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!

Glyph of Divine Protection bugged, awesome

Quick tip: Word is the Glyph of Divine Protection is currently bugged so that it doesn’t remove the physical damage reduction component, but still keeps the 40% magical damage reduction. The tooltip is also broken.

This means the glyph is no longer situational, but instead very recommended until the bug is fixed.

The last time I ever cast Blessing of Sanctuary

I’m sure you’ve seen forum threads where the old timers will get all nostalgic and wonder aloud, “Remember when blessings were 5 minutes long?” or “Remember when you had to reapply your seal after every judgement?” And then they told you to get off their lawn and that your jeans were worn too low.

Today is another one of those few moments in WoW-time when things irrevocably change. For good or ill. And we as players change along with them.

Before I logged on Sunday night, I wistfully cast Blessing of Sanctuary on myself one last time. While I’ll miss that spell, it’ll be much better in it’s new passive form.

Likewise the entire blessings system as a whole. Not having to listen to Falowin the rogue constantly berate the raid with “I need MIGHT” is worth the new system’s weight in gold.

Those are some convenient changes, but what about some less convenient ones? Consider the removal of the cherished Bubblehearth by way of the duration of Divine Shield being changed to 8 seconds. I can’t even remember the last time I Bubblehearthed, but it was always nice to know it was an option if the odds suddenly turned against me in a imminently deadly way and I needed a quick, cowardly exit.

Or what about Divine Intervention? I’m going to have start paying repair bills again for most wipes. The humanity of it all!

Those are just a few of the things I’m sure I’ll be musing about down the road to a pack of fresh-faced tankadins. As for you all, what are you going to miss most about the pre-4.0.1 world?

4.0.1 today

New patch drops today. Be sure to have that downloader running and your addons updated!

I did a second pass of my Everything You Need to Know About 4.0.1 post and updated the rotation, specs, and glyphs section with new information that has come out since I first posted that. Should be up to date for tonight, but please let me know if I missed anything.

Block capping at 80 with Mastery

Saturday night I hopped onto the beta to screw around with Reforging and see if I could expect to block cap myself come 4.0.1. As many of you know, block capping means stacking enough block chance that ordinary hits are pushed off the combat table, which can pay huge dividends in damage reduction in certain situations. In Wrath, block capping was especially desirable for Heroic Anub in ToGC, allowing you to cheese the damage from the adds.

In Cataclysm, block capping is going to be amazing, if only because it’s going to be like having a cooldown up for every physical hit. With a successful block now reducing any physical hit by 30%, you want to be block capped. (Of course, that also means there’s a cap on our Mastery, because any further dodge/parry once block capped pushes block chance off the combat table, but that’s an issue for another day.)

So the goal is 102.4% total avoidance+base miss chance+block. How feasible in that in my gear set at 80?

Here’s where I was in terms of avoidance and mitigation when standing in front of the Reforger NPC.

46.42% avoidance + 5% base miss + 21% block (5% base + 16% for learning Mastery) = 72.42% avoidance and block. 29.98% short.

I then proceeded to reforge every feasible piece to mastery. Dodge converted over if there was more dodge on the piece, parry otherwise, and equipped the Heroic CTC and reforged that to mastery as well. I attempted to keep dodge and parry at least even, but I had so much more dodge rating that diminishing returns made it so I got a lot more mastery from dodge.

I then dodged over to a dummy, buffed, and put up Holy Shield. This is what I had:

At 42.03% dodge+parry I lost a total of 4.39% avoidance and gained 24.35% block chance from Mastery.

So, with the 42.03% avoidance + 5% base miss + 60.35% block chance, I was at 107.53% avoidance+block. 5.13% over block cap.

Not too shabby.

I’m actually at the point where I should reduce how much Mastery I have, because that 5.13% overage is just wasted block chance. To mitigate this I can swap the Heroic CTC for a stamina trinket, and then dial back some of the Mastery.

Actually, I’m really liking the extra control reforging gives us over our gear and stats. To be able to shuffle around secondary stats like this is pretty cool.

Anyway, once I hit 81 the ratings conversions will shoot through the roof and block capping will disappear until at least the first raid tier (at least according to the calculations done by Zarko in this thread) but I’m excited at being able to taste such amazing damage reduction potential for the next two months.

