Who was it that said “the first casualty of war is planning”? Because that guy had our number. Poor Zilga went to the trouble of doing all this research on the early fights of the Firelands and the very first one we get to — Shannox — was a complete clusterfrak thanks to the last-minute change making him untauntable. Coping with that and formulating a new strategy cost us Tuesday, though we managed to knock him over Wednesday.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though, there’s still a mountain of trash and about a thousand BOEs between the first pull Tuesday night and the last one on Wedneday.

For starters, can I emphasize how much I love the Firelands trash? Actually, I’m exaggerating a tad. I love how quickly they die and how little (ie, non-existent) the need for CC is. The flip-side, however, is that there’s so-goddamn-much of it. Trash as far as the eye can see. And worse, to bring forth the first boss we fought, you need to clear a huge swath of it.

On the bright side, some of the trash is interesting. I love how the Corehounds attempt to eat the tank, or the spinning turtles which are oh-so-fun to kite around and guide into unwary dps or healers. That latter choice might be a bad idea, however, if you want to live through the boss fight.

Not really knowing how the place worked we initially kept clearing our way to where Shannox’s icon was on the map. Not seeing him, we cleared some more, having some hilarious zero-day wipes. For example, that pack of Flamewalker summoners. We kill their protector and heal back up and began to wonder why we were still in combat. Suddenly, the summoner finished charging the elemental, who promptly exploded and killed us.

So that’s how that worked …

Going up against Shannox was an exercise in patience, as our carefully laid plans quickly went agley. We had to rethink things on the fly, in addition to me quickly deploying some speedy strat-fu to find tips on how to handle an untauntable fight. Tank swaps were out; we learned later — much too late — the key was to keep Riplimb and Shannox apart. We basically spent the night learning what not to do.

Wednesday was a much different affair. After spending about 45 minutes clearing trash and compelling Shannox to finally appear, we hit him with our first attempt and got him .3%. That was a heartbreaking wipe, nearly a one shot, which would have been incredible.

Alas, we then did another six, long attempts and even suffering a trash respawn. Each attempt was foiled by some flavor of tank death, mostly due to us still figuring out the lay of the land and distances between tanks, healers, and everything in-between.

Thankfully, on attempt number seven we finally finished him off. I noticed that from how Shannox’s corpse was laying, it looked like he had bashed his head open on a rock. “Well, that’s what happened,” Sheepin countered, “he slipped and fell during the fight and killed himself on a rock.” I like it.

In any case, loot was distributed and we continued on our merry way, somehow weaving between trash and making our way up to Rhyolith’s plateau. Karr the Invincible was slightly anti-climactic. I was expecting him to do something that lived up to his name. Possibly involving his baby Magmaws that were sunning in the lava pits. But instead, he just toppled over with only a few volcanos to show for it.

We got to Rhyolith with only about twenty minutes left in the raid and put some learning attempts on him. Thankfully this one did gel with what was reported from the PTR and overall doesn’t seem to be a very difficult encounter. We’ll have to see how it goes when we have more time for it next week.

Kind of a slow start to Firelands, but we’ll pick up the pace. I’m happy just having new content to run.

Before I forget: I’ll be in the Great White North (aka, Buffalo, NY) next week so I will not be doing any posting. I will however, as always, be puttering away on Twitter. Good luck to everyone hitting Firelands this weekend/next week!

Just a quick programming note: I updated the 101 page and the CTC Calculator sheet for patch 4.2.

As for the sheet, obviously with the removal of agility-to-dodge it’s far less helpful. But I’m not going to leave it out of date!

Anyone hit Firelands last night? How’d that go?

The new patch drops today, and to help along with getting ready for the new content coming out tonight, here are a few things I wrote over at WoW Insider about 4.2:

• The major changes to our spec in 4.2
• A look at the new non-heroic raid gear by slot
• How to handle the Holy Shield change and the ramifications thereof

Make sure to put the new Holy Shield on your bars tonight, as well as swap out any Agility gear and get the new leg armor. Good luck in Firelands if you head in there tonight!

