Everything you need to know about Prot and 4.0.1 at 80

With mmo-champion announcing that they think patch 4.0.1 is dropping either next week or the week after, we need to come to terms with the imminent cataclysm about to strike our beloved spec. Prot will be changed forever and these changes will hit well before we first set foot on Hyjal or Vashj’ir. Many of us will continue to raid ICC, or other dungeons, in this new system, and it’s critical to be on top of all these changes so you can hit the ground running.

With that in mind I have compiled below a massive list of all the major changes being afflicted upon us in the upcoming patch. This list is also specifically compiled for the perspective of someone at level 80, so I’ll be leaving out a lot of the stuff we know about 81-85. Please let me know if I missed anything!

This is all so very–very–subject to change.

The big one: Holy Power

Probably the biggest single change to our class. Holy Power is a brand new resource system that will govern our rotation and open up a “finisher”-like move that we’ll need to boost threat or survivability. To briefly overview the system, HP appears as a bar of glyphs underneath your portrait. Every time you use Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous you gain a charge of Holy Power.

It caps at three, and once you have at least one stack you can use one of three finishers. Finishers get more powerful depending on how much Holy Power you have. Once you expend any amount of Holy Power you will gain the Holy Shield effect for 15 seconds, increasing block chance by 15% (percent is regardless of how much HP you spent to gain it).

Holy Power stacks also slowly disappear when out of combat at a rate of 1 HP per 10 seconds. You can use critters feasibly to keep this rolling out of combat.

Other mechanics changes

Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous are now exclusive, you can only use one or the other. Crusader strike deals 120% weapon damage (so slower weapons means bigger hits by CS) and that amount is further increased by talents and the prime CS glyph. Hammer of the Righteous deals 30% weapon damage to your primary target and then a Holy AOE hitting every enemy immediately around you.

Holy Shield, like I said above, applies when you expend any amount of Holy Power on a finisher. It’s worth 15% block chance on top of what you gain from Mastery, gear, etc.

We have three abilities that expend Holy Power: Shield of the Righteous, Word of Glory, and Inquisition.

• Shield of the Righteous deals a large, large amount of damage in a single attack. This is our single biggest hitting attack, a freight train of pain. Be sure to delight in the big numbers. If it is dodged, missed, or parried you will not expend any Holy Power. ShoR is best used when you are competing with DPS for threat on a single target, or have no imminent issues with incoming heals.
• Word of Glory is an instant heal which should invariably only be used on yourself. The talent Guarded by the Light modifies the spell so that any overhealing is converted to an absorption effect, meaning that no self-healing is ever wasted. At level 80 this probably won’t heal for much because our stamina (and thus attack power via Vengeance) will be much lower than it will be at 85. WoG is best used if you have a large threat lead and need a quick heal.
• Inquisiton boosts Holy damage dealt by 30% for 4 seconds per HP stack expended, maxing out at 12 seconds. This is best used when AOE tanking as it will increase your damage/threat from HotR, Consecrate, and Holy Wrath, among other abilities. (Note: As kaanman36 points out in the comments, this ability is not available until level 81. Still worthy of keeping in mind for the time being.)

Blessings are completely redone. Blessing of Sanctuary is gone (with the mana gain effect rolled into the talent Sanctuary), Blessing of Wisdom and Might are combined into the new Blessing of Might, and Blessing of Kings is now only worth 5% but increases magic resistances as well. Clicking your Blessing button once will automatically buff all party or raid members for one hour.

Auras have been revamped slightly as well, in that effects are generally the same, but all the resistance auras have been rolled into one Resistance Aura to rule them all.

The ability Touched by the Light (gained by speccing into prot) now automatically provides 6% spell hit. That means when melee hit capped we will be spell hit capped at well. This negates the new for a Glyph of Righteous Defense, which has been removed.

Righteous Fury now increases the threat generated by all abilities by 200%. This is an increase from the 80% we have now on Live, and has also been changed to apply to physical damage as well. It also has the most helpful tooltip ever.

Forbearance only limits Hand of Protection and Divine Shield now. Divine Protection and Ardent Defender are not prevented by it, nor do they activate it.