Your shopping list for glyphs before 4.0.1

Here’s your chance to stay ahead of the market before demand makes prices skyrocket. Assuming 4.0.1 drops this week, all your glyphs are going to change and it’s ideal to stay on top of that shift.

Compiled below is a list of glyphs on Live and what they’ll be turning into with the patch. (I’ve adopted this list from the original created by El’s Anglin’. All credit for the research goes to them!)

• Glyph of Avenger’s Shield (-> Glyph of Focused Shield)
• Glyph of Avenging Wrath (-> Glyph of the Ascetic Crusader)
• Glyph of Flash of Light (-> Glyph of Word of Glory)
• Glyph of Seal of Righteousness (-> Glyph of Dazing Shield)
• Glyph of Seal of Vengeance (-> Glyph of Seal of Truth)
• Glyph of Sense Undead (-> Glyph of Truth)
• Glyph of Shield of Righteousness (-> Glyph of Shield of the Righteous)
• Glyph of Spiritual Attunement (-> Glyph of Divine Protection)

Glyphs not changing from spell to the other, but you still want to pick up, are:

• Glyph of Consecration
• Glyph of Crusader Strike
• Glyph of Hammer of Wrath
• Glyph of Holy Wrath
• Glyph of Judgement
• Glyph of Lay on Hands
• Glyph of Salvation
• Glyph of Turn Evil

I suppose you could go whole-hog and buy all the current Paladin glyphs. Nonetheless, everything above are things that will probably be directly or situationally useful for us at some point, I suspect. Like the boy scounts say: semper paratus. Go stock up!

The maybe-so, feasible, possible new single target rotation for 4.0.1

Before you read this, please note a huge disclaimer: this is not final. This rotation has been posted in the last 30 or so pages of this thread in Maintankadin as a result of Theck’s first jaunts into theorycrafting the 4.0 rules set, but it’s not yet authoritative in that so much can change. If 4.0.1 drops Tuesday like rumored, and we have the 3 second Crusader Strike, and nothing else changes, this is valid.

Ifs aside, this rotation has been dubbed 939–as opposed to the 3X I was bandying about, thus marking the third time this blog has lost a naming crusade (Zeal, Ana’s desire to call it HoPo, and now 3X)–and is ridiculously simplistic. Here’s how it goes:

Pull with AS > CS > J > CS > HW > CS > ShoR > CS > J > CS > AS > CS > Shor > CS > J > CS > HW > CS > ShoR > CS > AS > CS > J > CS > ShoR > etc.

(Be careful not to judge when running in, second cast should be Crusade Strike, lest you throw the whole rotation off.)

Basically, CS every other ability, and in the “9s” slots weave in Judgements,  ShoR as Holy Power allows, and alternate Holy Wrath and Avenger’s Shield. There is no room for Consecrate, and Grand Crusader is only a dps gain when used to replace a Holy Wrath cast. If you hit AS when the proc lights up, you will suffer a big dps loss by pushing the whole rotation back.

Edit: Like Meloree suggests in the comments, if ShoR misses you want to hit it again on your next GCD. You don’t lose any Holy Power from a dodged/parried/missed ShoR.

939 is, as currently theorycrafted, currently the maximum threat possible to put out on a single target.

As for AOE, just Hammer of the Righteous on cooldown, and spam Consecrate and Holy Wrath away from CC. Use any other attacks when available. Grand Crusader is still useful for AOE. We don’t have Inquisition until 81, so spend Holy Power on ShoRs.

Again, just to reiterate: not final. I recommend keeping some grains of salt handy, just in case.

I do not think I could have fit more equivocation into this post if I tried. And believe me, I did.

Winding down

I can’t take this ennui anymore. Last night’s raid was eerie, in the same way that you might feel walking through a house you’re preparing to move out of. But that’s not really true is it? The house is still going to be there next week, just the furniture might be swapped around or something. We’re not really moving, we’re still going to be plugging away in that frozen hell hole, but we’ll be doing it with somewhat different abilities.

I’m hoping that the patch next week (assuming it is next week) will make ICC a little more “fresh”. We’ve been in there for 10 months now, which is an obscene length of time. Not to mention we never took a break from raiding over the summer. I’m shocked (and humbled) by the utter lack of mass burnout in the raid even after all this time. We definitely have some pretty dedicated folks in guild.

