Icing the Frost Queen

I’m still in shock we pulled this off. I mean, not completely, I did know it was going to happen. Mathematics demanded a kill, and we gladly complied. Still, it’s a pretty big deal for the guild that all our hard work paid off. I could not be more proud of our raiders, this was a kill we all needed to keep the faith.

We started the week with a rough patch, to say the least. Tuesday was… brutal… and we’ll leave it at that. So Wednesday we had something of a chip on our shoulders that demanded satisfaction. We buckled down and righted all the wrongs that held us back on Tuesday and still managed to get to Sindragosa with the usual 2 hours left in raid. Our game faces on, we got to work.

The first attempt was ok. We had a flawless first air phase, then a disastrous second. The second attempt we did immaculately until the third air phase, then the attempt collapsed. Shaking the rust off, as we say.

Subsequent attempts were so-so, generally requiring battle rezzes to be used in air phases, which was killing me. At least at this point we were hitting phase 3.

Finally after another attempt where the same mage (who I don’t often bring, but was dragging along as an Unchained Magic human shield) died for the umpteenth time to a Frost Bomb, I removed him from raid–something I should had done attempts ago–and brought in a newly recruited shadow priest.

Around this point we also imposed some pretty severe discipline onto vent. Basically, the rule became in phase 3: no talking unless it’s a healer announcement, a tank swap, or something life threatening. Everyone else just focus and lock it down. I think this was a huge key to our success.

The next attempt we got the fight to 7%. It was going fantastically, but Ana was cut off from heals momentarily and died, and then I went to pick it up but was eventually rocking way too much buffet stacks. Still, everyone was filled with hope. There was not a single air phase death that attempt. There was even a great raid awareness moment where a block got dropped the opposite way from where we were taking them, and everyone got out of the way, and then we kept the correct direction going afterwards. All in all, the mojo seemed to be back.

So we lined up again, and after a quick stupid wipe, we did what was destined to be the money shot. Air phases were nearly perfect, we had one death because someone was DC’d, but we kept going. Phase 3 starts and I get to work. Ana and I swap like clockwork, blocks go down with expert precision, healers are calling out roles and switches through vent without interruption. Finally we hit the single digits and it’s just gogogo time.

The enrage timer was ticking down, leaving us about a minute at that point. Everyone just pushed it as hard at they could and as I watched Sindy’s health slowly tick away from 3%, to numbers I never dreamed could lie beyond that. The “holy bleep” moment of “this is going to die” hit me in a euphoric wave, and then the Frost Queen crashed over dead and coughed up her purples.

I scored the 277 token from her for a hefty, hefty amount. Worth it nonetheless. Everyone was elated, and for some reason we rode that high over to heroic Putricide just to throw in some faux-attempts and get some idea of the mechanics of the fight.

Obviously we didn’t get very far. This is indeed our next dragon to slay, so to speak. I look forward to our coming weeks together, Putricide.

Oh, and as a humorous sidenote: remember how I said I was going to start rolling for Abom Duty? Well, prior to the first pull Ana, Nordic, and I rolled off for the right of riding the Abom. Nordic always wins, and I thought I finally had him when he rolled an 11. I then rolled a 6. Ok, well, Ana could be our last hope, right? Wrong. She also rolled a 6!

Curse you Nordicslayer.

Nonetheless, with five minutes left in raid we swapped it over to normal mode and quickly did the achievement in preparation for our eventual drakes scramble.

Great raid night overall, and a fantastic end to an ignominiously beginning week.

The game is afoot… race

Unlike the last game, last night’s actually lasted a decent amount of time and was (at least for me) much more fun.

We did this concept before, everyone rolls a level 1 and then races from one point to the other on foot, with deaths a plenty just about every mob over level 10. Last time we did Orgrimmar to Everlook; last night we did a track I thought would be much more ambitious, Silvermoon to the Dark Portal (by way of the Tirisfal zep).

Starting at the gates of Silvermoon in a huge naked pile, the gun first and we all broke for it.

Eversong, as you can imagine, was little trouble. I’ve leveled through the zone many times and knew the danger spots. I cross the Dead Scar at the north end than dodged down the road into the halfway point and crossed east towards the scar, and then down into the Ghostlands.

