Back to business in beta

One of the first things I did Friday when I got home was try to log into the beta and get some more leveling done and see if I missed anything. Instead, all the servers were down. A new patch was being applied from the looks of it, which means I got back just in time.

Later that night everything came back up and I caught on WoR some of the incoming changes. Most immediately tantalizing of which is the new Holy Power UI widget. I’m sure you’ve seen a thousand screens of this, but here are mine:

Perdy.

I’ll be talking a little bit about Holy Power, ShoR, and Holy Shield in a bit. But first, a few back-end things–check out the new tooltips for hit and expertise. This is pretty handy (especially for Expertise, which is a tad more complex than Hit). Takes a little of the numerical mystery out of the game, but QSS.

Now with more Block!

And of course, the biggest news of this build isn’t the fluff HoPo (as Anafielle calls it) interface, it’s the introduction of Mastery.

At base, our Mastery (Divine Bulwark) is worth 16% block chance as soon as you train it. As you add more Mastery rating that number goes up (tempered by the level/mastery formula, of course). At level 81, with 75 Mastery rating, my block chance went up to 23% before Holy Shield.

At lvl 82, I had managed to accumulate 492 mastery through various quest rewards, worth 28% block chance. That’s 32% before Holy Shield, 47% after. In fact, before dinging 82 I had about 52% block chance all together. One level dropped it 5% from the ratings/level conversion. I expect that drop will get steeper as my level gets higher.

The other “skill” available at the trainer was Plate Specialization, which boosts a stat if you’re in all plate.

So basically a free 5% stamina.

Revamped talents and spells

I already talked about Ret’s (grumble) gap closer in a post on Saturday, so I’ll avoid repeating myself here in this space. Some changes prot-side included a return to a +damage Consecration talent, a new Sacred Duty that makes ShoR have a chance to crit (I’ll talk about this re: priorities in a sec), and Wrath of the Lightbringer affects Judgements as well now.

Shield of the Righteous (ugh, that name) is now implemented, unlike the week before. You can talent into it and it appears in your spellbook. And unlike the 30/60/90 iteration, it now deals 20/60/120 AP based on how much Holy Power you’re rocking. At lvl 81 I had about 3700 AP with Might up. I was ShoRing for about 4600 damage a hit, which is 120% AP (including some Vengeance). Not too shabby, but also not the BOOMHEADSHOT type-attack I was hoping for. Perhaps at later levels with more massive AP numbers.

ShoR also when cast will put up a 20 second Holy Shield buff. For 15% block chance, regardless of how much Holy Power you had when you used ShoR. 1 HP is 15%, 2 HP is 15%, 3 is… you get it. This is much less onerous than the old prospect of stacking Holy Power to 3 then getting the max block buff up at the start of a boss fight. Now your first moves in melee can be CS+ShoR and you’ll be good to go.

Hammer of the Righteous has been redesigned. Rather than cleave and swinging flying, glowing hammers about with a mellifluous CLANG, you now just let loose a holy burst of light and hit everything around you. Rather than being a copy of Cleave, HotR is now a copy of Thunderclap. I haven’t tested the damage yet to see how much it does single target, on two, three, etc. and WoL ate the log I did Saturday. Nonetheless, I’m curious why this spell was redesigned, especially when Holy Wrath still works.

Speaking of HotR, it is, as we knew was coming, now on the same cooldown as Crusader Strike. And both have a 4.5 second cooldown, lining up nicely with GCDs.

Hand of Reckoning no longer does damage on taunt. Disappointing, but it was always a band-aid to the removal of Exorcism from our toolboxes. To fill in the gap we have Avenger’s Shield with a–talented–15 second cooldown (which gives me tingles) and the new Improved Judgements talent which allows us to have 30 yard Judgements. Something I can see myself getting.

The new priority

So, like I’ve been teasing, here’s the new priority rotation I’m monkeying around with: (1) Avenger’s Shield, (2) Judgement+3HP ShoR, (3) CS/HotR, (4) Hammer of Wrath, (5) Judgement, (6) Holy Wrath, (7) Consecrate.

The reason I have Judgement twice is because you definitely want to make sure to cast it before ShoR, since it gives ShoR a 50% chance to crit. It doesn’t have to be immediately before, the proc has a 15 second duration, so you can ride that for a bit, or jam another Judgement in right before ShoR for another chance of it.

Judgement otherwise still hits like a wet noodle and isn’t worth prioritizing over other, hard-hitting spells.

Also, don’t forget: the first rule of Grand Crusader is it will always proc if you use CS/HotR when Avenger’s Shield is not on cooldown! Also, we don’t talk about Grand Crusader.