Anyway, last night was a pretty good raid night. Whereas last week was spotty and a bit rough, we rounded out the edges yesterday and didn’t really stumble at all. We knocked out Halion pretty quickly then started working through ICC, only to wipe twice on Heroic LDW, and then continue the march through H Lootship and H Saurfang.

I picked up the Heroic Corpse Tongue Coin off of Gunship because it feasibly will be worth having in the interim period between 4.0.1 and Cataclysm when we have Mastery but are stuck at level 80. My goal is to reforge the dodge to mastery, which–if my numbers are right–should give me 3% block. (172 dodge rating x .40 = 68.8 mastery rating / 45.8 mastery rating per skill at 80 = 1.50 mastery skill = 2% per skill x 1.5 = 3% block from Divine Bulwark.)

Correct me if I did that wrong please, basic arithmetic is not my strong suit.

In any case, combining a new respect for dodge in the 4.0 ruleset with my fetish for the new block, and the preciousness that is the armor proc… H CTC could have its uses. Of course, straight stam will likely be the best choice, especially with Vengeance, but I love playing with new toys. Hence the pickup.

Another side note: I hit 50053 armor (with an armor pot) on Saurfang. Not too shabby! And the best part was we killed him in under 4 minutes, so I was able to roll the extra armor throughout the entire fight. I love it.

Anyway, once inside the Upper Spire we went about banging out another raft of achievements and hopefully finishing Blood Wing and Plague Wing achievements for the guild, once and for all. If I read the spreadsheet of achievements correctly, all we have left for some folks is Portal Jockey and LK achievements. Tonight when we do Neck Deep in Vile we’ll be scoring a huge swath of drakes for the raid, which is very exciting. I personally could care less about the Frostbrood mounts, but everyone else is pumped and I’m glad we could get them the ride and the free 310% flying come next expansion.

Speaking of achievements, tonight I finally got bit on the 25man and screwed it up fantastically. Having none of your buttons showing when you are working through your rotation is fine, but when you need to hit a specific one it really doesn’t help. I, of course, got mind controlled but thankfully didn’t wipe the raid.

They should have left me on the floor, along with my credibility.

Like I said, tonight should be pretty straightforward. Going to do H Dreamwalker, H Sindy, then Neck Deep. Probably will be a short night.

ES Olympics, Round 3

On entirely different note, on Monday night we did the third ES games designed to dole out the Sealed Chest items from crafting our second Shadowmourne. This time around we did a scavenger hunt. The rules were pretty simple–I’d stand at Tirion’s hut in Eastern Plaguelands and give everyone an item to fetch at the start. As each person came back to give me the item, I’d whisper them the next in the series, until we hit the end and there was a winner.

Obviously people couldn’t use mage or engineering ports, or any other item that would jump them a significant distance. Hearthstones were allowed, and thankfully no shamans so I didn’t have to deal with Astral Recall. Crusader Aura was also deemed illegal by majority opinion.

It went pretty smoothly overall, with only one major hiccup because I didn’t anticipate an item being available off of a vendor as well as farmed. In case you’re wondering, some of the items requested were: a Scum Covered Bag, Giant Clam Meat, a Colossal Parachute (especially proud of this one), Black Coffee and a Dalaran Donut, a Twilight Cultist Robe, a Runn Tum Tuber, and some other things I can’t recall.

After about three hours the winner finally emerged, Ichioso the Boomkin and his pal, Starfall. Rounding out second and third place were Antigen and Pallybella the holydin. Congrats to them for a great showing, especially Antigen who jumped a few places ahead on the last item to snatch up second place. That was pretty impressive.

I still have two Sealed Chest items left, and I’m not sure what to do with them. If anyone has an idea for another game, I’d love to hear it.

First insight to the dps value of our talents

I quickly mentioned this on Twitter, but it merits a quick post. Delicious theorycrafts inc.

Theck, Bringer of Numbers and Pounding Headaches, did his first pass through our talents to gauge the relative worth of each in terms of damage (and thus threat). I’m not going to copy-paste his findings, but to summarize:

• Our top three must-have threat talents are Wrath of the Lightbringer > Reckoning > Crusade.
• His sim placed Reckoning at second with around 50 dps per point. However, his sim was run on a 264/277 gear set without anything reforged for Mastery. Therefore with additional Mastery/block Reckoning will get much more beastly.
• Grand Crusader is really weak right now. To the point where there’s murmurs of not even speccing into it. That’s with current numbers though, things can obviously change.

