Archive for March, 2010

Word of the day: Trickle-down death

Main Entry: trick·le-down death
Function: Noun
: A death that happens slowly, with an intermittent stream of damage that adds up to more damage taken over a period of time than healing received in the same period. Requires a longer time frame to finally kill the tank (more than a few seconds). Trickle-down deaths can be ameliorated with increased mitigation (armor mostly), and avoidance. Common in Icecrown Citadel.

Antonym: The Ulduar Splat

Housekeeping!

I finally got off my kiester and managed to write a Tanking 101 guide. I have that sitting on the bar at the top now. Better late than never, right?

Also, I’m flying out for a work trip in Orlando tomorrow. That means that posting next week will be garbage, unfortunately. Unlike last time, I won’t make any grandiose plans of having posts queued up to out over the week. However, one promise I made last time that I will keep this time around is I will be tweeting nonstop out of complete and utter boredom.

I have a WordPress app on my phone, so I’m going to attempt to microblog. Alas, no walls of texts about this or that raid, because–double alas–I will not be raiding. All in all, I’ll do something to keep this place interesting while I’m gone.

Avoidance and HP in Cataclysm

Obviously this is just grasping at tea leaves for now, but Ghostcrawler commented a bit on a thread about Mastery and divulged some design philosophy about how they plan to approach tanking stats in the next expansion pack.

Some choice quotes and thoughts:

I’m not sure a strategy of trying to force tanks to gem / enchant other stats is ever going to feel good. That said, tanks used to worry more about being the mana sponge. The way to alleviate being the mana sponge is to take less damage and a great way to take less damage is to dodge more.

Personally, I wish tanking would go back to this. I like it better when there are more dimensions to tanking than just sitting there and getting punched in the face.

The relative value of dodge vs. parry is something we’ll have to play with. My gut reaction is that parry needs to be cheaper since avoiding 100% of one hit is more valuable than avoiding 50% of two hits, but I’m not sure how much cheaper. Avoiding spikiness (which dodge will contribute to) also has value, and if the second hit after a parry is dodged instead (such that you lose the parry “charge”) that plays into the cost as well.

I suppose this answers the question of if you would lose that second-swing 50% reduction after parrying by dodging or being missed. By cutting parry’s avoidance in half they would definitely have to compensate by lowering the ipoint “price” of parry rating. The new parry intrigues me greatly and I want to see them do the change right.

The passive talent tree bonuses for tanks will probably be something like 1) reduces damage taken, 2) increases damage done, 3) reduces damage taken in a way unique to your tree.

The 8-Ball says “3) increases damage absorbed by a successful block.”

If tanking gear had thousands and thousands of Stam, tanks would still socket Stamina because it’s reliable. If your health is low, then even if your avoidance is 99% that means sometimes you’re just going to die and no healer can save you.

Yes, exactly! It boggles my mind why some tanks think there is virtue in gemming for threat or avoidance. We don’t stam stack for the epeen, we do it because stamina offers the best return on investment when it comes to gems. Take for example, this thread on the tanking forums.

The original poster has completely missed the point: avoidance is all well and good for heroics where the hits are generally small. But WoW at 80 isn’t doesn’t endless heroics farming, people are gearing for much more than that. In the raid environment your first responsibility is always to survive the worse case scenarios, to maximize your time to live (TTL). That’s ethos behind effective health.

Gemming for hit and parry and dodge maybe activate all those pretty socket bonuses, but in the end (thanks to the realities of WotLK raiding mechanics) you’re gimping your survivability.

Now, if healers can generally heal you through damage but then eventually gas out, then avoidance becomes more attractive because it lets healers heal you longer. Does that mean you gem it? Not sure, but at least a trinket with all avoidance might be pretty exciting.

I hope this is the case with Cataclysm. I want boss fights to be less about short-term perfection and more about a steady performance over the course of an entire fight. I want to see tanks rewarded for properly balancing TTL to damage reduction. I want to see healers forced to be strategic about healing, and not just being forced into dumping constant, strong heals into the tank, mana bar be damned. Bosses in Cataclysm have the opportunity to be so much more complex. I hope they take it.

We also think we figured out a budgeting scheme to let tank gear have the same basic Stamina as dps gear. It’s not a huge balance concern either way, but it does look weird when dps plate has more.

That’s a relief. I was expecting a wave of bad tanks taking dps pieces to “maximize their EH.”

Once bitten, twice wiped

I’m trying to think of a fight that puts as much of an emphasis on personal responsibility as Blood Queen does. And, by personal responsibility, I mean each raider paying specific attention to a buff that they have that realistically the raid leaders cannot see the status of and cannot feasibly direct the execution of in the midst of the encounter.

