The good kind of wiping

Last night we spent a good 2 hours on Heroic Sindragosa 25, and while we didn’t down her, we got closer than ever before with 13% as our best attempt.

The whole night was generally moving in the same direction, upward. I remember when we first started working on this fight three weeks ago we were losing five people to the frost bombs every air phase, with a further number being cut down by asphyxiation. Last night, not so much. We had many air phases where no one got nuked. It got to the point where I didn’t have to obsessively watch grid to look for the little boxes to grey out and inform me of deaths, people were taking care of themselves.

Progress!

Unchained Magic was a lot better too, with fewer instances like three weeks ago when a mage blew us all up with some massive stack of Instability immediately following a Blistering Cold. He did more than 1 million friendly fire damage and set a new record I suspect the casters are secretly aspiring to topple. I’m watching them.

But in any case, in the flight to the steps at the beginning of the air phase, people were really good about standing aside and minimizing damage.

Likewise people were amazing about getting on the proper spots when Frost Beaconed. In the 36 air phases we did last night I can only think of two times when someone was in the wrong spot. And we only got an extra block once.

More progress!

Stuff to work on, though: people panicking in phase 3 and forgetting to not blow up the raid, to pay attention to their debuffs, the works. I always shout “Marathon, not a sprint!” when the third phase starts. Not that that helps much, but it carries the philosophy of the fight–phase three is the main show, and it’s about endurance, not zerging down the boss.

We’re getting there. We are totally getting there and I fully expect a kill on this fight, one of the hardest in the game, in the next two weeks. If not next week. It’s just a matter of time.

Despite the fact that we didn’t get a kill last night, I think morale still remains pretty high. We didn’t spend the attempts raging at people who got Frost Bombed to death, or hit some people with Instability. Frank didn’t ever poke up his bilious head at any point. We’re really not that kind of guild ultimately. And besides, that’s what the knee-cappings are for.

Instead people were joking and having fun and trying to keep people positively motivated. We had some good laughs at points like right after a fourth Bomb hit, Falowin was watching his block’s health diminish (but not his DBM apparently) and started shouting “NOT MY BLOCK, DON’T BREAK MY BLOCK” in a blind panic. Once he was broken out he realized air phase was over. We all got a good laugh and I’m sure that will come back to haunt him.

And speaking of events that will come back to haunt people, poor Morvain. The guy last night was hopped up to the gills on vicodin due to a horrible tooth-ache. Ever a trooper (and with a Gollum-like devotion to his Shadowmourne shards) he still raided, without much of any performance lost. Except for one moment last night when we switched it back to normal at the last 30 minutes of the raid to wrap up the LK and were kind of blowing off steam on the far less deadly Sindy Normal.

We’re deep into phase 3, with myself and a swath of people hiding behind a block dropping our Buffet. Morvain is there and gets targeted by Frost Beacon. “Morvain,” someone mechanically notes, reading off DBM. Nothing happens. “Morvain move.” … “MORVAIN!”

Then a woosh and about 10 of us are encased in ice blocks. “Sorry guys,” Morvain meekly pipes up, snapping out of his haze. “I was looking at my cat.”

Everyone is caught up in the sheer absurdity of it all, and in the haze of laughter and tears the other half of the raid gets iceblocked. We lose it, and–of course–the fight. Wipe.

It was kind of worth it. Like Antigen said, definitely the birth of an in-joke. That damn cat.

The Longer Arm of the Law

My favorite talent I don’t have is most likely getting buffed in future builds. The run speed increase, according to GC,

[is] 45% in our current builds.

That’s good to hear! It not stacking with PoJ was worrisome, but I figured they would eventually iterate it to have a faster speed (even if right now it’s just PoJ+boost).

Though, honestly, they should probably just merge this talent with PoJ, giving it a 15% base and a 45% (or whatever) boost when that 15 yard-minimum Judgement is cast. Seems silly to make Rets spend 4 talent points on run speed boosts.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a tiny flame of hope to tend to vis-a-vis us ever seeing this talent in Ret tier 2.

Back to business in beta

One of the first things I did Friday when I got home was try to log into the beta and get some more leveling done and see if I missed anything. Instead, all the servers were down. A new patch was being applied from the looks of it, which means I got back just in time.