Ghostlands was pretty breezy, with only one rough spot at the beginning that was promptly cleared for me by the pack leaders who were torn apart by lynxes.

Towards the end of Ghostlands I was chasing Antigen, and then took a screenshot of my pursuit. I didn’t realize screenshotting made you stop running momentarily, so I had to shelve that after it cost me a chance at passing him.

We soon passed into EPL, which was definitely the hardest zone of the race. It wasn’t just the mob levels (though that did result in bats flying from across the zone to eat our faces), it was that there was no clear way to pass into WPL without crossing through huge groups of mobs. I elected to go south down the road and then cut southwest along the mountains, north of the Infectis Scar, rather than follow the road and go through Corin’s Crossing.

That was a huge miscalculation and cost me any chance at a win, I suspect. The graveyard was way too far away to make corpse hopping viable.

At this point the leaders for the rest of the game were established, and those that fell behind terminally quickly settled into a perma-bottom place. Poor Falowin tried to cross the mountains at some indeterminate point and ended up spending most of the race in EPL.

Eventually I squeezed my way out of EPL, probably in 7th place, and started making my way through WPL. The West was all about following the road and then corpse hopping past choke points where mobs were parked on either side of a road. There was a bear pincer moment, a spider pincer, and one point where you pass a field with caster skeletons on your right and a spider on your left. No way out there.

I think I ended up gaining time in WPL, because once I crossed into Tirisfal I started seeing people again.

I barely made the zeppelin, and the entire time I dashed up the tower I could hear Vili (already on the boat) shouting “GO ZEP GO, LET’S GO!” To his consternation I disembarked with the rest of them to STV.

Heading north through STV wasn’t terrible, though somehow I fell far behind Vili, but ended up ahead of Antigen. Either way, a few tigers later and I was cruising into Duskwood, land of the roaming soldiers. The only make up for the annoyance of all the mobs camping the road was how close graveyards were to each other.

You could tell we were in the final phase of the race at this point. The leaders were passing through Swamp of Sorrows while myself and the two immediately behind me were barely entering Deadwind Pass. The next two zones (Deadwind and the Swamp) were amazingly easy, not a mob in sight. Well, I got chased by a crocodile at one point, but I easily outran him.

Eventually Cendra took the win and crossed the ribbon (aka, the Dark Portal) and passed into Outland. Vili and Freezedealer quickly followed taking respective second and third place. I managed to pull fourth, and the stragglers (except for Falowin, who was in WPL at this point) began to trickle in one by one.

While waiting there I’m sure we drew a few questions from the various 50s and 60s that crossed through the portal into Outland. How often is it you see a pack of level 2 and 3s just hanging out there?

At one point a demon ran up the steps and caused a minor panic, thinking he was coming for us. Once he passed someone, everyone opened fire, but obviously didn’t do much of a scratch. As Antigen said, “where was the defense on that?!”

Once the rest of the close-by stragglers came by, I took a picture and we called it a night.

I hope everyone who participated had fun. I personally had a blast, and was immensely relieved the results seemed by the books. One more game to go!

TIL: The Putricide Abom is a lot of fun

Why wasn’t I told?!

10man last night and I was tanking with Morvain, the Death Knight with the cat problem, and when we got to Putricide there was a moment of pause. Usually Nordic just takes the Abom, or him and Ana roll off for it in the 25man. And yet last night, on a whim, I decided to take it for a spin.

I knew the long and short of it: mash 1 when standing on a puddle, 2 to slow (though we were doing the achievement, so no slows), and apply sunders with 3. I spent the fight running around, gulping puddles, and applying sunders as needed. And I had a blast. It was a nice change of pace over just ducking around with the good Professor in tow.

I need to start ninjaing that job in the 25man.

The rest of the night we wrapped up some outstanding achieves that various people needed, like a Heroic Blood Princes kill for Gulliveig, and Portal Jockey for myself.

We then moved on to Sindragosa to finally put away the heroic kill. It took us three shots but we finally got the old girl down (in 10man at least). One of my main goals last night was to use the spinning strategy and to prove to myself that it can be done, and that it doesn’t hamper the raid. It seemed overall to be a huge help, if only to keep blocks uniform, so I’ll remain firmly in the “pro-spinning” column.

