Nerf pallies, or something

Like Voss said.

Here’s my entry for the ShoR crit contest (though I’m not really participating):

104,692 damage. The stuff dreams are made of my friends. And that was with normal tanking gear, no dps pieces! Just lined up all my ducks in a row (9 stacks of Gaseous Bloat, almost-max Vengeance, wings popped, Sacred Duty proc) and fired.

I even let Ana tank first too! (Hence the faux-gquit, and the horse head I woke up to in my bed this morning.)

For my victory lap I murdered Antigen’s mage’s eponymous Frost Elemental.

There can only be one.

MMO-Champ also has the latest beta changes from build 13221. They seem to be missing the ShoR nerf wowhead is showing. Hrmm.

Update: ShoR was definitely nerfed.

We changed Shield Slam and Shield of the Righteous to do more base damage and scale less with AP. This was to fix a problem where numbers became absurdly large with a lot of AP, especially under the effects of Vengeance, dwarfing the damage done by druid or DK tanks. With these changes, a tank in heroic dungeon blues should deal the same damage with no Vengeance, but Vengeance will have less of an impact.

The coefficient for Shield of the Righteous was lowered from 120% to 60% at 3 Holy Power. The coefficient for Shield Slam was lowered from 75% to 60%.

But apparently Word of Glory was not.

We buffed Word of Glory base points for Holy paladins. We nerfed the Ret and Prot talents to keep it about the same for them.

Reminder: I want your ShoR crits!

Like I mentioned last week, I’m going to do a post on Friday with the screenshots of various ShoR crits people have sent to me from their Festergut attempts.

It being Tuesday, there are a lot of folks heading back into a fresh ICC tonight, and if you’re one of them, be sure to have that Print Screen button ready to capture that 5-6 digit crit (or off of Recount after the fact).  Festergut crits only, please, since that’ll be the best opportunity for you in ICC to get the craziest shield slam possible.

You can email them to me at rhidach [at] gmail [dot] com.

Good luck!

Blizzcon 2010

Well, where do I start? It was a pretty epic weekend, full of friends, WoW news, endless walking, and lots of laughs. Thinking back now and peeling back the layers of jetlag that are caked on my memories, I absolutely had a blast out there and cannot wait for next year–provided I have the opportunity to go again.

The icing on the cake was, of course, meeting some of my guildmates for the first time. I’d already met Cendra and Ildara before, but this was my first time seeing Anafielle, Gandy, Sheepindeath, Palehoof, Katmandu, and Amulgur. All great folks and they totally made the weekend for me.

From left to right: Ildara, Cendra, Sheepindeath, Gandy, myself, Anafielle. (Not pictured: Pale, Kat, and Amulgur, who were off doing their own crazy thing.)

I’ll spare you all a play-by-play of all four days I was out there, but there were some key moments I am compelled to share. Like on Thursday, I was following the progress of the badge pickup line through Twitter with some trepidation hearing of multiple hours spent in line. However our delay in getting over there (because we were waiting for Cendra and Ildara to fly in and drop off their stuff at the hotel) ended up rewarding us. When we finally got to the B hall to grab our badges, the place was nigh-deserted.

I can’t even fathom the unmitigated hell that must have been standing in that awful line for a long as so many must have.

Once we had gathered up our badges and our guildees, we trudged down the road to the Anabella hotel for the WoW Insider party. It was a lower key event than I thought it would be, with huge crowds stacked around the podcast table and whoever was yelling into a microphone. The bar lines were long but the drinks weren’t too expensive. I managed to sate myself on multiple G&Ts over the course of the night. Had a good time overall, since I prefer low key things.

Towards the end before the party ended, there was a huge commotion at the patio. Apparently Ghostcrawler had arrived and was immediately swarmed.

Ana managed to pull a conversation with the guy, and despite my best efforts wouldn’t act as a partisan in my quixotic quest to get a gap closer for Prot. Instead the two chatted briefly about Maintankadin while I stood 30 feet away and shouted over the din, “LONG ARM OF THE LAW FOR PROT!”

But not really.