Now, one of the more disconcerting things about beta right now is how many free GCDs we have. I’m so used to rotating through my 9s and 6s that I find myself stopping dead in my tracks with no idea what to do next as all my abilities are on cooldown. In a raid I could toss out some Hands/utility. While soloing I just block Holy Wrath as a filler.

Oh good, more morality quests

And the last thing I want to talk about in this post is I had a very interesting questing experience in Hyjal this weekend.

What’s this? A moral choice?! I had the option of letting the NPC kill the quest target who we were interrogating, or let her go. Being a blood-thirsty Alliance I opted for the throat slitting, though outside of that quest there didn’t seem to be any recourse to my actions. I’ll be miffed if it turns out she comes back to you a week later and gives you a free epic for sparing her life.

Expect this to generate blog posts at the advent of Cataclysm much in the same way that Borean Tundra torture quest did two years ago. Money on the table!

Ret has a gap closer

I would recommend reading this post through something translucent and green, so you can capture the deep shade of envy I am currently possessed by. I log onto beta this morning and bring up my talent window to spec into a (finally working) ShoR. Just for the hell of it, I gloss over Ret’s talents and then proceeded to spit coffee all over my monitor.

Combined with:

So Judgement can be cast from 30 yards away, and gives a 30% movement speed increase if you’re at least 15 yards away. A pseudo-charge. A gap closer.

A frigging gap closer.

But why–WHY?!–does Ret keep getting all the cool toys and then putting them just out of range? As a tier 3 talent, Long Arm of the Law is impossible for Prot to reach, much like Rebuke. They are just taunting us at this point.

I’ll extend premature congratulations to Ret for the talent, and I hope it stays. I also hope it inches its way down the talent tree a bit to a lower tier.

Offspec Tank Loot Priorities

You know, I had a whole string of posts planned for today, but I got completely distracted by something I think you readers might find interesting instead.

Let’s discuss offspec tank gear and who gets priority.

A Story From My Past

Gather round, children, as Anafielle spins you a tale. I’d like to tell a little story about my old guild (called Brand New Day, on Drenden) and our troubles with the very first fight in ICC …. Marrogar 25.

When Brand New Day hit Marrogar for the first time, we used a 3 tank strategy. A lot was going wrong, but a disproportionately large number of wipes were to tank death. The MT and I were fine. But our third tank was a DPS warrior in a pretty weak tank set, and the healers just couldn’t keep him alive.

Our very first Marrogar kill took two weeks and no less than eight battle rezzes. I’m not even kidding. We had eight druids in the raid, and every single battle rez got used on a tank.

No problem. He’ll gear up, right?

But our third tank was DPS main spec – in fact, he would have been our first Shadowmourne recipient – and therefore he was “offspec” for tank gear.

Let me tell you. It’s really painful to face a fight like that, struggle with it as progression, struggle specifically with tank death, and then watch some beautiful offspec tank gear go to a healer’s bank set through the vagaries of RNG.

From Marrogar forth, Brand New Day quietly put an unofficial loot priority system in place. Throughout my time there in ICC25, our “third tank” quietly got priority on offspec tank loot. Several officers made a big deal out of passing loot to him on vent until no one had the guts to roll against him. The MT and I would even pass him sidegrades and make comments on vent like, “He needs this more.”

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Offspec Loot Priority: An Argument For It

When you only have two mainspec tanks, you’re going to occasionally run into a situation where your DPS offspecs will play a major role in your raid’s progression.

In an ideal world, offspec loot gets distributed evenly. Only people who will use their offspecs will bid on loot. But sometimes, that doesn’t happen. Sometimes you have to give someone priority. It really just depends on how many of your raiders are polite enough to distinguish between Druid #11′s fourth set and your raid’s desperate third progression tank.

It may not be entirely fair, but it’s true. If your progression is dependent on someone’s offspec gear, you have a vested interest in making sure that offspec gets geared up.

Offspec Loot Priority: An Argument Against It.

Loot priority is entirely reasonable when it affects your progression. But in my opinion, this is the only time when it should occur. Even if someone is tanking that week – even if someone ends up tanking a whole lot of the time – even if someone is a totally excellent person who I like, and who I enjoy tanking with – my personal opinion is that they shouldn’t get priority over other, raid-capable offspec tanks.

I’m complaining, in a really circular way, about a very minor loot issue last night. Since I’m a super pro Bitcher and Moaner, I decided to hop up on my soapbox – well, alright, I decided to take over Rhidach’s soapbox – and write a big long post about it. Even though it was probably a very minor error or a reasonable part of the loot rules that I just didn’t know.

Anyways. It begs an interesting question!

How many guilds have done the same thing? Prioritized someone’s offspec tank set in some kind of official or unofficial way?

Opinion of the Reader

Am I crazy for thinking this is reasonable sometimes? Am I crazy for thinking this is unreasonable sometimes?

