Better Late Than Never Friday, 7/31

On a house keeping note, I’m going to be on vacation next week. I’m trying to decide how to handle my absence, which I’ll probably either fill by making 5 posts this weekend and spacing them out with “Publish on x day” settings, or maybe with teeny tiny awkward posts on my iPod’s wordpress app (whenever I can find wifi in northern New Hampshire). I’m personally hoping I choose the former and then the patch comes out next week, while my (transparently) pre-written posts are about “How bad expertise sucks” or “If only we had a second cooldown.”

Although I could probably do a mad-libs raid recap… hrm… the possibilities.

does it matter if i don’t get my socket bonuses

Not particularly, assuming that bonus isn’t stamina. Avoidance is nice, but stamina is better. And block rating or hit/expertise aren’t worth gemming to achieve. Refer to my flowchart here for when to go for socket bonuses.

enchant weapon – blood draining does it increase with spell power?

I looked at a WWS from a recent raid to compare the heals that both I and Demogar (warrior tank) received from Blood Reserve, which is the heal the enchant gives. As you can imagine, I’m rocking about 860 spellpower (from stamina, I swear!) and Demo has a pitiful 0. Srsly, what a nub. Anyway, while just skimming through the WWS and writing down some numbers, for a one stack heal I got back around 391-466 hp, he got 405-412; two stacks I got ~894 and Demo ~900; three stacks 1215 verse 1243; four stacks 1665 versus 1650; five 1941 versus 2299.

Short answer is no. Actually, long answer is no too, but I’m pretty sure we get an additional 30% benefit to any crit heals from Blood Reserve. And yes BR does indeed crit. For example I received 1755 hp from a two stack crit. Not too shabby!

hit cap on righteous defense

17%, or 446 rating. Please don’t try to reach this. It’s not worth it.

glyph of seal of vengence vs glyph hammer of righteous

I’m very partial to the latter which is very, very useful for snap aggro in AOE situations. For example, on Kologarn when I pick up the rumbling adds that spawn, the glyphed HotR plus a Consecrate guarantees that I pick up every add before they have a chance to make a break for a healer. The SOV glyph isn’t as good right now because expertise is kind of bleh. But, in 3.2 it’ll be much more useful because we’ll be more dependent on the 5-stack SOV proc for threat. In 3.2 you’ll want that glyph. To actually answer the question, I’d get both.

paladin stamina to health conversion

For a Paladin 1 stamina is 10 hp. With the proper talents, 1 stamina is 11.4 hp.

how often do saronite plated legguards drop

If you’re in my guild, only once.

mongoose at level 80 tankadin

I know some people are very attached to this enchant for tanking (for the avoidance) but I’m just not a fan. It’s worth 120 agility when it procs, which is 2.3% dodge. Thanks to PPM it’s basically like adding .76% dodge to your character sheet, which I guess is nice overall. Based on what I’ve read it’s the best avoidance enchant but my biggest beef with it is the fact it’s proc based. You need avoidance the most when you have low health, and there’s just no guarantee that Mongoose will up to maybe give you that extra oomph to avoid the next hit. You have just as much a chance for it to proc at 100% health as at 5%. I’d recommend getting an enchant that’ll be there when you need it most and actually provides some EH; namely, Blood Draining.

seal of righteousness verses seal of corruption for tanking

SoC/V for sure. Righteousness is good for trash when stuff will die too fast for you to build a five stack and maximize the threat potential for that seal, but on longer living trash or bosses SoC/V is far and away your best choice.

tankadin effulgent skyflare diamond

Thankfully this gem is no longer bugged. Before 3.1 it used to, laughably, increase your resistances by 2% rather than reduce spell damage. Now it’s working as it should be. Does that make it a good gem? Eh, not particularly. You’ll in the end get more mileage out of the Austere meta. This gem seems too situational.

