Coping with loss (of threat)

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

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

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

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

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

The audacity of HP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This spreadsheet proves… er, nothing

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

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

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

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

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

Suffer well, brothers

It’s coming, comrades. Gird your loins.

I can read it in the tea leaves, the chicken bones, the dice, what have you. We’re going to get nerfed, and hard.

And I don’t mean the already-impending threat nerf. I mean an additional survivability nerf.

Every day I hold my breath and go to the official WoW tanking forums, and every time I do it feels like a punch in the kidneys. Each and every thread is “Pally OP” this and “Pally OP” that. Normally I wouldn’t be worried, but Ghostcrawler is responding to these threads, he’s reading this arguments, he’s seeing the anger that the overnerfed DKs and ignored Warriors are heaping on our class.

Sadly, the Druids are keeping mum, because they know what EH powerhouses they are. But ironically, all they’re doing is holding on to the hungry tiger tightest. Eventually after we get tossed off and devoured, they’ll be the only meal left.

And yes, I do agree that AD in it’s current incarnation is overpowered. A 15% EH boost matched with out superior stamina scaling is obscene and the benefits thereof are beginning to rear their head in this higher level of content. However, I know in my heart of hearts that Blizz is going to over do it, and hit us with the nerfbat so hard that we’ll be worse off than we were at the start of 3.0. We’ll resume our spot at the bottom of the tanking totem pole.

DKs are proof positive of this model. Blizzard let them go as they were from 3.0, through 3.1, and then finally after months of DKs being the hard mode tank, and GC saying “oh it’s not a big deal,” the threads piled up too high to ignore. Finally, after the outcry hit a fever pitch, Blizz enough was enough. They smacked DKs so hard that they are now arguably the weakest tank today.

I don’t have much faith that GC will resist the same impulses with us this time around. They can only suffer so many slings and arrows before they act.

Sorry to be fatalistic, but I just feel the urge to be the bearer of bad news.

To the ground, baby.

I prefer to offtank, tyvm

I know there’s a certain lack of glory in offtanking. To some it’s the shit job that the newbie takes, to others it’s where the lesser geared tank gets shuffled. To me, however, it’s the tank role with the most excitement. Any meathead can sit in front of a dragon and get pounded in the face. It takes a special kind of knuckle dragger to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, tossing off taunts like beads at Mardi Gras, and keeping the healers alive so they can in turn keep the aforementioned meathead from expiry.

In just about every raid that Demogar (the warrior tank) and I deal with, I always quickly snap up the offtanking role. Golems on Ignis, adds on Freya, Icecrown Guardians on Kel, Mistresses of Pain on Jaraxxus. You name it–I’ve rounded it up, kited it, and consecrated it down.

Why do I do it… lack of confidence? My gear not measuring up? Nope, I’m a masochist and I enjoy the adrenaline rush of keeping some ancillary mob under control. And my gear’s just fine, thank you.

If you constantly get stuck in the OT role, don’t despair. Remember, the attempt depends on your success much more than the MT. You’re the one tasked with doing the grunt work, he’s just sitting there getting made into mincemeat. And if he dies? You swoop in and save the day while he has to suffer the indignity of a battle rez. And if you die, well, there goes everyone with the highest global aggro–goodbye to the healers.

The maintank may in the end get the fortune and glory, but the offtank is the one that invariably carries the day. It’s a thankless job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Of course, this all assuming there are adds. If this is Loatheb or Hodir we’re talking about, just switch to dps and have some fun smashing in faces for a change of pace.

Four characteristics of a great tank, part 1: A sense of ownership

With the addition of dual specs in 3.1 and the influx of easy purples in 3.2, there’s been a wave of new folks strapping on the defense plate and stepping to the front of the group as a meat shield. And sure, these people can do the job of tank–they can hold threat and not die. But as a tank they don’t excel. It takes more than 540 defense rating to make you a great tank, it’s also philosophy and attitude.

I originally conceived of this series as just one long article, but then I decided I was in sore need of blog fodder and it’d be best to stretch this out interminably. Or at least until I do all four parts.

