Blue Murder

Single Minded Fury

2011-01-25T09:19:00.002Z

Fury is in kind of a strange place right now with two distinct specs - single-minded fury (or SMF) and Titan's Grip (TG).

SMF seems like it was bolted on quite late in the day to the normal fury spec and suffers from balance issues. I am SMF at present in my dps spec, having been TG in the previous xpac and while levelling, and SMF plays quite differently to TG. It also seems like fury was designed and balanced around TG, and the developers have not paid enough attention to how SMF works in practice.

Firstly, note that raging blow and slam are attacks based on weapon damage, whereas heroic strike and bloodthirst are based on attack power. Admitted SMF slam hits with two weapons instead of one, but my experience is that at present bloodthirst and heroic strike blow everything else out of the water - to the extent that raging blow crits for me hit the same as bloodthirst hits non-crit. I have actually taken raging blow off my action bar because it's just a waste of rage to use it.

My rotation at the moment is bloodthirst > heroic strike, with slam when it procs. I also use colossus smash to boost damage and refresh sunders, but that's all.

This is kind of strange, and defeats the whole purpose of the new fury design which is that you are supposed to have to manage your enrage state. I just don't bother at the moment.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the patch - based on current PTR releases it looks like SMF itself is getting a flat out dps buff (approx 4%), and bloodthirst, raging blow and slam are all getting very large dps buffs (around 20 - 30% I understand), while heroic strike gets a large nerf. It will be interesting to see if post-patch raging blow will be better than heroic strike - if it is better then I will need to put it back on my action bar, but if not then the rotation will remain bloodthirst > heroic strike, and it is likely that SMF damage as a whole will be too high and need a nerf.

Sub-20% my rotation is execute spam with colossus smash when available. SMF's flat +damage bonus really shines when executing and in this phase you can put out really high dps.

One final thing to note was a tip I picked up on Kadomi's blog and relates to sunder armour. The wording Glyph of Colossus Smash says that it refreshes the duration of any sunder stack on the target, but that's not quite what it does. What actually happens is that the Glyph adds a stack of sunders if there is already at least one stack on the target, or refreshes the duration of a maxed out stack. So you need to sunder once at the start of the fight, and then when you use colossus smash you will get a second stack of sunders with a refreshed 30 sec duration. The next time you use colossus smash you'll get a third stack of sunders. You therefore only need to hit sunder armour once.

Farming Bastion of Twilight trash

2011-01-20T18:42:00.001Z

I see a few bloggers saying that they are not "ready for raiding" yet.

My raid team is the guild's second team, and we have only just started raiding (two raids so far, Tol Barad boss and Magmaw down) but what we have been doing for a couple of weeks is farming trash in Bastion of Twilight. The trash is easy once you learn the pulls and have a couple of reliable cc-ers, and there is a very high chance of getting a BoE epic - we normally get one epic per run, but sometimes we've had two. We've had a couple of tanking swords, a couple of rogue ranged weapons and a druid tanking helm so far.

The best thing is that they are BoE - if no one in your raid wants them, stick them on the AH and use the money to buy an epic you do need!

Maybe something to consider if your guild is still gearing up for raiding.

The basics of tanking (draft)

2011-01-19T13:28:00.002Z

Disclaimer - this is being written for the benefit of a new prot warrior in our guild. It is intended to serve as a guide to the basics. If you want to know more, then try Elitist Jerks (whose prot warrior guide is getting better as it gets longer and harder to read) or Tankspot. This is a draft version of the guide.

Ratings

Your rating stats, in the order of best to worst are as follows:

Mastery > Parry > Dodge > Hit > Expertise

You should always reforge away hit or expertise - into mastery where possible. All items have two rating stats on them - the best items have mastery and parry, the worst have hit and expertise. Always look for mastery on your gear where you can.

Parry is better than dodge because of the Hold the Line talent.

Attributes

Stamina gives you health, obviously. Agility gives you dodge, but you shouldn't gear for it or gem/enchant for it. It just turns up on gear sometimes. Strength is a threat stat, and again, don't ever gem/enchant for it.

Why is mastery so good?

Mastery increases block chance and crit block chance, but let's focus on block chance. The goal at present is for warriors to become "unhittable", that means every attack on the warrior either is avoided, or is blocked.

Since bosses are level 88 and we are level 85, they have an increased chance to hit us than you might expect from looking at your character sheet. In order for us to become unhittable our total avoidance needs to be 102.4%. That's quite a lot. A realistic initial goal is for us to become unhittable when you have shield block (+25% block chance) activated. That requires us to have total avoidance of 77.4%.

If you remember that there is a base 5% chance for the boss to simply miss with its attack, you need to have:

dodge chance + parry chance + block chance > 72.4%

Once you achieve that, or get very close to it, you will be amazed at the difference. Shield block is up for 1/4 of the time, and while it is up you will be like a piece of iron - your healers will love you. Essentially, shield block becomes almost as good as shield wall once you hit 72.4% avoidance.

Mastery is your best way of increasing avoidance - it's relatively cheap in terms of rating requirements, and it is not subject to diminishing returns. Stack it.

Why are hit and expertise so bad?

In dungeons and raids, you will get all the threat you need from the vengeance buff (which increases your damage the more damage you take). As a warrior in particular, vigilance will ensure that your vengeance reaches maximum very quickly in raids, and doesn't drop off very often.

In theory expertise is a better dps stat than hit, but since we have vengeance and don't need dps stats then hit's other benefit (making our interrupts more likely to land) makes hit more valuable. On fights where interrupts are critical some top players are building special hitcapped sets to make sure their interrupts never miss. You need 8% hit to do this but to begin with it may not be necessary.

Rotation

Hit shield slam and revenge whenever they are up, and hit devastate if they aren't. Heroic strike when you have more than 50 or 60 rage. Don't forget about inner rage.

Concussive Blow and Shockwave do more damage than devastate and do lots more threat, so ideally you would have both of these in your rotation too. Personally however I prefer simple rotations, on many fights you'll want to save shockwave for adds, and anyway devastate is getting a big buff in 4.06 so the difference post patch will be pretty small I think.

There's lots to think about when tanking, so I save my precious brainpower for things other than a super-complicated six button rotation.

The cleverer among you will notice that I have not included rend in the above. I don't like the Blood and Thunder talent - I find it fiddly and unnecessary, and it requires me to have yet another button on my action bar. In heroics I maintain AoE aggro with glyphed cleave, revenge and thunderclap. It seems to work fine.

How to take less damage

The Thunderclap debuff and the demo shout debuff should be up on your target all the time. Practice this. They mitigate a huge amount of damage. Make sure that your UI shows those debuffs on your target, and maybe highlights them in some way or makes them bigger.

Make sure you are using shield block on cooldown.

Use your survival buttons - Enraged Regeneration, Last Stand and Shield Wall are all amazing, and are on short cooldowns. Don't save them for bosses! You can easily use one survival button on every trash pull, and be confident that there will be one available for the next pull.

Remember that Shield Wall is more effective if you press it BEFORE you take a big hit. If you have ALREADY taken a big hit and are low on health, use Last Stand instead.

Remember that Enraged Regen needs an enrage effect active on you to become available - press Berserker Rage to give you access to the regen.

Disarm almost never works on bosses, but normally works when a trash mob is hitting you with a sword or axe. It's a really solid damage reduction button.

Kiting! If you are taking lots of damage and near death why not stun the mobs using shockwave and heroic leap away? Or if you are fighting a boss, and the boss stops to cast some uninterruptable spell, why not run away? It will mean you take zero damage for 3 or 4 seconds while the mobs run back to you, giving your healers a bit of a break. Watch your threat while doing this though.

Spell reflect! I love tanking casters - zero damage taken, free rage and high dps.

Warrior nerfs in patch 4.06

2011-01-10T19:05:00.002Z

There’s a decent analysis of the prospective nerfs here.

As usual - this is PTR, things can change, not set in stone, blah blah blah.

For fury the patch notes look pretty unpleasant, since the buffs (raging blow being improved by war academy and the buff to mastery) seem to be outweighed by the nerf to heroic strike. I am slightly biased however, since I think the fury rotation’s dependence on enrage effects is pointlessly complex and difficult to work around, and there is no comparable difficulty in any other class that I can think of right now. It’s not simply a priority system based on procs, as every other class has, but you also have to manage your enrage state which is pretty ridiculous. Anyway, that’s a rant for another day. We are also hugely dependent on hit apparently (I haven't got enough fury experience in Cata to talk about that as yet, but it was true in WotLK and it makes sense for it to be true now).

The nerfs to heroic strike and cleave are also somewhat annoying for prot. I currently think cleave is a brilliant attack for prot right now – it hits hard but not too hard, it hits multiple targets, and it’s therefore great for AoE tanking. It also feels fun, for some reason - not sure why. Clearly therefore it needs a nerf for PvP reasons. This is somewhat depressing. I’ll probably still use it on cooldown when AoE tanking though.

The heroic strike nerf is pretty lousy, and makes the prot rotation complicated again – I will now have to try to decide whether heroic strike is better or worse than concussive blow or shockwave. I prefer the simpler prot rotation of shield slam > revenge > heroic strike, but it seems we are back into needing a six button rotation.

The buff to devastate, while probably not enough to compensate in theory, actually in reality is very good for me because I tend to lose my rotations under pressure and spam devastate mindlessly in panic. Now at least I will be suffering less of a dps loss. In addition, it’s a minor buff to the impending victory talent. Since you need to hit devastate to trigger impending victory then sub 20% you’ll basically be spamming devastate and hitting victory rush when it procs (which actually is surprisingly often – you are healing 7% of your health every 6 seconds or so). Spamming devastate is bad, but by making devastate more attractive, impending victory becomes less of a dps loss.

Impending Victory

2011-01-07T13:41:00.001Z

Yes, it's a bad talent. Yes it forces you to use a sub-optimal rotation. Yes, it's only very good for a comparatively short time on bosses. Yes, it's in my spec.

So far I'm finding that I am dying a lot, but I'm not threat capped at all. I'm doing loads of damage, and loads of threat, on either single or multiple targets. I'm therefore dropping dps talents and scratching around for any survivability I can get, and quite often in the last 20% of a boss's life I'm so far ahead in threat that my personal dps can drop a bit without a problem. The small 7%-ish heal you get from victory rush doesn't sound like much, but it's available every 6 seconds or so and just gives the healers some breathing space in that period, especially if I follow it up with shield wall or shield block.

It synchs with power auras - you can set your power auras addon to recognise the buff (it's called "victorious") to show you when the buff is active.

Tidyplates fix

2010-12-14T13:33:00.002Z

Like many of you, I use the Tidyplates addon when tanking as it makes it very easy to see who you have aggro on and who you need to taunt back. It's excellent. Since the 4.01 patch however it's been broken because of the issue of overlapping nameplates - rather than staying next to the mobs they represent, the nameplates wander around the screen when tanking large packs, which makes the addon pretty much unusable.

The problem appears to be due to changes Blizzard made to the default UI, and I've discovered that entering the command

/console spreadnameplates 0

should fix the problem. I'll check this later when I get home.

If you don't use Tidyplates, here is Kadomi's review some time back.

Shameless recruitment post

2010-12-01T10:18:00.000Z

This is a post that Griffinheart (one of my officers) put on our forums front page. As you can see, my guild is recruiting - we have loads of great dps but are seeking a couple of tanks and healers to round out our raiding teams. In WotLK we killed everything on normal mode and most things on heroic - culminating in our Frostwyrm mounts from ICC. If you are interested there's a link to our forums on this page - cross-server apps would be very welcome.

"After a bumpy year and, eventually, a split, Immortal is bent on reinventing itself. A core of adult players who have been playing together for almost five years is seeking to shoot new blood into its veins, with its sight set on the imminent Cataclysm.

Our intention is to reopen the doors of our guild and to turn it again into a suitable platform to enjoy the upcoming expansion, in an attempt to reconcile both the raiding and the social aspects of the game. Mind you, we are not recruiting as such; we only would like to add some more like-minded individuals to our particular roster of characters.

What remains of Immortal is a set of around 25 players from very diverse countries, all 18+, many of us actually 30+. Most of us have jobs (or had), better halves, mortgages, children and a nasty set of real life problems from which we like to take a break two or three days a week by killing stuff for a couple of hours or three. Even though we have very different schedules, all of us have been making the time for years to spend some hours together every week, to enjoy the special atmosphere Immortal has traditionally enjoyed during its existence.

Our targets for Cataclysm are still in great part to be decided, but all things are pointing towards a 10-man raiding guild running 2-3 teams, with at least one of them aiming to cover the whole nine yards for every raid dungeon: hard modes, meta-achievements, penguins… the whole shebang. If we manage to actually run two top-notch teams, we will consider the jump to 25-man raiding again, as it has been a guild constant since Vanilla. Many of us are experienced players with a hunger for blood and power, and will go to shameful extents in order to inexorably and ruthlessly achieve our goals: going on sick leave for a couple of days to practice tactics, or peeing in buckets next to our PCs to save AFK time (mental note: make sure my push-to-talk option is enabled on Teamspeak next time). Other than that, we are normal people.

We currently run two teams in ICC 10: one of them made of mains, running 2-3 evenings a week and just two blue dragon kills away from the Glory of the Raider achievement; the other one is made of alts and raids whenever we get the critical mass and minimum balance for it. Generally speaking, anyone with a real craving for raids has several chances every week to kick some (mostly) undead arses.

So, this is us. We are looking forward to having a lot of real fun in Cataclysm, and to share it with anyone weird enough to feel at home here –just like we do. If you are a decent human being with a passion for raiding or hanging out in World of Warcraft, and the strange gut-feeling that you could fit in Immortal, do not hesitate and post an application on our forums.

We are dying (really often) to meet you!"

To the ground, baby!

2010-11-24T14:04:00.001Z

Well, the nerfs are in and to paraphrase Zapp Brannigan - the warrior nerfs are like the warriors' love - hard and fast.

You can read the full list in all its horror in the patch notes. Most of the nerfs reduce damage done by 17%, but some are different. I'm going to look at Fury and Prot since those are the specs I have experience of. Assume that all abilities are reduced in damage by 17% unless mentioned.

Fury

Raging Blow is reduced by 27%
Mastery is buffed by 50%
Slam rage cost reduced from 20 to 15

This is a very heavy nerf for raging blow. It may be that the changes to mastery (extra damage while enraged) balances this out, but looking at some napkin maths I doubt it. The effect on our rotations is hard to see at present - previously the fury rotation was
Raging blow (where available) > Bloodthirst > Heroic strike. It may be that raging blow drops from being the main nuke to being a filler.

I still can't see a place for slam - the problem with it has been that heroic strike is so good that rather than being a way to bleed off excess rage we want to hit it on cooldown. If we are doing that we just don't have the spare rage to hit slam as well (or at least I don't) and you therefore drop slam altogether. I've seen the suggestion that slam procs need to cost zero rage and I agree with that. On the basis that we have more rage now than we will have at any time in Cata (crit, hit and haste are higher now than they will be) I can't see this change making slam attractive.

Prot

Devastate is unchanged
Revenge is unchanged
Shockwave is unchanged
Shield Slam is unchanged at 85 (not sure about at 80)

The only ability that prot uses which was nerfed is heroic strike. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Currently like for fury heroic strike is so good that it distorts the rotation - Shield slam > revenge > heroic strike with devastate being relegated to maintaining the debuff.

It may be that the nerf to heroic strike is enough to change the rotation but frankly I doubt it because heroic strike is simply so far ahead of devastate and shockwave at present. It should also be noted that the cookie cutter prot spec at the moment includes field dressing and blood craze, and so most raiding tanks (including me) haven't taken the war academy talent, which when maxed boosts heroic strike by 15%. The net effect of taking warbringer will bring us back to where we are now - that devastate is there just for the debuff (or can be dropped if you have the right kind of hunter pet with you), concussion blow is a stun only and shockwave is for utility and AoE tanking.

Oh, and finally, the rend nerf should pretty much kill off Blood and thunder as a prot talent I think!

Arthas at 85

2010-11-16T13:25:00.002Z

Tobold is a good blogger, in that he writes interestingly and well on varied subjects. I check his blog most days. I get quite frustrated about his attitude to raiding however. His comment about raiding in WotLK is as follows:

"I wouldn't say I have "finished" Wrath of the Lich King, for example I am not among the half million players who killed Arthas. But that was definitively due to lack of even trying, as I found WotLK raiding not that much fun: Too much "Super Mario Brothers" or "Simon Says" or "Don't stand in the fire", however you want to call that, and not enough focus on actually playing your class, if you know what I mean. I'm looking forward to Cataclysm, where at least healing appears to require more thinking (3 of my 5 level 80s are healers), and hope that Cataclysm raiding has a bit more tactical fights that require players to think on their feet instead of raid encounters resembling some sort of complicated ballet where the most important thing is that everybody stands at exactly the right position at the right time. Maybe I'll get to kill Arthas when I'm level 85 in some fun guild outing."

Tobold seems to like tank and spank fights. He doesn't like to have to run around much, he doesn't like to have to react to scripted attacks, and he doesn't like to learn a "best" rotation for his class. What he likes is to make decisions on the fly about what's the best spell or ability to cast, which for him makes interesting gameplay. I disagree, but it takes all sorts to make a world etc etc.

What I find interesting is that he thinks that he'll be able to come back at level 85 and kill Arthas for fun. I actually think that Arthas farming at level 85 will not happen very much at all. Consider the following:

- It's a long instance. You need to kill 11 bosses pre Arthas (and Sindragosa will be no pushover at 85 either).

- There are mechanics that can kill you that you can't outgear or outlevel. Defile will still kill you at 85 if you stand in it. Soul Reaper will still take off 90k of tank health in a few seconds. The necrotic plague does 50k damage to you when it ticks, or more if it has already killed some ghouls - that will still hurt at 85. The Val'kyr can drop a level 85 person off the edge of the raid. If you get hit by an ice sphere it's still a one shot kill. The fight is hard. It will still be reasonably tough at 85.

- It's hard to underman the fight. You still probably need 2 tanks for phase 1 (otherwise you are going to get plague in your melee or your tank is going to need to be cleansed all the time leading to higher boss melee damage). You still need 2 healers, since one healer might get grabbed by a Val'kyr in phase 2 or ported into the sword in phase 3 and you'll need another to cover.

- He doesn't drop anything cool or unique like a legendary weapon or a rare mount. The weapons don't have unique models either - they look the same as the normal raid drops.

And finally...

- Most good raiders have killed Arthas already. I'm sorry, but if you haven't killed Arthas yet then either you aren't a very good player, or you are new, or you have had some kind of unspecified other problem like a guild split or personal issues. Assuming that they do indeed remove the kingslayer title then there will be little incentive for experienced or talented raiders to go back and kill Arthas on a new alt. This means an Arthas pug will probably be an utter disaster.

Some simple tanking macros

2010-11-10T13:19:00.000Z

Some very basic tanking macros I use. Nothing particularly clever, but you might like them.

Warbringer

Credit to Veneretio of the now-defunct TankingTips for this one.

/castsequence [harm] reset=15 Charge, Intercept; [help] Intervene

If you press the button it casts charge. If you press it within 15 seconds it casts intercept. If the target is friendly it casts intervene. Note that if you have gyphed charge for a shorter cooldown you should change it to say "reset=14". Also, don't spam the button otherwise you'll cast charge and then intercept on the same target straight away.

Cooldown macros

I macro a warning to my healers when I use a cooldown. Stuff like

#showtooltip last stand
/cast last stand
/s Everblue used Last Stand

I think it helps your healers to know you are using a cooldown so that they can adjust their healing strategy accordingly.

Startattack macro

If you use a special ability and you have enough rage then you'll cast the ability and begin attacking your target with normal melee attacks (if you weren't already). If you don't have enough rage to cast the ability then you will not start attacking your target with white attacks either, and thus you won't start gaining rage. You'll just stand there like a lemon.

I therefore macro the startattack command to devastate (or bloodthirst in fury spec, or mortal strike in arms spec) as follows:

#showtooltip devastate
/cast devastate
/startattack

Lucky charms

One final tip. Via the keybindings in the normal blizzard UI it's possible to bind "set the skull raid marker" to a key. I've bound this to the "8" key in my UI, meaning that it's relatively easy to get the dps to focus fire on one target without messing around with menus during a fight.

Red

2010-11-01T00:08:00.000Z

All hail the red shirted guy...

Warrior tanking news

2010-10-29T13:18:00.003+01:00

Some warrior news.

Firstly the shield slam nerf is confirmed as expected - base damage will be increased but AP scaling will be decreased. This will signal an end to the massive shield slams we've been seeing on live, but should also improve burst threat on the pull.

Next come the changes to block. There are three, and I confess I'm not sure what the design intent behind the changes is.
- The increase to block chance provided by shield block is being nerfed from 100% to 25%. This shouldn't affect most warriors on live at the moment as avoidance in ICC gear is typically 40-45%, with a minimum 30% block and 5% miss chance. It might be a fairly severe nerf to warriors at level 85, and certainly makes shield block much less effective as a cooldown if total avoidance + block is materially less than 75%. Nevertheless it's not something to worry about yet - we'll find out about tank balancing at 85 in a couple of months' time.
- The second block change is that when you cast shield block, and it takes you over 100% avoidance + block (presumably this "100%" figure should actually read "102.4%" for bosses) then the excess block chance is converted to crit block chance. This is quite nice now, but it's hard to see that at level 85 it's going to be relevant at all. Blizzard have said that avoidance levels in Cata will be lower than today, and so given that we wouldn't expect to be unhittable at level 85 it's not easy to see why this change has been made. It's going to be a slightly weird mechanic if you have mobs of different levels attacking you (eg if you are tanking a boss at level 83 and adds at level 80) since you'll have different crit block levels between the different adds, but that's something that's always been in the game I guess.
- Mastery is being buffed. It now increases block and crit block by 1.5% per point of mastery (up from 1.25%). This makes mastery even more attractive for warriors - with mastery at 1.25% on live at the moment, dodge and parry are probably better for overall mitigation, but mastery is better to avoid damage spikes. This buff might make mastery just outright better than avoidance.

Thirdly, shield wall is being buffed. This is part of an overall adjustment of tanking cooldowns, and brings all four classes into line.

Fourthly, Vigilance is being nerfed, but wrongly. They are removing the 3% damage reduction proportion but leaving the Vengeance transfer. The Vengeance transfer is far far too good and it will be nerfed hard soon.

And finally - we started working on LK heroic last night. I'm not sure if we'll get him, but it's something to keep people interested for the next few weeks. At the end of phase 1 (with all the damage buffs on him) Arthas was meleeing me for 42,000 damage per swing (on 10 man). It's going to be really tough. Best try so far - 71%.

Reforging

2010-10-18T13:23:00.003+01:00

I haven't done any reforging yet. Nevertheless, I have some Thoughts:

1) Stamina is still king

You can't reforge primary stats, including stamina. You can reforge everything else.

I actually think that reforging therefore narrows gearing choices, since in a world without reforging you might have wanted some threat stats such as hit on a gear item, or defence, or in the bright and shiny Cataclysm healing model a ton of +dodge rating might have been superior. You might therefore have worn an item with these stats. Not so now - you can get your threat stats, or your avoidance, by reforging. You can't get stamina so it will still be the case that stamina is better than everything else.

