Blergh

So remember a few months ago when I outlined my philosophy of utter pessimism? Yes, well, we’ve been in one of those upward ascents for a month now, but I’m getting the impression we’re starting to go down the spiraling ramp of the dramacoaster. Blergh indeed.

Despite all this, last night was a great night raid-wise, second only to last week’s roflstomping of ToC, Ony, and VOA. While all in all I’m really proud of how everyone has mastered ToC25, I’m perturbed at how awful people were being on time for the raid. Invites went out at 7 server, Ony was declared the first destination, and everyone was told to start hoofing it in case there was pvp. And sure enough there was, an Alliance squad was camping out on the hill just behind the stone and jumping anyone that went to summon.

Slowly the minutes ticked by and by 7:30 we still had about 5 people scattered about the world. It takes all of five or eight minutes to hearth, port to TB, and fly to Mudsprocket. What the hell takes 30 minutes? Lazy bastards.

When we get to Onyxia we wiped the first time because a couple of people bit it on Deep Breaths (lol) or stood in front of the big adds (lolol) or got cleaved by Onyxia (lololol). I think next time we go there I’m going to have to pass around Amber’s guide to Onyxia. It basically says all that needs to be said about this encounter.

Second attempt we down the old lady. Gear went out and everyone headed over to ToC. By now it was 8 server time, two hours on the clock remaining.

We did two strategies differently from previous weeks. One was on the worms we just burnt down Acidmaw and let Dreadscale soft enrage. I personally found that having the poisons removed early was a huge dps boost, although some perpetually aggrieved healers (ahem) might disagree. This new strat allowed us to kill the beasts faster than we have yet. I’m wondering how well it will translate into heroic 25man…

Other new strategy is a carry-over from the heroic 10man. On Twins we tanked both in the center and let splash damage hit both. We didn’t get the Salt and Pepper achievement (mostly cause some dopey folks got gibbed by orbs) but we did an impressively fast kill. Most of the Twin Pacts were interrupted by the time they hit halfway through their cast bar, and that was without the opposite attuned people changing colors.

All in all, we one-shot the whole place, so well done ES. Now I just wish people could be on time. /grumble

Tonight’s our first foray into Grand Trial of the Crusader (25). I’m cautiously optimistic about how we’ll do, but we’ll see.

Better luck next time!

Well last night wasn’t a complete wash. We got Twins down, and rather easily so once we worked out the kinks in our strategy. Anub we were not so lucky on. Phase 2 was a mess, and that we’ll need more time with.

We had Phase 1 down pat, the shifting of Anub over, dragging the second set of Burrowers away, etc. But time and time again Phase 2 was a cluster-you-know-what. People I think kept panicking and rather than paying attention to spikes or helping kill the Scarabs, they were too busy running around like a chicken with their heads cut off. It also didn’t help that the Burrowers kept Shadowy Striking when I was trying to drag them into position and thus wasn’t on my game to do interrupts. Gah.

The Glyph of Holy Wrath is awesome in this fight (awesome idea, Yoggie). Though… I think I still have it on… eek.

But, Quel’Serrar, Serrar. We’ll put in more attempts this week and hopefully have a better time of it.

Oh, also, had an amusing run in with another pally. This guy initially apped to my guild, and was rejected because we heard he was a little overbearing/bossy. Moreover, he’s currently the leader of his guild, and I’m not a fan of aiding and abetting someone ditching a whole guild of people that trust him as their leader.

So lately he’s been whispering me trying to discuss various things and obviously ingratiate himself with me to get a second shot in the guild. And it almost worked! I was feeling kind of guilty, thinking “oh, he seems like a nice guy” and it wouldn’t hurt to let him reapp. While talking I mentioned casually I wanted the Libram of Valiance for a threat set (I mean, we all have different sets for different situations, correct?) which he interprets as me saying “I can’t hold threat evar HALP”.

So, bless his heart, he looks up my armory and immediately lets me know he’s discovered the problem–my spec is crap! You heard it here first, folks.

