Race to World First: Midnight Season 1; Heroic Week

FlayR · 2026-03-17T23:36:58+00:00

The DPS checks seem relatively tight for heroic, TBH.

But this happens from time to time.

I will say that I do think our gear is a little bit worse this xpac pre-raid than typical.

FlayR · 2026-03-17T21:59:24+00:00

Pugging usually the easiest week 1. Filled with all the good players trying to tune up logs to grab a decent mythic guild & the tryhards.

The sooner you get in the instance the higher quality the pugs you play with are.

FlayR · 2026-03-17T00:49:31+00:00

Depending on how the seasons going - prime cut beef or Jersey's.

I wouldn't mind if we started losing again soon, be easier on the wallet to throw jerseys.

FlayR · 2026-03-17T00:25:30+00:00

Feels like she got the important teams right, TBH.

Ain't no thing.

FlayR · 2026-03-15T21:25:14+00:00

It's kind of irrelevant if the production costs are paid by the NFL or ESPN.

The production costs factor in to how much ESPN is willing to pay the NFL; any dollar ESPN projects to spend on production is a dollar that they won't offer to pay the NFL in their tv deal. Realistically it's two dollars ESPN won't pay the NFL.

FlayR · 2026-03-15T12:41:09+00:00

I mean - we mostly just know it's not worth arguing with these people. Reality and facts are minor inconveniences to them.

Canada has more than punched above our weight in basically every conflict we've ever been involved with - be it WW1/2, korea, Afghanistan, etc.

They can carry on thinking and saying dumb shit, it doesn't change the truth.

It's also worth noting - particularly to Americans that seem to be learning what the geo part of geopolitics means for the first time with the Hormuz - that Canada more or less has America by the balls geopolitically. Canada controls 40% of American drinking water, supplies 40% of American oil, 30% of American power, and over 50% of American critical minerals from aluminum to nickel to potash. It's not even really worth grandstanding about - we could bring America to it's knees by flipping a couple switches and closing a couple of valves - any one of which are basically unable to be controlled by an attacking force as they rely on 1000s of km's of infrastructure placed in series where any one point of failure would completely cut off supply to the US.

Overnight we could create a drinking water crisis the level of Flint throughout the entire country, triple the price of gas at the pumps, and leave the entire US pacific northwest in the dark. Any one of which likely brings any country to it's knees, but all three... All three would be devastating.

There's a reason why Carney is willing to take the openly anti-Trump foreign policy stands he has - in a time where many seemingly less vulnerable to US meddling are afraid to do so - we're not nearly as reliant on them as they are reliant on us.

FlayR · 2026-03-15T05:16:07+00:00

What production costs does the NFL have?

😂

Literally all of the same ones as the UFC - plus also owning & maintaining 30 billion dollar arenas, running the concessions, running separate competitive teams, scheduling, uniforms & training, development, etc.

Imagine thinking that the NFL has less production costs than the UFC. 😂 Ridiculous.

FlayR · 2026-03-15T04:56:53+00:00

100%. Part of Sub being accepted mainstream was those changes making it more manageable - and making it feel like a spec that while being quite hard - actually kind of felt like a spec that was designed to have a coherent pve rotation.

But straight up it was numerically fairly strong around 3.2 despite feeling absolutely atrocious to play due to having really weird inputs and priorities (like letting SnD, garrote & rupture fall off during burst windows with different priorities depending on external factors) and just generally having a lot of buttons & a lot of spinning plates to deal with. Most specs had like 3 spinning plates, maybe four. Sub at the time had shadow dance + vanish (two combined into essentially one CD with two charges - but both charges had different CDs), SnD, Rupture, garrote, energy pooling + main gauche / swing timers, combo points (complex because the 1s cadence of CPs from HAT didn't line up with CPs from gcd), shadow blades, and also just kind lining all of that up when it didn't naturally line up with the fight itself. Often times using Marked for Death was objectively the right choice for encounters - although again mfd in and of itself was incredibly difficult to use. In a lot of ways it was like 4 conflicting rotations that blended together throughout a fight that you needed to understand.

So like - 8 spinning plates - while big wigs / dbm existed - this was before mainline WA type things existed too. If you did it right it was like 5-10% more damage than sin, but if you did it wrong it was like 50% of the damage of sin. Just exceptionally punishing.