To get to the meat of this post, the first characteristic I wanted to discuss was a sense of ownership. By ownership I don’t mean bossing around your party or raid members, or being in charge of direction and strategy. No, I mean something more existential. As a tank you are charged with the defense and well-being of your friends. As the adage goes:

My comrades are my weapons and I am their shield.
While I draw breath, they shall not perish.

That is, in a nutshell, what I mean by a sense of ownership. These folks in your group are depending on you to keep them alive in a way that is divergent and yet fundamentally more critical than what the healer does. If a healer dies, the tank and dps can get by for a short period of time through the use of cooldowns. If a tank dies, the boss is going to run around and begin one-shotting the dps and healer.

That’s not to say you should be some giant ego monster because you are well nigh indispensible. Far from it. You have a responsibility to the group, one you must rise to.

Now, how to integrate this philosophy into your playstyle?

For one, I recommend organizing your unitframes so your focus frame is sitting somewhere convenient and within your normal line of vision, so it never is out of view. Then set the healer as your focus. If this is a five man, there’s only one to choose from but in a raid the choice is a little more sticky. If a healer is specifically assigned to you, focus them; if there’s one that tends to be a little squishy, that’s your focus.

Now that you have that little focus frame sitting where you can see it at all times, keep an eye on it. If the healer’s health begins to falter, confirm if it’s an add, and then quickly slap a taunt to strip the offending mob off. Of if there’s a period of raid damage (such as a Tympanic Tantrum) consider BOPing them. Perhaps a Hand of Sacrifice. Maybe toss them a Lay on Hands if things look really bad.

Mainly, the key point here is to keep an eye on them.

One of my buddies once remarked about a particular fail tank in our guild that the key flaw in his method was he “didn’t care about healthbars.” This particular tank was perfectly fine with raid members dying, because he assumed that they had done something wrong and deserved it. He was, in short, a subscriber to the old phrase that the tank was only responsible for the healer and if a dps died “it was their own damn fault.”

He is wrong. A tank must be concerned with the wellbeing of all your party members. Each person is key to the success of the endeavor. No matter how stupid or aggro happy they are. Even if they rip a boss off you, vindictiveness does not supercede your responsibilities.

Remember, as a tank the survival of the party ultimately lies with you. You need to keep the dps from pulling aggro and getting pounded, or the healer from being instagibbed by an add that came unseen barreling down a hall. Consider your comrades your responsibility, act as their shield, and always care about the healthbars.

A tale of double Qs

I’m a pessimistic guy, generally. When things are going well in the guild my first instinct is to enjoy them for however ephemerally they last. If things are going poorly, then I tend to expect them to get worse. For some odd reason (completely unfounded, mind you) a gdisband is a constant concern of mine.

So yeah, as you can imagine we’re in a bit of a slump. The normal raid leader is taking a break so last night it fell on Cendra and I to manage the roiling masses. I took up the job of barking at everyone while Cen took over dkp. Initially we had a bit of trouble getting loot out after Flame Leviathan (oh, by the way, guess what didn’t drop? …again[x14]) and one of the dps huffed in vent something along the lines of “can we hurry this along please.”

Oh, gee, SORRY ‘BOUT THAT. Were we inconveniencing you??

I swear the dps have no idea how good they have it. All they need to do is sit in the back, not stand in the bad stuff, and pew pew away. Meanwhile I need to run around like a goddamn chicken with my head cut off to put adds off dps, and judge when to pop my one cooldown so I can save my life and prevent a wipe, while healers need to run around and stress about keeping me up. Meanwhile I need to worry about calling out overloads, cause damned if the dps won’t know enough to not stand in one. And with all this, this guy wants me to hurry up.

Arrgh, I digress. I can’t imagine how people who have to do this full-time in their guilds get by.

In any case, here’s a pro-tip for those of you not in positions of power in your guild: don’t show any interest in how the organization is run, because you’re just asking to be plucked into the officer ranks and having responsibilities a-plenty dumped on you.

