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!

Likewise, it’s pretty exciting when you mull about in your head that you’re around to join that elite upper tier of raiders that will be sporting gear 13 iLevels higher than everyone else. Falowin always talks about how he wants to look different than other raiders in his gear, how he wants to look special. I used to deride him as an elitist… but, gawd, that feeling is contagious. I can’t wait to sport an all-blue tier set.

As a guild leader, I think one of the most satisfying parts of this fleeting moment is how it’s given a second wind to our 25man raids. We spent the last few weeks slowly slogging our way up the top of the hill, finally peaking with the crushing of the Lich King, and now get to enjoy a downhill ride littered with progression and amazing loot.

Everyone is more excited about raiding than I’ve seen them in a while. It’s a totally gratifying feeling from this perspective.

Anyway, I look forward to reporting back tomorrow with tales of epic progression and only tank loot dropping.

(A man can dream!)

In my earlier post about armory data mining, there were many folks honestly disagreeing with me on the merits of my recommendations based on the level of content they are tanking. Some stick to heroics and thus seldom, if ever, experience tank death. Some are raiding ICC 10 or 25 and thanks to the buff are pushing past 60k hitpoints.

Those two experiences are like two sections of the same tanking möbius strip. Vastly different content, but the same indelible question: at what point do I hit diminishing returns on my survivability stats?

Actually, let’s scale back that question–is there such a think as too much survivability? Many might say yes, some of them having commented on the data mining post to that effect. I would say there is not. If you think there is such a thing, let me pose this question to you: what odds are you willing to accept for your survival? If you can gear to only die once every 100 encounters, but do 5% more threat than someone who gears to die only once every 1000 encounters, is that a worthy trade-off?

I personally would say no. In my mind I have one primary directive, to survive. Holding threat is secondary. I would always be that latter tank, gearing to prevent as many possible tank deaths as possible even if it means a little less threat. If you lose threat you can always taunt it back, or salv a dps, or what have you. It’s seldom the end of the encounter. If a tank dies, things can rapidly snowball into a wipe. I would posit that 9 times out of 10, a tank death will lead to a wipe more than a tank losing aggro.

So I ask, why would you increase the possibility of the former to prevent the latter?

An example: I saw a discussion of my data mining post elsewhere and someone brought up my commandment not to socket Nightmare Tears. The commenter said they saw a single Nightmare Tear as superior over socketing a single Shifting Dreadstone because, gosh, it’s a lot of stats for one gem. Sure, you lose five stamina, but you gain strength, intellect, and spirit. … And yet, the only bit of that that remotely reduces damage is the 5 block value you get (6.5 after talents).

So the survivability trade-off between a Shifting and a NT is this: Shifting gives you 55 hitpoints, and the Tear will let you ignore 6.5 hitpoints worth of damage when you block (if you block). How does a Tear remotely appeal?

My position is and will always be that survivability comes first. If we’re following the proper rotation and staying caught up on gear and your dps are not knuckle-dragging idiots, threat should never be an issue. We should never have to gem or enchant for threat, it should come organically from our gear. If we need to increase our threat, we put on a cape that has hit, or a pair of boots that has expertise. We don’t regem to gain a few more points of strength.

Coming back to the original question, I would say there is no such thing as too much survivability. Indeed, there’s no such thing as an immortal tank. Even a god can bleed. To that end, I will always gear, gem, and enchant to keep myself as optimally alive as possible. Once I have too much hp, I will focus on mitigation and avoidance. Never threat. That’s not my job.

Now, if I were some kind of jerk tank I’d relegate her all the annoying odd jobs. Like Rotface kiting, maintanking Putricide, holding Valanar, absorbing the Blood Mirror damage on BQL, playing D on Gunship, etc. Problem is, I like those jobs, so that won’t work. We’ve already had our first debate over who gets to tank Festergut first.

Truth be told, I’m really looking forward to this. The two guys that I’ve been forcing to tank our raids since Demogar went on hiatus have been doing a great job, but they were always dps at heart. It’ll be fun to have someone to talk shop with again.

