Archive for April, 2010

Better Late Than Never Friday, 4/9/10

Better Late Than Never Friday is a random monthly feature where I pull a bunch of search terms from Google Analytics that landed folks here and try to answer questions that may not be directly answered at this site, as gleaned from their keywords used.

best paladin tank enchant waist 3.3

Well, technically the only waist enchant is the Eternal Belt Buckle. If you’re an engineer though, you have two supplementary choices for some additional AOE damage. Using the Frag Belt or Personal Electromagnetic Pulse Generator tinkers on your belt (stacks with the buckle) can give your big pulls a little more oomph. The former obviously summons a bomb for you (with a neat little stun) and the latter can set off an Explosive Decoy for a chunk of physical damage. Both pretty handy.

nightmare tear does it give 10 to dodge also?

No, but it does give 10 Agility, which translates to some dodge. Though, not as much as 10 Dodge Rating would give.

glyph of judgement or command low level

Command is pretty nice at low level for the free mana it gives. That’ll make the early levels much easier to suffer through when going OOM is a constant, looming shadow.

sindragosa parry haste

Sindra does indeed parry haste (confirmed in this thread). This shouldn’t be much of a worry for two reasons: her breath is her biggest source of damage rather than her cleave, and dps will die if they sit in front of her, so you don’t need to worry about a clueless warrior causing you trouble, he won’t be up for long.

what kind of damage is putricide dealing? amplify magic

To the raid it’s either Shadow or Nature damage, depending on the attack. Your tanks will be taking a huge chunk of Physical damage from Putri’s melees, but even then there’s a lot of magic damage (especially in phase 3) and you don’t want to risk a tank gibbing ruining your attempt. I would recommend against amplify magic, honestly.

can i exchange my voa sanctified for emblems and mark?

Ye gods no.

does armor penetration stack with hammer of the righteous?

The damage is Holy, so it’s already penetrating armor.

does judgement proc seal of command cleave?

It does if you have at least one point in Judgements of the Just. It isn’t the judging the procs the cleave, it’s the application of the JoJ debuff. Probably a bug, but I’m not complaining.

festergut melee parry gib?

Festergut has parry haste turned off, so there is no danger of that.

Dreamwalker, et al.

Long overdue, but we finally took some time out of our busy schedules to put serious tries on Dreamwalker. Now that BQL was dead and that notch added to our progression belts, we wanted to fall back and do an easier encounter we could have done a while ago. It took us a few tries to get Dreamwalker down (well, up) because we had to figure out the optimal places for tanks, the dps spread, healer roles, etc. The last attempt went pretty went, and I’m happy with the efficacy of our kill.

One thing that stood out to me was how fast the fight goes towards the end. That is, it’s slow going from start to 75%, but after that the healers are accumulating more and more stacks, and one second you notice it’s at 90% and people are yelling for the Pallies to throw on LoHs, then suddenly it’s at 100%. Dreamwalker then stands up and melts all the Scourge. I don’t know why we waited this long to kill her.

And the biggest hurdle we probably had was communication. The Blazing Skeleton would sneak up on one side, get five ticks off and it would be game over. The last few attempts we got really good at knowing when they were coming (a mage would call out right before they spawned) and then people would screech when they made an appearance on their side. People would rush over and drop it with one or less ticks of waste being laid.

I gotta say, I’m pretty psyched that we went from being unable to kill Putricide–or any other wing boss for that matter–to convincingly being able to farm Putricide, and having the option of saying “we know we can kill BQL, but do we want to go try out Sindragosa?” Options! I love ‘em.

Lastly, this goes without saying. My guild’s healers are pretty awesome. They had a great system down, handled their own assignments in their own channel, and I knew I didn’t have to give a second thought to if they needed guidance assigning people to a role.

Oh, holy grip

For months now Zilga, one of the healing priests, has been saying the only thing she wanted in Cataclysm was a holy grip so she could “pull the dumbasses out of the fire.” While driving to work today I got caught in a traffic jam so I whipped out my phone and hit up twitter to see if the priest preview was ever released. I then saw they actually did add a holy grip, the Leap of Faith, and could not stop laughing. Zilga, got the lotto numbers?

Hints of Pally changes in the so-far released previews?

I’m going to issue the following predictions based on what we’ve seen in the previews for Shamans, Priests, etc.