What originally burnt me out from WoW last year was running the dopey little 10man guild I was in. Basically the job consisted of organizing Kara runs like two nights a week, which was all well and good. But eventually people got sick of Kara and stopped showing up, and in a 10man guild you don’t have the luxury of an overflowing roster. So each night basically degraded to me begging random people on my friends list into coming to Karazhan with us. And then we started doing ZA, which never went really far. All this administration nonsense drove me nuts and I just stopped logging on.

The same thing is most likely the reason behind the raiding absenses of the GM (which lead to the RL taking over raids), and then subsequently the RL’s break. And now it’s on me. Again. (George Santayana, you bastid).

When I came back to the game last October I swore to myself that I wouldn’t run anything. I’d just be a face in the crowd that would show up and do my job. But here I am now, whining on teh intertubes about this nonsense.

The stupid thing is, though, I really enjoy raiding. I enjoy killing the big boss at the end, I enjoy collecting the phat purps, I enjoy the achievement of overcoming some obstacle with 9 or 24 other raiders. But for all those good aspects of raiding to occur, someone needs to be the one that makes the roster, puts up with the BS. If I, or Demo, or whoever else, don’t deal with this crap, who will? Captain Impatient over there?

One final rant: I don’t know what kind of numbers your dpsers put out in 25man raids, but mine tend to suck. The expectation I think is that in ~226 gear you should be doing 3750-4500 dps, correct? The majority of the dps in our raids tends to do under that (see this WWS from last night overall). From time to time I like to punish myself with considering the irony that the people who demand we raid faster aren’t putting out the numbers that would easily facilitate that.

TL;DR: imma QQin’.

It’s all right to be wrong

Really, there there. Everything’s going to be a-ok pal. World’s not gonna end. Happens to the best of us.

Just like everybody poops, from the lowliest Victorian chimney sweep boy to the King of Siam (ok, my copy of the book may be a bit outdated), everyone is wrong about something from time to time. Honestly, it doesn’t make you less of a person to admit you were mistaken.

I like to think I’m pretty open to admitting my own faults. Hell, I’ve been wrong about stuff on this blog, and I’ve admitted as much!

Nonetheless, the reason I’m delving into this topic of self-delusion is based on an incident this weekend in guild and a personality trait I’ve noticed in one guildee that seems to surface more often than not.

The other day I was minding my own business in Un’goro, passing through to snuff out some bonfires, when one of the officers asked in guild chat why the Naxx run scheduled on Thursday was cancelled. I didn’t remember anyone intending to cancel it so I checked the calendar. It was still there. A couple of people, myself included, piped in saying we could see it still.

“Nope. It was cancelled. I got a cancellation message in the mail.”

But… it’s there… look, I can sign up and remove my name from it!

“You’re wrong.”

But if you’ll just open your calendar and look at it…

“Calendar must be wrong, I got a cancellation notice.”

If everyone else can see this event, maybe, just maybe [honored guild colleague], you’re incorre–

“Nope. And nope.”

Okie dokie. Obviously not going to win this one, someone is clearly a little too invested in their own veracity. Can’t damage the brand name, and all that.

Along this vein there is one person in the guild who also has a zealous, Scarlet Crusadesque devotion to that great whiteboard in the sky where some seraph is tallying up how many arguments he’s won. Unlike example A, this gentleman likes to counter opinions to the contrary with waves upon waves of misinformation. And any facts that don’t prove his point are dismissed as false data.

For example, someone was asking about the Paladin judging system, having just rolled a wee little Pally themselves. He Who Knows All informed the questioner that they should be picky with which judgement they use (not seal, judgement) because different judgements do different damage. As you, my fellow seasoned Paladins, know, what you judge only affects what dot you put on the mob. What damage the judgement does is based on the seal.

I piped in to correct him, and to prove my point I linked the three judgement spells. He immediately logged off and onto his Paladin to assuredly go wail on a target dummy for a few hours to hopefully find someway to prove his point. I never heard from him again on the subject.

