A full quarter more badass

I love each time Garrosh manages to get his Warsong out a little louder. Last week we killed 5 of the twelve heroic fights, with multiple wipes on Festergut and Blood Queen. This week we one shot both of those, easily. Part of that was of course knowing the intricacies of the fight a little better after the kill, but another huge help was surely another 5% more awesome.

Not to mention all the delicious HPs! I wants them all.

Er, but moving on… To add to our plate, the schedule called for adding Heroic Princes and Dreamwalker. I was initially (hell, still am) concerned about the raid schedule this week ever since Tuesday was a no-go. We have a make up night scheduled for Sunday, but even so I was very worried my all-important goal of Heroic BQL or bust every week was out of reach if we didn’t get to her last night. Mostly because Sunday has the possibility of being iffy.

So after two wipes on heroic Blood Princes, Frank started whispering into my ear dark tidings and it being an hour away from raid end I was beginning to debate in officer chat if it made sense to kill Princes on normal to guarantee BQL being down this week. The other officers (rightly) told me to simmer down and we did another go.

And killed them that next attempt. Egg on ma face!

As we running up the ramp and clearing to BQL I noticed my ShoR icon was faded out. My shield was also unequipped. I immediately panicked, thinking I sold it or destroyed it by accident, and searched my bags for them. I looked up at the top of my screen and my durability number was at 44%.

Not able to find the shield, and in near full-blown panic, I opened my character sheet and saw the shield still equipped, but at 0/120 durability. All my gear was at 44% but my shield was completely broken. Ye gods.

I don’t know why I announce these things in vent. I’m just giving Anafielle fodder for her eventual coup.

Anyway, we briskly one-shot Heroic BQL, which was pretty impressive. Though, after my moment in the sun, any plain-jane kill just feels so… pedestrian. Loot dropped and it was basically a carbon copy of last week. Anafielle got the heroic token, another Dying Light went to another mage, and everyone else groaned. At one heroic token a week right now, these things are hot commodities.

With about thirty minutes left in raid, the lot of us dodged over to Dreamwalker to start plugging away on her heroic mode. We had a few abortive attempts with one of our best portal-jumping healers disconnecting, so didn’t get very far unfortunately. 10 server rolled around and the sun set on our second, and best, night in 25 heroic modes yet. Very exciting stuff, 6/12 in one night.

Now let’s hope Sunday happens!

ICC25HM: Lord Marrowgar

This is the first in a series of guides to the bosses of Icecrown Citadel 25man Heroic Mode. I’ll be adding more of these as time goes on and as we down new bosses.

So, what’s different?

• Bonestorm will probably kill anyone in the epicenter
• Coldflame does more damage, stays up much longer
• Bone spikes occur during Bonestorm

Group composition we used: 2 tanks, 6 healers, 17 DPS.

The trickiest part of this fight is going to be the Bonestorm. You’d think Marrowgar would hit harder on the tanks but, honestly, he doesn’t. He was hitting me for an average of 26k last week, which on a tank pushing 70k hp is a tickle. I’m very comfortable two tanking this fight and freeing up one dps, rather than splitting the Sabre Lash three ways.

Coldflame turns into a fun game of hop-skotch. You and your partner tanks will be spending any non-Bonestorm moment of the fight strafing left or right. Likewise, I usually mark myself and the other tank, and then (because such is privilege of MTing) I call out in vent which way I’m going during each burst of Coldflame. Usually left four times, then right, rinse, repeat, etc.

To make it easier on the rest of the raid, they can just hide in the red circle under Marrowgar. Coldflame trails form just outside it. Tanks could theoretically do this too, but with only the two of us I’m worried about the tight confines of the inner hitbox leading to accidental Sabre Lashings. Plus, strafing is much more fun.

