarly well defined probability of getting X+1 ticks. Both of these probabilities are linear with Haste.

If you were to measure the mean number of ticks at different Haste levels around a breakpoint, you should then see a linear increase in the mean with Haste value. The mean should follow;

mean = X.P(X)+(X+1).P(X+1)

Example: the transition between 8 and 9 ticks. X = 8, and P(X) is linear with Haste (in our example take an arbitrary value of 0.8). That means that P(X+1) = 0.2 and so:

mean (example) = 8*0.8+9*0.2 = 8.2 ticks

The challenge is then to determine the scaling coefficient, A, given the expression:

P(X+1) = A * (Haste)

Which can be done by substituting into the previous equation and so on.

I hope someone takes a look at this! It would certainly explain why “randomly adding extra ticks” seems to be the case.

Update! Shortly after I posted this, I discovered that Binkenstein has actually beaten me to the punch by a couple of hours in proposing this. To prove that this idea was actually mine [i.e. I’m not just trying to rip him off! I came up with this separately] see my comments (timed and dated) on the Icy Veins Forums.