A brave new world
Tuesday night was a clusterfark, as most patch days are. Despite making a checklist for the guild to help them get ready and everybody waiting in Mumble and chomping at the bit for the servers to come back up, yours truly was frantically still attempting to patch because I forgot to start the updater when I left for work that morning. Complete and utter fail. I finally got in about an hour after everyone else.
The plan originally was to maybe raid if timing was good and everyone was settled, but between addons and confusion and terrible guild leaders, there was just no way it was happening. People spent most of the night trying to hammer together a working UI and then running heroics to get an idea of the new mechanics.
When I finally got in, the first thing I did was dodge off to Silvermoon and train everything and then reforge my gear. Just like on the beta, I block capped and without having to use Heroic CTC to do so. I then built both specs–single target and AOE–and glyphed both. Lastly, I regemmed all my gear so that any agi/stam gems were swapped out for strength/stam gems. My thinking was to grab the extra threat and the free parry from strength, but I have absolutely no clue how optimal that is. I suspect it’s not really a good idea, so I’m going to have to revisit that.
I also took a lot of joy in applying the mind control tinker on my helm for the free stamina, a parachute on my cloak, and getting tuskarr’s vitality enchanted on my boots. It’s not the same as Pursuit of Justice, but it’ll do.
Once the dust was settled a bit, I ran Heroic Gundrak with a few friends to find my legs. Switched to my AOE spec and went to town. Unfortunately, one of the dps was a mage, and I basically spent the heroic alternating Hammer of the Righteous and whichever taunt was off cooldown. I don’t think I had a good grasp on the mechanics at the time, but we were so overgeared that everything just blew right over without protest, so it was just about impossible to gauge much.
Before I logged that night I took a quick flight on my Argent Hippogryph, now benefitting from the same 310% speed that my less attractive mounts were blessed with. Perhaps one of my favorite quality of life changes this patch. I hated flying around on some godawful proto-drake just for the convenience of speed.
Another gorgeous change is the new water system. Yesterday I was taking a taxi down to Grom’gol for some ZG farming, and flying over the water with the sun reflecting was… wow. The world seems so much more vibrant now. I can’t wait to see that match up with the new terrain/textures coming in the actual Cataclysm.
Speaking of Zandalar–one of my biggest pre-Cataclysm goals was to hit exalted with that rep before the Zul’Gurub raid disappears. (I’m a sucker for Feats of Strength.)
I was pretty close when I started yesterday, measuring my progress in how mana Bijous it would take to hit exalted (assuming 125 rep from destroying the Bijou and then using up the honor token) and I started with something close to 60 Bijous between me and the finish line. When I landed in Stranglethorn I headed over to the Zandalar’s island and cashed in the mountains of coins I had accumulated. At the end I was something like 40ish Bijous away.
After that I finally went into ZG itself, donned the AOE spec, and started moving from one trash pack to the next. Seal of Insight is amazing for low-level grinding, to the point where I barely miss the old block–ok, that’s a lie–and Hammer of the Righteous is just godly for AOE. Round up a huge pack and whittle it down in no time at all. The only real trouble I got was on the tiger boss where constant silences made it nigh-impossible interrupt those heals. After a long war o attrition I managed to get all three guys down and push into the last phase of the fight.
A few more bosses and a score of Bijous later, and I had enough in my bags to push to exalted. Over at the island I cashed everything in and scratched another item off my Cata bucket list.
Doooooooomed
ICC at the end of the night was something else. That’s about the best way I can describe it. I’m sure you’ve heard that AOE threat is rough in a raid environment and I can surely attest to that. Unless you tie down the dps and force them to wait a few seconds for you to establish aggro, which is the exact opposite instinct that’s been instilled in them since the beginning of Wrath, there’s just no way you can control a pack without constant tab-taunting.
I was posting something like 6th damage overall on the pre-Marrowgar trash thanks to HotR, but in light of some casters (like the damn boomkin!) there was just no way to hold back the tide. Good practice for Cataclysm, I suppose.
One the bright side, nothing has warmed the icy cockles of my heart like the ShoR crits I was getting last night. With a full stack of Vengeance I could reach out and touch the face of 30k. Indeed, if there’s one thing every tankadin that reads this blog needs to do before Cataclysm comes out, it’s do Festergut and see the highest ShoR crit you can pull with Vengeance and the stacking debuff from that fight. When I first saw that giant 50k crit I started cackling like a maniac, and the 54k that followed almost put me in a diabetic coma it was so sweet.
Doxa tweeted me last night that he hoped I was using WoG, considering the massive threat lead I had on that fight (you can see it in the screenshot) and I’m tank enough to admit I was too busy chasing my next hit with ShoR to even think of that. Hence the sweet justice that I died around 3% and Ana had to pick up Fester, bubble off her stacks, and guide the fight to completion.