So, like I said: Bonestorm hurts. But, thankfully, it’s easily mitigated by a strategy posted by Rilgon on Stabilized Effort Scope. There is a cast time when Bonestorm is about to happen, so as soon as I see him casting it, I split one way, my co-tank splits the other. We spread to opposite ends of the room along the base of the ice. Likewise, a pre-appointed Hunter goes to one side of the door, and a Boomkin heads to the other. Four points to a square. Everyone else clumps in the middle.

The reason four of us spread out is Marrowgar will generally target the person farthest away from him to park a Bonestorm on top of. If it’s a tank, great; if it’s the boomkin, he can Barkskin; if the hunter, he can use Deterrence.

Ranged need to kill spikes that pop up in Bonestorm ASAP. Coldflame likes to worm its way under those people. If the Hunter or Boomkin that eat Bonestorms get spiked, I throw a Hand of Sacrifice on them to be safe.

If Marrowgar jumps into the middle, I pop Divine Sacrifice (the whole thing, not just Divine Guardian) and soak up some of that damage. Putting your healers in a group with you isn’t a terrible idea to give them some breathing room in those “oh crap” moments.

Honestly, this fight is a cakewalk and you’ll probably one shot it on your first attempt like we did. The hardest part for your raid will be scattering out of the middle of the Bonestorm if Marrowgar dives into the quivering pile your raiders are surely forming.

The lewt!

• Legguards of Lost Hope
• Bracers of Dark Reckoning

Downed by Server Boss!

Tuesday is the first night of the raid week for us. This is always an issue on patch nights because the patching process inevitably grinds to a halt. So it was the first night of Ulduar, so it was last night. Our server didn’t even come up until 9:30 local time, a full half hour before we usually call it for a night. A huge debacle ultimately.

So, what did we do to pass the time? At first we congregated on the guild forums and Vent, complaining about downtime and the like while eagerly anticipating a start to the night. As time bore on though it became more apparent that Blizzard was taking their time. At around 8 server time, the first batch of servers started to come up, so to pass the time I rolled a DK on Chromaggus on a whim.

Eventually I got sick of all the nude alt parades and yell spams, and hunkered down to just focus on figuring out Real ID. My position on the feature has generally always been one of exuberant willingness to adopt. I have no illusions of privacy on this, the Interwebs, and recognize that anyone reading this blog could probably easily find my real name and address if they wanted to. So, it honestly doesn’t bother me that the people I play WoW with know my real name. Likewise, it doesn’t bother me that their friends could look up my name via that.

That said, I recognize there are legitimate concerns with the system. If someone’s be e-stalked they rightfully could have objections to their real name being out there. I’m not going to throw stones having never been in such a situation.

Nonetheless, that’s my two cents on Real ID. Oh, and some kind of Invisible status would be nice for those that like to hide once in a while. And I’m sure Blizzard will in due course add such a thing, I sincerely doubt this is the final iteration of Real ID that we will ever see.

Anyway, I digress. After some time a group of us decided to roll some lvl 1 alts on Aegwynn and form a guild to use as a refuge when Lightninghoof was down. Apparently all we needed was 10 silver to make a guild charter, so a mob of us scoured the Durotar country side, jumping harpies like a flood of feral carnivore squirrels, and ripping whatever currency we could from their hides.

Despite my hopes of getting at least 90 minutes to clear up to Saurfang, eventually the crisis (so to speak) dragged on until 9 server time, and with no Lightninghoof in sight we just called it for the night.

Did anyone get to raid last night? Also, did you all take Real ID for a spin, what’d you think of it?

One of those weekends, &c.

I had the casa to myself on Friday night and I was determined to over-imbibe that night before I had to trudge off to an… interesting… wedding the next day. To help me along in my personal goals, we convened a drunk raiding night. The initial plan was Blackwing Lair (to get Gulliveig the Broodlord’s head), then BT for rep and a shot at some cool Illidan items, then whatever else we had time for before we pared the raid down to 10 people and went to wrap up the three achievements a few folks needed to get their Uld10 drakes.