On the last night of the tier (I think/hope) we accomplished our latest raid goal and bagged our latest turkey: Heroic Maloriak.

This fight initially gave us a lot of trouble, working to hit the dps benchmarks, nailing down the red phase cooldown timing, the kite pattern for the dark swills, etc. Over the past two weeks that we’ve gotten serious attempts on him, we progressed more and more, ticking off those little boxes next to every aspect of the fight as we figured out how best to overcome them.

Last Wednesday felt like it was going to be the kill night, but despite a few 5-7% wipes, the death of Maloriak eluded us. It was slightly devastating since the expectation at that point was still that Firelands was coming out the following Tuesday and thus that would have been our last shot at Heroic Maloriak while he was current content.

We found out shortly after that it seemed 4.2′s launch was pushed back another week. We’d have one more week to down the sucker. We were going to make it happen.

So there we were Tuesday night, lined up once more against the dragon alchemist. The attempts that night were technically progression, but they were rough. Very rough. Melee was dying left and right in the puddles, swills weren’t dying fast enough, Maloriak’s health wasn’t where it needs to be. We did some roster swaps and the result was dps tightened up markedly and we were hitting exactly the points we wanted to. Swills were dying before the phase transition giving extra dps time on Maloriak, so that was fantastic. Those in the melee melange weren’t dying any less to puddles however.

After Tuesday night, officers spent most of Wednesday figuring out where we could improve our strategy. One of the biggest things we did was cut down on how many melee we brought, though most of that was via chance. Some people dropped out for Wednesday’s raid and that allowed us to bring in more ranged to compensate, rather than forcibly dragging some melee out of the building.

When Wednesday started, our first attempt was a good solid attempt. It exploding rather unceremoniously about halfway through, but right off the bat we were hitting the dps benchmarks, which was a great sign. As the night marched on, dps on the swills got even better and we were cleanly finishing them off with second to spare every time.

Initially we were attempting to blow bloodlust at the beginning of the fight, and then have it available towards the end, but as our raid dps improved we had to wait long and long for the opportunity to re-use it, and that just wasn’t working. We weren’t having it up when needed most, at the start of the last phase. So the plan changed to saving bloodlust for then, which meant we couldn’t depend on the crutch of that extra x% dps we initially got on Maloriak from the blowing BL so early. However, we worked through that and still hit the dps benchmarks, completely validating the change in strategy — at least in terms of not being disastrous,

The last hour saw attempts reaching into the last phase, and after a particularly good one we took a break to focus and shake off any panic. The biggest enemy we had this point was lack of experience with the last phase — every time we hit it, people would invariably panic, make mistakes, etc. These words will come back to haunt me, shortly.

So after the break we get some more attempts in. Before the next pull, Lofaz (who has been MTing Maloriak) offers that he thought it’d be a better idea for me to tank Maloriak in the last phase for survivability reasons. I suspiciously accepted, and when we hit the last phase that attempt, I ran over to pick up Maloriak after my aberrations had been dispatched in the verdant haze.

I immediately start thinking, “ok, don’t panic, focus on the flame jets. Don’t get hit. Don’t get hit…” And the first flame jet then hit me. Landing with an embarrassed thud, I recollected myself and proceeded to side step only to get hit again. This wasn’t a glorious first attempt on my part.

After those two fails, I got the pattern down and managed to evade further jets. However my positioning was terrible and I fired two out into the raid at different points. Panic ensued and the wipe was short but brutal.

I apologized to raid and indicated I knew the score know and would suck less the next time around. And, thankfully, I didn’t lie. The next attempt I did much better, keeping the flame jets out of the raid and dancing with Maloriak between flame jets like a nameless, nimble fella dodging the meaty hooves of some aging actress on Dancing with the Stars.

