Breakfast Topic: Game notes

In hindsight, I used to do similar note-taking, albeit without using an actual paper journal. I surprised my wife one time by firing up a spreadsheet program to list down my gear upgrade path, listing the honor I needed as well as the honor I had currently. I listed the slots and the priority of upgrades, allowing me to plan my purchases ahead instead of going to the vendors willy-nilly and buying whatever suited my fancy. I calculated item values and my resilience totals, planning the most efficient upgrades before the GearScore addon
How do you keep track of your game progress? Do you write down your goals somewhere like a journal? Do you list down your gear upgrades and plan the dungeons you visit, or do you just roll on whatever seems like an upgrade? Do you research the best items available and plan on how to get them? If so, where do you keep those notes? With so many changes coming up in Cataclysm, it seems like a fine time to start taking notes again. I think, maybe, I might just keep an honest-to-goodness notebook this time.
Filed under: Breakfast Topics






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 6)
Orrine Jun 5th 2010 8:04AM
I memorise it. It's doesn't help.
Nex Jun 5th 2010 10:02AM
why ppl whine about GS?
it just shows how decent your gear is without having to inspect u.
i'd whine about recount/skada instead
because it turned the game into some weird dps race
and the developers are hugely concerned about making everyone's dps good instead of working on some important issues.
there are still imbalances in dps despite of that, with rogues dominating the charts and nothing being done about that.
raids/dungeons are simply about dpsing.
no cooperation or cc involved. stick to your rotation and be happy, tank will tank, healer will heal.
that's so retarded, i will never understand why ppl do pve. it's beyond me.
dpsing a mindless mob with your perfect rotation is fun yo.
Alanid Jun 5th 2010 10:11AM
I also memorize, except my WoW goals are always short term. When I log in I check what I have and what I need by either going to a pvp vendor, or using atlas loot for dungeons, heroics, etc. In the case of my Alts it's more like "I want to get to this level today" so I play some WSG and do a few dungeons to get some xp then (in the case of my druid) go crazy with my engineering. I've even got my engineering to the point where I cant learn anymore till my druid is lvl35 - he is currently lvl27.
Tapukimastra Jun 5th 2010 10:12AM
@Nex
Because people get too hung up on GearScore when considering players for raid spots, without factoring in skill.
Valt Jun 5th 2010 10:56AM
"why ppl whine about GS?
it just shows how decent your gear is without having to inspect u."
I hope this is troll because you say that GS is good and actual measurements meters bad.
But I still answer.
When you see shaman on trade going "5.2k GS shaman LF ICC25!!" do you think "Oh he has some nice gear"? Haha lol.
What I did was *gasp* INSPECT him and I saw that he had used hes heroic badges to gear with spirit. Yes, he bought spirit leather gear instead of mail "balanced to shamans" gear. He had also toc10 gear like cloak with spirit. On top of that he used green gems. GREEN gems that were huge mess. Spellpower+stamina, spellpower+hit, 24 stamina, haste, +6 all stats, +14 spellpower. No meta. No enchants. Melee crit talent as elemental, talents were mess.
He sure had good gear?
Now. You say that "omg if I have to move from fire I lose dps". Bullshit, you do less dps dead. You wont lose 1-2k dps if you move occasionally unless you are unlucky. If whole raid needs to move whole raids dps is low, its desinged that way. Also who cares. I have yet to see anyone getting kicked from not doing same dps as #1 unless its 1.5k
You are lazy not to inspect someone..? God damn fast-food generation. Even seniors are more active than you *shakes fist*
James Jun 5th 2010 11:24AM
Valt, you forgot something. Back in our day, we had to farm one side of stratholm, both ways, in the snow, with dogs chasing us, with little kids crying cause the hunter ninja'd the piccolo off the rare....
In all seriousness though, gearscore is useless realy. Just go to the armory, or wow-heroes, or wherever you want to look up a characters gear, and see if they have the right gems, enchants, ect. A 'magic number' is nothing, i look for knowledge. If someone is geared properly, I know that they must, at the very least, have done research on their class. This to me is more valuable than someone assuring you of their skill with a big number.
my 2 copper
jrb Jun 5th 2010 12:43PM
@valt
use elitest group (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/elitistgroup.aspx) instead. it's a good compromise between GS and Manually inspecting every item on every player you want in your PUG. Instead it'll give you percentage scores for you role, on gear, enchants, and gems. using a pvp cloak.. you'll get downranked for it. Using an inappropriate gem.. you'll get downranked for it.
in fact, can we get this mentioned in an addon spotlight, to try and shift some emphasis away from GS, please?
robert.brenchley Jun 5th 2010 1:09PM
This is just to funny. I currently have 7 such notebooks, and 5 little notepad sitting at my desk. All of them full of information about everything WoW. Someone likes to complain about them when she starting cleaning off the desk, so in the past I have had to throw some of them away. So I am unsure as to how many I have had over the many years that I have played WoW. lol
V Magius Jun 5th 2010 1:18PM
@jrb
Already done. http://www.wow.com/2010/02/11/addon-spotlight-elitist-group/
It's a ways back, so that might have been where you first saw it. I need to get that setup for myself.
Chris Jun 5th 2010 4:54PM
i absolutely agree with Valt and James but the sad thing out of all this is we do need this gs score. Here is why.
Seen in trade chat: LFM ... Pst class and GS.
