Great raid week, or *the greatest* raid week?

In the past few weeks we’ve been running two 25 nights, doing most of Coliseum on Tuesday and then VOA and finishing up Coliseum on Wednesday. Worked well, we got stuff done, people got their purps, everyone was happy.

So I wake up Tuesday and find out that Blizz is throwing a monkey wrench in the works: they’re releasing patch 3.2.2. Obviously, I’m shocked. I wasn’t away from WoW so I was not expecting a patch to come out–

Actually, I’ll explain this. Running joke is patches only come out when I’m on vacation or traveling for work. For example, 2.4 came out when I was in Florida for work (bee tee dubs, running Heroic Magister’s Terrace on a crappy hotel wireless connection while loaded on minibar booze = best thing ever), 3.0 when I was in Marseilles, 3.2 when I was in New Hampshire, etc.

Right, so back on topic: suddenly we had Onyxia to squeeze into the calendar, and by squeeze, I mean we actually had plenty of room for the old girl. To appease the masses yearning for dragon’s blood we decided to go after her after VOA that night. Moreover, the initial thought was Onyxia was resetting Tuesday night so it’d be stupid not to kill her when we could do her again the next day. Though, as we learned, not so much.

So we rip through VOA25 and then get our butts down to Dustwallow for Onyxia. The pvpers were out in force with a contingent of Horde sitting on the summoning stone, making getting the stragglers a little easier.

Once inside we burnt our way through Onyxia’s trash until we were face to face with the Brood Mother herself. Now, my only experience with this encounter was once at level 70 when I completed the huge quest chain for the hell of it, and then a few times at level 80 to gather scales for cloaks and to nab my t2 helm and Quel’Serrar (originals, both). I was not familiar with how the mechanics would work when at the proper raid level, aside from what I learned from the hilarious and classic Onyxia Wipe Animation.

So ES charges down the hill with the DK picking up Ony and me hanging in the rear on whelp and add duty. We get her to 70% quickly and she takes flight. The whelp train leaves the station and I immediately do my best to round as many as possible and help with the burn down. The AOE must have been intense because my fps dropped to 19 quickly, when it’s usually 60 in raids. A few people actually got dc’d, hah.

The adds go down and someone cries in vent “Deep Breath, look at her and move away from it!” Contrawise, the mouth breathers all stare at the ceiling in confusion and get roasted alive. The rest of us darted away and fall back together to deal with the eventually descending Onyxia. Of course the DK tank bought it, so I ran over and grabbed Ony to position her for phase three. The priests start rotating their Fear Wards and I used a bubble/debubble macro to slip out of one fear.

After going through the fear-break fear cycle a few more times Onyxia dropped to the floor and gave up her purples. A hunter and warlock helm dropped as well as the Sharpened Obsidian Edged Blade which is damn sexy. I was one for my Ret set. Loot is distributed and it’s only 7:30 server time, we’ve only been raiding for 45 minutes or so, amazingly.

A couple of us tabard hearth to the tournament and begin summoning the rest. We all pour into the Coliseum and start working our way through… and one shot every boss. We were out of there in two and a half hours, a few minutes shy of the 10pm ST cap I put on the raid.

Faction Champs in particular was an absolute joke. Usually we lose 5-8 people in the encounter, but with the nerfs done to overall damage we didn’t lose a single person. Sure, some of that can be explained by “practice makes perfect” and all, but the whole danger feeling of the fight was lost. Anub itself was also a cake walk. They toned down the damage the Burrowers were doing to the point where I never felt threatened, even while holding three of them at once. I’m not going to lie, I was kind of disappointed.

Well, that was Tuesday night: VOA, Ony, Col25. All cleared, all one shots. Amazing night.

And then last night we were kind of at a loss for what to do so it was decided we’d finally put to rest one of the ghosts haunting our guild: Sarth25 3D. We went in and did two learning wipes to figure out the finer points that most guilds knew of months ago, and then killed Sarth easily on the third go. So lots of folks got their titles and my pal Gulli got the drake for his mount collection.

Speaking of progress, I was looking at wowprogress, at the suggestion of Falowin, to see how our guild was doing there. Apparently we’re ranked 10th on our server and hilariously got the 17th kill in the world of Twins25 (which obviously doesn’t mean much, considering there’s a billion guilds tied for 17th along with us). All this progress and we’ve never killed Yogg. It’s kind of funny.

After Sarth I put together a dream team for ToC-10 heroic. It’s been our goal for a while to start working on that, and after Monday’s bloodlustless snafu we marched in last night with renewed vigor, determination, and shammyness.

Beasts we amazingly one-shot, and this was after wiping to them 13 times on monday. I’m assuming there must have been a stealth nerf in there, because I swear we were too slow to kill Gormok but the worms died sickeningly fast. Then Icehowl we just went through the motions with and burnt down with a minute left on the enrage timer. A nice morale boost for sure. 50 attempts left on the clock.