I imagine that there will be a similar rule for most classes where the most useful gear attribute is a primary stat.

2) How much hit is still needed?

**Caution, what follows is based on my understanding of hit mechanics, which is a little rusty.**

The glyph of taunt has gone. I've got about 6% hit I think, which means that since taunt used to use the spell hit table I would therefore think that I had 11% chance of taunt missing a boss. I have not had a taunt miss yet (2 raids so far) so I wonder if the developers have simply made taunt hit all the time, which is something that GC said he might do.

The reason I am musing on this (aside from worrying that I'll miss a tank swap) is that since as a threat stat expertise is twice as good as hit, and I am under the expertise soft cap, perhaps I should be turning some of my hit into expertise. I don't want to do that however if I'm going to muck up my taunting.

3) What is the parry diminishing returns curve?

Dodge, for me, is not as good as parry. Dodge avoids the next attack, whereas parry avoids the next attack and procs Hold the Line. Parry is therefore better.

However, on live pre-4.01 parry had a much more severe diminishing returns curve, meaning that you needed more parry rating to get an effective 1% of parry than you needed of dodge to get an effective 1% dodge. I wonder if that will continue into Cataclysm - if so, it means that gemming and reforging and enchanting dodge will still be better than stacking parry. If not, it means that dodge will be unquestionably worse than parry for me in the expansion.

I still therefore don't really feel like I have enough information to go out and pay cash to change my gear via runeforging. It might be different in Cataclysm if survivability is a massive issue, so we're adding avoidance to everything at the expense of threat, but at present I hope that some clever people at Tankspot and EJ will apply their ginormous brains to get an idea of the mechanics of tanking in Cataclysm.

EDIT - Ah - some of the information may be here.

Some first impressions of tanking post 4.01

2010-10-15T13:28:00.002+01:00

We had a very laid back and addon-less ICC10 run last night. Lots of silly pulls, people not knowing their class changes (hello there Mr DPS DK in blood presence!) and 8 bosses killed. With that in mind, here are some thoughts.

1) Shield slam is amazing. Simply amazing. With a full stack of vengeance and the heavy repercussions talent my shield slams are 16k - 20k during shield block. That's without inner rage. That is also NON-CRIT. I had a 37k non-crit shield slam on Festergut last night with 7 stacks of gastric bloat. The new shield slam is awesome once you stack vengeance to sufficiently high level. Since my other attacks were hitting for up to 7k I think, shield slam is a huge proportion of our dps now and catching those SnB procs is vital. I can't believe they won't nerf this.

2) The new heroic strike is really good - I like the fact that you don't wait for the next weapon swing, but it's just an instant whack in the face that's off the gcd. I have incite so it crits pretty often, and it hits hard enough to feel like a proper meaty attack. I need to get into the rhythm of hitting this button every 6 seconds instead of every 1.5 seconds and deciding when to cleave, but currently it feels like a positive change.

3) I've always liked cleave-type attacks, and with the glyph of cleave being major rather than prime, it's now available for prot warriors. Cleave therefore hits three targets and is pretty great for AoE pulls. Revenge still hits hard and the "revenge cleave" is still lovely for big pulls.

4) Single target threat isn't too bad at all. I didn't have any problems last night once I'd found out where all my buttons were and got my UI in order. It's definitely no longer straightforward to keep aggro on multiple mobs, but if people are following a kill order it's usually ok. By the end of the raid I was no longer losing mobs on AoE pulls, but of course if someone was going single target there would normally get aggro.

5) Rage generation was fine when tanking. When not tanking I still felt like I had enough rage to use a decent spread of abilities, although as ever having to drop revenge from my rotation in those circumstances was annoying.

6) I suggest that you don't bother with rend or blood and thunder, and that you ignore thunderstruck. A cookie cutter 31 points in the prot spec will have 4 utility points - I went for gag order (even though it's not particularly useful at present) and hold the line (which was up about half the time I think last night).

7) Thunderclap's been nerfed quite a lot. The damage is pretty poor (although as noted I haven't specced into thunderstruck) and so even though it does a lot of additional threat you'll need to tab target and cleave to keep aggro.

Some thoughts on the new prot talents

2010-10-14T13:17:00.001+01:00

One thing I've learned from this beta process is to refrain from blogging on mechanics that are not implemented yet. One week you write a brilliant deconstruction of the new ability or mechanic, and the next it is gone. (In my defence however, many of the things I posted on the official forums about have happened - new attack for fury, furious sundering gone as an ability, gushing wound gone, heroic leap usable in combat and in any stance.)

Now however, with the testing process aparently now continuing on live servers with the release of patch 4.01, it's worthwhile putting down some notes on the (hopefully final) talents. Focussing on the prot tree for now:

Rank 1

Toughness is required. Max this out.

Incite is apparently amazing for single target threat, and syncs very well with shield specialisation, see below, and war academy in the arms tree.

Blood and thunder seems too fiddly for me. Assuming it's an AoE pull, once you've charged you won't want to hit rend before your first thunderclap since you won't get AoE aggro, so you'll want to hit it before your second thunderclap. It might be slightly better at level 85 when you can pull using heroic leap, but then at least pulling with charge->thunderclap gives you plenty of initial rage. Much will depend on how out AoE threat pans out in the final numbers, but unless our AoE threat requires running a spec that is focussed on AoE threat, I don't think I'll take this talent. It's probably a decent AoE talent for arms spec warriors though, since thunderclap is their main AoE and they'll normally have rend running anyway.

Rank 2

Shield specialisation is possibly a little overpowered in its current format - bear in mind that with shield block up you will block almost every attack, so this talent provides pretty much infinite rage while you have shield block up. This should allow you pop Inner Rage (once you have it!) and get a few heroic strikes (some of which might be criticals due to incite) in for a big damage boost. It also syncs with heavy repercussions, below. I suggest you try to max this talent out since it is the best "extra rage" talent you can get at present.

Shield mastery is required. Max it out. You may not be aware that our shield block ability has been nerfed - it now only increases block chance rather than block amount, which means that the ability is less useful against weak-hitting attackers but remains very strong against bosses.

Hold the line is an AoE threat talent I think. When you are being hit by multiple enemies at once your likelihood of keeping this up is very much higher, whereas a single enemy hitting you will probably mean that the buff falls off from time to time.

Gag order is a great utility talent for 5 man instances. I remember heroics at 80 when they weren't totally AoE gankfests and this talent is really helpful for gathering caster packs together in 5 man dungeons.

Rank 3

Just take all of these talents. You need all of them. Concussion blow might be a bit weak now, but the stun will be required for levelling and the damage it does has been doubled on the PTR.

Rank 4

Improved Revenge and Devastate are required, obviously.

Impending Victory is an odd talent. Victory rush ("vrush") does 45% of attack power as damage at present, as compared to shield slam which does 100% of attack power (I believe, although possibly shield slam has been weakened recently). On those numbers, using vrush will be a significant dps and tps loss over normal attacks. Added to this is the relatively small heal, and the fact that you can only use it sub-20%, and the talent looks a little expensive. Vrush syncs with a talent in the arms tree that you'll be taking anyway (field dressing) and one that you might also be putting some points in if you are speccing for single target threat (war academy). It's also possible to use the new major glyph of vrush which increases the heal by 50%. If you take all the talents and glyphs that support vrush (and assuming they all stack!), then you might be looking at an ability that heals you for 8-9% of your health and hits for about 52% of attack power, but you can still only use it for at best a fifth of the fight.

Rank 5

Thunderstruck has a great name but is also an AoE only talent. It stacks 5 times, but the buff lasted 20 seconds on the PTR as opposed to the shockwave cooldown of 30 seconds. This means that if you want to keep this buff up on a fight where you aren't doing AoE threat, then you'll need to thunderclap 50% more than is normally required, which is a dps loss. Again, keep an eye on this in case they change the buff duration.

Vigilance is an amazing amazing talent for raiding now. Vengeance is such a huge buff, and afaik we'll be the only tank class to retain vengeance when we don't have aggro. I can't believe they won't nerf this, but for now it will be useless while levelling, useless in heroics and amazing in raids.

Heavy repercussions is a really strong talent. It's even better if you have maxed out shield specialisation talent since while shield block is up you'll probably have inner rage active too. This means your shield slam will be hitting for 230% damage during shield block.

Rank 6

I can't make up my mind on Safeguard. I think it will probably help in 5 mans from time to time, especially since vigilance doesn't transfer threat now. Nevertheless, I think it's probably overbudget at 2 points and it questionable that there will be situations where the ability to intercept a blow will not save your group mate but the 30% damage reduction will. Unless there are 85 heroics where perhaps the boss targets someone other than the main tank with a channelled spell (or something) then I will probably skip it. It's great in certain encounters, but pretty much you might spec for those encounters.

Sword and board is good. Take it.

Rank 7

Shockwave - take it, obviously.

There'll be more to come on this once I've had chance to raid.

Warrior raid buffs in 4.01

2010-10-11T13:20:00.000+01:00

There is an excellent post at Pwnwear about raid buffs and debuffs on the PTR at present. The key facts for warriors are

1) Battle shout changed - this is now +str and +agi instead of +AP. It shares stats with shaman totems and the DK ability horn of winter.

2) Commanding shout changed - this now adds stamina, and shares stats with the priest spell Power Word:Fortitude and the warlock imp.

The effect of this is that if you run with a priest in your raid there is no need to buff commanding shout at all, except perhaps after a combat rez. If you raid with a DK then given the short duration of horn of winter, it's possible that the buff will fall off during the fight if the DK is not paying attention. Since shouts give rage now (20 rage I think) then using battle shout from time to time should ensure that the buff stays up and should give you some extra rage.

End game

2010-10-10T21:02:00.003+01:00

Stance dancing

2010-09-27T13:13:00.002+01:00

Stance dancing means switching between stances to use abilities which are not normally used in your stance. For example a fury warrior (who would normally fight in zerker stance) might wish to use rend (only useable in battle and defensive stances). It is not an easy skill - you need to be able to switch stances, select the new ability, then shift back to your normal stance very quickly. Spending too long switching means a dps loss, and you need to factor in that when you change stances you lose most of your rage.

Stance dancing, while being something the developers say they like as a flavour of the warrior class, is slowly being phased out of the game. Prot warriors no longer need to stance dance to use charge or intercept, and the latest beta build makes pummel useable in battle stance so assuming this makes it to live arms warriors will not need to dance to access their interrupt. Dancing is critical for PvP, but is a neglected skill for PvE. Here are some abilities which a prot warrior needs to stance dance to use:

1) Retaliation

This is a fantastic AoE tanking tool which is criminally underused. For the next 12 seconds any attacker hitting you is treated to a mainhand attack in return, with 20 attacks maximum. On a 4 minute cooldown (with the improved disciplines talent) and useable in battle stance only.

I normally (umm honesty attack incoming, let's say - "normally when I remember") hit retaliation before I charge into a large AoE pull, so the button sequence is

battle stance -> retaliation -> defensive stance -> charge -> thunderclap

You can put out a large amount of AoE damage and threat in such situations. Similarly, if you use it just before hitting Challenging Shout you are very unlikely to lose aggro on any mobs within range.

2) Recklessness

This ability is more useful in single target situations. It makes your next three special attacks crit (not including heroic throw I believe), but at the cost of increasing damage taken by 20% until your three crits have taken place. Again, a 4 minute cooldown (with the improved disciplines talent) and useable in zerker stance only.

The +20% damage taken is scary at first glance, and puts people off, but bear in mind that the debuff only lasts until you have crit three times (about 5 seconds), and you might only expect to take 2 or 3 boss hits in that time. Add to the fact that if you use it on the pull you will probably be pre-hotted and pre-shielded, or with a prayer of mending on you. You will also have shield block available so you can use that to mitigate the extra damage you'll take from using this ability. I believe that shield wall has a shared 12 second cooldown with recklessness and retaliation, so you cannot use shield wall at the same time as recklessness to mitigate the extra damage, but I could be wrong on this. I still think the extra damage shouldn't be a problem though.

Three crits in a row means that your first shield slam will be huge, and you should also be able to get shockwave and revenge crits too. This will give you a very large initial threat lead on a boss.

It's not that well known (it certainly isn't on the tooltip), but this ability also makes you immune to fear. An interesting point that is almost completely useless for prot warriors since when feared you won't be able to shift to zerker stance to use it but nevertheless may come in handy if you are fury spec sometime.

3) Shattering throw

The armour reduction from shattering throw is in addition to the armour reduction from sunder armour. This makes shattering throw a valuable dps cooldown for your raid. Use it during heroism to make yourself very popular with dps warriors, rogues and hunters.

Since it has a cast time, your avoidance will be zero during the cast so you'll take more damage than normal for a couple of seconds but this should only be for one hit given the short casting time and so I don't think that this is a particularly important feature.

4) When not tanking

If you are in a tank swap fight then one of the deadly sins of tanking (ooooh - idea for a blog post!) is to overaggro your fellow tank when it's his or her turn to tank. Generally, Something Bad happens when you do this, at the very least your tanking partner and your healers will know you're a muppet.

Simply shift to battle stance or zerker stance when you aren't tanking to increase the damage you are doing, but reduce the threat of your attacks and reduce the chances of you accidentally overaggroing. This is particularly important for Festergut, since otherwise the massive dps boost you get when offtanking will lead to huge aggro problems for you. Helpfully, it will be easier to get to shattering throw or recklessness during this time, but remember to plan ahead and be ready to shift back to defensive stance well before you need to taunt the boss back.

Dyumedes

2010-09-23T10:46:00.002+01:00

This is Dyumedes.

He's been inactive for a while, but back in Vanilla he was pretty much the most famous tank on our server. I knew him slightly - we have some people in our guild who were pretty well known in the vanilla warcraft community such as Mileena and Griffinheart, and these guys knew Dyu and raided with him from time to time.

He's a hard man to get on with - I know another tank on our server who asked him politely for gearing advice and Dyu simply put him on /ignore without responding. Dyu was raidleader and GM of the top raiding guild on our server back in Vanilla, before his job (he was in the army) meant he had to take a long break from the game.

For all his faults (and he was perfectly polite and pleasant to me), Dyu was and presumably still is a top notch player. I remember Mileena telling me about a time when Dyu came and tanked a ZG run for us. She was seriously impressed I remember - Dyu chain-pulled every group of mobs (this was at a time when crowd control was vital in raiding) until they got to the tiger boss. The tiger boss in ZG had two adds which had to be killed within a few seconds of each other and you tended to split dps and use two tanks plus a dps tank on one of the casters. Rather than assign tanks Dyu just pulled them all and - Mileena's voice dropped here to an awed whisper - Dyu tanked everything himself.

This was a time when thunderclap was only useable in battle stance, so you had to stance dance to use it. You had to press shield block every 6 seconds to prevent yourself being hit by crushing blows. Shield wall was on a 30 minute cooldown. Mages and warlocks in raids regularly had to wand for the first few minutes of an encounter to let the tanks get sufficient aggro on a single target. The phrase "wait for five sunders before dpsing" was a dungeon and raid mantra. There was no revenge cleave, no damage shield no threat No Threat NO THREAT!

The reason I've been thinking of Dyu recently is that I've been reading the beta forums and looking at the changes to tanking we can expect. Apparently AoE threat has been hit very hard, and crowd control is supposed to be becoming more important. We'll also have threat decay, which will mean that we can never slack off in our rotations later in the fight once we have a good threat lead. All of these things are going to make tanking, particularly AoE tanking, much more difficult which is something that's being hailed as positive in the game - an end to the AoE dps zergs of the LK dungeons and a return to the more strategic encounters of the past.

While that's all very well, I wonder how far back we really want to go. Do we want to return to the Vanilla days, when even tanking three mobs could be seen as a major demonstration of skill from one of the server's best?

PP heroic down!

2010-09-19T21:54:00.004+01:00

Stupid failtank forgot to FRAPS or screenshot it. Dammit.

Amazing fight, cheers on teamspeak at the end. We rule! etc. I'm now 9/12 on heroic, with the guild as a whole being 10/12 (I haven't killed Blood Princes heroic).

We are just 3 boss kills away from getting the guild's first Frostwyrm. We tried the Sindragosa normal achievement tonight using the zerg method and got close. We were unlucky on the tombs and I was too cocky as regards the timing of blistering cold. I think it's doable.

EDIT - Oh, and I am now swaggering around with an improved organ...!

Conflict

2010-09-17T13:11:00.000+01:00

I am conflicted.

Cataclysm is coming out soon (probably too soon for me to get the Frostwyrm mount, grumble grumble) and worgen, frankly, look cool. I want one. The question is what to do.

Should I simply race-change my human warrior into a worgen? This has the advantage that I'd get to keep the history of the character, which is something I wanted to do with my current main - having played a different class in each previous expansion I admire people who've kept the same main character for four or five years and intended to keep this warrior toon as my main permanently. I could RP it a little, and get my doughty human warrior bitten by a werewolf.

(Interlude - I am a secret roleplayer. I don't tell anyone or roleplay in game, I just roll it round the inside of my head. I have a back story all worked out for all of my characters which I am too shy to share with the world.)

On the other hand, that would mean I won't get to play through the starting area which would be a shame. It might also be fun to level a new character to experience the reworked Azeroth. The problem with that is that there's no point in levelling a caster worgen. None at all. Worgen are savage beasts with massive pointy teeth. There's no way that a worgen is going to hang around at the back casting spells. Worgen should be rogues or warriors, that's all. I've levelled a rogue before and have no desire to do so again. So an alt warrior (probably fury, since it fits with the feel of the worgen race) is in the post in Cataclysm. Everblue will go arms/prot.

Raiding update - our best try on PP heroic is 12%. We're getting pretty close to a kill here...

Looking back at Northrend raiding

2010-09-01T13:38:00.003+01:00

Some thoughts on the last couple of years.

Favourite instance

Ulduar without question. The instance is stunning to look at and gets off to an atmospheric and impressive start with the vehicle fight. There is nothing else in the game to match the look of Kologarn, XT002 or Mimiron. I also like the genuinely new types of encounter - particularly Mimiron and Yogg Saron. These are really interesting and well put together.

Most difficult encounter

The encounter I've wiped most on without clearing was Anub'arak hard mode in ToC10. We stopped trying it when ICC came out, so while we could have gone back and stomped all over it with our new gear, we haven't. It's not really the same without the challenge I think.

We tried the fight for about four raids without success, and came close a few times. We would regularly come unstuck in the kiting phase with stupid deaths - people would use aggro-dropping abilities without warning the raid, so the boss chooses a new target without resetting speed, or people would try absurdly over-ambitious kiting strategies, or people would die to the adds. It was so frustrating.

In phase three I don't think we ever really nailed the healing - we had too many people being healed too high so that boss healing was massive.

In context though, Anub was nowhere near as difficult as Arthas. Arthas was a worthy end boss for the expansion and probably the toughest fight I've ever seen in any expansion.

Least fun encounter

Ugh, Malygos. Having to move the boss constantly away from the sparks, while allowing the melee to stand in the power circles, and keeping aggro ahead of massively buffed dpsers. An absolute nightmare. Once you'd done all that, you were at the mercy of people not dying on the drake phase, which they invariably did.

With hindsight, part of the problem could have been that prot warrior threat generation was dreadful in 3.0 warcraft. If we'd had the dps buffs we have now, keeping aggro could have been much easier.

Most fun encounter

Faction champions I think. My job was always to bully the healers with stuns, interrupts and fears. It was an excellent fight and you really felt that you were contributing if you could tie up one of the healers more or less constantly (mwahaha I own you Mr Priest).

I like fights where spell reflect is important too.

Most rewarding boss to tank

XT002 hard mode / Anub'rekan. We got this achievement around the same time as ToC came out, so we were all still in ilevel 219 and 226 gear. We solo tanked it, meaning that I needed to keep aggro on the boss, and also grab the sparks when they spawned. We also (and this is perhaps my favourite part about the fight) had a *clever strategy* for the fight, which involved special positioning for people who got lightbombed. It was my first hardmode fight, and was the time when my tanking stepped up a bit to take on the MT role in progression content.

Anub'rekan is in there because it represents one of my fondest memories of the expansion. It was my first WotLK raid boss, and with my 21k unbuffed health, I just could not survive leeching swarm. However fast I ran I would always get a few ticks and the poison would kill me before the kite was over. So I made a plan - I got one of my healers to stand 25 yards away, and I macroed intervene onto her to a key. I then immediately intervened onto her to escape the swarm and avoid getting any leeching swarm ticks. I love things like that - and that is what ties XT002 hard mode and Anub'rekan together - both fights we succeeded by coming up with a special strategy to beat a particular mechanic. This is perhaps one of my favourite aspects of raiding. It must make it frustrating to be in one of my raids, since I'm always wanting to try some new tactic or strategy, or trying a new positioning idea.

Maybe raidleading in 10s is like playing an RTS game on a grander scale. We have units (raid members) and between us we come up with a plan of attack for them. My RTS units rarely go afk for a smoke though...

Proudest moment

The LK kill. After about 85 wipes and 3 months it was a little emotional.

Tanking Saurfang 10 heroic

2010-08-27T14:09:00.001+01:00

Some random hints and tips for warriors at tanking this fight. People have been facerolling Saurfang on normal for a very long time and it's easy to forget the nuances of the fight. Actually there is quite a lot for tanks to do here - you don't need to move much, but everything you do has to be perfect, or you wipe.

We run with two healers for this fight, which means that you need to have killed the boss before he casts mark of blood for the third time. This means doing everything possible to minimise the amount of blood power gained by the boss.

- Let the other guy start tanking the boss at the start of the fight. The reason for this is that Saurfang's abilities are on very strict timers and therefore you can predict when he debuffs the tank - as you know you need to swap tanks when he debuffs his current target. There are two debuff points - after he casts boiling blood, and just after he summons the blood beasts. The tank who starts the fight will be debuffed just after boiling blood, and the OT will be debuffed just after the blood beasts arrive. You will need to be free to do other things once the blood beasts are up (see below) so you want the other tank to take the boss at that stage. That means that you want to be the OT.

- When the blood beasts arrive, immediately shockwave one of the beasts ("B1"). It's important that your shockwave does not hit the second beast ("B2"), since you want B2 to aggro on a ranged kiter. If you stun B2 next to your melee dps it might get hit by cleaves etc and aggro the melee, leading to a massive blood power boost and a probable wipe.

- Have all your dps apart from the B2 kiter nuke B1. You should help (since by now your tanking partner will be tanking the boss). When shockwave is about to wear off, use concussive blow. This will mean that B1 should be dead before your concussive blow wears off (8 seconds of stun should be enough to kill it). All your dps should then head off to kill B2. If it looks like B2 is going to get into melee range of your kiter you should taunt B2, allowing a few seconds more for your dps to kill it.

- Diminishing returns on taunts appears to be turned on for this boss. What this means is that if you accidentally gain aggro when you shouldn't it's a possible wipe, since when the tank taunts back the next tank swap will be in the diminishing returns window and will have a high chance of missing. It also means that if you are a warrior you should not use mocking blow as part of your rotation, as I did (/shame), since this is likely to stuff things up for your tanking partner.