The next morning I did my best to get everyone up and moving early so we could get in line pronto for the opening ceremony. Unfortunately, everyone afk’d for my ready check. After docking the raid’s DKP, I was able to motivate them to get into gear. On the walk down to the convention center, half the group split off to go get breakfast at some overpriced joint in Downtown Disney while the rest of us continued to the line. Once we had our spot near the fountain, we then proceeded to stand there for two hours, unaware that the line behind was extending to unholy lengths.

After about two hours of uncomfortable weight shifting, some dope dressed up as Risk Astley and poorly rickrolling the crowd with his iPod dock, various innuendo from Gandy, a parade of cosplayers whose shtick consisted of “I’m blond, scantily clad, and wearing blood elf ears!”, and all other kinds of craziness, the doors opened and the line started moving. We quickly got inside and grabbed some okay seats for the opening.

As you know, not much was announced for WoW aside a new charity pet from the online store. And they replayed the opening cinematic. Woo.

I then proceeded to spend most of the day in that hall, watching the various panels. Most of which were really interesting. As the day progressed and each panel ended, we moved closer and closer to the front of the room to the point where we were in the second clump of chairs from the stage, slightly to the left of center stage, in time for the live raid and costume contest/other contests.

The dance contest in particular was fantastic, and I say this as someone with a genetically predisposed lack of rhythm. The kid who did the gnome male dance was great, the trio who did the goblin female dance put on quite the show, only one of the male orc dancers was actually good, and the woman who did the female gnome dance made me all the more terrified of that benighted race. And, of course, the male undead dance. Poor guy, I was mortified for him.

Biggest disappointment of the costume contest: not watching a Draenei or Illidan cosplayer face plant on a ramp. Best costume: the “T4 warrior lfm for Kara”, that one took me back! (Except for the warrior part.)

That night we went to Bubba Gump’s for dinner and I briefly popped in to the meetup at the bar to say hi (once I had stuffed myself with a shrimp-based dinner), but by then a lot of people had already left. However, I did get to meet Ophelie of Bossy Pally, which was pretty cool.

The next day I resolved to not spend the entire day in that one room, so the goal was to just hit up the Class Q&A and then do some wandering and see everything I missed the previous day. So we skipped the cinematics panel at the beginning of the day, got some breakfast at Denny’s (in all its greasy glory), and then headed over to grab seats for the Q&A. The room was pretty full by the time we got there, but we snagged a row of seats in view of one of the giant monitors off to the side. Meanwhile, Ana ran off to get in the Q&A line before it was too late.

(If you can’t tell by now, she’s definitely the more social of the two of us!)

There were some really good questions and some amazingly terrible ones. As much as I hated the “lolpaladins” attitude present (and I’m sure I made a spectacle of myself clapping like a cymbal monkey any time someone asked a Pally question), the crowd was pretty well behaved. And when it wasn’t, it was primarily in response to the abject stupidity of some questions–like the first guy who had a raft of bizarre hunter complaints, or the DK that wanted to be buffed because nobody liked him in LFD.

The third question in or so was a really good one done by this fellow, asking about Grand Crusader and how worthless it is right now. Unfortunately, the devs side stepped the question, saying they’d buff the talent if need be. That’s all well and good, but they totally missed the point that the root problem is the rotation we have right now is so rigid there’s only one spot where Grand Crusader can feasibly go. As such, I’m suspecting their happy to keep 3-second CS where it is for some time, rather than fixing the rotation, which is pretty disheartening.

Another question got the devs to spill that in the near future we’ll have a talent that will make Divine Plea generate 3 Holy Power, giving us a full ShoR ready to go at the pull. That was great news!

Towards the end of the Q&A, Ana finally got her turn to ask her question. She stood up and asked the following:

Hey guys, this is Anafielle from the paladin blog, Righteous Defense, and I have a question about tanks in general. I was wondering if you were happy with the current implementation of Vengeance? Right now, … the way it’s working, you can run into an avoidance streak and you won’t get enough stacks; and it also punishes survival gearing to an extent because when you’re gearing for survival you’ll have less stacks of Vengeance. I was wondering if you were happy with the way that is?