Later that night everything came back up and I caught on WoR some of the incoming changes. Most immediately tantalizing of which is the new Holy Power UI widget. I’m sure you’ve seen a thousand screens of this, but here are mine:

Perdy.

I’ll be talking a little bit about Holy Power, ShoR, and Holy Shield in a bit. But first, a few back-end things–check out the new tooltips for hit and expertise. This is pretty handy (especially for Expertise, which is a tad more complex than Hit). Takes a little of the numerical mystery out of the game, but QSS.

Now with more Block!

And of course, the biggest news of this build isn’t the fluff HoPo (as Anafielle calls it) interface, it’s the introduction of Mastery.

At base, our Mastery (Divine Bulwark) is worth 16% block chance as soon as you train it. As you add more Mastery rating that number goes up (tempered by the level/mastery formula, of course). At level 81, with 75 Mastery rating, my block chance went up to 23% before Holy Shield.

At lvl 82, I had managed to accumulate 492 mastery through various quest rewards, worth 28% block chance. That’s 32% before Holy Shield, 47% after. In fact, before dinging 82 I had about 52% block chance all together. One level dropped it 5% from the ratings/level conversion. I expect that drop will get steeper as my level gets higher.

The other “skill” available at the trainer was Plate Specialization, which boosts a stat if you’re in all plate.

So basically a free 5% stamina.

Revamped talents and spells

I already talked about Ret’s (grumble) gap closer in a post on Saturday, so I’ll avoid repeating myself here in this space. Some changes prot-side included a return to a +damage Consecration talent, a new Sacred Duty that makes ShoR have a chance to crit (I’ll talk about this re: priorities in a sec), and Wrath of the Lightbringer affects Judgements as well now.

Shield of the Righteous (ugh, that name) is now implemented, unlike the week before. You can talent into it and it appears in your spellbook. And unlike the 30/60/90 iteration, it now deals 20/60/120 AP based on how much Holy Power you’re rocking. At lvl 81 I had about 3700 AP with Might up. I was ShoRing for about 4600 damage a hit, which is 120% AP (including some Vengeance). Not too shabby, but also not the BOOMHEADSHOT type-attack I was hoping for. Perhaps at later levels with more massive AP numbers.

ShoR also when cast will put up a 20 second Holy Shield buff. For 15% block chance, regardless of how much Holy Power you had when you used ShoR. 1 HP is 15%, 2 HP is 15%, 3 is… you get it. This is much less onerous than the old prospect of stacking Holy Power to 3 then getting the max block buff up at the start of a boss fight. Now your first moves in melee can be CS+ShoR and you’ll be good to go.

Hammer of the Righteous has been redesigned. Rather than cleave and swinging flying, glowing hammers about with a mellifluous CLANG, you now just let loose a holy burst of light and hit everything around you. Rather than being a copy of Cleave, HotR is now a copy of Thunderclap. I haven’t tested the damage yet to see how much it does single target, on two, three, etc. and WoL ate the log I did Saturday. Nonetheless, I’m curious why this spell was redesigned, especially when Holy Wrath still works.

Speaking of HotR, it is, as we knew was coming, now on the same cooldown as Crusader Strike. And both have a 4.5 second cooldown, lining up nicely with GCDs.

Hand of Reckoning no longer does damage on taunt. Disappointing, but it was always a band-aid to the removal of Exorcism from our toolboxes. To fill in the gap we have Avenger’s Shield with a–talented–15 second cooldown (which gives me tingles) and the new Improved Judgements talent which allows us to have 30 yard Judgements. Something I can see myself getting.

The new priority

So, like I’ve been teasing, here’s the new priority rotation I’m monkeying around with: (1) Avenger’s Shield, (2) Judgement+3HP ShoR, (3) CS/HotR, (4) Hammer of Wrath, (5) Judgement, (6) Holy Wrath, (7) Consecrate.

The reason I have Judgement twice is because you definitely want to make sure to cast it before ShoR, since it gives ShoR a 50% chance to crit. It doesn’t have to be immediately before, the proc has a 15 second duration, so you can ride that for a bit, or jam another Judgement in right before ShoR for another chance of it.