Now I’m not the be all-end all of pally tanking. There are folks far, far smarter than I and far better at “the biz” than I am. I’m just the lowly messenger. However, I was a bit incredulous at being told I was “doin’ it rong.” This kind soul informed me that my threat is bad because I have too many points in Ret. Oo-kay. He goes on to let me now SotP is the superior threat talent and I should really be going into that, rather than Crusade.

Nevermind the mountains of data at Maintankadin, this fellow knew the score.

After that episode I grabbed any lingering guilt I had, stuffed it in a box, and pushed it right out of the sewer pipe leading out of Dalaran. It’s the carrots’ problem now.

Weekend notes

1. Saturday I had the day mostly to myself so I decided to get a jumpstart on making my eventual Troll Druid (woohoo race changes). I rolled the Tauren Druid that morning and by the end of the night I had him at level 21. One thing that really struck me in that period was how much Druids suck for the first twenty levels. Level 1-10 is basically Wrath… Wrath… Wrath… ok… more Wrath.

Then when I got Bear Form I decided to do the next ten levels like that, since I already had the Shadowcraft BOAs equipped. So instead of Wrath spam, it was Maul spam.

It wasn’t too bad, I basically headed over to the Ghostlands and burnt through the next nine levels or so in five hours, basically spending most of the time aoe tanking groups of mobs during quests.

One hilarious mistake I found myself doing a lot: I was trying to solo Knucklerot at lvl 19 and I was doing really well, but at like 30% health I warstomped to stun him, shifted to cast hots on myself, and then… er, ran out of mana and couldn’t shift back into Bear Form. GG nub.

Once I got Cat Form however, the fun really started. Lots of fast hits, a cool looking appearance, and stealth. Boy howdy, I’ve always wanted a character with stealth.

I’m looking forward to getting this guy to 80 asap and then sitting on him until Cataclysm comes out. I doubt I’ll do much raiding with him this xpac.

2. Had some guild drama hit this morning, hurray. The fail DK tank that I’ve mentioned a few times in these pages finally flew the coop. There’s nothing really funny about what brought us to this point, nothing I can document for teh lulz here, which is unfortunate. Just long story short: Failtank got too big for his britches, and combining that with an attitude of “I’m the best, everyone else sucks” with nothing to back it up… it wasn’t meant to last.

The worst part of all this was he took a really good healer with him that I guess he was in a relationship with. I’m not really sure what their deal was, but she was really nice, so I mourn her passing, so to speak. Failtank on the other hand can get pound sand for all I’m concerned.

On the plus side though, no one seems to care in guild. I was worried he might bring other folks with him, but surprise surprise, no one cared much for him.

3. Finishing up Heroic 10man tonight. I’m not sure what to expect in terms of the last two bosses (I hear Anub is intense) but I think Twins will be ok. I would really like to clear the place out tonight (I honestly think we can do it, I just don’t know if we have enough time to get the needed attempts in with 2.5 hours for the two bosses). That may be me being pessimistic though. (What, me? Nevar!)

In any case, if anyone has some pro-tips for Twins and Anub I’d be much obliged.

Do want!

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?

hp5 is not a tanking stat

There’s a DK tank in my guild who I reference from time to time. He’s a nice guy, a good player, means well. But, sometimes he has a–oh what’s a nice way to put this–really stupid idea of how tanking works. His latest delusion is that the Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman is a good progression tanking trinket. It’s not.

When it comes to tanking you and I (and him) have two specific jobs: one is to hold threat on the mobs, and the other is to stay alive. To maximize the former we talent for threat, we swap in hit gear, etc. To maximize the latter we stack and enchant stamina to have the highest survivability possible. In this regard, the trinket is a total flop.

As I’ve mourned in the past, EH is king these days. And the reason why is EH is the best metric to determine time to live (TTL), that is, how long you can survive without a heal. When standing up versus a raid boss with silenced healers, what do you think is going to help you survive more: 2000 hp from a trinket, or a tick of 101 hp? The answer is obvious.

We should scorn hp5 for the same reasons we don’t talent into Divinity, it’s just useless overhealing. That tick of 101 hp is not going to save your life unless by some statistical miracle you take a hit that would have been a gib if not for that lucky proc. It’s a one in a million shot. Instead you’re often going to see those magic ticks swept under the ever-rising flood of heals being poured your way.

