Sunday, October 18, 2009

A Brief Anecdote About Min-Maxing

"Min-Maxing" is a term that came to the MMO gamer from the pen and paper world, and is often spoken of in derisive tones.  I don't really think this is fair; at its root, min-maxing is just another little puzzle-game that you play as part of the larger game.  I thought I might step through the thought process that I went through with a few different upgrades, enchants, and gems yesterday and today to sort of show what's really going on when people talk about min-maxing.
To begin with, before I did a couple off-night tens last night, I happened to be exactly on hit cap using only  Icewalker.  Then I got a new necklace, the Sparkling Onyxia Tooth Pendant.  The hit on the neck piece meant I was able to replace my Iron-Studded Mantle with the Pauldrons of the Devourer, which was good because those are the best shoulder items available right now, as far as I know.
The change did create a slight problem though: it put me four hit rating over the hitcap.  At first I was going to leave it alone, since Icewalker is a slightly better enchant than Superior Agility.  However, as I thought about it more, I realized that wasting 4 of those 12 points of hit was just too much.  Especially because my new shoulders had a yellow socket with a 4 agility bonus on it!  If I swapped Icewalker to the agility enchant, I would waste two less hit rating and get a four agility socket bonus I'd previously been missing.  I made those changes earlier tonight and was glad to do it - I just feel better if I've gotten every point out of my gear that I can find in it, you know?  And that's all min-maxing is: playing the little gear/enchant/gem puzzle game.  Think of it like Bejeweled.

No comments:

Post a Comment

If you're seeing the default Blogspot comment form, please be aware that I use Disqus for comment threading, and your comment will be imported into that system. Thank you very much for commenting!