Judgement otherwise still hits like a wet noodle and isn’t worth prioritizing over other, hard-hitting spells.

Also, don’t forget: the first rule of Grand Crusader is it will always proc if you use CS/HotR when Avenger’s Shield is not on cooldown! Also, we don’t talk about Grand Crusader.

Now, one of the more disconcerting things about beta right now is how many free GCDs we have. I’m so used to rotating through my 9s and 6s that I find myself stopping dead in my tracks with no idea what to do next as all my abilities are on cooldown. In a raid I could toss out some Hands/utility. While soloing I just block Holy Wrath as a filler.

Oh good, more morality quests

And the last thing I want to talk about in this post is I had a very interesting questing experience in Hyjal this weekend.

What’s this? A moral choice?! I had the option of letting the NPC kill the quest target who we were interrogating, or let her go. Being a blood-thirsty Alliance I opted for the throat slitting, though outside of that quest there didn’t seem to be any recourse to my actions. I’ll be miffed if it turns out she comes back to you a week later and gives you a free epic for sparing her life.

Expect this to generate blog posts at the advent of Cataclysm much in the same way that Borean Tundra torture quest did two years ago. Money on the table!

Ret has a gap closer

I would recommend reading this post through something translucent and green, so you can capture the deep shade of envy I am currently possessed by. I log onto beta this morning and bring up my talent window to spec into a (finally working) ShoR. Just for the hell of it, I gloss over Ret’s talents and then proceeded to spit coffee all over my monitor.

Combined with:

So Judgement can be cast from 30 yards away, and gives a 30% movement speed increase if you’re at least 15 yards away. A pseudo-charge. A gap closer.

A frigging gap closer.

But why–WHY?!–does Ret keep getting all the cool toys and then putting them just out of range? As a tier 3 talent, Long Arm of the Law is impossible for Prot to reach, much like Rebuke. They are just taunting us at this point.

I’ll extend premature congratulations to Ret for the talent, and I hope it stays. I also hope it inches its way down the talent tree a bit to a lower tier.

ShoR is such a tease

I finally managed to re-download enough of the beta (we all had to delete the old beta program and reinstall for the new launcher) to get in, and the thought of testing out the new Shield of the Righteous (new name or they forgot what it was called–you decide!) had me salivating. Once I got in–after many abortive attempts–I caught a taxi to the closest Paladin trainer in Darnassus to train the new ShoR, per the instructions in my spellbook.

So I get there, head into the Temple of the Moon, and hit up the trainer. “One ShoR please,” I politely requested. She just stared at me, dumbfounded.

… That ain’t right. I check the spellbook again, and it definitely says “See your trainer.” I then opened my talent window and spotted what I spotted was the culprit: you have to talent into ShoR. Ok, no biggie. I put the point in, hit Learn, and nothing happens. I close the talent window and reopen it, and half my talents are reset. I try again to no avail, it was not meant to be.

Apparently it’s for the best I couldn’t test ShoR as-is on beta, it’s changing very shortly. Right now the tooltip reads damage is 3250 plus 100% of your attack power per Holy Power stack. So unless there’s some trickery in that tooltip description, with an unbuffed AP of 3073, I could have been shield slamming for 12469, assuming the formula is 3250+(AP*HP) and not (3250+AP)*HP. The latter would be 18969, which is ridiculous.

Sidenote: the 3250 modifier there is because I’m level 81, I believe. MMO-Champ has it at 3198, which is probably the level 80 version.

Anyway, here’s the new tooltip from what I assume is an internal build we haven’t seen yet:

Slam the target with your shield, causing Holy damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to determine damage dealt:

1 Holy Power: 30% Attack Power
2 Holy Power: 60% Attack Power
3 Holy Power: 90% Attack Power

So much for the quickly expired statement that ShoR would be our “highest damage ability”. At three stacks and 90% attack power, I seriously doubt it’ll hit harder then Avenger’s Shield right off the bat. Maybe with buffs and enough Vengeance and some raid gear. Obviously I won’t know til I test it, so take that concern with a grain of salt.