Speccing Sanctuary (3/3) now reduces chance to be crit by 6%, and thus Defense is removed.

A successful Block reduces damage taken from that attack by 30%. Not subject to Block Value anymore. Nor does that stat exist anymore.

New mechanics

Vengeance increases your attack power by 5% of damage taken up to a maximum of 10% of your health. To pull numbers out of my butt, with, say, 50k hp fully buffed one can expect an additional 5k attack power. Which would be a 108% increase over my current 4614 attack power. Assuming say 20k hits in ICC, we’re looking at capping Vengeance within 5 hits or so. Of course, the major downside is that Vengeance very quickly degrades out of combat and your full stack will be gone within seconds.

Judgements, thanks to Judgements of the Wise, gives mana back every time you judge. We put up a self-replenishment that restores 25% of base mana over the course of 10 seconds. This will negate the need for a rolling, perpetual Divine Plea. There is also only one Judgement spell now.

Spell changes

Seal of Command is gone and along with it the snap aggro it generated.

Seal of Corruption/Vengeance is now called Seal of Truth. Same mechanics, though different numbers. We still put up a dot that stacks to 5. It is still our primary tanking seal.

Consecration now only lasts 10 seconds and has a cooldown of 30 seconds. Duration can be modified by talents and the glyph. Mana cost for Consecration is now ridiculous, 55% of base mana. This is cut by 80% when fully talented, but mana might not be maxing out the talent in single-target threat builds. Be careful not to spam this and generally only save it for AOE.

Holy Wrath now hits all mobs, but still stuns Demons and Undead. Can by glyphed to also stun Elementals and Dragonkin. Holy Wrath has a set damage amount that splits based on how many mobs it hits, so you can use it for single target or for AOE.

Divine Protection now only reduces damage taken by 20% for 10 seconds, but has a 1 minute cooldown. It’s basically Holy Barkskin now. This can be glyphed to reduce physical damage reduction to 0% but boost magical damage reduction to 40%, which means that the spell has two uses: (1) as a cooldown to pop for major magic damage fights with predictable burst, or (2) to roll constantly on cooldown to reduce damage taken over the course of a fight. It’s not really an “oh crap” cooldown any more. Off the GCD.

Divine Shield‘s duration was cut to 8 seconds (thus killing Bubble Hearth for good).

Ardent Defender is now an on-click ability. Reduces damage taken by 20% for 10 seconds and gives you the guardian spirit effect for the duration. If the effect procs, you gain 15% health back rather than 10%. There is no associated damage-reduced under 35% health effect. AD is the appropriate “oh crap” button. 3 minute cooldown (reduced by talents). Off the GCD.

Divine Guardian still reduces raid damage by 20%, but does not apply to the caster (and thus can’t be used as a tank cooldown anymore). Also doesn’t redirect damage to the caster, so we can shelve those macros.

Stat changes

Agility no longer gives armor, only crit and dodge now.

Strength now gives parry, in addition to attack power. Also does not give block value anymore.

Thanks to Plate Specialization we get 5% free stamina from wearing all plate pieces. Not that that was ever an issue.

Our Mastery, Divine Bulwark, gives 16% block chance off the bat, and an additional 2% per point of Mastery (not rating). Mastery is trainable from your class trainers at 80, so make grabbing this one of the first things you do.

Armor (at least, bonus armor) was nerfed pretty harshly. Expect to see your precious armor gutted the first time you log into the post-4.0.1 world and re-evaluate pieces accordingly.

Procs!

We have two procs to watch for, Grand Crusader and Sacred Duty.

• Grand Crusader has a power auras-esque effect, so it’s hard to miss, but nonetheless it resets the cooldown on your Avenger’s Shield. Can be procced by the used of Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous.
  Right now GC is only really useful in AOE circumstances. At present damage values, Avenger’s Shield is a threat loss if used instead of Crusader Strike/Hammer of the Righteous, Judgement, or ShoR. Don’t even bother speccing this in a pure single-target spec.
• Sacred Duty only alerts use with a red Judgement of Justice-like icon on our buffs frame. If you see this it guarantees a crit on Shield of the Righteous for the next 15 seconds. Do your best to match up ShoR with one of these procs.

Rotation?