I suppose Thaddius would be a good analogue, since you really didn’t know if people were paying attention to their polarity until they had managed to zap-fry to death a huge swath of innocent people, their whole lives ahead of them, like a toaster dropped in the pool at the youth center.

Blood Queen presented a unique challenge for us if only because while we excel in many areas, coordination and good old fashioned attention-paying is not especially our strong suit. The attempts done on Blood Queen were a few weeks ago, done mostly as exploration, and resulted (I’m told, I wasn’t there) in some fantastic wipes. Then, last week after murdering Putricide we gave her the ol’ college try and, while failing, had enough success to know the fight was definitely feasible.

Last night we put the first serious night of attempts on her. We finally got to her lair at around 8:30 server or so, giving us a solid 90 minutes to lock down the fight.

Aiding us in our journey of pain would be an amazing addon that Demogar found called BloodQueen. You put in a priority list of bites and the addon will track who has the vampire debuff, the timing on their bite, and assign for them (communicated through raid warnings and whispers) who they have to bite.

So in the screenshot above Cendra got the debuff first, and then ten seconds before he could bite someone the addon told him to go for the first person in the priority list: Morvain. A /rw went out, an icon was put on Morvain’s head, and Cendra would then run off at the proper time to bite his assigned target.

The addon was working pretty well last night, and despite some issues with the mechanics of biting (mostly people not standing close enough to their target) we’re doing pretty well on bites until the third wave. At that point we were having issues with people losing track of who they had to bite in the endless sea of notifications and raid warnings. At that point someone came up with the idea of making a separate chat window for whispers so you can see and not lose track of your assignments. Brilliant, definitely helped.

Another suggestion was made by Zilga, apparently the ambassador of Healsylvannia, who declared “the healers claim the middle.” During air phase they would immediately retreat there, spread out, and begin tossing out whatever heals they could to keep people up while bloodbolts whirled overhead. Once they started doing that the air phases went super clean with only an occasional death. Game changing strat swap.

Tonight we have the whole night drop BQL. At first last night I was filled with fear and loathing that she would turn into a new Putricide, a fight that would take weeks for us to down and even then would hardly be clean enough to henceforth be declaredly a farm fight. BQL however, once we made those strategy changes, didn’t seem so bad. We have the dps, it’s just everyone executing their jobs precisely and maximizing personal dps. I think tonight we can drop her… our last attempt things were really clicking and I think if someone didn’t drop a swarming shadows in the middle of the room and kill a swath of people we could have killed her. We wiped at 14%, with half the raid dead.

And I want my damn shield to drop.

How do you solve a problem like Paladin AOE threat?

Ominously, Ghostcrawler declared last week in a post:

The threat-related goals still remain:

2) Paladin — Nerf the threat capacity of HoR and SoC.

Now, I may have played the chicken little several times in the past and yet we still made out pretty well, generally. Despite two or three dire predictions of imminent nerfs, the worst we got was the Sacred Duty retuning. As for threat, well, that’s a horse of a different color.

Is Paladin threat too good? Generally yes, although not for the reasons that GC and others on the tanking forums would describe. For one, in the one case that Ghostcrawler is correct, Seal of Command was poorly designed and executed, and gave us an easily obtained threat boost that really should have been restricted to Ret Pallies.

SoComm has really only been useful since ShoR was perhaps unintentionally moved to being a melee attack in the early days of 3.3. Before then we procced the effect much less, to the point where it was useless for tanking. Post-ShoR change and suddenly the fastest and easiest way to pumped out the AOE teeps (like deeps, but moar threatnin’) was to switch to Seal of Command and go nuts on any clumbs of mobs in your path.

As for Hammer of the Righteous, is it really that overpowered? Really?

I would say no, but perhaps I’m biased. I see little difference between it and the Warrior cleave aside from the fact that ours hits an additional target (but has a cooldown) and automatically pierces armor thanks to the damage being of the Holy school.

Side thought: if HotR was so overpowered (and this is something GC has been hinting that he feels for some time) then why, oh why, does the Paladin t10 2pc bonus increase its damage by 20%?

They tried to tinker with HotR in the past, around the time of the 3.2 ptr, briefly shifting its damage to physical. This made HotR not only hit for less (now being mitigated by armor) but also do less threat thanks to not gaining the Righteous Fury +threat to Holy spells. They played around with changing how much damage the attack did, and then baking in a +threat modfier, but eventually decided to just revert the change and leave it as is. Kicking the ball down the road, I suppose.

I wonder if this change is now on the table again.