How about you?

Do you have enough mainspec tanks that all tank positions are filled by mainspec tanks, or do your DPS end up tanking a fair bit in raids? Have you ever given certain offspec tanks in your raid priority on loot?

Let’s hear it!

My Huge Ego & Festergut 25H

If Rhidach was here, he’d do a raid report and tell you all sorts of interesting and useful things about our raid last night. I’m sure a lot of people reading this blog would be really interested to know about things like how we turned Heroic Lady Deathwhisper from a tough progression fight into a relatively easy 2 shot, or why Heroic Saurfang suddenly gave us 5 wipes worth of trouble when we’d been farming him for weeks.

Fortunately, he’s not here. Instead, we’re going to discuss something much, much more important.

My Festergut 25H DPS.

Festergut Is My Favorite Fight

I sat in vent a few hours ago and mourned to my raid that I’d never rank on WOL for prot pally DPS because we’re not killing Festergut 25H at the right time. I wish he died earlier. My average DPS would be through the roof if he died before my buff wears off. Unfortunately, we still need 4 minutes and 11 seconds to kill his ass dead, and in that time my average dies along with my hopes of eventually joining the super exclusive Maintankadin Really Badass Paladin Club. They’re having a party at the top of the WOL rankings, and I am totally not invited.

My e-peen suffers greatly from this injustice.

Last night, before we pulled, I basically told the DPS to whoop it out and put on their awesomesauce pants so my ass could rank. They were Not Amused. Some clever wit pointed out to me that whooping it out and putting on pants were mutually exclusive activities. How the hell would I know? Who raids in pants, anyways?

Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about lust. Obviously the optimal time to pop lust is just after the tank swap, although my silly raid seems to believe that it makes the most sense at the beginning (when I am not buffed) or at the end (when I am also not buffed). Really?

Last night, no one called for it and we forgot to pop lust altogether. What kind of unobservant fool was main tanking that raid?

Well, I managed 9k DPS anyways.

Gear Swapping: A Serious Note

I, unlike my 11/12 and 12/12 ICC 25H bretheren, can’t swap out that much gear on this fight.

We still, sadly, have occasional issues with Fester 25H. Very rarely, but they happen. I recall an all too recent enrage timer wipe ending with a single live paladin and a vent full of dry comments along the lines of, “Farm!” “Totally on farm.” “Good thing Festergut’s on farm.” He is on farm. But anything can happen.

If I joke about forgetting to take off my threat gear, I’m lying through my teeth. I have a specific Festergut 25 set. I make each non-survivability-based gear choice with great care, knowing full well that if I die, it’s my own damn fault and I owe the whole raid repair fees as well as an apology for wasted time. Every itemization point I pull out of armor or stamina to devote to expertise, hit, or strength is a bit of effective health that could save my ass if some recruit mage or hunter decides to be go be BFF with the tank healers during a Vile Gas. Yes, I know this. So despite my joking about Festergut 25H and threat gear, I think hard about being conservative.

The major gear changes I recall making from an armor centric set: Bloodvenom Blade, 264 expertise boots (which I usually wear anyways), 277 hit pants (one of the most convenient places for me personally to find hit), some tank neck with expertise on it, the +200 str libram, and DMC:G in place of one of my armor trinkets. This puts me hitcapped and 32 expertise. Nothing special. I could hardcap my expertise if I threw on the TOGC expertise trinket, but Festergut hits pretty hard. I wore the Putricide 10H armor/stam proc trinket instead.

I consider this a poor man’s threat set – regular tank gear with some strength procs mixed in. I dream of wearing a Big Numbers set on Festergut 25H, but my AD proccing at the end of last night’s battle says “ROFL! Not gonna happen.” Look, a girl can dream…

Back To The Details

So I broke 9k dps. This is nothing special compared to the incredible numbers some of my cohorts can muster, but I was fairly happy with it.

On the plus side, I did beat two dps, which warms the cockles of my black and cheerless tank heart. Every time a tank beats a DPS, I fully believe said tank should take a shot. (Hey, tanks with threat sets…. I expect this rule to be followed.)

Good thing I only had Rotface 25H left to do. Big ooze kiting really requires at least one stiff drink. “Hey, you, in the dress, turn around! WHY ARE YOU RUNNING THAT WAY? COME BACK HERE! What, are we doing the achievement and no one told me? OH GOD VILE GAS–” *chug*

I uploaded the logs later last night. When I was done cursing my logs addon at great length for failing yet again to record Halion, I noticed to my great delight that my name was sitting on the right side of the Dashboard. I ranked! I really did! #194, baby!

I honestly thought I’d never do that on 25H. Alright, so it was 194th, but I’m pleased beyond measure that there are only 193 protection paladins among the guilds uploading to World of Logs between myself and Meloree’s extensively theorycrafted and simmed 16k dps in the #1 spot.