More recruitment

I can feel the Summer Slump’s hot breath on the back of my neck. His sweaty hand clamped firmly on my shoulder. Whispering sweet nothings of doom and raids with only 23 members. I’ve been actively attempting to recruit some more dps to add to the much-needed buffer so even as we shed a raider every two weeks or so, there’s someone ready to step up and get the party going.

The addition of Anafielle and her two healer friends will be key, since it frees up those dps guys so both can stick to dps every raid, rather than one being forced to tank. And the two healers were a load off my mind as to how to deal with one healer burning out and the other going away for a few weeks for her wedding/honeymoon. So that’s one crisis averted, now to add to the raid core.

Anyway, my guild is recruiting dps. If you read this blog and are on the Hoof already, or wouldn’t mind a potential server transfer, check out our recruitment post and maybe app on our guild site if you’re so inclined.

Keeping us rolling

I think right now we’re in a pretty good place in terms of interest from the raid core. We’re knocking on Arthas’ door, so that’s keeping everyone engaged, and we have some ancillary guild goals like Nordic’s Shadowmourne. Once we unlock heroic modes we’ll have that to keep people coming back every week as well. I’m hoping we accomplish that sooner rather than later so we can start rolling in 277 gear.

In the meantime, to add some other activities for some non-ICC fun, I have a list of off-night stuff to drop on the calendar. For example, I think I’m going to push for a white item run of Kara where everyone loads up on common-quality gear then we raid in that, equipping any epics we win along the way. I think it would be fun in the sense there’d be very little danger thanks lvl 80 resists, while not being a complete steamroll if done in current endgame gear.

Things are pretty “steady as she goes” right now. I can live with this.

After trying a metric ton of different options and code snippets I finally found one that worked and I’d like to share it with my fellow WoW blogging buddies out there.

NB: This requires you being able to edit a php file in your layout. I inserted this code into the sidebar.php portion of my design (with heavy tweaking). Not sure if Wordpress.com or Blogspot allow access to such a file, though any self-hosted blogs should have no problem utilizing this solution.

Here’s the code:

<?php

$url	= "https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/
GetFeedData?uri=FEEDBURNERNAME";
$ch 	= curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if ($data) {
	echo $data;
	preg_match('/circulation=\"([0-9]+)\"/',$data, $matches);
	if ($matches[1] != 0) {
		$subscriberCount = $matches[1];
	}
}

echo "$subscriberCount"

?>

Just replace “FEEDBURNERNAME” with the username you have with that service. Mine is RighteousDefense, for example. You can get your username just by looking at your Feedburner URL.

The code block will return your total subscriber number as text. Surround it with whatever flavor you want.

I hope this works for everyone and allows you to finally ditch that awful chicklet!

If you scroll down to earlier blog posts you can see how messy the earlier UI was, how much real estate was taken up by various nonsense and over-sized elements. My goal with this new UI was to slim everything down, to not allow any elements to be bigger than they needed to be.

The two main things I decimated were my unit frames and my bars. For the former, there was no reason to have giant health bars and portraits. A small bar would suffice. For the latter, I was key binding just about everything already so I didn’t have to worry about abilities being noticeable enough for easy clicking, so I scaled those suckers down and slipped them all into a tiny space. ButtonFacade with the DSMFade skin helped make the buttons smaller and svelter.

I also completely jettisoned ClassTimers, which was really only serving the purpose of “oh, is my seal on? What about blessings?” Now I have that function carried by Power Auras–those funky symbols and text you see floating over my character. If Righteous Fury is off “RF!” will alert me. If Blessing of Sanctuary is off, the blue S. If I don’t have a seal on, that weird cross symbol will warn me. If I’m afflicted by Forbearance and can’t pop a cooldown, I’ll know.

Per Kerridos’ suggestion in the last UI post, I set Recount to only show when out of combat (it’s an option in the appearance tab, I think) and Omen to only show while in combat. Piling the two on top of each other, I cut how much real estate the two take up. Definitely one of the biggest space savers I managed to accomplish.