In the end what it comes to down is, yes, we are gods of AOE threat, and that must be changed with us being adjusted down. How would I prefer this be done? For starters, make SoComm require a 2H weapon and make it the exclusive domain of Ret Pallies. Otherwise, if the intention is to let Prot keep it, adjust down how much damage the cleave does (though this will disproportionately hurt the Rets).

… Although, I do enjoy the irony of Rets taking a nerf on the chin because of us. Usually it’s the other way around!

Er, but I digress. The other recommendation is: wait and see how our AOE threat is outside of Icecrown. I strongly suspect that our AOE threat is being exaggerated, so to say, but the added damage of the Glyph of Sense Undead, Crusade’s 3% bonus, and the addition of Holy Wrath to our arsenal.

I suppose I could live with Hammer of the Righteous getting pared down, but I’d prefer that be last resort. I love that skill as is. And I’ve finally gotten over that awful CLANG noise it makes.

The only remaining question is this: is the nerf going to come pre-Cataclysm (and if so, why is it not on the PTR yet?) or will they just roll it into 4.0?

The undying ghosts of the past

Note: This actually happened last weekend, I just let this sit in drafts for a while.

The very first time we tried Undying it was on a whim, a drunk Naxx run that we suddenly realized was going perfectly. We kept going through each wing until we reached Kel’Thuzad. Seconds from victory, one of our raidmembers (while very inebriated) died in a voidzone.

The second time we tried, months later, we got up to Sapphiron before one of the healers forgot you need to hide behind the iceblocks and was killed by a frost bomb.

The third time, a few weeks ago, I didn’t have my pet frame enabled, couldn’t quickly dismiss my mind controlled Student on Razuvious, and a warlock got killed. Raz died from dots before we could make a break for it.

Fourth time, we did it on a whim after a drunk Ulduar run and managed to fail on the second attempted boss (Sapphiron) because someone was too far to the left of an iceblock and couldn’t LoS the frost bomb.

Saturday night we went to Naxxramas for the fifth time to attempt an Undying run. With seven people: myself, two healers, and four dps (with one dps a possible OT).

We started on Razuvious, with me double checking my pet frame was active, and dropped him with no trouble. Considering each dps in the raid was doing 2-3 times the dps that someone was doing when Naxx10 was progression, that wasn’t much of a worry. Our main concern was making sure no one died to environmental hazards during boss fights.

After Raz we ported up to Saph to drop the two “hardest” bosses in the raid. When Saph died I’m sure you can imagine my relief, considering so many of our attempts have ended with her. After the dragon we took out KT, though that was a bit more stressful than I thought it would be. I knew we generally would have no issues, but I was still getting constant flashbacks every time a purple ring formed on the floor or someone got trapped in an ice tomb.

It didn’t help that DBM added this awful noise whenever someone got ice tombed–like a “woooo-ong… woooo-ong”. Very unnerving to say the least!

So KT was dead and we were raid for some less stressful fights. Or, at least, less stressful to me. Everyone seemed to be having a great time while I was seeing spots and grinding my teeth down into nubs.

The rest of the run went generally smoothly with only a few bumpy spots. Our biggest hurdles (or so we imagined) were going to be Heigan and Thaddius. For the former, it wasn’t bad at all, despite the fact that all the damn casters made me and the two melee do the dance rather than just camping on the platform for most of the encounter. Somehow I managed to not screw up all the dancing and we got through all right.

Once Plague was cleared it was on to Construct for what we assumed would be a straight run to Thaddius. And then we remembered. Gluth.

We had one tank and one dps switching to tank here and there. Moreover, there were only seven of us total. How the hell were we going to kite adds and pull off a tank switch.

As we stood on the pipe, eating the slow ticks of damage from the slime, the answer came to me. The offtank, Morvain, would kill zombies and I would solo tank Gluth myself. Once the stack hit 10, it should fall off rather than renewing, and I was pretty sure I could hold out that long.

How wrong I was.

We started the fight and I’m watching my stacks steadily climb, hitting about 80% healing reduction by the time the first Decimate was approaching. My first instinct was to bubble off the stacks, and I suppose I got lucky because I bubbled right as Decimate hit, didn’t take any damage, and yet my stacks continued to climb. In short order they were at a full 10 (and, eek, not falling off) and I was at 84% health. For the rest of the fight I basically dodged/block/parried/and absorbed (thanks to disc shields) every incoming hit. I never dropped below 80%.

So despite the odds we managed to pull that one out pretty smoothly. Likewise, Thaddius went according to plan with some minor dps pacing issues on Fuegen/Stalag and then I guess at some point during the fight someone got zapped denying us the achievement for that. Ah well. Nonetheless, no deaths and we marched onward.