trouble picking up kel’thuzad adds

On 10man the trick is to fall back and watch both halves of the room. When an Icecrown Guardian spawns you have a few seconds to run over and pick it up before it beelines for a healer. Then immediately run over to the opposite end and grab the one that will shortly spawn there. Use Avenger’s Shield, Exorcism, and Reckoning to get their attention. In 25man you’ll probably be on one side with a different tank on the other, so there’s less running. As a fail safe, set the healer with the highest global aggro as your focus so you can watch their health and see if a Guardian snuck over to them.

ulduar demo driving

The trick to driving a demolisher (which I always do in our raids) is use your mouse buttons to drive forward and turn/aim and use keybinds to fire boulders. Time spent keyboard turning and fumbling to target something is time lost dpsing. Demolishers are slow so your biggest priority is cutting movement corners when you can.

why wont titanguard drop

I swear this isn’t me! I feel your pain, my friend. :(

Enraged just means it’s a more exciting kill

Last night wasn’t as bad as I originally dreaded. Yeah we started the raid with 24 people in group, but once we got through the Ignis trash (for the second day in a row) we picked up a 25th person. The first attempt was attempted and somewhat shortly ended in a wipe. Eek, I remarked.

On the bright side, while attempting to run out Ignis stuffed me in his fire crotch and recognizing my chance for an achievement I popped LOH and furious Flash healed myself. When I dropped out unscathed I continued running away, but he snatched me up again. The second time I wasn’t so lucky. Oh well, mission accomplished.

Part of the reason we wiped wasn’t due to heals or anything like that, but some confusion with the adds. The person in charge of popping brittle golems wasn’t familiar with the job (not his fault, that was corrected) and one of the other add tanks was doing the job for the first time. The second try both knew then what to do and executed their tasks with ease. So Ignis dropped and my fears that last night would be a repeat of Tuesday’s shite show were allayed.

We then moved on to Iron Council and one-shot them as well. And, proudly, I didn’t get instagibbed at all by Steelbreaker! (Thank you healers).

Auriaya was next and after a false start with the pull we regrouped and put in a seriously attempt. Things were going well until Demo bit it and I took over the tanking, but a lot of people died to pounces or being feared into the void zone.

One particular Shaman, who’s a nice guy, has an awful connection and often DCs. And as you know I’m sure, this is one fight where a DC is really painful, because if he’s standing outside of the stack, the Feral Defender is going to pounce at him, then back at someone else, and back and forth ad nauseam. I appreciate the healers hate letting someone die, but let him go! He’s causing raid damage and keeping him alive gives less benefit than just letting him die.

So anyways, Demo’s dead, I’m tanking, and a lot of dps bit it too. We had something on the order of 12 people left, 30% of Auriaya’s health remaining, and the clock was ticking on her enrage timer. We’re just focusing her down and I’m watching her health slowly tick, popping wings when I can and dpsing as hard as my measly tank damage will allow. Eventually we’re down to 8 or so, 30 seconds, 10% health. Clock keeps ticking, people pouring all they have into her. Then 10 seconds, 5%… her HP keeps going down. Finally at 2 seconds before enrage timer we heard that horrifying shriek as Auriaya’s corpse falls to the floor.

Phew.

After the excitement of that near-wipe died down we shuffled over to Hodir’s hallway and took his frosty behind down as well. I was pretty happy to be able to indulge in a little dpsing for once, since the new third tank didn’t have a dps offset and two tanks is overkill as it is on that fight.

And finally after Hodir we went after Mimiron who’d up til last night we had one-shot every non-progression attempt. I say “up til” because unfortunately we did wipe, and during Phase 4 as well, which hurts because that’s a good 10 minutes or so into the fight. Mimiron is so long that any wipe deep into the encounter is a huge amount of time spent.

One thing that definitely hurt us wasn’t spare heals or tanks eating too much of a plasma blast, it was idiots eating mines or shockwaves. Both in the first attempt, and after phase one of the second, the same two people had died to the same, stupid, shite. A tad frustrating since we explicitly call out in vent “SHOCK WAVE” so you have enough time to take your face off the keyboard and high tail it out of there.