To pretty up the whole package I deployed some kgPanels (I was going to try sunport but the screenshots they had didn’t appeal to me) to organize the map-buttons area and the Omen/Recount spot. I really like how it adds sharp lines and solidity to the presentation.

Lastly, I was initially going to give MSBT the heave-ho, and I did for a time. But, the Ulduar hardmodes on Friday was pretty convincing that while I don’t think I’m noticing my damage intake in scrolling combat text, I subconsciously have been. It was a lot harder keeping track of damage intake by glancing at my player unit frame rather than seeing the numbers whizz by. Though, I still unchecked a lot of what MSBT was showing and reduced the text size/alpha to make it less distracting.

I can’t wait to take this UI for a spin in ICC tonight, I’m looking forward to seeing more of the fights than I ever have before.

The night began innocuously enough, as most patch nights do, with everyone unable to log in or getting repeatedly disconnected. Invites went out, we raided ICC, etc. The usual.

After we called it a night I lingered in vent and the game, cutting gems for some folks before I logged. Ildara then mentions “did you see the forums?”

I look and there’s a post by Demo saying he was quitting the game, or at least going on extended hiatus. I immediately report this in vent and one of the people there asked who the new guild leader would be. “I guess me,” I sighed.

And just like that I was the new guild leader of Enveloping Shadows.

To be fair, it’s been like this for a while. Demo’s interest has been nothing but waning since January. I’ve been the de facto guild leader for at least two months now.

And to think a year and two months ago I first joined this guild and could barely get a raid spot. Now I’m the goddamn guild master.

There are no hard feelings between us. As difficult as it is to see him go, we always said you gotta do what you gotta do. If you’re burning out there’s no reason to hang around and become ever more miserable.

My immediate goals now are to arrest the morale decline of the past couple of weeks and get us progressing in ICC-25 again. I have no idea how we’re going to do that. I basically need to force a culture shift, which seems near impossible. I’m up for the challenge though.

Toynbee said that “countries die from suicide, not from murder.” I think the same is true for guilds. Leaders lose interest or their morale collapses. This trickles down and people stop trying, and then wipe to stupid things. Issues exacerbate issues until there is a critical mass of discontent.

I won’t let that happen. I can fix this.

If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

The topic du jour is once again tankadin hate, which was on the decline for a while after so many got it out of their system following the debut of Ardent Defender back in the days of Ulduar. At right about the time that DKs were smacked down, Paladins were propped up and for the first time in our long tanking careers we became something akin to the Second Coming. Or something like that. So I’m told.

We also got a nice fat target painted on our backs to go along with AD.

And now as part of the current flow of anti-Paladin sentiment the same old daggers are being drawn, dull as they are. Paladin tanking is so simplistic that only idiots play them. Paladin tanking is easy mode. Paladin tanking requires no skill. So on and so forth.

I mean, it’s obvious that these indictments are derived by the groupthink rage and envy at what is perceived as the top dog tank. Personally, I question how Druids get away unscathed with an even simpler rotation and far greater effective health, but I suppose that neither here not there. I don’t think there’s any merit to channeling dissatisfaction with your class into a hateful broadside against people that are, generally, on the same team. So to speak.

So then these footsoldiers of the aggrieved masses then fan out across the forums and abroad and denigrate us as degenerate facerollers. As evidence they cite how easy it is for us to aoe tank, how our rotation could be (wrongly) mapped to two buttons, and how our automatic second “cooldown” is a crime against nature. They then go roll Paladin alts (because, truly, the world needs more FotMers) and only reinforce their bigotry with the knowledge that a class–whose tanking arsenal was foundationally designed in 2.0 around reflective and area of effect damage–excels at holding more than one mob at a time.

… Holy hell, how did this get past the Sam Spades of the official forums for so long?!