- If you have paladins in the raid they can cast Hand of Protection on people who get boiling blood to cut down on the amount of blood power gained by the boss. Clearly they shouldn't cast it on tanks or on your assigned blood beast kiter.

- When you are tanking Saurfang you shouldn't use shockwave or concussive blow, or they won't be available for when the adds appear, leading to a wipe.

When tanking Saurfang during frenzy you should ensure that you have a cooldown up (or at least available). Good luck!

Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion...

2010-08-17T13:07:00.002+01:00

Since killing LK a couple of weeks back, I've been working my way through the heroic modes in ICC10. Currently I've beaten the first six bosses, and I must say it really adds a great deal of excitement to the encounters. In fact, some of the encounters feel like the heroic mode is the "proper" version of the fight - particularly Rotface and Festergut where the heroic modes have some extra voice acting, and new features which are implemented in an amusing way.

I think that LK heroic might be beyond us given the extreme difficulty of the fight (I think only one guild on my server has beaten it so far), but we will certainly try to get the Glory of the Icecrown Raider achievement, which has a special dragon mount as a reward.

The major roadblocks are likely to be Sindragosa heroic and the Sindragosa achievement, both of which look like an absolute swine, but we managed to get one of the harder achievements last night - Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion.

This requires you to complete the encounter without using the abomination's slow ability on the various oozes and clouds which spawn during the fight. What this means is that you are going to get hit by the adds. A lot.

Positioning is vital. When the green oozes spawn then you need to remember that the AoE damage when it reaches its target is split between all players in range. We split the raid into two groups for the oozes - the melee dps and tank in one position, and the ranged dps and healers in another (we used two healers). We normally killed the green ooze before it exploded for the second time, meaning that raid damage was manageable. The orange oozes are tougher, and you need to remember that damage from these mobs is not split between nearby players - thus you need to be spread out when these spawn. You also need to be aware of the DoT effect on the person that the orange ooze is targeting - that person will need quite a lot of healing while the ooze chases them. We used heroism in phase 2 to get the oozes out of the way as quickly as possible, and once you get into phase 3 it's the same as normal (except you won't have heroism available, so your execution needs to be better).

It's really quite fun, and makes the old, familiar fight a lot more interesting.

It is done

2010-08-08T20:44:00.003+01:00

Months and months too late, after guild splits, cancelled raids, teams breaking up and people being absent due to holidays/boredom/starcraft2...

Damage done vs DPS

2010-08-06T14:27:00.003+01:00

The Pugnacious Priest is working out some guild issues in her blog.

Basically, she's getting criticised because her dps is too low (although I think 11k is pretty damn nice), and she responds to this criticism by pointing out that her total damage done is not too shabby - in fact total damage done comes in at 7th or 8th in a 25 man raid.

While this is valid to an extent, and certainly appears to have convinced some of her blog commentors, I'm not sure I agree that damage done > dps all the time. For this to be true it implies that if you die it must be your own fault - you have sacrificed some dps and instead gained some extra life time during which you have inflicted extra damage. This analysis neglects two points -

1) It's not always your fault if you die!

Sometime's it's the tanks' fault for not picking up a mob fast enough, sometimes you had the right to expect a heal from your raid healer but for whatever reason you didn't get one, sometimes a dispel is missed, sometimes you are the target of a nasty blood boil-type ability which requires massive healing to survive and you don't receive said healing. In any of those cases your total damage done might not be great, but dps is a better measure of your abilities at such times.

2) Burst is valuable

Many endgame encounters these days involve a requirement for burst dps. Halion is an honourable exception, but think of the val'kyr in the Arthas fight, the iceblocks in Sindragosa, the oozes in Professor Putricide, etc. In these encounters the ability to pull out all the stops for a short period of very high dps is crucial. In these encounters a high dps player will be more valuable, because they will shine in those short periods.

I agree that a dpser who can't be taught to stay out of the fire is useless, but that alone does not make damage done superior to dps as a metric for analysing raid performance.

In the case of the Pugnacious Priest however, she's screenshotted a log which covers 12 attempts. This should even out unlucky deaths (you wouldn't expect to die unluckily every fight), which means that there is more likely to be something wrong if a high dps player is consistently poor when total damage is considered. In such cases there's the possibility that there is some issue with their survival skills - perhaps they are neglecting them in favour of dps, which doesn't seem to be helping their progress.

Vacation

2010-07-23T16:12:00.001+01:00

On holiday for a bit. Back in a few weeks.

WTB fingers

2010-07-21T15:59:00.003+01:00

The latest warrior changes are out. Some really fun and interesting mechanics, fury gets its new attack (and animation!), but my first thought is "Where am I going to get the action bar space?"

For example, as Prot your normal rotation will be a priority system as follows:

Revenge > Shield Slam > Shockwave > Devastate

At 20% or less boss health you will probably mix in Victory Rush procs for the self heal, and at high rage situations the intention seems to be we will burn off rage with Heroic Strike. This means our normal rotation will require 6 different attacks.

In addition, we will need to apply Thunderclap and Demo Shout to the boss every 30 seconds, plus Rend for maximum dps/aggro. That's a further 3 buttons.

Furthermore, we have seven defensive buttons - Shield Wall, Last Stand, Shield Block, Spell Reflect, Enraged Regen, plus up to two clickable trinkets.

All of the above buttons will be needed every fight. We will also need to manage our buffs - Battle Shout and Commanding Shout, which being of short duration normally need to be refreshed several times each fight, as well as being used to give rage. We'll need Vigilance where you can see it, since that needs to be up all the time.

We will also need to use our "utility" buttons - Charge, Intercept (which you can no longer macro with Charge as /castsequence macros are being killed in Cata), Intervene, Heroic Leap and Heroic Throw. Don't forget Intimidating Shout and Disarm, which are sometimes useful, and Cleave.

All of those buttons will be needed by us on a regular basis and will need to be somewhere we can click on them in a second. That makes

Rotation buttons (6) + Debuffs (3) + Defensive cooldowns (7) + Buffs (3) + Utility buttons (8) = 27 buttons, all of which should be bound to a key.

One other mechanic in Cata will be an increased requirement to stance dance - currently in the beta berserker rage is only useable in zerker stance (edit - no it isn't! datamined error by MMO Champ!).

That is frankly crazy. WTB more fingers.

EDIT - Also I forgot racial skills such as the snare break, Concussive Blow, Challenging Shout, Taunt (!!) and Mocking Blow! Including Berserker Rage and Bloodrage that makes 34.

New Fury macro for Cata

2010-07-14T13:53:00.003+01:00

Might this work?

/cast slam
/cast victory rush

If you have either your slam proc or your victory rush proc available then it will use one of them. If victory rush works out to be a more powerful attack than slam maybe swap the order round in the macro.

Also - thinking about it - at present victory rush costs zero rage. This is necessary because it's an opener and you need to use it at the start of a fight when (you guessed it) you have zero rage. Does this mean that one of Fury's three main attacks in Cata will be resource-free? Or will they change the talent to allow victory rush in combat, but make it cost (say) 10 rage?

New talent trees

2010-07-14T12:43:00.005+01:00

The new talent trees are now available. Stuff that caught my eye from the Prot tree:

1) Rend sychs with the new talent Blood and Thunder.

This looks like an interesting new mechanic and it seems as if the new opening moves will be charge/leap -> rend -> thunder clap. The choice of opener will be interesting because leap firstly does not generate rage, and secondly does an AoE stun so for two seconds you will not be taking rage from damage. Leap might do enough AoE threat (in fact it probably will, thinking about it) that AoE threat will not be a problem, but nevertheless the tank can expect to be rage starved for a couple of seconds and may not have sufficient rage to immediately follow up with a rend and a thunderclap. If charge is used as an opener then dps will have to be aware that the tank will probably not thunderclap immediately after the charge, and so will do only proximity aggro for the first couple of seconds on all mobs bar the first. It might be easier to peel mobs off the tank if the dpsers immediately open up with AoE or a heal lands straight away.

Is rend currently useable in defensive stance? It seems so according to Wowhead, although I have never hit it as a Prot warrior. I just assumed this was a beta change, but it looks like I was wrong.

2) Damage shield buffed

This now does 20% of attack power, so probably triple its damage on live.

3) +healing effects

We have a talent to increase healing on us by 6% - Field Dressing. This is in the arms tree and will probably be required (or it should be required by anyone who understands EH). This is an interesting and welcome new talent, but unfortunately means that if you want to take Field Dressing, Blood Craze can only be accessed with exactly 31 points in Prot, and I couldn't make a good prot spec with less than 32 points in Prot.

I think we do need to know whether Blood Craze will stack with the enrage effect that procs from Improved Defensive Stance. This will inform much of our talent choices.

4) Vitality buffed

We get a 15% buff to stamina now, up from 12%.

5) Vigilance no longer removes threat

As anticipated, Vigilance grants Vengeance rather than stealing threat. This is an excellent change, although there's no sign of Vigilance allowing Revenge procs, which is a shame. Hoping that changes before 4.0 hits.

6) Heroic Leap can be used in combat

It also doesn't seem to require a particular stance. This seems good for Fury Warriors, although with a cooldown of 2 minutes it's only going to be used more than once per fight on raid bosses I guess.

The downside of the new abilities is that together with rend this is another button for prot warriors to hit. We will need to find room for two new buttons on our action bars, with rend in particular probably being something that will be used fairly regularly. That's not going to be easy.

In addition, with the promised demise of /castsequence macros, the macro that chooses between charge and intercept based on the charge cooldown will no longer work. This is therefore a third button to include on the interface somewhere.

7) Sweep and clear

This new talent doesn't look very interesting at all - I can't see many people taking this and I'd be very surprised if this makes it to live.

8) DPS specs

Arms seems to have got a lot of love and I like Lambs to the Slaughter very much, although it's questionable how much dps this will add. I think this is a talent for EJ to do some work on, because it's not clear to me how the calculations would work and someone will have to sit and whack the dummy for a few minutes to see the effect on white swing speed.

The emphasis on enrages for Fury spec is a little odd, will be difficult to balance and it's really disappointing that we don't get a new attack to replace whirlwind. Victory rush is a boring proc attack, exactly the same as Slam, and I think the spec has lost quite a lot of its flavour. The Single Minded Fury talent is unexciting as ever (if I wanted to dual wield one handed weapons I'd roll a rogue).

It also appears the Blizzard have dropped the Gushing Wound idea, meaning that at present warriors are I believe the only class to get two new spells instead of three. Worse than this, one of the new spells isn't really a spell, just a balancing adjustment to our rage pool and damage.

Summary

The prot changes look good to me. There are a bunch of new abilities and interactions to consider and the tree looks attractive - there are difficult decisions over where to spend points.

Arms now looks the better of the two dps specs, with Fury looking particularly thin. Unless there are improvements to Fury, I'll look to play Arms in Cata I think.

Finally!

2010-07-13T12:52:00.001+01:00

The raid team I formed after my guild split up is finally coming together into a strong group. We downed Sindragosa last night, after I think two or three wipes where our new MT was learning the fight. It was my first kill (my previous raid team had killed her on a night when I wasn't present, and then we rolled the raid ID forward on LK) and it was a really clean kill.

Some stuff that made the fight easier -

- Two tanks in frost resist gear. This made it possible to go to 10 or more stacks of the debuff before the tanks swap. It meant there was less running around, less drama, and lower overall tank damage.

- Aspect of the Pack. We ran with this on for most of the fight - the only person who ever might get dazed is the tank, and both of our tanks had ways to escape it on a tank swap - I would intervene a player or charge an iceblock, while the druid would shapeshift. To prevent problems positioning the boss, the Aspect should be turned off during an air phase and then turned back on when the boss has been positioned correctly. The Aspect trivialised the boss's death grip ability, and I don't think anyone got hit by this the entire night, whereas normally we've had people reacting too slowly, or getting surprised by it in phase 3. To avoid any doubt - the boss's AoE does not proc the Aspect daze.

- Melee on icetombs. We only had one melee character - a ret paladin. In phase 3 we had him on tombs full time to ensure they went down fast enough.

- The boss does a really annoying thing after each death grip - she repositions herself by walking towards the tank (even if the tank is within her hitbox) until the tank is at the centre of her hitbox. This has the effect of spinning the dragon around so she is often facing the raid, and means that the dragon gets tanked further and further away from the raid as the fight goes on. This can be dealt with by tanking the dragon standing as close to the centre of her hitbox as you can, and then backing away slightly after she repositions herself so that she is tanked in almost the same spot after each death grip.

It was a real "phew" moment. Sindragosa is a tough fight and even our team 1 has problems with it. I was glad to (finally!) get the kill, and to get it in a way which bodes well for our LK attempts.

We tried LK later, and since we were without a DK tank or a rogue to fan-tricks the ghouls, we struggled getting all the small adds to the OT. The OT (me) used vigilance on the MT and tried to taunt the ghouls one at a time, but I was losing aggro to the healers before they reached me, which was infuriating. All of the LK guides I've seen suggest that you don't need the small adds on the OT to make the disease stronger, you can just stack the disease on the shamblers and have the MT tank the boss and the ghouls all at once, but it's not how I've always done it.

I need to give it some thought before Friday.

Last Stand

2010-07-11T20:16:00.002+01:00

One of the fun things about playing a plate class is that if you happen to be dpsing and the tank dies then very occasionally you can swing into action and save the day.

It happened on Friday in ICC against the Blood Princes. The MT is tanking the flame guy and the shock guy, but bites the dust. I grab a shield and tanking weapon, activate defensive stance, hit taunt, hit shield wall, after a few seconds taunt the second mob and that's me baby - tanking two raid bosses as fury!

There is the sound behind me of two healers having heart attacks, but I ignore their whining, tell them to man up, and we take the bosses from 30% to a kill! I then do a lot of /flex-ing in raid chat.

Revenge idea

2010-07-09T12:46:00.002+01:00

On the soon-to-be-extinct official forums you still get the occasional gem of feedback. Today's is a poster asking for

"A way to cast Revenge when not the taking damage - e.g. "when the player with Vigilance takes damage, there is now a 20% chance to allow the use of your Revenge ability" or something similar. One reason protection warr. dps is so much lower when not taking damage is because we lose Revenge, which has become our hardest hitting ability."

GC's response is

"I think this is a valid point"

Yes! This would improve the prot warrior's offtanking rotation massively - Revenge is cheap (since rage is in short supply when offtanking) and hits like a truck. Linking it with Vigilance is clever because it keeps the unique flavour of Revenge.

I believe the current iteration of Vigilance is also to allow the Vengeance buff to develop too, so again we will have a way to keep our AP high when offtanking. One of the great weaknesses of warrior tanking is our offtank dps, and both of these changes would make a big dent in the problem.

I hope very much that GC and the rest of the developers give some thought to this idea.

Mastery rating on gear

2010-07-05T13:34:00.002+01:00

A quote from Eyonix a couple of months back:

Here’s how the system works: As you spend points in a given talent tree, you’ll receive three different passive bonuses specific to that tree. The first bonus will increase your damage, healing, or survivability, depending on the intended role of the tree. The second bonus will be related to a stat commonly found on gear desirable to you, such as Haste or Crit. The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree -- meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear.

Protection warriors have three masteries at present

- Damage reduction
- Vengeance
- Critical block

According to MMO-champion's Cataclysm warrior preview, the damage reduction is capped at 8.01%, and vengeance (hereafter referred to in this blog as "venge") is capped at 5% damage taken. This leaves critical block chance as increasing depending upon the amount of the mastery stat on gear.

Here's a picture of some new gear with mastery on it.

So what does mastery do for prot warriors then? Well, it's block value, essentially, isn't it? It makes our blocks bigger. It is therefore useless against spell damage and against bleeds, and it is RNG-based. With block now mitigating a fixed percentage in Cata it may be that larger blocks are valuable - certainly I normally block 2-5k damage per hit, whereas if the Cata block model was used I'd be blocking around 5-10k. To a certain extent the value or otherwise of RNG-based mitigation stats such as block and dodge will depend upon whether or not Blizzard's new healing model works.

The new healing model is for the tank not to be in immediate danger of dying in a 4 second window, so casters can wait to see if the tank takes a hit before deciding whether to heal. Healers therefore don't need to be spamming the tank constantly or at least can be using a small, mana-efficient heal rather than a powerful, expensive heal. If that's right then block and dodge might be useful, and mastery as a stat might be desireable.

Currently though it looks as if I'll be searching for stamina and armour on my gear, rather than mastery rating .

Back on track

2010-06-29T16:50:00.001+01:00

The blog's been a bit light for the last few weeks. Partly because this is because I'm playing less warcraft, and partly this is because I've been dealing with the aftermath of the guild shenanigans and doing GM stuff.

When the guild split we lost our entire "ICC10 team 1", which was also the heart of our 25 man team. This included two of our guild's three MTs, plus two of our strongest healers, and our two best dps. Some people I liked very much ended up leaving, and I'll miss them.

We've had to start again, and are now a 10 man guild. My 10 man team, which had been on LK at about 20%, got split into pieces. The main piece is now our first team, or T1, and they finally got the LK kill (without me, the bastards), and are now 4/12 in hard modes. I decided to try to get a second team up and running, T2. This new team involves currently five or six mains, and some of the guild's better alts.

I'd never really understood before how much people's performance drops on their second character. Some people who are very strong on their main characters simply do not seem to be able to cut it when raiding on their alts. My new team has had some really really disappointing raids, and it's been quite frustrating. I have been concentrating on picking a consistent group, and it finally seems like we are getting some results at last and are turning into a decent team.

We killed 10/12 this reset, and I hope for better next week. I would be really disappointed if the guild split meant that I'd lost my chance to kill Arthas, but I think it's turned out for the best for the guild as a whole. The atmosphere is a lot happier now and people seem to be cheerful again.

Grass is greener?

2010-06-21T13:10:00.002+01:00

I've been levelling a (blood spec) DK tank. It's interesting to see the differences between a blood DK and a warrior, although I understand that frost and unholy specs play a little differently.

Firstly, I am amazed at how overpowered the DK is in solo content. I can take on 6 or 7 mobs of the same level or greater and come out with full health. The self healing is really something special. I can easily solo elites of higher level (orange to me). Possibly one of the reasons that there are so many bad max-level DKs is that the DK is so very easy to level - run in, drop a DnD, spread your diseases (optional), death strike when possible to restore health.

Disease management is annoying when tanking. The diseases don't seem to last that long or be autorefreshed (or maybe I haven't picked up the talent or ability that refreshes them yet). Keeping multiple mobs diseased via pestilence is something that often gets lost during chaotic fights.

It's also annoying that you need to press four buttons to do decent AoE damage - frost strike, plague strike, pestilence, blood boil. That's 6 seconds for impatient dps to pull aggro from you. DnD is great, but it's on a long cooldown so is not always available for every pull or if adds arrive late in the fight. Warriors may complain that DnD is better than thunderclap, and indeed it is better in theory, but thunderclap is available every six seconds and hits hard enough to get the mobs onto you when you use it. Frost DKs get howling blast, so I guess this is something unique to blood.

I wonder how the rune changes will alter rotations for DKs in Cata. I haven't read anything recently but I recall the intent was to slow down rune recharge times by only allowing one rune of each type to recharge at any one time. Certainly DnD looks absurdly expensive for three runes if the rate of recharge is essentially halved - it will mean I think that you can't use any more rune-based attacks for 10 seconds afterwards since it would put a frost, blood and unholy rune on cooldown. Perhaps rune strike going onto the GCD will help DK tanks have a button to hit in those circumstances. In addition if your diseases last 15 seconds and you are only going to get a frost rune every 10 seconds, most of your frost runes will need to be spent on keeping Frost Fever up I think. This means death strike could be a bit of a luxury.

DPS is insane as usual - I am in tanking gear, with no dps talents outside the cookie cutter, only the heirloom shoulders and I am pretty much always top of the meters, and even single target it's possible to pull 500 dps or so. Nerf the buggers!

DKs have some amazing abilities - strangulate and chains of ice, for example - which seem to be lacking in other tanks and I think their "toolkit" is probably the best of any class other than the warrior. The two-resource system is just a bit too unwieldy to be comfortable - I see many complaints about the resources not being there when you need them for interrupts and for defensive cooldowns, and personally I find the requirement to have a blood rune available for rune tap, for example, to be potentially fatal.

My overall reaction is that there is just something a bit too clever about the DK class for me. I'm enjoying the levelling curve, but I don't think that my warrior is in danger of being replaced any time soon.

Busy week

2010-06-03T13:41:00.003+01:00

1) Old guild split after I left.

2) Various people left.

3) Am now back in old guild, but promoted to GM.

4) LK still not dead.

Busy week.

Touch the sun

2010-05-27T13:21:00.001+01:00

So I haven't been posting for a while because I had this brilliant "Guide to tanking the Lich King" post written, but, uh, we haven't killed him yet. We are consistently in the 20% range, but can't seem to get the last phase down.

And it seems that the kill is a ways off now, because my guild is in the process of a painful split. The personal differences between the various groups in the guild just got too much to bear, we were losing people all over the place, and there have been quite nasty moments in gchat and on the forum. What's worse, there was no push from the officers to fix anything (especially since some of them were the problem).

I decided to try to split the guild. I've set up a new guild called Icarus, and invited some old friends from around the server. I felt such a bastard for doing this - I'd been in my previous guild for nearly 5 years, and there is a core of players I've known for nearly all that time. It remains to be seen whether enough people will come so that we can organise a regular 10 man raid team but we'll see. I hope so - we have I think 6 or 7 members at the moment, plus I think I can rely on a few people from other guilds to come along too.

Still, everything changes I guess.

Stay on target...

2010-05-18T13:50:00.002+01:00

Our best try at Arthas 10 so far is 38%. We have phase 1 and the transition phases nailed. We are pretty good at the Val'kyr phases, and hopefully we'll get a few really solid final phase attempts on Friday.

Each raid we get a little bit closer...

Last Word

2010-05-14T14:13:00.003+01:00

I was called in to dps in one of my guild's 25 man raids last night and picked up the Last Word, which no-one else wanted and would otherwise have been sharded.

I've been trying to decide whether this weapon is any good or not. To compare, I am currently using The Facelifter, and I have Crusader's Glory which I might use for EH fights such as Saurfang heroic (if we ever get there). Leaving aside Crusader's Glory for the moment, and on the assumption that the Last Word proc has 100% uptime (which I believe it has), essentially the decision comes down to

Last Word http://www.wowhead.com/item=50179
1.8 speed
+21.1 dps
+12 stamina
+60 strength
+300 healing received

The Facelifter http://www.wowhead.com/item=51010
1.6 speed
+41 defence rating
+41 parry rating
+36 expertise rating

I think that the extra weapon dps and the harder devastates which derive from the strength (120 attack power), the weapon dps and the slower speed will be outweighed by the loss of expertise rating and the chance for fewer heroic strikes. So as a threat weapon, I think The Facelifter wins out although there is probably not very much in it.

