Trading avoidance for EH

Just wanted to point out this awesome post over at Maintankadin for any aspiring tanks or, hell, any folks trying to determine when to sacrifice avoidance for more effective health.

Go to this post and scroll down a little to the descriptions of the tank levels, find yourself and your recommended number. Then, scroll down a little bit more to where it says “How to stack stamina” and gem or enchant down the line as your tank level would recommend.

Awesome guide based on some rock-solid math from Theck and Meloree. I was pleasantly surprised to find I’m doing all but the last three, and strongly considering the third from the bottom: replacing the Argent Crusade head enchant with the Engineering one.

If you’re debating the value of one gem/enchant over another through the lens of EH, this is a great tool to help you along the right path.

A new chapter begins

The night began innocuously enough, as most patch nights do, with everyone unable to log in or getting repeatedly disconnected. Invites went out, we raided ICC, etc. The usual.

After we called it a night I lingered in vent and the game, cutting gems for some folks before I logged. Ildara then mentions “did you see the forums?”

I look and there’s a post by Demo saying he was quitting the game, or at least going on extended hiatus. I immediately report this in vent and one of the people there asked who the new guild leader would be. “I guess me,” I sighed.

And just like that I was the new guild leader of Enveloping Shadows.

To be fair, it’s been like this for a while. Demo’s interest has been nothing but waning since January. I’ve been the de facto guild leader for at least two months now.

And to think a year and two months ago I first joined this guild and could barely get a raid spot. Now I’m the goddamn guild master.

There are no hard feelings between us. As difficult as it is to see him go, we always said you gotta do what you gotta do. If you’re burning out there’s no reason to hang around and become ever more miserable.

My immediate goals now are to arrest the morale decline of the past couple of weeks and get us progressing in ICC-25 again. I have no idea how we’re going to do that. I basically need to force a culture shift, which seems near impossible. I’m up for the challenge though.

Toynbee said that “countries die from suicide, not from murder.” I think the same is true for guilds. Leaders lose interest or their morale collapses. This trickles down and people stop trying, and then wipe to stupid things. Issues exacerbate issues until there is a critical mass of discontent.

I won’t let that happen. I can fix this.

If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

3.3.3 Paladin changes

Paladin

• …

No news is good news!

Actually, about the only “big news” for our class this patch is the tooltip for Sacred Duty was changed to acknowledge the 4% stamina nerf.

I’ll take a simple tooltip change over AOE nerfs any day of the week.

Back in the seat

Muscle memory is a huge convenience. After a week spent in the icy tundra of Orlando (I brought a cold snap down with me, sorry Floridians), I came back from the conference this weekend and was bamboozled into an ICC-10 run last night. Still sitting on a raid lockout I had the foresight to extend before leaving for my work trip, I reactivated it and we hopped in right to Sindragosa.

And despite having not tanked in a week and being incredibly rusty feeling, my fingers apparently were able to jump right back into the flow and managed to do the thinking for me. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what key Holy Shield was mapped to, but when the point came in 969 to use it my middle finger instinctively shot up and pushed 2 down. I felt like Doc Ock with his sentient mechanical tentacles.

I was just, as a lark, reading the wikipedia article on muscle memory and it mentioned that you need to repeat an action 740 times for your brain/muscles to “memorize” it. I have no idea if that’s true, but think about how many times I use Holy Shield over the course of a raid. According to this log it was almost 200 times in one raid.

Sorry, stupid digression–I just found the whole concept fascinating. Some people use muscle memory to make repair cars better, some for surgical procedures, I use it to lower my reaction time while tanking.

Anyhoo, Sunday night. Raid. Sindragosa.

We did a few attempts on the crazy harpy (BETRAAAAAAAAYS YOU) each time doing fantastic and then having some issues with phase 3. After a chunk of attempts people got the hang of getting away when targetted for ice blocking, breaking people in their group out, etc. The second to last attempt we got her to 5% or so, then the last one it was a photo finish, killing her with a few people dead and two people blocked, along with the boss nearly almost enraged. It got to the point where people shouted out “ignore the blocks! Kill the boss!”

So we did and then she dropped. It was messy, but the way attempts were trending we were probably going to kill her cleanly the next time. I’ll take a sooner messy kill over a perfect kill ten minutes later. Time is always a luxury.

Another digression: let’s talk about raid leading philosophy for a second. What did in the 5% attempt was two people got extra-blocked (ie, stood too close to the targeted person) and the attempt fell apart. On the run back I named names and stressed paying attention not just to where you are when targeted but also where others are when they are targeted.