The only time this trinket should be used is if you’re not yet uncrittable and need the defense, or if you’re farming some vanilla instance and can’t be arsed to self-heal. Otherwise, leave it at home and equipped a stamina trinket.

They call me the Seeker

Hooray, one grind down. And now I have the title of a random Paladin npc from Warcraft III. Great success!

Great raid week, or *the greatest* raid week?

In the past few weeks we’ve been running two 25 nights, doing most of Coliseum on Tuesday and then VOA and finishing up Coliseum on Wednesday. Worked well, we got stuff done, people got their purps, everyone was happy.

So I wake up Tuesday and find out that Blizz is throwing a monkey wrench in the works: they’re releasing patch 3.2.2. Obviously, I’m shocked. I wasn’t away from WoW so I was not expecting a patch to come out–

Actually, I’ll explain this. Running joke is patches only come out when I’m on vacation or traveling for work. For example, 2.4 came out when I was in Florida for work (bee tee dubs, running Heroic Magister’s Terrace on a crappy hotel wireless connection while loaded on minibar booze = best thing ever), 3.0 when I was in Marseilles, 3.2 when I was in New Hampshire, etc.

Right, so back on topic: suddenly we had Onyxia to squeeze into the calendar, and by squeeze, I mean we actually had plenty of room for the old girl. To appease the masses yearning for dragon’s blood we decided to go after her after VOA that night. Moreover, the initial thought was Onyxia was resetting Tuesday night so it’d be stupid not to kill her when we could do her again the next day. Though, as we learned, not so much.

So we rip through VOA25 and then get our butts down to Dustwallow for Onyxia. The pvpers were out in force with a contingent of Horde sitting on the summoning stone, making getting the stragglers a little easier.

Once inside we burnt our way through Onyxia’s trash until we were face to face with the Brood Mother herself. Now, my only experience with this encounter was once at level 70 when I completed the huge quest chain for the hell of it, and then a few times at level 80 to gather scales for cloaks and to nab my t2 helm and Quel’Serrar (originals, both). I was not familiar with how the mechanics would work when at the proper raid level, aside from what I learned from the hilarious and classic Onyxia Wipe Animation.

So ES charges down the hill with the DK picking up Ony and me hanging in the rear on whelp and add duty. We get her to 70% quickly and she takes flight. The whelp train leaves the station and I immediately do my best to round as many as possible and help with the burn down. The AOE must have been intense because my fps dropped to 19 quickly, when it’s usually 60 in raids. A few people actually got dc’d, hah.

The adds go down and someone cries in vent “Deep Breath, look at her and move away from it!” Contrawise, the mouth breathers all stare at the ceiling in confusion and get roasted alive. The rest of us darted away and fall back together to deal with the eventually descending Onyxia. Of course the DK tank bought it, so I ran over and grabbed Ony to position her for phase three. The priests start rotating their Fear Wards and I used a bubble/debubble macro to slip out of one fear.

After going through the fear-break fear cycle a few more times Onyxia dropped to the floor and gave up her purples. A hunter and warlock helm dropped as well as the Sharpened Obsidian Edged Blade which is damn sexy. I was one for my Ret set. Loot is distributed and it’s only 7:30 server time, we’ve only been raiding for 45 minutes or so, amazingly.

A couple of us tabard hearth to the tournament and begin summoning the rest. We all pour into the Coliseum and start working our way through… and one shot every boss. We were out of there in two and a half hours, a few minutes shy of the 10pm ST cap I put on the raid.

Faction Champs in particular was an absolute joke. Usually we lose 5-8 people in the encounter, but with the nerfs done to overall damage we didn’t lose a single person. Sure, some of that can be explained by “practice makes perfect” and all, but the whole danger feeling of the fight was lost. Anub itself was also a cake walk. They toned down the damage the Burrowers were doing to the point where I never felt threatened, even while holding three of them at once. I’m not going to lie, I was kind of disappointed.

Well, that was Tuesday night: VOA, Ony, Col25. All cleared, all one shots. Amazing night.

And then last night we were kind of at a loss for what to do so it was decided we’d finally put to rest one of the ghosts haunting our guild: Sarth25 3D. We went in and did two learning wipes to figure out the finer points that most guilds knew of months ago, and then killed Sarth easily on the third go. So lots of folks got their titles and my pal Gulli got the drake for his mount collection.