The good and the bad:
Raid leaders ask for gs. some don't even respond if gs is too low. many of them don't even bother to inspect after or before invite. Many of them assume: Higher GS = more gaming experience, therefore more skills.
When i was a fresh 80, I was kicked from group a few times while standing in Dal because some other (insert class here) had slightly higher gs than I. Did he have skills? who knows! But at least his GS was better than mine, right. /COUGH.
the main problem with gs is people tend to use the stat religiously where I think it should only be used as a general guideline.
Numb Jun 5th 2010 9:04PM
@Chris
Here's where your particular argument against gearscore becomes invalid: You are arguing that you were kicked from a raid because your gearscore was too low. While it's true that a person with higher gearscore may very well be completely fail, gearscore *can* be a useful tool in evaluating the low end of the scale...
While I personally use ElitistGroup when I'm forming my pugs, for the sake of this example let's say that I'm only using GS. If I take a 5.5k GS Hunter I run the risk of that person being low dps. I have no way of evaluating his skill and so GS in his case is a terrible tool to rely on solely. Now if I take a 4k GS Hunter I don't run the risk of him being low dps - I am guaranteed that he will be low dps. For better or worse, gear is a major factor in performance in WoW, and even if you are incredibly skilled you simply won't be able to consistently pull 10k dps as a Hunter in 4k GS gear. So your point Chris, is invalid because if you were removed for having too low of a GS, that's a totally legit reason not to take you. And the results would be the same if the person used ElitistGroup, search for you on Be.Imba/wow-heroes, or took the time to manually inspect you. Unless a person is GEARING INCORRECTLY (which is the REAL issue with gearscore as opposed to ElitistGroup), if you have no other outside knowledge it only makes sense to take the better geared person as it *does* imply a higher potential.
TL;DR: GS *shouldn't* be used to assume how well a person will perform, but it *is* fine to determine if they even have the gear that they potentially CAN perform at the level required.
McRaider Jun 6th 2010 7:21AM
Remember the "slightly" part. He was talking about getting kicked from a raid because he found a person with *slightly* better gear. The difference between 5634 gs and 5654 gs isn't big and in raids you might not even notice it. If you just kick people to get a person with 20 more gs, you'll just get slowly ignored by the whole realm for being an "over-perfectionist" idiot.
dalroi Jun 6th 2010 8:07AM
@Numb
You misread what Chris was saying. He never said his GS was too low, he said he got replaced by someone with a (slightly) higher GS. I assume his GS was high enough to get accepted in the first place, in which case his point is entirely valid.
Your point about someone with a too low GS guaranteeing he won't do enough DPS is also entirely valid of course, provided we're not talking about a tank or healer (who don't DPS), but that's beside the point.
Also, if you accept someone with a high GS, it matters what their gear is aimed at. I guarantee you that a tank or healer with a high GS will be awful at DPS in that gear.
Personally, I don't have GS (or an alternative) and I probably never will install it. I PUG raids very infrequently, but if raid leaders ask me for my GS I usually reply that I have successfully downed Festergut in ICC-25 as a healer and Putricide as tank in ICC-10. That tells a lot more about my capabilities than any GS rating.
For guild raids we use http://wow-heroes.com to see if someone's fit to enter our raids; you have to start somewhere. New raiders will first enter our farm raids to get them used to the encounters and see whether they hold up. After a while we take them with us in our progression raids.
Eisengel Jun 6th 2010 2:21PM
Fix't for Spriests: http://www.shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=24134
Cassie Jun 5th 2010 8:04AM
I use Microsoft OneNote and keep an entire little notebook full of BiS items for my different characters, materials I need to farm for specific professions/the best places to get them, goals for each character, things like that. Keeping it on the computer is handy because I can have it open on one screen while WoW is on the other, and I can also use that handy dandy copy/paste function. It's very nice to be able to see at a glance which bosses I want loot off of, or which dungeons I should try to get into for loot, etc.
Schadenfreude Jun 5th 2010 3:02PM
I use a notepad for short-term things (i.e. go get this thing right now) and make .txt files for the longer-term ones (i.e. I ultimately want this gear set).
Meg Jun 5th 2010 3:13PM
Notepad is my journal. I have a file called READ ME which has my immediate shopping list (flasks, food, potions to X character, and so on), one called Econ which houses notes about the economy, Badlist for cross-server griefers in case I ever see them again (hopefully I won't since I ignored them...), Outfits for various gearsets, and a big fat GDKP folder full of text files detailing attendance and gold....
And I always have at least one open just to write down notes and stuff. Oh! And I keep the calculator open at all times too.
Aloix Jun 5th 2010 7:29PM
+1 to OneNote! My WoW Notebook is a little crazy @_@ I keep notes of gear, strats, macros, power aura imports, random snippets of infos of all sorts. I love it, though.
A text file or similar would be not sufficient, I need the organization of pages/tabs/section groups.
Fantastic program for any info organizing, really.
I used to use a small spiral notebook before I got turned on to OneNote.
I do also have an Excel Workbook for some profession/economy stuff.
Brandon Jun 5th 2010 8:08AM
I Have a notepad full of WoW Details, Logs, Chats, Prices, 1-450 Proffessions, Mats and everything since 2008.
Moonfaxx Jun 5th 2010 12:35PM
Sometimes I catch myself using the calculator on my cell phone and a piece of scratch paper sitting on my desk. It is then I realize that I have a program called Calculator and Notepad on my computer. Tehe. :)