To say the least: Boring. Overly simple as well.

Something had to give and I’m glad to see that we’re finally getting that much-needed complexity that many of us have been clamoring forever for.

All of the paladin specializations will make use of a new resource called Holy Power. Holy Power accumulates from using Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and some other talents. Holy Power can be consumed to augment a variety of abilities, including:
An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

969 is dead and rightfully so. We’ll be shifting to using a more priority-based system in Cataclysm that builds on using abilities when the payoff is at its apex. For example, say Crusader Strike builds Holy Power for us, then we would do some normal attacks, mix in CS, and build HP to 3. Once Holy Power is maxed out, that’s when we would pop Holy Shield for a longer damage reduction “break” (which begins to make sense of GC’s assertion that you would only use Holy Shield once a minute or so, it becomes much more manageable when there’s a clear point to use it).

Or, you could opt for casting Inquisition and going for a threat boost (probably more useful for trash or farm content?). In any case, choices! And priorities! We’re not just doing A, C, B, D, A, E, B, C, etc, anymore!

Has it been properly conveyed how excited I am about this system yet? I realize this is a weird reverse of Rogue combo points, where we’re stacking these on ourselves, but I am sure in the end it will be just the tonic class needs.

Likewise, this GC quote from this weekend is pertinent:

We felt like we needed to add several new spells to the paladin rotation, including making Holy Wrath a real part of the rotation. With all of those changes, we thought it was hard to justify having a mechanic to choose your Judgement when you were already choosing your Seal and Aura. It’s just a different model. If anything at the moment I’m worried that we made paladins too complex and might have to reign it back in a little. We’ll see when players can try it out in beta.

Yes, wait and see! After the long time we’ve spent wallowing in “easy mode”, erring on the side of complexity is not a bad thing. Just go with it.

Lastly, I would like to /sign the suggestion given by many on the official forums, as well as by Rohan and Sucidal Zebra: rename Holy Power to Zeal. Holy Power is an undeservingly lame moniker for something with so much potential.

So I hit up twitter, and asked if anyone knew someone taking art commissions and Vid (of Pugging Pally fame) dm’d me back in short order offering her services. I took her up on it and I am so happy I did. As you can see above, I have definitely gotten the deal of a century. I’m pretty sure Italian princes used to have to pay small fortunes to get this kind of quality back in the day.

I’ll stop before I get accused of flattery.

In any case, if anyone is wondering the meaning of the new banner above, it’s a drawing of yours truly standing before a burning block in Stratholme, looking all righteous and “defense-y”. Fitting, I would say.

If you’re looking for someone to do an art commission of your character for a blog, or what-have-you, I cannot recommend Vidyala enough (you can find her email address on her about page). The whole process was a joy to proceed through, and Vid was very patient with my many, many tweaks and requests. She took my bizarre and vague description of what I was looking for, and turned it into the amazing banner that now adorns the top real estate of this blog. All in all, I could not be more satisfied with the process or the final result. Thanks Vid!

I’m going to regret saying this, but the paladin trees are the most changed in the game. There are only a few of the current beta talents that survived the, um, cleansing.

Well then.

While 1500 armor is a pretty sexy chunk of protection, I’d rather that be always up than an extra cooldown. I’m all for extra cooldowns, for sure, but… I feel the need to gripe.

Also I don’t see any rocket boots listed, which is a shame. I’ve yet to work the courage up to swap those into my tank set and they’ll soon (well, relatively speaking) be gone.

Lastly, the Cogwheels and Hydraulic pumps thing looks interesting but if I had to bet I’d say it’s just a way to customize an engineering-only trinket so they only have to make one. A +stam empty shell with two sockets, one of each kind. Which basically means we’ll probably be making an avoidance stat stick with this and this. Good starter, but ultimately a yawn-fest for sure.

Hopefully things pan out to be a little more exciting.

I feel like I missed a lot in the week I spent over in Buffalo, what with the Real ID crisis and the 31 point debacle. There’s really not much I can say about Real ID that hasn’t already been said, and a week ago at that, so I’ll keep mum. Not to mention the matter is “settled” so to speak.

As for 31 points, and locked trees, I am very much in favor of this change. First and foremost because it can help remove one of the plagues of the Paladin class, that we’re too powerful at baseline. If they divide up healing, damage taking, damage dealing and lock each specialization up behind that faded out wall from levels 10-70, then that gives the developers a lot more room to make up more powerful in our spec without the risk of a Ret Paladin having too much survivability, or a Prot Paladin being able to toss more than three heals.