Speaking of a rotation, 969 is dead. Moment of silence, please.

However, in it’s place, we have 939. Ugh.

Refer to the rotation detailed in this post for single target. Basically we have a priority system of 3HP ShoR > CS > J > AS > HW. Consecrate can be substituted for Holy Wrath, mana allowing, since it’s approximately a 60 dps increase. With a 3-second CS, that means that even other attack is CS, and then you follow with the highest-dps ability in the queue. (Source.)

For AOE, use HotR, HW, AS, and Consecrate to hold threat. Grand Crusader can be helpful here.

How I will spec

I’m planning to have two Prot specs, one for single-target/survival (aka, bosses) and one for AOE fights/trash/Gunship defense.

For bosses, something like this.

For trash, something like this.

If you want just one prot spec, this is probably the best choice.

Reckoning will be worth having, and not just because physical attacks are now affected by Righteous Fury. Moreover, it (unlike the WotLK iteration) gets better as you stack Mastery, which is great.

Divinity might also raise some eyebrows, but in the brave new world of Cataclysm encounters where healer mana will matter and damage taken will be slower, you’ll want that extra oomph. It will also benefit Word of Glory by double dipping for a healing increase.

I’m skipping Improved Hand of Justice because there just isn’t the budget room for it in a non-specialized spec. Same deal with Eternal Glory where the proc design and the possible infrequency of WoG use will limit its benefit.

How I will glyph

Assuming all glyphs from the beta make it over to Live during 4.0.1, then I’ll go with the following deck depending on what spec I’m using:

For single-target

Prime: Glyph of Seal of Truth, Glyph of Shield of the Righteous, Glyph of Judgement
Major: Glyph of Focused Shield, Glyph of the Ascetic Crusader, Glyph of Consecration

For trash

Prime: Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous, Glyph of Shield of the Righteous, Glyph of Seal of Truth.
Major: Glyph of Consecration, Glyph of Dazing Shield, Glyph of Turn Evil (for ICC utility)

Honestly though, these are approximate guesses of which glyphs will translate to the most TPS. I expect that any imminent theorycrafting will shuffle this list around a tad.

I’m also going to keep a Glyph of Divine Protection handy for Sindragosa-esque fights.

For both, Minors will be Lay on Hands, Truth, and Kings.

Reforging at 80

Something I’ve seen listed elsewhere which I think has a lot of merit (and thus I recommend) would be to, upon training Mastery, reforge your gear away from Dodge or Parry (whichever s higher) to Mastery. At current gear ratings and our level, we’re going to have steep diminishing returns. You can easily turn 4% dodge into 20% block with some quick reforging, for example. Feel free to go wild and see if you can block cap. You can always do the reforging if your avoidance dips lower than what you are comfortable with.

How to prepare for 4.0.1

I’m going to leave this up for commenters, but the single biggest piece of advice I have is to stockpile one of each glyph and bank them for the switchover. Glyphs will be changing to their newest iteration and prices will surely rise after the fact. This can get you a step ahead of any price gouging.

For gems, if you’re currently sporting any Shifting Dreadstones, you might want to put aside some Solid Majestic Zircons or other Dreadstones to regem with.

Are there any changes I missed that bear stating? How is everyone here planning to spec come 4.0.1?

From the Mailbag: Many mobs, handling them

Something I’ve never really done–post an email–but this was a really good question I received a little while ago, and I thought it be worth sharing (especially on such a slow news day!) for any other prospective tanks that might be lurking.

I have been reading your blog for awhile now and it pushed me into making my first tank, thank you by the way! I’ve played the last 4 years as a healer and dps, but I’m really starting to enjoy paladin tanking. I was hoping you could tell me how I know what mob to select if i see someone grabbed aggro. One target is easy enough, but what happens if you are all grouped up on 10 different things, and suddenly someone is taking damage, how do go about selecting the correct mob to start whacking/taunting. My char is only 43 at the moment, but i really want to start hammering in the correct concepts sooner rather than later. Are there certain mods I must have, i.e. if you saw someone without them you would laugh at them?