It was a bit obvious at the time she got up there that Ana was a little nervous. Let’s be serious though, who wouldn’t be? I echo Antigen’s sentiment that “I would’ve been so nervous I would probably just said “Hi!” and excused myself.”

Personally, I don’t have anywhere near the cojones to get up in front of all those people and put myself at the mercy of what could be a very merciless crowd. I did my part by holding back the compulsion to sympathy-stress-vomit all over the Mullet in front of me.

The rest of the con was hardly as exciting. I spent the rest of our time there checking out the booths from afar (no thanks, lines!), the art gallery, hitting up the store, grabbing lunch, and doing some more wandering. At around 5:30 we ducked outside for the official Lightninghoof photo, only to find out they rescheduled the photo for an hour early and had already taken it. So, we took one of our own. Palehoof even paid the kid who took the photo with a loot card.

From there we broke off and went back to the hotel to drink beer, eat pizza, and shoot the shit. After a while, Ana and Gandy got wanderlust so they headed off for the after party. Apparently they didn’t make it back until 5 am the next morning and we had to retrace Gandy’s steps with a receipt from Denny’s time-stamped at 4:15 am. In any case, was relieved to learn after the fact that Palehoof was there to keep Gandy from trying to drunkenly Tricks someone, IRL.

And then of course yesterday we all bid our farewells to one another, wished safe travels, and scattered to the four winds, back to our respective homes and varying states of jet laggedness.

The plan is to roll with an even bigger crew next year. I hope that happens, Blizzcon was way too much fun to share with just 9 people from our guild. Can’t wait til next time.

Finding our footing once more

Up until that first pull of Heroic Marrowgar I was terrified that last night was going to be a repeat of the debacle that was the raid on Wednesday last week. The first time we tried Heroic Marrowgar last week I think I was two shot, ingloriously. The offtank followed suit with much haste.

Last night–much better! We had no problems dropping Marrowgar. In fact it felt like pre-4.0.1, except for dps was much higher, so the fight didn’t last as long. Then on Heroic LDW we had a somewhat clean one shot. With everyone’s additional health I’m sure that there were survivors to some unnecessary ghost explosions. I’m sure we wouldn’t have pulled it off that attempt if not for 4.0.1, but at this point I’m beyond caring about these externalities. I just want the night to go well.

And so it did. We pretty much rolled over everything in our path, cleanly one-shotting Heroic Putricide and only stalling at Heroic Sindragosa at the end of the night. With Put in particular I was convinced there were some boss damage hotfixes, because I was reduced to a paste by his normal mode last week, and yet last night I wasn’t taking that much of a beating. Lo and behold, there were.

Per the crab,

We’ve made some Icecrown and Halion changes already and we may need to make more.

He didn’t go into details but I’m certain that they nerfed boss damage in ICC and RS. On just about everything except for Sindragosa (who is still very truck-like in her damage) I was sitting pretty with very few “oh crap” moments, if any.

Last night was also a great chance to get more comfortable with the rotation and all our new toys. I’m much happier with 939 than I’ve been since it was first devised. It’s still annoying to CS every other attack, but the 9′s are not as locked in as they used to be (there’s some fluidity) to make the rotation require some thought. Plus, I’m really liking the choice presented by Shield of the Righteous and Word of Glory.

The former you use at the start to establish a threat lead, then once you’re comfortable with your position you can use Word of Glory to boost your survivability. A lot of times I found myself with a good 10% or so headstart on the dps and started popping the self-heal/absorb. I like any choice we get and any choice that rewards us for not choosing poorly. I think WoG is one of the those things.

Perhaps my favorite part of the night, though, was Heroic Festergut. Thanks to Vengeance and the the damage buff he slaps on the tank, I pulled off an 85,665 damage Shield of the Righteous crit. I’m sure I could have done much better with AW up, or some dps gear, though I was at least using my Bloodvenom Blade.

In any case, I close out my post with this demand: I want to see your crits. Email me screenshots of ShoR crits on your scrolling combat text or Recount, from Festergut. Your personal bests, the biggest number you can push. Next Friday I’ll do a post showing off the biggest ShoR crits I received. You can email your screenshots to rhidach [at] gmail [dot] com.