What’s that, you say? There are probably no more than 200 different guilds uploading to WOL who are running Fester 25H with paladins as first tanks? Goddamnit. I was just starting to feel like a special snowflake.

edit: I just checked the logs again and between last night & right now, I’ve been knocked out of the top 200. Hold on, be right back, crying in a corner. I’m serious, I almost cried, here at work. I have to do better next week!

Threat Gear and Taunts

Another guest post from Anafielle while Rhidach is gone on vacation! Soon, you will forget this blog ever belonged to Rhidach! I mean, except for the domain name…

I’m working on a true, Wrathy-style threat set.

Working on it. I always say I’m working on it. I’ve been saying this for months.

I keep telling Rhidach I’ll have one soon. That he should live in fear of my threat set because one day, very soon, he will never tank a single trash mob again. The mobs will run away in fear of my threat set. I’ll just look at them meanly and their threatplates will turn from angry red to beautiful, soothing green. Tactician stuns and Vile Spirit silences won’t stop this threat set. Nothing will stop it. His desperate taunts will bounce harmlessly off the omen lead I will have on everything unfortunate enough to be within my melee range.

And so on.

Craving a Real Threat Set

I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill tank set. I have a threat optimized set. Every tank should. By “optimized,” I mean “tank gear gemmed and enchanted for survival that happens to have good threat stats.” This set involves Bloodvenom Blade, DMC:G, and carefully chosen pieces of gear that grant me high expertise and capped hit. I wear it for most everything except progression. Tanking Heroic Festergut 25 in this set “by accident” is one of my favorite things to do.

No, I’m talking about a threat set specifically gemmed and enchanted for the purpose of threat. I want one of THOSE. A real, completely threat-centered set of gear. Wrathy detailed his here, and I’ve had a bad case of tank envy ever since. (This happens to me a lot when I read Wrathy’s blog.)

Look at that badass gemming. Optimized enchants. I want it. I want it badly. I have that post bookmarked. I’ve talked for months about making a set like this.

Yet I don’t have one yet.

I have so much gear, perfect for this purpose. But I … I … I just haven’t quite gotten up the guts to gem with (gulp) strength.

I keep pulling stuff out of the bank, staring at it, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I can feel everyone who ever taught me how to tank, standing over my shoulder, looking down disapprovingly. I look at a red gem, but then, something inside me says, “You’re really going to put that THERE? Really?”

There’s no reason why I’m reluctant. I’m not using that gear for anything else. I have enough gold to experiment with gems. I am smart enough to know when NOT to wear a set like this.

It’s just so… hard. So against the grain.

That voice, in my ear! “Really. You’re not REALLY going to put that strength gem in that gear, were you? Were you, Ana? Doesn’t that blue one look so much more inviting? Wouldn’t this piece be more useful with stamina?”

I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the guts. I just can’t deviate from my usual gemming practices. I’m not nearly as badass as Wrathy. I don’t have the guts to experiment.

I resign my membership from the Cool Tanks Who Experiment With Gear Club.

Who Needs a Threat Set When You Have Two Taunts?

Rhidach will tell you that I don’t really need a threat set, considering how often I taunt trash off him. Vent is always full of my apologies and excuses, ranging from the fairly reasonable to the completely ridiculous.

“I have a quick trigger finger!”
“I saw that one turn red, and I taunted.”
“I totally thought that one was mine.”
“What? Didn’t you tell me to go left?”
“East? What is this east shit? Wait, I need to get out my compass.”
“Shit!! I hit RD on the wrong mob.”
“Well, I was trying to save that poor ret pally!”

I don’t know what happened. I never used to taunt this much. I blame… trash.

The biggest culture shock, coming to Enveloping Shadows from my old guild, was trash. I went from neatly (obsessively?) marked pulls to AE fests full of aggro everywhere. Half our DPS have never heard of an assist macro and the other half seem to take great pleasure in DPSing precisely the mobs we are not currently trying to hold threat on. I find myself always craving assist so I can mark the mob I’m tanking – and I promise, I am smart enough to be paying attention to the logical next kill target – in the vague and completely misplaced hope that the DPS might find it in their heart to kill that one next. More often than not, I spend a lot of time running around.

So I have, somehow, gotten into a habit of taunting way too much on trash.

I’m particularly bad on Blood Wing trash. I usually taunt Rhi’s mobs off him when he gets stunned, which I feel is Appropriate Offtank Behavior. But then, the DPS will have pulled the OTHER things I was tanking off me. I have to chase THEM. Then the Tactician is free, and I taunt him… oh, Rhi’s not stunned anymore? I totally forgot about him.