Respectfully,
The Eager Student

Hi TES,

Do you play with Name Plates turned on? If not, I definitely recommend doing that (it’s in the interface options). Then get two addons:

• Tidy Plates
• Tidy Plates: Threat Plates

With both installed and name plates on, the names above each mob’s head will turn green and small when you have control over them, and then red and large when you’re losing aggro. Easiest way to keep tabs on all the mobs for sure!

Happy tanking!

- Rhidach

A shot in the arm for WoG, and build 13066

There was a very interesting (and informative) Ghostcrawler post this weekend that gave some some great news about Word of Glory, as well as some insight into our tanking situation.

Word of Glory now scales with either attack power or spell power, whichever is higher. The net result is that Ret and Prot Word of Glory will heal for at least 50% more than they did before. That was why we had to nerf Selfless Healer. If I am remembering correctly, a level 85 Ret or Prot paladin 3 Holy Power WoG went from around 6000 to around 9000 (before Selfless Healer or Guarded by the Light). You should test it yourself though, since I may be misremembering.

One poster on Maintankadin reports Word of Glory healing him for 25k (out of a total of health bar of almost 100k hp) multiple times while Vengeance capped. Hearing these numbers just about evaporates many concerns I have about WoG. Indeed, with a heal of that value (25%!) then the ability definitely becomes a “meaningful choice”, contra the threat of ShoR.

If you need the threat, you shield slam. Otherwise you can toss a major heal on yourself. Much better choice now.

In other news, not only is Sanctuary broken, but so is our avoidance.

As far as tank balance goes, in beta we found that DKs and Feral druids were taking less damage than paladins and warriors. This is partially because of the Sanctuary bug (where it just wasn’t working). Beyond that, the avoidance of the former were just a lot higher. Druids get dodge and DKs get parry just from wearing Agi and Str respectively. Block tanks used to get a little mitigation from Strength, but it was never much, and that won’t really work any longer with the new model. Solutions include letting Str affect parry (for everyone in the same way Agi provides dodge) or giving all plate users some kind of Forceful Deflection passive or talent.

Part and parcel is this declaration:

Basically, we think that avoidance below 20% or so doesn’t feel very good because you don’t see it, and avoidance above around 70% or so breaks encounters and forces us to add “radiance” debuffs to raids.

It’s interesting, and welcome, to get hard numbers like that. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Build 13066 also was datamined this weekend, and looking at the change there’s nothing particularly amazing. The biggest change I saw was Seals of the Pure going to 2/2 points, and Vindication going to 1/1, each shedding one point to cap. Which frees up three points for us. I think it’s safe to say they intend to trick us into putting those points into Guarded by the Light. Though, in light of the WoG change, I will gladly do that.

I’m currently looking into a spec like this, with those last points (plus the one in Hallowed Ground) going to some combination of Hallowed Ground, Reckoning, Eternal Glory, or Rule of Law. I’m certain it will depend if I’m doing an AOE threat or single target threat or survival build. Also depends on the relative TPS value of those talents.

Build 13033 tries to doll up Word of Glory

Ah, but does it fail?

Before I get into that, let’s look at the changes:

Divinity is now a Tier 1 Protection talent.

Yes, perfect! Now I don’t have to divert unnecessary points into Holy. This will really help with leapfrogging the (other than Seals of the Pure) rather lackluster first tier. Also means I can work Divinity into just about every build rather than just a survival-focused one.

Protector of the Innocent is gone, moved to Holy.

I feel like I just dumped my garbage on the neighbor’s lawn.

Guarded by the Light additional effect – In addition, your Word of Glory will also cause Holy Shield.

This is a good step in the right direction for Word of Glory. It’s not the end game–by far–but a good building block. I’ll expand on this a little further down.

Judgements of the Just now also reduces ranged attack speed.

Excellent.

Crusader Strike now causes 120% weapon damage, up from 100%.

Loving it! Crusader Strike needed more oomph. This should firmly ensconce it above HotR for single target, if the last build didn’t already.

Anyway, let’s talk about Word of Glory and the current Holy Power design. Right now the consensus is that we, as Prot, do not have enough Holy Power. We can only generate the good stuff every 4.5 seconds, and ultimately expend it every 13.5 seconds or so. It’s a rigid process, to say the least. Compared to Ret who are nakedly rolling around in massive piles of HoPo, we are the pauper spec of the Paladin class.