It’s also for the best that they’re using the redesign of the talent trees to get rid of the stupid point dumps that no one used and were primarily a noob trap. Like Ghostcrawler said:

[Players] were also given ample opportunities to make mistakes, what we call “traps.” A forum-savy player may know which are the dumb talents nobody takes or which are the mandatory ones that might at first glance seem too bland to take. But why have “choices” that are just there for new players or people who just want to swim against the stream just to be different? We’d rather have actual legitimate choices, which we feel like we can offer by having a stable of fewer good talents.

A prot tree missing Stoicism or Divinity, or only having 1 rank of Spiritual Attunement would be a good thing. As fun as it is for all of us to be in the know and cluck our tongues at those who don’t understand why Reckoning isn’t as much threat as Crusade, there’s no real benefit to having a series of “stupid traps” in the talent system.

It’ll also be interesting to see which talents don’t make the cut in the shuffle. Our tree is very top heavy, has a lot of good stuff, talents that I can’t see living without. Obviously I can, but at a glance I feel like a kid being asked to donate some of my old toys to Goodwill. Everything north of Blessing of Sanctuary feels like some epic Transformers figure.

Can’t wait for the next beta build.

So, how about some other blue posts I missed over the week? First, concerning that worst debuff ever:

[Forbearance] will be reevaluated.

I hope by reevaluated, GC means “taken out back and bludgeoned to death with a dirty toilet seat.” There is no excuse to keep this glorified band-aid any longer in game, with the touch up that so much of everything else is getting. Even if it means each spec only gets one Forbeance-inducing ability anymore, like Holy gets LoH, Prot Bubblewall, and Ret Divine Shie–no that’s a terrible idea. In any case, it’s time for a more polished mechanic than “you used x cooldown, now y and z are locked out for 2 minutes.”

Re: block,

Without defense gear any longer and with no block rating on gear, you’re probably at ~5% block, which is way too low. We need base block to be higher, but we still haven’t fully decided if that’s something all characters get or just warriors / paladins, or just tanks, etc.

I’m assuming by “all tanks” he’s also referring to the DK absorb mechanic and Savage Defense? Otherwise I’m a bit confused. Right now I’ve got 11% block (mostly from Defense), with 30% from Holy Shield, and 30% from the occasional Redoubt. I wonder what the final “base” number they’ll settle on will be. I have no idea what would “feel right” at this juncture, since 30% damage reduction can be very powerful if you’re getting that too often.

Lots of speculation about lots of changes. Let’s hurry up and get that next beta build so we can get a better idea of what we’ll all be working with this fall, eh?

Lastly, big thanks to Anafielle for posting in my absence and keeping some of the cobwebs away! I hope she’ll continue to post in the future, and I request you all shoot puppy dog looks her way to ensure that.

The Cataclysm news continues. GC posted a few times recently on threat generation, tricks & MD, and the possible introduction of a threat decay. Check out the whole string of blue posts – they’re all worth a read.

On threat, one of the changes we’re considering trying out is to have threat decay pretty rapidly. The idea is that a tank should never be able to get so far ahead on threat that they can AFK for the rest of the fight. It might sound like a nerf, but really the intent is to make sure that the tank’s job is never done — that what you do will remain important. [...] The tuning wouldn’t be such that if you missed a couple of swings that the warlocks would pull aggro. The feeling would be more that you have to still make decisions with regard to threat generation throughout the fight.

Furthermore, we are exploring the threat generation of Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade being temporary. That way it would still be useful for initial pulls or when adds join the fray, but wouldn’t be a crutch to keep tank threat consistently high throughout a fight. (Source)

OK, guys, let’s calm down and take a look at this. Ghostcrawler is basically pointing out two undeniable truths of raid tanking and threat generation today:

• Tricks and MD are capable of (mostly) replacing the threat of a disconnected / debuffed / AFK tank.
• Threat generation near the middle and end of some fights becomes easymode due to a huge threat lead. This is especially obvious if the DPS target switches a lot, or if you are being consistently tricks’d.

I’m not sure how you can disagree on either of these points if you’re a tank with omen installed.

Threat problem? What threat problem?

Case in point: Deathwhisper HM Phase 3.