Single target threat as a whole was not that bad. The trick is to get that first ShoR off ASAP, and you’ll have an okay lead from there on out. I’m still getting used to the muscle memory of 939 and internalizing what buttons to push when, but for the whole I’m in a good place.
There were a slew of annoyances last night. Some minor, like having to constantly switch specs before/after fights. Some were major, like Blood Princes bugging and refusing to actually stand up and engage. The 30% buff also decided to drop off for half the raid some time before Sindragosa, and then after a wipe it dropped for the rest of us. At first I thought it was a display error, but I definitely had a lot less health than I would with the buff.
I felt that missing 30% hp acutely on Professor Putricide, who once he hit phase 3, ran me over like a mack truck. In the space of three seconds I took 80k damage. No crit, just pure pain. Healers were not ready for that kind of punishment and I was so shocked I didn’t even get my Ardent Defender off in time. I know we’ve taken a huge loss in damage reduction from the talents pruning and all the armor we lost, but fer crissakes. Not to mention the damage done by just about everything was increased. All told, that adds up to a floor stain in the form of yours truly.
Over the course of the night, everyone seemed to run the gamut of emotions from diabolically giddy (Zilga the disc priest) to power mad (Ichi to boomkin) to despondent (the holy pally) to consistently knocked offline (Falowin the rogue). I’m hoping that the raid didn’t make anyone lose hope or experience some kind of crisis of faith. It was a rough night, truly, and would be a huge step back if this was still pre-4.0.1. But obviously a lot changed and we’re still adjusting to it.
The theme of the night was the long-running guild joke of “doooomed”, per the following Futurama clip:
I know we’ll be fine, but it’s a bit painful at the moment.
Oh, some final recommendations for gearing. One is to avoid the 4pc bonus if it’s onerous to gear for it. In the past, it was worth it because our cooldown toolbox was much more limited and that extra dodge was handy. However, in this brave new world of 1 minute Divine Protections and clicky-Ardent Defenders, the 4pc is subpar at best. And this is coming from one of its most vocal supporters. Not to mention, Divine Plea is now on a 2-minute cooldown, which means you get to use the bonus half as often as you used to. So yeah.
Lastly, I’d recommend ditching the Greater Inscription of the Gladiator and grabbing the new Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle. Before, the latter enchant was a huge pile of avoidance, which was kind of meh, but now that the dodge it gives it definitely worth the tradeoff of 8 stamina. Likewise, Resilience provides zero crit immunity now, so the Glad enchant is overall not worth it anymore.
Anyway, everything aside, 4.0.1 has been interesting… to say the least. Now to pick up the pieces!
Armory Feed
I love your raiding UI. Is this something you built from scratch? Or did you start with one of the UI compilations and tweak to suit?
@Rhidach
14 October 2010 at 2:05 pm #
Built it from scratch, I detailed it a bit in this post. Only difference between that and what I’m currently running is I’m using Bison for buffs instead of the not-updated Satrina’s. And I swap sides between maps and buffs. And I can see my rotation buttons again.
We have a mage who despised being arcane, loves the new frost, and has gone ever so slightly mad now that she owns the damage meter. That and I’m married to a rogue who has just discovered the potential of Vendetta and Murderous Intent.
I feel I need to develop new muscle memory VERY QUICKLY.
LabRat’s last blog ..Planning Ahead
@Rhidach
14 October 2010 at 2:57 pm #
There’s something heartwarming about that cackling that the underpowered let loose once they realize they’re much, much more powerful. And something terrifying. My disc priest last night was definitely terrifying.
RE: Str/Stam gems. According to Theck’s MATLAB sims, strength has taken a huge hit to it’s threat gen, putting it somewhere in the range of agility. As things are now, our highest threat stat is Expertise to soft cap (still 26), then Hit to melee cap (at which point it falls off almost entirely due to the 6% spell hit baked into our spec), then expertise again until about 55. So, best bet, gem exp/stam in those red sockets!
@Rhidach
14 October 2010 at 3:07 pm #
There’s something that feels dirty about gemming purely for threat, at least I can semi-rationalize it by saying strength gives me parry.
I miss my agi-armor gems. :(
I was in the same boat. I just told myself that having more expertise would mean more survivability on any bosses with parry haste. ;)
@Rhidach
14 October 2010 at 4:08 pm #
Aka, Sindragosa, haha.
Actually, that’s a valid point. She’s mean now.
@arlenwkg
14 October 2010 at 4:25 pm #
She definitely is mean. I got targeted with a frost tomb in p3 while tanking her. :(
That was actually exactly the boss I had in mind haha. When I was reforging and regemming, 90% of my mind was on how hard that fight was going to wreck us (our healers struggled before changes–we haven’t killed heroic Sindragosa in months–now things are awful) and how I could try to make it better. Then we walked into heroic ICC last night and Marrowgar started killing my offtanks while we were stacked. Bricks were shat and wipes were had and now Sindragosa terrifies me.