Because we were starting with BWL, of course a group of unattuned folks had to do the caravan through UBRS and the Rend event. I don’t know if anyone’s done this lately, but the bane of these trips has been that if you kill Rend before he jumps off his dragon, the event bugs and you need to reset the instance. Thankfully, we didn’t pull that this time!

Once finally in BWL we quickly shot through the whole place in like 30 minutes. My person interest in the place is limited to the remaining three pieces of T2 I need–boots, belt, chest. A few folks needed the achievement, and I think someone else wanted the Elementium. In any case, it was a smooth run and in no time at all we were porting to Shatt and flying off for Karabor.

The transit apparently proved troublesome for a few of us. Those with the Touring Rockets decided to dump their passengers, so while yours truly is like a cat with buttered toast on his back, Anafielle was not as lucky.

Splat.

I’m currently really liking Black Temple. It’s huge but not drawn out. Boss fights are still somewhat interesting (I say this as someone who never ran the place in TBC), and a complete run has a Goldilocks duration. Plus the stuff off of Illidan is pretty awesome–the blindfold, the shield I covet, the creepy staff, etc. I think it took us about 90 minutes to burn through the place, and once the Betrayer hugged the floor, we decided to dodge to Silithus for an AQ40 run. Because, why not?

Once we were done re-enacting Starship Troopers and I was satisfied with pissing everyone off by constantly asking in a drunken manner, “Is this the gauntlet? How about now?!” we then finally broke down to a 10man to get some folks their drakes. I wasn’t planning for this to take very long, so I told the five that had to drop group to hang around and we’d run Hyjal or something after. 20 minutes, tops.

Anyway, while the 10 of us ran Orbituary, Disarmed, and Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare, Anafielle was passed out on her keyboard. And then there were 14!

Once the Ulduar fun ended we headed over to Hyjal and steamrolled through the place. After Archimonde fell, I realized it was way past my bed time and staggered off to wake up early the next morning, hungover, for my drive to the wedding.

The bug hunt

On Sunday, after having run AQ40 the other day, I noticed my reputation with the Brood of Nozdormu was around 31640/36000, within spitting distance of the next level and putting me one step closer to being able to really start the Scepter quest chain. So I flew down to Silithus to cash in my stockpile of Qiraji Lord Insignias and hopefully push it to neutral. As I was clicking through the multiple goes of the repeatable quest, I watched my reputation slowly trudge up to maxing out Hated.

After cashing them all in I was at 35640/36000. When I was done blubbering like a girl, I went back to farming carapaces.

Finally, 10 agonizing minutes later I had the 200 I needed, turned them and prepared for that delicious green swirl of neutrality.

Wait… that’s not right… Neutral is after… no… not more carapaces… NOT MORE CARAPACES.

/flex

I’m not much of a pvper, but when accidentally opening up the pvp window I noticed that it was AV weekend. So, on a whim I jumped into a match which was about to start. Someone asked in /bg who was the tank. Some guy in 232 gear speaks up first, but since I have a chip on my shoulder since the last time I was in AV, I volunteered as well. Some guy must have inspected us both, because he immediately decreed that I was tank.

We zerged right up to Vann, skipping the mage at the halfway point. Looks like Alliance was doing the same, because I never heard them engage our midway guy-person. Like I said, I never do battlegrounds. I don’t know these names.

Anyway, we get to Vann, I check to make sure people are behind me and I pull. 30 seconds later Vann went down, the results screen came up and yours truly was top damage done. Gogo aoe damage on five mobs at once.

Team Rocket Alpha Snowflake strikes back

We run two ICC-10 heroic groups on Sunday, which jokingly have adopted the names Team Rocket Alpha Snowflake and Team Bravo Sunshine Ponies, if I have those right. My team (Alpha) started an hour late because the second tank forgot we were raiding. Ana’s team meanwhile continued their lockout from last week, on time, which had gotten the guild-first kill of Saurfang 10H last week.