A huge side effect of our HoPo drought is that when we have three options for expending the resource–ShoR, Inquisition, or Word of Glory–there emerges a clear winner in an unfortunate triage. Inquisition is ideal for AOE situations, and other than that, the predilection is to dump Holy Power into Shield of the Righteous. Word of Glory isn’t given a second though because it doesn’t make sense to expend 13.5 seconds of resource generation on a self-heal when you could deliver a major hit that is running 25% of our current damage done and put up a damage reduction effect.

With every previous build Blizzard has been putting more an more lipstick on the pig to get us to take her home. First there was allowing overheals from WoG to convert into a shield, then it was slipping Eternal Glory into the first tier of our tree, and now we have Word of Glory also putting up the Holy Shield effect.

Side note to recognize the inanity of this–at this juncture let’s just redesign Holy Shield to go up whenever Holy Power is expended, yes? Seems like it’d be less code and tooltips that way?

Anyway, back to my beef. Word of Glory is getting more attractive, sure, but there is one major problem with the ability that can’t be tinkered away. Fundamentally, it’s a tiny heal that doesn’t scale and costs you as many resources as a giant shield slam. The return on investment is minuscule, to say the least. If they want us to use Word of Glory, they need to make a giant change to it: it needs to be free.

For the moment it’s clear they’re not going to give us more Holy Power, despite this being badly needed. Apparently the fear (according to the crab) is:

If we give Protection ways to generate more Holy Power, then that opens the door for getting both Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous going at the same time. As soon as that’s possible, you’re going to assume you have to do both to be competitive, and whenever you can’t keep both up, you’re going to be frustrated.

I guess this is a valid concern but it’s a damn stupid reason to restrict our Holy Power generation. Why not make ShoR and Inquisition exclusive from each other (much like Inq and HS were back at the beginning of beta)? Is that too hard a solution to implement?

Anyway, back to Word of Glory. Like I said, the fix is to make the spell free. Not directly free, of course, but instead redesign Eternal Glory to something like “when you use [some spec-specific ability] there is a x% chance you will proc the effect Eternal Glory, which will make your next Word of Glory expend no Holy Power and have the effectiveness of a 3HP heal.” Make the effect last 15 seconds so we can find a neat gap in our rotation (because the Light knows we’ll have plenty of those) to pop WoG.

And there we go: problem solved. Word of Glory will now be used, and it won’t severely cramp our rotation, aside form pushing everything back a GCD. Which is a much more reasonable threat loss than a whole ShoR.

Make it so.

Great success

On Tuesday night, I donned my armor set, chugged my flasks, and got ready to see if I could finally reach for the firmament and touch the face of the raid boss armor cap. I am happy to report I managed to do it, getting exactly 6 over the cap (a very efficient record breaking) and without depending on procs to boot.

The only caveat is I did this under the effect of an Indestructible Potion. While that obviously was what pushed me over the finish line, I don’t consider it “cheating” because you can just about keep the effect up for the duration of a 4 minute fight with pre-potting.

Though again, most fights are at least 5 minutes. Hrm.

In any case, I also picked up the heroic Bile-Encrusted Medallion later that night. Which means I can actually shed 84 armor from that set. That’s new.

Two interesting facts about ShoR in Cata

I was perusing this thread over at Maintankadin, attempting to contain my excitement that Theck is beginning to start up his theorycrafting apparatus for Cataclysm, and noticed two pretty interesting asides about Shield of the Righteous that are worth sharing.

The first is that when the Sacred Duty proc is active, ShoR will apparently not be missed, dodged, or parried. This may change in future builds, but something to keep in mind when making judgements about what buttons to press when. Do remember that if ShoR misses, you lose the three HoPo stacks that you patiently built up.

The second is that, to maximize threat, there are certain circumstances where hitting a 2HP ShoR is better than waiting for a third stack of Holy Power. Specifically, if you have a Sacred Duty buff that will expire before you can accumulate a third Holy Power, you should hit ShoR. The reasoning behind this is a 2HP ShoR+Sacred Duty does the same damage as a non-Sacred Duty 3HP ShoR. And, by waiting for Sacred Duty to fall off and for you collect that third stack of Holy Power, you’re pushing a future ShoR back by 4.5 seconds, thus a threat loss in the long-term.