We had issues with the enrage timer because we’d lose a dps here or there in phase 3 to what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds. Namely, Chilled to the Bone being stacked too high. I’m sympathetic to the idea that if the healers can get you, you’re golden, but crunch times happen, Unchained can be unkind, and healing might be stretched. And then suddenly having so many stacks of that debuff is going to kill you.

In any case, good practice for Wednesday I hope.

With the heroic Sindy kill, a bunch of us got our drakes. (This is the part where Ana comments “MONTHS BEHIND!”) It’s a nice achieve to have, but I don’t particular care for a boney dragon. I’ll probably still to my Rusted Proto for now, I like the cut of his gib far more. Is that weird?

My guild, casual or hardcore?

Stoneybaby of Big Crits/WoW.com was asking on Twitter for posts regarding the variations of play and commitment between casual and hardcore guilds (to steal his wording). Through his tweet I realized that this is something I’ve always wanted to write about, but could never build up the courage to force myself behind a keyboard and expound upon, if only because I wasn’t prepared for the time investment such a topic requires.

Considering it’s now officially timely, I’m forcing myself to take the plunge. But only lightly… it’s more like dipping my toe in the pool. I won’t go into too many specifics, but I want to speak a little bit on the gaming “philosophy” that guides our guild and why I think that our MO has delivered the success that we currently enjoy.

I don’t want to get into the whole messy business of defining what is casual and what is hardcore, because I think such a task is sisyphean at best, and impossible at worst. It’s completely subjective, ultimately. It varies from person to person, much like the taste of Soylent Green.

Like the old saying goes, “it’s a recession when my neighbor loses his job, and a depression when I lose mine.” Well–one could say a common definition for many is “a guild less progressed than mine is casual, one more progressed is too hardcore.”

If I had to–subjectively–define my guild, my first answer from that dichotomy that comes to mind is “casual”. We only raid ICC-25 for 7-8 hours a week, two days out of the seven, we don’t maintain a military-like discipline when raiding, and we don’t always approach fights 100% optimally. And yet, we’re ranked 2013th in the US. We’re 9/12 ICC-25 HM. Obviously, we’re not that casual.

But then again, I guess casual isn’t so much the results, but rather the approach… right? If that’s the definition, then yeah, casual all the way. If not, then I guess we’ll wear that hardcore label, though we’re surely not as hardcore as many others.

Hell, we used to be a lot more hardcore in terms of our schedule, with far sparser results. Up until March we were running a schedule of raiding Tuesday to Thursday, which sucked, frankly. It was too much raiding, too clustered together. (Woops, my casual is showing.) Finally as part of the first wave of reforms to stem the bleeding we were experiencing at the time–and that’s another post for another time–we cut it back to two days a week. The result unexpectedly paid huge dividends.

We started doing more in those first two days than we did across three. It was like the Laffer Curve, but for raiding schedules.

And why did we cut back the schedule? Because at three days, the general consensus was that it was too hardcore! People didn’t want to spend three days straight in front of their PC. The vast majority of my guild’s raiders have RL commitments: significant others, spouses, children, night jobs. It was onerous for us to raid so much.

Of course, there is a downside: only raiding for those 7 hours limits how many progression shots we get on a boss week to week. We spent 2-3 hours every Wednesday for weeks while learning the LK fight. Then we extended the lockout to get a full 7 hour block on the guy, only to down him the first night of that week. Likewise, we’ve been pouring our energies into Heroic Sindragosa lately. Progress has definitely been steady, but I can’t help but think we’d have the old girl down by now if we had an extra 3 hours a week to spend on her.

But I digress. Surely the schedule we operate under is a tick in the casual column, with regards to time invested. Now, let’s talk about effort invested.

More of my dps than not read EJ. They do their class research. The two main raiding rogues are total spreadsheet junkies, a discipline that they’ve taught to every other rogue that have joined the raiding ranks. The healers spend their off time thinking and researching about strategies and techniques. Antigen obviously has his own blog, and knows his stuff. Ana and myself write about tanking, as well… as you know. We spend an unhealthy amount of time bouncing ideas off each other and diving through Maintankadin threads.