However, last phase panic still took over and we ended up wiping.

Finally, we came to the last attempt of the night. Zilga emphasized it was the last attempt and implored people to keep their heads on straight, to focus and do their jobs. The attempt proceeds in earnest and in no time we’re facing the last phase. I pick up Maloriak and begin our waltz. I kept flames jets out of the back, Antigen and Lofaz did their best to avoid the crushing, stacking damage from their Prime Subjects, the healers held it together, and the dps churned out as much pain as they could stand to cast.

The health on Maloriak trickled away as I unleashed a torrent of obscenities outside of Mumble while doing my best not to do something utterly moronic, resulting in my death and the squashing of the raid. Sidestep, sidestep, sidestep, flip, etc. That’s all I could focus on between intermittent activations of cooldowns to ease the pain I was inflicting on the healers.

As more dps began to die, someone had the well intentioned but supremely unhelpful idea of calling out Maloriak’s remaining health in Mumble. Zilga immediately putting the kibosh on that, yelling “EFF YOU, STOP COUNTING THE DPS AND KILL HIM!” I’m glad she did, that counting was distracting as hell.

Anyway, finally, to the relief of the raid and my spasming adrenal gland, Maloriak finally keeled over dead and coughed up his purples.

A mighty roar rang out from the guild and we all basked in the glory of our new titles and the glorious loot. I managed to snag the heroic Mace of Acrid Death (the glories of being the only shield tank in the tanking corps) to my great excitement.

As a portal for Orgrimmar was thrown up and we all departed Blackwing Descent for what would probably be the last time in a progressional capacity, I thought back to the first time I set foot in its halls at the beginning of this year. ES felt like a far different guild back then, the first time we downed Omnitron in 10man mode while wearing all blues. More innocent, perhaps. This has been a rough tier for us, with lots of hiccups and half-steps, though we managed a respectable dismount.

We attempted to goad Zilga into delivering an end-of-tier speech, with a resounding cacophony of “speech! speech! speech!” but she would have none of it. That cheer after Maloriak died was all the inspiration you needed, she explained.

I enjoyed the ten minutes I spent after raid in Org, fielding whispers of “where did you get that title from?!” All thanks to the best debuff ever.

Glad to be of service Nef!

I don’t get it, I just don’t get it.

I’ve been spending much more time than I care to admit dredging through the fetid swamp that is this thread on the official tanking forums. The discussion is about the Holy Shield change and whether it’s a buff or a nerf — the primary source of disagreement in the tankadin community for the better part of three weeks.

I’m seeing the same arguments there that have been regurgitated elsewhere over the duration of this whole sturm und drang, and they’re just as uncompelling as they were the first time someone first spit them up.

1. We don’t need another cooldown – this one button too many!

This is the most beguiling complaint of all. I’m trying to decide if the sentiment is “I’m incapable of juggling all these cooldowns” or “I’m too lazy to try”. There’s no such thing as too many cooldowns (er, outside of the point where you break the game) and the more opportunities you have to boost survivability, at the tips of your fingers, the more powerful you will be.

I don’t understand this sentiment of being handed a cooldown and turning it away. It feels like someone not wearing a second trinket because they can’t be bothered to click the On Use ability.

2. It’s an overall nerf to TDR

Partly true, but not how they think.

I made a point similar to this (but not exactly this sentiment, which is wrong) in my WI column on Friday and was attacked by my Very Special Troll that I had somehow contradicted myself. I don’t think sentences with more than one clauses must exist in his world, because what I meant was “it’s a slight nerf to TDR, but the buff to survivability vastly compensates for it.”

The fact of the matter is that having 10% less block value in non-threatening periods (because we’ll be using Holy Shield in the more threatening periods) of damage will hardly be noticeable. Overhealing, which can run to absurd percents in raid content, will easily cover up most of that extra damage intake. Meanwhile, you’ll be gaining a huge boost to your mitigation but blocking more of those really dangerous physical hits.

