Slainté!

Ah Brewfest, my favorite Azerothian fiesta. There is nothing like rocketing along on a keg-laden Ram, sloshed to the gills, with chaotic oompah music blaring as your zoom by.

I was secretly hoping that rather than replicating all the entry-level badge items again Blizzard would update the trinkets from the TBC years. Namely, Coren’s Lucky Coin. It wasn’t in the cards, and now rather than having an awesome BV trinket for my threat set, I’m left with some silly dodge nonsense.

Speaking of trinkets, how about those two 170 stamina charms? Craziness, though great for starter tanks. I would easily choose the Bubbling Brightbrew Charm (the use effect is a weak Healing Stream Totem) over Essence of Gossamer, though not over the Heart of Iron nor probably the Black Heart, either. A lot of stamina is nice, but the massive amounts of that stat on these two items kind of reinforces my point from Friday does it not?

Of course you’re now going to see legions of fresh tanks duel-wielding barmaids. Such is the siren song of effective health.

I think my one goal of this fortnightly fest (aside from being hailed as Brewmaster Rhidach) is getting a mole machine remote, if only for the easy access to MC it will give.

Tonight we’re heading into Heroic ToC-10. I hope to report good things tomorrow.

The audacity of HP

I wrote in my post yesterday that I hit the 40k unbuffed mark on Wednesday, which is a milestone in many ways, and a sad commentary in others. Think about it: I have eight times more health than I did at level 60, and that’s only twenty levels ago. That’s how out of control stat inflation has gotten.

Tanks running around with this much health does not lend itself to balanced boss design. To make up for such vivacious tanks, raid bosses need to hit that much harder to actually create any sense of danger for the healers (hence most Uld25 bosses and folks like Gormok the Impaler).

So then tanks can get two- or three-shot in progression raids and suddenly healing has ramped up to constantly healing the tank (even if they don’t need the heals at the moment) lest the boss fires off too many hits in a row and gib them.

And then this boss design cascades down into an arms race of sorts. Because tanks have too much health bosses hit harder, so tanks stack even more health. Instead of Pershing Missles, we’ve got dual stam trinks in our arsenal.

So avoidance be damned, full speed ahead on EH. Which then, of course, cascades down into the worth of a tank being solely determined by their effective health. Any EH advantage is perceived by the roiling, screeching masses as a huge disparity because in this brave new world of raid buffed tanks with 50k+ hitpoints all that matters is your raw effective health number. Utility is thrown out the window, avoidance ignored, and cooldowns discounted. All we care about is how many hits can you take before finally dying.

This is a huge fault in the design process right now because there are so many different flavors to each of the different tanks–strengths and weaknesses that makes each class unique. And each and every one of those differences is being discounted completely save for EH. It’s a huge betrayal of the concept of BTPNTC when a specific class might not be deliberately favored, but a particular aspect of boss design is, which then ipso facto divides the tanking classes into those that can compete on the sole basis of this one criterion, and those that have fallen behind.

To be fair, I don’t think Blizz anticipated how bad it was going to get. GC already admitted they hadn’t even dreamt of hard modes when designing Wrath, and because eventually hard modes had to provide better loot, the designers were forced into cranking out gear with iLevels that weren’t expected until much later into Wrath’s patch cycle. Maybe even not until Cataclysm. They now publicly regret that some dps is running around 70%+ crit chances and tanks are boasting 50%+ avoidance, though obviously not much can be done about that now.

But how will they approach this in the next xpac? Well, same thing they did at the stat of Wrath. Ratings diminishing returns will be jacked up so as soon as you ding lvl 81 you’ll suddenly have much less crit/dodge/etc. than you did at 80. That’s all well and good, but you know what else they expect to do? Jack up everyone’s health pools. That’s right: more stamina.

What do you think the upper level of raid-buffed tank health is going to be at Patch 4.3? 75,000? 100,000? Who knows–the sky is the limit!

… and that’s the problem. Blizz needs to take the opportunity of Cataclysm to tear the system down and rebuild it anew. Tone down the iLevels across the board, removing the huge jumps from vanilla greens to TBC greens to Wrath greens which are no longer necessary. Smooth it out so rather than wearing iLevel 200 gear after dinging level 80, you’re wearing gear that has an iLevel of 80. Then, of course, tone down mobs across the board so you can survive a level 80 mob in iLevel 80 gear.