Very interesting stuff. I can’t wait for the number crunching to begin over there so we can start to get a better picture of our rotation and threat talents, as we move closer to Cataclysm’s launch and patch 4.0.

Build 12984 ups the numbers a bit

The latest build in Beta fixed one of the big problems we had, that HotR was doing more single target damage Crusader Strike, but buffing through talents the damage of CS. It’s a pretty textbook change, but they just modified a talent to buff CS. Keeps it out of the hands of those greedy Rets, so that’s a plus.

Here are the changes to our spec this build:

• Wrath of the Lightbringer slightly revamped – now increases the damage of your Crusader Strike and Judgement by 30/60% and increases the critical strike chance of your Holy Wrath and Hammer of Wrath by 15/30%.
• Guardian’s Favor is now a Tier 2 Retribution talent.
• Improved Hammer of Justice is now a Tier 2 talent, up from Tier 1.
• Eternal Glory is now a Tier 1 Protection talent.
• Reckoning is also now only 2 points (instead of 3) and maxes out at a 20% proc chance, instead of 30%.

The Eternal Glory <> Guardian’s Favor swap and knocking Imp HoJ up the tree a level changes how we spec a bit. Before Improved Hand of Justice was a no-brainer, because Protector of the Innocent sucks, but now Eternal Glory fills that roll. And, with Imp HoJ on the same tier as Toughness and Judgements of the Just, we basically skip it on our trip to the top. It might have a use in certain situations, but there is more ROI from later talents than spending points on knocking 20 seconds off of a stun/on-GCD interrupt.

Reckoning also got stealth nerfed for what it’s worth. I’m still holding a skeptical eye towards this talent until we see a Theck crunch on talent TPS, so I’ll hold off any concern for now.

I’m pretty happy with the Wrath of the Lightbringer buff, because it was a much-needed damage boost to CS. It also makes Holy Wrath and Hammer of Wrath possibly heavier hitters as well, which is a bonus.

Ultimately, I specced like this in Beta while screwing around yesterday. I pulled both of the Word of Glory talents because I wanted to give the spell a shot, at least while leveling. Color me underwhelmed.

Heals for 9076 with 3HP, which is… ok. It’d do 9621 with Divinity, but that hardly helps. At the moment I’m just not seeing the pay off for Word of Glory and 3 Holy Power. HoPo is too precious and rare a resource to blow on a non-scaling heal. I can see situations where it could be useful, but those are limited. I’m crossing my fingers that the nigh-mythical numbers pass might make Word of Glory more attractive, but who knows? At the very, very least we need some kind of additional Holy Power source. Be it a proc, or another ability… something.

Yesterday was also the first time I got on Beta since they fixed Sacred Duty. Hoo-boy, now that is a fun proc. It can be ill-timed, refusing to proc when you have a 3HP ShoR loaded in the chamber. On the bright side, a 15 second buff lasts a long time and more often than not you’ll have that delightful little red judgement icon waiting for you when you’re ready to shield slam something.

There is nothing more satisfying than a 15k ShoR. And this is at level 83 while soloing. I can only imagine in level 85, with raid gear, and fully buffed.

One last heartache: the Seal of Truth glyph is gone. Farewell, free Expertise. (Correction: It was switched from a Major glyph to a Prime. Sorry for any confusion, I regret the error!)

Pimped my UI, part 4

When I was putting together this post, I noticed something funny. The first time I majorly changed up my UI and posted about it was April 2009. The second time was October 2009. The third, April 2010. It’s now mid-September 2010 and I realize there seems to be about a six month life span to each iteration of my user interface. Coming April 2011: Pimped my UI, part 5!

Anyway, I’m really proud of what I’ve come up with this time. I originally set out to make the most minimalistic UI yet, and I think I’ve succeeded. And there’s still a lot of tweaks I can make, especially to the in-combat “version”. Shrinking DXE’s bars, scaling down TipTac’s tooltips (they do not need to be wider than grid, imo), and shrinking Omen to show maybe half an many rows.