The next consideration is defence. I use the two ilevel 264 crafter armour pieces and neither has +defence on it. I am about 20 defence over the cap, and so replacing The Facelifter with Last Word means that I will need to start gemming for defence. On the assumption that I will need to replace two +30 stam gems with +10 def / +15 stamina gems, and both of those new green gems will allow me to complete a +6 stamina socket bonuses (which I think is right), the overall effect of losing the defence rating is that I lose 21 defence rating and 19 stamina. Using that to restate the above gives me the following

Last Word
+60 strength (= 30 block value)
+300 healing received

The Facelifter
+6 stamina
+21 defence rating
+41 parry rating

The 6 stamina is trivial - 65 health or so, and so is the block value. We are therefore comparing avoidance on The Facelifter with the +health buff on Last Word.

The efficacy of the health buff is hard to measure and it comes down to the thorny old question of why tanks die. At present I never go from 100% to 0% in one hit. It simply does not happen. When I die it is often from a series of hits (soul reaper + melee on LK, or a string of unavoided hits on Festergut are the only times I can remember recently). Quite often my death lasts 3 or 4 seconds and is along the lines of - big hit - big hit - little heal - big hit - dead. The point is that I almost always get a heal of some kind during the burst period which leads to my death, be it an earth shield bubble popping, or a renew tick, or something similar. The +heals buff supplied by Last Word would be helpful in that scenario as follows (on the assumption that my healer is a holy priest, as she is now):

- Each renew tick would heal for an extra 200 or so (my rough maths based on EJ's overall coefficient of 3.3)
- A holy priest's flash heal would heal for an extra 320 -ish (EJ)

So on that basis, on the assumption that during the period of burst damage you get a renew tick and a flash heal the +health buff would be worth about 520 extra health, or about 47 stamina.

The +heal effect is broadly like +armour because you need less healing to go from an injured state into a state where you can survive the next hit. It might help if you think of it as an armour effect which is proportional to healing taken (and you don't know the healing taken because it will vary from occasion to occasion - you have to estimate based on what is reasonable).

There's a great quote about this weapon on Maintankadin

"the RNG of avoidance fails me roughly ~55% of the time; my healers, however, rarely fail me"

This makes sense to me - my healers normally manage to get a heal in on me, even if it's a small heal. Anything that makes that small heal better is essentially EH.

And there, I've made my decision! Once I've sorted out my defence stats, I'll be using this I think.

Shield specialisation

2010-05-06T14:18:00.003+01:00

If you assume that at present the standard raid tanking spec includes deep wounds, then there are only a few spare points to throw around. I personally consider improved disciplines to be baseline too, which means that one of the key decisions that tanks make when speccing is whether or not they want to max out shield specialisation. Two points in this talent are required, and it often comes down to whether you want to add a further three talent points, or whether you want to go for three points in focussed rage instead.

In my opinion shield specialisation is unquestionably better for progression fights, whereas focussed rage might be superior for heroics and farm content.

My reasoning is that firstly shield specialisation provides mitigation. Tanking is all about taking less damage, right? Taking 1600 block value, and bearing in mind the 60% chance for critical block, you have roughly a 1% chance per swing to reduce melee damage by 1600 and a 2% chance per swing to reduce melee damage by 3200. You can refine this further by excluding avoided attacks and attacks which are already blocked - suppose dodge chance of 6%, parry of 21%, block of 16% and miss of 10%. This means that, assuming the boss swing connects, you have about a 2% chance to reduce boss damage by 1600 and a 4% chance to reduce boss damage by 3200.

Tank gearing is all about taking lots of small numbers then adding these together to make big numbers - lots of small mitigation abilities combine together to provide a significant degree of protection. I think the extra block chance provides meaningful extra mitigation.

In order for focussed rage to be better than maxing out shield specialisation, it needs to provide a good enough rage boost such that we are happy to forego the extra mitigation. So let's look at the benefits of focussed rage.

The first point to note is that rage is capped at 100. Suppose I have 100 rage. I use 3 abilities, reducing my rage to 40. The boss then hits me so hard that it would be worth 80 rage to me, but since I have 40 rage my rage gain is capped at 60. Note that focussed rage has been precisely zero benefit to me in that period. If I had specced into focussed rage I would have had 49 rage after having used my three abilities, so my rage gain on being hit by the boss would have been capped at 51 instead. I would have had 9 extra rage as a result of using focussed rage, but this extra rage would have been wasted as soon as the boss hit me.

"Aha!" you might say, "but what if you avoid the boss's attack?" Well yes, if I were to avoid a long string of the boss's attacks there is the possibility that I might save enough rage from focussed rage to get an extra attack when I would otherwise have been rage starved. Bear in mind however that avoided attacks also grant you rage under the shield specialisation talent.

For the purposes of this example let's assume that the boss hits you every 1.6 seconds (1.8 is the norm in ICC I think), you have a 1.6 second swing speed on your weapon, and your reaction times are not great so you press a GCD-limited attack such as devastate every 1.6 seconds. Thus you have 2 attacks - heroic strike and a GCD attack - for every incoming boss attack. Focussed rage saves you 6 rage between the boss's swings, whereas if you avoid the boss's attack you gain 3 extra rage from shield specialisation in that time. Therefore if you have a string of say 3 avoided attacks, which is pretty rare these days, taking focussed rage would have gained you just 9 extra rage over maxing shield specialisation - not even enough for a devastate. That's 9 rage over just under 5 seconds too, and if you hit revenge (5 rage), shield slam (20 rage) and devastate (15 rage) in that time, plus three heroic strikes (36 rage), you would still have rage left anyway.

So, in short, focussed rage is pretty useless when you are regularly getting whacked over 100 rage by a boss. Where it comes into its own however is when you are not getting whacked by the boss - when the boss is casting and when you are the OT in a tank swap fight. One of the most annoying things about the LK fight is running out of rage when you avoid the hit before he starts channeling something, and then you have four seconds of him casting before you start getting rage again. When the boss is not hitting you shield specialisation gives you nothing at all, and focussed rage shines.

So there you have it - shield specialisation gives a mitigation benefit that is not trivial in my view. When you are getting hit by a raid boss there is not much difference between the two. When for whatever reason the boss is not hitting you then focussed rage is a significant dps boost.

Your choice is whether you want the mitigation, or some extra dps when not getting hit. I have chosen the former.

EDIT - Corrected my napkin maths!

Vengeance

2010-04-30T15:00:00.001+01:00

"Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking."

I've been thinking about this a little bit. This will mean that tank dps scales with HP - so 10 stamina also provides 1 attack power. I believe that 10 stamina also means 1 strength for paladins, so they'll get 1 strength and 1 attack power from 10 stamina. I don't really understand paladins, so I'll leave that for now. In addition you have vitality, which increases stamina by 9%.

I foresee a couple of outcomes

1) Blizzard's goal of making us care about things other than stamina will not be as successful as they would like

Blizzard have said that they want us to care about avoidance more in 4.0, by limiting healer mana and keeping avoidance down. Lots of tanks like that, and I guess people are intending to try socketing for avoidance a little more. Remember however that since stamina increases the effect of the vengeance buff, stamina stackers will also do more damage than avoidance tanks - not only because they have more rage, but also because will have more attack power.

Suppose I was choosing between a stamina trinket with 400 stamina, and a dodge trinket. I'd have to bear in mind that if I chose the stamina trinket I would have an extra (passive!) 436 attack power, in addition to the extra rage I would get from being hit more often. The potential attack power differential between an avoidance tank and a stamina tank could be very significant, depending upon how Blizzard tweak the numbers between now and Cata though.

2) Vengeance will be unbalanced

My unbuffed health has roughly doubled this expansion between stepping into Naxx and currently fighting Arthas. The differential is greater for 25 man raiders, but remember that without the extra tiers in gear required to differentiate 10 man and 25 man raiders the gear curve is likely to be flatter in 4.0.

Dps numbers however have increased by a factor of about 5 or 6 - whereas 2k was good in blue gear in Naxx, now the top dpsers are pulling 10k plus. On the assumption that a flatter Cataclysm gear curve will compress this to say 4 times, you still have dps increasing twice as fast as the vengeance buff.

This implies that either vengeance will be massively overpowered early on, or it will be too weak later on to keep up with runaway dps. I'm not saying that we'll have threat problems in tier 13, because we don't know how it will work in practice, I'm simply saying that the rate at which the vengeance buff increases will probably not be as great as the rate at which dps increases.

Raid lockout changes

2010-04-27T09:12:00.001+01:00

As hinted by GC a couple of weeks back (I love it when I get something right), 10 man and 25 man raids will share a lockout in Cataclysm. In addition, and perhaps just as importantly, the same gear (including ilevel) will drop in 10 man and 25 man raids. I'll look at some of the potential consequences which occur to me:

1) Social consequences

I am a 10 man raider in a 25 man guild, and I raid once or twice a week on my guild's raid off nights. My guild will have to decide whether or not it continues raiding 25 man with mains. We currently run 3 ten man teams on off nights - team 1 is on Rotface hard mode, team 2 (me) has had two evenings of LK training, and team 3 has killed Putricide. Our 25 man raid is on Sindragosa.

Will the hard mode 10 man raiders be willing to wait for the 25 man team to catch up?

Either we'll stop running 25 mans with mains in LK (in which case those people who really love 25 mans will leave), or we'll continue running 25 mans with mains (in which case I might have to leave a guild I've been in for over 4 years if I want to raid). I suspect the former, and we'll become a 10 man guild. I suspect that most guilds except the real hardcore guilds will do the same and the 25 man raid will die away. We've come a long way from Molten Core.

2) Tank balancing

As a 10 man geared tank, I have about 3-5k less health than the guild MT (who also runs 2 lockouts a week). 25 man bosses hit harder because (i) the tank has more health, avoidance, armour and buffs, and (ii) the tank has 2 healers on him.

In Cata, the 10 man tank and the 25 man tank will have the same health, avoidance and armour. In addition, with Blizz chilling out on raid buffs and introducing disposable scrolls, it's likely that kings and fort will be available, meaning the tanks will probably both have the key tanking buffs. What we therefore will see is a weakening of tanks that do 25 man content relative to those that do 10 man content.

Balancing incoming tank damage will therefore be very tricky, since Blizzard won't have as much leeway to increase tank damage from 10 man to 25 man content without the tank getting one-shot. Healing philosophy in Cata is supposed to be that mitigation will matter more because healer mana will be limited, but there is a risk that by upping the tank damage to the level where it can be expected to occupy 2 healers in 25 man content the healers will (unless they have excellent communication) be required to spam heal the tank to keep him alive. On the other hand, if tank damage is not increased sufficiently in going from 10 man to 25 man, then a single tank healer will be able to keep up the tank, leaving a "spare" healer to heal the raid.

Here's a prediction then - "In 25 man Cataclysm content you will need fewer healers than you do in existing LK 25 man content. Healers will need to respec dps to keep their raid spots."

More Cataclysm thoughts

2010-04-13T11:20:00.002+01:00

A general ramble about Cataclysm today. Still talking about fury spec.

Slowing down rotations

The DK rune system is changing to be slower. Here's an extract from one of GC's posts on the topic

"If that still doesn't make sense, then focus on what the experience will be, which is that you'll have more breathing room in your rotation and won't have to hit a button every single GCD."

You won't have to hit a button every single GCD.

With all the QQ about whirlwind being removed from the fury rotation (some of this was from me, yes), perhaps this is a design goal of Blizzard for 4.0 that they haven't explicitly shared with us yet. In that post there's also a comment about GC wanting DKs to play like warriors in that they will hit slower but harder.

Maybe we are supposed to have gaps in our rotation in 4.0 where we just sit there and wait for the buttons to light up. I remember doing that when I levelled my warrior (and paladin actually now I think of it) and it was not fun. Nevertheless perhaps it is what we can expect in future. I hope not.

The fury rotation

There was a blue post concerning the fury rotation, where Vaneras said that he "thought" that fury might need another attack as part of their rotation. My initial reaction to this was along the lines of "o rly?", but now I wonder whether or not blizzard really think that they might leave things as they are.

One of the problems in designing a new attack is that it's hard to make it seem different from existing major nukes. Currently Bloodthirst, Execute and Slam are very similar - they are a single weapon attack, the only obvious difference is that Execute and Slam don't hit quite as hard. In short - they are all so alike that they are quite dull. This is the same problem that Arms has - trying to differentiate the different weapon attacks, and it doesn't succeed very well. Compare this with say a fire mage, where there are clear differences in the look and feel of Living Bomb, Fireball and Pyroblast. A new fury attack needs to be cosmetically different from Bloodthirst in order to be interesting. I think something like a rogue's mutilate could work - an instant strike with both weapons for 100% damage, perhaps applying a DoT, or doing more damage if you have a DoT up on the target. Essentially all you'd see is two yellow numbers popping up instead of one, and so I'd hope we'd get a new animation for it too.

It should be noted that this new attack will need to be available reasonably early in the levelling process - maybe at level 30 when zerker stance becomes available, otherwise it's not clear whether levelling as fury will be viable at all.

Weapon speed

One other point that made me think a little bit, was that if whatever they do for fury does not involve a two weapon strike, then we will look for faster offhands in Cata.

Currently Bloodthirst does damage based on attack power and WW is based on weapon damage - bigger WWs are the reason why slower weapons are better for us in both hands - Quel'Delar is the best ilevel 251 weapon, for example, and is not much worse than the ilevel 258 and 264 weapons available from LK and 25 man raids. The reason for this is that it has a 3.6 speed in comparison to 3.5 for Oxheart and Ramdaladni's, and 3.4 for the Claymore (which is therefore rubbish). You'll note that Shadow's Edge and Shadowmourne have speed 3.7.

(Why oh why is the coolest-looking weapon the worst? I love how the Claymore looks!)

With WW being removed, we will be left with Bloodthirst as the main nuke, which is independent of weapon speed. Who knows how heroic strike damage will be calculated, but I doubt it will be weapon damage-based attack. It's more likely to be a function of attack power and rage consumed.

Therefore fury warriors will have Slam, which depends on the damage of the main hand weapon, and Furious Sundering (shudder) which as currently structured will hit for 50% of weapon damage, as well as Deep Wounds ticks, which depend on main hand damage. Offhand damage will have no bearing on specials damage at all.

This means that unless they do create a new attack which inflicts offhand damage, you'll want a slow main hand in Cata for big slams and sunders, and a fast offhand for smoother rage generation.

Falling skies

2010-04-08T22:03:00.003+01:00

The preview of the warrior abilities for Cataclysm will be released today. It is here.

Now, I know that this is not even in beta yet, and much may change, but we can only respond to what is there, and this is utterly utterly dreadful and appears devoid of any serious thought. Some of the other classes - notably healing priests - seem to have really interesting and fun abilities. The warrior preview looks awful.

Let's run through the new abilities.

1) Inner rage

Now this has the potential to be interesting, and there may be some maths involved about whether it is better to let your rage touch 100 from time to time to kick off the buff. However - bear in mind that the stated goal for 4.0 is that warriors will not be in the infinite rage situation that they find themselves in today. Rage will be precious and rage management will be important. So in order to get to 100 rage it is going to require several seconds of just standing there and meleeing the target - very dull. Alternatively, it means that warriors will be massively overpowered in any encounter with significant raid damage. It's a balancing nightmare for those raids, and it looks shit for the rest of the time. Next.

2) Gushing wound

A PvP ability. Presumably available in zerker stance. Will it replace rend for arms warriors? Probably not since rend triggers overpower currently. So a PvP ability for Fury warriors. Since bosses don't typically move around all the time, and at one stack this will be weaker than rend (sorry, lolrend I believe is the term) it won't be part of the fury warrior's rotation for PvE (unless of course fury warriors don't have a rotation - more on this below).

3) Heroic leap

A new kind of charge - it shares a cooldown. Useable in battle stance unless you have juggernaught (arms) or warbringer (prot). So fury will have to stance dance to use this then? This will be fun for prot, but of little practical benefit to arms warriors who will just charge in. Fury warriors will never use it because of the requirement to dance, and because it seems like it can't be used in combat without one of the two talents already mentioned.

So what do we have - a pointless passive benefit, a PvP dot, and a funky new opener for prot which will not be used by dps specs. Recall that we already have two openers for prot in charge and heroic throw. A third seems pointless, but never mind. Let's now consider the "Changes to Abilities and Mechanics" section.

4) Heroic strike/Cleave

This will now work similarly to execute apparently. I posted on this a few days ago, but you can see that they intend it to fulfill a similar role to execute. Since execute is already a main nuke for arms, it seems that arms warriors are not intended to heroic strike in 4.0. They will swap in cleave for execute when AoEing. Prot and Fury will I guess have a rage threshold depending on weapon speed (for prot) and gear level above which heroic strike becomes better than one or other of the main nukes (or main nuke for fury - since there is only 1 now - see below) and you hit HS instead.

Balance will be an issue but isn't it always.

5) Shouts

Boring. We get rage now. The questions are - 1) how much rage, and 2) will demo shout grant rage too? Demo shout granting rage would be nice, perhaps talented improving rage gain as well as the attack power debuff. Not very exciting though.

6) Whirlwind nerf

So WW will only be used when AoEing. This casts out the iconic ability of the fury warrior (imagine losing fireball for mages or mind flay for shadow priests - the change is that big). It also utterly guts the spec. Fury's rotation is currently completely balanced around WW - much of the theorycrafting is balanced around the 1 second difference between the length of 4 unhasted GCDs and the 8 second cooldown of WW. Fury already is missing one nuke - there are times when you literally have nothing to cast because WW and bloodthirst are both on cooldown and slam hasn't procced. What's the fury rotation going to be now? BT, hit slam if it procs, BT, hit slam if it procs, repeat?

There is absolutely nothing here about what will replace WW for fury warriors (subject to Furious Sundering, but I hope it isn't that). We could use HS, but that is not supposed to be spammed, and certainly not hit in 2 out of every 3 GCDs as we'd need to. I guess that 100 rage ability doesn't sound so bad, since, get this, Fury warriors will have nothing to hit for over 50% of their GCDs, as announced. Incredible isn't it?

6) Mortal Strike PvP nerf

The change here makes no sense. Blizzard have said that burst healing in PvP will be less important in 4.0 because health pools will be higher and burst dps will be relatively weaker. Thus abilities which restrict healing throughput become less important, not more important.

If this is an example of Blizzard's logic when it comes to PvP balancing, I have a prediction for you - healers in general will be massively overpowered in PvP in 4.0. You will not be able to burst down an opposing player if they have decent gear and healer support.

7) Sunder armour nerf

The main reason for this is that Blizzard have said they are chilling out on critical raid buffs, and sunder is currently pretty huge. It's a cretin-friendly change, since your garden variety cretin will forget to keep sunders up all the time on the target, so more dumbing down of the class - the penalty for poor play is reduced.

I wonder whether or not it will be worth maintaining sunders as a dps warrior in 10 man. Since armour pen gets better the more of it you have (exponential returns), armour pen on gear is disappearing, and the power of the debuff is being nerfed by 40%, in 10 man raids where there are say 2 melee dps, it may no longer be worth the personal dps loss of maintaining sunders.

8) Furious Sundering

Either a pointless or a depressing talent. It will be pointless if Fury warriors have something better to do with their GCDs, because how often otherwise do you use sunder armour in a fight? Three times at the start, and then once every 25 seconds or so. Not very much.

It will be a depressing talent if sunder armour is supposed to be fury's new secondary nuke - the thing to hit if WW is on cooldown and slam has not procced. Is this the best you could do guys? 50% weapon damage is a pretty weak attack even as an instant special. We replace WW - a hard hitting, fun attack, which has a cool animation and is (crucially) utterly in keeping with the flavour of fury as a ball-out devil-may-care berserker. We replace it with a weak attack that reduces armour. God I hope not.

9) One handed fury

This is an absolutely awful idea. To take a phrase from Blackadder - "the crowning turd in the water pipe". The reason is this - either dual wielding one handers will be better than dual wielding two handers or it won't be. You can't hide from EJ, and much as I dislike the posters there as a bunch of bastards, they will work out which is better. Then EVERY serious fury warrior will go with what is better. This is the illusion of choice - either Single-Minded Fury will be obsolete or Titan's Grip will be.

10) Critical block chance

I posted a while back that surely critical block will go in the expansion because it will be hugely overpowered. Guess I was wrong!

11) Vengeance

This is not just a warrior thing - but for all tanking specs. It sounds good, although 10% of stamina as attack power means different things for eg paladins and deathknights who do spell damage, and it means that druids who have the highest health will get an immediate boost. Bornakk mentions that druids will need a smaller benefit in his post - but gives a different reason. Nevertheless, it all comes down to balance as usual. Perhaps they will get it right this time.

Conclusion

Nothing material new for arms in PvE. A cool new opener for Prot (seriously - who looked at the warrior class and said "those guys need some mobility"?), together with the possibility of an overpowered critical block.

Fury destroyed as a spec. Great.

I appreciate that this is pretty major QQ from me, and I'm sorry about that. But this was supposed to keep us excited and interested for 4.0. What? For goodness' sake!

Edit - copied here http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=12947282557&postId=129460193072&sid=1#161

Double post, in which I fail on Sindragosa and worry about the future of my guild

2010-04-06T12:38:00.003+01:00

Sindragosa

I read a twitter comment (a tweet?) from one of the tanking bloggers a few weeks ago about how the iceblock mechanic in Sindragosa is really unforgiving. I have now discovered that this is true.
It's a really punishing fight, and our attempts last night were not helped by the fact that I was tanking (for the first time in about 4 weeks - very rusty) and I had horrible spiky lag.

I wiped the raid twice. Firstly - and here's a pro tip - the boss casts frost breath just after the fifth stack of mystic buffet (amusingly mispronounced as "mystic buffay" by just about everyone in the entire world - like it's an all-you-can-eat restaurant for wizards). This means if you are swapping tanks at five stacks you either have to run in front of the boss before you taunt and risk eating the frost breath (so both tanks get hit for 30k), or you have to wait until the boss has cast frost breath before taunting. The alternative is to do what I did, taunt the boss a nanosecond before she breathes, ensuring that she breathes on the raid.

The second wipe was some sort of crazy taunt bug - I taunted, so my taunt was on cooldown (and my MT refused to let me vigilance him for some reason), but after the fixate period ended the boss switched targets to the MT (who was hiding behind an iceblock). I used challenging shout but by then of course every one was dead.

That bug is infuriating. It may be due to lag, or it may be that my taunt is missing (although that's really unlikely since the boss definitely targeted me). I'm tempted to glyph taunt to be honest.

Blue post

I saw this today. Now what does GC mean by that? I applaud the fact that he recognises that 25 man guilds have a massive advantage when it comes to acquiring emblems, since emblems are acquired twice as fast when you can also run a 10 man raid on your off nights. It's frustrating for me to have emblem costs set artificially high because it's assumed you are running both.

Nevertheless, how can the problem be fixed? The most obvious, and the one that GC seems to be implying, is that you will be forced to choose between 10 man and 25 man raiding - ie that the raid lockout will cover both 10 man, 25 man and heroic settings. This will absolutely destroy many 25 man guilds - including ours.