It’s unreal the lengths people will go to delude themselves, and attempt to delude others, into believing what they assert. The world would undoubtedly be a much better place if once and a while everyone could swallow their damn pride and admit that, yeah, they were wrong about x or y. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with being wrong. You’ll survive if you admit it, I promise.

When your guild hits a raiding roadblock

It’s the same damn thing every time. New content comes out and your guild goes rushing in head-on and promptly knocks themselves out on some obstacle they weren’t prepared for. Sometimes the object blocking your progression is a glass door, which isn’t really an obstacle at all, just something you need to slide open and slip through. Othertimes you’ve got a brick wall in your way.

For my guild the Keepers of Ulduar (heroic) are proving to be a mix of the two. Hodir we initially considered a giant, frozen brick wall, but with the assistance of our new strategy the fight was simplified to the point of absurdity. I can’t count how many times in my “WoW career” I’ve been in a guild that’s stuck on a fight, and with one teeny tiny stupid little change to the strategy the whole fight opened up.

Like, for example (and this is embarassingly obvious in hindsight), on Akilzon in ZA we used to switch to dpsing the birds which would prolong the fight until mana ran out and we all bit the dust. Then, one day we realized “hey let’s ignore the birds.” And we one-shot Akilzon. /facepalm

But those are the happy happenstances when the difficulty of an encounter is how you approach it. Worse are the ones that you can’t overcome due to the unwillingness of mathematics to get out of your damn way. That is, sometimes you don’t have enough healers, or the dps isn’t pulling their weight (while the tanks, of course, remain infallible!) and progression suffers as a result. Those times, what do you do?

As I see it, you have only one option, keep trying. (Disclaimer: I’m a bit of a masochist.)

Yeah, we can’t down Freya consistently, or Thorim at all, and the thought of Mimiron in 25 man causes me to lose control of my bladder, but damned if we’re not still getting gear from the first two sections of Ulduar. That’s not a bad thing, and after enough time you’ll be able to drag The Numbers into a side alley and beat them into submission while no one is looking.

And then before you know it you’ll be rolling in tier 8.5 gloves.

Of course, the major threat to the guild during week after week of fail is that people will get frustrated and stop coming to raids. Thus, the delicate balance must be preserved between progression and wiping.

The solution, moreover, is definitely not to slink back into older content (as I’ve seen suggested in my guild). Yeah we can do the safe thing and farm Naxx25 and Malygos, but why? What’s the point of spending two nights in that floating hellhole at this point in the game?

But I digress. Today is the start of another raid week. Tonight we’ll clear up to (and hopefully including) Auriaya, and probably leave Ignis for tomorrow. Then we’ll spend the rest of the week on the “harder” stuff: Iggy, Hodir, Freya, etc. We won’t down Mimiron, Vezax, or Yogg-Saron. And, you know what? I’m ok with that.

Because eventually we will. As long as keep gearing, our day will come.

… But hopefully before 3.2.

Waxing nostalgic

I’ve only been playing my Paladin since October of 2007, but in that relatively short span of time there’s been a huge amount of changes to this class. I was just thinking of some of them and decided to share.

Remember when…

• Lay on Hands had a 1-hour cooldown
• Seals would be used up whenever you judged, so you’d have to macro a new Seal application to your Judgement key
• Seals changed so they didn’t get used up when you judged, and lasted for more than 30 seconds
• There was only one Judgement spell
• Alliance had the best tanking seal and Horde the best dps
• You had to drink between each pull
• You couldn’t raid tank until you were “uncrushable”
• Holy Shield had a shorter duration, so you couldn’t keep it up constantly during a fight
• Our threat was primarily reactive, we had very few offensive attacks
• Blessing of Salvation was the most critical dps blessing
• Divine Protection was a crappier version of Divine Shield
• Spell power was our major threat stat
• You could only use Exorcism on Strat runs
• LoS pulling was a major skill
• Death Knights didn’t exist! (haha)

Pallies who have been tanking longer than I have can supply more numerous (and more shocking) changes. Feel free to share any I forgot.