I was then (jokingly, though) accused of bitchery. In your raids, do people get called out when the make mistakes? I know personally I usually let people chastise themselves in private, but lately I’m not so sure that’s effective. I feel a dignified public shaming would better reinforce “oh hey, standing next to this guy is a bad idea” the next time around.

Whenever I screw something up my first response is to apologize in vent and explain how I screwed up. I’m just extending that courtesy to everyone else now, haha.

But, again, I digress. After Sindra was downed we excitedly bounded over to the Upper Spire and then up the teleporter to the Frozen Throne. We all posed for pictures with Arthas (hence my pic above) and then kind of dawdled about how we were going to deal with the fight. It was a Sunday night and already kind of late, and as much as I’d like to take a 15 minute break to watch the video, we didn’t have the time for that.

I alt-tabbed and browsed stratfu’s strategy a bit (I know, for shame, not being prepared!) but I got lost in the mountains of descriptions and all the cascading diagrams. Ironically (maybe) for someone who writes a blog and guides about fights sometimes, but I for the life of me, cannot learn a fight by reading a description. Words just blend together and I get bored of what I’m reading. I’m a much more visual learner, or at least I need to wipe a few times for something to “click”.

Anyway, we decided to wing it. Yes, wing Arthas. We had about 20 minutes, we weren’t going to kill him that night, might as well have some fun.

We had some basic understanding of how Phase 1 worked based on how much we read before giving up and after the second try we were basically getting through it pretty easily, once positioning was worked out.

The Remorseless Winter phase went a little oddly with us dying in new and exciting ways each time we tried it. The first time we weren’t expecting the floor to crumble when it did (I blame Gandy’s saronite bombs) and a few of us tumbled to our deaths. Another time one of the ice clouds burst too close to a few of us and we got blown off the side of the map.

Like I said, we didn’t have a shot in hell of dropping Arthas in our short time window. I’m rolling over the lockout to next weekend and we’ll get a full night on the sucker then. At this point I doubt many people care about the 251 gear or the easy badges, we want our Kingslayer titles.

On cooldowns

In a thread on the tanking forums, Blizz is seeking opinions about tanking cooldowns: their durations, their effects, etc.

I can’t post on the forum from my phone so I offer my opinion, abbreviated, in this space.

For one, cooldowns shouldn’t be down for more than three minutes. Ideally we should be able to use them at least twice over the course of a fight. Moreover, glyphs reducing durations is a terrible idea. Glyph should add functionality or diversify the ability, never tinker with the length of time the cooldown is up or down.

Cooldowns also, I feel, need to move away from being just “reduce damage by x%”. That’s boring at best. Our cooldowns should have some flare to them. Give us a bevy of abilities that affect different types of damage–ie, physical or magical. For example one ability could give you temporary resistance bonuses to the last magic school you took damage from, another could boost your armor value.

Cooldown usage should require most thought than a binary “do I need an oh-shit button? y/n”.

And fer chrissakes, no more automatic cooldowns. I want buttons to push dammit.

Word of the day: Trickle-down death

Main Entry: trick·le-down death
Function: Noun
: A death that happens slowly, with an intermittent stream of damage that adds up to more damage taken over a period of time than healing received in the same period. Requires a longer time frame to finally kill the tank (more than a few seconds). Trickle-down deaths can be ameliorated with increased mitigation (armor mostly), and avoidance. Common in Icecrown Citadel.

Antonym: The Ulduar Splat

Housekeeping!

I finally got off my kiester and managed to write a Tanking 101 guide. I have that sitting on the bar at the top now. Better late than never, right?

Also, I’m flying out for a work trip in Orlando tomorrow. That means that posting next week will be garbage, unfortunately. Unlike last time, I won’t make any grandiose plans of having posts queued up to out over the week. However, one promise I made last time that I will keep this time around is I will be tweeting nonstop out of complete and utter boredom.

I have a WordPress app on my phone, so I’m going to attempt to microblog. Alas, no walls of texts about this or that raid, because–double alas–I will not be raiding. All in all, I’ll do something to keep this place interesting while I’m gone.

Avoidance and HP in Cataclysm

Obviously this is just grasping at tea leaves for now, but Ghostcrawler commented a bit on a thread about Mastery and divulged some design philosophy about how they plan to approach tanking stats in the next expansion pack.

