Better Late Than Never Friday 6/5

I’ll skip the normal fluffy introduction to this feature, but let it be said: woo, Friday!

archaedas’ lost legplates thoughts

Not a fan at all. No defense means you need some serious defense on other pieces to make up for the gap, and expertise is such a wasted stat for us. Unless you have defense to spare I would avoid these pants.

are tankadins better with swords, axes, or maces?

Depends on your race. Blood Elves, Dwarves, and Draenei get no melee weapon bonuses, but humans get a 3 Expertise bonus to swords and maces. Expertise is of course basically crap (especially +3), so it’s not a game changer.

Correction! Muiran points out in the comments that Dwarves get a mace spec bonus of +5 expertise, as well.

does blood draining work for hunters

I hope not.

for paladin how much spell power do you get for each stamina

With Touched by the Light 3/3 you get .3 spellpower for every 1 point of stamina.

last laugh vs stoneguard

Last Laugh, hands down.

where will i find vrykul

I’m going to assume this is a question about the JCing daily, and not just in general (because they’re nearly everywhere in Northrend). Closest Vrykul to Dalaran is the area with the blight pool/blighted proto drakes in southwest Storm Peaks. Just fly over the Argent base, and you’ll be there in no time.

tankadin need hitrating

Thanks to all our many instant, high-threat attacks, hit isn’t as huge a deal for us as it is for other tanking classes. However, for consistent threat you probably want around 3-4% of it. Don’t ever gem for hit, though, you’ll get it organically from your gear. Also, it’s more than likely you’ll reach hit cap in Ulduar25 gear (I’m sitting at 7.9% right now) and that is not a bad thing. Embrace it!

Egads, I tweet

Not sure how I feel about this yet (damn you Wed 2.0) but I set up a twitter account for this blog. I’ll probably tweet about stuff in game–a little more current than “last week we killed x boss”–and any interesting links I find about prot pallies, as well as links to posts as they go up.

If any of you, dear readers, happen to be on Twitter as well, please “follow” me (or whatever you kids are calling it these days) and I’ll return the gesture.

See you in the cloud…

Hard-mode FL 10man down

Last night Uld25 didn’t happen (which is baffling… it was Wednesday!) so after levelling a bit with the DK I was asked if I wanted to try hard-mode Flame Leviathan in 10 man. We attempted it once beforehand, half-heartedly, just to see what it was like. We left the Freya tower up, which turned out to be somewhat difficult.

This time we left the Hodir tower up which wasn’t as bad as some descriptions make it out to be. Basically the three changes are: all our vehicles move 20% slower, FL gets 50% more health (giving it around 34 million hp), and these two roaming columns of white light randomly chase down someone and attempt to freeze them in place. If you stay constantly moving they’re cake to avoid.

The biggest thing about this is shutting down FL as often as possible. That means the fight starts with people getting tossed up, you’ll have a shutdown less than a minute in,  have bikes retrieve catapultees and bring them back to be relaunched as soon as FL starts moving again.

Also one of the deciding factors on that last attempt was when Cen hopped off his bike and into my demolisher to nab me a pyrite barrel, that gave me 5 more pyrite rounds for the last shutdown, which definitely knocked a major chunk of health out.

The best part of it all? Hard mode drops 2 Emblems of Conquest! I am now 11 emblems away from my T8 helm.

Joined the dark side, want my cookies

So this weekend I had a lot of time to play WoW because my girlfriend was on the opposite side of the country, and as a result was really bored. To pass the time I did something I’ve been meaning to do since November: roll a DK and do the starting area quests.

Problem is, I really liked it. Playing a DK is fun. DPSing as one isn’t like Ret where there’s no strategy, no using each cooldown as they come up. You have to make sure both diseases are up, dump runic power when you have too much, build it up when you have too little, etc. Blizzard definitely put a lot more thought into this class and their playstyle than they have with others.

I’ve already gotten my DK, Rheaver, up to level 63 and I’m anxious to take him for a spin in the endgame.

Would I tank as a DK? Probably not, except for maybe taking it for a spin. I’m too invested in Rhidach–emotionally, and in terms of achievements, equipment, what have you. But the temptation is there, gnawing on my subconscious like a Mynock on a power cable.

And I understand the sentiment behind forum posts like this one. As it stands now, Paladins are fundamentally flawed when it comes to tanking in Ulduar. We’re not designed to be eating 20k+ hits with regularity (we have one–one–freaking cooldown!), we’re built for lots of tiny little hits (Holy Shield, Ardent Defender, Sacred Shield) or helping other tanks eat their giant hits (Divine Sacrifice, Hand of Sacrifice). Blizzard has completely screwed the pooch when it comes to Paladin tanking as of late.

Last night I was tanking Ignis and we wiped many times because the boss would two shot me with two massive melees, before a heal could get in. The entire time I couldn’t help but think that a DK was so much better suited for the task. I had one cooldown to use (dps was riding too close for Hand of Salv, making it too risky) so I had to be exceptionally frugal on when I popped it. I basically waited for any time a healer got pulled into Ignis’ firecrotch. And in the mean time I’m eating 100% damage for the majority of the fight, when a DK in my same situation could rotate through his three cooldowns and make the encounter that much easier.