Read the whole post to get the straight dope. A lot of these numbers aren’t yet final, so don’t them as gospel, but they’re heading in the direction we’re going.

And then… everything changed

Crusader Strike – 3 sec cooldown. Hammer of the Righteous – 3 sec cooldown. Cooldown shared for both. [source]

For the worse or for the better? Depends on your point of view. Personally, I agree with the sentiment I saw on the tanking forums–it seems they’ve gone from one extreme to the other.

In a world of 4.5 second Crusader Strikes, we were looking at GCD gaps a-plenty. Around 6 a minute. With a 3 second CS, we’re now looking at being GCD locked, with every other keystroke being Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous. How is this an improvement? We’ve substituted one evil for another.

The rotation’s pet name is currently moving through committee, but personally I favor “3X”. I know it sounds like some model of automaton–and, poetically, oh how that fits–but it refers more to the fact that the rotation boils down to: CS > J > CS > HW > CS > ShoR > CS > J > CS > etc.

I appreciate the fact that we’ll be much less ability starved, so to speak, and I commend the devs for working to correct that, but there has to be a better way. 969 was a mindless rotation that was powered purely by muscle memory. A rotation with GCD gaps required knowledge of what abilities to use when to excel, and I reveled in that. 3X I suppose is kind of a halfling in the sense that the 3 will always be obvious, but the X requires enough forethought that if you don’t use the best choice possible at that moment, you’re hurting yourself in the long run. I can appreciate that, I suppose.

There’s also the question if you actually want to hit CS on cooldown, or if sometimes something else will take a higher priority. Then again, with ShoR doing the damage it does, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t want 3HP ASAP.

A part of me is excited we’re going to have no empty GCDs, and another part of me rues the fact that there wasn’t a more elegant way about this. I still feel like a simpler solution was throwing one more single target ability in the mix, an instant Exorcism or something, to fill those gaps in a less shoe-horned way. Or, like Theck advocated, making Judgement generate HP, and thus pushing up the availability of ShoR. I think that would be a much, much better solution.

And of course there’s the dev’s concern that Inquisition will now be up during ShoR, and the implications thereof. I’m deferring (once again) to Theck on this, who doesn’t think it will be a big deal.

I don’t believe that Inq will ever be worth casting on single targets. Even in the old 4.5-second CS model, it didn’t break even. The 3-second model will have a larger physical/holy damage ratio, making Inq even less likely to succeed. The real problem is that even though you’re adding 30% damage to ShoR, you’re not making up the 70% that you’re losing by not casting ShoR, because your only holy damage sources are J and AS (and seal damage).

Ultimately, I think 3X is a step backward. There were more elegant solutions and Blizz took the easy way out to calm the concerns about GCD gaps. I don’t think this solution is viable in the long term, and I guarantee–if it doesn’t mutate again before launch–we’ll be seeing another redesign of the Prot rotation in the near future.

Lastly, there was some unequivocally good news. The first is that HotR is getting buffed to scale with attack power (and thus Vengeance).

We realized that the AE portion of Hammer of the Righteous didn’t scale with Vengeance. While it’s true that Prot paladins gain some spell power, they get it from Strength, not the attack power provided by Vengeance. We changed Hammer to scale with attack power, which should mean it hits harder with Vengeance. That will provide some of the damage boost you are looking for.

The other is that HoJ will be going off the GCD for us, finally giving us a real interrupt. A long cooldown one, but a real one.

While we still think an off the GCD interrupt isn’t an essential tool for a tank, we also don’t think it’s going to break anything for paladins to have one either. Our eventual solution is to let Vindication’s ability to let HoJ interrupt also take HoJ off of the global cooldown. That change will require new tech, so it’s not something you’re likely to see anytime soon, but you can know that it’s in our long term plans. Again, we don’t think the interrupt issue is a critical problem that must be solved today. The rotation one in the previous paragraph is a bigger deal.

I guess it’s better than nothing, eh?

Now… while we’re giving away toys you don’t think are necessary… how about that gap closer?