Patch 3.3 for tankadins

(Hippogryphs touch the ground now. /joy)

Here it is! Patch 3.3 is upon us. I’m happy to say that the trial I was serving as a juror in ended today (look for a stealth update to the previous post with an epic recounting of the entire thing), so I can devote my full energies to this patch and this post. Hopefully this will give you an idea of what affects us, as tanks, in 3.3.

How we should spec

Well, still 53/18, but with a change. Those three bridge points that could go in Reckoning, Divine Sacrifice/Guardian, or Improved HoJ? Put them in Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian.

Why Divine Guardian?

According to the patchnotes, DG is redesign to now be:

This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

Key words here are “the effect does not terminate … before [DS's] full duration.” Therefore my friends, please immediately put this macro (from Theck) on your bars:

/cast Divine Sacrifice
/in 0.5 /script CancelUnitBuff(“player”,”Divine Sacrifice”)

We now have a free, new mitigation “raid wall” and we don’t have to take any damage for it! Just activate the macro and Divine Guardian will go up and you’ll remove 20% of raid damage from the raid. Very powerful spell. Definitely a must have.

Divine Sacrifice is generally useless now for Prot because of the party-shuffling requirements. Leave that for Holy and Ret to screw around with. Remember, if you do use it, bubbling will not remove the damage intake portion of the spell.

The Lay on Hands nerf

Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.

This is unfortunate, but not much can be done (it could be much worse). Do as much as you can to avoid LoHing yourself out of habit, because you’ll lock yourself out of bubblewalling.

Taunt diminishing returns nerfed

We’ve revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.

This is interesting! A nice change that’ll save us from having to deal with possible raid wipes wrought by taunt-happy, glory hogging tanks.

What should I buy first with my Emblems of Frost?

Corroded Skeleton Key. 60 Emblems of Frost. Make it so.

Empanelled!

Pardon the IRL post…

So I had jury duty this morning, showed up bright an early, waited in the assembly room, etc, etc. I’m probably in the .1% of Americans that actually wants to serve on a jury, and in the years since I turned 18, I’ve eagerly watched my mailbox for a summons.

Well, finally the day came and I am happy to announce that I have been selected to serve in the jury of a civil case. We already had opening statements today and Monday/Tuesday are the scheduled continuations of the trial.

My blogging is going to be a tad disrupted since I usually post from lunch at work and the judge seems to frown on blogging during proceedings. I’ll have to do some late posts or have something in the can ready to auto-post that day.

I’m currently thinking of the jury as a 14-man raid and the foreperson as the tank. Let’s see if I can get them to pass me lead Monday morning, haha.

Back to the future with Mongoose

One of my aspirations in TBC was to have enough threat that I could get away with tanking using a Sun Eater enchanted with Mongoose. Unfortunately, that day didn’t come until 3.0 when my trusted Merciless Gladiator’s Gavel was retired. But the dream lived on!

Last night in heroic ToC-10 (hopefully the last time we run that as current content), I scored the heroic Ardent Guard. Such an awesome weapon. As for enchanting it, I am terribly bored with the thought of Blood Draining on yet another weapon, so I decided to take a different route: finally giving Mongoose some time in the sun.

I’ve done a bit of poking around on weapon enchants, and what really piqued my interest was this threat sim run by Theck which shows Mongoose as being our second best (practical) threat enchant, only trailing Accuracy by a tiny margin. Combined with the armor and dodge granted by the proc, it seems worthy of a trial.

Update: Some actual numbers would be nice, eh?

• It’s been calculated that thanks to the change in how SoV is handled, Mongoose’s proc time has jumped to 52% since 3.2 (why it’s good all of a sudden)
• This means that the enchant is worth ~62 “constant” agility (120 agility x .52 = 62.4)
• That’s a “constant” 124 armor and 1.04% dodge and 1.19% crit
• In reality, when it procs, you get 240 armor and 2% dodge and 2.3% crit

Not too shabby!