This really needs to be fixed, with some kind of parity (not homogenization, parity) spread around. Block needs to be fixed/changed and a new cooldown needs to be issued. Pronto-like.

Anyway, apologies for the rant… I’m just very frustrated at how Blizzard could have been caught so unawares at the direction tanking has taken, and how seriously unprepared they left us.

The Leviathan’s Coil nerfed

The Leviathan’s Coil ring has had its armor reduced from 882 to 448 to properly reflect the item level.

Eff.

When to use Divine Sacrifice in Ulduar

You do have Divine Sacrifice in your build, right?

If not, and you raid often, you should. Primarily, the reason why is that Divine Sacrifice (DS for the purpose of this post) has the potential to be a raid saver at several occasions (especially in Ulduar) and gives a better return on that one talent point investment than any of the other “bridge” talents that bring us deeper into the Prot tree. That is, it’s better than shaving 20 secs from an interrupt, or Reckoning, for obvious reasons.

Admittedly, the spell is much more flexible while offtanking (one of the ways that Blizzard has been subtlely reaffirming tankadins as trash tanks), but as I’ve mentioned before, in 25man I tend to offtank more often than not. As such, here are times when I typically pop DS in Ulduar:

XT-002: During the Tympanic Tantrum use Divine Sacrifice to reduce the damage everyone takes from 80% of their total health to only 56%. This was a much bigger deal when Tantrum did 120% of everyone’s health, and DSing reduced damage to 84%, but your healers will still thank you. This is also probably one of the few times you can get away with bubbling while maintanking, as XT stops meleeing during a tantrum and will only turn to face the highest aggro. You just need to be careful to remove bubble asap once the tantrum is over and make sure you have XT’s attention.

Assembly of Iron: If you kill Brundir last, whenever he goes up the air to follow people around, run nearby and pop DS if too many people get caught under the lightning storm.

Kologarn: This happens quickly, but if you’re fast enough you can probably use DS to eat 30% of one Shockwave, which can do up to 16k nature damage to each raid member in 25man.

Auriaya: Assuming your group is stacked up well you’re going to still take some heavy damage from Sonic Screech (on Heroic mode I would say between 5500-6500 damage is a good split). Give your healers some breathing room by shaving that down a little.

Hodir: Frozen Blows does raid wide frost damage. While this should be mitigated somewhat by Frost Aura/resist gear, it’s still helpful to shave off some raid damage.

Freya: The only major high-raid damage part of this fight is when the main little adds spawn and explode when killed. Sometimes the dps gets a tad overzealous and can wipe the raid by killing to many lashers at once. DS makes that zeal a little less threatening.

Mimiron: In this case you’ll want to use DS to help out whoever is tanking Mimiron during the plasma blasts. You can use Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice on two different plasma blasts to help the maintank live through those very high damage instances. If you have the abilities off cooldown, you might also want to use them during Phase 2 when there’s no aggro and the potential for some nasty hits is a huge possibility.

Handy macro! Lastly, I have my Divine Shield macroed as:

/cancelaura Divine Sacrifice
/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

(I can probably combine lines 1 and 2 with a comma, I suspect.)

When I intend to pop Divine Sacrifice, I hit my bubble macro first applying Divine Shield. GCD ticks and then I hit Divine Sacrifice. When I want to drop bubble/DS/both I hit the bubble macro again and both are cancelled. I never want Divine Sacrifice active without Divine Shield, so this makes sure both are off at the same time.

Now I turn it to you guys. Any times you pop DS in Ulduar that I didn’t list here?

My guild’s DKP system

Credit for this whole set up goes to Demo, who not only found the addons but also figured out how to make them work and through his constant, unceasing, incessant nagging forced the guild to adopt them. … And I mean that in a good way.

Here are the addons that every raiding guild member is required to have (you won’t get the bidding window without them):

• Bidder
• Bidder_BossAuction

And these are the addons the DKP admins need to run the system:

• DKPmon
• DKPmon_CSV
• DKPmon_BossAuction
• CT_RaidTracker

All addons can be found on this page.

Yes, it seems like a lot, but honestly it all runs very smoothly. The way it works for the rank and file is when a boss is downed the master looter gets a loot window from DKPmon that gives him the option to “Open for Bidding”. Doing so activates the window in my screenshot where raiders can click on an item and enter their bid. No one knows how much the others bid on an item, it’s totally silent.

When bidding is closed, DKPmon is used to announce the winners and how much each person paid for an item, and then the master loot uses the “Distribute” option to give out the loot to the winners and deduct points as spent.

And at the end of the night the DKP admin exports the raid and uploads it to the ES guildlaunch site giving you a page like this.

The whole system is very painless to use once you get the hang of it. I very much recommend it!