3. Healers will go OOM healing us now

So false. What OOMs healers more than anything is getting tanks back up to full after eating a huge spike. Not spamming their most efficient heals during more stable points of the fight. The 10% loss of block value will still keep us healable through those efficient spells, while we’ll have Holy Shield to cut even more damage off the spikes, making us require less dire healing to bring us back to a safer level. Used correct, the new HS is a boon to healer mana.

4. I’ll just macro it to Crusader Strike

I feel like XT-002 a bit: No, no, no, no, no. Bad idea!

The value in this change is that it gives you control over when to deploy and allows you to mitigate those moments that are most dangerous to us. If you macro it to CS, you’ll likely blow it when you need it the least. You might end up mitigating more of that less dangerous damage, great, but you’ll still going to die during Flame Orders or when Nefarian casts Electrocute, because you automatically used the cooldown 15 seconds ago.

It’s not “sticking it to the man” by screwing your raid or group with lazy play. The only ones who suffer are your comrades and your repair bill.

Ultimately, I just don’t get the furor this change has raised. This crowd is reduced to raging like a pack of wild monkeys in front of a shiny black monolith. Except in this case, I highly doubt any positive change or enlightenment will come from the contact.

My demand of Antigen was simple, teach me to be like you.

When he was finished squealing at the prospect of cramming my tiny head with everything he knew about Ret Paladins and molding me into some kind of dazzling killing machine, he composed himself, straightened his hair, and emphasized the gravity of what he was going to bestow upon me. It was going to be a long road, full of split-ends and broken hearts.

We trained for many hours as he helped me tweak my gear to properly balance hit and expertise (“Reforge this to hit… no wait, expertise… no, hit!”), taught me the most important part of dps (“Always be jumping!”), and rounded out the whole process with a classic 80s training montage (Montage!).

But the end of our journey, I finally managed to snatch the canister of pomade from his hand. The student was ready to walk his own path.

As a sidenote, may I comment, for a brief second, the cruelty of finally having a gap closer — but only in an offspec? It’s like being allowed to hold the Holy Grail — to feel its smooth contours, to partake in eternal life from it — but you can’t take it with you. If you want to keep it forever you need to trap yourself behind the seal, for eternity. A fate worse than death. Perfectly akin to being a mainspec Ret Paladin.

Go on and read ahead. I’m going to linger here and spend a few more moment with that translucent streak of furious speed.

But I digress. I carried Antigen’s lessons to raids this week when I stepped aside from the main tanking position on some one or two-tank fights to allow the other two tanks to do something other than dps while I have all the fun. I followed Antigen’s advice to a T, forgoing Inquisition as much as possible, and making good use out of hardcasting Exorcism.

And that’s the story of how I barely broke 20k damage on Magmaw.

Fear my hybrid usefulness.

Credit for this picture goes to the fantastic Rades, who spotted an interesting difference in argumentation technique on Wednesday following the tanking Q&A answers were revealed.

In one corner, Linedan and Lara were discussing Vengeance and how the Q&A didn’t properly address concerns people had over it. In the other, Vosskah and I were engaging in one of our usual tiffs over some inanity. Which, of course, quickly drifted in one of our usual Blood Elf vs Draenei throwdowns.

Still, I think I had the best burn.

But I digress!

I printed up a copy of Rades’ masterwork above and have it hanging in my office at home. Favorite detail: me pulling Voss’ chintacles, him pulling my hair. And therein Voss makes his most deadly mistake yet.

No one messes with the ‘do.

Practice.

If last week was all about my non-raiding goals, perhaps my biggest (and most inane) raiding goal is perfect handling of the adds on Nefarian. This entails getting them into as tight a pile as I can in phase 1, for starters.

I feel like I’ve done tighter than this, but, no matter. The real payoff came in phase 3 later that attempt when Lofaz and I were dragging adds around the chamber and they all reset at the same time well out of fire.