Some choice quotes and thoughts:

I’m not sure a strategy of trying to force tanks to gem / enchant other stats is ever going to feel good. That said, tanks used to worry more about being the mana sponge. The way to alleviate being the mana sponge is to take less damage and a great way to take less damage is to dodge more.

Personally, I wish tanking would go back to this. I like it better when there are more dimensions to tanking than just sitting there and getting punched in the face.

The relative value of dodge vs. parry is something we’ll have to play with. My gut reaction is that parry needs to be cheaper since avoiding 100% of one hit is more valuable than avoiding 50% of two hits, but I’m not sure how much cheaper. Avoiding spikiness (which dodge will contribute to) also has value, and if the second hit after a parry is dodged instead (such that you lose the parry “charge”) that plays into the cost as well.

I suppose this answers the question of if you would lose that second-swing 50% reduction after parrying by dodging or being missed. By cutting parry’s avoidance in half they would definitely have to compensate by lowering the ipoint “price” of parry rating. The new parry intrigues me greatly and I want to see them do the change right.

The passive talent tree bonuses for tanks will probably be something like 1) reduces damage taken, 2) increases damage done, 3) reduces damage taken in a way unique to your tree.

The 8-Ball says “3) increases damage absorbed by a successful block.”

If tanking gear had thousands and thousands of Stam, tanks would still socket Stamina because it’s reliable. If your health is low, then even if your avoidance is 99% that means sometimes you’re just going to die and no healer can save you.

Yes, exactly! It boggles my mind why some tanks think there is virtue in gemming for threat or avoidance. We don’t stam stack for the epeen, we do it because stamina offers the best return on investment when it comes to gems. Take for example, this thread on the tanking forums.

The original poster has completely missed the point: avoidance is all well and good for heroics where the hits are generally small. But WoW at 80 isn’t doesn’t endless heroics farming, people are gearing for much more than that. In the raid environment your first responsibility is always to survive the worse case scenarios, to maximize your time to live (TTL). That’s ethos behind effective health.

Gemming for hit and parry and dodge maybe activate all those pretty socket bonuses, but in the end (thanks to the realities of WotLK raiding mechanics) you’re gimping your survivability.

Now, if healers can generally heal you through damage but then eventually gas out, then avoidance becomes more attractive because it lets healers heal you longer. Does that mean you gem it? Not sure, but at least a trinket with all avoidance might be pretty exciting.

I hope this is the case with Cataclysm. I want boss fights to be less about short-term perfection and more about a steady performance over the course of an entire fight. I want to see tanks rewarded for properly balancing TTL to damage reduction. I want to see healers forced to be strategic about healing, and not just being forced into dumping constant, strong heals into the tank, mana bar be damned. Bosses in Cataclysm have the opportunity to be so much more complex. I hope they take it.

We also think we figured out a budgeting scheme to let tank gear have the same basic Stamina as dps gear. It’s not a huge balance concern either way, but it does look weird when dps plate has more.

That’s a relief. I was expecting a wave of bad tanks taking dps pieces to “maximize their EH.”

Once bitten, twice wiped

I’m trying to think of a fight that puts as much of an emphasis on personal responsibility as Blood Queen does. And, by personal responsibility, I mean each raider paying specific attention to a buff that they have that realistically the raid leaders cannot see the status of and cannot feasibly direct the execution of in the midst of the encounter.

I suppose Thaddius would be a good analogue, since you really didn’t know if people were paying attention to their polarity until they had managed to zap-fry to death a huge swath of innocent people, their whole lives ahead of them, like a toaster dropped in the pool at the youth center.

Blood Queen presented a unique challenge for us if only because while we excel in many areas, coordination and good old fashioned attention-paying is not especially our strong suit. The attempts done on Blood Queen were a few weeks ago, done mostly as exploration, and resulted (I’m told, I wasn’t there) in some fantastic wipes. Then, last week after murdering Putricide we gave her the ol’ college try and, while failing, had enough success to know the fight was definitely feasible.

Last night we put the first serious night of attempts on her. We finally got to her lair at around 8:30 server or so, giving us a solid 90 minutes to lock down the fight.

Aiding us in our journey of pain would be an amazing addon that Demogar found called BloodQueen. You put in a priority list of bites and the addon will track who has the vampire debuff, the timing on their bite, and assign for them (communicated through raid warnings and whispers) who they have to bite.