Gevlon posted a while ago that the only way a non-hardcore raiding guild can survive is if there is a core of dedicated competent players - raid leader/organiser, MT, at least two good healers, some dps who can be relied upon etc. These people may get frustrated at the lack of 25 man progress, but the guild develops a guild-within-a-guild which runs a higher level 10 man team. These guys therefore get their hardmode loot and their achievements via the 10 man group. This seems reasonable to me, and is certainly the case in my guild. Will these guys remain in the guild if they can only raid one lockout per week and they can't get past Rotface because of some idiots who can't kite oozes? I think not.

Making one overall lockout will therefore in my view destroy a huge number of longstanding guilds.

A better answer would be to grant emblems via weekly quests, or some other similar mechanic to ensure that you only get emblems the first time you complete part of a dungeon, in whatever size raid.

Let's hope that Blizzard come up with a solution to the problem that doesn't kill off guilds.

Rage reworked in 4.0

2010-04-06T08:53:00.003+01:00

Rage will be changed in cataclysm. See here

http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/rage-normalization-in-cataclysm/

Some initial thoughts:

1) Heroic strike is going to be very difficult to balance. Arms and prot warriors already have a full rotation so either those specs will never hit heroic strike, or there will be some rage level where heroic strike is better than one or other of their attacks (probably devastate or slam). For fury, we have spare GCDs already so can slot in a heroic strike, but again if it hits harder than bloodthirst above a certain level of rage we'll need to monitor that.

2) Because rage generation will increase as haste and crit increase, end game warriors will still have more rage than fresh level 85s. I think this aspect could be unbalancing, although rogues and hunters will also gain energy/focus faster via haste in cataclysm. Since our resource gathering will increase via two stats instead of one there is still the possibility that stacking crit might be the way to go.

3) The way that rage is gained for prot warriors means that tanking farm content is going to mean that we are more rage starved than currently. If rage gain is based on the proportion of health lost from damage, incoming damage will contribute little or no rage as tank health increases.

4) If offhand weapons cause 50% threat, I guess that will be multiplicative with the 50% damage penalty for offhand weapons, meaning that 2h fury builds receive 125% rage gain. This corresponds to the arms talent which increases rage gained by 25%. When you take the talent that increases offhand damage done by 50% however, this means that fury rage gain will be 137.5%, meaning that fury will generate more rage than arms. I suppose that ability costs will need to be balanced around this.

5) If battle shout gives me 10 rage and is trumpeted as a rage gain mechanic I will be disappointed, to put it mildly. I don't want lots of itty bitty rage gain buttons (bloodthirst/improved zerker rage/battle shout), I want one button on a short cooldown to increase rage.

Buffs

2010-03-31T13:40:00.000+01:00

It's amazing how much raid buffs can affect fury warrior dps. My typical raid composition is

Prot pally
Prot/ret pally (he's ret for single tank fights, which is Dreamwalker and BQL so far)
Holy priest x2
Resto/elemental shaman
Elemental shaman
Combat rogue
Survival Hunter
Arcane/fire mage
Fury warrior

You will note the buffs I am lacking are

Melee haste - Frost DK
Minor speed - Moonkin/Ret pally
Attack power multiplier - Enhancment shammy/Blood DK/MM Hunter
Bleed debuff - Arms warrior/Feral Druid

In addition, the strength of earth totem we get is not talented.

According to the simulation in Landsoul's spreadsheet, the lack of these buffs reduces my theoretical maximum dps by 1,100, or around 15%. That's a massive difference. I wonder if other classes are so reliant on such a wide variety of buffs to do reasonable dps.

Killer Queen

2010-03-30T13:09:00.002+01:00

Finally had a second run at Dreamwalker and the Crimson Halls, and got a kill of all three bosses (or rather not a kill, in the case of Dreamwalker). Of the three fights, BQL is by far the most interesting and fun, and is very well designed.

Here's my take on the 10 man version of the fight as a fury warrior.

The boss is (roughly) tank and spank, with some tweaks. She should be tanked in the centre of the room, slightly towards the back.

She has two minor abilities to be aware of - a linking ability ("Pact of the Darkfallen") which creates a beam between two people and causes AoE damage. If you get this simply run to the other end of the beam - once the pair of you are within 5 yards the effect is cancelled. The second minor ability causes shadows to appear under your feet ("Swarming Shadows") in the same way as Legion Flames for Jarraxus. Just kite the fires away to the side of the room and run around the edge until it disappears, then intercept back to the boss.

There is a special cleave which means that you need one MT and one "OT" who must stack on top of each other. The "OT" should in fact be a dpser, and ideally a dpser with as high health as possible. There is no point in taking a second tank since the damage the OT receives cannot be mitigated. Health and stamina buffs are still useful though, so +stam trinkets can still be used. Plate dps are ideal for the OT role since plate armour gets more stamina for its ilevel than other armour types. If you are the OT remember that you will be attacking from the front and therefore the boss will be able to parry your attacks. It's therefore worth stacking expertise for this fight to maximise your dps. The boss does not parry-haste, so don't worry about MT deaths - you simply need the expertise for your dps.

The key mechanic in the fight is the vampiric bite. This must be managed pretty much flawlessly otherwise you will wipe to mind control or the hard enrage. After 15 seconds she will bite someone. Exactly who she picks is not widely understood, but the consensus seems to be that she picks the non-tank who is highest on the threat meter (whether dps or healer). I understand that -threat modifiers and abilities may be turned off for this purpose. Of my 5 attempts on this boss, I was bitten first twice, which is presumably because I was using sunder armour and thus causing extra threat. Basically - a fury warrior is quite likely to be bitten first so be ready.

When you are bitten you gain double damage, you heal yourself when attacking, plus your attacks do zero threat. I was getting 7k melee white attacks non-crit when I had death wish and trinkets up. It's seriously fun. The boss has a massive health pool and a short hard enrage, so this buff is absolutely necessary to beating the encounter. The buff lasts for 75 seconds. When it runs out you get a cool red effect around the screen, a new action bar with just one ability (bound to "1"), and you need to use that ability to bite a friendly target within 15 seconds. If you do that, your buff timer is refreshed to 75 seconds, and the person you bit has the same buff. 75 seconds later, both biter and bitee will need to find someone to chomp on, meaning that four of you will then be vampires, etc etc.

If you fail to bite someone then you get mind controlled for the rest of the fight. Basically it's a wipe.

The key to managing this is to realise that there will be four rounds of biting before the enrage hits and you wipe. Eight raid members will therefore be vamps by the end of the fight. We handled the biting as follows:

1 - Someone is bitten by BQL

2 - If the person bitten was a ranged person (dps or healer) they bite our best melee dps. If the first vamp was a melee dpser, they bite our best ranged dps.

From here on - ranged dpsers only bite ranged dpers and healers, while melee dpsers only bite melee dpsers and tanks.

3 - We now have 1 ranged and 1 melee dpser as vamps. The ranged dpser bites another ranged dpser. The melee dpser bites another melee dpser.

This prevents the two vamps trying to bite the same person.

4 - This is the hard round. Everyone in your raid needs to have a "bite buddy" - someone that they will bite in round four, and someone that is unlikely to be bitten in the first three rounds. Both your tanks are candidates, as are the healers. You need to know before the fight who you will bite in this round, and where they will be standing approximately. If you are being bitten, you need to know who will be coming to bite you. My bite buddy was our OT, a ret paladin.

This method doesn't work so well (although it does work) if you get a healer bitten in the first round, but that didn't happen in any of our 5 attempts last night so it may be pretty rare I think.
You will not get to a fifth round of biting (or at least you shouldn't). You will hit the enrage first.

The boss will enter "phase 2" from time to time - it should happen twice in the fight. She runs to the middle of the room, flies into the air, fears the raid for 4 seconds (breakable with berserker rage), and starts shooting bloodbolts at people. These do AoE damage so you need to spread out. Plan in advance where you are going to run to, and crucially run to the same place every time. If you run to the same place every time, your groupmates will know to expect you there and will steer clear. After about 10 seconds the boss will come back to the ground.

As regards phase 2, the only thing to remember is that you don't want your sunder armour debuff to drop off during this phase, so remember to renew it just before she flies up. Secondly, the second phase 2 coincides with the fourth round of biting. This can cause a problem if your bite buddy is running away to a corner and you need to bite him. Make sure you raid knows that if they have not yet been bitten at the start of the second air phase they need to find their bite buddy very quickly, then quickly spread out.

Best of luck!

Progress

2010-03-25T09:34:00.001Z

This blog started out with lots of posts about "what I'm doing", and while the focus has changed a bit I think it's good to put down here where I'm at in ICC at the moment.

Since I downed the Prof a couple of weeks back I've been to a couple of raids. My team raids twice a week, and I generally go to the first of those raids. We've been extending the raid lock, which is great, and both of the raids I've been on have been learning nights. In each case the boss went down in the second raid. This is frustrating from an achievement perspective, but hey I'm seeing the fights, having fun and, most importantly, Not Sucking At DPS which is good.

So I've been wiping on Blood Princes and Dreamwalker basically. Both times on the learning night we got very very close. I think 5% on Princes, and 98% on Dreamwalker (and the Dreamwalker wipe was a real sickener as our rogue accidentally clicked on the healer portal halfway through the fight and caused one of our healers to lose his stack of +heal buffs).

From a dps perspective I was near the top on Dreamwalker, which is hardly surprising because it's a multi-target fight. I put points into "heroic fury" to help with movement on that fight, and it's a real bonus to have intercept available more often.

On Blood Princes it was harder, since the knockback really makes the fight annoying for melee. My damage done was very high however, because I am good at not standing within 10 yards of people when the boss casts empowered vortex. I therefore survive longer than people who have not yet developed this key skill, and do more damage overall as a result. You can't outgear that!

Criticals

2010-03-23T12:48:00.001Z

I've been thinking about the attack table a little bit, and in particular about the crit cap. I have never really considered the crit cap before, but it turns out that I am getting rather near it. To demonstrate how problems can arise, suppose you are a dual wielding fury warrior, with no hit or expertise, attacking from the rear. With white attacks your attack table would be:

Miss - 27%
Dodge - 6.5%
Glancing blow - 24%
Crit/hit - 42.5%

Therefore if you have crit chance of 25% the white attack table is

Miss - 27%
Dodge - 6.5%
Glancing - 24%
Crit - 25%
Hit - 17.5%

It can be seen that any crit above 42.5% will be wasted as regards white attacks - extra crit will not increase white attack damage as it will be "off the table". Special attacks do not glance, and have a miss rate of (I believe) 9% rather than 27%, so have higher crit caps. This is why +hit and +expertise gear is so important - not only is it a linear damage increase, but it also increases rage generation and increases the crit cap.

I am expertise capped, have +11.5% hit, and crit of about 40%. My white attack table is as follows:

Miss - 15.5%
Glancing - 24%
Crit - 40%
Hit - 20.5%

When you consider rampage adds 5%, and raid buffs account for around another 5%, the crit cap is only 10.5% away. This is something I will need to monitor as my gear improves - I currently have gear score of only 5,375, so there is likely to be considerable improvement in my crit rating as I gear up. This cap is only for white attacks however - most of my damage comes from yellow attacks where the table is

Miss - 0%
Dodge - 0%
Glancing - 0%
Crit - 40%
Hit - 60%

No such worries here then!

The point I need to take away from this is that as my gear improves the desirability of crit is going to fall away sharply when it ceases to benefit my white attacks any more. I may need to regem when I get near the tipping point, as I currently have some yellow +crit gems that I could swap out.

Ore

2010-03-22T14:45:00.002Z

Since I am now a dps warrior, I had to change my professions. Inscription will stay since that's still useful, but herbalism had to go as it has no dps benefit at all. I therefore have spent the last few days and several thousand gold levelling jewelcrafting.

Impressions - the period up to 300 is absolutely painful. There were simply not enough gems and ore on the AH for me to do it without farming, so I had to run around on a mining alt farming ores for several hours. Seeing the only Azerothian Diamonds on the AH listed for 20g each was very depressing. From 350 onwards though it was cake - I had lots of cobalt and saronite ore saved up from levelling an alt, and being exalted with all the northrend factions meant that I could immediately pick up rare recipes. The last 20 or 30 skillpoints will (if my gems on the AH sell) actually end up making me a few hundred gold in profit, rather than costing a few hundred gold.

I need to find my feet a bit with the new skill, but the daily quest and currency system is interesting - reminiscent of the excellent cooking quests (which are one of the minor successes of this expansion I think). I should have my first Bold Dragon's Eye gem tonight, for a total increase in strength of 14x3=42 when all three are socketed.

It's quite a large investment for about 110 attack power (or 75 dps at my gear level) but that's what raiding is all about - working hard on your gear (grumble), and hopefully I can make the gold back through buying and selling gems.

On the gold making front - prices (and therefore profits) continue to rise for glyphs, although I note that one of my fellow glyph sellers seems to undercut me pretty regularly and quite quickly after I post, so I am making less money overall. I guess I am on his friends list. I will have to combat this by getting my bank alt to post (which is just annoying tbh). Having JC as an alternative source of money will be useful.

New template

2010-03-19T13:04:00.002Z

The old template was a bit dark. This one's a little bit easier on the eye.

Black leather

2010-03-17T13:45:00.002Z

Why is it that leather armour is still better than plate armour for dps warriors? Why can't Blizzard fix this? Compare the two ICC10 chest armour drops:

Plate

Blade-scored Carapace (drops from Deathbringer)
152 strength
72 crit rating
84 haste

The strength gives 304 attack power, plus 20% (zerker stance) plus 10% (kings) gives 304 x 1.2 x 1.1 = 401 attack power.
The crit rating gives 1.57% crit

Leather

Chestguard of the Frigid Noose (drops from Lady Deathwhisper)
200 attack power
79 armour pen
132 agility
99 haste

The agility is increased by 1.1 by kings, and gives crit (62.5 agi = 1% crit). The agility is therefore 2.32% crit.

God only knows how armour pen affects my dps - I assume it makes it go up. According to Landsoul's spreadsheet, a point of Armour Pen is worth about 0.8 of a point of strength to me. This means that 79 armour pen is worth 63.3 strength.

I'm going to ignore the haste, as it isn't worth much and it kind of balances. On the basis that the armour pen balances out 63.3/152 x 401 attack power = 166 attack power, we are therefore left comparing 235 attack power and 1.57% crit with 200 attack power and 2.3% crit - ie 35 attack power in favour of the plate, and 0.73% crit in favour of the leather. The leather is definitely better.

I am currently wearing the leather chest armour.

It's kind of ironic that there was so much clamour from warriors etc for the introduction of a +strength ashen verdict rep ring, when the +agility ring is better for us anyway. Similarly the +strength Quel'delar which I have is inferior to the +agility version.

I think the problem is that for warriors the conversion of agility into crit is simply too good. We get too much crit per point of agility. I wonder if warriors are balanced around being in plate armour, and therefore by being in leather armour we get "extra" dps. The alternative is that we are balanced around being in leather armour and those warriors who insist on wearing plate are gimping themselves.

Revelations

2010-03-16T10:07:00.001Z

The last couple of 10 man raids I've been picked as dps rather than a tank. It happens that I'm leading the raid on Friday and was chatting last night to the guy who's been picked as tank instead of me. I mentioned to him that I was going to select myself as a tank instead on Friday, so he might want to sign for one of the other 10 man raids instead. But then I thought about it. And thought about it some more. And I realised that I would be gimping my raid team really badly by going on Friday's raid as a tank.

I can only raid once a week at the moment, but our team raids twice. So for the second raid we need to ensure that there is a skilled and geared second tank available. I can best serve my raid team by making a permanent switch to dps, and grabbing this other guy to be a fixed tank for the team. I'm much easier to replace if I am a dpser.

So that's what I've done - I'm now fury main spec. It hurt to change, especially since I've worked so hard on my tanking gear, but there it is - life is full of difficult compromises.

So what to do now? Well I want to be the best dps warrior that I can be. My fury gear has up to now been offspec only, and so is a real mixed bag (I still have ilevel 200 and 219 items, for example). I pull about 5-6k single target, which is not really anywhere near good enough. I need to practice my rotations, sort out my spec, start grabbing the frost emblem gear when available, and get the crafted gear made. If my gear score will always lag behind my raid mates (because they do 25s and have access to full ilevel 264 gear) I need to ensure that my knowledge of the class and the encounters and (crikey!) my gaming ability will be enough to bridge the gap.

In short over the next two weeks I want to:

- Get the ilevel 264 boots crafted (this will require me to make another 2k gold or thereabouts from the AH)

- Get the ilevel 245 braces crafted (Landsoul's spreadsheet says these are better than the ICC10 loot)

- Spend my frost emblems on some T10 - probably the shoulders

- Try to get in an ICC25 pug to grab the two handed axe from the first boss

Time to get started.

Hunting, Shooting, Fishing

2010-03-12T13:29:00.004Z

I levelled my cooking and fishing skills about a year or so ago. They were not very profitable at the time and so while I used to do the daily quests for gold, I pretty much ignored them after a while.

After a particularly successful ICC run meant I had to find nine new epic gems, plus four new enchants, however, I was pretty much skint last week. With the glyph business dying off a little on my server now we have a new seller who posts glyphs in huge quantities for 5g each, I looked into these old tradeskills to see if there was anything I could use to make money from. I was pleasantly surprised.

I used to make the +hit and +expertise food. The +hit food was better because the mats are so cheap and they use fish that you get from open water fishing - you don't need to find pools and can just fish away. Since (inexplicably) people often can't be bothered to cook the raw fish they get, it was sometimes possible to pick up the fish from the AH for a few silver, and sell on the cooked fish for 4g each. This market seems to be much smaller now - presumably because of the extra hit and expertise on gear so people don't need to use special food to hit the caps.

I have therefore tried to find new markets, and looked again at cooking. Most of the food you can make is rendered obsolete by fish feasts. I need to do some research before I decide whether making fish feasts is worthwhile or not - I doubt it to be honest, but need to look into it carefully. For now, I have hit upon the idea of making food that is better than the fish feast buff. I hope that min/max guilds who are trying hardmodes will use this instead of fish feasts.

I am mainly focussing on dragonfin angelfish at the moment. These are fished up from Dragonblight and the pools are quite rare. Nevertheless, when cooked into +str or +agi food, they sell for around 150g per stack, or even more sometimes. It's possible with good luck on spawns, or by fishing late at night (when rocking a baby to sleep, for instance!) to grab a full stack of fish in around 15 minutes, so this pulls in a decent (if unspectacular) income. The annoying thing is that most (but not quite all) of the value is in the raw fish on my server - it's not possible to buy the raw fish from the AH and cook them yourself for a huge profit. Still - I watch for bargains on there and they do pop up from time to time.

Another reasonable way I have found to make money is on my mage alt. He will never be a main character raider, and so while I am enjoying gearing him up and blasting through instances from time to time, buying him gear with frost emblems is a waste of time. I therefore sold my first primordial saronite on this toon on the AH last night, netting 1750g. A few minutes later I saw someone selling primordial saronite over /2 for 1500g. What I should have done is immediately buy it from him and flip it straight onto the AH for 166g profit (taking account of the AH cut), but I am paranoid about being stuck with this stuff as prices fall (and when 4.0 hits it will be worthless of course). I should have been a bit braver, as demand will probably stay high for a while yet.

I am still making decent money from glyphs. I have worked out that every stack of icethorn that I buy makes me 40g profit assuming I buy it for 10g, mill it for 1 snowfall ink and 6 ink of the sea, and the resulting glyphs sell for 4 or 5g each. Occasionally I do a bit better than this, such as last night when I was the only person listing one of the key warlock glyphs, and I sold three of them in 10 minutes for 20g each. Inscription can be a bit of a grind though, especially because you can't afk-craft or afk-mill. It gets tiresome to have to manually click through the process for the umpteenth time, which is why I am not a big time glyph seller - I just use it to make about 500g a week and that's me happy.

In an effort to make a higher margin on fewer items, I have made a few of the inscription offhand items. These need to be sold over /2 instead of the AH because it is rare in my experience that people will browse the AH for an offhand, but the profit margins are 50g-100g per item, and they are really quick to craft.

I'd quite like to get the crafted tanking legs, which will cost about 15,000 gold at current prices. I guess if I sold everything right now I would have about 6-7,000 or something over all my alts. Still some way to go yet.

Four seconds

2010-03-10T16:16:00.002Z

I downed Professor Putricide for the first time last Friday, in my 10 man raid.

I feel conflicted.

I'm really pleased to have finally killed that guy - we had two or three (I forget) very long trying evenings of wipes, including some heartbreaking sub-5% deaths. But (and here's the thing) we killed him with the new ICC buff...

The +5% damage/heals/health zone-wide buff. So did we only succeed because of this buff? Could we have killed him without it? I guess I'll never know now (because I doubt I'll be able to convince my team to try again without it).

So I did what I always do why I'm worried or upset - I got my calculator out.

The only time on the Prof fight when dps/heals are a particular concern is in phase 3, which he enters at 35% health. Most of the deaths occur due to dps throughput, rather than health - the 5% health is likely to be 1,000 to 1,500 health for a non-tank and my experience is that non-tank deaths in phase 3 are due to massive pulses from the raidwide aura he casts - ie the overkill is quite large. The healing bonus is not really relevant except in tank healing, since the heals cast on non-tanks will either be so big they top the player off, or so small that 5% is neither here nor there. Low dps however means that the debuff stacks higher and higher on the tanks, causing higher and higher raid AOE damage, and leading to a wipe.

Focussing on the dps bonus therefore - the prof has 9.7 million health, so you have to burn him for 3.4 million health in phase 3. The "5% extra damage" buff equates to the boss having 4.8% less health, ie 3,238,000 health (explanation - you do 3,238,000 damage to him, the buff increases that by 5% to 3.4 million). The effect of the dps increase therefore is that the time you take to do phase 3 is reduced by 4.8%.

Phase 3 always seems like it is over in seconds when I run it. It is such a crazy dps fest that it condenses in my memory to a frantic button-mashing blur. I estimate that given that all the dpsers will be burning cooldowns in phase 3, and heroism will be used, a decent 10 man dpser might put out say 6k in phase 3. Let's assume 5k to 6k, 5.5k on average - just to be safe. Working on the basis of 6 dpsers and tanks doing 2k this gives a raid dps figure of 37k. This means that phase 3 might last 88 seconds assuming no-one dies. This is reduced from 92 seconds without the ICC buff. The buff therefore equates to killing him four seconds faster.

Four seconds. Is that the difference between success and failure?

In our kill our OT died just as the boss did. Would the MT have been able to take over for four seconds? Would the raid damage aura have pulsed once more and wiped us? I think (hope) that we'd have been ok, but I still wonder how it could have gone in those last few seconds.

It came from the PUG

2010-03-08T09:05:00.001Z

Why do I hate PUG raids? Let me count the ways:

1) The delays

Why does it take so long for 25 people to arrive at the instance, get into the right spec and click yes to a ready check? Last night we had a new boss to fight - the instance reset boss. Some cretin spoke to King Wrynn and turned off the +5% buff in ICC, so we had to get everyone out of the instance and reset it. It took about 20 minutes of constant raid warnings. They were standing right by the instance entrance too.

2) The buff police

"OMG I NEED BOM FFS" No you don't. You don't need it. Your dps is shit, it will still be shit with BOM. Just shut up and get on with your job and we will redo paladin buffs before the boss.