1. There’s going to be an early attack like the “Primal Strike” that shammies are getting. Some kind of baby Crusader Strike, if they don’t just move that attack earlier in the Ret tree.

2. We’re getting something like the Warrior’s Vengeance Mastery:

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won’t see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

We’re so getting that too.

3. Warriors get Critical Block as their third-tier Mastery ability. Likewise, I think we’re getting a Redoubt like effect where a proc will give us extra block chance. The proc rate will make it over time reduce damage as much as Critical Block would.

4. I’m still holding out hope for some kind of gap closer. I strongly hoped that we’d be given Heroic Leap as our lvl 85 spell, but I guess Warriors are getting that (the jerks), foiling my initial prediction. Still, Ret suffers in pvp from having no gap closer, and we remain the only tank that can’t immediately zip to a mob or bring it to us. I think that’s going to change.

13/52/6, the (situational) max survival spec?

Bored, I decided to ogle the armory profile for Lazeil, the prot paladin who tanked Paragon’s Heroic Lich King-25 kill. I wanted to see what this person was doing to succeed in such an environment. One thing that stood out was Laziel’s second spec, a 13/52/6 protection setup.

The major upside of this spec seems to be how much survival it affords–Divinity for extra heals (a boon in this, the age of trickle-down deaths), Improved Lay on Hands for an extra cooldown (probably more useful to back up an offtank thanks to Forbearance), and Aura Mastery to boost Devo Aura to give 2410 armor (basically like popping 2/3 of an Indestructible Potion every 2 minutes) or boost the resistances of Fire/Shadow/Frost Aura. On top of this, Glyph of Salvation is worth a Forbearance-free 20% damage reduction cooldown, with obvious downsides.

LoH-related sidenote: While researching this post I found this comment by Lazeil on the EU WoW forums concerning Lay on Hands, saying he doesn’t consider LoH a cooldown, because:

[I]t can’t be used beforehand when you know something is going to happen and it suffers from gcd so it can’t be used quickly if something unexpected happened. It even has a drawback. There are very few situations where I would use LoH instead of Divine Protection.

And, furthermore, “[t]here are very few situations where I would use LoH instead of Divine Protection. I use LoH mostly to save others for example from Infest on Lich King Heroic.”

Nevertheless, the downside of such a spec seems to be mostly in regards to threat. Only 1/5 Divine Strength, no Crusade, no Touched by the Light. Lazeil must live and die by Misdirects and ToTs.

Would I recommend this for normal raiding? Absolutely not. It seems entirely situational, good only for heroic 25mans, and only for specific fights therein. Just keeping threat alone probably requires a lot of external help.

Still, nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how those at the cutting edge are speccing their character, even if it’s for certain fights or situations.

Pimped my UI, part 3

Here is the fruit of my labors:

If you scroll down to earlier blog posts you can see how messy the earlier UI was, how much real estate was taken up by various nonsense and over-sized elements. My goal with this new UI was to slim everything down, to not allow any elements to be bigger than they needed to be.

The two main things I decimated were my unit frames and my bars. For the former, there was no reason to have giant health bars and portraits. A small bar would suffice. For the latter, I was key binding just about everything already so I didn’t have to worry about abilities being noticeable enough for easy clicking, so I scaled those suckers down and slipped them all into a tiny space. ButtonFacade with the DSMFade skin helped make the buttons smaller and svelter.

I also completely jettisoned ClassTimers, which was really only serving the purpose of “oh, is my seal on? What about blessings?” Now I have that function carried by Power Auras–those funky symbols and text you see floating over my character. If Righteous Fury is off “RF!” will alert me. If Blessing of Sanctuary is off, the blue S. If I don’t have a seal on, that weird cross symbol will warn me. If I’m afflicted by Forbearance and can’t pop a cooldown, I’ll know.

Per Kerridos’ suggestion in the last UI post, I set Recount to only show when out of combat (it’s an option in the appearance tab, I think) and Omen to only show while in combat. Piling the two on top of each other, I cut how much real estate the two take up. Definitely one of the biggest space savers I managed to accomplish.

To pretty up the whole package I deployed some kgPanels (I was going to try sunport but the screenshots they had didn’t appeal to me) to organize the map-buttons area and the Omen/Recount spot. I really like how it adds sharp lines and solidity to the presentation.