If you’ve ever seen her solo tanked, you have witnessed something that (in my opinion) should not be possible. The tank in this strat is producing zero threat thanks to Touch of Insignificance. 100% of his threat generation comes from rogue tricks and hunter MDs. Solo tanking DW is one of the weirdest feelings I’ve ever had – you’re basically a meat shield with zero threat generation. A non combat pet with 60k HP could do your job. Huh. Sounds like fun.

This Deathwhisper strat made me think very, very hard about how much my threat generation matters on other fights where I’m being tricksed AND producing threat.

What are you talking about? There’s no threat problem.

I’ve rarely seen a raid get threat capped by the MT. Does this happen more in more progressed guilds? I don’t play in a top 100 world raiding guild, but I do play in a guild that’s a solid 7/12 ICC 25 hard modes. Our DPS are no slouches, but with correct threat management they stay below the MT without much trouble at all.

Can you remember a lot of fights recently where you ended up miles ahead on omen? Does your threat generation still matter at the end of a fight? Could you stop doing your rotation for a while and still hold threat? There are fights where that answer, for me, is yes.

The last major meaningful threat decision I made near the end of a fight was to hit Holy Shield and then pick up my nice cold beer. You know I wasn’t producing any threat because I had to take my face off the keyboard to drink. Mmm, Magic Hat #9 – an excellent decision.

Wait for 5 sunders and then DPS the boss!

I think GC was pretty clear about the problem he’s trying to solve. He is NOT talking about making establishing threat more difficult or painful. He is NOT talking about short term threat. He’s talking about eliminating a very, very specific problem – huge threat leads which emerge on a lengthy fight.

Having a slow threat decay makes sure that your job is never done — that you can’t get so far ahead of everyone that hitting Shield Slam at the right time becomes irrelevant for the rest of the fight. If you are already an awesome tank you probably won’t notice a difference. [...] You won’t suddenly notice a massive drop because “decay kicked in.” But you’ll never be able to get so far ahead of everyone else that there is no possibility of them catching up even if you do nothing. (source)

I think it would be really interesting to have to work to keep threat on the boss after the DPS has switched off for a while and switched back on. A small threat decay would work this in nicely without affecting our threat generation in any other way. I like the idea. (Commence the stoning!)

To be honest, I’m more interested to see what they do to Tricks / MD. I think that they’re the larger problem right now.

Anyways, it’s a blue post about a mechanic they haven’t even put in the Cataclysm beta yet. Take it with a grain of salt.

As the off tank for Enveloping Shadows, I will now subject you to my lengthy thoughts on… off tanking. Please direct all complaints to Rhidach! :D

Am I A Main Tank or an Offtank?

I sat down to edit my Twitter bio the other day (obviously an action of great importance to my life) and as I started to describe what I do – “Off tank for Enveloping Shadows” – I started to wonder… does that really cover it? What exactly do I do in my guild? Should I say co tank? Second tank? Main tank? All these terms seem flawed in some way.

I usually end up describing myself as a main tank, and the offtank for Enveloping Shadows. Does that make any sense at all?

Two of the tanking blogs I respect most have dealt with this topic at length – Almost a full year ago, Wrathy described a tanking corps without a Main Tank. More recently, Gravity posted on the term off-tank and why it has little relevance to today’s tanking corps.

Not all of us off tanks have the opportunity to be a part of a tanking corps like that. I’ll describe a little of my history, before my time with Rhidach’s guild.

The Quiet Typical Offtank

When I first learned how to tank, in my old guild, I had a main tank who was also the raid leader. He was very much in charge and very much in control of everything in this raid. This is the guy who marks every trash pull carefully. I never, ever ran in to pull a group of mobs – he started every pull. It was almost a shock to me to learn that most guilds chain pull and the OT pulls as much as the MT does.

My off tank experience pre-ICC had mostly consisted of taunt trades, taunting adds, tanking the “less hard” boss, twiddling my thumbs for half the fight, or disgustedly putting on a DPS set for a single tank encounter.

To be fair, this made perfect sense at the time – I was extremely new, and for much of WOTLK he was teaching me how to tank, and I was messing things up in spectacular ways. I wasn’t in a position to be sharing roles with someone who had nine years of experience through two different MMORPGs, and who was also the raid leader to boot.

I educated myself though, and to be honest I think I educated myself (and still constantly educate myself) with a care that borders on obsession. He, for example, never really understood my love of having multiple gear sets, and I always had to be quietly careful with my threat set on farm bosses so as not to pull off him.