So we’re on phase 2 in the second attempt with those two mouth breathers sucking tile and feeling pretty good about the attempt nonetheless. We get through phase 3 with another person or two down. Still doing pretty well. Then in phase 4 we start suffering serious attrition. People bite it to the intermittent shockwaves, others to the spun-up lasers. It was definitely a race against the clock.

Eventually there were only a handful of us left, once again staring down the enrage timer. Cendra’s reading off in vent the health of the three parts while we furious dps as hard as we can. The second tick down but it looks like we’re not going to make it, when finally in a burst of luck Sated dropped off. Gulliveig blasts off a Bloodlust and we close the gap down to 1% each piece. Then the enrage timer hits 0 and Mimiron turns gigantic and red. It looked like the end, but we successfully dropped the parts to zero at literally the last second.

Probably shouldn’t have been that close, but a kill was a kill.

It’s been a pretty lackluster raid week thus far, but at least we’re only one boss shy of our usually kill count. So, could be worse.

Get me outta here!

I danced around the issue in my last post but now I’m going to just say it outright: I am sick and tired of Ulduar25. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Titanguard is an elaborately constructed hoax, or that thanks to a delayed strike of the summer slump we’re having trouble clearing simple farm content.

We started off the night somewhat dimly, with only 24 raiders online and I had each and every one of them invited. We probably had about 18 or so regular raiders, and the rest were people whose time in Ulduar was severely limited. Usually it’s fair to say that doesn’t bode well.

One enjoyable part of the raid was in the run up to and the fight with FL, we had Palehoof in the raid. I seldom mention it but He Of Green Text is one of my guildees and his schedule has precluded him from raiding for a while now.

He’ll soon be able to start joining us regularly which is pretty cool, but in any case, it was pretty funny seeing Pale and his father in the same raid. His dad (also a hunter) joined us at the end of Naxx and started raiding with us regularly through Ulduar. It’s been interesting to watch Pale’s father going from being RAFed up and then slowly but surely getting decked out in better gear (and seeing more content) than his son.

It was–blech, I’ll use the word–cute to listen to them interact in vent during the pre-FL clearing as the father drove and the son was the gunner. Palehoof saying things like “dad I’m out range of the pyrite” and the father giving advice on how to shoot down choppers or pyrite barrels… like something out of a father’s day card. I opened up iTunes, cranked up Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle,” and let it warm the icy recesses of my shriveled, jaded heart.

But anyway, enough of this happy crap.

Actually, on second thought, I’m not going to dwell on this too much, because I’m sure it gets to tedious to read a blog where every other post is “waa waa raidz r harrrrd” (this isn’t LiveJournal fer chrissakes). Suffice it to say, the fallout of all this nonsense is probably when the Coliseum comes out we’re probably dropping down to 10man groups and going through a rebuilding period. Any dps that thought it was ok to coast and do 3k in a raid will soon find themselves benched, and I can’t wait for the questioning of why they’re not taken to raids anymore. The lootz will be less epic, but honestly it’ll be worth it not to drop 80g on repair bills in one night.

(Is it patch day yet? How about now?)

Time’s running out in Ulduar

When typing out the title to this post I realized I wrote a similar post way back in March (good gawd, so long ago) about Naxx winding down. And that was a month before Ulduar came out.

We’ve now been delving into the titanic prison for the last 14 weeks and most likely this will be the last full raid week before the next patch drops. Tempus fugit.

The question I keep asking myself is: will Ulduar still be worth doing after 3.2? The short answer is probably no. The gear is a half-tier worse than 10man Coliseum (normal mode), and a tier and a half worse than 25man Coliseum (normal, again). That’s a HUGE jump in iLevel, akin to the jump from Naxx10 to Uld25. Moreover, considering the badge haul is less than what you can get from doing a full Naxx clear, it’d be hard to justify an Ulduar run on those merits.

Obviously though we have unfinished business in Ulduar. Yogg needs to die, and it makes me sad we won’t be able to kill him until we’ve basically “cheated” and powered him down in a higher iLevel of gear. Will we probably keep raiding Ulduar three nights a week (or, at least attemptedly)? Probably not. The Coliseum is small enough we can probably devote a day or two to it, and just use the rest of the time to scratch the raiding itch Ulduar.