I probably won’t get a decent test of it until Icecrown on Tuesday (crossing fingers) so I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Using Google Wave as a guild coordination tool

Confession: I love Google Wave. I think it’s the future of Interwebz communications and have spent every waking second since I was hooked up with an invite exploring and evangelizing the technology.

As repayment for the initial invite, @ibroadfo committed me to doing a post on how I’d utilize Google Wave within my guild. So, here’s what I’m doing:

Truthfully, right now that only thing I’ve settled on is using Wave to consolidate raid strategies for Icecrown. Thanks to Wave’s collaborative features, I can write a full wave of raid strats, each “blip” (box of text) for a specific boss, and include any Waving guildies so they can comment and contribute to formulating a viable technique for each boss.

In each strategy blip I pasted a list of boss availabilities I stole from wowwiki.com. And then added little comments here or there, and highlighted colors to represent if something only really applies in heroic mode, or if it’s something a healer/dispeller needs to pay attention to.

Wave also allows me to embed videos from Youtube, so I can put up kill vids from the ptr.

And of course, others can comment or ask questions about specific bosses and we can work out answers or solutions.

Obviously, there’s still a lot more to do …

The sky’s the limit with Wave and I just need to figure out what else can be done with it within my guild.

I have some ideas but I think that depends on if I can manage to finagle most of the raid core into using this new technology.

Ultimately, Wave is a very powerful collaboration tool and can help streamline any brainstorming processes within your guild that might currently be done (clumsily) in external forums or in-game. Because anyone can add, edit, or contribute to a guild wave, you can do some awesome stuff with them.

Anyone using Wave inside their own guild? I’d be interested to hear how you’re approaching it.

March of the Icecrown Penguins

My guildie, Morvain, made this video in his despair over the delay in 3.3′s debut. This is pretty hilarious:

Won’t somebody please think of the penguins?

Trinkets, yes, pretty trinkets

3.3 will bring a pack of new trinkets for use to jam into slots 13 and 14. Like most batches of new items, some are good, some are bad. Let’s take a look at them and assess:

Corpse-Tongue Coin (and Heroic version)

Drops in the 25man Gunship encounter.

I’m sure many are going to look down at avoidance stats in light of Chill of the Throne, though you should not. Even though we lose a huge chunk of dodge while in the Citadel, avoidance is still a worthy stat. Icecrown gear is pretty heavy on armor, and it seems Blizzard is trying to push mitigation on us in lieu of the avoidance we’re sacrificing. Likewise, 5712 (or 6426) is a powerful amount of armor.

Using the 11:1 armor to stamina equivalency (in regards to purely physical fights), the proc is worth 519 stamina when you need it the most (at under 35%). This proc alone makes this trinket awesome for physical damage-dominant fights. Not so much if we’re talking more of a magic damage fight, like Sindragosa.

I would definitely use it… possibly on most fights. Even in a high magic-damage fight, the proc is that intense.

Unidentifiable Organ (and Heroic version)

Drops in the 10man Gunship encounter.

I hate ramp-up effects, and this trinket is no exception. Maxed out the effect is worth 240 stamina, which is great, but two big caveats: (1) it’s possible to go into a lucky avoidance streak and lose your stack (especially with a 60% proc chance, that’s double RNG) and (2) this trinket is nigh-useless for offtanking. Sure, the armor is great, but if you’re not getting hit by melee attacks with enough consistency to guarantee and ever-increasing stack, you’d be better off with the Glyph of Indomitability.

MTing in a melee-heavy encounter is another issue altogether. Then it’s ok, but depending purely on how often the proc is up and how high it gets.

Corroded Skeleton Key

Purchased for 60 Emblems of Frost.

/drool, is all I need to say about this. 228 stamina is amazing and the one-use effect is nice for moment when you’re expecting a big hit. This will definitely be welcomed upgrade to my Heart of Iron. Even better, it’s spectacularly easy to obtain.

A must have for sure.