Moreover, rather than letting the arms race continue, redirect tanking towards a more balanced experience where avoidance is more than just a necessary and random evil that would actually be worth gemming for. Make it so EH is no longer the only criterion for a successful progression tank.

Stat inflation is only beginning to get out of hand. Imagine how much worse it will be at the beginning of the next expansion when we’re all in iLevel 400 gear and rocking health bars that would make a vanilla instance boss jealous.

This spreadsheet proves… er, nothing

This is what I do when I’m bored at work: make bad spreadsheets. I wanted to see if there was a pattern with bids on Trophies from Col25–in the sense that they get more expensive as the night goes on, or they decrease in value, etc. It’d help me game when to bid dkp on a Trophy and get it as cheaply as possible.

X-axis is position of Trophy (1 drops from Beasts, 2 from Jaraxxus, etc.) and Y-axis is the relative cost of the trophy with 1 being the least expensive of the night and 5 the most.

As you can see there’s no real discernible pattern in bids aside from (I guess) the first week being a rush for them, then second week people trying to play it smart so waiting until the last one of the night but really driving up the price, and then in the third week the reverse happening because everyone assuming the same pattern would hold and the first one would go for cheap.

And, if you’ll indulge me the hypothesis, once we hit the fourth charted week, people gave up looking for patterns and bid whenever.

Of course, that’s all conjecture! Maybe in a few more weeks when I have more data this will make a little more sense.

Two Anubs, one night

Tuesday night we basically repeated what happened last week, when we killed everything up to Anub’arak but couldn’t down the last boss before everyone had to split because of lateness. So Anub rolled over to last night and we rolled in to take him out.

What screwed us up Tuesday night was too much experimenting with some pretty fail alternate strategies. We tried using AOE to burn down Burrowers and damage Anub at the same time, which was slow. The DK tank also suggested making the pursued person run far away and get bubbled or something, but that just spread everyone out, and turned out to be pretty fail as well.

What did work was what we did last week: kill 1 add from first pair of Burrowers, I hold the other 3. Also, we burnt Bloodlust once the first add was down, so we could assuredly make the enrage timer. I think with this strategy, on the attempt that we killed him, we only had two Burrow phases. I may be wrong… strong emphasis on may.

So, alas, I think that’s the strategy we’re sticking with. It’s sloppy but our tanks and heals are leet enough that it works.

With Anub down we then metered out the two groups for TOC-10 and in a short hour I racked up enough emblems to grab my third piece of T9.245, as well as a nice achievement.

Random thought: I really need to get into Heroic TOC-10. It’s a sin we haven’t started clearing that place out yet.

Now, speaking of T9.245, I think order of attack on emblem purchases will now be Headplate of the Honorbound and Liadrin’s Breastplate of Triumph with the order depending on if I win a trophy before accumulating 75 emblems. The Headplate will serve as a placeholder for when I (hopefully/eventually) win the tanking Judgement helm from the new Onyxia.

Lastly, I am proud to announce that I have officially beat Demogar to 40k hp unbuffed. Despite being disadvantaged by neither being a Blacksmith nor a cow, I managed to pick up enough gear while he was on his honeymoon to close the gap and sprint across the finishline.

Of course, the gear that got me to that point is horribly lacking in hit, so I probably won’t be rocking that much stam outside of sitting in a Demolisher on Flame Leviathan.

Woo hoo, superior stam scaling.

Hit rating matters

On Saturday night I ran my ToC10 raid. I took the main tank role while one of our Ret pallies donned his prot gear to handle OTing. This is of course the same gentleman that did the “I don’t think, I just do what I’m told” remark last week, so I wasn’t expecting much. It is only ToC10, after all.

And then when he logged on he announced in O chat that he was drunk, which prompted me to joke that he should stay sober enough to do his job. He replied by saying that it didn’t matter, tanking consisted of sitting there and hitting “my hammer” and then “my shield.” Oy. So he was going to have to take the MT role.

Anyways, we’re on Gormok–first fight–and I get my three stacks and I call for a taunt.

“Woops, guess he didn’t like that,” I’m informed. Gormok keeps wailing on me. Oh goody, taunt fail.

1.5 seconds later: “Nope, not that one either.” Stack number four applies.

A few more seconds pass, Hand of Reck comes off cooldown, and finally Gormok turns to face the other tank.

This continues the next time he needs to pull off me. “Do you have any hit rating?” I ask. He wonders aloud when that became a tanking stat. /headdesk

The next time I need him to pull Gormok off me, I just bubbled to remove my stacks, dropped aggro to him, and immediately salv’d so Gormok would stay with him after my bubble fell off.