3) The loot drama

Wodin's Lucky Necklace dropped from trash last night and 20 people hit need on it. By sheer fluke it went to a dps warrior for whom it was an upgrade (not me - I passed). Since it has agi on it we had two hunters leave because they refused to believe that it's a great dps warrior item. We also had whining on /ra for the rest of the raid.

PUG raids turn everyone into a ninja.

4) The cascade of quitters

You wipe. One person leaves without a word. Then a second. The assumption grows that the raid is over and all of a sudden half your raid leaves.

Why do they do this? It took 45 minutes to put the raid together and you could find one or two new members easily. If people would just wait for 5 minutes then the raid could continue. Because they all leave as a kind of knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) reaction, they've wasted 45 minutes of their time - how is that efficient?

5) Gearscore e-peen

If you have good gear score then make the hell sure that your performance lives up to it, or shut the hell up. People with 5.6k gearscore who bitch about "carrying noobs" and then pull 4k dps really really annoy me. It's ok to be shit, but don't be shit and superior.

Yes, I had an annoying PUG last night. How could you tell?

Shield Block RIP

2010-03-02T13:52:00.003Z

Still thinking about avoidance - so if block is 30% mitigation, what will happen with shield block? Presumably this will go or change substantially - otherwise 100% block/avoid chance, and hits that get through are mitigated by 60% (90% if it's a crit block)!

And this active 25% of the time?

I think that shield block will be changed signficantly in Cataclysm.

This is a shame, as it's one of my favourite warrior abilities.

Avoidance changes - some thoughts

2010-03-02T13:24:00.004Z

There are a number of stat and mechanic changes being announced for 4.0. A full list is available here, but these caught my eye

Block Rating - Block is being redesigned to scale better. Blocked attacks will simply hit for 30% less damage. Block rating will improve your chance to block, though overall block chances will be lower than they are today.

I wonder if the developers will leave critical block as it is (ie 60% blocks). If so, and using current encounters for illustration, we might expect blocks of 15k to 20k in 25 man content. That's quite a lot. I know that the intention is that bosses won't hit so hard in Cataclysm, so these numbers don't quite correspond to what we'll see in 4.0. Nevertheless, block will remain a very powerful mitigation/avoidance tool, and it's still not going to be easy for Blizzard to balance blocking classes (particularly warriors) with non-blocking classes.

With lower boss damage per swing and mana management becoming important again (this is the stated design goal anyway) avoidance may be as important as stamina and mitigation in Cataclysm. Nevertheless, since warriors can block it makes sense that their other avoidance and/or EH should be lower than druids and DKs to compensate for this. It will be interesting to see if we get lower EH (as we have now), and whether this actually matters.

Parry - Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

Two points - firstly on the basis that spiky damage = bad, this will make parry better than dodge [Edit - no it won't, because you can block, dodge or parry the second attack, or it can miss. This means that parry will have around 75% of the value of dodge, depending on your avoidance levels] Good for DKs, bad for druids. Secondly, I wonder if this mechanic will be applied to mobs and bosses as well. If so, the value of expertise plumments for tanks, because one of the main reasons we take it is to avoid being parry-hasted. There is no mention of expertise being removed in the blue post, so I guess it just becomes a dps stat.

EDIT: Been thinking about it. If you can avoid the second attack then this is a massive nerf to parry because it is unquestionably worse for mitigation purposes than dodge, even before DRs kick in. But if they make it so you can't avoid the second attack, who would ever stack parry because parrying an attack means you can't dodge the next one - it lowers the value of your dodge stat! This change can't make it to live surely?

Quote of the day

2010-03-01T08:47:00.001Z

Such a day, Rum all out -our company somewhat sober: -a damn confusion among us! Rogues a plotting; -great talk of separation. - So I look'd sharp for a prize; - such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damn'd hot, then all things went well again

Blackbeard Teach, Pirate

3.3 so far

2010-02-25T08:56:00.002Z

This was on MMO champion today

Warrior - Protection
Vitality: Now boosts Stamina by 3/6/9%, up from 2/4/6%. Strength and expertise benefits have not changed.

We also have a +50% damage buff to revenge.

Two nice buffs in the pipeline assuming they make it to live.

Traps

2010-02-24T17:42:00.002Z

I can't raid at the moment because I can't guarantee that I can be online at any particular time, and when I can get online I have to stop playing every five minutes to change nappies, comfort crying child etc. I've been grinding heroics with my tank and my arcane mage alt instead.

Although heroics are easy these days now we massively overgear them, there are still some places where even a well geared tank can still die if you are not careful. Here's a list of four which occur to me. I've ignored the three new instances because they are definitely not AoE fests. I've also ignored places which impose any difficulty of execution (eg Skadi's gauntlet in UP) - I am only interested in mobs with surprising and dangerous abilities.

Utgarde Keep - The very first room has mobs that sunder armour, which debuff stacks to five. It's tempting to charge in and pull the whole room, but if you have a full whack of sunders up then the mobs can melee you for 5k. If you have four or five mobs beating on you for 5k per swing then even a well geared tank can die very quickly.

Old Kingdom - The Ahn'kahar Spell Flingers have a spell which does damage equal to 80% of the target's maximum health. These guys are also found near the start of the instance before the first boss. The spell can be reflected (woo hoo 50k hits) or interrupted, but again leaving these guys up too long, or pulling two packs (there is one per pack) can often lead to a dead tank.

Azjol Nerub - The Anubar Prime Guards have abilities to reduce the damage they take, increase the damage they do, and cause AoE damage whenever party members are healed. These should not be a problem if dps is awake, but what often happens these days is that the tank will rush ahead of dps and pull the mobs, meaning that the debuffs on the tank stack up several times before dps starts. By the end of the fight the mobs will be hitting quite hard indeed, so you may need a cooldown to survive depending on your gear level and how strong your party is.

Gundrak - The elementals before the Drakkari Colossus drop a mojo puddle which does 1.6k dps on heroic. This should not be too much of a problem, but again since it is normal practice these days to pull the whole room you can have overlapping pools and damage can stack up quickly if you are not aware or if your healer is not up to it.

New alt

2010-02-18T13:16:00.002Z

My wife presented me with a second daughter over the weekend - hence the lack of posting action. Raiding is out for the foreseeable future, but when things get back to normal I will get back to posting again.

Thus far my new little alt has trained the Demoralising Shout ability, and therefore appears to be following in her daddy's footsteps.

Avatar

2010-02-11T23:43:00.001Z

This made me laugh. The song is catchy too.

Power Auras

2010-02-11T13:24:00.001Z

I've found Power Auras to be a really useful addon over the last few weeks, and it has dramatically improved my performance since I added it to my UI.

Basically it adds a large customisable graphic whenever you get a particular buff, and you can add a sound as well. This is brilliant for dps roles which rely on procs - I use it for "Slam!" when I'm playing in my fury offspec, and for "Missile Barrage" and "Hot Streak" procs on my mage alt. Since these procs add a short buff, it's very easy to see if you have an ability proc - without the addon I had to watch the scrolling combat text to see if the proc name came up, or look at my (crowded) buff list. If my attention was diverted (eg I was looking at my rage bar to see if I had enough rage to heroic strike, which I do every three seconds) then I would simply miss the proc and take a dps loss.

With Power Auras, it's obvious straight away if you have a proc active and so you shouldn't miss out on any dps from proc events.

So - great for dpsing. But there's more.

Rotating cooldowns is now a key part of tanking, and Power Auras helps here too. You can assign Shield Wall and Last Stand to the addon (for example), so that you can see clearly when you have each buff active. This means that if you are chaining cooldowns together you don't have to watch the buff timer in your buff list, and there's no possibility of you forgetting to activate the second buff - you can see when Shield Wall has ended and know that it's time to activate Last Stand. It makes fights such as Heroic Northrend Beasts and Festergut much easier (these are particular fights where you need to chain cooldowns).

Gah

2010-02-09T08:37:00.002Z

We had a 4% (300k) wipe on Putricide last night.

Galling.

EDIT - We use the strategy where the boss is tanked next to the green ooze spawn point, and the melee stack there. This means that the melee do not have to run about, and you get much more dps time on the boss, plus splash damage (I was targeting the green add and cleaving, for example, to hit two targets).

About half the time the add will explode in the melee group, but with four of us stacked together it wasn't too bad (10-12k ish). We never lost a dps to the explosion, but occasionally I would have to burn a self heal (lifeblood, enraged regen or last stand). I tended to save shield block for the times when the green ooze was active, so that I would have high mitigation for those periods to take the strain off the two healers.

We got to P3 about 5 times out of 8 tries total. 3 of those times we had a bad transition which lead to a dead dpser. We had 2 really solid attempts - the first was the 300k wipe, the second I got clipped by the green ooze after taking an unblocked melee swing and a dot tick. 400 damage overkill. 13% wipe. Gutted.

Armour again...

2010-02-06T15:57:00.002Z

Here is a thread from maintankadin. It's been linked elsewhere and is an interesting read.

Aside from the elitist jerks who seem to think the best way to get their point across is by insulting people (and Theckd has the patience of a saint, quite apart from anything else), the most important thing to take away from this is that picking the "best" gear for tanking is not straightforward - there isn't simply a model you can apply to decide what you should pick. The value of armour relative to HP varies depending upon:

1) the amount of unmitigated damage received in the fight as a proportion
2) how hard the boss hits (the harder the boss hits, the more valuable armour is in comparison to stam
3) the amount of heals that you receive between hits

The last one requires a little more explanation - if you are going to die in two hits, and your armour reduces the size of the hits, then your healers need to heal you for less to enable you to survive the second hit.

The thread demonstrates how just because a model can be expressed mathematically by someone who is very clever (and Theckd is indeed very very clever), it does not necessarily mean that it's the right model. It's better to take some time yourself and think carefully about why you die, and whether the mathematical model actually fits that.

This is why tank theorycrafting is so interesting. It's really hard.

From my perspective I've always loved armour as opposed to stamina. Having read this thread it's great that my instinctive preference for armour may actually mesh with reality. I've started by buying the Glyph of Indomitability to replace one of my old stamina trinkets. I have a clear premonition that Putricide will drop a trinket for me this week too...

The four stages of fail

2010-01-27T10:13:00.001Z

This is what broadly happens when you come up against a boss that challenges your execution, rather than being a gear check. I am thinking of Rotface or Professor P here, where the raid is required to learn new tactics.

Stage one - Utter fail

At this stage you don't really understand the mechanics of the fight. There are uncontrolled adds everywhere, people are standing in the slime, no-one really knows what to do. This stage is scary because the fight seems incomprehensible to you. You may have read up on the strategy or watched tankspot videos, but nothing can really prepare you for the first couple of tries.

Stage two - Regular failure

You now understand most of the boss mechanics and are trying different strategies to help minimise their effect. You still have regular failures of execution, tank swaps being missed for example. You are wiping because you haven't hit on the optimum strategy and/or because your raid team can't reliably execute the fight mechanics.

Stage three - 40% wipes

At this stage you have a settled strategy but it still isn't working. This stage can be quite depressing, because people are still messing up - not that often, but often enough to mean that you are wiping. The raid leader is starting to get annoyed with people for screwing up.

The key to turning this stage into a kill is usually improving dps. Where dps classes have to run around, kite mobs, switch targets etc then they lose dps time. Low dps means that the fight goes on longer, which means more opportunities for people to mess up.

What dpsers have to learn is to execute the fight mechanics properly, while at the same time maintaining high dps. Once they do this you will progess to the last stage (or even bypass it).

It is possible to get past this stage with flawless execution and poor dps, but that strategy is very sensitive to people messing up. Long fights mean more chances for things to go wrong and generally once things go wrong they tend to get out of control very fast indeed. Improving dps is usually better than improving execution at this stage.

Stage four - 10% wipes

Failures at this stage are often due to "tunnel vision" - people focussing on the kill and their execution of fight mechanics. Tell your team to stay calm, concentrate on the mechanics, and keep doing what they are supposed to be doing. The kill will come.

Noob

2010-01-25T11:15:00.001Z

I was flying with some friends in EvE on Friday night through low security space when we got ganked by some more experienced players. They were flying large, powerful ships while we were in very basic gear. We didn't have any chance at all really, other than to escape (which I did, although my mates weren't so lucky).

In local chat afterwards the gankers were gloating about having killed the "noobs".

It's been a long time since I have been called a "noob" with any justification - the only time it ever happened to me in Warcraft was when I got my ass handed to me on my first foray into arena pvp. Perhaps this kind of aggressive smack talk is more prevalent in pvp games, I don't know.

It was a strange feeling, anyway. It took me straight back to the schoolyard to be honest. I wanted to shout at them "I'm not a noob! Honestly! I'm really good at video games! I completed Street Fighter 2 on difficulty 8 with no continues! I made my godson cry by beating him repeatedly at Mariocart! Whenever men gather together to play Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 my name is spoken in hushed whispers!"

Ah, never mind. They'll keep. I've added them to my "friends" list (populated by actual friends, and evil gankers) so when I can fly something which is not held together with prayers and sellotape I'll repay the favour.

Unfaithful

2010-01-18T13:29:00.001Z

I'm bored of heroics. I don't want to play alts because I've done all the content before. I can earn my flask/enchant money quickly. I raid once or twice a week only. So I've (whisper it) been playing other games, for the first time in nearly five years.

I downloaded EVE online. First impressions - beautiful, massive, scary, complex. Here is a picture of my current ship - do you see where I am coming from with beautiful?

Steam

2010-01-13T21:58:00.001Z

Anyone had any experience of using Steam? I just tried to download EVE online from their website, and have paid my £15, but the game simply will not load. I get an EVE picture which persists for about 10 seconds, then nothing. Perhaps I've not linked my account properly?

Dunno

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

Cheers

Bornakk

2010-01-13T13:09:00.003Z

This is interesting. I find it kind of frustrating when Bornakk posts on tanking issues, because I just don't get the impression that he understands what he's talking about. This may be an incorrect impression and in fact he could be the world's foremost tanking expert, I just don't know.

Let's run with Bornakk's comment about wipes with the boss on 500,000 health. The current feeling seems to be that there's at least 500 dps difference between a warrior tank and a similarly geared tank of another class in a raid boss situation. That in any event is the sort of number I see regularly (I raid with a very skilled but slightly grumpy paladin).

On the assumption therefore that a fight lasts say 7 minutes, that translates to me doing 210,000 damage less than my fellow tank in that time. By Bornakk's logic therefore, every 7 minute wipe which occurs with the boss's health at less than 210,000 (I have been involved in two such wipes in my last four raids) is a direct result of my dps being underpowered compared to other tanking classes, and would have been avoided if I'd been switched out for a paladin, druid or death knight. Low dps definitely does increase raid wipes - to say otherwise is at best disingenuous.

I find it really bizarre that this has not been addressed. Blizzard must surely have their own tools to monitor dps, and there is a massive disparity between prot warrior dps and the dps of other tanks (being offtank in VoA25 where the DK main tank was doing 4k on Koralon while I pulled 1.7k was pretty upsetting). I really don't think that the answer is for me to L2P - my rotations are pretty good (although the prot warrior rotation is very challenging) - it's just that warriors are underpowered. Saying "you are underpowered but it doesn't matter" is pretty pathetic really. You might as well say it's ok that warlocks are underpowered but that's ok because rogues and mages are overpowered so on average raid damage will balance out.

I also can't believe it's that hard to increase PvE prot warrior dps without breaking PvP. Here are some ideas which took me 5 minutes to put together:

1) Make rend useable in defensive stance

2) Make thunderclap apply a dot (referred to amusingly as "the clap" on the forums)

3) Reduce the base damage of shield slam/revenge, but make it so that shield slam/revenge damage increases with the number of sunders on the target, so that damage when there are 5 sunders up is higher than now.

4) Reduce the damage of concussion blow to something sufficiently low that it's no longer in our single target dps rotation (this will simplify our rotation and balance the rend thing).

5) Make one of the deep prot talents increase the rage cost of heroic strike and the bonus damage. Alternatively you could do this via a glyph.

See? Easy...

EDIT - Looks like someone at tankspot had the same idea as me, and damn well made a graph about it. The difference in dps is apparently 1k on average, so that would be nearly half a million damage in a 7 minute fight /boggle

Still don't reckon the disparity is a big deal? I'll start polishing my fury gear...

Just an ordinary gas cloud...

2010-01-12T13:36:00.003Z

...but that's no ordinary gas cloud!

Some stream-of-consciousness stuff about Festergut

Oddly I will start this tactics note by discussing healing. Initially raid damage is very high but tank damage is low. This slowly reverses during the fight so that raid damage reduces and tank damage increases to the point where the tanks will need to use cooldowns to survive the boss' normal melee attacks. The fight is also a very hard dps burn with a tight enrage timer. You can see our DPS count in the screenshot in the post below - 5k is the absolute minimum here. You will note the comparatively high tank dps - this is due to a buff which increases the tank's damage considerably and is one of the interesting and fun aspects of this well thought out fight.

Festergut applies a debuff to his melee target every 10 or 15 seconds called "Gastric Bloat". This ability increases the tank's damage by 10% and stacks to 10. If it reaches 10 stacks the tank explodes and kills the raid, so the tanks need to swap at nine stacks. Once you've swapped tanks, the tank who is not tanking (if you follow me) will have +90% damage, so needs to switch stances/forms or turn off righteous fury if they are a paladin. They can then go all out dps for a while (I was pulling about 4.5k dps at this stage) while they wait for their debuff to expire. It's important to note that you must only swap at nine stacks and not before - if you swap earlier than that then by the time you are ready to swap tanks again the first tank's debuff will not have expired, and so you will have one of your tanks with a stack of 10 bloats and therefore a wipe.

The second ability to worry about is called vile gas. It is an AoE and targets outside melee range as priority. In 10 man it is cast on one target at a time, splashing to targets in about 8 yards. You must leave at least one person at range to soak this, and ranged should spread out to avoid it hitting more than one person. It hits pretty hard and applies a disorient effect. If this hits your melee/tanking team it's probably a wipe. Due to the potentially disastrous effect of having a healer disoriented, we ran with three healers, and had two of those healers grouped up with the melee. This meant they were never affected by the gas.

The third point of concern is the gas cloud that permeates the room. This does shadow damage to the raid every couple of seconds. Every so often Fester will suck up a proportion of the gas, reducing the amount of regular shadow damage done to the raid, but gaining a +30% damage buff. He will do this three times. By the time he's sucked up three lots of gas, he will have +90% damage, and will melee the tank for about 25K per hit. It is vital for the tank to chain defensive cooldowns during the time the boss has three inhale stacks.

After he has three inhale stacks, the boss will eventually vomit up all of the gas back into the room, doing about 50k shadow damage to each person in the raid. That is bad, but it can be avoided, as follows. Around the time of each inhale, the boss will cast an infected spore debuff on two people, and the infected person will get a Loetheb-style spore symbol on their head. The spore does AoE damage to the infected person and everyone near them, but when the debuff timer runs out everyone within a certain radius will get an "inoculated" debuff, reducing shadow damage taken by 25%. This stacks three times. The inoculated debuff is removed after the boss vomits.

We used the strategy of all the ranged running to the centre at each spore phase. This lead to high AoE damage for the raid from the spores, but with three healers we healed through it. It ensured that everyone got a chance at being inoculated. Bear in mind that inoculation is a binary magic debuff, so it can be resisted (which is a pain). It's worth having some kind of plan if you are unlucky enough to resist two inoculations in a row (dispersion for shadow priests, mage armour for mages, hand of protection etc).

So, for melee dps this is very easy - stand at the boss and nuke. For healers who are standing next to the melee team, they stand there and heal. For healers standing at a distance and ranged dps, they should run in to the melee hug at the spore phases, and run out afterwards.

For tanks - the worst geared tank should pull the boss and begin tanking. The first tank will get to 9 stacks of the debuff after 2 inhales and once the other tank taunts they should go dps. The better geared tank will then tank the boss through the first 3-inhale phase, and will need to blow cooldowns in this phase. External cooldowns such as guardian spirit may be needed. Due to the very short berserk timer, you should be killing the boss around the time of the second vomit.

I would suggest saving heroism for just after the first tank swap, so that the super-powered tank with +90% damage will get full benefit of the additional dps. I used shattering throw in this phase too.

Fester's dead

2010-01-11T22:14:00.006Z

My first time tanking in ICC tonight. First four bosses down, plus Festergut. I actually enjoyed it a lot more this time. Saurfang is a much better fight to tank than I'd thought at first - there is more to do. Festergut is an excellent encounter - really well designed. I will write some tactics down tomorrow when I have chance.

Mighty Organ

2010-01-11T13:15:00.002Z

I posted some time ago during the 3.3 PTR about the proc on the ICC10 tanking trinket. I concluded that the proc was rubbish, and to avoid using the trinket. As it happens the trinket was changed significantly before launch (perhaps GC is a reader! /wave!).

The latest version is the Unidentifiable Organ, which drops from Professor Putricide, and it's really quite interesting. Leaving the armour aside for a moment, let's look at the equip effect.

"Each time you are struck by a melee attack, you have a 60% chance to gain 24 stamina for the next 10 sec, stacking up to 10 times."

This means that the probability of this proccing in any 10 second period is calculated as follows:

Let S = Boss swing speed, A = Tank combined dodge/miss/parry, E = Expected number of tank hits in a 10 second period, P = Proc chance in a 10 second period.

E = (1 - A) x 10/S

P = 1 - 0.4^E

Plugging in some figures, let's have combined avoidance of 35% including Icewell Chilliance, and a boss swing speed of 2.5 seconds. This gives the expected proc chance of 90.76% every 10 seconds.

So, iterating this, the chance of it stacking to 2 is 90.76% x 90.76% = 82.39%. The chance of a 3-stack is 74.78% etc. Based on some very rough and ready stats, I would say that with those figures your average stamina bonus would be aound 7 stacks - so 168 stamina (the probability of a 7-stack is around 50% - it's been a while since I've done any stats and so it might not follow that the probability of 50% translates to the expected value so that figure of 7 could be wrong). You will get a different result with different bosses and different levels of gear however.

The combination of armour and stamina makes this one of the most powerful EH trinkets around - it is arguably better than either of the 25 man trinkets (this one is an avoidance trinket, and the regular armour proc is great but armour is less powerful at low health than at high health so it's more of an overall mitigation thing than something which is likely to save your life; and this one is great but very situational). The usual caveats apply however:

- the stack will probably fall off at some point during the fight, so you might be unlucky with the timing and it could happen during a period of high boss damage

- for tank swap fights such as, well, most of them, the stack will fall off when not tanking

- if the boss stops attacking to cast a spell, the stack is more likely to fall off

- caster bosses in general are less likely to trigger it since spells don't give the trinket a chance to proc

It's worth noting that this trinket will be especially useful for tanking Saurfang during his Frenzy, when his attack speed increases sub-25%.

Swing and a miss

2010-01-11T09:38:00.001Z

So we have the suggested change is that charge and intercept will no longer break roots, and we have a nerf to shield slam at high levels of strength or BV which we are told will not impact at normal levels of PvE gearing.

What does this mean then?