Swearing revenge, Team Alpha responded by spending ten attempts on the same fight while Bravo went to work on heroic Putricide. Finally, after about an hour we knocked over Saurfang.

Alas, Bravo managed to match our previous heroic kills (Fester, Rotface, and BQL) and then one-up us with Dreamwalker. While the rivalry flares up I’m just happy the guild is getting these progression kills. I’m a softy like that. Nonetheless, next week Alpha is prepared to take back the crown.

And, in other news, I really, really need to do strategy posts for heroic fights.

Not seeing eye to eye

Personally I feel like the standby system we started using back in February has saved this guild, much in the same way the DKP system did back in Ulduar. We haven’t missed a raid since it was initiated, and since we began maintaining a “buffer” of folks to always ensure there are 25 raiders available, we haven’t missed a raid. Both Tuesdays and Wednesday nights have been happening like clockwork, and I consider than an amazing success.

Of course, there are always the folks who refuse to accept the system. Being put on standby is antithesis to them, and they will lash out if they don’t get their way.

One such example happened the week of our Lich King kill. We had a hunter (who was also an officer) that took a long hiatus for his wedding. He came back, raided for about two weeks, then went on hiatus again. It seemed like being newly married wasn’t working with raiding. Whatever, no problem. But then he came back a month ago and wanted to raid again. So he came to a raid and DC’d constantly while in combat. On one BQL attempt he even wiped us because he was the first bite and, of course, disconnected. Game over right there.

The following week we extended the lockout and pushed hard on the Lich King. Looking out for the success of the raid, as I am wont to do, I benched this hunter so he wouldn’t cause a wipe from an ill-timed disconnect. The hunter responded by quitting the game. He sent letters out to a wide swath of people thanking them for being good friends and all that, and all I got was the crushing feeling that I wronged someone.

I know I did the right thing, I couldn’t take someone that could potentially wipe the raid to progression attempts on last fight in the last raid of the expansion. Still, it was pretty depressing that this person–an officer no less–was so blinded by their own… perhaps selfishness is the word… that they couldn’t look beyond their own wants to see they could legitimately harm the progression of the raid and guild.

Another more recent example of this is a healer we have that just returned from their own wedding-induced hiatus. This particular person was usually never benched because they were the only healer of their class and it was pretty helpful to have that particular class/spec there. Anyway, when this person went on hiatus last month we lost one healer due to school aggro and another due to moving. We were down to barely having enough healers, and if a healer couldn’t make it one night, we might not have been able to raid. It was way tighter than I would prefer to allow.

So, I did the only logical thing I could do, I recruited. We brought in a few healers bringing the total number of healers up to 8. The buffer was restored.

This person comes back from hiatus and is nonplussed to see that not only did we recruit more healers, but also another one of that class/spec. And not only that, but they were (horror of horrors) benched on Wednesday. I got a miffed whisper asking why this was (because it was your turn) and why did we recruit healers (because we had to) and why would someone be benched only one of two nights (so people don’t have to be locked out for a whole week)?

Not only that, but it was asserted that rather than being on standby for one night, this person would prefer to be benched for the whole week so they won’t get saved to raid that won’t be finished and can just pug it. This left me a bit speechless, because again I’m not accustomed to running into such focused self-interest when I’m here trying to promote group cohesion. There’s really nothing to say to that other than that next time I’ll just bench this person for an entire week when it’s their turn.

I guess for me it has always boiled down to this binary question: if you had to sit out of a raid once a month to ensure that the guild always has a raid of 25 people available, would you be willing to that?

If you answer yes, you are good peoples in my book. If you say no, then we really have a problem. That’s a pretty huge philosophical chasm you and I have to cross.

The night I solo’d ICC25, or something

Ok, it’s sort of hyperbole. But, well… you’ll see.

