Bubble&Taunt: Pulling victory from the jaws of defeat

Sometimes you can’t depend on some stupid streak of luck, you’ll need to make your own victories when the enrage timer hits zero. I’m sure you’ve been there before, the health bar on the boss is rapidly approaching zero, in tandem with the enrage timer. Either you or the boss is about to explode, and if only you had a few more seconds you could ensure it was the latter.

Some of you might already be doing this, but for those neck-hair-raising moments I recommend the Bubble&Taunt maneuver. What you do is in the second before the boss enrages, quickly cast Divine Shield, then use Hand of Reckoning. This will buy you three seconds. After the three seconds is up, the threat negation of the Divine Shield will make the boss turn and crush one of the raid members to dust. If you’re fast enough you should be able to squeeze off a Righteous Defense and buy yourself another three seconds.

In total that should be about 6-7 seconds of extra time you’ve bought for the raid to bring the boss down. Sometimes that’s all it takes for those really sloppy kills or those epic first downings.

Mastery and inconsistencies

In our class preview last month we were told that our third mastery would mean that “the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.” The assumption among many quarters was this meant we’d have a higher-than-normal damage absorption rate from blocks. That is, a warrior would block for 30% and sometimes 60% (if critting) while we would block for, say, a steady 40%.

Turns out that was not the case. According to the datamined Alpha Mastery values, our third mastery definitively increases our block chance. This corroborates what was datamined by MMO-Champ, which I mentioned in my last post on the subject.

The Mastery values are pretty interesting. It appears that with 51 points in a tree we’ll be gaining 8.01% damage reduction, the Vengeance effect, and a 16% additional base block chance. Putting aside that Mastery and Block Rating is the same stat for us right now, 16% is a pretty major number when each block is a straight percentage of damage reduction.

Overall though, it’s interesting to see a disconnect between what Blizz said they would do in our class preview and what reality has so far turned out to be. I wonder if anything else from the preview is… off.

We’ve got the orange fever

Last week when we killed Sindragosa, Nordicslayer, our designated Shadowmourne-wielder-to-be, completed the Frost Infusion quest. Last night in our usual 10/12 romp through ICC-25 we had 7 Shadowfrost Shards drop. That’s a 70% drop rate, much higher than the 25% I was expecting.

I’m not sure where I got that number, but I’m happy that I wrong. We’re on track to finish that Shadowmourne by the end of June (sooner if luck is favorable and the randomness holds out). We have another person, a DK, who’ll be finishing Frost Infusion tonight and can collect shards as soon as Nordic is done. I’d expect his Shadowmourne to be done around August.

Very exciting!

On a related note, there’s been discussion about what to do with the BOE chest loot. While the system that these items come from is ridiculously ill-thought out, the fact that they are BOE means I can use them for some great guild morale boosting. The plan as it is now is the two Shadowmourne builders can pick one item from the chest to keep for themselves (both will probably pick the mount) and the rest we’ll distribute via some sort of guild lottery or as prizes in guild events.

Likewise I’m planning to somehow cajole everyone into unanimously giving me the Tabard of the Lightbringer as a thank you for all the stress the lovable scamps have put me through while running the guild and raids. I think I can sway them with some dignified weeping.

What I’m curious about is this, if your guild is building a Shadowmourne, what kind of drop rate are you seeing–or did you see–on the shards? And also, what’s your plan for the five BOE items?

Block Rating == Mastery

All standard “this is subject to change” disclaimers apply, but here’s some food for thought of how things stand right now in the Alpha.

We have one stat which will be featured on tanking gear called Block Rating. This will increase our chance to block, and when a block occurs a flat 30% damage reduction will occur. We increase this stat through gear with Block Rating.

There is also a stat called Mastery that we’ll we accumulating. According to the Class Preview, Mastery will affect “block amount”. Blizz clarified this by noting the thematic difference between Warriors and Paladins, as the former blocks for more reduction, and the latter blocks more often.

That’s all well and good, but if you look at the Alpha spells they say our third Mastery is “Increases your chance to block melee attacks.” And, more succintly, “Block chance %”.

So–and maybe I’m jumping the gun a bit here–but doesn’t it seem that Block and Mastery are the same stat?