“You should probably get a screenshot of this,” Lofaz suggested.

So for the next fifteen seconds we just kind of stood there, twiddling our thumbs, tossing a few ranged spells at Nef.

Of course, the fun began again soon enough.

Really. Was there one substantive/possibly game-changing answer from the whole thing? I guess it was nice to learn that a tanking legendary isn’t off the table, but we would likely not see it for at least two more patches. Likewise, the devs called a truce in the Battle of Blockcap. For that I thank them, if only because they realized they didn’t have enough time to properly gut our mastery and deal with the consequences appropriately on the PTR.

So, here are the interesting and important questions/answers.

Q: What are your intentions with each tank’s mastery and mastery in general?

A: Paladins: Mastery is an attractive stat for paladins, but has some design problems. It scales very well, but due to the nature of our combat tables (and being able to “fill them up”), you can get “block capped,” which is a massive performance benefit. Worse, Protection mastery scales with itself, since there are no diminishing returns on block chance, and the amount of rating you need to block cap goes down as your dodge and parry improve, allowing you to put even more of your stats into dodge or parry. This sort of feedback loop is something we always try to stay away from, so we plan to change this in the future. We tried several alternatives for 4.2, but weren’t happy with the results. Any change which made mastery weaker (such as subjecting block to diminishing returns or changing what it does) would have required mitigation compensation for paladins elsewhere (with all the design risks inherent in making such changes), as well as asking many players to extensively re-gem or re-forge. We’ll ask players to do that when the need is great, but we didn’t think this problem crossed that line. The major risks are that Protection paladins become too powerful or too weak or that gear with mastery will at some point be rejected once characters are over the cap. We don’t think any of those problems will manifest themselves in the 4.2 content.

This is somewhat of a relief. I was really hoping they’d let us blockcap in peace in 4.2 and it seems like we’ll have that luxury. I think it’s also safe to say, at this juncture, that the latest Holy Shield change is likely to be the version that’ll end up on live servers in a few weeks. A relief all-around… for now.

Hopefully when Blizzard finds the time to nerf our mastery they don’t overdo it.

Q: Will we see a tanking Legendary sometime soon?

A: The tanking community both loves and hates when this question comes up, but it received a lot of votes, so we’ll answer it. The answer is not soon, but probably eventually. The problem with tanking legendaries, of course, is that the shield-users and non-shield-users tank with different weapons. That’s not a deal breaker, but it is a consideration. We could allow the legendary to be transformed from a one-hander to two-hander or we could just design an item for a more narrow audience (such as a shield). The 4.2 legendary has fairly wide appeal, and the 4.3 legendary will have much more narrow appeal. We don’t want to fall into the trap of making legendaries too formulaic.

I feel really guilty admitting this, because the conventional wisdom is that putting a legendary in the hands of such a central role — like the tank — raises tuning issues for content and so on and so forth. But, I just don’t care. This is one of those times when every intelligent impulse is dulled and all I can hear is the siren song of orange text held within my greedy hands. Like I tweeted:

Yes.

Q:Are there any plans to update the leg armor in 4.2 now that the plate tanks receive no dodge from agility? Maybe introduce a new leg armor patch that adds str/stamina, or a mastery/stamina?

A: We did. As you’ve probably seen by now, it’s called Drakehide Leg Armor, and it provides Stamina and dodge rating.

Q: Can you make it so that taunt doesn’t miss, just like you did for interrupt abilities? Doesn’t feel as though it would be a complete upset to overall balance.

A: Yes, absolutely! And in fact we did it back in patch 3.9. Tank classes’ taunts have been unable to miss since then. We recognize that tanks will nearly always choose mitigation stats over threat stats and it’s particularly frustrating to have to reach a hit cap just to make sure taunts or interrupts don’t miss, which is why we no longer require that.