I recently realized my taunting had definitely crossed the line between “honest mistake” and “really inappropriate”, and started making a serious, serious effort to be really careful not to RD any of his targets.

We were moving through Blood Wing a week or two ago, and vent was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment or two. Then Rhi says suddenly, into the silence, in a really exasperated tone: “Is Anafielle dead or something? She hasn’t taunted off me in a while.”

Excuse me while I go crawl in a corner and die.

Tanking Halion

Another guest post from Anafielle while Rhidach is gone! You get to deal with me all week…. so, like I always tell my 10 man, get excited!!

Several of us popped in to see Heroic Halion 10 last night.

Although the other tank was a DPS on a pally alt, he was the more experienced shadow side tank. He tanked Shadow Side earlier this week & they decided to leave him with it. This left me up in the physical realm.

Physical side tanking sucks when you are a massive control freak, like I am. I firmly believe every tank has a bit of control freak in them somewhere…

You get to sit there while the raid wipes on the hardest part of the fight… doing absolutely nothing except staring at raid frames. NOTHING. Last night, I couldn’t even really tab out to complain to twitter or walk away to get a beer (umm… definitely things I have not done while tanking normal 25) because the void zones persist in both phases. God knows the moment I looked away, someone would spawn a void zone under me and I’d die.

Shadow Side Tanking (normal)

I’m going to pause to complain a little here about our Normal Mode strat.

For Normal Halion, the strat we use involves constantly spinning the dragon throughout phase 2 and 3. The tank keeps the single orb we can see on the dragon’s left hip, which means the other orb is over the tank’s left shoulder – this in general keeps the beam at a good angle through the dragon the whole time. But we turn him throughout this phase, not just when the orbs are about to activate.

Learning how to do this was…. fun. Yeah, that’s the word. Listening to Rhidach on vent figuring out how to turn constantly at the right speed certainly was fun. It’s got to be that “talk me off the ledge,” panicked tone in his voice sometimes.

I find it way too amusing when he panics & try to cause it as much as possible. I know, I know, I’m such a good offtank.

Then he left me All Alone a few weeks ago, before we’d killed Halion, and I had to do it myself. I failed miserably. Not going to lie. It was probably the most miserable failure I’d ever encountered in my time tanking. I did just about everything wrong that could possibly go wrong. I even lost threat to some DPS. So embarrassing….

So. End result – our normal mode Halion strat is hard on tanks. At least, hard on these two pally tanks. While the jury is still out on me, Rhidach knows his freakin’ shit when it comes to tanking. When I take a while to figure something out, I assume I’m just slow or stupid. When Rhidach takes a while to figure something out, that something is probably overly complicated. My assumption is that our Halion strat is overly complicated.

But in the end, this is how we learned the fight, and we both have learned how to do it now. So why fix what’s broke? That’s how we do it.

Shadow Side Tanking (heroic)

Unlike normal mode, on heroic our tank doesn’t constantly turn the dragon. Rather, the tank sits still and repositions the dragon as needed right before the cutters activate.

The other tank told me – and I firmly believe it – that this is so, so much simpler and much easier than the constant turning we do on normal mode. In fact, he told me he had no trouble tanking heroic once he’d learned where to watch. Then the raid switched to normal and he had a ton of trouble with our “constantly turns” strat and never quite got the hang of it.

I’d heard from twitter (always an excellent source of information – and I’m not kidding) that most people who do Normal Mode also sit still for as long as possible & only turn when they’re positioning for beam activation.

Boy, that sure would be nice.

Tank Overruled

After wiping a few hours on heroic, we switched the raid back to normal. I wanted to try the “Not Moving A Whole Lot” strat on 10, but the whole 10 man raid nixed me.

“The beam will be in the wrong place!” they said. “You get four reference points on Heroic. It’s much easier. But you only get two reference points on normal. It’s not worth repositioning the dragon right just for the cutters. You’ll tail swipe someone or something.”

I wasn’t leading the raid. I didn’t want to push 9 people into something new, seeing as they’d just wiped in the shadow realm for two hours while I /danced with void zones up top. I shut up and readied my strafe keys.

Honestly, now that I have figured out how to constantly turn, it’s not TOO bad… it still sucks though. I have figured out how to do my normal rotation while turning constantly, which is something I really should never have fucked up in the first place. I still need to practice strafing in a perfect circle. I stopped and started a lot, and it’s a good thing I’m way overgeared because I got hit by the beam at least once.

I really hate this fight.

I want to see Shadow Side on Heroic, mostly because I’m a lazy tank and I can’t wait to sit my ass down a little and rest between cutters in phase 2 and 3.