Lastly, I was initially going to give MSBT the heave-ho, and I did for a time. But, the Ulduar hardmodes on Friday was pretty convincing that while I don’t think I’m noticing my damage intake in scrolling combat text, I subconsciously have been. It was a lot harder keeping track of damage intake by glancing at my player unit frame rather than seeing the numbers whizz by. Though, I still unchecked a lot of what MSBT was showing and reduced the text size/alpha to make it less distracting.

I can’t wait to take this UI for a spin in ICC tonight, I’m looking forward to seeing more of the fights than I ever have before.

So much Cataclysm news

Looks like Blizz is gearing up for the Cataclysm beta shortly, slow leaks of Cata info are starting to pick up the pace, threatening to build up to a torrent. For starters, they leaked how rage would be redesigned, and then followed up with a description of how dispel mechanics would work in the next expansion. The latter affects us, particularly these two points:

Paladins will be able to dispel defensive magic, diseases, and poison.

Protection and Retribution paladins will lose their current ability to dispel magic.

So it sounds like baseline Cleanse will remove diseases and poison, and magic dispelling will be made a Holy talent. Interesting.

Then this morning, we awoke to this ominous announcement of our imminent class preview:

The paladin is still deep in development. Instead of giving a preview that would be potentially less comprehensive than the other classes we made the decision to post it when it’s ready, in order to properly honor the paladin class and those that play them. The wait isn’t too long however as we’re expecting to be able to post it on April 16.

I wonder what this means? Personally I hope it’s a confirmation that big changes are coming to all of our trees and that Blizz is actively taking into consideration my wise counsel and prognostications, haha.

I can’t wait for April 16th to see what’s in store for us.

A weekend of achievement

I’m delaying the UI post one day so I can tweak some things tonight. It will go up tomorrow! In the meantime you can see my new UI in these screenshots.

Friday we were supposed to wrap up ICC-10 and finally kill the Lich King. Hell, I even named the calendar event “The Dethroning”. I was going all in on any possible, and probable, jinxes. Unfortunately, raid didn’t happen. One invited person didn’t show and two couldn’t make it. And those in guild were either severely undergeared or all ready saved. To salvage the night we instead went for some good ol’ fashioned Uld10 hardmodes.

They went last weekend (when I wasn’t around) and cleared up to Firefighter but couldn’t down that fight. So Friday we started on Mimiron and after finally managing to scrape up a healer (one of our super geared raid healers came on) we were good to go. We then defied our expectations and easily one-shot Firefighter. The glories of severely overgearing an encounter!

With that easily acquired feather in our caps, we then double backed and opened up Algalon’s lair. Because, why not? We had the keys, none of us had ever seen the fight, it would only take an hour max. Might as well take a few whacks at it.

Algalon is, to put it lightly, a very intense fight. I can only imagine what it was like to do this when it was end-game content rather than the playground of a pack of drunkards. There are multiple counters letting you know when different dooms are going to befall your raid, the least of which was definitely not the Big Bang. The way we ended up handling that was Morvain, the DK, would tank initially then when I picked it up from him, after my first phase punch, the first Bang would occur.

I’d get hotted up and a everyone would go in a black hole and the hit would typically proc Ardent Defender, and the hots would push me back up to nearly full health immediately afterward. The second one Morvain would take, using a guardian spirit for similar effect. The third I would have AD back for, so I’d eat it and maybe pop Divine Protection if I got uncomfortable.

We did a bunch of attempts just working out the various mechanics, usually wiping to some little mistake that would kill someone and then domino effect into a wipe. That would lead to us quickly sprinting back to our corpses ASAP to get another lick in.

With about 30 minutes to go I was getting a bit nervous if we were going to get it that night. Then that attempt everything clicked, I guess, and we pushed it to the sub-20% phase for the first time. Suddenly waves of enemies were appearing and Morvain and I just went crazy taunting as much as we could. In a blur, Algalon dropped combat with us and then went into his monologue. It was pretty cool to get to see the fight, let alone kill it, however cheap the victory might have been.

Also, Algalon is hands-down the most beautiful boss encounter I have ever seen.