I can’t imagine outside of learning the encounters it would take that long to down five raid bosses. Even with a stuttered release of one new raid boss per week.

Also, I’m still trying to wrap my head around a raid instance with five bosses. I wonder what the difficulty tuning is like and if it’ll be as hard as Ulduar was when that first came out, before all the nerfs. Can you imagine how freeing it would be if the Coliseum was relatively easy and you only had to spend one night a week in there for loot better than Ulduar (which requires so much more).

That actually sounds pretty nice…

In any case, after 3.2–basically, starting next week–my WoW habits are going to change considerably. The Daily Heroic will be a bigger priority than ever if I want to eventually deck myself out in all the new emblems loot. Including eventually all five tier pieces, which I’ll need the emblems to purchase. And if raiding does turn into a one or two night affair then I can honestly say I’ll probably become a bit more “casual” in how I spend my time in-game.

PS. Titanguard… damn you Titanguard… tonight is your last chance!

The raid leader matters

Considering my recent bitching about the one day–horror of horrors–I had to run a raid, I somewhat enjoyed the position I found myself in this weekend is a particularly gruesome Naxx25 run. It was late and I was pretty sloshed, and in hindsight the whole episode was an interesting case study on the following obvious point: a leader makes or breaks a raid.

Not to disparage the person leading the motley crew that assembled to run this outdated raid tier (so outdated that the healers were three Ulduar25-geared people with a fourth occasionally subbing in when the group had to split up), but he was in over his head.

A little less than half of the raiders were pugged, the rest being myself, the aforementioned three super healers, and then a bunch of undergeared folks. For reasons I’m not entirely sure we started with Military and then when that was cleared (three hours later!) we went to Construct.

Actually, I think Construct was my fault. It’s hazy, but I’m pretty sure I was asked which wing to do next and I just repeated whichever wing I was standing in front of.

An amusing moment: during 4HM I was tanking Thane who we burned down (dps was surprisingly good) and everyone ran over to Baron to kill that too. The Baron tank typed in /raid for me to taunt it off him and I kind of spaced out/just stood there (see earlier, re: my being sloshed) and didn’t notice until the Baron tank died. Eek. Got a nice “Rhidach wtf” for that one, too.

To bring it back to my original point: the raid leader wasn’t keeping a tight enough leash on the 24 of us. It took us (I repeat) 3 hours to clear Military, mostly due to time being spent waiting for someone to go afk, or for loot to be passed out, or stupid wipes because someone ran ahead and pulled when no one was ready. These were all issues that could have been ameliorated with some heel-clicking discipline.

I wish more of the normal 25man Ulduar crew could have been stuck in that slow motion hell. Might make them appreciate the relative efficiency of our raids a little more.

(Oh, obvious post script: no, we never finished. 6 hours later and we stalled on–of course–Thaddius. Never did Spider or Plague wings.)

Speccing next patch just got murky

Oh, things used to be so simple. 53/18 was our max threat spec and you could get every utility talent you wanted along the way. Now, how complicated it all seems.

Blizz changed Seals of the Pure so that 15% damage modifier also applies to the 33% weapon damage bonus you get with a five stack up. This change means (as calculated by the amazing Theck) that 5/5 SotP is worth as much threat as the 3/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade (major caveat on this below) pairing that most of us are running around with today.

To summarize Theck’s findings, this brave new world of threat looks like this against non-Undead/Humanoid/Demon/Elemental mobs:

• 5/5 SotP == 3/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade
• 4/5 SotP is ~70 less TPS than the 3/5 + 3/3 pairing above
• 5/5 SotP + 3/5 Reckoning > 3/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade (by ~80 tps)
• 5/5 SotP + 3/5 Reckoning > 5/5 Conviction + 3/3 Crusade (by ~10 tps)

Ultimately, there are several specs that cascade from this change:

4/53/15 – This spec takes most of the mitigation utility talents plus the delightfulness of PoJ. It’s less threat than the standard 3.1 spec, but not by much.