Team Bravo: A History

Welcome to another guest post by Anafielle! Rhidach is gone on vacation again and forgot to remove my guest posting privileges. Righteous Defense is mine! All mine! Be warned, the beta coverage is temporarily suspended in his absence. In his place, I’d like to talk about one of my favorite topics – 10 man raiding.

I lead a 10 man, something I stress out about on twitter all the time. I actually lead the second 10 man in the guild, while Rhidach leads the first. These raids are called Team Bravo and Team Alpha, respectively. Despite our names, my raid is actually the more progressed of the two.

How did this happen? Oh, this is one of my favorite topics…

A 25 Man Guild with Two Tens

Like many casual-progression 25 man raiding guilds, Enveloping Shadows has long had an unofficial “officer” 10 man. Rhidach leads and MTs it, and mostly takes the officers and a few top DPS. For a long time, this was the only solid guild 10 man.

There was no real second 10 before I arrived. Several of the DPS had tried to start one, but they never quite got enough tanks and ran into troubles. There was, before I came, a fair amount of resentment focused on Rhidach’s 10 as the only successful 10 man. “They steal all the best players,” “They don’t care about the rest of us,” “They have all the guild tanks” (this was true), etc etc.

Enter Anafielle ….. I randomly appeared on the server, a mainspec tank just as geared as Rhidach, and one of the first things I told the guild was, “Hey, I like 10s. Is there a 10 man that needs a tank?” Needless to say, within hours of my server transfer I was approached by a bunch of people about the “second” 10 man.

Thus a second guild 10 man raid was born. The “officer” 10 became known as Team Alpha and my “second” 10 became inevitably known as … Team Bravo.

The Team B Underdogs

We were the underdogs from the start. No officers. Scattered schedules. A rotating roster that never looked the same from week to week. Even our name meant Team B. Fueled by passion and stopped by nothing, full of righteous indignation from months of watching Team Alpha get 10 man progression kill after progression kill, my raid started out like a beat up rebel with something to prove. We had a chip on our shoulder the size of Texas and a nasty streak as wide as the Mississippi river.

The DPS in my raid knew they were good. They had all spent time at the top of Recount. They knew they had the capability to get all those achievements – they’d just never had an organized raid to do it with. I was less a leader and more a guide, funneling their skill into useful accomplishments.

Our First Big Kill

I still remember our first progression kill. I carefully stacked my first Team Bravo raid for Heroic Saurfang specifically because I knew Rhidach’s officer 10 hadn’t downed the fight. (Me? Competitive? Nooo.) I picked out the top ranged DPS I could, spent so much time learning the strat, and carefully assigned CC and kill targets.

When we killed H Saurfang, I went wild with glee. It was a guild first! A GUILD FIRST! TAKE THAT, TEAM ALPHA!

I barely knew Rhidach at this point. He’d just recently trusted me with his cell phone number in case of emergencies. I knew I couldn’t misuse this power. Giving an Internet E-Friend your cell phone number can be dangerous and is definitely a sign of trust. But, in my euphoria, I had to brag to him and he was rude enough to be offline. So I took a screenshot of our kill, labeled it in big obnoxious letters “WE WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!”, transferred it to my cell phone and text messaged him with it.

Man, I’m such an asshole!

Team Bravo, The ES Progression 10

Over the last few months, despite setbacks, Team Bravo has risen to glory. We have gotten almost every single recent guild 10 man first. Most importantly, three weeks ago, Team Bravo achieved Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

It hasn’t been a completely smooth ride for Team Bravo. We’ve suffered from all sorts of ups and downs. I’ve personally fucked up all manner of things, from scheduling to simple Raid Awareness issues to leadership decisions like how we do a fight. Scheduling has really been the worst – our roster has rotated a ton over the last few months. Only now are we settling down into something approaching a regular schedule and roster. And still, I struggle with it… I’ll have to do a whole blog post on this, because scheduling a raid is the absolute bane of my existence as a raid leader.

Anyways. Our glory and success.

Team Alpha vs Team Bravo

I’m under no illusions – Team Alpha has often not run, and has been very casual about the fights they hit. It’s hard to be proud of beating someone who’s not really fighting back. They really only started focusing when we started beating them!

By contrast, Team Bravo was very, very focused. We started basically from scratch, but we had our eye on the goal from Day One. This is probably my fault – I was absolutely obsessed with getting my drake. A 10 man drake was my private dream, and I was not shy about telling everyone that I planned to get it for myself and for everyone around me. The 10 man was my personal vehicle for the drake. I privately thought of it as a fair trade – I would MT and lead for them, and my raid in turn would carry me to a pretty skeleton mount.

We finally made it. It took a lot of work, but three weeks ago we triumphed over All You Can Eat and Heroic Putricide (our last two hurdles) and scored our drakes.

