Third times a charm?

So the guild’s loot system changed… er, again. This is now the third change to the system since early February, and it’s only mid-March. Yikes.

And in case you’re wondering, yes we finally gave in and implemented DKP.

I don’t want to get into the details of how this came about (big hint: more loot drama), just that it’s kind of disappointing. I was hoping we’d all be “mature” enough to deal with how the loot was distributed, that people would be willing to pass if they got a string of pieces, that there’d be little to no greed.

Don’t get me wrong, people generally were great. But the system had huge flaws that would show from time to time, and this was just inevitable I guess.

Another highlight from the raid this weekend includes the aforementioned DK from this post returning to our Naxx25 raid, and taunts were a-flying. We did Gothik and it was just obscene. At the phase when he’s warping between the two halves of the room, he pops into ours and I pick him up.

Immediately a taunt. I start just wailing away, grab aggro by out tps-ing the DK. Taunt. I win back aggro again. Taunt. Rinse and repeat until Gothik goes down.

I was talking to the warrior MT before the raid when I saw the DK was in it, and remarked that I had a full night of being taunted off of to look forward to. The MT is immediately like “I thought he was doing that!”

At least it’s not just me, eh?

New Ulduar tank trinkets revealed

Holy hell, is Blizzard trying to escape the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of dodge diminishing returns or what?

Check these out (from mmo-champion.com):

This is a serious upgrade to Monarch Crab. Right now I have my crab gemmed with a Solid Sky Sapphire and a Solid Dragon’s Eye, so it’s giving me 138 stamina and has the on-use proc for 300. The Heart is definitely a bump up on both counts.

This is like the Essence of Gossamer without the stamina. It’s nice, but I’d rather have the Heart of Iron. This is definitely a better fit in a trash set, since 205 damage being shaved off won’t be that much help when you’re taking multi-thousand HP hits.

But let’s talk about dodge. Right now I have 305 dodge rating, or 21% dodge. It’s not that much, but I’m already feeling my returns a-diminishing.

With these two trinkets equipped and procced, I’m looking at some serious lost dodge. I’m terrible at math but it looks like around 4% avoidance will just outright disappear.

How much avoidance are we going to see on gear in T9?

Better Late Than Never Friday, 3/13/09

When writing this post I accidentally typed the title out as “Best in Slot” Friday… which is a nice Freudian slip of what I keep intending to write a post about. Anyways, this is the second Better Late Than Never Friday, a periodic piece in which I pull search keywords that brought people here from Google Analytics and answer the questions behind those keywords that they probably didn’t find during their visit.

best in slot paladin protection, best in slot prot paladin, best in slot paladin tankadin, best in slot tankadin, prot paladin best in slot list, prot paladins best in slot gear

I’m working on it!

best stat threat tankadin

A tankadin’s best threat stat is strength, hands down. Not only do you get attack power from it (for all abilities), but you double-dip and grab block value as well for mitigation and Shield of Righteousness! A distant second is hit rating, which affects almost all our attacks. Expertise is not a good threat stat–it just doesn’t affect enough abilities to matter.

crit cap for paladins

I’m assuming this means the cap where you can’t be crit anymore. The answer is 5.6% crit reduction, which is around 540 defense. Always double check on your character sheet, because you could have 540 defense but 5.59% crit reduction!

gem strength tankadin

Don’t gem strength for your Paladin. For my sake. :(

good dodge% for a tankadin

Diminishing returns makes this somewhat of a dodgy issue (har har har) but I did some digging and found this chart. According to it, diminishing returns starts around 200 rating and promptly begins to nose-dive around 350 or so. I’m currently sporting 305 rating/21%, so diminishing returns around starting to make themselves known. Honestly though, dodge is the best avoidance stat, so as long as you’re not sacrificing stamina to pile it on, then keep on piling.

hit rating tankadin

Honestly, hit rating is not that important for tankadins. Most of our attacks would require 8% hit rating to be capped, but that would require a lot of sacrificed health and avoidance to achieve. I’m personally sitting at 5% melee hit rating, and I don’t intend to improve it anymore.

how much hit and expertise does a paladin tank need?

Refer to this post for expertise. For hit, by the numbers, a tankadin needs 9% hit rating to cap out most of our attacks (judgements, ShoR, HotR, Avenger’s Shield, etc.) which is 296 rating. For spells (ie, Righteous Defense and Hand of Reckoning) we need 17% hit, or 446 rating.

But again, a Paladin really doesn’t need more than 4-5% hit rating. And the glyph makes sure than one of our taunts cannot miss.

tankadin titanium plating or defense

To answer the question in a round-about way, my ideal situation is to have Hero’s Surrender with Enchant Shield – Defense for boss fights and Wall of Terror with the Titanium Plating for trash.

righteous dresses

And how!