On a different note, I think they need to graduate the AP contributions a little more steeply. With an equal AP contribution per stack of Holy Power, I can forsee a future where (assuming we still have free GCDs) it’ll be more threat to hit ShoR at 2 HP, rather than waiting for the accumulation of a max HP stack. Though my crystal ball can’t yet see how much value there’d be to sacrificing 5% block for some more damage and threat. Perhaps if they changed it to something like 20/50/90, where you’d definitely want to wait for that 3rd stack.

Anyway, it’s all conjecture! Can you sense how much I’m itching to shield slam something?

A night of frost and glory

Interestingly enough, I haven’t done a raid recap post in a long while. Nothing much to report lately–we’ve been plugging along on Heroic Sindragosa, having our first real night on her last night. Our showing wasn’t very impressive, we’re having some trouble with the whole buffet of what the fight demands: block positioning, Unchained Magic people not blowing others up, etc. Survival issues.

So, I’m thinking next week we’ll do what we did when we were learning normal Sindragosa: max survivability. DPS wears extra frost resist gear, add a seventh healer, then the goal is to live til the enrage timer. Once we make it that far we’ll dial back survivability until we can find the sweet spot that gets us in under the clock.

This is a strong contrast to last night with our second kill of Heroic LDW where we were mastering the hardest parts of the fight, people were failing at the easiest, most fundamental part of the fight: the ghosts. A ghost would pop up next to someone–melee, ranged, heals, whatever–and they wouldn’t notice til it exploded, or notice late and not be able to get away. We did about four attempts of differing degrees of success, each splashed with the delightful stench of ghost ‘splosions, and each time I got a little closer to completely Franking out. (Yes, it’s a verb now.)

Finally, before the last attempt I snapped and let Frank take over. I told everyone that we were not going to spend two hours on the fight. I don’t care if we wipe, but it was not going to be to ghosts. Everyone was on notice, one more ghost-induced wipe and we would switching it to normal and move on. I felt like crap after declaring that, cause I don’t want to be that raid leader, the Troxxed-style douchebag that issues ultimatums and leads by making people feel bad.

Frank was vindicated when we then went on to perfectly kill H LDW, with no deaths by ghosts. It was… shocking. I don’t know if I should feel good that we pulled it off, or worse that it could so easily be done. I guess we’ll see next week!

Anyway, back to last night. As I tweeted yesterday we were starting the night with our Shadowmourne guy, Nordicslayer, having 48 shards. He’s been collecting them slowly, but surely, since May 11th and we’ve had the extra drop chance of heroic modes since the beginning of June. His poor luck aside, the raid was pumped for him to finally finish the damn axe that night. Or to listen to him cry when he only got one shard from the five bosses we were doing. Either way.

Much to my surprise, a shard dropped off of heroic Festergut, first boss of the night. And then the last one he needed dropped off of heroic Rotface. Finally, some luck!

A parade of us then ran downstairs to watch him turn in the quest and the shards and finally collect his damn axe. Nevertheless, this was months in the making–congratulations Nordicslayer!

I tried to get a nice screenshot of him for the guild site, but he must have moved at the last second, only leaving behind the swirling soul that apparently used to inhabit Antigen’s mortal shell.

We reached Sindragosa at around 7:45 server time, giving us a good 2 hours or so to work on the fight. But you know the rest.

To give us a break, I switched it to normal and we dropped her easily and then moved on to the Lich King to collect the Sealed Chest. The Lich King was another clean kill, excellent for the second wave of dpsers getting dropped off the side of the map. Oops. Personally, I was most excited that that was the first time in a long time I didn’t have to go into a rambling 10 minute explanation of the fight for some new person. I’m sure everyone else was pretty stoked about that too.

Nordic looted the Sealed Chest, and per our agreement he kept one of the vanity items for himself and gave the other four up for the guild. He chose the mount, I took three items to hold to give as prizes in a series of off-night guild events/games, and then per my constant nagging requests over the last four months, took the tabard for myself.

It’s weird. Achieving Shadowmourne feels like we’re turning the page on one of the last chapters in ICC. I know we still have Heroic Sindragosa to kill, then Putricide–and then by some miracle a choir of angels is going to come down and push Arthas off the side of the Frozen Throne for us–but it feels like we’re running out of time in there. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get some major ennui about ICC. Not bad ennui (if there’s such a thing), just… 9 months is a long time to do an instance, you know? It’s time to move on to bigger Internet dragons.