We started the night with Festergut Heroic, after about 12 wipes on him last night we were itching for a quick kill. It wasn’t a one shot, but every one of the five attempts we did we shaved a percent off his health each time we wiped to the enrage. 5%, then 4%, then 3%, then .9%. Then the last attempt we had this amazing go with no Goos hitting melee, no healers getting gibbed, probably a few ranged getting hit, but generally a great attempt.

As we got closer to the enrage we were riding the razors edge. It was obviously going to be very close. Anafielle hits 9 stacks a few seconds before enrage, I pull it off her with Righteous Defense, then as he turns gigantic and throbby red, I bubble, Hand of Reckoning, and do as much damage as I can. As soon as the fixate fell off, Fester turned and splatted Ana into a fine paste. With molecules of his hit points remaining, Valgard (a ret pally who also bubbled) and I did our best to whittle what we could down while Vili ankhed back up and continued to heal furiously. Finally, moments before aoe death overcame us, we chipped away that last few thousand hp and Festergut dropped to the floor.

Epic, to say the least.

And best of all we spent generally little time on Festergut, so we had a lot more breathing room for the rest of the night. My initial goal at the beginning of the week was a little bold, I thought: Heroic Marrowgar, Lootship, Festergut, Rotface, and BQL. Perhaps a boss or two too much, but it was a worthy first week goal. After the wipefest on Festergut last night, I dialed it back a bit in my head, just getting Festergut and Rotface down would be good enough. So, that’s the attitude I started the night with: just get the twin uglies down and we’ll be in a good spot. Right-o, off to the races.

So with Festergut dropped, we scurried off for Rotface. I heard this fight was easier than Festergut’s hardmode, but I had no idea. Our very first attempt turned into an utter clusterfrak at around 30% with 2/3rds of the raid dead, and yet we almost killed him. Thankfully we wiped, and could do it for real. The second time around we killed him with no issue. Another easily farm-able hardmode, I love it.

Then we tumbled over to the Blood Wing and dispatched the Blood Princes. I basically explained the BQL hardmode as “more dps needed, one mistake wipes us, don’t screw it up!” It was delivered lovingly, I swear.

Some were pessimistic about the dps required to drop her, but for some odd reason Frank was in hibernation and I was feeling sunny about our chances. It was probably some head trauma.

Anyway, off we went and on the first attempt we lost a few people in the air phase. And by a few people I mean the two that had the bites. Somehow no one noticed and right before the enrage someone observed, “hey we haven’t had any bites lately.” Woops, 30% enrage wipe.

The next time we lost some people on airphase, yet despite brezzes, eventually it was a wipe with the enrage hitting at 8%. The fourth go we had a really close wipe, something like 4% or so. We could so get this, just needed one flawless attempt. Just one.

The fifth attempt we had just that. No deaths, no mistakes, bites went to the right people. I had high hopes as we trudged through the motions. Finally as we came to the moment of truth, we were looking to be just shy of the enrage. About 2% left as it was going to hit. As we usually do, the enrage hit and all the Pallies bubbled. Eventually only Ana and I survived, BQL runs up for air phase at around .5% and starts blood bolting. Looks like a wipe as we furiously judged and tossed wrathful hammers.

In our darkest moment, a glimmer of hope. Vili bolts up and spot heals Ana and I, only to be struck down once more. Ana soon follows. Somehow I persisted and a lingering Rip from Purraj the feral druid got the killing blow.

When the dust settled, I surveyed my surroundings, sighed a heavy breath of relief, and then immediately tweeted my victory.

What? Rez? Oh, yeah, I could do that. I was duly chastened.

When rezzes were finished, the loot window went up, we all bid, and I managed to score my first 277 piece: the heroic t10 token. I am so excited to begin building my blue tier set. Even if it cost me nearly a kilo of dkp!

With the excitement contained and about 10 minutes left in raid, we dodged over to Sindragosa and one-shot her, which put us exactly where I started this week hoping we would be: all farm bosses dead plus those five benchmark heroic kills. And we did it, we totally did it. I am so proud of my raid crew, another fantastic week.

