Revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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