But then again, we have a much more literal Internet dragon to work on right now.

Sidenote on the latest beta build: I’m not going to do too much prodding with the changes, because we know things will be majorly changing again soon. I will however check out how hard ShoR is hitting for tonight. I’m hoping to have a post titled “IT’S OVER 9000″ tomorrow.

Cooldowns and Forbearance on Beta

I’m sure folks have some questions about our menu of cooldowns in the next expansion pack: what’s available to us, when can we use them, how much do they mitigate, and (most importantly) is that terrible debuff Forbearance still in-game.

To answer the last question first, I am saddened to report Forbearance still survives, much like the UFO over Houston, post-nuking, in Independence Day. Target remains.

On the bright side, from what I could tell Divine Protection and Ardent Defender do not trigger it and can be used while your are afflicted with Forbearance. So finally (well, for now, don’t pop the champagne yet) we’re not the only tank locked out of our defensive cooldowns if one is used.

I am also happy to report that Ardent Defender (like Divine Protection right now) is off the GCD, so you can pop it at any point. Likewise I noticed that you can pop Divine Protection and Ardent Defender at the same time, though I’m not sure you would want to since the damage mitigation wouldn’t stack. I could only see doing that if you needed AD’s safety net and had buyer’s remorse from popping DP first.

Which brings me to my next point–the low cooldown on Divine Protection is pretty nice and I suspect will require a major attitude shift when it comes to survival. I’m thinking the model will in the future be something like Ardent Defender is popped as an “oh crap” button and Divine Protection is used as close to once per minute (if the minute cooldown holds) as possible to reduce damage taken over the duration of the fight and thus conserve healer mana. If the boss has predictable, regular damage spikes that would be the best point for it.

As always, standard beta disclaimer applies: everything can change!

On a slightly different note: I mentioned in an earlier post that Holy Shield was bugged on beta. Sometimes it would give 1.5% at 3 Holy Power stacks, sometimes 180%. Never 15%!

Last night while doing a few quick quests, I popped HS and hit 2013% bonus block chance. A minute later I pulled 1347%. I think at that point I was meta-blocking.

Ascending the roller coaster track once more

Ready for another drop on the roller coaster? More big changes coming in the next beta patch of two, apparently. After getting in to beta this past weekend, I felt like I reached a point of comfort with our attacks, and was planning to write a particularly detailed post about the “rotation”, but obviously I nearly spoke too soon. Ghostcrawler has come out with a raft of future changes to our abilities, so instead I’m going to go through each and add some insight from how these currently work on beta.

Shield of the Righteous — Now consumes Holy Power to cause damage.

Holy Shield — Now a passive ability that causes your Shield of the Righteous to provide 5% block per stack of Holy Power consumed. In other words, you never click Holy Shield. You just click Shield of the Righteous and buff yourself.

ShoR currently does not exist on beta, and I’m glad that it’ll soon be back. I was excited about this reintroduction when it was hinted at a few days ago, and I’m moreso now that they’re going to give it a whirl on beta. Right now HP is incredibly boring–you stack it to three then hit Holy Shield for a buggy block chance increase (sometimes it was doing 1.5%, sometimes 180%!) or give yourself a quick, boring heal. ShoR using Holy Power for an impressive single-target attack with add some much-needed flair to the system.

My biggest worry is whether we’ll expend the Holy Power if ShoR misses. That’d be pretty killer in a tight spot when previously we never had to worry about Holy Shield missing.

Also, not to try to reinvent the wheel here or anything, but… wouldn’t it more sense to–instead of making Holy Shield passive and bring back ShoR–but make Holy Shield an attack? Wouldn’t that be less work?

Hammer of the Righteous — Now generates Holy Power but shares a cooldown with Crusader Strike. Almost all talents that affect one or the other will affect both. The intention is you use Crusader Strike -> Shield of the Righteous for single target and Hammer of the Righteous -> Shield of the Righteous for multitarget.