At this point we started to debate our next step. It was obvious the biggest hurdle now was going to be doing Four Horsemen with seven people. Finally, we decided to bite the bullet and head right for 4HM, doing spider wing last. One way or another Undying would end on that fight.

We ended up bringing in the pally healer’s fiance, a warlock, for some extra dps since we were stretching ourselves out so badly. Two priests went in the back, as heals, and healed themselves. In the front Morvain tanked Baron and I tanked Thane with the rest of the dps plus the pally healer. As soon as the fight started we burnt down Thane very quickly, so I yanked Baron off Morvain so he could go to the back and relieve them. We burnt the Baron down, then fled to the back to kill the remaining two Horsemen.

Once Zeliek dropped we got an interesting surprise.

Considering we hadn’t cleared Spider wing yet, looks like the achievement is bugged a tad. I wonder what the requirements are? KT and 4HM? Sapph, KT, and 4HM? Everything but Spider wing? Who knows!

At this point I was feeling a little hollow about the achievement. It wasn’t bad enough we severely outgeared the place, but it was just adding insult to injury that the damn achievement was bugged. Nonetheless, we went and cleared Spider with no deaths, scoring our Dedicated Few achievements in the process.

Perhaps not as epic as it would have been pre-3.1, but it was pretty fun overall. And it’s nice we finally put that nagging desire to nab Undying to rest, finally.

How to tank Putricide in Phase 3

Well, I can claim some authority on this based solely on how many times I’ve done this fight now… although, actually I suppose that’s a lot like Danny DeVito’s character from The Rainmaker claiming authority on taking the Bar Exam. Er, but I digress. Putricide. Phase 3.

Putricide in Phase 3 is a bastard if there ever was one. Basically as soon as everyone gets control of their characters back after the tear gas transition, you have 120 seconds (give or take) to drop Putricide or you’ll terrifying–and perhaps a little joyfully–rack up killing blows against every member of your raid. Not to mention triumphantly top the healing chart for that attempt.

If you’re doing 10man, you want to space out the Mutated Plague debuffs across two tanks like so: 4 on one, then 4 on the other. This will give you the smoothest transitions for the benefit of maximizing dps.

For 25man you need 3 tanks splitting the stacks like so: 2/2/2, then 4/4/4. There are more arcane patterns you can do if you want to squeeze every last drop of dps out before the soft enrage, but the textbook way is good enough.

Do note: if any tank gets 5 stacks it’s generally lights out.

Now, when the phase starts you’ll want to immediately run towards Putricide as a group and take him to the wall. Start slowly kiting him backwards, barely moving only if a puddle or flasks are dropped. Make sure to beat it into your dps they want to be directly behind Putri, because those flasks will pop up next to his legs and the middle is a safe zone. If any of your dps eat a -75% hit debuff that is murder in such a tight dps race.

Likewise, during tank transitions avoid those flasks at all costs, or else pray for the gods to look kindly upon your taunting attempt.

Keep pacing him around the wall, with no jolts or dashes ahead that will pull Putri out of range for your melee. Tank transitions should be clean, with you stacking on the current tank and then taunting and continuing the kite flow.

Once you get the 4/4/4 range don’t be afraid to pop Divine Sacrifice/Guardian. Your healers will thank you.

I’m not going to lie, Phase 3 is rough at first, and could take a few attempts to get the flow down so no one trips up on anything or eats a wayward flask. It took us quite some time to get down pat on 25man. Best of luck!

Good news, everyone!

First, yes, the title of this post is meant to be ironic in the sense that I pre-excoriated everyone prior to Putricide coming out, telling them not to title their kill-posts with that famous line from Farnsworth/Putricide. Although, I guess it’s not as ironic if I have to explain it… hrm. And it probably isn’t ironic at all to begin with… double hrm. Hrm hrm.

But, good news indeed, and this doesn’t involve the Death Zone, or the Zone of No Return, or for that matter anything from the Galaxy of Terror… we did it, we killed Putricide!

First and foremost I’d like to thank Renne of Malfurion (apologies if I got your name or server wrong, doing this from memory) who rolled a level 1 alt on the Hoof to wish my guild good luck and offer encouragement. That was totally unexpected and helped motivate people to know that others were rooting for us.

The night started off with Demo offering a poll via ready check: yes to do Blood Queen, no to go back to Putricide. Just about everyone hit no, it was an overwhelming response. Indeed, everyone was gung-ho about finally downing the sucker and reclaiming our honor. Poor Morvain had recurring dreams that night before that we were fighting Putricide, getting him down to 4%, and then the fight would reset. If anything, we had to do this so Morvain could sleep once more.