After Algalon I started debating with myself which Keeper I wanted to send down for One Light. Normally you’d want Thorim to get rid of the Immortal Guardians, but at our gear levels Phase 3 would probably go by really quickly, and I would be capable of holding a huge number of the guardians. As long as I kept them far enough away to prevent Yogg from getting free heals. I was trying to talk myself out of sending down Freya who would bend the difficulty curve a bit by giving us sanity wells.

I eventually settled on sending down Freya, dooming that lockout perhaps. Nonetheless, during my epic wasting of time up top running back and forth between Freya, everyone continued to clear down to Vezax. Once I got down there we finished off the trash and then went on to one-shot Vezax’s hardmode with little difficulty.

The real challenge was, as I suspected, Yogg. And not because of the hardmode. A lot of us were tired, some of us were clumsy, others rusty. It was pretty late and we kept stalling on the normal mechanics of the fight. People not getting out of the brain room in time and getting mind controlled, not enough dps being done to the brain, etc. If it was earlier in the night, I doubt that fight would have been much trouble. We ended up calling it at midnight, server time because a few had to go.

On the last attempt, as we were wiping, I ran into a portal to check off at least one the visions from my In His House He Lays Dreaming achievement. The wages of being a tank, eh? Certain achievements you usually have to finagle or trick your way into getting, like Hot Pocket or Denyin’ the Scion or Take Out Those Turrets, or snatch them mid-wipe.

Then yesterday was, in addition to Easter, the beginning of Noblegarden. The latter being the last holiday I needed to get my Violet Proto. And of that holiday I only needed three achievements: Chocoholic (I was 25/100 on this), Desert Rose, and Spring Fling. So in the morning I buckled down and headed over to Falconwing Square, which was crawling with pink bunnies darting from egg to egg and I was immediately reminded why I hated Noblegarden so much.

I eventually just camped in one spot in Falconwing that had near me three to four different eggs, and just darted between the four spawns grabbing them as they popped. Eventually my eyes started to bleed, so I bought the Spring Robe for Desert Rose and moved on to Brill, determined just to do Spring Fling and not hunt anymore eggs.

Then I saw how nearly deserted Brill was and what easy pickings the eggs there could be. I found another fruitful camping spot and hung out for a while, getting enough eggs to finally put me over the top for Chocoholic. From there I finished up my epic rabbit breeding journey and then did a quick tour of the various dry spots in Azeroth. Finally I finished up the last achievement of the last holiday I needed for What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.

I’m so glad that’s over.

… I should do Noblegarden on my druid if I’m going to use him in Cataclysm. Ugh.

Got the UI itch again

Every so often I get the feeling my UI is way too cluttered and I need to do something about it, lest the seas rise and dogs and cats begin living together.

Right now, I would definitely say my UI is obscenely jampacked with way too much screen real estate taken up by various addons and widgets. It could stand to be pared down a bit.

I doodled a quick sketch of what I’d like to do:

My main goal in a new design would be to free up as much of the screen as I can. That means jamming everything in the bottom whatever-fraction of the screen, and having as little as humanly possible beyond that. I think realistically I can swing that, provided I make the buff icons at the top as small as possible.

Other big changes are making ability icons tiny, since I keybind them anyway, I don’t really need to see them all that much. I may end up hiding huge swaths of them. I’m also going to replace ClassTimers with Power Auras, since I used to former to track if I had my main self-buffs on and if Forbearance was up. I’ll just code the latter to concisely show if Forbeance is forbearing me, or if I’m missing Righteous Fury/Blessing of Sanctuary/et al. Going to also ditch Scrolling Battle Text because that’s just information overload that I don’t follow as is.

Lastly, I’m going to use kgPanels to make everything more organized looking.

Can’t wait to get cracking on this–I love a project. I’ll report back monday with the results.

The curse, reversed

The revitalization of the guild continues apace! Last night we swore revenge on the epic beatdowns the Blood Queen had inflicted upon us. We, along with our trusted friend the 10% buff, were going to get our pound of flesh from her sparkling hide.

The first pull was around 7:00 or so, after quickly doing the raid weekly and then shuffling over to Icecrown. Once we were through the trash I gave a rundown of the fight to the four or so people who had never done it before. After rambling for ten minutes, I then gave the cliff notes version:

Swarming shadows, run to the walls, don’t drop it in melee. Pact of the darkfallen, get to the middle. Air phase, spread out six yards apart. Bites, do them.