I know it’s early, and like I disclaimed earlier, everything is subject to change, but hopefully they’re planning to change this. Having two stats do the same thing makes Mastery beyond boring for us, plus will eventually lead to a point where we will likely have “too much” block and have to get nerfed accordingly. Likewise, we could be the only spec with a cap of some sort on the value of our Mastery. That’s not cool.

I’m sure this will change. Right now though, I am filled with trepidation.

Paladin buff tweaks in Cataclysm

I spotted these on Maintankadin, and figured I’d share.

Resistance Aura — Gives 31 additional Fire, Frost and Shadow resistance to all party and raid members within 40 yards. Players may only have one Aura on them per Paladin at any one time.

Makes sense to consolidate all the resistance auras into one. There seems to be some heavy buff stacking going on in Cata.

Blessing of Might — Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing attack power by 11% and restoring 2 mana every 5 seconds for 1 hour. If target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.

Blessing of Kings — Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing strength, agility, stamina, and intellect by 6% for 1 hour. If target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.

We knew these were coming, but, most importantly: “If target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected“. YES. Do want.

Threat tip of the day: Don’t Hammer of Wrath!

Just a dopey little tip, but one that seems counterintuitive. One of the more fun parts of a fight is when you break past the 20% mark and the button for Hammer of Wrath lights up. If you ever dabble in Ret you know that’s a time you can seriously pull ahead on a boss fight, but for Prot the use of that spell is much more nuanced. Namely, you should probably avoid using HoW altogether.

If you’re running a standard 969 rotation, it was previously suggested to throw HoW in whenever because it was generally a pretty hard-hitting, high-threat attack. These days, thanks to superior gear scaling with our other attacks, this is no longer the case.

According to Theck, the only spell of ours that Hammer of Wrath does more damage than is Holy Shield. And, when fighting an AOE pack or a boss, you probably want the block boost more than an instant execute attack.

The skinny is this: the only time you should be using Hammer of Wrath in end-game is when on the move, or off-tanking, and you need an instant attack. And only to substitute Holy Shield or maybe Consecrate in your 969 rotation, if you’re even dropping Consecrates. Don’t substitute Judgement, as that will do more threat than HoW.

Clipping Sindragosa’s wings

Wednesday night my guild took down Sindragosa on about the seventh attempt of the night. I made several tweaks to the strategy (as I detailed in a previous post) which I think made the difference. That is, in addition to the experience we had built up the last two times we faced down this frosty dame. Here’s how we did it:

Pre-Game

I used AVR to around a scene of seven meshes. I’ll go into further detail on how to do this in a future post, though it’s pretty simple. Put five raid symbols on the stairs–skull, cross, triangle, square, and circle–and arrange them with three in the front and two in the back. Put 10 yards between each symbol. You can test distance by drawing one and having someone stand in it, moving 10 yards away (checking a proximity detector to confirm distance) and then dropping a new symbol.

We also put two green circles out on the main floor. This is where people would be dropping frost beacons in phase 3. More on that in a bit, of course.

Sidenote: When people are positioning themselves on AVR-drawn objects, make sure they pan their cameras straight down. Because the stairs are on an angle the AVR meshes don’t sit well on them, kind of float, and can look like they’re in a different spot if viewed at a weird angle. Just pan the camera down and they’ll be in the right place for everyone.

Phase 1

When picking up Sindragosa you want her sitting on top of the west-east line that crosses the area horizontally. When she’s coming down stand in the southwest corner of the circle and swing around to hopefully position her in the proper place.

You melee want to stand at max melee range (to prevent getting Tail Swiped) and your ranged want to park themselves directly behind your melee. The reason ranged need to be so close is because when everyone gets sucked in for Blistering Cold, those that are farthest away are going to land after everyone else does, and thus have less time to run away from the aftershock. The closer the ranged are the bigger their headstart is.

Likewise, if you find your raid is having trouble running out of Blistering Cold there are two tricks you can use to give them some breathing room. Have a warlock put Curse of Tongues on Sindra, and the cast time for Blistering Cold will go from 5 seconds to 6.5. Also, when everyone lands, have a hunter turn on Aspect of the Pack, and then quickly turn it off right before the spell hits everyone. We had issues with some slower people and coupling those two changes made a world of difference keeping everyone alive after a Blistering Cold.

Also, I noticed that when Curse of Tongues is up, Sindra won’t lunge forward after casting Blistering Cold like she usually would.