I’m assuming this means Hammer’s cooldown is going to get reduced to 4 seconds, or the two abilities will meet somewhere in the middle. Likewise, I’m curious if HotR will retain its 100%-50%-25% damage spread in this new iteration. Hammer was hitting for about 3000 damage this weekend on its primary target, while Crusader was hitting for less. They’ll have to redesign Hammer (probably an equal damage spread among all three targets) to make it attractive for multi-target pulls and unattractive for single/bosses.

Avenger’s Shield — No real change, but it still hits pretty hard. Both CS and HotR can proc Grand Crusader to lower the Avenger’s Shield cooldown.

Let me just take a moment and proclaim my undying love for Avenger’s Shield as it is on beta now. When that ability comes off cooldown, you want to use it immediately (pronto!) because it’ll hit for around 7500 damage on each target it hits. No spread, 7500×3. Not only that, but I’ve seen it crit for 15,000, which is just breathtaking. I don’t think I usually crit for more than 10k in ICC 25 while fully buffed, and this ability can crit for 15k while soloing! More like Avenger’s Freight Train, eh?

They absolutely hit the nail on the head with this one. AS is fun to push, and when you see that Grand Crusader proc, you want to immediately indulge in some Captain America’ing. Probably the most tragic thing that has happened to me on beta so far is pushing back using Avenger’s Shield to get another CS off, and therefore generate some more HP, only to have that CS proc Grand Crusader, robbing me of an Avenger’s Shield. I’m man enough to admit I weeped.

Vindication — can be caused only by Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous.

Not very consequential, considering Vindication was bugged on beta to basically apply from anything. I’ll miss the brief shining moment that we had Holy Demo Shout, though. It’s going to be a pain to be the only tank class that can’t debuff an entire massive pull.

Holy Wrath — With the above changes, we think Prot paladins have enough rotational buttons to hit, so we are downplaying Holy Wrath. Holy Wrath is really intended as a Ret filler spell (for when other attacks are on cooldown). Prot could technically use Holy Wrath, but we aren’t providing any talent hooks.

This is probably a good idea. Right now our “rotation” (I keep using quote marks because it’s not a rotation, as I’ll explain shortly, and I can’t think of a better catch-all word) has a lot to keep track of. Holy Wrath is good for massive pulls to immediately build threat on a mob of tiny murlocs charging at your healer, or on a single target where it’ll hit for more than half of our abilities.

Once you get to three or more enemies though, it’s lightweight, and unless you can’t be arsed to tab around and build threat equally with more powerful attacks, there was no real incentive to using HW. Phasing this out for general purpose is a good idea, it should remain situational.

Consecration — Now on a 10 sec duration with a 30 sec cooldown. The Hallowed Ground talent makes it cheaper and hit harder — it does not affect duration. Use Consecration when you need it, but you can’t spam it. This is consistent with the AE changes we are making to all tanks.

There goes the UI element, I suspect!

From the limited time I had this past weekend I found myself just about never using Consecration. It hits for a piddling amount and often (thanks to Hallowed Ground) outlived it’s target by a wide margin. As such it was pretty deprioritized in my rotation. In Throne of the Tides, on the other hand, it was very hand for boss fights (fire and forget!) or for what few AOE pulls I could live through. All in all, I think a better design direction is a short-lived, harder hitting Consecration, over a long-lived, weaker version. The short duration and longer cooldown will make dropping the spell a much more meaningful action as well.

One last worry: with Holy Shield gone, ShoR’s return, and the combined cooldown of CS/HotR, that’s one less button to push. I wonder if we’re going to have some free GCDs now. On beta there’s always something to hit, so that’s not a worry but we’ll see with these changes if that remains the case.

Don’t call it a rotation

The version first I did (after the other first thing) in beta was I found some target dummies and tried all of our abilities to see how much they hit for. I had a legal pad in front of me, scribbling down numbers, and taking notes. I then plotted out a timeline of GCDs to try to figure out the smoothest rotation possible. Basically, some kind of analogue for 969. I quickly realized this was impossible, because there are so many intersecting tracks and cooldowns, and even a proc, that the only way to approach our rotation is to recognize what it truly is: a priority system.