The point I’m getting at is this: hit matters. It’s not just some ancillary threat stat, it also has really impacts on raid performance. Taunt misses can be the end of an attempt, easily resulting in a healer death if an add is running amok, or a dead tank if a boss switch doesn’t occur in time. Moreover, considering the threat nerf we’re taking next patch, we’re going to have to be a little smarter about how we’re generating hate. With attacks causing less aggro, it’s going to be critical those attacks land more consistently.

Now before I continue, a big caveat: don’t gem for hit, just swap in enough gear to maintain a healthy 6%. And augment that with the Glyph of Righteous Defense. Being hit capped (263 rating, 8%) is nice, but don’t sacrifice survivability for it. 6% is a happy medium and easy to achieve.

With the glut of expertise on gear in the Coliseum, it’s going to be harder and harder to reach that comfortable level of hit. You’re going to want to swap around pieces to compensate.

Running with zero hit rating is not a good idea.

It begins

They nerfed AD on the latest version of the PTR.

Actually, this is a perfectly justifiable nerf, considering what a godly talent Ardent Defender is at the moment.

Nevertheless, I hope this is the end of the tweaks, though I’m not convinced it will be.

Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.

The change to HotR was taken out as well.

Yawn: A look at updated 3.2.2 patch notes

Well, I’m fresh out of ideas, and frankly the idea of doing two BLTNFs in a row bores me to tears. So, I decided to do a post on everyone’s favorite, excruciatingly mundane topic: patch notes. Contain yourselves, please.

Blizz updated their test realm patch notes, which you can see on mmo-champ and elsewhere. The official site too, I suppose, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Seal of Corruption and Seal of Vengeance: These seals will now only use the debuff stacks generated by the attacking paladin to determine the damage done by the seal and by the judgement.

Nice fix to an annoying bug.

Hammer of the Righteous: The damage from this ability is now considered physical instead of Holy. The threat generated by the ability has been increased such that it will continue to do approximately the same threat it did when it was Holy damage.

This will hopefully help us with our one source of snap aggro on multiple targets. I for sure wasn’t relishing the prospect of having diminished threat in the snap category, so this is a nice mitigation to an annoying nerf.

Relics: All buffs provided by relics (idols, librams, totems and sigils) now share an exclusive category such that gaining a buff from one of these items will remove all other buffs gained from items in this category.

This really doesn’t affect us. I think only the most intense of the min-maxers were actually bothering to libram swap. The swing timer reset was too much of a hassle, and the threat bonus was marginal, all things considered. I wonder if this change means other classes were relic swapping as well, or if Blizzard’s trying to be ahead of the curve.

Speaking of librams, I’ve been seriously considering picking up the Libram of Valiance for my threat set. And, by threat set, I mean in heroics I tend to swap out my stam trinks and Libram of Defiance for Lavanthor’s Talisman, the STR Darkmoon Card: Greatness, and Libram of Obstruction.

Supposedly, according to numbers I’ve seen elsewhere, the 200 STR of LoV has a 90% uptime, so is worth a constant 180 STR, which then threat wise works out to an equivalent of 540 BV. Not straight conversion, mind you. Threat conversion. So, even with the change to Libram of the Sacred Shield in 3.2.2 to ~450 BV, the LoV will still work out to be better.

And that’s before the mind-shattering additional spell power you get from strength. Just try to wrap your head around that! … Uh, yeah.

All around we’re looking at a 5-6% threat nerf. Not great, but could be worse.

By the skin of our acid-drenched mandibles

We did indeed kill Anub last night, finally. And I wish I could say “ok, this is how you do it” but I’m not really confident in our strategy (despite it working) so instead I’m going to tell you what not to do.

One offtank isn’t enough

We did the fight last night with two tanks. The DK (who, while being more squishy, is bad at picking up adds) took Anub, and I rounded up the critters. That’s all well and good, but to maximize dps on Anub we were doing a strategy where the first Burrower to pop up got nuked down, and I held the other three from that phase, which were would then burn down as soon as Anub submerged.

Seems all well and good, but be prepared for this delightful little debuff. With three Burrowers on me I was looking at a full stack of this pretty quickly. Not only that, but this buff also kicked in for them as well. 300% damage buff along with a 300% attack speed buff. PURE AWESOME.