And then, of course, we went back again over the last 2 weeks and killed pretty much every fight a second time to finish drakes for everyone who’d worked with us. I had always been very clear about my promise of drakes for everyone who was there for “the hardest fights”, and I spent a very long time carefully planning our last two weeks of raids to finish drakes for everyone I could manage. A raid is a team, and I was determined not to leave anyone out.

Amazing. Absolutely phenomenal. I look at my raiders and their drake, and despite the 30% buff… it feels like a real accomplishment. I feel really happy to have helped us achieve something really great, something indicative of hours and hours of work!

I have learned a ton about raiding, raid leading, management, and scheduling from my raid. And despite the stressing out I do about leading… my nights with Team Bravo are, without a doubt, the most fun I have during the week.

More Posts!

So, as you can tell, 10 man raiding is one of my favorite topics. While Rhidach is gone, you can expect some posts from me on 10 man strategies and a very long Drake Achievement guide for those of you trying to work your way to some pretty mounts. Stay tuned for more fun stuff!

ShoR is such a tease

I finally managed to re-download enough of the beta (we all had to delete the old beta program and reinstall for the new launcher) to get in, and the thought of testing out the new Shield of the Righteous (new name or they forgot what it was called–you decide!) had me salivating. Once I got in–after many abortive attempts–I caught a taxi to the closest Paladin trainer in Darnassus to train the new ShoR, per the instructions in my spellbook.

So I get there, head into the Temple of the Moon, and hit up the trainer. “One ShoR please,” I politely requested. She just stared at me, dumbfounded.

… That ain’t right. I check the spellbook again, and it definitely says “See your trainer.” I then opened my talent window and spotted what I spotted was the culprit: you have to talent into ShoR. Ok, no biggie. I put the point in, hit Learn, and nothing happens. I close the talent window and reopen it, and half my talents are reset. I try again to no avail, it was not meant to be.

Apparently it’s for the best I couldn’t test ShoR as-is on beta, it’s changing very shortly. Right now the tooltip reads damage is 3250 plus 100% of your attack power per Holy Power stack. So unless there’s some trickery in that tooltip description, with an unbuffed AP of 3073, I could have been shield slamming for 12469, assuming the formula is 3250+(AP*HP) and not (3250+AP)*HP. The latter would be 18969, which is ridiculous.

Sidenote: the 3250 modifier there is because I’m level 81, I believe. MMO-Champ has it at 3198, which is probably the level 80 version.

Anyway, here’s the new tooltip from what I assume is an internal build we haven’t seen yet:

Slam the target with your shield, causing Holy damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to determine damage dealt:

1 Holy Power: 30% Attack Power
2 Holy Power: 60% Attack Power
3 Holy Power: 90% Attack Power

So much for the quickly expired statement that ShoR would be our “highest damage ability”. At three stacks and 90% attack power, I seriously doubt it’ll hit harder then Avenger’s Shield right off the bat. Maybe with buffs and enough Vengeance and some raid gear. Obviously I won’t know til I test it, so take that concern with a grain of salt.

On a different note, I think they need to graduate the AP contributions a little more steeply. With an equal AP contribution per stack of Holy Power, I can forsee a future where (assuming we still have free GCDs) it’ll be more threat to hit ShoR at 2 HP, rather than waiting for the accumulation of a max HP stack. Though my crystal ball can’t yet see how much value there’d be to sacrificing 5% block for some more damage and threat. Perhaps if they changed it to something like 20/50/90, where you’d definitely want to wait for that 3rd stack.

Anyway, it’s all conjecture! Can you sense how much I’m itching to shield slam something?

A night of frost and glory

Interestingly enough, I haven’t done a raid recap post in a long while. Nothing much to report lately–we’ve been plugging along on Heroic Sindragosa, having our first real night on her last night. Our showing wasn’t very impressive, we’re having some trouble with the whole buffet of what the fight demands: block positioning, Unchained Magic people not blowing others up, etc. Survival issues.

So, I’m thinking next week we’ll do what we did when we were learning normal Sindragosa: max survivability. DPS wears extra frost resist gear, add a seventh healer, then the goal is to live til the enrage timer. Once we make it that far we’ll dial back survivability until we can find the sweet spot that gets us in under the clock.

This is a strong contrast to last night with our second kill of Heroic LDW where we were mastering the hardest parts of the fight, people were failing at the easiest, most fundamental part of the fight: the ghosts. A ghost would pop up next to someone–melee, ranged, heals, whatever–and they wouldn’t notice til it exploded, or notice late and not be able to get away. We did about four attempts of differing degrees of success, each splashed with the delightful stench of ghost ‘splosions, and each time I got a little closer to completely Franking out. (Yes, it’s a verb now.)