I think that’s a tick in the hardcore column. Not all guilds have a majority of their members spending time “off the clock” to work on improving themselves and their performance.

But we’re not 12/12 ICC 25 hardmodes. We’re not farming Invincibles. Which is partly why I am hesitant to deign myself fit to don such a moniker as “hardcore”. It doesn’t feel right upon my head.

Yet, ultimately, I think we’ve found a “sweet spot” in the casual/hardcore spectrum. Our input is casual–we don’t raid that often–but our output is in many respects hardcore. We get results, we kill bosses, we get loot. We might do it more slowly than other guilds, but in the end we’ll reach the same destination.

So very, heart-breakingly close

We’ve been working on Heroic Sindragosa since at least the beginning of August and it’s be steady progress ever since. While it sucks to only realistically have a max of three hours a week to work on the old girl, it’s been pretty obvious we’ll soon have the kill. The first week we were wiping at 60%. Then we were kissing phase 3 the next. Then wiping at the 26% mark the next. Then 13% last week. Last night we got her to 3.9% before giving up the ghost, on our best attempt.

3.9%

Mathematically it’s impossible not to drop her next week. I like our odds.

One thing I did to shake things up was to force the raid to adopt the AYCE strategy I came up with the other night. Our third phases were hectic, blocks were going in crazy places, or too far away. I figured my strategy would tighten that up a bit, make for a cleaner close to the fight. And of course I got push back.

I don’t mean reasonable pushback, with intelligent, well reasoned concerns, but just snark. Determinations that “this couldn’t work” and “why are we changing the strategy after getting it to 20% last week?” And then this person went on to rage to an audience in a separate channel that I am not party to. It was infuriating, to say the least. Give me some credit, I’m not a complete goddamn moron.

After the third try with the new strategy, we got her to 8%, our best attempt up to that point. Before that, the naysayer whispered me and said something to the effect of “You know you can’t adopt a new strategy and expect it to take off in a few attempts, right?” After that 8% try, the naysayer whispered me again and said “You’re allowed to say I told you so, you know.” I just smiled and replied, “Not my style.”

As for the 3.9% attempt, what kills me was that could have very well have been a kill attempt. It was the last attempt of the night, so it had that mythical Last Attempt Aura that we’ve benefitted from in the past. Air phases were golden, with I think only one death across all three (which was quickly remedied with a brez).

And then finally, we were at the 8% mark with just about everyone alive, and I had this heavy hope that we were going to come out victorious. I don’t think I was breathing much at that point. We’re about 40% around the rotation, at least four blocks have successful gone down, and the next person gets marked.

They don’t move. I call out the name, and “I DC’d!” is the response in vent. My heart sinks.

I see the symbol over his head, and the dps standing next to him. “Move away from X!” The dpser doesn’t listen, tunnel visions. Gets chain blocked. Some scramble to start breaking them out, but the death blow was just dealt. We’re at 5% now. The next person to be marked for a block ran way far away to drop Unchained Magic, and was caught with their pants down. No way they can make it to the proper spot in time, and the block is too far away. So we resolve to start rotating the other way and catch up to the last block to go down.

I’m almost there, and the next person marked decides to drop the new block counter clockwise, rather than to the right of Sindy’s face and thus resuming the proper rotation like I intended. At this point it’s around 4.5% and people are dropping like flies because blocks have been garbage and no one could drop their Buffet stacks.

I bite it around 4.2%, Ana tries to pick up the slack, but she’s quickly overwhelmed. We soon wiped ingloriously at 3.9%.

So close. So goddamn close.

Things we need to work on: control is getting better, but people really need to watch their debuff and do what they can to reduce damage taken. This especially includes healers not tunnel-visioning and neglecting to run out when they have Unchained Magic.

Next week.

Been waiting a long time for all you can eat

Another step closer to getting my ICC drake, as we wrapped two of the harder achievements in the 10man meta last night. One was the terrifying All You Can Eat, the other the endurance-testing Been Waiting a Long Time for This. With these two under my belt I need only Portal Jockey and a heroic Sindragosa kill, and I’m golden. Or… boned… in this case.