Phase 2

After a period of time, Sindra will go up in the air and mark five people to be turned into ice blocks. We had DBM enabled on a raid assist and that threw up marks on each of those five players. They then ran to their respective spots as delineated by AVR.

Everyone else who was no marked was instructed to run to the wall of the stairs and hug that spot until the blocks went up. As soon as blocks formed we jumped in, knocking down the back two blocks, then the front three. You’ll find the farther apart the blocks are, the harder it will be to get them down in time. Splash damage goes a long way in this phase.

As the tank I was watching the timer while dpsing my own private block. Sindra casts four frost bombs and as soon as that fourth one hits you want to run out into the wider area and prepare to pick Sindra up and position her like you did when first aggroing her. Remember: on top of the east-west line is ideal.

Rinse and Repeat

Phases 1 and 2 will cycle until you hit 35%. For this reason you probably want to use Bloodlust/Heroism right off the bat, to get the best and most use of it, and hopefully restrict the fight to no more than three air phases. More than that and you’ll have Enrage timer issues.

Phase 3

This is where the fight gets interesting. Sindra will stay permanently grounded, but you’ll still get a frost beacon regularly. For this purpose we have those dots on the floor past the stairs. That’s where you want beaconed people to run and drop their block. Everyone else should be parked on the north-south line to avoid being caught in a chain block.

Have two to three dual wielding melee (we used two rogues and a frost DK) to be on permanent block duty. They’re going to have issues dpsing Sindra thanks to Chilled to the Bone, so we maximized raid dps by having the blocks demolition crew occupy themselves with that task while the rest of the raid only used the blocks to drop their Mystic Buffet stacks.

Train your dps and heals to watch the timer of Mystic Buffet, which has an 8 second duration, so that they can just park themselves next to a block and continue to dps or heal, and only break LOS when they have 2-3 seconds left on their timer. Once the timer expires, if LOS’d, they’ll drop their Buffet stacks. They might as well continue to dps/heal because just hiding behind the block and twiddling their thumbs won’t make Mystic Buffet fall off, the debuff has to tick to 0 first.

Phase 3 is not a dps race, it’s an endurance test. If your raid panics and starts blowing cooldowns you’re going to get chain blocks and wipe. Just reassure them to pay attention, exercise situational awareness, and always stand in the middle if they’re not dropping a block or their stacks. Slow and steady wins the race.

As for Frost Resist

I made everyone in raid wear two pieces so we could work on surviving to the end of the fight. On the sixth attempt we reached my big goal: wiping to the enrage timer. The seventh attempt we killed Sindra with a few seconds left on the timer (although, funnily enough we were 24 manning it because one guy had to go pick up his daughter–I never expected that to be the attempt).

Now I think next week, since everyone has seen a kill, we can dial that back to one piece of FR and probably none in a few cases. I’ll let the healers make that call.

Personally, I wore Belt and Boots again for little more than 300 FR. I’m happy with damage intake with that number.

Aftermath

Killing Sindragosa was a huge morale boost for the guild. We’d been kinda stuck on her for the last two weeks and now that she’s down I’m sure the next kill will be a lot easier.

After dropping her I was so happy to be able to lead the raid up to the Lich King. At that point we were mostly farting around, without much effect (although Phase 1 is kinda down now, haha) but I was just happy to let everyone see the fight and the area. There was much “ooing and ahing” from those that aren’t party to my 10man runs.

Somehow I need to figure out how to finagle the schedule so we can get some meaningful attempts on Arthas every week. I suppose if we start three shotting Sindra every week that’ll be about two hours every Wednesday to learn him. That could work.

Moreover, the guild’s designated Shadowmourne person completed the last of the Unholy/Blood/Frost quests and will start collecting shards next week. Very exciting!

Let the leaks begin!

The Cataclysm Alpha was leaked to the internet and now screenshots and datamined info galore is spilling into the community.

Unfortunately not much about Paladins is yet known. I checked mmo-champ’s talent calculator for our class and the only talent change I could see was Crusader Strike is now gone from the Ret tree and in its place is a talent (Improved Crusader Strike) that increases damage of that attack by 10%. I thought we were getting rid of +% talents?

