Back to the grindstone

My first full work day in about two weeks (thanks to Prague and Thanksgiving) and I feel completely out of my element. I’m not prepared to return so abruptly to cube life. And blog life, for that matter. I know last week I was “back” and then I only did, what, three posts? Sure it’s a holiday, but I should have done a bit better than that.

My first second max-level character

On a happier note, last night I finally hit 80 on my death knight (who I rolled back in… wow… July). I’ve been a bit slow, obviously.

The impetus for this last minute alt burst is a good chunk of the regular raiders in my guild are obviously sick of doing the same five bosses every week (Icecrown *really* needs to drop this week) and were looking to shake things up a bit. Doing Coliseum with ten different characters who can’t easily consider the raid as “on farm” will definitely add some spice. It’ll be fun to gear up and progress a brand new toon.

When I picked up the DK again earlier last week I paid the $25 to change him from a Belf to Undead, mostly to evade the “lol belf dk” stigma when running pugs and the like. However, I’m starting to regret the decision, missing the grace and elegance of the… er, well, mostly the hair. Them Blood Elves have some pretty sweet ‘dos.

I’m loathe to throw away a total of $50 for nothing, though, so my penny-pinching ways will probably get the best of me and prevent future finagling. … We’ll see.

Oh, and can we talk for a second about how much easier 70-80 is now with Cold Weather Flying available at 68? I basically burned through every level, banging out huge swaths of quests at a time, with no time wasted running through packs of dazing mobs. It was sublime.

Calm before the storm

Right now in-game is pretty quiet. Like I mentioned, everyone’s crazy bored of the Coliseum, and raid nights are seeing a few more new faces than usual because some of the raid core doesn’t bother to log on. People are rolling and leveling alts, while others are just taking a break from the game altogether. Especially a certain holy paladin in my guild, who has done this for the second time now.

I’m not sure what’s more excruciating, the last few weeks of Naxx while waiting for Uld, or this stretch before Icecrown. Naxx at the end sucked because we were starting to regress, with people not showing up out of boredom and reaching their personal gearing goals, so we actually got to the point where we were consistently wiping in there. That was depressing. Now, thanks to dkp in part, I think, we haven’t had as many attendance inconsistencies. Still, it’s the same. five. bosses. every damn week. I cans only takes so much and I can’ts takes no more.

I’m itching to knock down the doors of Icecrown and get to work dethroning Arthas. Come on Blizz, let’s get this show on the road!

Armor’s epilogue

Wrathy brings up a fascinating point regarding the new theorycrafting done with armor. With this new mathematical understanding of the stat, it’d be possible to make a spreadsheet where you’d plug in various numbers (including a predetermined percent of how much damage in a fight is magical) and you could weigh armor, stamina, and avoidance (among other things) to empirically work out what kind of gear you want to run with in that fight.

The thought of becoming Excel jockeys like some Rogues I know scares me a little, but it adds a little flair to our craft other than stamina, stamina, stamina. I’ll be following this effort in earnest as it develops.

Happy turkey day!

I hope everyone (at least, my American readers, and not you sneaky Canadians with your Thanksgiving in October and your Fourth of July on the first of July) has a great day full of overeating, pie, beer, and an early bed. Best holiday ever.

Be well, friends.

Second look at armor!

My colleagues Honors and Wrathy have already written about this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

The conventional wisdom for a while now has been that 11 armor is equivalent to 1 stamina. Theck, however, has turned this assumption on its head by plotting out the value of armor based on how much of a fight is magical damage. In this post he has a graph basically showing various armor/stamina values–with this as the money quote:

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth.

It’s interesting because just about every fight has *some* magical component to them which means that the old 11:1 figure is just about worthless. This kind of throws out the window the ancient understanding of EH as a figure of armor and stamina, with no vacillating in between. Now, serious vacillation is needed.

What this means is that if you’re evaluating two pieces of gear, one with lots of armor and one with lots of stamina, you should choose the piece with more stamina (assuming the excess armor doesn’t exceed the value of excess stamina for the amount of magical damage in that fight). All that means, ultimately, is this is another point in the column of “stamina > all”. Stamina remains the safest bet, sadly.

Well, not totally, armor does have some worth. Just not as much worth as we assumed it had before.

Let’s talk tankey… er, turkey

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.

I’m finally back from my work trip to the Czech Republic (beautiful country, btw) and ready to get back into the blogging swing of things.

When I logged on this morning at 6:30 am, riddled with jet lag, I discovered it was Thanksgiving in game. Completely slipped my mind that I’d be coming back during a new holiday. Anyhoo, I ran through most of the achievements this morning, and I have some Pally-themed advice for those of you burning through the achievs as well.

The Turkinator is a bit rough, and more easily done on a low pop server or early in the morning/late at night when no one is on (like 6:30 in the morning perhaps). For us Paladins, the easiest way to do this is first make the following macro:

/target Wild Turkey
/cast Hand of Reckoning

Then do a circuit of Tirisfal Glades (or Elwynn Forest, if you’re into that sort of thing) and just mash whatever hot key you bound that macro to until 40 birds bite the dust.

For Tirisfal I recommend this path:

You should run into more than enough birds to complete the achievement just following the pink line. Moreover, I hear the area south of Scarlet Monastery has tons of birds, if you want to frontload your count a little.

I have no idea where the best turkey spots are in Elwynn (being a Hordie). If anyone could suggest for our Alliance friends an optimal path, I’d appreciate it.