The not-so-Undying

Tuesday is typically our Sartharion night, but now that we’ve been focusing on 2d it’s been moved to Monday (aka Progression Night). So Tuesday indeed rolls around, as it is wont to do, and we don’t have a raid to raid to satisfying that raiding itch.

Indeed.

So an impromptu Naxx10 forms, and it was all and all very successful. We steamrolled the place, finishing in about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. We didn’t wipe once, which was excellent.

In fact, we were doing so well that for a period of time I had that nagging little though in my head saying “hey, we’re on track for The Undying.”

“Quiet, you!” I immediately commanded it, fearing a jinx. It was too late though, the Jinx Gods were alerted by my hubris.

We burnt through spider wing and plague wing without a single death, and marched all the way up to Four Horsemen without incident. Then disaster struck.

We switched Rivendare and Thane, but the two bosses were kept too close after the switch and the stacks continued to pile on. A priest got stuck with a 5 stuck and couldn’t heal himself through it. He went down. Crap.

Moving on, we ignored a pull in the lead up to Patch, and of course–of course–when we engage Patch the pull comes, and in the confusion a dps warrior is taken out by a hateful strike.

We also racked up two more deaths on Thaddius. None on Kel though, which is awesome.

I think if we bring a few more A-teamers (maybe use 3 healers) and are deliberately more careful we can do it. Might as well try before they take the Black Proto Drake away!

Easy weapon skill leveling for tankadins

So as I mentioned previously about six hundred times I picked up a certain tanking axe over the weekend and found myself with the dilemma of having to quickly get my axe skill from 101 to the full 400 before the next raid.

A circumstance inflicted itself upon me back in TBC when I was jumping from sword to sword, until I eventually picked up the Cudgel of Consecration from Magister’s Terrace.

And no I did not raid back then, so no Hammer of Judgement for me. Or Amani Punisher for that matter.

I think I had the Crystalforged Sword for a long, long time. Like six months. I was using that thing in Kara! Then, when I finally replaced it, I had the Cudgel for about two weeks, until I had accumulated enough arena points for the Merciless Gladiator’s Gavel.

But I ramble. My point being it was annoying enough going from having the full sword weapon skill to needing mace skill. Now I had to level axe skill. Axes! What kind of paladin tanks with an axe?!

To make this process as painless as possible I needed a very specific kind of mob to grind. It had to be numerous, melee only, high level, and weakly damaging.

And success, I found one: the Captive Vrykul (and his lazy cousin, the Exhausted Vrykul).

These guys are great. They’re all over the place in the Brunnhildar Mine, they don’t hit that hard, and they only have melee attacks. I just swung away at them with Seal of Light up, so any damage they did cause was easily recovered by seal procs. Because they’re level 79 or so, you’ll be able to grind them all the way to 399 (or 400 if you’re a glutton for punishment and have three days to work on that last point).

Grinding my gears, and confusing Dalaran with Belfast

For the past few days this tool–er, night elf–has been hanging out in front of the Horde-side bank in Dalaran, on his Red Proto Drake, somehow undismounted, and just sitting there. For long stretches of time too.

I don’t get this behavior. Doesn’t this guy have anything better to do with his time?

If I can get Freudian for a moment, maybe what bothers me most is that he’s poking around on the “wrong side of town”. The north side bank is closest to the Sunreavers’ Sanctuary, so it is in my mind the Horde bank.

It’s kind of a West Side Story mentality if you will, with all the requisite fingers a-snapping gang wars in the center courtyard.

I tend to avoid the south side for the same reason. Feels like trespassing.

Am I the only one that feels this way about Dalaran?

Running out of time in Naxx

In a way, we’re all kind of running against the clock when it comes to the current tier of raiding in WotLK. How many weeks can we reasonably expect to have left in which Naxxramas is main raiding dungeon? 3? 4? 6? Probably a month at most. It’s that thought that is compelling me to worry a little bit more extensively about getting as much of my best in slot gear obtained as humanly possible.

I ticked off one of those goals last night in Naxx when I picked up the Last Laugh (mark it, that’s the third time I’ve mentioned this now). Now my big goals are the Valorous Redemption Handguards, the Legplates of Sovereignty, the Bracers of the Unholy Knight, Kyzoc’s Ground Stompers, and the Ablative Chitin Girdle. And suddenly I’m stressed! Yikes…

In any case, let’s talk about Naxx. [...]

Laughing best, and how best to enchant said laughing

So like I mentioned in my previous post, I picked up the best-in-slot tanking weapon, Last Laugh, last night. The situation in which I picked it up was a little tense (something I’ll go into further detail with in my next raid recap post), but what I really wanted to focus on was the little crisis this axe inflicted upon me: how to enchant it.