The one very interesting thing leaked so far are the stat values of enchants and profession bonuses. The max level of Toughness gives 60 stamina right now. In Cataclysm it’s going to give 121 stamina. There’s a chest enchant that gives 75 stamina. Several different new tanking enchants as well, like +blocking on bracers, +dodge on bracers, +dodge on weapon. Hopefully this means we won’t still be using Mongoose still in Cataclysm, haha.

I know these are just placeholders and probably will change, but think about what that might mean for other things. If Toughness is 120 stamina, then would epic gems in Cataclysm give 60 stamina each (following the formula of epic gems being about half the stamina of the prof. bonus)? Gravity thinks this means we’ll see tanks in T11 with 120k hp. Hawt.

If you want to see something really cool, check out the maps of all the various zones on mmo-champ. Some crazy changes there that I won’t spoil in this space. (Likewise, I’ll be sure to post spoiler warnings and tuck stuff behind a read more link when it comes to storyline and whatnot…)

I’m eagerly awaiting some more substantive leaks. For now though I’m content to know that the first hole has opened up in the dam, and eventually we’ll have a torrent.

Lock, stock, and …

Ok, back to Sindragosa tonight. It didn’t go too well last week, but I’ve made some roster switches and some strategy tweaks and I think we’ll have a better shot at her tonight.

Last night was a huge pain, with the game seemingly intent on neutering my goal of killing all farm bosses (10/12) and having a clean slate for Sindra tonight. We had a few roster switches on the way to Saurfang, thanks to various emergencies popping up. That delayed us a bit. Then, when we finally downed Saurfang the door to the Upper Spire wouldn’t open. Awesome.

I herded everyone out and we jumped to Naxx to kill Razuvious for the weekly while I ran a 20-minute timer awaiting a soft reset. After 20 minutes we went back and (thankfully) the door was now open. But that was 20 minutes behind on the clock we then were.

Everything went swimmingly, including BQL, which we three shot. And the two wipes before were enrage wipes with 1-2% of her health to go. We probably could have killed her the first time if I didn’t get DI’d. I was planning to just bubble and taunt and hope the dps killed her during fixate. No dice though, my DI (while well-meant) just made me drop aggro and let BQL blow everyone up. Of course, I blame myself but the true fault was with people who died in the second air phase or whenever and made us miss the enrage. I know mistakes happen, but gah.

Anyway, I’ll digress for now. Let’s focus on the positive: not one mind control in any of the three attempts. /bask

We dropped BQL with about thirty minutes left in raid, if we were going to 10 server time. So 30 minutes for Rotface/Festergut/Putricide. Eek. I chain pulled more or less to Rotface, we quickly one-shot him, then dodged over and dropped Festergut post haste. That was done at around 10 server though, so I more of less begged people to not drop so we could hopefully kill Putri rather than forgo his loot.

Amazingly, we one-shot the good doctor as well. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least.

Raid redundancy is key

We’re a casual guild, we don’t enforce mandatory attendance percents, people are generally free to come and go as they please, though the more consistent people are favored for invites. One of the huge issues we’ve had in the past though was, with the old system, we protected the spots of about 30 people and didn’t invite or gear beyond that. And, after time some burnt out or stopped showing up and we brought in new faces but we were totally screwed a few months ago when we were getting 7-8 no shows a night from the core.

To prevent this from happening in the future and killing raids, I started recruiting a lot more folks, to the point where we have about 40 raiders now that can come in and keep me confident I’m not hurting the raid. And we still have about 8 people or so night to night who can’t make it, and thanks to the redundancy in the system we haven’t missed a raid night since I started bringing in those new recruits.

Last night we had three different people drop because of various emergencies–one crippling lag, one a friend in a car accident, and one not explained but it sounded urgent. I had plenty of folks on standby though and the only delay was in summoning a standby person to come in. The system worked.

But, part and parcel to this, people need to go on standby sometimes. And sometimes, the standbyers need to be the vets or officers. The system can’t work if it isn’t fair, you know? One officer I had on standby last night bitched to me for no end since he saw on Sunday night he was on standby for Tuesday, and this was the first time in… well, since the new system was instituted that he was benched. And this was for one night.

Last night when the raid started the bitching did not cease. He sat in vent and sarcastically shot little snarks across my bow about his position. The kicker? This guy’s a frigging officer, and he was conducting himself like this. I had half a mind to at least demote, at most gkick, and wash my hands of this. If you’re an officer you are supposed to set a frakking example for the members. How will they react when they see an officer bitching in vent over being benched for one goddamn night? Ugh.

