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.

The first thirty minutes

I was up until about 1:30, installing beta and then patch beta, and patching beta, and … patching beta. It took quite a lot of time.

Once everything was done, I copied a character onto the beta and then flew over the spires of Orgrimmar, sighed contentedly, and then passed out on my keyboard.

Then about and hour ago I finally got the chance to hop on again and began doing what I do best: obsessively, and compulsively, build the perfect sand castle before the tide comes in. I specced like so:

Then hit up the trainer to grab some skills:

Apparently there’s a fun bug where you can’t train anything at the moment. That wouldn’t fly for me, so I did the painful work-around of dropping a profession first and then was able to pick up Seal of Truth, Word of Glory, and the ability to Parry.

Once that was done, I larded up my bars with all the skills and attacks I could squeeze on them and keybound everything just right.

Once that was all done, something still didn’t seem right. I wracked my Belf-like noggin’ and decided I needed a tabard for some vain reason. So I tracked down the Tabard Vendor and purchased the snappiest number they had.

Alright, we’re golden, time to hit up some beta!

Dammit.

I did manage to check out one thing from my list (yes, I made a list of things to check out): what does the new Consecration interface look like?

Well it puts a little timer underneath your player unit frame that counts down how long you have left on the duration of your Consecrate. When you drop a new one, the timer resets. Pretty cool, especially if we’re going to be using 2/2 Hallowed Ground, it’ll be nice to be able to keep track on the full duration of a debuff that we just dump on the ground.

Once the server gets back up I’ll hit the dummies and run some logs and see what our “rotation” looks like at the moment and how much everything hits for.

By the way, if there’s anything you want me to check out–be it a location, an npc, how much Holy Light hits for in prot gear, whatever–just comment and ask. I don’t mind running around and taking screenshots!

Into the breach!

As I’m leaving work today (er, this being post-midnight I suppose it was yesterday) I noticed Rilgon tweet rather cryptically in a fashion that altogether hinted he had received a beta key. In short order, he confirmed this great news with a blog post and named his mysterious benefactor: Curse. In a fit of pique I tweeted them asking if they’d be so kind as to hit me up as well. I figured it was a shot in the dark, closed my computer for the day, and left the office to begin my weekend.

About 20 minutes later while in the grocery store with my girlfriend, I noticed my phone buzzing a few times as if I received a few emails. At the booze aisle I finally checked out what the hub-bub was, and spotted an email from Anafielle saying “YESSSSSSSSSS” and another saying that @cursenetwork was following me now.

I put two and two together and immediately began hyperventilating. “What, what is wrong?!” the gf questioned as I began foaming at the mouth. I stammered the word “b-b-beta” and launched Twitter to make sure this wasn’t some delusion of grandeur.

Yet, there it was. “Holy crap!” I then finally found the breath to spit out, “I’m in the damn beta!” The gf then congratulated me, though we both knew she had no idea what I was talking about. She means well though.

Anyway–you, gentle readers, you understand the magnitude of this! We’re about to embark on a grand journey of math, and screenshots, and endless hours spent in front of test dummies with World of Logs running. I’m going to bloat this blog to the seams with every manner of factoid and tidbit I can of the rollercoaster ride that our class and spec is taking this beta cycle.

I’m beyond excited that rather than just saying “this sounds bad, but I have no idea” or “I bet this would be great in person,” I can actually confirm these changes first hand. I’m also beyond honored that Curse deemed me worthy of receiving this beta key. I’ll do the community proud in presenting some amazing and in depth coverage to justify my presence there.

Build 12644: a few interesting changes

Build 12644. Some changes make sense, some seem like steps towards a different direction, like their reaching for something in the distance but don’t quite have it yet. Beta, and all. Ultimately just another step towards in the inevitable–though the question is: step forward, or step back?

1. Avenger’s Shield is getting all proc-y

So Avenger’s Shield has a base cooldown of 30 seconds. The talent Shield of the Templar reduces that down to 20 seconds. On top of that, Grand Crusader has been redesigned to give us a 20% chance to proc a reset on AS’s cooldown. This is great, but what’s the deal exactly?