Speaking of progress, I was looking at wowprogress, at the suggestion of Falowin, to see how our guild was doing there. Apparently we’re ranked 10th on our server and hilariously got the 17th kill in the world of Twins25 (which obviously doesn’t mean much, considering there’s a billion guilds tied for 17th along with us). All this progress and we’ve never killed Yogg. It’s kind of funny.

After Sarth I put together a dream team for ToC-10 heroic. It’s been our goal for a while to start working on that, and after Monday’s bloodlustless snafu we marched in last night with renewed vigor, determination, and shammyness.

Beasts we amazingly one-shot, and this was after wiping to them 13 times on monday. I’m assuming there must have been a stealth nerf in there, because I swear we were too slow to kill Gormok but the worms died sickeningly fast. Then Icehowl we just went through the motions with and burnt down with a minute left on the enrage timer. A nice morale boost for sure. 50 attempts left on the clock.

Then Jarxxus we had some trouble with initially with getting the portals down in time until we decided to shrink it down to one tank and six dps. This made life so much easier, because basically if you find yourself with two Mistresses of Pain, you’re looking at a world of hurt. That’s two counterspells going around, two healers that can be pounced at a time, it’s chaos. On the attempt we killed him we executed the fight perfectly. Portals went down very fast so we were never left with more adds than there would be in the normal mode. Took six wipes to learn, but when we got it, it was a thing of beauty. 44 attempts left on the clock.

Then onto Faction Champs–and oh boy did we luck out with group composition. We had the pally and druid for healers–that is, the two easiest to control. And no warrior, which made Zilga, the one clothie breathe a sigh of relief, even if the DK was still there (ZILGA DOWN!). So the kill order we settled on was Enhance Shaman, DK, Hunter, then Druid, Pally, and Shadow Priest. Nailed the fight on the second go, leaving us with 42 attempts left.

Unfortunately that was it for the night, have hit the time most people had to bail. We’re reforming on Monday and hoping can clean up the place and score the A Tribute to Skill achievement.

Overall, though, an amazing raid week. One I’m proud to be a part of with a great bunch of people.

Coping with loss (of threat)

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.

Tanks, what you need to know about 3.2.2

So apparently 3.2.2 is dropping today according to mmo-champ. While it might make sense to spend the first night of this raid reset mourning the AD nerf, we tankadins are made of stronger stuff. Grab your boot straps and make the best of this down-tuning. Here’s what you need to know about the changes to our class in this patch.

1. Our threat nerf will work out to around a 5% tps loss

We’re going to lose about 100 spell power from the change to Touched by the Light and receive 10% less bonus threat from Holy damage thanks to the Righteous Fury change. This seems drastic, but smarter folks than I have calculated that out to “only” a 5-6% loss in tps. Not the end of the world. Might not even be noticeable.

To compensate be sure to get more hit so your threat is more consistent. Get expertise soft-capped too. And if you find your threat cratering, considering the Accuracy enchant for your weapon. (Don’t go overboard and gem for strength, though.)

2. Seal of Command is still not for tanking

I know the new aoe aspect looks tempting, but this is really a buff for Ret in trash–it’s not meant for us. You’re going to do more threat with SoV/C up and HotRing stacks on to a swath of mobs than hitting individual guys for a pittance and chaining two extra holy strikes on your single weapon swings. Avoid the temptation to go spec into SoComm.

3. Judgement Helm is awesome and you want it

Srsly. It’s freaking T2 and it has hit. I honestly don’t know which is better.

Oh. Right. The T2 part.

4. No more libram swapping

I don’t think many people did this anyway, but just in case, we can’t libram swap anymore. If you unequip a libram you lose its effect.

5. <35% is going to hurt a lot more

Ardent Defender received an annoying nerf that will make the sub-35% hp zone a little more dangerous for us. The change overall is about a 9% effective health loss, unfortunately. It doesn’t gimp us (the change was actually justifiable in terms of how powerful AD was) but it does mean that we’re not as “invincible” as we once were.

You mess wit’ da bull…

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