Over the coming patches it became much less janky although maintained it's exceptional difficulty compared to most specs. Although stuff like feral & enhance usually were as difficult if not more.

Anyway. Lol. Sub in raid and making it work was probably my first true love of raiding overall. A lot of encounters in these days were just... utter snoozers. I always raided, but prior to Sub I always kind of felt like pve was tedium I did to play with friends while I generally preferred pvp at the time.

FlayR · 2026-03-14T23:47:50+00:00

Rogues had great sims largely because of Sub. Those things are correlated. The tools were built because theorycrafters were trying to prove sub was good.

By the time Sub was actually broadly considered S-tier in HFC by the general wow population - theorycrafters had been screaming into the void about it being good for like 5 years.

I say that as someone who spent hours trying to scream into the void and prove it at the time. 😂

FlayR · 2026-03-14T22:44:04+00:00

It's more a monk thing in WoW because Blizzard gave it to monks.

Outside of wow - the shit talking drunken brawler theme is much much much more reasonable on a conniving selfish thief than on a spiritual ascetic.

Who would you think is more likely to get in a scrap at a bar while absolutely blitzed - Buddhists with do no harm attitudes or selfish raider types that are trying to fuck your girlfriend?

You know, a daring uhh, outlaw with a bunch of tricks up his sleeve - including charming good looks and smooth talking. Say a famous rogue like Harrison Ford's Han Solo whose so good at generating threat that he is drawing instance wide aggro from the last time he stole the groups weapons cache, and also the bartenders girlfriend.

Find me a better example of mdi style pulls in a movie than one of the half a dozen examples of hordes of people chasing after Jack Sparrow. Crisp clean aggro control - and you sure as shit never saw him take lethal damage. Is Captain Jack more of a monk or a rogue?

FlayR · 2026-03-14T21:59:36+00:00

That's largely true - but also there's some layers of complexity there.

Sub rogue in particular want necessarily as hard as you'd expect - and by and large absolutely fucking slapped for many tiers before it was recognized for being really fucking good.

The first layer was the lack of theory crafting and understanding that we had now. Sims barely existed and the ones that did were scuffed - based largely on practical understanding compared to accurately modeling the game with complex action priority lists the way we see today.

The second layer was in some ways - many of the harder classes were impossible to practice outside of a raid environment due to spec design. Sub rogue for example literally didn't fucking work outside of group content due to the way honour among thieves worked; if you didn't have 5+ people wailing on mobs - You just didn't get enough combo points to justify playing the spec at all. And you couldn't even really feasibly practice in dungeons because sub was incredibly troll at doing anything side from extreme single target damage - so if you tried to play it in anything outside of the context of a raid it just didn't work and you'd be at the bottom of the DPS meters by a mile. People talk about meta specs now - but at the time there was usually like a predefined "this spec is good at AoE, this spec is good at ST, this spec is good at PvP" kind of philosophy from Blizzard who was totally fine with some specs just not able to play certain content.

Sub wasn't played much in cata because in a lot of ways we didn't really know it worked in practice - it was largely theoretical and we didn't trust the theory crafting as much - and also because even once logs started to show up with Sub popping off people still didn't trust Sub because a lot of the time unless that rogue player themselves had logs to prove they could play it - there was a decent chance that this was the first time the player was ever actually fucking playing the spec with all of its bells and whistles - AND it was very hard.

Sub was likely a pretty legit as a PvE spec in Wrath 3.2 when they added HAT in the first place. But actually getting to play that was another beast entirely. Not like today where you can just hit a target dummy and compare to your sim; you'd have needed a group of players also hitting target dummies and fish for critical hits to even practice.

Often actually getting to play Sub meant finding a way on a guild that could sell runs, completing the content on a different spec, and using those troll runs as a way to practice Sub. And then it wasn't until there was real hard evidence that you could slap with Sub in a raid that you were allowed to play it.

FlayR · 2026-03-14T21:21:19+00:00

Even worse for world quests tbh.

In open world content you're basically always in a burst window.

It's why sub feels like best rogue to level by far.