Then Jarxxus we had some trouble with initially with getting the portals down in time until we decided to shrink it down to one tank and six dps. This made life so much easier, because basically if you find yourself with two Mistresses of Pain, you’re looking at a world of hurt. That’s two counterspells going around, two healers that can be pounced at a time, it’s chaos. On the attempt we killed him we executed the fight perfectly. Portals went down very fast so we were never left with more adds than there would be in the normal mode. Took six wipes to learn, but when we got it, it was a thing of beauty. 44 attempts left on the clock.

Then onto Faction Champs–and oh boy did we luck out with group composition. We had the pally and druid for healers–that is, the two easiest to control. And no warrior, which made Zilga, the one clothie breathe a sigh of relief, even if the DK was still there (ZILGA DOWN!). So the kill order we settled on was Enhance Shaman, DK, Hunter, then Druid, Pally, and Shadow Priest. Nailed the fight on the second go, leaving us with 42 attempts left.

Unfortunately that was it for the night, have hit the time most people had to bail. We’re reforming on Monday and hoping can clean up the place and score the A Tribute to Skill achievement.

Overall, though, an amazing raid week. One I’m proud to be a part of with a great bunch of people.

Coping with loss (of threat)

You know, this really isn’t that big of a deal. It’s only ~5% of our threat lost, which shouldn’t be more than 400-500 tps. Yeah, we’ll be fine, everything will be hunky dory.

What really bothers me about this though is, was it really that big of a deal that pallies were the best tanks for threat. I mean, really?! Did it makes that much of a difference that we could out-threat any other tank and give a good dps ceiling to the pew pewers?!

If only we fought this change harder in the tanking forums. If only we defended high threat as being our “flavor”. This never would have happened.

Oh, what’s the use? Now I’m going to have dps pulling off me left and right. The DK tank was already out-threating me on a few encounters last night. It’s only going to get worse.

… Eh, screw it. I’ll get hit capped and switch 2/2 Divine Guardian for 2/5 Reckoning. We’ll be fine.

Tanks, what you need to know about 3.2.2

So apparently 3.2.2 is dropping today according to mmo-champ. While it might make sense to spend the first night of this raid reset mourning the AD nerf, we tankadins are made of stronger stuff. Grab your boot straps and make the best of this down-tuning. Here’s what you need to know about the changes to our class in this patch.

1. Our threat nerf will work out to around a 5% tps loss

We’re going to lose about 100 spell power from the change to Touched by the Light and receive 10% less bonus threat from Holy damage thanks to the Righteous Fury change. This seems drastic, but smarter folks than I have calculated that out to “only” a 5-6% loss in tps. Not the end of the world. Might not even be noticeable.

To compensate be sure to get more hit so your threat is more consistent. Get expertise soft-capped too. And if you find your threat cratering, considering the Accuracy enchant for your weapon. (Don’t go overboard and gem for strength, though.)

2. Seal of Command is still not for tanking

I know the new aoe aspect looks tempting, but this is really a buff for Ret in trash–it’s not meant for us. You’re going to do more threat with SoV/C up and HotRing stacks on to a swath of mobs than hitting individual guys for a pittance and chaining two extra holy strikes on your single weapon swings. Avoid the temptation to go spec into SoComm.

3. Judgement Helm is awesome and you want it

Srsly. It’s freaking T2 and it has hit. I honestly don’t know which is better.

Oh. Right. The T2 part.

4. No more libram swapping

I don’t think many people did this anyway, but just in case, we can’t libram swap anymore. If you unequip a libram you lose its effect.

5. <35% is going to hurt a lot more

Ardent Defender received an annoying nerf that will make the sub-35% hp zone a little more dangerous for us. The change overall is about a 9% effective health loss, unfortunately. It doesn’t gimp us (the change was actually justifiable in terms of how powerful AD was) but it does mean that we’re not as “invincible” as we once were.

You mess wit’ da bull…

This is what I do when I’m bored between Heroic ToC-10 wipes.

Slainté!

Ah Brewfest, my favorite Azerothian fiesta. There is nothing like rocketing along on a keg-laden Ram, sloshed to the gills, with chaotic oompah music blaring as your zoom by.

I was secretly hoping that rather than replicating all the entry-level badge items again Blizzard would update the trinkets from the TBC years. Namely, Coren’s Lucky Coin. It wasn’t in the cards, and now rather than having an awesome BV trinket for my threat set, I’m left with some silly dodge nonsense.