For about the first hour we were trying a tweak strategy that involved more movement to attempt to minimize opportunities for raid damage. That didn’t work though, dps was slowed considerably. Where we used to get to P3 with 3 minutes left, now we were getting there with 1:30 left.

When we finally switched back to the tried and true method we had a few attempts with people dying to the same old stuff. Once we worked that out though, we were starting to get cleaner add kills and the boss’s health was dropping ever more precipitously. Once he was dancing around the 38% mark I had to play footsie with his positioning. He couldn’t stay in too long or he’d push over to P3 with an add up. Stay out too long and we’ll get another add. We needed that Goldilocks middle where I get him to 36% with cleaves, then drag out and whittle him down to 35.1% myself, and then bring him back in as add was dying to be pushed over.

I managed to pull it off, getting him to dps at about 36% as the green ooze died. With five seconds til the next ooze cast, everyone gunned it and quickly pushed him to P3. All the slime was gone and… holy cow… everyone was still alive. This was our most perfect shot at P3 yet.

Phase 3 was crazy, with everyone nearly panicking (me especially) as we tried to push him down as soon as possible and as fast as possible. The first two stacks went up on each tank, then I got it to 4, Demo to 4, and Nordic took it. At the 3 mark people started dying with Putricide at under 3%. 1:30 still on the hard enrage timer.

We pushed it with all our might, the healers doing their damnedest to keep the tanks up and when it hit about .5% this golden light washed over me, all sounds on vent ceased, a radiant warmth shone down, and I was granted peace in the knowledge that our long weeks of struggle were finally coming to fruition.

With a gasp, Putricide keeled over and coughed up his purples.

Finally.

Great job, ES!

5% faster, higher, strong

What is Hellscream’s Warsong? I like to imagine he’s yelling out the Olympics anthem for us. I know that would inspire me to give 105%.

Last night was probably our best night ever on Putricide. One attempt we got him to 9%. Another, our best attempt, we had him at 4%. And that was with us going into P3 with 3 dps dead. If those three were up, it would have been lights out for the good doctor.

After all this time and all the struggling, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I think our biggest problem is the strat allows for too much raid damage. We currently camp on the green side at all times, so we eat 2-3 green slime explosions each time one is up. That gives a lot of room for error for someone to get targeted and destroyed with others no having the time to stack on them. I think we can fix that issue with a strategy tweak…

Sidenote: sorry for the light posting this week. I’ve been swamped at work. I’ll be traveling to Orlando in two weeks, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I have a feeling the guild is getting back on track. Attendance is a lot better, buoyed by new recruits, and nothing would improve guild morale more than finally dropping that malodorous malpracticer.

And if part of our victory is due to a 5% buff… so be it. I’ll take the kill without reservations.

Cataclysm stat changes announced

Interesting stuff!

Stamina - Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

Armor - The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

These two together are interesting: it seems like the effort is being put into tank’s time to live deriving less from health and armor mitigation (aka effective health) and more from other stats. I’m not sure how I feel about, or at least understand, declarations like stamina and armor will be similar across tanks and non-tanks alike. I suppose reforging and enchants/gems will expand that gap, but it’s sort of weird.

Block Rating - Block is being redesigned to scale better. Blocked attacks will simply hit for 30% less damage. Block rating will improve your chance to block, though overall block chances will be lower than they are today.

Shield Block Value - This stat will no longer be present on items, since the amount blocked is always proportional to the amount of damage done. Talents and other effects might still modify the damage-reduction percentage from 30%, however.

Makes sense, they were talking about bringing Block down so you couldn’t go through a heroic with like no damage while a Druid or DK would be dealing with a lot more pain.

Parry - Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

This is the most interesting change, I think, and definitely the most unexpected. A smart idea to change Parry so it isn’t just a carbon copy of Dodge. I like this implementation, although I’m assuming that damage reduction is just applied to the next physical melee attack.

Defense - Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

Operative phrase here being “versus creatures.” So a Ret or Holy Paladin can’t slap on RF and be crit immune in pvp. Great idea, and quells many concerns when this was first floated as a change to RF a few weeks ago.

Finally, they sum up our 4.0 gear adjustments as:

If you are a tank (druids excepted), expect to see:

No more Defense on gear. Existing Defense becomes Dodge, Parry, or Block Rating.
No more Block Value on gear. Existing Block Value becomes Block Rating.
You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
Bonus Armor on gear will go down slightly.

Sounds to me like Cataclysm will change tanking to be less EH-centric and more diversifying out toolset so avoidance (as we now know it) along with the new Parry and Block mechanics are worthwhile in a raid situation. Awesome.