Right now it is tankadin gospel (see: Letter of St. Uther to the Demon Hunter Supplicants 10:2-4) that you put Enchant Weapon – Potency on your tanking weapon, dammit. No other enchants need apply.

And, generally, rightfully so! The +20 strength from Potency works out to 23 strength and 15 block value, with the right talents, which is gravy for shield slams and damage reduction. Far and away it is an excellent choice.

But this… this is Last Laugh! I ripped this axe myself from the icy claws of the Archlich himself, the Lord of the Dread Citadel Naxxramas! Surely, there was a, er, more recent enchant that would better fit this god amongst T7 tank weapons.

I’ve had my eye on Enchant Weapon – Accuracy for some time now. To say the mats make it a bit cost-prohibitive would be an understatement (6 abyss crystals among others, natch). But does the math justify such an exorbitant enchantment?

I did some research and I found in a thread at Maintankadin an amazing breakdown of TPS mechanics. The jewel in this thread was this particular table that I was searching for: numbers crunched showing the DPS/TPS difference between Potency and Accuracy. In short, Potency is 21.6 DPS and 55.9 TPS, and Accuracy is 25 DPS and 65 TPS.

The main caveat is Accuracy is only more threat as long as you are not soft hit capped, as the soft cap affects most of our attacks: auto-attack, shield of righteousness, hammer of the righteous, avenger’s shield, judgements, and hammer of wrath. Once you hit that soft cap then Potency is better for threat generation. Considering how little hit a tank should be stacking, that should never be an issue.

So, yes, for the moment, Accuracy is the superior tankadin enchant. A bit of a luxury, but superior nonetheless.

Screenshot spam

I apologize for not having any posts over the last few days. The hubbub with coming home from the conference and the desire to get back into WoW with both arms swinging took a lot of the energy I usually reserve for this site. However I’ll be posting something a wee bit more substantive on Monday!

In lieu of something interesting, here’s some screenshot spam:

The 226 Club (aka those of us with iLevel 226 weapons) has a meeting before some Malygos attempts.

Leveling my axe skill. As you may have surmised by my participation in the dance party from the screenshot above, I picked up my Last Laugh tonight. Of course, at that moment, I was rocking 101/400 axe skill.

Woops.

Why I tank

Kind of a crazy day at the conference when, perusing my feedreader on the ol’ iPod, I noticed I was linked on WoW Insider. Total insanity… without the unkillable Druid adds.

For those new eyes checking out my humble corner of the Interwebs, I feel compelled to write a new post as a delicious morsel of what you can look forward to feasting on if you continue to sit at my table of… alright, I’m clearly very hungry right now. Food metaphors aside, here’re the goods.

I first rolled my tankadin a year and a half ago, in September of 2006. I was on a long hiatus from WoW and was planning to rejoin the game on a server a few of my friends were playing on. Asking what class role they needed filled I was told a tank, so tank I rolled. Like a turkey leg off a tabl–er, sorry, doing it again.

So originally I came to tank out of sheer coincidence, it’s what they needed, so I provided it. But, over time, other reasons emerged for me not deleting Rhidach into the Abyss That Only GMs Tread.

For example it is really easy to pug as a tank. In TBC it was stupid easy, you’d hop in the LFG channel and put in your comment “Tank, x hp, uncrittable” and you’d get hit immediately with some whispers. These days there’s a bit of a tanxplosion on the multitudinous servers, so it takes an extra of minute or two to find a pug needing your services.

Still that not having to languish in the LFG channel is a mighty nice privilege. I’m sure any healers that read this blog can sympathize.

Other reasons I came to enjoy tanking are a bit more personal. For example, I find it deeply satisfying to complete a group of a mobs, or a boss, knowing that if not for my character’s ugly mug and heavily-dented shield, the rest of the party would promptly go splat.

Every time the main tank has gone down in Naxx and I’ve managed to round up the wayward adds and hold them in my holy wrath while the remnants of the party pull together and overcome a near wipe… that’s satisfying.

The massive repair costs are a burden I will gladly carry to see the raid or group through to the end of the journey.

There’s a definite high–a taste of serotonin that I’m generously provided by that lump of gray matter that calls my skull home–when I’m tanking. It’s hard to describe, but I bet among anyone reading this blog they’ve had that pang of satisfaction at some point, whether it was when landing a sweet crit, or managing to get that heal off before someone was nearly smashed into the dirt, or what have you.

Tanking is exhilirating. That is why I tank.

Plus, the pay. We get paid for this, right?

Alright my dinner awaits! Good feasting… and tanking!