Finally, before the last attempt I snapped and let Frank take over. I told everyone that we were not going to spend two hours on the fight. I don’t care if we wipe, but it was not going to be to ghosts. Everyone was on notice, one more ghost-induced wipe and we would switching it to normal and move on. I felt like crap after declaring that, cause I don’t want to be that raid leader, the Troxxed-style douchebag that issues ultimatums and leads by making people feel bad.

Frank was vindicated when we then went on to perfectly kill H LDW, with no deaths by ghosts. It was… shocking. I don’t know if I should feel good that we pulled it off, or worse that it could so easily be done. I guess we’ll see next week!

Anyway, back to last night. As I tweeted yesterday we were starting the night with our Shadowmourne guy, Nordicslayer, having 48 shards. He’s been collecting them slowly, but surely, since May 11th and we’ve had the extra drop chance of heroic modes since the beginning of June. His poor luck aside, the raid was pumped for him to finally finish the damn axe that night. Or to listen to him cry when he only got one shard from the five bosses we were doing. Either way.

Much to my surprise, a shard dropped off of heroic Festergut, first boss of the night. And then the last one he needed dropped off of heroic Rotface. Finally, some luck!

A parade of us then ran downstairs to watch him turn in the quest and the shards and finally collect his damn axe. Nevertheless, this was months in the making–congratulations Nordicslayer!

I tried to get a nice screenshot of him for the guild site, but he must have moved at the last second, only leaving behind the swirling soul that apparently used to inhabit Antigen’s mortal shell.

We reached Sindragosa at around 7:45 server time, giving us a good 2 hours or so to work on the fight. But you know the rest.

To give us a break, I switched it to normal and we dropped her easily and then moved on to the Lich King to collect the Sealed Chest. The Lich King was another clean kill, excellent for the second wave of dpsers getting dropped off the side of the map. Oops. Personally, I was most excited that that was the first time in a long time I didn’t have to go into a rambling 10 minute explanation of the fight for some new person. I’m sure everyone else was pretty stoked about that too.

Nordic looted the Sealed Chest, and per our agreement he kept one of the vanity items for himself and gave the other four up for the guild. He chose the mount, I took three items to hold to give as prizes in a series of off-night guild events/games, and then per my constant nagging requests over the last four months, took the tabard for myself.

It’s weird. Achieving Shadowmourne feels like we’re turning the page on one of the last chapters in ICC. I know we still have Heroic Sindragosa to kill, then Putricide–and then by some miracle a choir of angels is going to come down and push Arthas off the side of the Frozen Throne for us–but it feels like we’re running out of time in there. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get some major ennui about ICC. Not bad ennui (if there’s such a thing), just… 9 months is a long time to do an instance, you know? It’s time to move on to bigger Internet dragons.

But then again, we have a much more literal Internet dragon to work on right now.

Sidenote on the latest beta build: I’m not going to do too much prodding with the changes, because we know things will be majorly changing again soon. I will however check out how hard ShoR is hitting for tonight. I’m hoping to have a post titled “IT’S OVER 9000″ tomorrow.

Cooldowns and Forbearance on Beta

I’m sure folks have some questions about our menu of cooldowns in the next expansion pack: what’s available to us, when can we use them, how much do they mitigate, and (most importantly) is that terrible debuff Forbearance still in-game.

To answer the last question first, I am saddened to report Forbearance still survives, much like the UFO over Houston, post-nuking, in Independence Day. Target remains.

On the bright side, from what I could tell Divine Protection and Ardent Defender do not trigger it and can be used while your are afflicted with Forbearance. So finally (well, for now, don’t pop the champagne yet) we’re not the only tank locked out of our defensive cooldowns if one is used.

I am also happy to report that Ardent Defender (like Divine Protection right now) is off the GCD, so you can pop it at any point. Likewise I noticed that you can pop Divine Protection and Ardent Defender at the same time, though I’m not sure you would want to since the damage mitigation wouldn’t stack. I could only see doing that if you needed AD’s safety net and had buyer’s remorse from popping DP first.

Which brings me to my next point–the low cooldown on Divine Protection is pretty nice and I suspect will require a major attitude shift when it comes to survival. I’m thinking the model will in the future be something like Ardent Defender is popped as an “oh crap” button and Divine Protection is used as close to once per minute (if the minute cooldown holds) as possible to reduce damage taken over the duration of the fight and thus conserve healer mana. If the boss has predictable, regular damage spikes that would be the best point for it.

As always, standard beta disclaimer applies: everything can change!

On a slightly different note: I mentioned in an earlier post that Holy Shield was bugged on beta. Sometimes it would give 1.5% at 3 Holy Power stacks, sometimes 180%. Never 15%!

Last night while doing a few quick quests, I popped HS and hit 2013% bonus block chance. A minute later I pulled 1347%. I think at that point I was meta-blocking.