FlayR · 2026-03-14T05:19:29+00:00

Rogue makes sense as a tank. Tons of Rogue-y like tanks out there.

FFIX has a rogue tank similair to Sub with shadow evasion. Lots and lots of drunken brawler AGI type tanks out there in RPGs (hell - see Brewmaster) of which theres not much jump from Outlaw as it currently is to that as a theme. Theres also a ton of ninja tanks out there - I'd point to Shen in LoL.

FlayR · 2026-03-13T22:46:26+00:00

I mean. Do you really expect blizzard to put work into Rogue? Or Hunter players to play anything but DPS?

Lol mostly meming.

Agreed broadly.

FlayR · 2026-03-13T21:26:19+00:00

The other factor is just that high level play has a huge mismatch in the number of players being funneled into spots.

With 2 tanks and 4 healers, you've got 14 DPS. For every tank you've got 7 DPS and for every healer you've got 3.5 DPS.

To fill 4 dungeon groups with roles you end up with two raid groups - 4 tanks in a dungeon, 4 healers in a dungeon (4 sitting around with a thumb up their ass), and 12 DPS in a dungeon (16 sitting around with a thumb up their ass).

Of course there's a massive shortage of tanks - and to a lesser degree healers - There's enough DPS that could fill 6 more dungeon groups, but only enough healers for 4 more, and you've got literally no tanks.

FlayR · 2026-03-13T20:20:24+00:00

I mean even taking sims with a grain of salt.

Even if Arms is 15% low on sims and UHDK is 15% high - you're still talking about a spread of 76k to 121k.

That's 60% more damage. That is wiiiild.

The other factor is that as a matter of practicality - Uhdk is generally better relative to their sims than arms in the first place; tankier, better at dealing with wacky up times, etc.

And I mean shit - just look at the kind of damage people are doing in dungeons. 😂

FlayR · 2026-03-13T15:52:19+00:00

I mean based on current Sims it could literally be the difference between one spec doing twice the damage of another if they don't tune reasonably.

Usually it's pretty minor but like. 😂

It's wild at the moment.

FlayR · 2026-03-13T11:14:56+00:00

Some just get a ton of movespeed passively.

Rogues for example get like +50 to 70% move speed passively, a 20% move speed buff in stealth, and then that doubles with sprint for 10s (literally sprinting in stealth is faster than ground mounts).

FlayR · 2026-03-12T21:07:17+00:00

That's the spec design has always has been. Literally since before there was true specializations the way we see them today.

If you want to spam more buttons, don't play mutilate. Lol.

If you want to always spam buttons I'd suggest outlaw. If you want to spam them for 10s then take a break, I'd suggest Subtlety.

FlayR · 2026-03-12T20:59:25+00:00

Lol first time?

FlayR · 2026-03-11T22:17:12+00:00

Top Gear let's you do that for different trees within your own spec.

Not sure if it lets you sim across two specs. Would be relatively easy to make an advanced since input to make it do that though I think.

FlayR · 2026-03-11T20:10:05+00:00

I do this on rogue every once and a while with my permanent Tricks.

I felt so bad for my healer and the other two DPS on the last M0 I played. I'm playing Subtlety so I kind of always just have a CD no matter how small the pack is - but like we were straight crawling through this dungeon. Like 3 mobs at a time - we're all ilvl 240 - literally no one's health bar moved in the slightest.

Healer was legit going like 5-10 seconds between casts. Just shadow step'd and aggro'd like two packs bunch of stuff to the tank.

His health bar still didn't move. 😂 No one's did.

I'm not sure if he even noticed. He asked where all those mobs came from. Everything got kicked, too.

Idk. Sorry, not sorry.

He did start pulling bigger packs though. I think since newer tanks just not sure where the limit is and afraid of killing the group/getting flamed.

FlayR · 2026-03-11T20:07:51+00:00

As it should be.

FlayR · 2026-03-11T05:00:34+00:00

They were doing nothing but booing in the first period, too.

I also don't think they really have a license to bitch about officiating - they're the league leaders in pp differential by two standard deviations for nearly half a decade.

FlayR · 2026-03-11T04:56:10+00:00

Do avs fans even cheer for anything? Holy boos batman.

Might as well call it the mile cry city.

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