Good first steps!

Heroic Marrowgar was a joke. Not much harder than normal Marrowgar himself. I found this shocking when, on the first attempt, he was at around 50% health, we were two Bonestorms in, and one person was dead. I was expecting a minor speed bump like when we first did this on Heroic 10 mode. But nope, easy one shot, and the slot machine burped out the purps.

We did LDW on normal, obviously, and then went on for Heroic Lootship. About the only hiccup there was being I was jumping over, a missle hit one of the spiky things on the side of the ship that a Resto Druid was parked on, and the game decided that despite being in midair I was hit as well, so I went flying off sideways into the gap in between the ships. I reappeared in the middle of the deck and sprinted back over to the other side, but by the time I got there and picked up Muradin, three melee were dead. I’ll never hear the end of that.

Normal Saurfang, which we could probably do, but my thinking is find what the baseline for how many easy hardmodes we can do every week is, and then build it from there. To maximize upgrades.

After Saurfang we headed to Putricide’s hallway and cleared the trash to go to Festergut first. This is where things got interesting. Once I was done explaining what was different on heroic mode, and how I wanted everyone in melee to stack on a marked person and switch legs every time a Goo got launched, we had an epic wipe where people consistently got hit. Bah. Eventually we settled into the ES model of progression: slow, steady gains. Within short time we were hitting the enrage timer, so now we just needed to up dps to actually drop the boss.

It was around this time the Fates decided to throw a monkey wrench in the works. First, one of the dps (a warlock) had to drop for a work emergency, so I invited one person to come in and got no response. The warlock that left dropped a summoning stone and hearthed out. I then invited another dps with similar results, no response again.

The first dps I invited (who was having connection issues earlier in the night but assured me they were fixed) then accepted and we summoned him in. He starts running in place and looks like he’s DCing. I sigh and remove him, as the second dps I invited finally accepts and joins the raid. Unfortunately the DCing dps is still there, running in place, and we can’t summon the other guy since there are 25 people in the instance. As the guy finally disappears, the summoning stone disappears as well.

I sigh, and Zilga and I run outside to summon the dps who’ll give us 25 people. Unfortunately once we get near the summoning stone outside, we realize we’re both in different phases and can’t see each other. Another sigh and we both hoof it in as the 25th makes his way to us.

As we reach Festergut’s room again, one of the druids manages to somehow pull Festergut with a Crashin’ Thrashin’ Racer and starts the encounters. Some of us bolt into the hallway and hide while Festergut kills any unlucky afkers or those who stayed behind in the room. As the three or so of us that survived the wipe catch our breath in the hallway, someone trips a hidden trap, and a flood of geists come barreling down towards us. At this point I have to laugh, because it’s officially gotten ridiculous.

Eventually the geists die and we get back to business. Progress starts rolling again and by the end of the night we were wiping at around 4-5% on the last two solid attempts. Disappointing, but at least we know we can get it once people tighten up dodging Goos and the whole not-dying thing.

At 9:30, half an hour before end time, the trash respawns in the hallway. I decide to give everyone a break rather than spending 15 minutes clearing trash for two more attempts on the boss. We just want and quickly demolished normal Dreamwalker for a “shake off” kill.

So with the night over we stood at 2/12 heroics. Not godly, but we made good progress on number 3, who I’m sure we’ll brush off with little trouble tonight, allowing us to knock down #4 (Rotface) and put in solid attempts on #5 (BQL).

Taking it to the next level

This is a pretty exciting night we have ahead of us. After our epic defeat of the Lich King on 25man mode last week, we’ve finally unlocked hardmodes and all the lovely iLevel 277 pieces that come from them. Like Rilgon said in the LK kill post, everyone knows that Heroic Lootship is the second half of the Lich King’s loot table. Like the old guild joke goes, two words: Loot. Pinata. I can’t wait.