5/54/12 — This trades PoJ and DG for the final point in SotP and 3/5 Reckoning. This spec is worth ~170 more tps, but you’re trading off 15% run speed and a buffed Sacred Shield for that extra oomph.

0/53/18 — I know everything written thus far implies you can ignore Crusade, but the problem with that is this: if you’re fighting any of the mob types that Crusade does 6% damage to, then this spec is worth about ~140 more tps than 5/5 SotP, but when you’re not getting 6%, this spec is ~100 tps less than 5/5 SotP.

Considering you’re going to encounter more humanoids/undead in 5mans and outside of instances (along with most of the encounters in the Coliseum falling into the 6% category), overall you’ll probably get more threat with the third spec.

If in Ulduar you’re threat goes down a little (and for sure, in the great scheme of things, if you’re doing 8000 tps, 100 tps isn’t that big of a loss) it probably won’t be the worst thing in the world, because you’ll end up with more threat in the Coliseum with Crusade than otherwise.

For anyone who follows my Twitter, you’d have seen this morning that I pronounced Crusade was dead. As I’m sure you all know by now, I tend to stack haste rating IRL, and that was probably a case of me greatly exaggerating Crusade’s demise.

Ultimately though the one absolute you can walk away with from this post from is this: you want Divine Guardian and you want Vindication. Survivability is always a higher priority than 100-200 additional tps.

A tale of double Qs

I’m a pessimistic guy, generally. When things are going well in the guild my first instinct is to enjoy them for however ephemerally they last. If things are going poorly, then I tend to expect them to get worse. For some odd reason (completely unfounded, mind you) a gdisband is a constant concern of mine.

So yeah, as you can imagine we’re in a bit of a slump. The normal raid leader is taking a break so last night it fell on Cendra and I to manage the roiling masses. I took up the job of barking at everyone while Cen took over dkp. Initially we had a bit of trouble getting loot out after Flame Leviathan (oh, by the way, guess what didn’t drop? …again[x14]) and one of the dps huffed in vent something along the lines of “can we hurry this along please.”

Oh, gee, SORRY ‘BOUT THAT. Were we inconveniencing you??

I swear the dps have no idea how good they have it. All they need to do is sit in the back, not stand in the bad stuff, and pew pew away. Meanwhile I need to run around like a goddamn chicken with my head cut off to put adds off dps, and judge when to pop my one cooldown so I can save my life and prevent a wipe, while healers need to run around and stress about keeping me up. Meanwhile I need to worry about calling out overloads, cause damned if the dps won’t know enough to not stand in one. And with all this, this guy wants me to hurry up.

Arrgh, I digress. I can’t imagine how people who have to do this full-time in their guilds get by.

In any case, here’s a pro-tip for those of you not in positions of power in your guild: don’t show any interest in how the organization is run, because you’re just asking to be plucked into the officer ranks and having responsibilities a-plenty dumped on you.

What originally burnt me out from WoW last year was running the dopey little 10man guild I was in. Basically the job consisted of organizing Kara runs like two nights a week, which was all well and good. But eventually people got sick of Kara and stopped showing up, and in a 10man guild you don’t have the luxury of an overflowing roster. So each night basically degraded to me begging random people on my friends list into coming to Karazhan with us. And then we started doing ZA, which never went really far. All this administration nonsense drove me nuts and I just stopped logging on.

The same thing is most likely the reason behind the raiding absenses of the GM (which lead to the RL taking over raids), and then subsequently the RL’s break. And now it’s on me. Again. (George Santayana, you bastid).

When I came back to the game last October I swore to myself that I wouldn’t run anything. I’d just be a face in the crowd that would show up and do my job. But here I am now, whining on teh intertubes about this nonsense.

The stupid thing is, though, I really enjoy raiding. I enjoy killing the big boss at the end, I enjoy collecting the phat purps, I enjoy the achievement of overcoming some obstacle with 9 or 24 other raiders. But for all those good aspects of raiding to occur, someone needs to be the one that makes the roster, puts up with the BS. If I, or Demo, or whoever else, don’t deal with this crap, who will? Captain Impatient over there?