Case Study: The Festergut First Tank

Festergut (with my old guild) marked a change in how I viewed my traditional role. I remember hitting it for the first time, and my MT told me to take the boss first. “Oooh! Is this because my threat is good? I know we’ll have trouble with the enrage.” I was always pretty proud of my threat, and I thought my MT might have handed me this boss so I could take advantage of the damage buff. Nope, he went on to say, he just didn’t trust anyone else but himself to tank the third inhale. In other words, he didn’t trust me. Pretty silly since both inhales are, well, exactly the same.

It was a blow to my confidence. But hell, I was going to take advantage of a fun fight where I got to tank first, position the boss, and DPS with a cool damage buff. I was going to do it exactly right with the extent of my knowledge of my class and the encounter. I put on my slow threat weapon just like I’d learned, went behind the boss when I wasn’t tanking, and popped my wings with care. I watched my survivability and scoured the logs, and carefully adjusted my gear for threat as I could without sacrificing armor. It was one of the coolest moments in my tanking career when my old MT pointed out disgustedly on vent that I was beating half the DPS, and we needed to move hero post-tank swap to boost my damage. When we finally killed him, I was extremely pleased with myself.

Now that was a kind of off tanking I’d never, ever done before.

Being The Offtank in Icecrown Citadel

From my perspective, ICC brought all kinds of new toys to the table. I might be alone in this, but Plagueworks has always been my favorite ICC wing as the off tank. From positioning the boss on Festergut, to slime tanking Rotface, to riding the abom on Putricide, Plagueworks gave me interesting and challenging things to do – arguably more interesting and more challenging, in the first two cases, than what the boss tank is doing. I can’t be alone in feeling this way. When I came to Rhidach’s guild, he and I were both used to slime kiting on Rotface – we used to roll for it, and the loser had to tank the boss.

Sure, off tanking BQL is boring, but it’s fascinating for me because it’s one of the only boring encounters the off tank gets. And the gear requirements on BQL make it interesting in an entirely different way.

I have a limited amount of experience tanking. I don’t know much about the raids that came before Naxx. I’d be curious to know whether the readers of this blog think that ICC is more interesting to tank than the raids that came before it – in my experience, it certainly has been.

A New Guild, A New Role

In retrospect, I think the change in my perspective has less to do with what I was tanking and more to do with the environment I’m tanking in right now, with Rhidach and our guild Enveloping Shadows.

In Rhidach’s guild, which I joined about 2 months ago, I find myself in a guild where I am definitely a member of a tanking team. Even if it’s a tanking team of two! Rhidach and I play the same class, we read all the same blogs and websites, and we both keep ourselves very well informed on tanking strategy and theory. He might be the raid leader as well, but I always feel open to speak my mind about a strat or talk about who is better suited to what role. We switch up the roles often. We’re both equally suited and fairly equally experienced with all the different tanking roles that ICC requires of its tanks.

There have even been rare times when I’ve found myself with more knowledge of a strat, or knowledge of a different strat, that he has then used with success. With Rhidach gone this week, I’m fully prepared to take the lead – and several months ago I would have been in a panic about doing that.

Off Tanking as part of a Tanking Corps

For me, the term off tank doesn’t mean “the tank doing the easier jobs.” It’s a description of my role in the raid with regard to Rhidach’s role – he’s the main tank, I’m the off tank. I choose this role from the position of a tank that is part of a team.

I think of the terms Main Tank and Off Tank as a description of our roles in the raid, not of our roles in that specific encounter. Even if he’s the one tanking adds, or if I’m the one taking the boss first, I always think of him as the MT and me as the OT. I like it when a raid is organized and someone’s the leader. I like to have a good idea of who’s in charge and, while I’m perfectly capable of main tanking, when he’s around I’d much prefer it be him.

It’s also fun and amusing to watch him stress out.

So I wear the label I set on myself with pride. I’m a main tank and an occasional raid leader, but I’m the off tank for Enveloping Shadows. Off tank in a 25 man raid is the position I choose for myself and the label I apply to my role, and it makes me happier than anything else in this game.

Now, it’s time to main tank my 10 man raid tonight…

I never did anything like this back when I was privileged enough to get to offtank BQL. I guess the closest I’ve ever been was when tanking Loatheb back in Naxx25, I built a good threat lead then alt-tabbed out for the rest of the encounter.

Also: Peggle > Bejeweled.

