My guildie, Morvain, made this video in his despair over the delay in 3.3’s debut. This is pretty hilarious:

Won’t somebody please think of the penguins?

Ghostcrawler shows his true colors:

We agree with Communism.

Better dead than balanced!

To do something a little different, my post today is a brief interview with Demogar, my co-tank and brother-in-arms. Demo was recently served with a 3-day suspension from the WoW forums for what I can only assume was trolling. As you can imagine, he has some strong opinions on the state of tanking today, haha.

This is a bit of a fluff interview though, just to introduce the guy you’ve only seen in taunting comments and raid recaps to the wider audience of this blog’s front page.

1. Tell use a little about Demogar: when did you create the character,
what spec did you level as?

Demogar was actually created solely as something to do when I wasn’t helping a friend level his first toon on my Mage alt. I never intended to play him past level 20 but the mechanics of the class got its hooks in me. I leveled as Fury until level 61. A healer friend of mine begged me to tank for him but I was terrified of the responsibility. After several terrifying dungeon runs I found my footing and a passion for the game I had never known before.

2. What’s your raid tanking experience?

I played but never really got into raiding pre-BC outside of a few Molten Core and ZG runs of my old Warlock. I took some time off after BC launched then when I came back and leveled Demo I seemingly missed the boat on getting into a raiding guild. The guild I did get into spent the expansion running Kara and failing at early ZA. I went to another guild and did a little bit of Hyjal and SSC but nothing serious. Both guilds I tanked for but the Kara guild I was main tank.

3. What was your biggest raiding defeat? Biggest victory?

Excluding current content I would have to say working with my old guild to clear Kara and finally killing Nightbane… the biggest defeat was seeing how badly they performed in ZA and how we were never going to evolve any further. Including current content definitely 10 man heroic ToC is what I am most proud of and Yogg-Saron is my biggest disappointment.

4. What’s your favorite part of my tanking? :P

I think we have a good rhythm tanking together. You are as focused and committed to your role as I am. We each bring something different to the table and compliment each other well. You are able to herd adds together and hold them better than I can by far and are always on the spot with raid utility, whether it be Divine Sacrifice or Hand of Sacrifice on me when I need it. Tanks sometimes tend to butt heads and compete with each other, a problem you and I have never had. Your mind is always in the game and you’re always prepared and ready to react when something doesn’t go exactly as planned.

5. In 7 words, sum up your current feelings of the state of warrior
tanking. You are excluded from using the words “nerf” and “paladins”.

Slightly behind, very ignored, still VERY capable.

6. What do you think is the biggest misconception Paladins have about
Warrior tanks?

I see a lot of people think that Disarm and Spell Reflect are useful raid tools when they are in fact near worthless in a raid setting. There is some trash I can reflect tank and a couple bosses I can disarm but generally they don’t count toward anything in a raid environment.

7. Name the biggest change to tanking you’d like to see in Cataclysm
(non-class-specific).

I would love to see a heavier emphasis on bosses with tricky mechanics over bosses that just hit like a truck. I think Twin Val’kyr are easy but they are a lot of fun because it is all about execution. It would also be nice to see gear options that are viable aside from stam stacking. It was nice when we used to have to balance our stats out to be more well rounded rather than just walking HP pools.

8. How many tanks, ideally, do you think a 25man raid should require?

I think they either need to have all encounters require two tanks or have them all require three. If they change it up a lot then you need to not only have two very well geared main tanks but also some very well geared DPS with very good tanking gear. That isn’t always easy to do. I personally like two tanks but I don’t care either way as long as they keep it consistent.

9. What do you think is a better system: high avoidance with
harder-hitting bosses, or lower avoidance but more, smaller hits?

I prefer low avoidance with smaller more predictable hits. I don’t think the difficulty of the encounter should be determined just on how much gear the tanks and healers have. I do think bosses should certainly hit hard but not as hard as they have been.

10. T13/14 in Cataclysm: How much hp unbuffed is a warrior tank going to
have? Make your prediction now!

It all depends on how much HP we have in full heroic T10 before I can compare fresh 80 HP to fully geared. But since they say that the Defense in the item budget will probably going to become stamina I would say possibly 80k in full heroic T14.

This post is dedicated to Falowin and his 310% mount.

Everyone knows Crusader Aura increases your speed by 20%, but what most don’t realize is the 20% boost is multiplicative rather than additive. That is, rather than taking the 20% boost and just slapping it on top of your mount speed, you multiply it in to the total movement speed number.

For example, a 280% mount makes you go 380% faster than normal run speed. Multiply the total movement speed by 1.20 (for the 20% bonus from Crusader) and you get the total movement speed with the aura up: 456%.

Contrawise, Falowin on his pretty pink 310% mount will only be going at 410% speed. If I was flying on said pretty pink mount (while wearing full t5, natch), I’d be moving at 492%.

Now imagine a pally with Aura Mastery on a 310% mount–they’d be going at 574% speed!

… I need to get me a Rusted Proto.

Disclaimer: I wrote this post yesterday in its entirety, and then a power flash ate it. The subsequent rampage took up all my remaining posting time yesterday, but let me assure you, Rhi did most certainly smash.