One final rant: I don’t know what kind of numbers your dpsers put out in 25man raids, but mine tend to suck. The expectation I think is that in ~226 gear you should be doing 3750-4500 dps, correct? The majority of the dps in our raids tends to do under that (see this WWS from last night overall). From time to time I like to punish myself with considering the irony that the people who demand we raid faster aren’t putting out the numbers that would easily facilitate that.

TL;DR: imma QQin’.

Tanks, what 3.2 means to you

Ardent Defender, our new cooldown

Our long national nightmare is now over, we finally have a second cooldown! And a real one at that, not some slap-dash, Mickey Mouse cooldown.

So sum up all the changes to the talent: AD has finally been fixed so that it is no longer leapfroggable (ie, any damage that applies under 35% of your health is mitigated), and it has a new effect that, if you are reduced to 0 hp, you receive an immediate heal to 30% of your max health (assuming you have 3/3 in the talent and 540 defense skill).

Once you receive that heal you get a debuff from preventing that save from occurring again for two minutes. Originally on the PTR that debuff also removed AD’s damage reduction, but that is a bug that has been fixed.

Dodge couldn’t avoid this nerf

Our avoidance is taking a nerf that will reduce our dodge across the board while presumably increasing parry. Overall this will amount to a reduction of our total avoidance. Rather than rehash the numbers, as I’ve done previously, just know the three take-aways on this are: (a) agility/stam gems are now junk for pure avoidance, (b) parry gems are not an immediate red flag for bad tanks, (c) defense is now, oddly, our best avoidance stat. There’s a lot more nuance in this, mind you, thanks to diminishing returns.

Sacred Shield is less awesome, but still great

Not as awful as I originally supposed in my post on Friday. I mistakenly assumed that the Holy Pally hot would only apply if their shield was on you, but any old SS will do. So, despite my earlier ruminations, still get Divine Guardian instead of 2/5 Reckoning. But anyway you slice it, only one Sacred Shield is disappointing.

Sweet, sweet Vindication

This is perhaps my second-most favorite change in 3.2, an attack power debuff to a boss that’s automatically applied. We don’t have to burn rage or gimp our dps/threat to get this up–nope, it comes just from us meleeing. This will be a great mitigation buff to us overall.

You’ll probably want to shift two points from Conviction into this talent, assuming you’re running the 53/18 spec (and you better be! /shakingoffist).

BV is better, but still not better than avoidance

Block value as you know is getting a huge boost. Does this mean you want to start wearing your block set and slapping the Titanium Plating on your shield for tanking Ignis25? Er, no. You’ll still want a heavy EH/avoidance set. Considering most BV pieces also have block rating, you’ll want to continue keeping most of these pieces out of your heavy tanking set, but by all means, use them for trash.

Change is a blessing

Blessing of Sanctuary has been given a +10% stamina modifier (that doesn’t stack with Kings) in order to make it more attractive to Paladins. But is it? Sure, if you can have Kings as well. Kings gives avoidance (through agility) and mitigation (through strength) which between the two makes it the superior blessing for raid situations if you have to choose between the two (which hopefully you won’t). At least now you won’t have to bemoan the loss of Kings’ health while in heroics where the mana return of Sanc is critical.

Exorcism is not for tanking anymore

Exorcism has been retooled to make it a situational move for Ret Paladins. That is, Art of War procs and they fire off an instant-cast Exorcism, and the rest of us shlubs are stuck with a 1.5 second cast time. This change of course makes Exorcism unusable while tanking, because time spent casting is time you can’t avoidance any attacks (and pushback, oh the pushback).

They changed Hand of Reckoning so that it does a lot more damage if the mob is currently not targeting you, which is supposed to make up for losing the Reck/Ex pickup combo for a run away mob. It’s an annoying change overall, but one we can work around.