So, what did we do to pass the time? At first we congregated on the guild forums and Vent, complaining about downtime and the like while eagerly anticipating a start to the night. As time bore on though it became more apparent that Blizzard was taking their time. At around 8 server time, the first batch of servers started to come up, so to pass the time I rolled a DK on Chromaggus on a whim.

Eventually I got sick of all the nude alt parades and yell spams, and hunkered down to just focus on figuring out Real ID. My position on the feature has generally always been one of exuberant willingness to adopt. I have no illusions of privacy on this, the Interwebs, and recognize that anyone reading this blog could probably easily find my real name and address if they wanted to. So, it honestly doesn’t bother me that the people I play WoW with know my real name. Likewise, it doesn’t bother me that their friends could look up my name via that.

That said, I recognize there are legitimate concerns with the system. If someone’s be e-stalked they rightfully could have objections to their real name being out there. I’m not going to throw stones having never been in such a situation.

Nonetheless, that’s my two cents on Real ID. Oh, and some kind of Invisible status would be nice for those that like to hide once in a while. And I’m sure Blizzard will in due course add such a thing, I sincerely doubt this is the final iteration of Real ID that we will ever see.

Anyway, I digress. After some time a group of us decided to roll some lvl 1 alts on Aegwynn and form a guild to use as a refuge when Lightninghoof was down. Apparently all we needed was 10 silver to make a guild charter, so a mob of us scoured the Durotar country side, jumping harpies like a flood of feral carnivore squirrels, and ripping whatever currency we could from their hides.

Despite my hopes of getting at least 90 minutes to clear up to Saurfang, eventually the crisis (so to speak) dragged on until 9 server time, and with no Lightninghoof in sight we just called it for the night.

Did anyone get to raid last night? Also, did you all take Real ID for a spin, what’d you think of it?

Of course, there are always the folks who refuse to accept the system. Being put on standby is antithesis to them, and they will lash out if they don’t get their way.

One such example happened the week of our Lich King kill. We had a hunter (who was also an officer) that took a long hiatus for his wedding. He came back, raided for about two weeks, then went on hiatus again. It seemed like being newly married wasn’t working with raiding. Whatever, no problem. But then he came back a month ago and wanted to raid again. So he came to a raid and DC’d constantly while in combat. On one BQL attempt he even wiped us because he was the first bite and, of course, disconnected. Game over right there.

The following week we extended the lockout and pushed hard on the Lich King. Looking out for the success of the raid, as I am wont to do, I benched this hunter so he wouldn’t cause a wipe from an ill-timed disconnect. The hunter responded by quitting the game. He sent letters out to a wide swath of people thanking them for being good friends and all that, and all I got was the crushing feeling that I wronged someone.

I know I did the right thing, I couldn’t take someone that could potentially wipe the raid to progression attempts on last fight in the last raid of the expansion. Still, it was pretty depressing that this person–an officer no less–was so blinded by their own… perhaps selfishness is the word… that they couldn’t look beyond their own wants to see they could legitimately harm the progression of the raid and guild.

Another more recent example of this is a healer we have that just returned from their own wedding-induced hiatus. This particular person was usually never benched because they were the only healer of their class and it was pretty helpful to have that particular class/spec there. Anyway, when this person went on hiatus last month we lost one healer due to school aggro and another due to moving. We were down to barely having enough healers, and if a healer couldn’t make it one night, we might not have been able to raid. It was way tighter than I would prefer to allow.

So, I did the only logical thing I could do, I recruited. We brought in a few healers bringing the total number of healers up to 8. The buffer was restored.

This person comes back from hiatus and is nonplussed to see that not only did we recruit more healers, but also another one of that class/spec. And not only that, but they were (horror of horrors) benched on Wednesday. I got a miffed whisper asking why this was (because it was your turn) and why did we recruit healers (because we had to) and why would someone be benched only one of two nights (so people don’t have to be locked out for a whole week)?

Not only that, but it was asserted that rather than being on standby for one night, this person would prefer to be benched for the whole week so they won’t get saved to raid that won’t be finished and can just pug it. This left me a bit speechless, because again I’m not accustomed to running into such focused self-interest when I’m here trying to promote group cohesion. There’s really nothing to say to that other than that next time I’ll just bench this person for an entire week when it’s their turn.

I guess for me it has always boiled down to this binary question: if you had to sit out of a raid once a month to ensure that the guild always has a raid of 25 people available, would you be willing to that?

If you answer yes, you are good peoples in my book. If you say no, then we really have a problem. That’s a pretty huge philosophical chasm you and I have to cross.