Housekeeping note! Tomorrow morning I’m flying out to California for Blizzcon. Blogging here will of course be light to non-existent, since Anafielle is also going to be there. However you can follow both of us and our Blizzcon-related ramblings on Twitter! Here’s my Twitter page, and here’s Anafielle’s.

Don’t gem Shifting Dreadstones anymore

Something not mentioned specifically in patch notes–but very important in case anyone missed the very hidden memo on this–agility doesn’t give armor anymore. One major by product is that (along with agility enchants no longer providing EH) Shifting Dreadstones are now an inferior gemming choice.

What made them so great before 4.0.1 was that agility was a triple-dip stat for us: dodge, armor, and crit/threat all in one tidy little package. While agility gems only provided 83% as much avoidance as the actual-dodge alternative, that 17% gap was easily made up (and then some) with the armor and threat. Now, obviously, the threat alone doesn’t make it as worth it.

As such, I definitely recommend you swap out that Shifting Dreadstones for Defender’s Dreadstones if you’re looking for more avoidance (and survivability), since parry is our only avoidance choice for purple gems.

Contrawise, if you’re looking for extra threat–and, it can be argued, survivability on Sindragosa–you can gem Guardian’s Dreadstones for expertise.

Personally I’m going to gem Guardian’s Dreadstones because that 60 parry rating I’ll be gaining will primarily go into the starving, gaping maw we call diminishing returns. At 85 it’s another story, but for now I’m opting for the expertise.

Hidden armor formula change brings the pain

It wasn’t enough of an insult that they gutted the precious armor from many of our pieces, but now it’s been confirmed in this terrifying thread on the tanking forums that the new armor formula for Cataclysm mobs and bosses has been retroactively applied to 81-83 mobs in WotLK content.

The old formula for damage reduction from armor was:

Reduction = Armor / (Armor + MobLevel * 467.5 - 22167.5)

And the new formula for Cataclysm is:

Reduction = Armor / (Armor + MobLevel * 2167.5 - 158167.5)

The rub is that the latter is now being applied to 81, 82, and raid boss creatures. Coupling this with the loss of armor itemization and other damage reduction talents, and you have some very vulnerable tanks in raid settings. I’m sure many of you have already seen some much higher numbers last week in Icecrown that you weren’t seeing two weeks ago before 4.0.1 dropped.

I’m very curious to see if there’s going to be a blue response to this or if we’re just supposed to deal with it until December. My understanding is a similar thing happened with 2.0 and 3.0, but I wasn’t raiding at the end of Vanilla or TBC, so I really can’t speak to that. Anyone have any idea?

In any case, I’m equally dreading and cannot wait for raid Tuesday to see how ICC25 goes again.

Update: GC posted in the thread and proceeded to completely miss the point

Agility no longer provides armor. Is that what you’re seeing here? I didn’t see that mentioned in the discussion, but I might have missed it.

Ah, nope.

Hopefully after receiving further responses he went to do some testing of his own. Maybe there’ll be a hotfix. Well, I doubt it, but a man can dream.

Ret finally helps for once, buffs, &c.

I know Retribution sometimes gets a raw deal around here, mostly because they’ve been an unending source of nerfs for us. Not to mention Holy Power is their fault, they stole our gap closer, and they smell bad. But–wait, where was I going with this?

Oh yes, well apparently hell froze over because for once they’ve done right by us, receiving a nice buff that has (as collateral “damage”) led to many of our abilities receiving a buff as well. Reports are that Crusader Strike, Holy Wrath, Hammer of Wrath, Judgement, and Censure were all buffed.

I can confirm that Hammer of Wrath in particular has done a complete 180 in terms of worth. Last night I was getting 14k crits from the spell, consistently. I think it’s safe to say we want to possibly start replacing Holy Wrath in 939 with Hammer of Wrath under 20%. Perhaps even Avenger’s Shield, numbers permitting.

In other news, the damage boost from the Crusade talent wasn’t affecting the splash portion of the attack, significantly hurting our AOE capabilities. Ghostcrawler has confirmed, though, that this was hotfixed last night. I’ll take it.

Lastly, I updated the 101 guide for 4.0.1. As always, please let me know if I forgot anything!

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?