Expertise isn’t terrible anymore

With the change to Seal of Corruption/Vengeance to do an additional 33% of weapon damage with melee hits after a five stack is up, expertise becomes a valuable stat again. For example, this change makes the SoV glyph the second-best TPS glyph in the game now (and one I’ll happily swap into my spellbook after the patch now that I don’t need said Mickey Mouse cooldown anymore). You’ll probably not want to gem expertise or purposefully gear for it, but don’t shun any gear anymore because it has expertise on it. A junk stat no longer.

Other cool little things

Lastly, two dopey little changes I’m happy about are Auras reapply after your death automatically, and Righteous Fury lost its duration and mana cost.

By fire be showered with purples!

Rawr. I love doing the old world raids. Something about storming your way with three other people through a deep, firey doom that once took forty strikes me as just right.

I’ve been tricking friends to run MC with me from time to time so I could go for the two Bindings of the Windseeker, so one day I could sport a legendary that’s 20 levels out of date. (I dream of standing outside of the bank with it equipped like all the kool kids seem to be doing these days.)

Because raid last night was cancelled (and thus Thorim lives to confound another week) we were looking for something to do, so the crew and I headed over to ZG to try to get some mounts to drop for Cendra. That failed we went over to Kara for another mount run, and then to kill Nightbane for Ildara’s long-ignored Cudgel of Kardesh quest.

You know, if you told me a year ago that I’d look back on Kara as fondly as I did last night, I’d've told you to shut your damn dirty mouth.

Probably all raids look much better through nostalgia-colored glasses, though. I can only imagine how many people hated MC back in the day.

(Side note: I’m happy to report we one-shot Door Boss heading into Kara. Woo.)

Anyway, after Kara I cajoled everyone to head to MC and thus we did, spending about 10 minutes chit chatting endlessly with Lothos Riftwalker while we waited for one of his portals to let us in. Once inside, finally, we decided on a full clear and made our way through the bosses.

Garr unfortunately did not yield either of the two things I wanted from him: the right-hand Binding or the schematic for the Force Reactive Disk. He did drop the gloves to the banana shoulders set which I guess is nice.

After Garr I ran over to Geddon and pulled him into the hallway where we took him down. While poking through the loot table I thought I started to hallucinate because–was that really–no, couldn’t be…

Oh my yes. Binding number one was now mine.

After the initial excitement died down, followed by some secondary excitement, I realized that the others had run off without me. Shopping lists of elementium coursed through my mind while all the while a dark voice whispered “pah, good luck getting the other binding. Slash cackle.”

I hate that guy.

We cleared the rest of the bosses, scared off Executus, and then plodded down to Ragnaros’ Spiral of Doom. The old boy was summoned and we put him down like a bear in a campground parking lot.

He dropped his purps, among which were the Judgement legs, which now brings my total of T2 pieces to, er, two.

All in all I good night for acquiring inconsequential items.

3.2 scattershot thoughts

Divine Guardian as a talent is kind of crap now with the nerf to Sacred Shield (only one per target). May be useful if no Holy Pallies are in the raid, but we always have at least one. Because it won’t do much for me for mitigation anymore, I think those two points are going to go somewhere else.

But where? Well, I need to bridge down to the sixth level talents with those two points, so they have to go somewhere in that first half of the tree. Call me crazy, but I might put them in Reckoning.

According to Jasari over at Maintankadin, Reckoning has received a 47% buff of tps per point thanks to the SoV change (assuming a four stack is up). While the tps per point gain isn’t exactly consistent, 2 points in there will net me an additional 66 tps.

Why not Improved Hammer of Justice? I’d rather take a threat increase (no matter how minor) over 20 seconds off an interrupt that is bound to the GCD.

I’m very disappointed about BV threat cap. Gone are the days of my 10-11k ShoR crits, at least for now.

The change to Judgements of Just (can’t be overwritten by a non-JoJ judgement) is pretty awesome however.

Vindication is pretty awesome, and a mitigation talent at that, so it’ll be must have. The points for it though will most likely be leeched over from Conviction (which has a lower tps per point value than Crusade).

Feasible spec come 3.2 would be this, I suppose.