Here is, based on what GC just proposed and what non-changing abilities are like on beta, what I suspect the priority system will soon be:

1. 3HP Shield of Righteousness
2. Avenger’s Shield — hits like a truck, and you don’t want to miss a Grand Crusader proc
3. Crusader Strike/Hammer of the Righteous — depending on size of pull
4. Holy Wrath — for single targets, assuming it still hits for around 2700
5. Judgement — only hits for around 1300, very weak. Moreover you really on need to use it once every 15 seconds or so, to make sure you keep the attack speed debuff up. If mana retains being a non-issue, then Judgements of the Wise is not a good enough reason to prioritize this.

Not sure where Consecration will fit there (I’ll have to see how damage it does). I suspect it’ll be under Hammer of the Righteous for large pulls.

I have to honestly say that I am loving Paladin tanking in beta. It’s reactive, there are choices you have to make on the fly to be a more effective tank. Furthermore, you have to make the right choices to put out the most threat and thus be the most effective tank. It rewards you for playing smart.

Beta Day 2: Exploring, waggling, Hyjal, and Throne of the Tides

I never got back online on Saturday after the 30 minutes I spent setting Rhidach, and had to wait until Sunday morning to do some real exploration of the changed world. Once I got back on that morning, I hopped on my Hippogryph and started touring Azeroth, checking out the more lore-heavy places that were important to my Paladin.

(Sidenote: this entire post might as well be one huge Cataclysm spoiler. If you don’t want to see anything from the screenshots I took, I’d recommend skipping the post. If enough people are trying to stay pristine I’ll start hiding this stuff behind a cut. Though, I didn’t really grab screens of anything particularly important.)

I immediately hopped on a zap to Undercity to check out Lordaeron and the Plaguelands, before ending at the training dummies in Silvermoon.

Flying over Undercity was a sight to see. I was always curious what was behind those massive locked doors in the courtyard (other than the transport orb to Silvermoon) and it’s just amazing to see the sprawling, ruined courtyards and gardens behind and around the citadel.

I then darted off eastward to pay a visit to my bud Tirion in Hearthglen. Looks like the guy has set himself up pretty well since we broke him out of that ice cube. Hell, looks like he took just about all the credit for the toppling of the Lich King and erected a monument to that effect.

If you don’t think that’s vainglorious enough, there’s a matching statue in Light’s Hope Chapel. Tirion, you bastard, we did all the heavy lifting, all you did was a backflip!

After spending a huge chunk of time attempting to work out a rotation (more on that in my next post), I logged off for a bit. While I was gone I had a revelation: just about everyone I know from Twitter was Alliance and therefore Horde-side was going to be awfully lonely in the beta. To increase my chances of maybe doing a few beta raids eventually, I bit the bullet and created a premade Alliance Paladin.

A female Draenei one.

So I did the set up dance with her. She is named Rhydach. Her hips do something funny when she walks. I don’t get it.

Yes, I feel dirty too. But it’s not my fault, Draenei was the only option for Alliance Paladin premades!

On the bright side, since I’m playing Cataclysm on Alliance side, it’ll feel a little fresher once the expansion pack comes out. Rather than if I spent the entire time on Horde side in the beta. In any case, after the set up I spent most of the rest of the day questing in Hyjal. Only took me about three and a half quest hubs to get to 81. Though, I’m guessing 81 to 82 will take a lot more experience.

Soloing as a tankadin was pretty straightforward. We still have a wide raft of abilities, and you’ll generally find yourself using them all except for Consecrate, unless you’re surrounded by a large group of mobs. Health was usually not an issue–I don’t recall dropping under 90% except for a few AOE situations (not being blockcapped/having the old block is a pain) and mana was definitely not an issue. I could Judge every 20 seconds and just about always have a full blue rage bar. It was pretty awesome, but also pretty mindless with regards to our primary resource.

As for our seconday resource, without a specific UI for it, or any addons, Holy Power is a pain to keep track of. I often found myself forgetting how many stacks I had and then having to squint at all my buffs until I remembered which icon was for Holy Power. Annoying, but obviously fleeting. Also, hitting Crusader Strike every third attack is not as huge of a pain as I expected it to be, and I generally had enough HP to keep up Holy Shield if I wanted to.

Of course, Holy Shield is weirdly bugged right now on beta. Sometimes I would hit it and get 45% block, sometimes I’d get 180%, and sometimes I’d get 1.5%. There was no consistency to the buff. I usually just used HP to pop Word of Glory after every mob and top myself off.