Well the Warbringer nerf is really disappointing and will affect PvE. I regularly use charge to escape snares in dungeon tanking - lots of mobs have frost nova or similar abilities and especially on multi-caster pulls this will make the job much harder. It won't affect raiding much, which is something I guess, but dungeons such as Halls of Reflection just got a fair amount more difficult.

This leaves paladins and druids able to break snares at will (via Hand of Freedom and shapeshifting), and DKs able to grab casters via death grip. Warriors will need to wait for the cooldown on heroic throw to expire I suppose, or use a racial ability. I don't want to be all falling skies about this, because it's not that much of a big deal, but it's a shame.

As for the shield slam nerf - assuming Blizzard get their numbers right then fine, no bother. The threat bonus is actually a buff if Blizzard are correct. Separation of damage from threat output is a backward step for a spec which still lags way behind other tanking classes, in damage terms. This is in the context of an expansion which has seen regular small buffs to prot dps as Blizzard realise each patch that prot warrior damage is still too low. I pull about 1.8k in a single target situation these days, and my rotations are now pretty strong - it's less if I have to move about, or interrupt regularly (ie leaving 10 rage as a minimum). I get rage starved in any content prior to ToC10 now too. Bah.

We will have to see whether Blizzard leave our only hard-hitting attack alone. There is still QQ on the forums about shield slam, and I see that heroic throw and spell reflect are now deemed to be unbalanced by arena players. It was telling that Bornakk in the thread I linked makes reference to a prot warrior locking down a mage and for the prot warrior's "partner" to be uncontrolled. Still balancing around the 2v2 arena bracket then are you then Ghostcrawler? Even though it is now defunct? I remain of the view that the introduction of small scale PvP via the arena system was a bad mistake by Blizzard.

Nerfbat incoming...

2010-01-08T13:02:00.003Z

Ghostcrawler has said that Prot Warriors are going to be nerfed for PvP reasons. This is depressing - the most fun thing about Prot Warriors is the varied toolkit and mobility. It would be a shame if that went away because Blizzard are obsessed with their declining arena "e-sport". From what I've read on the forums it seems like its our ability to break roots repeatedly that's the problem, and I guess this is due to the Warbringer talent.

Let's hope they can find a solution which mitigates the perceived PvP "problem" without stopping us from zipping around to pick up adds in PvE - perhaps by making Warbringer only work in defensive stance, although presumably the better warrior PvPers would simply stance dance to charge or intercept out of the root (intercept only requires 10 rage, so it should be possible to dance and intercept despite the loss of rage, although since intercept does not generate rage it's harder to follow this up with a massive combo of attacks so perhaps less of an issue).

The damage thing is a bit more worrying - my dps is still pitiful even though my rotations have improved drastically over the last few months. Maybe (and again I am just making stuff up here) the damage of shield slam and revenge could be reduced when not in defensive stance, but this is just another layer of complexity for new warriors to deal with.

It's odd that despite the fact that DKs were supposed to be the "caster tanks", warriors are arguably better for tanking caster elites than any other class. DKs have death grip and a magic shield, but both of those are on a decent size cooldown. Warriors have the ability to spell reflect (which is still simply great against such mobs) and the ability to move quickly between the adds putting out threat on each via Warbringer. The four stuns (intercept, charge, shockwave, conc blow) help dramatically too. It's always the warrior who has to go prot spec and bully the healers in Faction Champions.

DKs are still great for tanking magic using bosses, since magic shield in effect becomes another mitigation cooldown whereas the warrior's toolkit is generally useless against bosses. Frost DKs also have Acclimation, one of the strangest and most mysterious talents in the game, discussed by Gravity here.

HoR low dps strategy

2010-01-07T16:48:00.001Z

I meant to post about this earlier but forgot. If you are in a Halls of Reflection group where the DPS is a little low to beat the final gauntlet, you can cheat.

Before you start the final event by talking to Jaina, get the whole party to hug up as far away from Arthas as possible but keeping him in LOS. There is a little ledge protruding over the cliff. You should have the cliff dropping away behind you, a rock wall to your right, a crack in the ground to your left, and you should be looking at Jaina and Arthas. Have your tank run over and start the event before rejoining your hug.

Arthas will walk straight past you and you will be out of range of his Curse of Doom aura. If your positioning is a little out you might get a couple of ticks, but these should be healable. Arthas will chase Jaina up the pathway, while you follow behind him. It's important to note that the mobs will still aggro on you, and if your dps is low then you won't have much (or any!) downtime between waves. Nevertheless you will not have to worry about Arthas catching you up since he will concentrate on Jaina.

Once the gauntlet ends and Arthas gets (spoiler incoming) blasted by the cannons, you can just run through the rockfall to escape.

Trash

2010-01-05T13:04:00.003Z

Finally, after much effort, managed to put together a credible ICC10 raid of main characters from my guild. My previous attempts had been before the Marrowgar 10 bug fix and so I'd just cleared trash before.

We cleared the place in 70 minutes, with no deaths (as in, not one raid member died at any time during the instance). The closest we came to losing someone was due to framerate issues at the top of the elevator before the gunship fight, when our cat druid nearly fell off. It only took 70 minutes because I had to have the fights and trash explained to me each time.

Now granted, everyone else had cleared the place a couple of times before on 25 man, but still. Still...

It now will feel like farming every time we go back there. Can't wait for the heroic mode to be released since the raid damage is really undertuned on almost all the fights. Incoming tank damage is probably ok, especially on Saurfang where you actually feel like you are being hit hard, but since the raid damage is so low all the three normal fights become tank and spank in essence. Ho hum. Perhaps I have got used to doing Ulduar and ToC hard modes, so expect a couple of weeks' work to get each kill, rather than each boss to roll over for me every time.

There is also not enough trash. Trash really gives an instance an atmosphere and a sense of scale - the Marrowgar trash is brilliant - the mobs hit hard, there are difficult casters to deal with who cast an interesting spell, and there is the constant fear of triggering one of the big buggers that lurk at the side. All the time you have Marrowgar grinning at you from the end of the corridor - it's really nicely done. The Deathwhisper trash is disappointing since there isn't much of it and it's all in the same room as the boss. I always feel that clearing trash about 10 yards from the boss (while said boss just sits there like a lemon) lacks a certain something. The high priest mobs are fun though - if they were tied to come both together that would be better, and it would be even better if they were in a smaller space so the bomb debuff they cast was more of an issue.

There is very little trash before the gunships, and none at all before Saurfang. A lack of trash makes an instance feel a bit like a series of loot boxes, one after another.

This comes back to one of the things I've been thinking about more and more recently - Blizzard is trying to make Warcraft less annoying. Trash is probably up there with the levelling process and having to travel for ages to get to the instance. If you remove it, people yell "Great", but then soon get bored of the arcade style content which is on offer. I miss levelling being difficult and time-consuming. I really really miss having to go on a long journey to a far-off part of the world to do an instance (remember doing BFD the first time when you had to travel from Stormwind? This ancient temple on the beach near a forest you'd never been to before. Having to get the tram to Ironforge and then walk to Menethil because you didn't have the flight points?). I also miss raid trash. More trash please.

Everblue the Not-So-Patient

2009-12-24T09:14:00.002Z

The introduction of cross server LFG, combined with the emblem shift to triumph gear in 3.3 means that people are taking part in more PUGs than ever before. A corollary of this is that bad players are being grouped with good players much more than before. Many people have blogged about particularly bad experiences, some of who are so bad it's almost funny.

Vordan has my favourite though - a melee boomkin with a tanking weapon doing 430 dps...

My worst experience to date was last night in Halls of Reflection heroic. This was my first encounter with a new breed of gamer - people decked out head to foot in high end epics (ilevel 219 and 232), who think they are good players because they are in epics and are nevertheless rubbish. We had

- Mr Hunter - 2.8k dps - some attempt to use pet properly, some trapping, no misdirects, no FDs that I could spot, not good at picking the right target, no AoEing when asked, 6/10

- Mr Rogue - 2.1k dps - not much to say really - seemed to be in stealth a lot , no misdirects, not good at picking the right target, no AoEing when asked, 5/10

- Mr Disc Priest - Unusual spec for a non-raider, but did ok I think, no shackles on casters though, which was annoying for the multi caster pulls 7/10

- Mr Mage - 1.8 dps overall, including AoE sections - Frostfire spec, gemmed for int, meta gem not activated, seemed to pick different spells rather than having a fixed rotation 3/10

We completed the first two bosses after wiping twice. DPS was awful, but we just about ground our way through. We wiped three times on the final run however because the three dps simply could not put out enough dps to clear the adds before Arthas caught us up. The most frustrating part of the evening was that the mage DC'd and did not look like reappearing, so we kicked him and I invited a hunter from my guild (awesome player - 6k dps easy). The priest then said that the mage was his mate, and left as well, and the group broke up. I have met my fair share of 800dps fury warriors in levelling greens - that's one thing - but a guy decked head to toe in ilevel 219 and 232 epics that can only put out 1.8k dps. I simply don't know. I whispered the mage later to apologise for the kick, and offered to help him with his dps. I got some abuse, some lies and ignored...

Bah. My experience was different to Vordanger though - he found someone who is just utterly clueless at warcraft. I found someone who has welfared his way to decent gear (the mage's gear score is not much worse than either of my specs), and who thinks he's the bomb, but is in his own way just as bad as the Meleekin.

Update - I checked his armory this morning and it appears he has respecced arcane, so maybe something I said went in. Or maybe he was casting frostfire bolt in arcane spec. Hmmm...

Fried eggs

2009-12-24T08:53:00.001Z

This is good. Thanks to Kadomi for the link.

Cooldowns

2009-12-16T09:58:00.000Z

All tanking classes have a cooldown which reduces incoming damage by a percentage, and most of us have an ability which restores a chunk of health. Since this is a warrior blog, I am going to talk about shield wall (incoming damage reduced by 40% when glyphed) and last stand (health increased by 30%).

The important thing to notice about shield wall is that you should use it BEFORE you take damage. Suppose you have 30k health. If you use shield wall when you are on 30k health then you can take 30k / 0.6 = 50k damage before dying. If you wait until you have taken heavy damage and are on 10k health then you can only survive another 16.7k before dying. Thus rather than preventing 20k of damage, your shield wall will only protect you for 6.7k.

Following this through, if you don't get a heal, then if you cast shield wall after the first 20k hit, then you will die if you take 36.7k damage before getting a heal. If you had used shield wall pre-emptively then it would have taken 50k to kill you.

Of course if you get a heal then you may be fine, but the point remains that this ability is not something to be used AFTER you take a big hit, but should be used whenever possible BEFORE the damage lands. This means shield wall is most useful if the boss has predictable large increases in damage - frozen blows, fusion punch etc.

The opposite is true of last stand - it is a reliable heal - 9k for our tank with 30k health - and it creates more "room" in your health bar so heals that would have been wasted as overheals now have some effect. It is reasonably powerful for sustained boss damage (because of the overheal effect referred to), but also the key point is that depending on how much damage you have already taken it may be more effective than shield wall - the precise tipping point will depend on your maximum health, but in our example of a tank with 10k health left and 30k max health, last stand will be more powerful at helping him survive until the next heal lands than shield wall.

End game

2009-12-14T13:58:00.000Z

One of Blizzard's stated aims for this expansion was to make raiding more accessible. At first glance this appears to be a reasonable desire - raid content must be the most expensive form of level-cap content that Blizzard produce and it is at times breathtakingly well executed. Allied to this, Blizzard have tried to remove elements of the game that felt "grindy" or required a considerable investment in time, especially repetitive tasks.

You would think therefore that this would make the game better - more great experiences for more players, and less annoying aspects.

Blizzard have failed utterly however, and pursuing this strategy is destroying the game.

MMORPGs are successful where they create a persistent online society. Where you log on every week and see your friends, where you have long term goals, and where you see your character slowly improve in meaningful ways.

But there are no long term goals in the game any more, other than perhaps the levelling experience (which we've all been through now more times than we can count). There are very few rep grinds left- rep for most of the main factions comes for free at 80 via the tabard system, and the important enchants are now Bind on Account so you only need to do them once. There is no "gear path" since the emblem goalposts get shifted with each patch - it is almost always correct to grind "heroic" instances to get epic gear one tier below the current raid tier. Blizzard are trying to turn Warcraft into an arcade game - something that you just pick up and play for an hour or so and then put down. It is ironic that just as Warcraft becomes the most fun it has ever been, the game is dying because Blizzard simply cannot put out new raid content fast enough. When content is hard then you enjoy it for a long time. When content is easy you enjoy it until you've killed it two or three times, and after that it becomes boring.

Icecrown Citadel perfectly illustrates how utterly defunct Blizzard's policy is - it looks and sounds like a wonderfully put together instance, but Blizzard are so terrified of it being cleared in the first week that they are intending to drip-feed the content to us over the next four months. Even with the "self nerfing" Ashen Verdict system, whereby the instance naturally gets weaker over time, Blizzard have been unable to give us normal mode content that can't be beaten in a matter of hours.

I am trying to put together a guild run for the instance tonight and all my guildies appear to have cleared all four bosses on several alts.

Blizzard are worried that people will kill Arthas, let their subscriptions expire, and only renew in 4.0. The fact is however that this is exactly what many people will do because when Arthas is dead there is nothing meaningful to do in the game any more. Unless you are hardcore enough for the hard modes, you may as well say goodbye until Cataclysm hits, because the game is so easy now that there's nothing left.

Think about this - in January when the next set of bosses open up in Icecrown, you will already have the first four on farm and be starting to get bored of them. You will only have three interesting new bosses to do. At no time in the next few months will there be a significant amount of fun, challenging PvE content in the game. And Blizzard have nothing in store for us until Autumn 2010...

LFG

2009-12-11T08:32:00.002Z

Everyone seems to be posting their experiences of the new LFG tool, so here are mine.

- As a tank I get instances in an average time of 5 seconds. This is good.

- There is slightly more lag than normal. Enough so it feels a bit weird. Perhaps I have been spoiled by my relatively lag-free gaming since I got my powerline networking.

- Can retri paladins turn righteous fury off please?

- What the hell is it with that 5% damage/health/healz buff? Were heroics not easy enough anyway?

- Topping the dps meters as a tank in VH heroic was disappointing, but 2k dps was a record for me. Possibly due to that silly buff referred to above.

- Can people dps the mob I have marked please? If you dps another mob and it hits you I will have limited patience for taunting it off you repeatedly. If you really really don't want to dps the marked mob, then AoE. AoEing is fine.

- Free emblems of triumph are nice. I feel like my gear is now ready for my first crack at Icecrown next Monday.

- I like the new disenchant option. God knows what it will do to the server economy though. A guess - these BoP blues/epics would have been sold for cash to vendors, thus increasing the money supply in the world. Now they are turned into enchanting materials, increasing supply of goods. More goods + less money = lower prices. On the other hand we have loads of new gear to enchant, so perhaps the two will balance out somewhat.

- That bug (reported here) that makes the mobs run behind you is incredibly annoying. I have been tanking mobs by walking backwards in a circle.

- I am quite excited by the prospect of old world dungeons seeing more activity, as I plan to roll a werewolf in 4.0.

3.2 nostalgia

2009-12-08T13:50:00.001Z

So Patch 3.3 will hit this week.

I'm excited but kinda sad too. We were so close to getting Anub'arak hard mode down, but didn't quite make it. We had our second night of attempts last night - only four wipes on the first four bosses which included a first Twin Val'kyr hard mode kill for me. I was really proud of that achievement - after so much strife in that instance and learning of the fights, it really feels like the first four bosses are now farmable. The last boss however...

A fair few of the wipes were adds related, which is always pretty embarrassing since it was my job to grab them and tank them. We had kiting problems which was new and unwelcome, but we were getting into P3 fairly regularly - we had I think 5 or 6 attempts where everyone was alive at the start of P3. I think a lot of our problems stemmed from getting the healing mix right - it is such a hard fight to heal, and requires a completely different mindset to normal healing - one healer has to spam heal two tanks who are taking massive damage, while the other needs to do small heals to keep the group alive while reacting fast to penetrating cold damage. I think we would have got him down in the next evening of attempts, but with everyone wanting ICC now (including me), I wonder if we will ever get back to him with sufficient intensity to get a kill.

Upside - at least I can grind some emblems of triumph now to get my ilevel 245 helm. My T8 helm, while being pretty cool in that the token drops from a hard boss and can't be bought for emblems, is looking fairly scruffy now.

Anub'arak 10 hard mode - offtank tips

2009-12-01T10:09:00.001Z

I had my first tries on Anub'arak hard mode last night (10 man as usual). 18 wipes in total, and we started to get solidly into phase three towards the end with our best try being 7%.

I was pretty rusty - I had not tanked for nearly a month - but by the end I was getting a lot better. I was the offtank, which is a pretty demanding role, and so some tips here. It is not a strategy guide, since you can get those on tankspot. It's just some tips for a warrior offtank.

- Gearing for stamina is not important here - avoidance and block are king. You also need nature resistance enchants on your helm and cloak, plus a nature resistance flask. Shaman/hunters in your raid should put up some nature resistance in phases two and three. I had 31k health unbuffed for this fight and was generally ok, although I need to add some more block if I can.

- The first two adds will spawn after about 10 seconds of the encounter. If you charge and bloodrage you should have enough time to put five sunders on the boss to help your physical dps before you need to go and pick up the adds. Don't muck about here though - any phase one deaths mean a wipe, and the adds are pretty fast initially so if you have time to put down only two or three sunders it is not that big a deal.

- Heroic throw the first add, then charge/shield slam the second. The boss should be positioned next to (or on) an ice patch and the raid should be hugged up behind him. Bring your two adds onto the ice patch and then call for dps.

- Three of your six dps (this is a two healer fight) should nuke the adds. They should prioritise abilities that do splash damage such as cleave.

- The adds sometimes try to submerge. Ignore this as they are standing on the ice. Occasionally they will try to "shadow strike". You have four seconds to interrupt this with a shockwave - both adds will try to cast it together and you will interrupt both with shockwave so no bother. A ret pally with avenging wrath can also help you out if you need it. I have only ever seen the adds try to cast this once in the fight - there appears to be a long cooldown on it which is longer that the cooldown on your shockwave.

- I should say that I didn't get any DBM warnings for the shadow strike. if you don't watch the add's cast bars carefully (and have enemy cast bars in your UI of course) then you might miss one, which means one or two dead dpsers and therefore a wipe.

- Once the adds are dead, put some more sunders on the boss, then go and look for the second adds spawn. You will offtank these adds for the rest of phase one. Bear in mind that the adds get slowed by the ice patches and so the speed that these adds will reach the raid varies. Your heroic throw will probably be on cooldown, so charge one add, hit it, then intercept the second and hit that. Drag the adds to an ice patch and tank them - dps will ignore them for now. I don't generally drag the adds next to the boss - although doing so is better for dps purposes, since they will be hit by splash damage from your dpsers, it causes problems in the transition between phases one and two. I prefer to tank them on an ice patch away to one side somewhere but with perfect execution (ie more skill than me) you may want to drag them back to the boss.

- After a while, the boss will submerge. You will get a DBM warning for this. About three or four seconds before this your MT should pull the boss off the ice patch and your raid should run away from where the boss is. If you are tanking the adds next to the boss then you need to move the adds to another ice patch, but you have an 80% slow effect from the ice patch which is a big problem. Intervening on a raid member can help, but generally this is fiddly which is why I try to avoid it.

- You need the boss to be well below 60% at this stage, otherwise you are going to need two submerge phases to get the kill. Two submerge phases is not necessarily fatal, but it means you are going to have to be amazing at kiting the boss in phase two, and you are going to have problems with the enrage timer.

- There is lots of talk about kiting strategies for the boss, but most of it is not necessary. You have six ice patches, and will need one for your next phase one. This means that if you are planning one submerge phase then you can use five of them. In none of our 18 tries last night did we run out of ice patches. The key here is to stay alive - try to kite the boss if you can, but bear in mind that the boss speeds up substantially the longer a kite progresses, and it is very easy to die to long ambitious kites. Also remember that if you use an ability to drop aggro (eg fade, feign death) then the BOSS SPEED DOES NOT RESET. This is critical - the next person to be targeted will have to move really fast to avoid getting nailed by the boss. If you are going to use one of these abilities then call it out on vent to warn others to be aware of the need to duck behind an ice patch fast.

- The reason that most people die in phase two is the small adds. They die quite quickly but when enraged they do considerable damage. They are untauntable, and can only be stunned if not enraged. They enrage if alive too long. We tried all kinds of clever strategies for dealing with the small adds, but in the end we simply told our dpsers to hunt down the small adds whenever they see one alive. Go after them rather than waiting for them to come to you. Dpsers should be aware of where the healers and clothies are and be prepared to help them out if they see them in trouble.

- After about a minute the boss will emerge. This is not a threat wipe, and dps can go all out straight away. The first pair of adds will spawn straight away. This is the hardest part of the fight for the offtank - the boss will not be positioned properly and it may not be easy to see the adds from where you are. The raid might be right next to the adds' spawn point. You must grab these two adds very very fast and pull them to an ice patch next to the boss - again, heroic throw is good here. As before your three dps will kill the adds and then go back to the boss.

- The next pair of adds will probably not spawn before you hit phase three. Don't panic when you hit phase three - wait for the adds to spawn, grab them (this might be tough because heroic throw will be on cooldown so charge/hit/intercept/hit is probably the way to go). Bring them to the ice patch next to the boss and call for all dps to focus on them and burn them down. I would not advise trying to get any sunders on the boss at this stage - make certain you get the adds under control.

- Once these adds are dead hit heroism and all dps nuke the boss. When new adds spawn pick them up but don't tank them on the ice - you want them to submerge.

- The key thing in phase three is for your healers to understand how much they need to heal people for to keep them alive and yet minimise boss healing. The boss' health drops fast in phase three after the first pair of adds are dead - if you can hold on then it is definitely doable.

Good luck!

Warm Turkey

2009-11-26T18:41:00.001Z

Tobold writes interesting and sensible things about gaming. He makes you think a lot of the time. Here is one of his recent posts. In it he talks about how it is now ridiculously easy to level cooking in Warcraft. It seems like a frivolous topic, and there is the usual "catering to casuals" versus "streamlining annoying bits of the game" arguement in the comments.

I levelled my cooking skill at the time I levelled this character because I thought it would make it easier for me to get access to ability buffs and might give me the chance to make money. I didn't enjoy doing it particularly, although there was a mild feeling of achievement from time to time. I put in the effort because I thought it would be worthwhile to do so in order to gain an advantage over people who did not take the time to do so.

So for me, this is a nerf - any real or perceived advantage I gained has now gone. My achievement and effort was good for about a year, but is now worth less than it was before because most people will be able to do as well or better.

Still, it's only cooking.

This comment is fascinating however

I'm amazed at the direction complaints towards MMOs have taken over the last year or so. It seems all the things that made MMOs what they were are suddenly anathema to players.It seems like so many people hate most of the many small things that have always been part of an MMO.Questing, grinding, grouping, craft skills, everyone seems to be trying to find a way to make them go past more quickly... It's like saying: "I love playing football... except the part where you go outside, work as a team or have to kick a ball. That part sucks and I try to get it over with as soon as I can because it's annoying."