Speaking of trinkets, how about those two 170 stamina charms? Craziness, though great for starter tanks. I would easily choose the Bubbling Brightbrew Charm (the use effect is a weak Healing Stream Totem) over Essence of Gossamer, though not over the Heart of Iron nor probably the Black Heart, either. A lot of stamina is nice, but the massive amounts of that stat on these two items kind of reinforces my point from Friday does it not?

Of course you’re now going to see legions of fresh tanks duel-wielding barmaids. Such is the siren song of effective health.

I think my one goal of this fortnightly fest (aside from being hailed as Brewmaster Rhidach) is getting a mole machine remote, if only for the easy access to MC it will give.

Tonight we’re heading into Heroic ToC-10. I hope to report good things tomorrow.

The audacity of HP

I wrote in my post yesterday that I hit the 40k unbuffed mark on Wednesday, which is a milestone in many ways, and a sad commentary in others. Think about it: I have eight times more health than I did at level 60, and that’s only twenty levels ago. That’s how out of control stat inflation has gotten.

Tanks running around with this much health does not lend itself to balanced boss design. To make up for such vivacious tanks, raid bosses need to hit that much harder to actually create any sense of danger for the healers (hence most Uld25 bosses and folks like Gormok the Impaler).

So then tanks can get two- or three-shot in progression raids and suddenly healing has ramped up to constantly healing the tank (even if they don’t need the heals at the moment) lest the boss fires off too many hits in a row and gib them.

And then this boss design cascades down into an arms race of sorts. Because tanks have too much health bosses hit harder, so tanks stack even more health. Instead of Pershing Missles, we’ve got dual stam trinks in our arsenal.

So avoidance be damned, full speed ahead on EH. Which then, of course, cascades down into the worth of a tank being solely determined by their effective health. Any EH advantage is perceived by the roiling, screeching masses as a huge disparity because in this brave new world of raid buffed tanks with 50k+ hitpoints all that matters is your raw effective health number. Utility is thrown out the window, avoidance ignored, and cooldowns discounted. All we care about is how many hits can you take before finally dying.

This is a huge fault in the design process right now because there are so many different flavors to each of the different tanks–strengths and weaknesses that makes each class unique. And each and every one of those differences is being discounted completely save for EH. It’s a huge betrayal of the concept of BTPNTC when a specific class might not be deliberately favored, but a particular aspect of boss design is, which then ipso facto divides the tanking classes into those that can compete on the sole basis of this one criterion, and those that have fallen behind.

To be fair, I don’t think Blizz anticipated how bad it was going to get. GC already admitted they hadn’t even dreamt of hard modes when designing Wrath, and because eventually hard modes had to provide better loot, the designers were forced into cranking out gear with iLevels that weren’t expected until much later into Wrath’s patch cycle. Maybe even not until Cataclysm. They now publicly regret that some dps is running around 70%+ crit chances and tanks are boasting 50%+ avoidance, though obviously not much can be done about that now.

But how will they approach this in the next xpac? Well, same thing they did at the stat of Wrath. Ratings diminishing returns will be jacked up so as soon as you ding lvl 81 you’ll suddenly have much less crit/dodge/etc. than you did at 80. That’s all well and good, but you know what else they expect to do? Jack up everyone’s health pools. That’s right: more stamina.

What do you think the upper level of raid-buffed tank health is going to be at Patch 4.3? 75,000? 100,000? Who knows–the sky is the limit!

… and that’s the problem. Blizz needs to take the opportunity of Cataclysm to tear the system down and rebuild it anew. Tone down the iLevels across the board, removing the huge jumps from vanilla greens to TBC greens to Wrath greens which are no longer necessary. Smooth it out so rather than wearing iLevel 200 gear after dinging level 80, you’re wearing gear that has an iLevel of 80. Then, of course, tone down mobs across the board so you can survive a level 80 mob in iLevel 80 gear.

Moreover, rather than letting the arms race continue, redirect tanking towards a more balanced experience where avoidance is more than just a necessary and random evil that would actually be worth gemming for. Make it so EH is no longer the only criterion for a successful progression tank.

Stat inflation is only beginning to get out of hand. Imagine how much worse it will be at the beginning of the next expansion when we’re all in iLevel 400 gear and rocking health bars that would make a vanilla instance boss jealous.

This spreadsheet proves… er, nothing

This is what I do when I’m bored at work: make bad spreadsheets. I wanted to see if there was a pattern with bids on Trophies from Col25–in the sense that they get more expensive as the night goes on, or they decrease in value, etc. It’d help me game when to bid dkp on a Trophy and get it as cheaply as possible.

X-axis is position of Trophy (1 drops from Beasts, 2 from Jaraxxus, etc.) and Y-axis is the relative cost of the trophy with 1 being the least expensive of the night and 5 the most.

As you can see there’s no real discernible pattern in bids aside from (I guess) the first week being a rush for them, then second week people trying to play it smart so waiting until the last one of the night but really driving up the price, and then in the third week the reverse happening because everyone assuming the same pattern would hold and the first one would go for cheap.