Like a nail in the head, I need that.

Let’s dance, Sindy

I alluded to some strategy changes earlier in this post. They are basically minor tweaks to ameliorate issues we had with people getting hit by Blistering Cold more than I would like. For example, if people don’t have a run speed enchant or talent, they need to get Tuskarr’s Vitality. And a hearty facepalm if they didn’t already have some kind of speed boost. Especially, the dps. Likewise I’m making sure ranged dps/healers stand behind the melee rather than at max range.

Also, I’m asking everyone to bring two pieces of Frost Resist gear. That might be overkill, but my main goal is to make it to the enrage with everyone alive then dial back survivability until we find the right balance between that and dps.

I think we have a better shot of Sindragosa tonight. We know the fight a bit more, I’ve cut anyone from the raid tonight who was a constant disaster last week, and the increased focus on survival should bear fruit. I hope.

Alright, let’s do this.

Heroics, raids, and attunements: past and future

Yesterday someone spotted on the Spanish WoW forums this revealing quote from a Blue:

Looking to Cataclysm, maybe you want to know that, for normal dungeons, players must discover the dungeon in the world prior to access it from LFD tool. It is possible that you could see attunements for heroics and raids (which would be similar to the one of Karazhan). Developers aren’t sure yet of whether they use attunements or not. However, heroic dungeons at level 85 would probably have more gear requirement (in comparison) than heroic dungeons at level 80.

From this there are two points I’d like to address. The first is the idea of raid attunements.

I think they’re a great idea.

But, not the way they were done in the past. The old BC system was broken, it punished guilds when they had to recruit, and made it really hard for players who joined the raiding scene late to jump into the end game, without forcing a guild to go back and do old content so the new recruits could join the rest of the raid in the current tier. Imagine if that old system was still in place and you had to drag someone through Ulduar again before you could take them to ToC. That would be excruciating.

I tweeted about this yesterday, but I think a great “tweak” to the attunement system would be to do something like the old BC system but couple it with the new guild achievement system to create a third way that doesn’t punish guild suffering from turnover. Set it up so there’s an achievement to unlock each raiding tier. To score the T12 achievement and open up Uldum (or whatever it will be), you need to have 25 guild members complete the quest chain through the T11 content that eventually attunes them to T12. Once you get 25/25 on that achievement, your guild dings, and future members (and anyone on the bench) are automatically attuned provided they are still in the guild.

I think raiding would be well-served by some sort of limited attunement system, especially the one I just outlined. Raiding needs that mystical je ne sais quois it had in the previous two x-pacs where progressing from tier to the other was marked by a lot more fanfare than a new patch. It doesn’t need to be some ridiculously onerous series of hoops, just a simple questline that would be fun and rewarding and easily accomplished by anyone seriously attempting the current raiding tier.

As for heroics, I hope that they do up the gear requirement to run them. Heroics should once again be heroic. I want a situation like we had in BC, where you had to grind a set of gear just to get ready for heroics. The day I dinged 80, I was herded directly into heroics, despite barely getting to the 535 defense minimum for them. Once I was in there, I girded my loins to be struck down immediately by some vengeful and vicious trash mob, but it never happened.

Likewise, I never got the point of having normal 80 dungeons and heroic 80 dungeons if people could just jump into heroics on day one. But, I guess that’s neither here nor there.

A great suggestion I saw on Blessing of Kings was for the first raiding tier to not open up until a bit of time after the expansion pack launched. That way people wouldn’t feel like they had to gogogo rush to max level, and then dive immediately into progression. If we were stuck in heroics for the first month or two of Cataclysm, it would make that “tier” of content more meaningful and feel less grindy right off the bat.

Ultimately, there are two sides to every coin. On one side, there’s how BC ran heroics and raids–forcing people to do lengthy questlines and kill certain bosses to move on to the next tier, and demanding rep grinds for unlocking heroics. On the flip side is the Wrath method–an “anything goes” model where someone can set foot in ICC without ever seeing an earlier tier raid, and likewise being able to jump into a heroic as soon as they hit 80.

Both were extremes, the wrong way to go about it. But, they both had One Big Thing right. The trick is finding the middle ground between the two in Cataclysm and hitting that sweet spot between exclusivity and accessibility.