Now, I need to start checking out what I’ve missed on mmo-champ. I’m sure lots has happened in my absence.

Housekeeping: I’m leaving, on a jet plane

Starting tomorrow I’m heading over to the Czech Republic for a work trip, so blogging will be pretty light around here. I intend to finagle a way to post from my iPhone while sneaking wifi connections and avoiding roaming charges, so I will definitely stay in touch (Twitter will be bouncin’) but long crazy posts are probably out of the question.

Be well friends, and I’ll be back posting on my normal schedule–States-side–on the 23rd!

Confirmed: No tanking Quel’Delar

Le sigh.

We don’t feel there is a need for [a tanking QD.] We aimed to make sure that every class had something to gain from the Quel’Delar series, but that doesn’t mean every spec of every class. Could a tank use the one handed dps version of Quel’Delar? Yes, it may give them more threat. Is this ideal for surviving while tanking? No, but there are other items available for that.

Does there need to be a tanking QD? No. Would it be nice if there was one for our spec when there’s one for just about every other spec? Yes.

Revealed ICC loot makes me a happy tank

For starters, the base Ashen Verdict ring is iLevel 251 which is an encouraging sign of its progression. The exalted version will probably be iLevel 277 if the rings follow the same formula as the Hyjal ones. And I’m very excited it has hit on it. Will be a staple of my gear set for sure.

Actually, overall I really like the itemization of the ICC gear I’ve seen. Some pieces with hit, nice chunks of stam, no accursed expertise.

And can we talk about this trinket? 228 stamina and a pretty nice Use effect to boot! Commence /drooling, friends.

Despite having a totally badass name, this Libram is garbage. Maybe as a purchase later on, but it’s ultimately worth 19 more dodge rating than the Libram of Defiance, so it’d be silly to waste Emblems of Frost on it.

This chest is the only badly itemized piece I’ve seen so far. Totally for the threat set. (Correction! Yours truly is a dope–the bonus armor actually more than makes up for the odd stats, making this a very awesome chest piece.)

Most annoying thing I’ve seen thus far: either Blizzard hasn’t finished designing a tanking Quel’Delar or they don’t intend to include one. I’m leaning toward it being the latter. Sigh.

But, let’s focus on the positive! So far lots of well itemized gear and no deluge of expertise like what we had to suffer on ToC pieces. Hopefully Blizz keeps that pace going as they fill out all the loot tables in Icecrown.

Scattershot thoughts

Roster drama

We have a pretty solid twenty-five man group right now, well geared and focused. That is a welcome change from patch raid cycles where we’ve dealt with having to bring in floaters on our big nights, or deal with folks getting the gear they want and then disappearing until the next raid was released.

Now we’re victims of our own success. We have a bunch of folks who can do the content but aren’t top flight like our core raiders and so raid invites are few and far between for them. They’re obviously aggrieved, but what can I say? How can we bench folks that put the effort into learning their class and gearing/speccing properly?

Demo sent out in-game letters to some folks (especially to a few that have been bitching in /g that they aren’t getting invite, a huge party foul) telling them the raid roster is generally closed so they can’t expect invites. Harsh, but the truth does sting, does it not?

We had one kiddie rage quit, but that was no big loss.

Overall, if people would just work on improving themselves rather than sitting around and playing the victim card, they’d be a lot more successful at getting into the raids. Just recently we had a healer decide to disappear, probably until Icecrown–ok, I lied, one instance of a disappearing act–and a new priest recruit has been stepping in to take her place. Last night he did a great job, and basically won himself a guaranteed raid invite. He did it the right way, he didn’t bitch in /g he was being benched, he went out and geared via heroics and waited for his time to shine, and now he’s got it.

But on a positive note

Our raid core is damn good. Everyone there is committed to their success and the success of our guild. I think part of that is our players tend to trend a bit older (like older than college students) so we have generally a pretty mature raid. Loot drama is nonexistent (unless they’re hiding it pretty well) and everyone is performing at or beyond the level they should be. We’re not at the point where we can down ToGC25 Beasts, but we can one shot all of ToC25 in 45 minutes, so that’s a good bellwether.

Part of that may be the ease of this raid cycle’s content, but I think a bigger part of it is many of us (myself included) have improved as players since the guild started raiding late last year.

Goooooals

Kyrilean has a thought-provoking post on his blog about goals and how when you have none you tend to burn out from the game. It made me ponder for a while what my own goals are, short/long/whatever term. I would probably say my goals are:

Short term

• Get exalted with Netherwing
• Kill at least Beasts in ToGC25
• Kill Yogg
• Complete Glory of the Ulduar Raider
• Red proto drake

Long term

• Get my druid to 80 before Cataclysm
• Get full t10 and all the necessary accoutrements so I can finally get a FigurePrint of Rhidach
• Loot last Binding and build Thunderfury

Not many goals, but enough to drive me, and enough to keep me busy.

Icecrown can’t come soon enough though. Even with somewhat challenging weekly clears of ToGC10, I am incredibly bored of the Coliseum. I never thought I’d see the day I say this, but…

I miss trash.

Herding cats

Trying to get everyone in order for a guild photo.

Finally, a 3.3 change I can get behind

Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion and Sated from the target. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Definitely a good fix to an annoying oversight.

The updated patch notes also just say that LoH gives Forbearance when self-cast but not when cast on others. Looks like they’re skipping the Infusion of Light change and just making LoH baseline able to cast on others with no threat of Forbearance. A welcome change.