And, if you’ll indulge me the hypothesis, once we hit the fourth charted week, people gave up looking for patterns and bid whenever.

Of course, that’s all conjecture! Maybe in a few more weeks when I have more data this will make a little more sense.

Two Anubs, one night

Tuesday night we basically repeated what happened last week, when we killed everything up to Anub’arak but couldn’t down the last boss before everyone had to split because of lateness. So Anub rolled over to last night and we rolled in to take him out.

What screwed us up Tuesday night was too much experimenting with some pretty fail alternate strategies. We tried using AOE to burn down Burrowers and damage Anub at the same time, which was slow. The DK tank also suggested making the pursued person run far away and get bubbled or something, but that just spread everyone out, and turned out to be pretty fail as well.

What did work was what we did last week: kill 1 add from first pair of Burrowers, I hold the other 3. Also, we burnt Bloodlust once the first add was down, so we could assuredly make the enrage timer. I think with this strategy, on the attempt that we killed him, we only had two Burrow phases. I may be wrong… strong emphasis on may.

So, alas, I think that’s the strategy we’re sticking with. It’s sloppy but our tanks and heals are leet enough that it works.

With Anub down we then metered out the two groups for TOC-10 and in a short hour I racked up enough emblems to grab my third piece of T9.245, as well as a nice achievement.

Random thought: I really need to get into Heroic TOC-10. It’s a sin we haven’t started clearing that place out yet.

Now, speaking of T9.245, I think order of attack on emblem purchases will now be Headplate of the Honorbound and Liadrin’s Breastplate of Triumph with the order depending on if I win a trophy before accumulating 75 emblems. The Headplate will serve as a placeholder for when I (hopefully/eventually) win the tanking Judgement helm from the new Onyxia.

Lastly, I am proud to announce that I have officially beat Demogar to 40k hp unbuffed. Despite being disadvantaged by neither being a Blacksmith nor a cow, I managed to pick up enough gear while he was on his honeymoon to close the gap and sprint across the finishline.

Of course, the gear that got me to that point is horribly lacking in hit, so I probably won’t be rocking that much stam outside of sitting in a Demolisher on Flame Leviathan.

Woo hoo, superior stam scaling.

Hit rating matters

On Saturday night I ran my ToC10 raid. I took the main tank role while one of our Ret pallies donned his prot gear to handle OTing. This is of course the same gentleman that did the “I don’t think, I just do what I’m told” remark last week, so I wasn’t expecting much. It is only ToC10, after all.

And then when he logged on he announced in O chat that he was drunk, which prompted me to joke that he should stay sober enough to do his job. He replied by saying that it didn’t matter, tanking consisted of sitting there and hitting “my hammer” and then “my shield.” Oy. So he was going to have to take the MT role.

Anyways, we’re on Gormok–first fight–and I get my three stacks and I call for a taunt.

“Woops, guess he didn’t like that,” I’m informed. Gormok keeps wailing on me. Oh goody, taunt fail.

1.5 seconds later: “Nope, not that one either.” Stack number four applies.

A few more seconds pass, Hand of Reck comes off cooldown, and finally Gormok turns to face the other tank.

This continues the next time he needs to pull off me. “Do you have any hit rating?” I ask. He wonders aloud when that became a tanking stat. /headdesk

The next time I need him to pull Gormok off me, I just bubbled to remove my stacks, dropped aggro to him, and immediately salv’d so Gormok would stay with him after my bubble fell off.

The point I’m getting at is this: hit matters. It’s not just some ancillary threat stat, it also has really impacts on raid performance. Taunt misses can be the end of an attempt, easily resulting in a healer death if an add is running amok, or a dead tank if a boss switch doesn’t occur in time. Moreover, considering the threat nerf we’re taking next patch, we’re going to have to be a little smarter about how we’re generating hate. With attacks causing less aggro, it’s going to be critical those attacks land more consistently.

Now before I continue, a big caveat: don’t gem for hit, just swap in enough gear to maintain a healthy 6%. And augment that with the Glyph of Righteous Defense. Being hit capped (263 rating, 8%) is nice, but don’t sacrifice survivability for it. 6% is a happy medium and easy to achieve.

With the glut of expertise on gear in the Coliseum, it’s going to be harder and harder to reach that comfortable level of hit. You’re going to want to swap around pieces to compensate.

Running with zero hit rating is not a good idea.

It begins

They nerfed AD on the latest version of the PTR.

Actually, this is a perfectly justifiable nerf, considering what a godly talent Ardent Defender is at the moment.

Nevertheless, I hope this is the end of the tweaks, though I’m not convinced it will be.

Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.

The change to HotR was taken out as well.