And then we were off to the races. We had an epically awful first go attempt that failed at around 45%. No matter, those four people saw the mechanics of the fight. The next attempt we got her to 12% or so before she enraged. That filled me with hope. I told everyone I believed in them, and then we proceeded to wipe for the next two hours.

Sigh. You people just can’t make things easy, can you?

By the end I was starting to despair, as I’m sure people could tell by the lack of enthusiasm in my voice. I knew we were capable of the kill but we needed to overcome those stupid little mistakes that would get someone killed. People dying in airphase. Not getting bites off and getting mindcontrolled. And so on. There are a hundred ways to mess up, and just one death usually meant falling behind the enrage timer.

What I think eventually turned the tide was making the first biter wait as long as he could before biting the second person. This would then push the second wave of bites to after the air phase, rather than right before it. Once we started doing that, we stopped losing people during the first airphase. The only downside being that this reduced how much time we had at the end with all vampires up, but thanks to Mr. 10% Buff we had the wiggle room.

After the two hours of wipes some off us were rezzed up at the boss, others released and started to run back in, only to find the Valks back up and circling the Upper Spire. I started to run down the hallway to meet them, but all the packs there had already respawned. Those of us left behind wiped ourselves and then met everyone at the teleporter to reclear back up to BQL.

It was already 9:30, basically thirty minutes before the raid would end and it was starting to look like we weren’t going to get her.

I knew, despite any despair I might be feeling, we couldn’t use the respawn as an excuse to quit early. That attitude was fatal to the guild and we had to break it, or it would break us. So, reclear we did, and made our way back up. Some folks took a quick break and we readychecked, flasked, and were off.

I pulled and we all started to pour in the hurt. 65% before the first air phase, ahead of the timer. Bites occurring after she came down, so we were safe for that.

To help this crucial point along, I popped Divine Sacrifice/Guardian to shave off some damage. I also bubbled because someone got awfully close and I didn’t want to accidentally kill them. Thankfully, no one died during the airphase. Everything was going well, people just needed to hold it together.

More bites go out and the second airphase happens. Again, no deaths. Then the last wave of bite assigns go out and I watch the window for the addon to report back successful bites. I watch Vampires 9-13 get created quickly, then with sweat dripping down my brow, the last few trickle in. Vampire #14. “Two more guys!” Vampire #15. “One more, get that bite off!” Vampire #16. Everyone was bit.

“Pop bloodlust, burn cooldowns, NUKE HER!”

I pop wings and immediately start laying as much dps in as I can. It’s about 40 seconds left on the enrage, 25% to go. I’m watching both her health bar and the enrage timer with equal parts dread and hope. Shouting encouragement into vent, both tick down to the inevitable. Finally, with about 1% to go we had only a few seconds to live. Finally, with her hp in the decimal points, it was obvious she was about to enrage. I quickly popped bubblewall, both trinks, and an armor pot, bracing myself for the burst.

It was all for naught, though.

With a screech she then collapsed to the floor, never getting a hit off. We killed her the millisecond she enraged.

It took a second for the kill to sink in, and then I quickly clicked on her body to see the loot. And there it was. The shield. The Icecrown Glacial Wall. The bulwark I had been drooling over since it was first revealed. (Yes, yes, I know, the heroic 10man shield is better, let me have my moment, damn you.)

Taking up the IGW, I put to rest the ghosts of all the shields I had lusted over before, but been thwarted in my attempts to obtain. The ALD, Bulwark of the Amani Empire, Bulwark of Azzinoth. All had escaped my ambitions. Finally, I had broken the curse.

More importantly (far more importantly), this was a huge victory for the guild. We went from weeks of early exits, no new kills, endless demoralizations. It looked like ES was on the way out. This week we bucked the trend though, we refused to leave, we didn’t let excuses prevent us from continuing to try fights.

I’d like to take credit for it, but I honestly can’t. I’m a terrible guild leader and an even worse raid leader. Sure, I can explain the fights, I can diagnose wipes somewhat efficiently. But, I am just as susceptible to despair as any rank and file, and after those numerous wipes I was all but giving up on the inside. It was only by the light of the optimism of my officers and the happy warriors of the healing corps that the mood of the raid stayed afloat and we were able to muster the will to down this blood-sucking bitch.

This victory belongs to the entire guild. You guys earned it!