It was only by the skill of the healers that I was allowed to live. I should have been gibbed so many times (the AD debuff was just about constantly up) but somehow I made it. I’m sure being a bit overpowered this patch has something to do with it. Also, again, having amazingly awesome healers goes a long way.

Anyway, long story short: two off tanks recommended. One grabs the first two Burrowers, one grabs the other two. Tank them 12 yards apart ideally.

Don’t try to help with scarabs

I made the mistake of running around, throwing taunts, and trying to keep healers alive under constant scarab attack. And then Burrowers came up and I had a full 40 stacks of this. Avoid scarabs if you’re a tank.

Don’t stand on permafrost to avoid impales

You’ll take some damage if you just stand on a permafrost when an Impale is headed your way. Instead, put the permafrost patch between you and the incoming spikes and you’ll avoid the hurt. We lost a few people during phase 2 because they got taken out by an Impale through a permafrost.

Don’t burn down adds until phase 2

DPSing Anub while he’s up is really important in this fight. Because the burrow phases last so long you really don’t have room for more than three of them. Past that you’re looking at an enraged Anub coming up. Splitting dps on Burrowers is just asking for hitting the enrage timer.

Don’t push to phase 3 until Burrowers are dead

At 30% Anub basically steals everyone’s health over 40%. Combined with Burrowers piled on you doing god-knows-how-much damage, you’re looking at a dead offtank and Adds Gone Wild. So make sure dps understands that all dps needs to stop on Anub at like 35%, then Burrowers burned down, then back to the boss to push him to phase 3.

Ideally, execution of each phase should look like this: MT on Anub, two OTs on Burrowers. Each time a pair of Burrowers comes up, one offtank grabs them, the second grabs the second pair. Burrowers are held until phase 2 where they are marked and burnt down. During burrow phase, everyone stacks up to AOE down the Scarabs, which tanks avoid taking any acid stacks. Rinse and repeat until Anub hits 35%. At that point, adds are dealt with until they’re dead, and dps pushes Anub into phase 3. Anub is then burnt down.

Great success[!/?]

Suffer well, brothers

It’s coming, comrades. Gird your loins.

I can read it in the tea leaves, the chicken bones, the dice, what have you. We’re going to get nerfed, and hard.

And I don’t mean the already-impending threat nerf. I mean an additional survivability nerf.

Every day I hold my breath and go to the official WoW tanking forums, and every time I do it feels like a punch in the kidneys. Each and every thread is “Pally OP” this and “Pally OP” that. Normally I wouldn’t be worried, but Ghostcrawler is responding to these threads, he’s reading this arguments, he’s seeing the anger that the overnerfed DKs and ignored Warriors are heaping on our class.

Sadly, the Druids are keeping mum, because they know what EH powerhouses they are. But ironically, all they’re doing is holding on to the hungry tiger tightest. Eventually after we get tossed off and devoured, they’ll be the only meal left.

And yes, I do agree that AD in it’s current incarnation is overpowered. A 15% EH boost matched with out superior stamina scaling is obscene and the benefits thereof are beginning to rear their head in this higher level of content. However, I know in my heart of hearts that Blizz is going to over do it, and hit us with the nerfbat so hard that we’ll be worse off than we were at the start of 3.0. We’ll resume our spot at the bottom of the tanking totem pole.

DKs are proof positive of this model. Blizzard let them go as they were from 3.0, through 3.1, and then finally after months of DKs being the hard mode tank, and GC saying “oh it’s not a big deal,” the threads piled up too high to ignore. Finally, after the outcry hit a fever pitch, Blizz enough was enough. They smacked DKs so hard that they are now arguably the weakest tank today.

I don’t have much faith that GC will resist the same impulses with us this time around. They can only suffer so many slings and arrows before they act.

Sorry to be fatalistic, but I just feel the urge to be the bearer of bad news.

To the ground, baby.

I raid lead like Anub

Last night was messier than I would have preferred. We started off with VOA25 and burnt down the three guys in there pronto, mostly scoring some pvp crap. Then we hopped over to Coliseum and started to make our way through it.

Beasts went down somewhat okay, but more people died to silly stuff than I’d like. Jaraxxus was a huge cluster-you-know-what. Two dps pulled off of the DK tank and got killed, and a few others bit it from standing in fires or the incinerate AOEs. The entire attempt was a slow attrition on a ranks and I saw the specter of an enrage wipe looming ahead. We probably downed Jaraxxus with less than a minute left on the enrage timer. Sloppy, sloppy kill.

