Finally, some progression

I think it is sporting to say my guild is a bit, er, stalled when it comes to Ulduar 25. Our scheduling of raids has been crap which leads to people not coming on for raid nights (because they don’t know when they are) and then any ad-hoc raids that due form tend to eventually fall apart because we can’t keep a sustainable number of raiders in group.

Last night was therefore a happy rarity, and Ulduar 25 raid. The night was young and we had one farm boss to whet our appetites before we banged our heads against the wall on Kologarn.

Iron Council was a cake walk after a quick initial wipe caused by yours truly. Steelbreaker started casting Fusion Punch while standing in a Rune of Power, so even though he was promptly moved out, he still did this:

Steelbreaker Fusion Punch hits Rhidach for 32564 Nature. (5250 Resisted) (5540 Absorbed)

Ouch. And then:

Steelbreaker melee swing hits Rhidach for 19681 Physical. (1579 Blocked) (1517 Absorbed)

Game over, man.

Clearly I forgot the rather obvious: pop bubblewall before Fusion Punch landed. That 32k hit would have been for only 16k and the subsequent 19k would have been halved as well.

To compensate for my noobishness we made a point of announcing when Rune of Power was being cast so I could preemptively move Steelbreaker before it popped up underneath him, and I was doubly sure to be more aware of bubblewalling if things went bad again.

In any case, second attempt we easily took care of the encounter, although there was definitely a significant attrition occurring during every Overload where one person wasn’t paying attention and couldn’t make it out of the blast radius in time. Silly dps.

After the Iron Council went down it was time to shift focus for that bane of our raiding existence, Kologarn. Of the last five weeks we’ve run Ulduar 25, if I recall correctly, we’ve downed him twice and let him completely road block us three times. How ironic he turns into a bridge then, eh?

I’m happy to report we two-shot the jerk after an initially spotty attempt (where the druid tank ran out to dps the adds, got beam focused, then walked the beam back into the melee stack /facepalm). The tanking set up was yours truly on adds (more on that in a sec) and Demo/said druid nub tank on Kolo. All melee was stacked up on the tanks, and the healers were out with the ranged.

The way I handled adds was I’d sit with melee and dps the arm until it was at about 10%. Then, I’d dash under the right arm, drop a consecrate at 2% or so and when the adds spawned it’d hopefully be timed well enough that the first tick would hit them. A glyph Hammer of the Righteous would trap four in my aggro, and I’d have to follow up with a quick shield toss on the one Rubble that didn’t get hit with HotR to make sure I had them all. When Consecration was off cooldown, I’d drop another and go to town.

That second attempt went very smoothly, despite one terrifying moment when some dps trying to race away from an eye bream almost brought it right to me, and Kolo soon perished. Though, unfortunately no Saronite-Plated Legguards (gawd, I want those so badly).

After Kolo we still had a solid hour of raiding ahead of us to wack away at Auriaya. And wack we did. The first few attempts were basically just figuring out the best way to do the pull. Unlike 10 man, she now had four cats with her, and they needed to be somewhat separated to distribute their stacking buff. All around nastiness.

Despite some pretty solid attempts at the end, we ran out of time. I think tonight if we can get the raid going on time and have a focused body of raiders, we shouldn’t have much trouble with her ultimately. The only thing holding us back in this fight is getting the execution down, and when that happens it’ll be cake.

What’s done is done

Mining vs engineering: an EH comparison

EH as most of you probably already know stands for Effective Health, which is basically how much raw damage a mob has to deal to kill you. It’s a pretty potent number for determining proper gearing, derived from your total HP and your total armor.

Now, as I’ve blogged previously, I’m planning to drop Mining and pick up Engineering (for the +800 armor to gloves, among other reasons). Some people around here (looking at you Logan!) have been arguing against the switch, and with excellent points at that. So I’ve been holding off on pulling the trigger because the prospect of losing 50 stamina seemed pretty daunting.

Finally though I sat down and crunched some numbers, and I think I finally have the ammunition I need to make the jump.

Here are the EH numbers I received from this awesome calculator on the Tanking Tips site for each scenario:

Mining (33274 HP/25074 Armor): 83428

Mining with Toughness affected by Kings (33324 HP/25074 Armor): 83553

Engineering (32704 HP/25874 Armor): 83572

So, no matter what, it’s an EH gain. I think I’m making the right choice.

GC: New cooldown for tankadins coming

We’re not going to give paladins a warmed over version of Last Stand. We do recognize that they need another cooldown. Our plan is for something slightly different.