And then of course one of these little pukes comes to this blog and regurgitates the same, tired claptrap that we’re subjected to day in and day out, spices it up with the mellifluousness of a subliterate mouth-breather, and then has the gall to top it off with a winking emoticon, like that somehow turns his bilious dribble into some biting riposte.

Does it bother me, to have to deal with this nonsense from anonymous troll and guildmate alike? Yeah, it does. For once we’re at the top of the heap, legitimately or not, and dammit that cannot stand. Pitchforks in hand, the wailing masses call for our heads, like we personally were the ones that decided that Paladins were due their time in the sun.

Do we need to be balanced against other tanks? Self-evidently, yes. Do we need this garbage hurled at us on a daily basis? No.

I’m sick of it. You seething wretches need to grow the hell up.

Long-term, the paladin manner of generating AE damage and threat is probably too good, especially given how simple it is. To be honest, we have very mixed feelings on the whole AE tanking game. We brought the druid and warrior more in line with the paladin for fear of recreating the Shattered Halls / Mount Hyjal experience, where other tanks just weren’t competitive. What that has led to of course is the AE tank + AE style of damage for almost every pull. You need the tools to be able to tank legitimate adds fights (imagine lots of incoming mobs), but does that mean every pull needs to devolve into that? We’d like to see less AE overall, so buffing everyone’s AE tools isn’t going to be tops on our agenda. That does however mean that we really can’t afford to have a “best AE tank”, and while things are more fair there than they were in BC, they aren’t fair enough.

I don’t think this means we’re going to get nerfed any time soon. I’ll explain why.

Here’s the problem with decrying the OPness of Paladin AoE: the sample is wrong. You can’t wait us tank the mobs before Marrowgar and assume that that’s the rule rather than the exception.

In that room I get to use Holy Wrath and benefit from additional damage multipliers from Glyph of Sense Undead and Crusade. On top of Seal of Command cleaving like nuts, of course our AoE damage is going to be ridiculous. It’s a fait accompli.

Line us up in a room full of evil monkeys or some mob type other than Undead/Demon and you’re going to see a different picture of Pally tanking.

Also, the fact can’t be ignored that Paladins were initially designed to be the best AoE tank, because generally that’s all we could do in Burning Crusade. Only in Wrath was it decided to bring other tanks up to our level, but not to concurrently re-evaluate Pally AoE prowess against the other tank classes. A classic oversight by Blizz.

My point being, Paladin AoE is only “overpowered” due to the situations we’re being observed tanking in. I posit we’d be much less effective in a dungeon crammed with non-Undead/Demon mobs. Still the best AoEer, sure, but not some godly tank that could hold a sweeping horde against all comers.

And every time Consecrate is assumed to be the end-all, be-all of our AoE arsenal I have to chuckle. This isn’t TBC, CC doesn’t stand for Constant Consecration anymore. We can’t just drop that golden puddle and make all the mobs stick to us like glue. What makes us such amazing AoE tanks are all the tools at our disposal: HotR, Seal of Command, Holy Wrath, Holy Shield, Retribution Aura, and Consecrate.

Now as to the reason behind GC’s aside regarding our tanking style, he’s probably foreshadowing a design decision that’ll come to bear in Cataclysm. They’re probably going to move away from raids at least, and maybe heroics, being complete AoE fests. Maybe with 75% AoE damage reductions across the board like Blessing of Kings suggested.

I wouldn’t worry about a nerf any time soon. Between the piddling warrior buffs (I use the term lightly) and the reluctance to fix DK survivability, GC has demonstrated time and time again they’re happy to leave tanks as is as long as that mythical “replacement” situation doesn’t occur.

AoE tanking is just another ball kicked down the road.

Hell, if I wanted to be smarmy I could say “the best posts of the decade,” but that kind of smarm is below me. Making up words like smarm, however, is not.

Um, but I digress. 2009 was the first real year of this blog, which was initially created on December 19th of last year, and sporadically updated, then abandoned for a month, and then kick started for good at the very end of January. Every since then I’ve been churning out posts, 266 in total this year. Some were bad, some were good, some were awesome. A lot were raid stories, or musings on the state of our class, or news about buffs and nerfs, or just silly divergences from the normal stuff.