And yes, I know Ana’s team has had their drakes for a few weeks now. But Team Alpha is all about catch up! It’s how we roll.

Anyway, I digress. Let’s talk about how we did each achievement.

All You Can Eat

The first attempt we did for this achievement was using a zerg strategy that Anafielle had touted in the past. I’m always very wary of zergs, and this was no exception. Having one healer get consistently Unchained was not fun, and having two mainspec healers go to offspec roles that they don’t typically raid with didn’t help either. We quickly wiped.

So we started doing it the non-cheese way. For the next two hours (and I know it was two hours because we had trash respawn), we kept breezing through phases 1 and 2 and then crashing hard in phase 3. People would stack a debuff too high and die, or blocks would go in the wrong place (since we were trying to keep them close to the head)… in short, it was a series of clusterfarks.

A lot of us were tired, some were hungover, and basically the general raid wasn’t operating at peak efficiency. I was questioning whether this was going to happen.

After the trash respawned, I had a brain storm: positioning blocks and getting them in the ideal spot seem to be our biggest issue, so why not change how we drop blocks? We’ll drop that first block in that ideal spot, and then every time we need to put down a new block, the tank rotates Sindragosa slightly so that a new ideal block spot opens up to the left of the existing block. Then there’s a close, pristine block to hide behind for the tank swap, and dps can instantly identify which block to nuke down.

Here’s a terrible diagram (nothing to scale) to demonstrate my crazy talk:

Sindragosa starts with her face at position A. First block goes down just to the right of her face where that white dot is. Next time someone gets frost beaconed, the current tank rotates Sindragosa to a point halfway between A and B, and the block goes to the next white dot. Old block is burnt down, raid has a close block to hide behind, and dps still have access to Sindragosa’s stomach.

Just crazy enough to work, I thought. And anything else was preferable to the same old that we were doing and wiping with for so long.

So we tried this new strat, and got the achievement on the first try with it.

I’m so going to try this strategy with our 25 heroic run on Wed.

Anyway, some other helpful tips–and apparently I’m the last one to know this–but if you’re LOS’d at the 2 second mark on your Buffet debuff, it’ll fall off. So you can start running at the 1 second mark, which gives you a whole ‘nother two seconds to beat feet and relieve the other tank so they can drop their debuff. Moreover, the RaidAchievement addon is amazing for this. Will instantly tell you if someone screws it up so you don’t kill Sindragosa and miss the achievement because some dope wasn’t watching their debuffs.

Been Waiting a Long Time for This

We went into this achievement with an equal mix of tiredness (it was 30 minutes before raid end), confusion, and ignorance about the mechanics of the achievement. After talking with Ana about the rules (you need to get >30 stacks and hold that til transition) it became obviously that no one did their homework. Thankfully, Ana is an achievements expert.

So anyway, first attempt we did the first phase like normal, stacking diseases and just holding off transition, and by the time the disease got to about 20 it started murdering ghouls instantly. The disease fell off and we had to wipe.

Again, didn’t do our homework! We consulted Ana and she explained with great patience that we should RTFA and actually do the strategy: basically, cleanse the first disease far away so it doesn’t pass to the group or the mobs, then dispel the second disease onto the mobs, then after that dispel the rest of the diseases far away so no one gets it.

You skip the first disease so you can gather up the first wave of ghouls, giving you time to build up a solid base of fodder for the plague. I know this now because on our next attempt the first person to get the plague forgot and ran to the mobs. Diseased passed onto the mobs, and we just shrugged and kept going. But the plague hit >20 stacks, it was quickly murdering mobs left and right. We had the LK at 72%, and held him there, and I frequently had to run back to him and get the disease passed either to a freshly spawned ghoul or to a teammate to keep it alive.

Utter chaos.

Finally, we had it up to 32, and pushed LK hard. We finally pushed him over with the disease on someone at 31 stacks, it got cleansed, passed to ghoul that somehow survived, I pulled them aside on the edge as we worked through the transitions. Each ghoul dropped dead in short order, then I self-cleansed the plague off of me, removing it from the fight.