There is hope.

I’d actually prefer something unique than further homogenization of the tanking classes, so this is very good news.

Blood Draining won’t kill you, but it still sucks

As anyone who frequents Maintankadin would know, Theck is an inimitable mathematical genius who usually plies his trade at crunching numbers to better our understanding of our class. In this post he applies his numerical accumen to Enchant Weapon – Blood Draining, which some Paladins questioned would (due to its mechanics) have the nasty tendency of killing us.

Basically, because BD procs at the same point that Ardent Defender would kick into effect, it could feasibly push you over the AD threshold, back into that scary territory where extra 30% damage reduction does not roam… and allow a boss to leapfrog AD and finish you off. Not good.

Well Theck ran a detailed analysis of Blood Draining and posted his results in this thread. In essence, BD on average is not more likely to get you killed, but it’s also not on average going to save you.

QED:

Despite the fact that blood draining won’t reduce your survivability, it also doesn’t do anything to increase it for very large boss hits. Unfortunately, very large boss hits are often what kills a tank, making this an expensive enchant that works best in the cases we don’t need it, and worst in the cases we do.

I haven’t had a chance to try out Blade Warding yet, but at least I know to avoid this enchant now.

Update: As Honorshammer points out in the comments below and on his blog, Theck amended his data to simulate raid healing and BD comes out much better. I think I’m still not a fan, but it’s definitely not as bad seeming as it first was.

Ugh, waste of a night

Last night held so much promise. On Tuesday we cleared the first four bosses of Ulduar25, leaving us an easy kill of Iron Council and then plenty of time to work on Kologarn. Instead… not enough people logged on. On Wednesday.

I’m not 100% certain but I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the last two weeks Kologarn has been our roadblock to further progression into Ulduar, and many people just decided they’d take the night off and avoid a difficult boss, then come back the next time to find us surely ready to tackle the T8 bosses.

If that’s the case, I mourn this guild, because apparently a lot of people had that opinion last night. Only 18 people came on for the raid.

And the next raid is scheduled for Saturday. I’m sure you can see where that is headed.

After the 25man raid fell apart, a bunch of us put together a 10man run together, which was very successful. We started with a few attempts at FL with one tower up (which wasn’t too awful, I think we could have downed it if we had devoted more time to it, but we wanted to get further into Ulduar, so it was counterproductive to spend the night on that, unfortunately.

After FL was downed normally we then proceeded to one shot every boss up to Thorim (who we downed after two wipes once we realized we had too much dps going into the hallway group) before we had to call it a night.

So, the 10 man was wonderfully successful, and we are awesomely positioned for Mimiron attempts the next time we go in there.

As for 25 man, er, not so much.

CC? This is madness!

Crowd control is back with a vengeance in Ulduar, and more or less that’s a good thing. In Naxx, trash was basically all the same: round them up, AOE them down. In Ulduar, no more! Now you will kite them, or keep them separated (but not too separated), and make them face away from the raid, and so on.

Trash has depth, and that is scary.

As you can imagine, we’ve started deploying limited CC, mostly frost arrows. Sheeps have been deployed occasionally as well. It’s streamlined the pulls a lot, and cut down on wipes, which is always a good thing. I figure once we start to gear up more we’ll be able to steamroll through the packs with minimal to no crowd control.

And for the record, I am not a fan of effects like this one. Makes it very hard to hold aggro on large groups without constant target switching (what am I, a warrior?!).

Engineering: here we go again

I was an engineer before WotLK. In fact, I picked up the profession around last May because I was so enamored with the Tankatronic Goggles, which were beyond awesome. Equivalent to T5 gear if I recall correctly. 

Now, I’ve always been somewhat of a min-maxer when it comes to professions. When choosing my character’s “job” I look first and foremost as what stats I’m going to get out of it. So, after Wrath was released, I reassessed my professions and decided to drop my previous pair of Engi/BS and start anew as JC/Mining. Which is where I sit today.

But now I think I’ve lost it. I’m going to drop Mining to level Engineering… again.

Why? A couple of reasons: the utility of the repair bots and MOLL-E is nice. The mote extractor is still an ok way to make money (at least for crystallized fire). The haste tinker would be pretty awesome for my Ret set. But, most importantly, the glove tinker for Engineers in currently best in slot.

That 800 armor is the pièce de résistance for me. It works out to about 1% DR when all’s said and done, which is more EH than the 50 stamina that Mining gives me. So I think I’m making a good trade.