A huge part of what makes the UI so uncluttered is the sharp reduction of how many buttons are on-screen. I went from my full rotation and various ancillary abilities being completely on screen–44 buttons worth of precious real estate. Now I have 13, 8 for cooldowns, and 5 for buffs. Everything else is keybound and invisible. (Well, except for auras and the micromenu, which are visible on mouse over.)

The only problem this presents is that hiding my full rotation and all these buttons requires a lot of faith in my own muscle memory. The other major problem: not being able to see when abilities are on cooldown. Right now I’m not finding it hard to watch when an attack is used based on my cooldown bar reacting to GCDs being expended, but sometimes I’ll lose track and have to restart at the beginning of the rotation. It’s a pain, but something I think practice can allow me to work around.

If worse comes to worse I’ll make the primary rotation bar visible on mouse over so I can quickly eyeball cooldowns if needed. I expect to be be fine though.

I also set up click for my various Hand abilities. Shift+right click is Hand of Sacrifice. Alt+right click is Hand of Protection. Ctrl+right click is Hand of Salvation.

Probably one of the less drastic changes, but one of the most effective, was what I did to my unit frames. The way it is now, I have my player frame on the bottom, with health being the driver of how full or empty the bar is. I removed the separate mana bar, and instead just have my % of mana remaining on the left. The little spark under the mana number indicates if Divine Plea is active (that’s Power Auras).

Above the player frame is the target. Buffs and debuffs show just above the target (which are a bit too small right now, at least for ones I’m applying), and on the top right is the target of target. Just the name though, because that’s ultimately all I really need. I don’t show any indicator of target mana, which I really need to fix, if only to check healer mana levels before pulls.

And lastly, on the right is the focus frame. Pretty simplistic, just name and health. I need to put focus target in there somewhere.

One other big change I wanted to mention was I completely dumped the whole “have a bar with various sub-addons at the top of your screen” model. Instead I have nice, clean, minimalistic SLDataText under my unit frames. It’s not not have this line of crap bordering the top of my window.

Just to review, here are the addons I used:

• Satrina’s Buff Bars for buffs/debuffs
• basicMiniMap for map
• Pitbull for unit frames
• Grid for raid frames
• Chatter for the chat window
• TipTac for tooltips
• Deus Vox Encounters for bossmods

I still have a few things I want to change or streamline (as I mentioned above), Once I do that, I’ll finagle a way to offer this UI as a packaged download. Once I figure out which folders I would need to include.

Feel free to ask any questions about it in the comments! I’m sure I left tons of small details out.

Better news, everyone

Back in March… or April, whenever it was… when we were working on Putricide for the first time and wiping endlessly on him, I would drive home from work at the end of the day and say to myself “this night can only end two ways–one is with Putricide dead, the other is with him alive for another week.” It was initially a mental exercise meant to brace myself for the inevitable disappointment that characterized those interregnum days.

Then, of course, one day I posed that question to myself and the former outcome was the one fate handed to us. Putricide was dead, and the renaissance of ES began.

I revived the exercise for our weeks of learning the Lich King. It was hard fought, but after about 4 nights of solid attempts spread out over a month (so it goes with a 2 day raid schedule) we finally nailed the guy to the way. The exercise metastasized a bit from devouring my attention on that long car ride home up 95 to on a bike ride I would take after work in the local cemetery.

I know that sounds creepy, but paved roads and no cars. Win-win my friends. And it’s quiet. (Ba-dum-bum.)

But I digress. I dwelled a lot on the fight and the viability of victory, and eventually inevitability won out. Like it usually does. And as we started working through hardmodes I didn’t really need to spend a lot of time agonizing on possibilities, because we usually downed new hardmode fights the first week we tried them.

Things changed of course with Heroic Sindragosa, which took us about four weeks to eventually down. A pretty epic ride, and you can bet that old saw came back in full force. And then after Sindragosa, I revived it for Putricide, but prematurely. It took us 57 attempts to kill Heroic Sindragosa. It took us only 16 to kill Putricide. And that’s with 11 of them being done with a suboptimal strategy.

An amazing turn around between the two fights, I think.