We then went back to autopilot through LK10, eventually downing the fight with the only moment of difficulty being when Gandy the Rogue accidentally overshot the ledge while his rocket boots we active and plummeted to his death. We almost wiped because people started laughing, but Frank whipped everyone back into line.

Towards the end, I was eyeing the enrage timer nervously. We were down one rocket man dps and had about 3 minutes left at the 30% mark. My fears abated, we hit 10% with 1:30 to go. …I so did not want to have to play plague-juggling again.

This achievement is definitely easier than the Sindragosa one, but the tradeoff is it’s a much bigger pain.

And now that both of those are done, time to start worrying about Sindragosa 10H for next week…

Fun while it lasted!

I’m debating how to phrase the toning of this post. While what happened was definitely fun (while it lasted) it was also very frustrating in that it definitely ended with suspicious circumstances.

Alright, cynical skepticism, you’re up.

So last night was the first of the “ES Olympics”, the three games we would use to disperse three of the Shadowmourne loot items: the Favor, the Music Box, and the Pendant. And last night’s game was “Hunt the GM”.

I made the ugliest human I could stomach to craft and fled south to what I thought would be a pretty ingenious hiding spot. The rules generally were I’d be in a contested zone and not move.

I considered several dick moves I could pull, like rolling a Night Elf and Shadowmelding, or rolling a druid, getting it up to Aquatic Form and hiding in the ocean somewhere. But I decided against being mean.

Here’s where I ended up, and you can see the path I took:

Believe you me, it was a pain in the ass to get to Darkshire as a level 1 with a wolf chomping my face off every 15 feet.

There’s a small grove behind the tower on the border between Duskwood and Deadwind Pass. I ducked in there and camped out behind a tree. I indulged in some masculine giggling while waiting for my eventual executioner.

I hung out in vent while I listened to everyone talk about trying to find me. It was like hide and seek on steroids. Everyone was enjoying themselves, and at 7:20 I dispensed the first of my six prepared hints, which was just a throw away.

And then a moment later, the guild’s resident shifty warrior found me. This is while everyone still barely had a clue what zone I was. And so the game ended, twenty fast minutes later.

To harken back to the cynicism I summoned at the beginning of this post, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the warrior did a /who check for each zone on another account and found the one level 1 character that was out of place, focused on Duskwood and then zipped around with a /target macro with that level 1′s name. If I was going to cheat that’s how I would do it.

Not that I would because, you know, I have principles. And stuff.

In any case, I have no proof; but 20 minutes is awfully suspicious. Eyebrows are firmly cocked.

Annoyances aside, the 30th is my guild’s 2 year anniversary, so the second game will be that day. Probably another lvl 1 naked alt race. That was a lot of fun, and is basically impossible to cheat at without being ridiculously obvious. And as for the third game, I have no clue what to do. Any suggestions are welcome in the comments.

And of course with the pace Morvain is getting Shadowmourne shards, we’ll be having another series of games soon enough.

The good kind of wiping

Last night we spent a good 2 hours on Heroic Sindragosa 25, and while we didn’t down her, we got closer than ever before with 13% as our best attempt.

The whole night was generally moving in the same direction, upward. I remember when we first started working on this fight three weeks ago we were losing five people to the frost bombs every air phase, with a further number being cut down by asphyxiation. Last night, not so much. We had many air phases where no one got nuked. It got to the point where I didn’t have to obsessively watch grid to look for the little boxes to grey out and inform me of deaths, people were taking care of themselves.

Progress!

Unchained Magic was a lot better too, with fewer instances like three weeks ago when a mage blew us all up with some massive stack of Instability immediately following a Blistering Cold. He did more than 1 million friendly fire damage and set a new record I suspect the casters are secretly aspiring to topple. I’m watching them.

But in any case, in the flight to the steps at the beginning of the air phase, people were really good about standing aside and minimizing damage.

Likewise people were amazing about getting on the proper spots when Frost Beaconed. In the 36 air phases we did last night I can only think of two times when someone was in the wrong spot. And we only got an extra block once.

More progress!