Only downside I can see so far is I’m trading a gathering profession for a major gold sink. But, I think in the final analysis it works out.

Mmm ketchup

I have a lot to catch up on, so I’ll try to keep it fairly concise. In the week since I last posted we only raided Ulduar 25 this past weekend. The Saturday start was something of a disaster, as over the last few weeks raiding attendance on weekends has been unmitigated crap. Despite not having our usual 25man raiders we managed to down FL, Razorscale, and XT. Not only that, but we started the night by one shotting Malygos and 20 manning 1D Sarth.

I told you all, sometimes I don’t get my guild. And I mean that in a good way.

Of course, then on Sunday we downed Iron Council and spent the rest of the night wiping on Kologarn.

In any case, after the experience of this weekend we decided to switch 25man raids to weekdays (specifically Tues/Wed) to take advantage of having almost 40 people online on those days while barely scraping 25 on Sat/Sun. Keep in mind though not 3 months ago we switched 25man raids to weekends so we’d have more raiding time. How things change!

Now last night was the start of the raiding week, so to capitalize we started off with Emalon25 ( who is soooo easy now that they nerfed him), and then headed into Ulduar. We one-shot FL and what does he drop but this awesome and probably over-budgeted ring. I promptly snatched it up, finally replacing my Titanium Earthguard Ring.

Has anyone noticed that when you down FL your raid still stays in combat? I don’t know if this is a bug or not, because it’s happened the last few weeks. Apparently some random dwarves stay up and just run around after FL goes down, locking us in combat. A DI will typically take someone out of combat, but only for a short while. Right now our only relief seems to be running out, which is a huge pain considering you can’t use teleporters while in combat, and the distance between FL and the entrance is vast.

Anyhoo, after FL we marched over to Razorscale and quickly one-shot her as well. The fight is always a bit surreal now that it’s been nerfed/tuned down a bit. I still remember the ungodly hell it was the first week in Ulduar. So glad this was changed.

After that we went on to down XT after a few attempts, who dropped the Signet of the Earthshaker. Demo didn’t want that, so I took it as well. It’s got a nice amount of stamina and defense, and the block rating will give me some flexibility with gear so I stay block capped while maximizing avoidance elsewhere.

And then after XT we went over to Ignis and downed him after a few tries as well.

So first night and Siege of Ulduar is cleared! That means we have a nice, full night of… er, Kolo wipes… ahead of us. Crap.

Um, but I digress. Let’s back up a sec for some hilarity.

While we were clearing trash to FL there was some unrest in gchat from some dps who were sore they weren’t being taken to Ulduar. Mind you, they weren’t skipped intentionally, just they weren’t invited that night. By the time we got to FL though, one of the sore dps typed this into gchat accidentally:

Oops indeed.

He left the guild immediately after, though he was probably about to get kicked.

It’s kind of a shame, the guy was decent dps even in bad gear. He probably would have been really good in time and with some better gear.

Speaking of further drama, one of the issues bubbling just under the surface concerns two new members we picked up two weeks ago. These two came from the best Horde guild on the server, and for that reason I shall call him Captain [AwesomeGuild]. Now C[AG], I have been informed, is by virtue of his previous guild membership apparently some kind of WoW god. And we are but lowly mortals that walk under this bestriding colossus’ legs.

Because C[AG] was in [AwesomeGuild], suddenly he’s being consulted for every progression boss fight, despite the fact that he joined us two weeks into Ulduar’s release, so I doubt he’s seen more of the place than we have. Case in point, on Kologarn last week we wiped a few times, so offerings were brought to this Ye O Mighty Oracle, and he revealed that a druid main tank would be in order because druids have more avoidance.

Er, wut?

Unless something has changed significantly recently, wasn’t the whole point of druids that they don’t have much avoidance? Don’t they only have dodge as an avoidance stat?

I think this guy’s full of it, and some people are just stroking his ego. To make it worse he has all the personality and charm of any random leet kiddie you might encounter in WoW. For example, a guildee asked in gchat the other day which of two pieces was better for him. Both were similar, but one had hit and one had crit. C[AG] says in guild “HURF DURF HIT CAP OR NOT HIT CAP”. Granted, the answer was obvious, but there was no need to be such a dick.

And frankly, anyone who uses the word “brah” unironically is suspect.

Apologies!

Sorry for my posting drought this last week. I’ll be returning to a normal posting routine starting tomorrow and exploring such fascinating topics as guild drama, raid drama, and my newly acquired love for my Ret offspec.