Is AS supposed to be some sort of ghetto interrupt, on the global cooldown and suffering from the usual half-second delay in the application of the silence? I hope that’s not even half the intention of this change because that’s a depressing thought if they thing this makes a remotely plausible replacement for Rebuke.

My other thought is, how is Avenger’s Shield hitting on the beta? Is a powerhouse hit that would be worth using whenever the cooldown is up, or would it take a back seat to something doing a little more damage, like perhaps the new Hammer of the Righteous iteration? If Avenger’s Shield somehow becomes our heaviest hitting attack–a mighty big if–then that Grand Crusader proc will be something fun to watch for and immediately react to. Otherwise, it’ll just be a moment where we’ll have to stop and reassess our priorities midfight–”HotR is next, then Judgement… but AS just procced, so AS then judgement”–or something similarly annoying.

I really wish I was in the beta and could run some logs and work this out.

2. Holy Shield gets a little better

Up now to 20 seconds, which is good because we’re not as much in “one CS miss and you’re boned” mode anymore. However, two CS misses!

Personally, I think duration needs to get a little higher so that we can use Holy Power for something more than maintaining Holy Shield. Blizz wants the new resource system to be more interesting than stacking it to three and gaining a buff that other classes (I speak of our eternal enemies, the Warriors) get for free. I’ll return to this gripe shortly. In any case (or, as Anafielle would say, “irregardless”) Holy Shield is getting better but it’s not quite there yet. Need just a little more breathing room to make up for CS misses in early raid tiers and to give us a little more choice with Holy Power.

3. They want us to use Word of Glory, but I’m not buying it

Speaking of choice with Holy Power, the newest iteration of Guarded by the Light gives us a reason to use Word of Glory, giving us a protective shield worth however much we overheal ourselves with the ability. Doing on average 1367 per stack of Holy Power, and boosted by 20% by GbtL, it’s theoretically possible we’d get a shield worth 1640 per HP. At a max stack of 3 Holy Power, that’s a shield worth 4920 damage. Theoretically.

While that sounds interesting, I have two concerns: (1) who realistically is going to have more than one Holy Power to spend on a Word of Glory per Holy Shield cycle? And (2) how ridiculously hard is it going to be to time Word of Glory to maximize overhealing and thus getting as much shield as possible? I’d say close to impossible. Maybe at the start of the pull as a Holy Power dump, but I think I’d much rather have more block than a piddly 5k shield. A piddly 5k shield that doesn’t scale, and will still be 5k at the last raid tier.

Needs more work, send it back.

4. New Hammer of the Righteous, ShoR probably dead

The bell tolls for ShoR. Hammer of the Righteous now hits for 300% weapon damage on a single target, 150% damage on a second target, and 75% on a third. It’s not a single and multi-attack all in one. Good change–less clutter, makes HotR (presumably) our biggest gun.

5. Hallowed Ground not mandatory anymore

With the removal of the +damage component of this talent, it’s purely optional at this point. Also like if the Glyph of Consecration was made into a talent and given steroids. There’ll be no direct tps improvement for taking it, other than perhaps an indirect benefit by freeing up GCDs that would otherwise be spent maintaining Consecrate. I can’t see myself taking this talent in a hypothetical boss-only talent spec unless it really smooths out the rotation for us.

And, speaking of Consecration, a pertinent GC quote:

Currently we are looking really hard at AE damage abilities by all tanks. We tried Thunder Clap with no cooldown and didn’t like it. We also tried Thunder Clap with a Consecrate-like talent, but I’m not sure we like that either. At the moment we are thinking of nerfing any of the really passive AEs, including Swipe, Death and Decay, Damage Shield and Consecrate. All of those abilities (well, maybe not Damage Shield) would still be usable, but they would be more situational.

The bottom line is that we think all tanks need to be able to trivially handle the massive adds or straggling adds situations easily, or none of them should be able to.

Personally, I think it’d probably be easiest for the devs to move to a model where you can AOE tank, but until you severely overgear the instance, it’d be a fool’s errand to attempt to do so. It’s going to be impossible close Pandora’s Box at this point. Just let AOE tanking exist, balance it across the classes, and then make it deadly to do so right off the bat. People don’t want to CC in heroics when at the last raid tier, as much as they say they do.