When we stood there in front of Putricide last night, I articulated a new strategy and some tweaks I wanted everyone to operate under. This is in addition to a commandment to download and install an addon called Plagued that tracks through /yells about someone’s head if they have the plague and counts down until they need it taken away from them. Last week, we were making people with the plague go to a safe spot.

This week, I told everyone to spread out, stay put, and put on their raid awareness hats. People were to call out in vent when they were taking it from the plagued person. Everyone needed to be cognizant of where those massive red yell bubbles were.

Other tweaks: pets had to be on green slime whenever up, and the DKs were taking turns popping armies onto the green slimes during transitions, for extra damage soaking.

The first attempt with this new strategy, we got Putricide to 50% before wiping, beating our previous record of 51% by inches.

Our second attempt we got him 12%.

Suddenly everyone was energized. We hadn’t even seen phase 3 before on heroic, and suddenly we just coasted right in to it. The raid was infused with equal doses of terror and excitement.

We proceeded to do a few more attempts, each time hitting phase 3 with ease and wiping due to the soft enrage. Something had to change. On the last attempt, I made a risky decision: when the orange slime comes down in the second transition, rather than hanging back and waiting for it to pick a target, melee go in and start wailing on it. In the attempts thus far, orange was up with at least 20% when Put activated, and we needed that dps time on the big guy.

Luck shined her golden countenance upon us, the first target orange picked was at range. My gambit succeeded. Orange died right as Put activated. Everyone was alive. It was go time.

We started rounding the outside of the room, and Put’s health was steadily dropping. We lost a few people here and there, but everyone was focused. We were going to make this happen. Suddenly I heard that a healer had died, and I popped a cooldown, and then my assigned raidwall.

We held it together as the numbers. Tank swaps continued until I believe Nordic drew the last tanking turn with 3 stacks at around the 2% mark. We held it together–along with our breath–and finally push the fight over the finish line. Putricide keeled over and coughed up his purples.

No Last Word, unfortunately.

After the exhilaration wore off, we trucked over and up to Arthas and did the Been Waiting a Long Time for This achievement to begin the long march for getting everyone their 25man drakes. A necessary, if not annoying, first step.

Oh, and duty and tankadin camaraderie compels me to congratulate Ana on ranking #57 on the Festergut 25H dps ranks for prot pallies. She’s been working really hard, and I’m sure in the next few weeks she can place even higher!

Ultimately, I think my favorite part of the night was right before LK when one of the dps said “I totally called this last week when I said Rhidach was going to come up with an amazing strat and we’d kill him easily.” That was a much needed confidence boost after the stomping my RLing ego took the other night.

Apparently some of them have faith in me, haha.

Highs, lows, and creamy middles

Well, despite my initial fears that the RNG gods had smitten me for my hubris, I was rewarded with another drop of the heroic Icecrown Glacial Wall. It’s exciting to have the BiS shield in the game, though for some reason it doesn’t carry the same level of excitement that the first one did for me.

Perhaps this is because I’ve seen upgrades to this shield at level 82 on beta. Ah well, dust in the wind, my friends!

On the plus side, the new shield gives me a huge chunk of armor to add to my pile, which makes hitting the raid boss cap all but inevitable. And speaking of, during Saurfang last night somehow I failed to beat my previous record…

I had a Mongoose proc when screenshotting last week, so I think that number was abnormally high. Maybe I’m fine, but I have this lingering doubt that I had the 251 version of the Unidentifiable Organ equipped still after having scored the heroic one on Sunday night (I apologize for not bombarding you with six links for this item, heh). In any case, I’ll need to double check that when I get home.

Tonight I’ll finally re-enchant my Ardent Guard for Major Agility, make sure my armor set is correctly set up, and then prepare for glory.

As for the raid as a whole last night, it was another pretty great night. We knocked out Halion, then everything in ICC as heroic for the first wing, plus Blood Wing, and Dreamwalker. Sindragosa we had to do on normal to get our third Shadowmourner-in-waiting his frost infusion, so he can start accumulating shards as early as next week. The second Shadowmourner, Morvain, is already at 42 shards after five weeks.

We have Heroic Put on deck for this evening. I’m hoping for some major progress to be made, so cross those fingers!