This is true - the levelling and exploring experience in warcraft is increasingly portrayed as a chore. Why is that? I am as bad as anyone - getting from 75 from 80 on my paladin alt was a real grind, and yet it was only the second time I'd seen the content. Some ideas:

- It is no longer a group game

Sometimes I am literally the only person in a levelling zone - particularly some of the more out of the way ones like Badlands or UmBungo Crater. Most levelling is now done alone and the most memorable and fun way to level is with a guildie or friend.

- There is no real reward

Because the levels flash past so fast none of the gear you receive has any lasting quality. I remember getting the paladin two handed weapon Verigan's Fist at level 25 many years ago, including soloing the first boss of Deadmines, and using it for 10 levels. It was a brilliant, epic experience and I was really excited to get it. I've had nothing like that in any of the expansions and when I level alts I can get through ten levels in two nights.

- It is very easy

You are hardly ever in any danger of dying in PvE these days. There are no elite mobs or quests. Something easy to obtain is not usually inherently valuable.

So what is left that we like in the game? Raiding is better than it ever was, and was brilliantly conceived and executed in Ulduar. Coliseum is disappointing as an instance, but some of the fights are well designed. Arena PvP is again supposedly very enjoyable for a certain sado-masochistic mindset. What's the link between these activities? They are essentially social activities, they require co-operation and co-ordination. They offer tangible rewards. They are difficult.

The more that Blizzard dumbs down the early part of the game, the less that people will enjoy it I think.

Logic

2009-11-19T09:04:00.003Z

I have been cold turkey from Warcraft for over a week now - not logging in at all. The main reason for this has been work - we have a big international client who are restructuring and so I'm in the middle of a pretty unpleasant series of overseas meeting. Another reason has been family - I'm taking the wife away for a couple of nights in a spa hotel this weekend and leaving my daughter with her granny. A final reason is that there isn't much in the game to draw me back at the moment - it so happens that I haven't been able to make any of the raids, and raiding is what kindles my excitement at the moment. Oddly, I have been missing raiding as dps, rather than tanking. I really enjoy fury, and I think would like to make this my main spec if I can do so without taking the raid spot of one of my dps friends.

I haven't given up the game at all - Icecrown looks fantastic and I can't wait for that - but 3.2 was such a let down as a patch.

So, in lieu of anything interesting about tanking, an anecdote from this book, which I devoured from start to finish yesterday while waiting for flights and connections.

I used to play a bit of poker (mainly live tournaments and the occasional cash game), and am just good enough to regularly beat bad players, without actually being good enough to hold my own against anyone competent. My weakness is that I love to play, and I love to gamble. I will chase my inside straight draw, or my flush draw, and usually crash on the final card. Victoria Coren's book is a fascinating human story about learning the game and finally getting a chance to win a big tournament.

Anyway - to the anecdote. A good few years ago now Mike Tyson is dating Naomi Campbell (the supermodel). They are at a celebrity cocktail party in London. They are arguing, when an elderly Oxford professor approaches them and tells Tyson to "Leave that girl alone."

Tyson, miffed, replies "Who the fuck do you think I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world!" The professor immediately replies "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our fields, and I suggest we talk about this like rational men."

Faction champions heroic - redux

2009-11-10T13:18:00.002Z

Firstly, and if you read nothing else in this post, here is an analysis of AI target selection in Faction Champs in ToC.

Secondly, we had our second kill last night on heroic mode. We got pretty much the toughest bunch of horde champions we could have - warrior / retribution paladin / shadow priest / resto shaman / resto druid / warlock, and we had to have our MT swap to his PvP hunter to get the kill, which took about 10 tries.

One big plus for us was the strategy of setting someone to keep hitting the warlock's felhound. We eventually used our hunter pet for it, and I saw a large number of the AI heals heading for the pet instead of the champion that we were attacking. As before our successful strategy (we tried several before this one worked) was to take out 2 of the 4 damage dealers before we went for the healers.

I was really pleased to get the kill, because it proves that last week was not a fluke due to an easy setup, but crikey that's a frustrating fight when you are wiping.

Tank survey

2009-11-06T17:04:00.003Z

There is a survey of tanking bloggers doing the rounds. Since Gravity was kind enough to tag me in his response, herewith my answers:

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary Tank?

Everblue, Warrior, and I'm specced 15/3/53 at the moment.

What is your usual tanking environment?

Ten man, normal mode and hard mode stuff.

What is your favourite encounter to tank, and why?

The key ingredient of a favourite encounter is that it must be hard, but not sufficiently hard that I die all the time. I quite like Lord Jaraxxus in ToC10 heroic - you have important stuff to mix into your rotation (the interrupt), you have to be mobile enough to avoid infernal AoE without running into Legion Flame or gimping your dps switches to the portals etc.

In the past I enjoyed Anub'rekan (when it was hard and you had to get out of the insect swarm by intervening).

What is your least favorite encounter to tank, and why?

Malygos when you don't have a DK in the group. You have to do huge dps to keep ahead of the people who have the damage buff, you have to position the boss so that the breath doesn't hit the raid, and you have to keep moving the boss around the circle so the sparks pass over the raid before hitting the boss. It's an absolute nightmare combination and I hate it.

I don't mind mobility fights, but mobility + dps buffs to your raid = tank nightmare. There are similar issues on Hodir, but the problems aren't as extreme.

What do you think is the biggest strength of your class, and why?

Warriors have an ability for every situation. There is never a boss where a buff, debuff or tank ability is needed and warriors don't have it. Whether it is picking up adds, short cooldown interrupts, kiting, tactical use of cooldowns, the sunder debuff to increase dps etc. We are "good all round".

...and weakness?

We are "balanced" around critical block. Critical block + shield block is very very powerful indeed in current content, but it is unreliable. I therefore think that although we mitigate melee damage better than any other class, we are also potentially the squishiest tank class.

What is your favorite thing about the class you chose for your primary Tank and why?

I like the complexity of our baseline abilities that we use. I think that there is always some ability that I could use better to be better at tanking (for example at the moment I am trying to work cleave and disarm into my playstyle more). I think that some of the other classes lack the depth of the warrior.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel is the best tanking assignment for you?

My 25 man experience is limited, but I would suggest that we are the best adds tank. We are very mobile, so can move to pick up adds as they spawn, reasonably tank caster mobs who stand apart from each other or do some limited kiting. We can AoE stun (bosses are usually immune to stun but adds are usually not). We can spell reflect (ditto). Shield block makes us basically immune to physical damage for 1/4 of the time. We have two interrupts.

In a 10 man raid of course you just have to do everything.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with the most?

Paladins. If it's a paladin it means I may not have to keep up demo shout, and I have an array of helpful spells I can call on if the encounter requires it (eg hand of protection on the transition between Gormok and the Jormungar's in Northrend Beasts to clear my impale stack). The extra health from BoSanc is good too, as is the armour from devo aura. Consecration will always be up so incoming adds will get snagged by the pally.

...and the least?

Ummm. Hard to say. I have very little experience tanking with druids, but I suffer from a bad case of health-bar-envy, so I would have to say them.

What is your worst habit as a tank?

Mashing devastate in a panic when I am trying to move the boss around. My rotation just falls away in particularly stressful situations. Recent buffs to devastate mean that this is less of a liability.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?

My tank partner taunting mobs off me without agreeing beforehand. I don't mind if it's part of the plan, for example in our normal ToC heroic raids my tank partner is much better geared than me, and we agree that in certain circumstances where there are two bosses and his boss is dead he will take over my boss. Otherwise though it's just rude.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other tanks for PvE tanking?

I don't know. The forums say not, tankspot says not, and Veneretio says not. I agree that with block as it is warrior damage is very spiky, but other than that I don't feel underpowered and I am tanking bosses that hit hard. I'm happy with my game experiences, so why complain? (Another 5k health would be nice though...)

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?

Recount, fraps, "did-the-healer-die?"

What do you think is the toughest thing for new players of your class to learn about tanking?

Managing heroic strikes while trying to run a normal rotation. It's a horrible playstyle. Please fix it Blizzard.

If someone were to evaluate your tanking ability via tools like fraps, recount, and World of Logs, what tendencies would they notice?

Hmmm. If they watched a video of me tanking on fraps they would see that I have a very large number of keybinds (I have 28 keys bound to abilities that I use regularly, not including modifiers such as shift- and alt-, and not including mouse combinations), that I mash devastate in panic from time to time (see above), and probably that I am a keyboard turner and don't strafe enough. On recount they would see that my dps is not brilliant (but improving I think), and that I am pretty good at stuff like interrupting and reflecting spells. They might also see that I use pretty much all of the warrior toolkit including stuff like retaliation and shattering throw.

They might see that I don't normally use cleave or disarm, although I am now starting to switch these in for fights where they're helpful.

They would see that I use a lot of macros.

Avoidance, Mitigation or Stamina and why?

Mitigation. I know it is better to stack stamina for large unavoidable damage, and I do socket stamina gems and currently run with two stamina trinkets. Nevertheless what I want to do is stack armour, and I look for armour whenever I can get it.

I like my character to feel "tough", which means armour, not a meatbag with tonnes of health. Is "meatbag" a word? It should be.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

I stack stamina and armour ahead of of avoidance. I never enchant or gem for avoidance unless I need the defence rating or I need a decent socket bonus.

What Tanking class do you feel you understand least?

Druids. Never played a druid.

Addons for tanking?

Some form of boss ability timer is utterly crucial. Get it and keep it updated. I use DeadlyBossMods. Also vital is something in your UI which shows the targetoftarget unit frame, together with that frame's debuffs. It is necessary for tank-swapping fights such as Thorim. I use Xperl unit frames for this.

Recount and Omen, obviously.

You also need to be able to see your target's cast bar, otherwise you won't be able to interrupt properly. The default UI now has this functionality, but I use Xperl.

I used to use wardrobe addons (for my blocking set, my EH set, my dps gear etc), but the wardrobe feature in the game's standard UI is very good and I now don't use any external addons for this. I have weapon swapping macros for when I am dpsing.

Other than that? I use Scrolling Combat Text so that my incoming damage and heals don't fill up the screen. I move them to one side and make them smaller.

Machinima

2009-11-06T10:58:00.002Z

For those of you who have not yet discovered the delights of Cranius, he's a really talented US singer who also makes warcraft movies. The movie that made his name was the iconic "Big Blue Dress", which I think is perhaps my favourite warcraft movie of all time. Among his many other videos he made a music video to the excellect "Highwayman", and a version of a Timbaland song called "Ulduar" which has been running through my head for hours now...

I strongly recommend you look his work up.

We are the champions

2009-11-03T11:18:00.001Z

We had our weekly ToC 10 heroic raid last night. My co-raid leader (a retadin) was away and we replaced him with a tank, meaning that not only was I leading the raid alone, but also I had to dps for the first time ever in a guild raid. I had only a little PUG raid experience previous to that (I'm not counting my mage raids in vanilla or shadowpriest raids in TBC - this was melee dps, and new to me).

My gear is all over the place - a mix of ilevels 200 to 232, with a blue cloak in there too - and I'm not properly gemmed or enchanted. I also run a spec with some PvP talents in for the faction champion fight. I bought an emblem of triumph ring before the raid in the hope that this would increase my dps a bit, but other than that I was very nervous.

As it turned out however, the raid was really successful.

We one-shot the Beasts, which was a brilliant start - no one got hit by the charge, and it was a really smooth kill. I was, of course, fifth (and therefore essentially last) on recount, but 3.5k dps was not too shabby. It took about ten tries to kill Jarraxus, and sad to say several of the wipes were my fault. I found it very difficult to switch targets fast enough, to manage my rage effectively, and to not stand in the fire like an idiot. One dps death usually means a wipe on Jarraxus, because you have to be so quick at taking down the portals otherwise you get overrun by adds. When we finally got him down I was so busy cheering that I didn't notice I had the legion flame debuff, and so died several seconds after the fight ended.

I was then prepared to give the champions about half an hour, just to practice but we had a really good setup and so I knew that a kill was possible. We had rogue/enh shaman/lock/mage/tree/disc priest - so no plate at all. Sure enough, five or six wipes later, we had our first kill! Some thoughts on the tactic:

- We had a prot warrior locking down the priest

- We ignored the tree to start with (excepting the odd fear and some random cc)

- We nuked down the rogue, purging the hots and using healing debuffs (I have a 50% healing debuff)

- We then killed the tree healer, then the other melee dps, then the second healer

This strategy was used because although we'd killed the tree a couple of times before, we were having real problems with the melee ganging up on people and losing people around the time of the first mob death. So even though we reduced the number of attacking mobs by 1 (by killing the tree) incoming damage was still too high to safely deal with. Once the rogue was down the amount of burst damage being put out by the mobs as a whole was a lot less, and there was less danger of losing someone before a heal could land. With good dispelling from our shaman and the two priests we could get rid of the hots cast by the tree, so aside from interrupts the amount of healing we were having to burn through getting the rogue down was not that much more than we had had to burn through on the tree.

We did not assign any CC to the mage or the lock, other than having a designated interrupter for hellfire.

We assigned some CC to the enhancement shammy, but not much. CC was a self help device - it allowed people to use it defensively if threatened.

Our strategy worked I think because the rogue is the squishiest melee mob we could have got - I think if we had had DK and warrior then we would have had more problems but nevertheless this is maybe the way to go if you get the tree healer (whose heals can be purged). Similarly, if we'd had the either the resto shammy or the holy paladin instead of the tree I wonder if we would have been able to burn down the rogue at all.

...lies and videotape

2009-10-30T23:27:00.002Z

The Northrend Beasts heroic video I made can be viewed here:

http://www.fallen-from-grace.net/

Thanks must go to my good friend Alviarin for dealing with divx hard mode after my ham-fisted editing and kindly hosting the video for me.

My UI is a little screwed up in the video - I was experimenting with having some of my character and target frames at the bottom of the screen, which worked out badly and I have since reverted.

The most useful thing to take from the video I guess if you were looking for tips is the positioning of Dreadscale in P2. You want to be near enough the Acidmaw tank that he can get to you if he gets the debuff, but far enough away that the cone attack and AoE don't hit the raid. After each cone attack you will have a few seconds to move the boss around so that you can burn off the debuff from your raid members, before you need to be on your guard for the cone attack again.

The chill of the throne

2009-10-30T08:23:00.001Z

I note that dodge is getting a nerf in Icecrown - a flat 20% reduction in avoidance. What will this mean for warrior tanks? It means another buff to block.

Ghostcrawler has said that he wants bosses to hit for sustained dps but in a series of smaller hits rather than a few large hits. Block (as is known) is much better against small hits than big hits, and as warriors we are the best blockers thanks to critical block - our blocks are less often than paladins, but with 10k blocks becoming a reality in ICC (I now routinely block for 8.5k in my normal tanking gear when raid buffed) warrior survivability is going to increase.

Just how marked this increase will be remains to be seen and is a function of the boss encounters. Nevertheless, this is a big buff for us.

Oh - and I frapsed our recent second kill of hard mode Northrend Beasts. I've been playing with the video over the last few days and it's now ready. I'll post it here when it's uploaded to my friend's server.

Rage

2009-10-26T09:06:00.001Z

Here is an interesting post about dealing with angry guildies:

http://blog.cold-comfort.org/nerdrage-deal/

I just got back from one of the dullest management courses ever known, but there were some gems amongst the dross, so here are two other tips:

1) Try to find common ground.

The example used in the course was about a pro-life group and a pro-choice group operating in the same town in the US. Despite the fact that you'd think that these people had nothing at all in common, when forced to get together and find common ground they both discovered they could agree on the desire to reduce teen pregnancy in that area. By stepping back they found a basis for a positive relationship and something that they could work together on, despite their differences.

If you are arguing about raid strategies (for example) try to see the big picture. You both want to down the boss, you just disagree about the best way to do it. If you focus on the fact that you both want the best for the group, it becomes clear to see that there is no essential conflict between you. Often by stepping back and finding common goals you can resolve an argument quickly.

2) Confront difficult issues

If you constantly duck the difficult issues then people's reactions to the problem which isn't being dealt with generally fall into two catagories - introverted reactions and extroverted reactions.

Introverted reactions involve essentially "hiding". In a guild context you might have people avoiding the guild forum, being unwilling to speak on vent, ignoring requests for people to volunteer for difficult tasks.

Extroverted reactions are the opposite - being aggressive towards fellow guildies. Criticism of minor flaws out of all proportion to their seriousness is a good example.

If you are seeing either of these in your guild, they could be a symptom of a deeper underlying problem, a conflict which exists within your guild and which you are not addressing. Merely dealing with the symptoms of the problem may be counterproductive - people may consider that they are being victimised. Try to look closely if their are other conflicts - often these are personality clashes - which are causing other people to react.

New tanking trinket

2009-10-21T12:49:00.002+01:00

According to datamining carried out by MMO-champion, the tanking trinket available in Icecrown 10 man (normal mode) will have the following effect:

Each time you dodge an attack, you gain 24 stamina for the next 10 sec, stacking up to 10 times.

There is no indication as to whether this is an on use effect, whether there is an internal cooldown, or whether it is simply "always on". I doubt it is an on use or internal cooldown effect, since there is no length of time listed for the buff. I presume therefore it is always on.

The trinket would therefore be 240 stamina, but it would take quite a long time to warm up.

Dodgy maths incoming...

Suppose your dodge chance is d.

Then the expected number of melee swings before you dodge an attack is 1/d. This means that if you ignore the possibility of the buff dropping off due to going 10 seconds without a dodge, the expected number of melee swings before you dodge 10 attacks and you have a full stack of the buff is 10/d. For example, if your dodge chance is 24% you would expect to receive 41.67 swings before the buff stacked to full.

Bear in mind that a 5 minute fight is 300 seconds, so with a boss swing timer of 2.4 seconds you will receive 125 swings in the whole fight, meaning that the full buff will only be up for (125-41.67)/125 = 67% of the fight.

Now, we also need to consider the possibility of the buff dropping off, perhaps due to encounter mechanics (eg the boss ceases attacking, for whatever reason, or there's a tank swap). For Northrend Beasts / Gormok, for instance, this trinket would be useless because the buff will just drop off when the other tank is taking impales. In normal combat the probability of the buff dropping off just from a series of melee swings failing to be dodged is actually pretty high - in ten seconds you will probably be attacked 4 or 5 times, meaning the probability of the buff falling off is (1-d)^4 or (1-d)^5, ie 25% or 33% where d=24%.

Running with this example - given that it will take you 41.67 melee swings on average to get the buff to full, with 2.4 seconds between boss melee swings you are looking at around 100 seconds and in each 10 second period there is a 25%-33% chance that the buff falls off. The chance of the buff falling off in that 100 second period is very very high - I put it at above 95%. This means that the chance of the buff ever topping out at +240 stamina is pretty small, and means that unless there is a large stat buff as well as this effect on the trinket, the trinket will go the way of the ToC10 trinket in being a useless piece of junk.

Grand

2009-10-19T22:29:00.009+01:00

Stepped warily into the arena for the third night of hardmode attempts, and immediately it felt like our hard yards the last two weeks had paid off. First attempt was a good P3 which failed because of a dps death leading to failing the enrage timer. After the fifth attempt I ranted at people a bit for being hit by the charge, which of course meant that I was hit by the charge next time, but we got a kill anyway. It felt really really good.

The more observant of you will have seen that I picked up the heroic bracers from the boss. That felt good too!

We then tried Jarraxus and, on our second attempt...

The big red bastard went down! That fight felt much easier - the key appears to be the dps switching fast to kill the adds, and dispelling the boss's buffs fast.

(mumbles something about getting owned by faction champions for an hour)

Brilliant raid - excellent fun.

Heroics OK?

2009-10-19T13:53:00.000+01:00

I was looking for a group to do the daily heroic quest (Old Kingdon) to get the last two badges to buy my tier 9 gloves, and found a group who were farming heroic dungeon achievements. We got the achievements from the first, third and last bosses in Old Kingdom, and it was a really fun evening - much more fun than I've had in a heroic dungeon for ages.

The achievement for Elder Nadox (the first boss) in particular was very satisfying http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2038. The boss spawns an add every 30 seconds or so, and if the add is within 100 yards of the boss, then the boss is immune to damage. The achievement requires you to leave all the adds alive however. We eventually dealt with it by using a dps-specced DK to tank the boss, and kite him into another room. I stayed in the boss's room in blocking gear, and picked up the adds when they spawned. With my array of stuns and self-heals I didn't need the healer to heal me at all, and was on about 85% health when the boss died.

The achievement for Jedoga Shadowseeker was more trivial http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2056. Every so often she becomes unattackable and one of her worshippers tries to sacrifice himself to give her a massive damage buff. Normally one would kill these before they complete the ritual, but the achievement requires you to leave them alive. When buffed her melee swings hit me for 12k, while the whirlwind hit me for 20k (and amusingly one-shotted our dps DK twice - we battle rezzed him halfway through the event). There are three enraged phases - shield wall the first time, disarm the second time, last stand the third. Easy.

The final boss achievement was a zerg http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=1862. The boss periodically casts insanity - I believe at 66% and 33% - requiring you to fight evil versions of your group members. We attempted to get him to 33% before he'd finished casting insanity, and did so first time. This meant we only had one insane phase to deal with, and we downed the boss in 90 seconds. We used our DK's army of the dead to tank him, and I went fury for the occasion.

It was a real feeling of, well, achievement and it was interesting to do the same old fights in a new way. I wonder whether it's worth going for the proto-drake mount you get for doing every heroic achievement - I have about three-quarters of them already and it would add a certain amount of interest to heroic dungeon runs.

Theorycraft

2009-10-16T13:02:00.001+01:00

Gravity over at pwnwear mused some time ago about why so many tanks are into theory. I've been thinking about that on and off and there are two reasons which occur to me.

Firstly, if you are a tank then a big part of your job is to not take damage (that's not all of your job, but it's a big part of it). How can you get better at this? You can make sure that you keep up one or two debuffs on the boss, and one or two buffs on yourself, but that is so basic as to be assumed (ie you are a bad tank if you don't do this, but not necssarily a good tank if you do). You can use one or two reactive abilities such as interrupts, or cooldowns to coincide with periods of increased boss damage, but that has only situational effect. Otherwise, you just can't get better at this part of your job by improving your rotations, experience or skill.

You ensure that you take less damage by gearing appropriately, and the fact you need to gear properly means that good tanks take a healthy interest in the effect that gear has on their ability to do their job.

The second reason is that, refreshingly, there is no right answer. When I spec fury there is a "right" spec to use, and there are "right" answers for what gear I should equip (strength vs armour pen vs crit, for example has a right answer). For tanks there are no right answers - it is unarguable for example that a tank who stacks avoidance will take less damage than a tank who stacks stamina. But is this the right thing to do? Everyone has their own opinion, and the considerations change depending on class, role, and encounter.

Theorycrafting for dps specs is very broadly a case of - insert your gear into the spreadsheet, read the optimum rotation on EJ, rinse repeat. The work has been done by clever people already and you just need to research the best approach. Any theorycrafting you do is simply an inferior version of the work done by someone else. Theorycrafting for tanks is an organic community, and everyone's work can make a difference without ever being the final word on the subject.