Really?! These questions were answered? And people voted them up on the forums? I sincerely hope this didn’t take the place of two far more worthy inquiries. Though, I guess the next runner up to be answered was about shaman tanking. The devs shouldn’t stoop to waste their limited space on questions that could be answered by watching mmo-champ’s front page.

Q: Do you plan to bring other tanks to the same level as Death Knights who have a lot of advantages over other tanking classes (easier to heal, quite a number of various safe abilities, etc.)?

A: Death knights are a somewhat different style of tank compared to the others. They take significantly more damage than other tanks, but then heal/shield that extra damage back instead (and sometimes more). Due to taking more damage, and that damage coming in spikes, they’re also the most likely to die to unexpected burst (such as when they don’t have runes up to Death Strike, have no cooldowns available, and fail to dodge or parry a few attacks in a row. They also have more personal impact on their own survivability and mitigation than any other tank, by tying much of their performance to Death Strike (and especially optimally timing their Death Strikes). So in the hands of a really skilled player, they can do some amazing things, but not usually much better than the other tanks. We’d actually like to head more in that direction with the other tanks (making them tie more of their defensive performance to their ability usage), in the future.

No kidding, Death Knights can do amazing things in the hands of a skilled player because they have more control over their own survivability via active abilities? Sounds a little bit like the reasoning that the new Holy Shield is a buff, eh? Eh?!

This is the conclusion to my theme this week of my “three non-raiding goals”.

Gather ’round, friends, for my tale of woe. Unlike the last two posts, this is not a goal achieved. No, this is a dream deferred … for far too long!

For years now I’ve been attempting to put together a Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. Well, almost two years, so nearly plural. Searching back in my blog history, the first mention I can find of Thunderfury was having already had the first binding by late November, 2009. If memory serves, I actually got that on either my first or second trip into Molten Core for a bindings run. My immediate thought was, “oh fantastic, this will be done in no time.”

Apparently that’s the WoW equivalent of killing an albatross, because here I am 19 months — or, 82 lockouts — later with still only one binding to show for it.

For the past year and seven months (with a three month gap after Cata launched) I’ve been religiously hauling myself down to the Core — all the easier this past year thanks to Direbrew’s Remote — to take my weekly crack at Garr and his binding. And for the past 70+ times I’ve done it, I’ve tasted the bitter sting of disappointment.

Hell, I’ve done that run so many times I could probably do it with my eyes closed. In the front door, turn left, along the right wall avoiding the giants, hop down the ledge catching the lip of the edge below. Run along that and jump down to the right, descending towards Garr. Go straight, avoiding Ragers but probably being forced to kill the Corehounds. Don’t loot them. Continue down and weave between giants. Once in Garr’s “room”, break right and pull him along with any immediately nearby Corehounds and put your back to the wall. Hammer of the Righteous, Inquisition, Consecration, etc., etc. Open loot window, sigh with infinite disconnect, hearth back to Org to sell the lvl 60 purples.

You know, the usual.

My nemesis during this whole process has been Nordicslayer, who is currently working on his own private version of The Ultimate Collection. He received the opposite binding I needed before I got my first, and so we started running MC together for a few months since we each needed a different one. Then one week I couldn’t make it, he went with someone else, and the binding I wanted dropped. Shortly thereafter he got his second binding as well and he went on to construct his legendary.

Since then he’s farmed up both glaives on our guild drunk BT runs, was the designated first Shadowmourne recipient in ICC, and last weekend won the Thori’dal bow in a drunk Sunwell run by virtue of the being the only person in raid who could equip it. We hates him, Precious. Oh yes.

I’ll continue farming Garr, because I have no choice. Perhaps one day the binding I need will drop, and I can finally make use of the 10 Enchanted Elementium Bars and the Essence of the Firelord, finally summon Thunderaan, and finally send him back to the void. After almost two years, it’s bound to happen eventually. That’s how random chance works, right?

… Right?