Likewise, it’s pretty exciting when you mull about in your head that you’re around to join that elite upper tier of raiders that will be sporting gear 13 iLevels higher than everyone else. Falowin always talks about how he wants to look different than other raiders in his gear, how he wants to look special. I used to deride him as an elitist… but, gawd, that feeling is contagious. I can’t wait to sport an all-blue tier set.

As a guild leader, I think one of the most satisfying parts of this fleeting moment is how it’s given a second wind to our 25man raids. We spent the last few weeks slowly slogging our way up the top of the hill, finally peaking with the crushing of the Lich King, and now get to enjoy a downhill ride littered with progression and amazing loot.

Everyone is more excited about raiding than I’ve seen them in a while. It’s a totally gratifying feeling from this perspective.

Anyway, I look forward to reporting back tomorrow with tales of epic progression and only tank loot dropping.

(A man can dream!)

The Path to nowhere

Count me among the many that were disappointed by the announcement that the Path of the Titans was being scrapped for Cataclysm. I understand that they may have been unhappy with the iteration, and honestly the system had the probability of being ultimately very unwieldy, but the potential of PotT was so huge that I think it was worth the fighting for. There was something majestic about an ancillary system of customizing your character, where we could bask in an extra level of min/maxing. I rue that we’ve been robbed of that.

In the place of PotT, we’ll have medium glyphs. What are medium glyphs?

Medium glyphs are the kind of glyph you’d take if you had more choices.

The example they gave was cooldown glyphs for Fury Warriors. So in that example, major glyphs are the ones that directly affect dps, while the medium glyphs are the ones that are a little weaker that you would understandably avoid.

Also, please change that name. “Medium glyphs” is just about the laziest name they could have given to this feature. I’m sure it’s not final, but, gawd… terrible name. Even for a stand-in.

But I digress. Let’s think about what would constitute a medium glyph for Prot Pallies. Following the definition about the first tier/second tier preferences, I suppose one glyph that immediately jumps to mind as the kind that would be a medium is the Glyph of Salvation. It’s not something we’d take first-string because it’s pretty situation (ok, very situational), but it’d be nice to have full-time. Another glyph that I would love to have, but generally stick with improving threat over it is the Glyph of Righteous Defense.

Thought exercises aside, this discussion is pretty moot because (I think it’s safe to say) the whole stable of glyphs is probably getting seriously revamped. Or the abilities they currently modify are being changed, like taunts maybe going onto the melee hit table. We’ll have new glyphs for new abilities, new ones for old abilities, we’ll see the removal of crappy glyphs, and maybe the redesigning of some standbys. No point in getting too deep down into this at the moment.

And lastly, since we’re talking about glyphs, I’m pretty happy with the decision to let us “remember” glyphs we’ve used and swap them in as we will. This would be pretty handy for a situation like when my guild was learning Heroic Anub 10 back in the day and the Glyph of Holy Wrath was pretty helpful for the adds, so every night we’d do that fight I’d slip in a Glyph of Holy Wrath. Then once the night was over I’d put the Judgement glyph back in. Invariably I ended up with a stack of each Glyph, which I remember costing a bunch.

Hopefully Blizzard will work out some system that scratches that “alternate leveling” itch we all have. Being five levels short with nothing extra to show for it now is pretty lame.

Another rating going away in Cataclysm

Warning: This is a Cataclysm spoiler.

Back in May I asked a simple question: if our Mastery is increased block chance, then wouldn’t Mastery rating be the exact same thing as block rating? At the time it seemed like the answer was indeed yes, and that we’d have a horrendously redundant Mastery.

Of course, like I said at the time, things could very well change–and now it seems like they have.

According to a Ghostcrawler post from the Alpha forums leaked onto a site that promulgates Cataclysm leaks, there will be no block rating in the next expansion pack. As he says,

You may notice there are no items with block rating. If we want shield-using tanks to get block, we add mastery to the item.

Well, that settles that, eh?