(Another sidenote: this is how I was specced at 81. I retrospect, I wish I diverted the point from PoJ and the two from E4E and put them in Divinity. I’ll explain why shortly.)

The Throne of Pain!

So the good news is dungeons require a lot more thought in Cata than they do in Wrath. The bad news is a normal dungeon was about as difficult as a TBC heroic. At least for now, I’m guessing it might be a bit overtuned (just going on a limb here).

I was in there for 90 minutes, and we only got the third boss. And I died 13 times. Sometimes instantly. That place is like a sopping wet meat grinder.

Every instinct in my body was telling me to attempt to tanking all the mobs, and yet as soon as I had two of one kind of mob on my, I would die. Or a wave of murlocs would rush past me, intent on eating the healer (they were tiny and dangerous, like Rot Worms on steroids) and so I’d pop Holy Wrath to aggro them all, and then break CC. Which would then release the mobs that would pulverize me into a fine paste.

Once we worked through the gauntlet hallway we eventually made our way to the first boss who at times felt almost like a raid boss. She has a channeled lightning attack that will do some serious damage to the tank (like around 18000) if not interrupted. She also had two “down” phases where she’d retreat into this whirlwind and three adds would come in the room. The casters would immediately need to be CC’d and the melee add picked up and burnt down. Then one at a time kill the casters before the boss re-aggros. Once we got the hang of it, it was an easy kill.

Huge change of the pace from the tank and spanks of Wrath!

We then ran back to the previous central room where a new boss suddenly appeared. We just ran in and pulled him, and I was promptly one shot (45k damage) by a channeled attack he did. Note to self: run out of it. That must have been a fun surprise for the healer.

The second go we dropped this guy, though it was getting a bit hairy towards the end as he kept giving me a move speed debuff curse, which then almost led to me getting caught by the one-shot attack. To be fair, I think the healer didn’t know I needed a decurse, and I definitely didn’t have the dexterity to type out “HALP” while running out of a Dark Fissure.

About at the 90 minute mark we cleared up to the third boss and got an attempt in, but by that point one of the dps had to go and the group fell apart.

Overall it was a pretty intense dungeon, though I’m sure it’ll be easier once Cataclysm comes out. There’s not way they’ll leave an entry dungeon that overtuned. That said, I really like the design that I encountered in there: I have the threat to tank all the mobs, but if I try, I’ll go splat. I like having to use some CC and think about pull execution. Though this makes me mourn for the kinds of pugs that would bang their heads against such a design on live.

Just to speak a little about threat–I didn’t find I was having much of any trouble with it. I know this is level 81 and an entry-level dungeon, but single-target threat was easy mode. I don’t think I ever dropped on under 100% threat on a mob I was intentionally tanking, at least according to the stock UI. After that run I think I have a much, better handle on the new “rotation” which doesn’t seem as counter-intuitive. But, like I said, I’ll talk about that in my next post.

Survivability on the other hand was tenuous at times. I don’t know if it was the healers or if I was doing something wrong, but it felt like a raid at times where I was three hits away from death. If I was ever tanking more than two mobs I’d chain cooldowns and ride a stream of invectives to victory. It was seat of your pants in there.

Lastly, I have a log of the dungeon run if anyone is interested. There was a hunter, mage, fury warrior, and resto druid in the group as well.

Please make this change!

As far as rotations go, something I mentioned in the live forums is we are trying letting Shield of the Righteous (or whatever we decide to call it) consume Holy Power for more damage *and* refresh Holy Shield. So you would need to get Holy Shield up, but then you could just use your shield hits instead. If you were ever in a position where you couldn’t hit the boss, you could always fall back on just casting Holy Shield itself. We’ll see how that feels.

That would be an amazing change, it would make Holy Power less of a limitation and more of a bonus, remove the maintenance-y feel of Holy Shield, and bring back our old friend ShoR all at the same time. I sincerely hope they make this change and are happy with it.

Bonus: a hint of something else they really should do.

We’d like to give Prot paladins (Ret too) passive spell hit somewhere.

That’d be pretty necessary if our attack power reduction debuff (Holy Wrath+Vindication) is on the spell hit table.