Stuff to work on, though: people panicking in phase 3 and forgetting to not blow up the raid, to pay attention to their debuffs, the works. I always shout “Marathon, not a sprint!” when the third phase starts. Not that that helps much, but it carries the philosophy of the fight–phase three is the main show, and it’s about endurance, not zerging down the boss.

We’re getting there. We are totally getting there and I fully expect a kill on this fight, one of the hardest in the game, in the next two weeks. If not next week. It’s just a matter of time.

Despite the fact that we didn’t get a kill last night, I think morale still remains pretty high. We didn’t spend the attempts raging at people who got Frost Bombed to death, or hit some people with Instability. Frank didn’t ever poke up his bilious head at any point. We’re really not that kind of guild ultimately. And besides, that’s what the knee-cappings are for.

Instead people were joking and having fun and trying to keep people positively motivated. We had some good laughs at points like right after a fourth Bomb hit, Falowin was watching his block’s health diminish (but not his DBM apparently) and started shouting “NOT MY BLOCK, DON’T BREAK MY BLOCK” in a blind panic. Once he was broken out he realized air phase was over. We all got a good laugh and I’m sure that will come back to haunt him.

And speaking of events that will come back to haunt people, poor Morvain. The guy last night was hopped up to the gills on vicodin due to a horrible tooth-ache. Ever a trooper (and with a Gollum-like devotion to his Shadowmourne shards) he still raided, without much of any performance lost. Except for one moment last night when we switched it back to normal at the last 30 minutes of the raid to wrap up the LK and were kind of blowing off steam on the far less deadly Sindy Normal.

We’re deep into phase 3, with myself and a swath of people hiding behind a block dropping our Buffet. Morvain is there and gets targeted by Frost Beacon. “Morvain,” someone mechanically notes, reading off DBM. Nothing happens. “Morvain move.” … “MORVAIN!”

Then a woosh and about 10 of us are encased in ice blocks. “Sorry guys,” Morvain meekly pipes up, snapping out of his haze. “I was looking at my cat.”

Everyone is caught up in the sheer absurdity of it all, and in the haze of laughter and tears the other half of the raid gets iceblocked. We lose it, and–of course–the fight. Wipe.

It was kind of worth it. Like Antigen said, definitely the birth of an in-joke. That damn cat.

The Longer Arm of the Law

My favorite talent I don’t have is most likely getting buffed in future builds. The run speed increase, according to GC,

[is] 45% in our current builds.

That’s good to hear! It not stacking with PoJ was worrisome, but I figured they would eventually iterate it to have a faster speed (even if right now it’s just PoJ+boost).

Though, honestly, they should probably just merge this talent with PoJ, giving it a 15% base and a 45% (or whatever) boost when that 15 yard-minimum Judgement is cast. Seems silly to make Rets spend 4 talent points on run speed boosts.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a tiny flame of hope to tend to vis-a-vis us ever seeing this talent in Ret tier 2.

Back to business in beta

One of the first things I did Friday when I got home was try to log into the beta and get some more leveling done and see if I missed anything. Instead, all the servers were down. A new patch was being applied from the looks of it, which means I got back just in time.

Later that night everything came back up and I caught on WoR some of the incoming changes. Most immediately tantalizing of which is the new Holy Power UI widget. I’m sure you’ve seen a thousand screens of this, but here are mine:

Perdy.

I’ll be talking a little bit about Holy Power, ShoR, and Holy Shield in a bit. But first, a few back-end things–check out the new tooltips for hit and expertise. This is pretty handy (especially for Expertise, which is a tad more complex than Hit). Takes a little of the numerical mystery out of the game, but QSS.

Now with more Block!

And of course, the biggest news of this build isn’t the fluff HoPo (as Anafielle calls it) interface, it’s the introduction of Mastery.

At base, our Mastery (Divine Bulwark) is worth 16% block chance as soon as you train it. As you add more Mastery rating that number goes up (tempered by the level/mastery formula, of course). At level 81, with 75 Mastery rating, my block chance went up to 23% before Holy Shield.

At lvl 82, I had managed to accumulate 492 mastery through various quest rewards, worth 28% block chance. That’s 32% before Holy Shield, 47% after. In fact, before dinging 82 I had about 52% block chance all together. One level dropped it 5% from the ratings/level conversion. I expect that drop will get steeper as my level gets higher.