It may be a good thing I’ve been talking to some other guilds about a guild change for Cataclysm, because if some healing changes aren’t made I’m not sure we’ll be able to do much Heroic ICC raiding for the rest of the expansion–not Sindragosa, and likely not Putricide, that’s for sure.
Sindragosa appears to be able to target anyone for frost tombs now.
We had the offtank get targeted twice and the main tank thrice.
@arlenwkg
14 October 2010 at 9:28 pm #
It’s because she’s suppose to ignore anyone over 40k hp, but now that the entire raid is over 40k, she just chooses randomly. It was to prevent people from just stacking stam and ignoring one of the mechanics of the fight.
I’ve a question on the changes to T9 and T10 2pc, for any of you with a retribution off-spec. In my ret spec, I have the 2pc bonus from each. Each states the bonus is 5% increased damage. Are these stacking, so I get 10%?
@Orthien
14 October 2010 at 7:30 pm #
After I finally fixed my UI I was supprised at how easy this new rotation was to pick up.
Took a awhile to get used to running without my main bar which I finally hid, but still quite easy.
Orthien’s last blog ..Mini Prediction
With Engineers armor webbing counting as a regular enchant, rather than our tinker, which is better to use as a tank, Hyperspeed Accelerators or the Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket? I guess I’m not clear what Haste does for us anymore.
@Rhidach
15 October 2010 at 9:03 am #
Haste is one of our weakest threat stats, under expertise, hit, and strength. You can definitely avoid that tinker. Personally, I’m sticking with the 250 armor tinker for now, even though I’m distraught at the nerf it (and armor in general) suffered.
@Rhidach
15 October 2010 at 9:23 am #
Actually, apparently the armor enchant and the pyro rocket stack. So do that, haha.
Hey Rhidach, sorry to beat a dead horse since I asked you this the other day, but now that you’ve seen raiding in teh live patch do you prefer a “tank” weapon or a DPS weapon?
I’m not the most pro of tanks but I’ve found my threat is barely sufficient with a tank weapon but through the roof with a DPS weapon but was wondering if you were having any issues?
@Rhidach
15 October 2010 at 9:05 am #
In raids I’m still using my Last Word, because survivability can be a little spotty at times with all the damage reduction we lost. Outside of life or death situations though, I’ve started using my Bloodvenom Blade a lot more. You’re right, it’s awesome for bringing some serious tps to the table!
I am new to your site (started reading after the patch). I just wanted to thank you for all the advice and the entertaining blog. :)
So far I am liking the changes and have no aggro issues as a pally tank in mostly 245+ gear.
@Rhidach
15 October 2010 at 9:05 am #
Thanks for reading :)
Aggro isn’t terrible, as long as dps gives you a little breathing room. I find as soon as I can get that first ShoR off, the better.
Yea, took me a day or so to realize (when I finally read the tooltip) that HW doesn’t take holy power. That helped a lot with multiple mobs.
A couple of random ICC observations:
My highest ShoR crit was 57k on Festergut! However I was wearing full tanking gear, so I reckon you can go way higher if you mix/match some Ret gear.
Anyone else having problems with Heroic Sindy, where the movement speed debuff is not dropping off? I’m getting it stack up to 6 stacks, which makes moving to/from tombs in phase 2 very difficult. HoF isn’t long enough to make it there and back.
So, just finished my ICC 25 tonight. Festergut damage was insane. I was 13.7k dps… and my highest shield crit was 96k!! I was jumping up and down. <3
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v244/hakaishin_jin/SoRCrit.jpg
Pic for reference~ :o
@Rhidach
17 October 2010 at 11:07 am #
Wow, that’s awesome! I feel like Fester is the perfect time for the new Glyph of Salvation, since you can still dps for about 30 seconds after the tank swap while you still keep the precious buff. When the swap happens, self-Salv, turn off Righteous Fury, and go to town.
Really liking the UI, Ive been trying to figure out something new and Im liking yours. I already use most of the addons that you use, so now I just need to move them around a little. Thanks.
GG
Sapria’s last blog ..Addons and Macros • Re- Addons to Watch
I linked this post to my tankadin boyfriend and he started salviating reading about the crits you got on Festergut. Fine, I think, let’s do an ICC10 then.
… He tanks Festergut without Righteous Fury on (second or third time he does that) and pulls out 15k dps and tops the charts. (It was 10man semi-pug.) I don’t know if I should thank you for that or be angry that you made tankadins so excited for Festergut that they’re soon in for a nerf if they keep pulling these numbers. :p
Lidanya’s last blog ..It’s Saturday and I’m cold
@Rhidach
20 October 2010 at 9:30 am #
Ha! Wait til you see my post today. I’m throwing down the gauntlet. :)