So in the screenshot above Cendra got the debuff first, and then ten seconds before he could bite someone the addon told him to go for the first person in the priority list: Morvain. A /rw went out, an icon was put on Morvain’s head, and Cendra would then run off at the proper time to bite his assigned target.

The addon was working pretty well last night, and despite some issues with the mechanics of biting (mostly people not standing close enough to their target) we’re doing pretty well on bites until the third wave. At that point we were having issues with people losing track of who they had to bite in the endless sea of notifications and raid warnings. At that point someone came up with the idea of making a separate chat window for whispers so you can see and not lose track of your assignments. Brilliant, definitely helped.

Another suggestion was made by Zilga, apparently the ambassador of Healsylvannia, who declared “the healers claim the middle.” During air phase they would immediately retreat there, spread out, and begin tossing out whatever heals they could to keep people up while bloodbolts whirled overhead. Once they started doing that the air phases went super clean with only an occasional death. Game changing strat swap.

Tonight we have the whole night drop BQL. At first last night I was filled with fear and loathing that she would turn into a new Putricide, a fight that would take weeks for us to down and even then would hardly be clean enough to henceforth be declaredly a farm fight. BQL however, once we made those strategy changes, didn’t seem so bad. We have the dps, it’s just everyone executing their jobs precisely and maximizing personal dps. I think tonight we can drop her… our last attempt things were really clicking and I think if someone didn’t drop a swarming shadows in the middle of the room and kill a swath of people we could have killed her. We wiped at 14%, with half the raid dead.

And I want my damn shield to drop.

How do you solve a problem like Paladin AOE threat?

Ominously, Ghostcrawler declared last week in a post:

The threat-related goals still remain:

…

2) Paladin — Nerf the threat capacity of HoR and SoC.

Now, I may have played the chicken little several times in the past and yet we still made out pretty well, generally. Despite two or three dire predictions of imminent nerfs, the worst we got was the Sacred Duty retuning. As for threat, well, that’s a horse of a different color.

Is Paladin threat too good? Generally yes, although not for the reasons that GC and others on the tanking forums would describe. For one, in the one case that Ghostcrawler is correct, Seal of Command was poorly designed and executed, and gave us an easily obtained threat boost that really should have been restricted to Ret Pallies.

SoComm has really only been useful since ShoR was perhaps unintentionally moved to being a melee attack in the early days of 3.3. Before then we procced the effect much less, to the point where it was useless for tanking. Post-ShoR change and suddenly the fastest and easiest way to pumped out the AOE teeps (like deeps, but moar threatnin’) was to switch to Seal of Command and go nuts on any clumbs of mobs in your path.

As for Hammer of the Righteous, is it really that overpowered? Really?

I would say no, but perhaps I’m biased. I see little difference between it and the Warrior cleave aside from the fact that ours hits an additional target (but has a cooldown) and automatically pierces armor thanks to the damage being of the Holy school.

Side thought: if HotR was so overpowered (and this is something GC has been hinting that he feels for some time) then why, oh why, does the Paladin t10 2pc bonus increase its damage by 20%?

They tried to tinker with HotR in the past, around the time of the 3.2 ptr, briefly shifting its damage to physical. This made HotR not only hit for less (now being mitigated by armor) but also do less threat thanks to not gaining the Righteous Fury +threat to Holy spells. They played around with changing how much damage the attack did, and then baking in a +threat modfier, but eventually decided to just revert the change and leave it as is. Kicking the ball down the road, I suppose.

I wonder if this change is now on the table again.

In the end what it comes to down is, yes, we are gods of AOE threat, and that must be changed with us being adjusted down. How would I prefer this be done? For starters, make SoComm require a 2H weapon and make it the exclusive domain of Ret Pallies. Otherwise, if the intention is to let Prot keep it, adjust down how much damage the cleave does (though this will disproportionately hurt the Rets).

… Although, I do enjoy the irony of Rets taking a nerf on the chin because of us. Usually it’s the other way around!

Er, but I digress. The other recommendation is: wait and see how our AOE threat is outside of Icecrown. I strongly suspect that our AOE threat is being exaggerated, so to say, but the added damage of the Glyph of Sense Undead, Crusade’s 3% bonus, and the addition of Holy Wrath to our arsenal.

I suppose I could live with Hammer of the Righteous getting pared down, but I’d prefer that be last resort. I love that skill as is. And I’ve finally gotten over that awful CLANG noise it makes.

The only remaining question is this: is the nerf going to come pre-Cataclysm (and if so, why is it not on the PTR yet?) or will they just roll it into 4.0?