So Tuesday’s raid night was awesome (let’s not talk about last night) to the point where we pulled another one-shot three-fer, knocking out Onyxia, the Coliseum, and VOA 25s in one night. We were such a well oiled machine we burnt through all three over the course of about two and a half hours, with Coliseum only taking an hour and fifteen minutes. And as we’re roflstomping all this undertuned content, I noticed how relaxed the atmosphere was. Just to speak for myself, I tend to shut down and lock up on progression stuff, focusing more on the fight to the detriment of you know, actually enjoying the game. I stress out a bit.

Not Tuesday though, everyone was joking and laughing and some of the same running jokes that make an appearance in almost every raid were rolled out. Which then got me thinking about how many in-jokes my guild has, and how it’d make great post fodder in a sure-you-have-no-idea-what-we’re-talking-about-but-I-swear-it’s-funny sort of way. Here’s a bunch of them (and I invite my guildees that read this blog to contribute any I have missed):

“Zilga down!” I’m not entirely sure Zilga ever really died as much as Falowin did, so the origins of this are a mystery to me. Nonetheless, this is the universal “oh everything is going great” comeback. E.g., “5% left!” “Zilga down.”

“Back in my day…” One of the raiders, Valgard, has a visceral hatred of addons, for good or ill. He wouldn’t use an equipment manager until Blizzard came out with its own and would manually change gear piece by piece. It was painful. Demogar shot back at him with an impression of an old man (or perhaps a grizzled prospector) saying “Back in my day we didn’t need no dagnabbit addons!” The charm has faded since the first time it was done, but the bite of the indictment lingers to this day.

[Random awful Valgard joke]. Speaking of Valgard, boy does he love his bad jokes. It’s an accepted fact of life that at least once per raid we’ll be subjected to a quality joke as “Master looter? More like master tooter!” Groans aplenty, I assure you. One day he’ll make an actual good joke and the fabric of space and time will collapse on itself. No one will ever know.

“Loot pinata.” This is my fault, I came into some boss fight in Coliseum (not sure which one–was probably pre-nerf Faction Champs) with a cup full a’ hubris, insisting that said fight was so easy it was a loot pinata. It was not. I have yet to live this pronouncement down.

“20 minutes, tops.” Back during Ulduar we used to have the worst time with Freya’s trash. People got too antsy and would stand in the thunderstorm or forget to re-CC. Bad things happened, and one night it was proclaimed that the trash would take twenty minutes tops to get through. It took two hours. I left a little piece of my soul behind in that garden.

“RISE FALOWIN!” I did a haiku on this way in the past, and alas the basis for this in-joke has essentially passed, because Falowin is stubborn and refuses to die as often. In any case, in Naxx, whenever there was a Dark Touched Warrior in the trash pack, you knew–KNEW–that Falowin was going to die. He was like a side character in a Final Destination movie. He just had no effing chance. It happened so often that Morvain, one of the DKs, made a Raise Ally macro that would turn Fal into a ghoul and /yell “RISE FALOWIN!” It remains epic to this day.

“God himself cannot stop us.” This is another Falowin-related joke, pursuant to the ridiculous hubris that infects our ranks sometimes. To make fun of Demogar’s various pronouncements of confidence, Fal would then declare “god himself cannot stop us.” And then he would.

“I don’t give a bitch.” This one only started Tuesday, but it has legs (as they say). One of the warlocks was telling a story of a ten year old in a class he teaches trying feebly to swear derisively. The little boy declared that he “didn’t give a bitch” about something or another and an epic joke was born. We already spent most of the day yesterday scrawling this across the guild forums.

“Oh, I know what we’re doing wrong.” If we’re starting to wipe on a boss for stupid reasons, Demo like to refocus us a bit by putting a skull on the boss. Which is super helpful, because sometimes I get confused and try to tank one of the hunter pets. It’s good for a laugh though, and helps dispel some pent up tension over wipes.

“Dental plan!” “Lisa needs braces.” Kind of a stupid one. During Icehowl I would say in vent “massive crash” which apparently sounded an awful lot like Lenny saying “Dental plan!” in that Simpsons episode. So someone replied “Lisa needs braces” and another stupid in-joke was born.

So that’s just a smattering of my guild’s nonsensery. Do your guilds have any silly running jokes?

I can’t believe I forgot to post this.

My girlfriend is a savant when it comes to baking, and for my recent birthday she clandestinely wrangled my buddy into secreting her a screenshot of my character. Which she turned into this:

A work of art! I’m a lucky guy.

Anyone wanna get me one of these for my impending bday?

Exit question: With diminishing returns, think it’s possible to hit 100% avoidance with that equipped?

You know, this really isn’t that big of a deal. It’s only ~5% of our threat lost, which shouldn’t be more than 400-500 tps. Yeah, we’ll be fine, everything will be hunky dory.

What really bothers me about this though is, was it really that big of a deal that pallies were the best tanks for threat. I mean, really?! Did it makes that much of a difference that we could out-threat any other tank and give a good dps ceiling to the pew pewers?!

If only we fought this change harder in the tanking forums. If only we defended high threat as being our “flavor”. This never would have happened.

Oh, what’s the use? Now I’m going to have dps pulling off me left and right. The DK tank was already out-threating me on a few encounters last night. It’s only going to get worse.

… Eh, screw it. I’ll get hit capped and switch 2/2 Divine Guardian for 2/5 Reckoning. We’ll be fine.

This is what I do when I’m bored between Heroic ToC-10 wipes.