For Faction Champs, we are basically still learning the fight, and it’s pretty difficult so I’m not going to offer any criticisms of our performance. We did kill them all in probably one of the more epic boss fights I’ve ever done. I think at the end of it were were looking at about 11 people left standing.

The order I put forward (and I’m open to suggestions on this) was burn down the priest first, then the druid. The holy pally was being handled by a rogue, so we skipped her and downed the enhance shammy next. Then the warrior (who I hate), dk, and rogue. Back to the pally, then hunter, shadow priest, and warlock.

I spent most of the fight following around the shaman, taunting him when possible, and cutting down his totems. My main goal was to keep him from getting a windfury proc and one-shotting a healer. I used shield tosses and Arcane Torrent to contribute to the healer burn. After the shaman was dead I shifted attention to the melee, trying to keep them occupied and off the squishies.

Like I said, pretty epic battle, and definitely a kill we earned. Thankfully the Champs coughed up the Juggernaut’s Vitality, which puts me at 39.1k unbuffed health. Delish.

Speaking of gear, I’m having a huge issue with hit rating right now. I’ve been eagerly gobbling up 245 gear, but in doing so I’ve been steadily losing hit. Earlier last month I was capped at 263 on the dot, and now I’m at a measly 108. To remedy this I can add 53 with the T9.45 legguards I’ll be getting in 8 emblems. I might have to enchant my weapon with Accuracy too. Considering the threat nerf we’re getting in 3.2.2, I really don’t want to take my chances with suddenly being so far under the hit cap.

But I digress! So after Champs we started up Twins, which was new to some people… with predictable consequences. First attempt was marked by people dying to Vortexes (I so badly want to call them “vortices”) and Twin Pacts going off. Part of that was me being a huge idiot and calling out during a Lightbane Twin Pact, “Everyone grab light and get Lightbane!!” I think I confused the hell out of people and that was not a bubble sundered.

Of course it also says something about the raiders that they didn’t have the critical thinking to recognize I screwed the pooch on those instructions and compensate. One guy even said “What? I just do what I’m told.” Great ‘tude champ. Yer gonna go far.

So first attempt on Twins was a wipe. Second time we were doing well, but somehow it all went to hell towards the end. The DK tank bought it and I ended up tanking the two of them in the center at like 30%. Somehow we lucked out and didn’t have anymore Twin Pacts, and I somehow managed to hold both through a Vortex. It was pretty crazy, but we got them down.

Then the ground fell out from under us and we got to finally face Anub as a 25man raid… and I totally dropped the ball. I didn’t do my due diligence on this guy, neglecting to look up strategies while thinking that it would be a carbon copy of the 10man incarnation. It wasn’t. The enrage timer is much, much tighter and requires a different approach.

Too late did we realize that having dps focus down both Burrower groups each above-ground phase was a bad idea. We spent about three attempts wiping that way, and only on the last one (declared as such because a lot had to scram after) did we obviously have the right approach. We pushed it to phase 3 easily, but then wiped because the DK is squishier than I am. I’m probably going to have to take Anub from him when that phase starts.

At least I know we can easily kill him tonight. A one-shot hopefully. Assuming everyone shows up.

After that disappointing conclusion to the raid we headed over to Uld10 to continue the Hard Mode Party. Our main goal, as you can imagine, was I Choose You, Steelbreaker, which had eluded us last time we tried it.

This time we had the same issue at the start, people didn’t realize Fusion Punch left a dot that needed to be dispelled, so when I blew up and the DK took over he was killed pretty quickly by being falcon punched to death.

The second attempt we cleaned that up but didn’t have enough dps to down Steelbreaker… although we definitely had the wrong approach by bringing me back to life and attempting to do a second tank switch. That just gave Steelbreaker another chunk of health and more damage to boot. To fix the strategy we had one of the healers go dps (so 2 healer, 6 dps) and we resolved to let the DK blow up if that’s what was going to happen.

So the fight starts, we hit phase 3 (side note: the three sweetest words in the English language are “ fades”) and I get my Overwhelming Power. I pop wings, go to town and at 10 secs on my meltdown the DK taunts and I bright for a safe distance. I explode, get a brez, and settle in behind Steelbreaker to do some measly dps and take over Cleansing duty.

At about 10 seconds on the DK’s Meltdown, Steelbreaker coughs up his purples.

I think tonight we’re going to follow up Coliseum with working on the Freya hard mode.