Below I’ve listed what I personally feel are the 10 best posts of this blog in 2009. Some of them I wrote before I started getting a real audience here so they may be new to you. It’s interesting to see how my writing style and focus of topics changed over the course of the year. I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane as much as I did.

10. “The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance”

This post was a bit–er, pardon the pun–random. It sprung from back when my guild would use a roll system for loot back in Naxx and we had folks griping that they were cursed with “bad luck” when it came to rolling on things, or when they rolled high early in the evening they would gripe that they “wasted” their one “good roll” of the night. As the arch-skeptic of the guild, I felt it was my duty to correct such Cargo Cult-level nonsense. Hence, this diversion from tankadinery.

9. Achieving great things in the kingdom of the spiderfolk

This post was from back in the early life of the blog and when every post I did was burdened by some huge word vomit of a title. That was probably one of the longer titles I’ve ever given a post, to accompany one of the wall-of-textiest posts ever.

8. Four characteristics of a great tank, part 1: A sense of ownership

Ah, broken promises. Parts 2 through 4 still do not exist, despite my many fervent attempts to sit down and commit the little bastids to computer screen. I’m a huge fan of the way the series started though, and one day when I finally finish the other parts they will make a magnificent treatise on what it means to be a great tank.

7. Thought of the day: Situational Awareness

This was a fun post to write, and stemmed from reading about the study that I mention wherein. I don’t want to ruin the premise of the post for those of you who haven’t seen it and watched the video, but suffice it to say, it’s a pretty cool exercise on what I would consider a linchpin characteristic of tanking.

6. Why I love Rogues, a raid recap

Not just a run of the mill raid recap! I included in the post, for lulz, a haiku devoted to Falowin (a rogue guildmate who has the unlucky habit of dying on trash). Epically, he responded in the comments with a Shakespearean sonnet, in iambic pentameter no less. Comment of the year for sure.

5. How to gem, via a flowchart

This was the redo of an earlier chart from the days before we had epic gems. I’m a huge fan of how the chart turned out, both in terms of reception and how classy it looks.

4. 5 ways to boost your threat

One of my best “how to” posts, I feel. I also decided to test the blogging cliche of making a numbered list. In terms of visitors brought to the blog, this post has brought the most, bar none. Clearly all my posts should be numbered lists.

3. How to defeat heroic 10man Trial of the Crusader

I loved writing this article, crafting it the morning after a thrilling Tribute to Mad Skill run. I lovingly included as much detail as I could and from what I could tell the guide was an immense help to some people. A few folks emailed me or commented in the original guide saying that it helped them complete ToGC-10, which was an awesome thing to be told. I’m glad it was helpful.

2. Call me Ishmael

Oh Thorim. The bane of ES’s existence in 3.1. The gatekeeper between us and victory in that awful place. And, the impetus for the guild restructuring that followed. Nevertheless, we did eventually kill him, but only right before 3.2 came out. To celebrate the victory I cribbed a bunch of quotes from Moby Dick and retooled them to fit the narrative of Thorim being the Great White Whale to Demo’s Ahab. Hilarity followed.

1. I could say this joke was running

This was a very funny post when I wrote it, giving me the chance to draw on all the nonsense my guild commits during raids. Probably took me longer than it should have because I kept collapsing into fits of laughter. I love my guild, everyone in it rocks. We’re crazy, crazy people.

And I hope ES has as much success in 2010 as it did in 2009, and enjoys even more glory when Cataclysm raiding begins.

A very heartfelt thank you to all my readers. You guys and gals are why I write this blog, not for my own self-aggrandizement (an added bonus!), but to share some laughs, impart some advice, and provoke some discussion. Thank you so much for reading me in 2009 and I hope I live up to my first year of blogging by being a better blogger in 2010.

Have a great New Years everyone, stay safe and have fun!