The other “skill” available at the trainer was Plate Specialization, which boosts a stat if you’re in all plate.

So basically a free 5% stamina.

Revamped talents and spells

I already talked about Ret’s (grumble) gap closer in a post on Saturday, so I’ll avoid repeating myself here in this space. Some changes prot-side included a return to a +damage Consecration talent, a new Sacred Duty that makes ShoR have a chance to crit (I’ll talk about this re: priorities in a sec), and Wrath of the Lightbringer affects Judgements as well now.

Shield of the Righteous (ugh, that name) is now implemented, unlike the week before. You can talent into it and it appears in your spellbook. And unlike the 30/60/90 iteration, it now deals 20/60/120 AP based on how much Holy Power you’re rocking. At lvl 81 I had about 3700 AP with Might up. I was ShoRing for about 4600 damage a hit, which is 120% AP (including some Vengeance). Not too shabby, but also not the BOOMHEADSHOT type-attack I was hoping for. Perhaps at later levels with more massive AP numbers.

ShoR also when cast will put up a 20 second Holy Shield buff. For 15% block chance, regardless of how much Holy Power you had when you used ShoR. 1 HP is 15%, 2 HP is 15%, 3 is… you get it. This is much less onerous than the old prospect of stacking Holy Power to 3 then getting the max block buff up at the start of a boss fight. Now your first moves in melee can be CS+ShoR and you’ll be good to go.

Hammer of the Righteous has been redesigned. Rather than cleave and swinging flying, glowing hammers about with a mellifluous CLANG, you now just let loose a holy burst of light and hit everything around you. Rather than being a copy of Cleave, HotR is now a copy of Thunderclap. I haven’t tested the damage yet to see how much it does single target, on two, three, etc. and WoL ate the log I did Saturday. Nonetheless, I’m curious why this spell was redesigned, especially when Holy Wrath still works.

Speaking of HotR, it is, as we knew was coming, now on the same cooldown as Crusader Strike. And both have a 4.5 second cooldown, lining up nicely with GCDs.

Hand of Reckoning no longer does damage on taunt. Disappointing, but it was always a band-aid to the removal of Exorcism from our toolboxes. To fill in the gap we have Avenger’s Shield with a–talented–15 second cooldown (which gives me tingles) and the new Improved Judgements talent which allows us to have 30 yard Judgements. Something I can see myself getting.

The new priority

So, like I’ve been teasing, here’s the new priority rotation I’m monkeying around with: (1) Avenger’s Shield, (2) Judgement+3HP ShoR, (3) CS/HotR, (4) Hammer of Wrath, (5) Judgement, (6) Holy Wrath, (7) Consecrate.

The reason I have Judgement twice is because you definitely want to make sure to cast it before ShoR, since it gives ShoR a 50% chance to crit. It doesn’t have to be immediately before, the proc has a 15 second duration, so you can ride that for a bit, or jam another Judgement in right before ShoR for another chance of it.

Judgement otherwise still hits like a wet noodle and isn’t worth prioritizing over other, hard-hitting spells.

Also, don’t forget: the first rule of Grand Crusader is it will always proc if you use CS/HotR when Avenger’s Shield is not on cooldown! Also, we don’t talk about Grand Crusader.

Now, one of the more disconcerting things about beta right now is how many free GCDs we have. I’m so used to rotating through my 9s and 6s that I find myself stopping dead in my tracks with no idea what to do next as all my abilities are on cooldown. In a raid I could toss out some Hands/utility. While soloing I just block Holy Wrath as a filler.

Oh good, more morality quests

And the last thing I want to talk about in this post is I had a very interesting questing experience in Hyjal this weekend.

What’s this? A moral choice?! I had the option of letting the NPC kill the quest target who we were interrogating, or let her go. Being a blood-thirsty Alliance I opted for the throat slitting, though outside of that quest there didn’t seem to be any recourse to my actions. I’ll be miffed if it turns out she comes back to you a week later and gives you a free epic for sparing her life.

Expect this to generate blog posts at the advent of Cataclysm much in the same way that Borean Tundra torture quest did two years ago. Money on the table!