6. Holy Demo Shout is go

I keep confusing Thunderclap and Demo Shout, which would be unfortunate, but this is warriors we’re talking about here. Anyway, Vindication is no longer an auto-debuff (which I cheer) and now an effect of Holy Wrath (which makes Wrath of the Lightbringer mandatory). I’m ok with this change. Less auto is good.

7. What the heck is our rotation becoming?

Someone observed we’re going from the easiest rotation in the game to the most difficult. In some respects, I think they’re right. Gone is the elegant simplicity of 969, and here comes a choppy priority system. We’re looking at a toolbox of HotR, Judgement, Crusader Strike, Holy Wrath, Holy Shield, Consecrate, Avenger’s Shield, and maybe Word of Glory. You’d want to Hammer before Judging, in case Sacred Duty procs, and you want to always get at least the three Crusader Strikes in every 20 seconds (though this basically being used every time off cooldown, since Holy Power is the foundation of our rotation), and you want to shield toss when proc’d (maybe), and you need to Holy Wrath every thirty seconds, and Consecrate at least every 15.

I deliberately made that paragraph as wall of text as I could stand, if only to underline how bizarre the rotation feels. And yet, the best part is: next build there’ll be something fundamentally different in there.

Roller coaster!

Her end was inevitable

It seems like a lot of guilds out there have stopped progressing really this summer, which makes me proud of my plucky little guild that we’ve continued plodding along in ICC 25 even in the middle of the summer doldrums. We racked up a latest progression kill last night, on heroic Lady Deathwhisper 25. Obviously the 30% buff is a big help, and helped us cheese a few aspects of the fight (I’m specifically thinking of making ghost explosions 30% less deadly than they could be) but ultimately I don’t think that diminishes our accomplishment. Just reduced how much wall-head-banging was required.

In any case, we started working on this mouthy lichess last week and put about 2 hours in before I switched it back to normal so we wouldn’t fall behind for the week. Our best attempt we got her to around 30%, which is not to shabby.

Then this week our very first attempt and we got her to around 23% before the raid wiped in a ghost-ignited explosion. I was filled with hope, but then on the second go we had some serious issues with ghosts and wiped at around 40%, which me start to Frank out a bit, like Bruce Banner after getting a paper cut. I reiterated my philosophy of “ghost=death” and insisted that melee get away as soon as they come up to prevent a ghost that was perhaps zeroing in on a tank from turning them into a puddle.

Third attempt was much, much better on the ghosts. It still ended ingloriously, but seeds were obviously planted. There was little to no tunnel-visioning and I heard very few tell-tale ‘splosions from the raid.

Fourth attempt we got it down to 7% before we were completely overwhelmed by adds and the raid was finished off. I was officially in full-blown “we can do this” mode.

Fifth attempt I set up a dedicated adds team of three ranged and two melee, rather than just assigning people on the fly based on their position in Omen. Adds as a result went much smoother, and ghosts were awesome, but it got really sticky at the end. As her health plummeted we had a really bad ghost explosion in ranged that took out a couple of healers and a few ranged. We steadily worked our way down to the 3% and I was holding my breath just doing whatever I could via Hands, Raid Wall, or screaming “GHOSTS” to keep the raid going. A cold sweat pouring down my face, we finally knocked her over dead.

We didn’t even have to do the first kill via bubbles post-enrage. I think that’s a first for progression.

In any case, another few seconds and we surely would have wiped, we were severely overwhelmed. So you can imagine how proud I was of the raid for holding it together in those crucial last seconds.

Next week I’m sure will see a much, much cleaner kill.

On a different tangent, I was also really happy with the two newest recruits we brought into raid last night. One was a DK who did great dps, and the other was the equally awesome Antigen of Haz Mace, Will Raid (I am collecting paladin bloggers it seems) who had a great first showing in his first 25man with us. I love when recruits click.

Great night over all, and the best thing is we’re ahead of schedule this week. I think we can turn that around into a full clear of ICC25 tonight.