Raiding After Dark

Two Years

2012-02-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

Warning!

This post will be a bit sentimental and melodramatic, so you have full rights to skip this - it might even get sappy and mopey in places.

I've been writing this blog for two years as of today.

155 posts, 192 comments, 31k page-views and about half of those from non-US sources, including Brazil, Denmark, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden...

The bulk of my traffic has come from a very small subset of posts - the story got a lot of attention, another entry picked up WoWInsider got some eyeballs, and my transmog posts seem popular, as do a couple of guides in particular, but the rest of my entries are not particular standouts. Some posts that I put a lot of thought and effort and emotion into just kind of slipped into oblivion and I find that sad, but such is the way of things in the frequent writing market - you produce a bunch of stuff and throw it up on the wall and some of it will stick and most of it will just kind of melt into the plaster becoming the background for the standouts.

It's kind of crazy (and somewhat depressing) when I think about the number of number who've read this blog is bigger than the number of people who've seen my plays or read my fiction. But it's a privilege to have people read and take an interest in anything one writes, and I do appreciate the people who've followed me for this long, or have even taken an occasional gander at a Google-result that plopped them here. I appreciate every one of you who has taken a few minutes to read what I had to say, and if it helped you in any way, I'm twice as glad.

155 posts in 2 years is almost 1.5 posts a week. That's not a terrible average, though I've had more productive months than others. Especially in the end-tier of the expansion, when MoP is bringing so many changes, a lot of what there is to say seems somehow irrelevant or too-late or after-the-fact so I find myself starting topics or looking at old drafts and slowly deleting them one line at a time, as I realize they're well past their best-use date.

I've also been thinking of stopping completely, but I don't think that'll happen. Even if my readership dropped back to the dozen or two views a month I used to get when I started, I think I'd just keep writing to catalog my thoughts.

Often, I find myself wanting to blog about topics that aren't relevant here - my issues with politic and economics, my struggle with atheism while trying to bond with a religious family whose culture is tied into faith, I could write all day about my son who's nearly a year and a half, and I want to write about the last year of depression treatment that I went into... but none of that is relevant here, none of these are things I want to tie into Warcraft, even if all of these are entangled with my Warcraft experience in deep, intractable ways.

My guild that I play with, my friends that I play with, are all carefully chosen people who reflect my political and non-religious ideals. Not only their tolerance, but their acceptance and involvement with me and my family keeps me engaged. My wife doesn't play, but some members of my guild are friends with her on Facebook, they ask me about my son, I share videos with them over YouTube. I bond with some of them about my treatment, and... it's all tied up.

Two years ago was also, more or less, when we started this guild, when the six or so of us decided we would play the game on our terms, and wouldn't be held to crappy standards of play, nor would we be exposed to homophobia or sexism just to be able to progress as raiders or have strong PvP teams. And we've succeeded in almost every way imaginable.

And through it all, I kept writing, about my frustrations, about my triumphs, about my concerns, during that time I went from co-GM and Raid-Lead to Raid-Lad to merely an officer and attended nearly 95% of the raids that happened during this time. I did Arena in three seasons reaching ~1600 rating every time on two classes.

All of that to wind up exactly where I started two years ago. The end of an expansion, goals in hand, hope and excitement for the future, surrounded by friends... but there are two fundamental differences from the way things were two years ago.

1. I'm a dad.
2. I'm not depressed.

The dad thing and its constraints on time is obvious, but the depression thing is a bit more complicated. At some point in 2009/2010 I slipped into a major depression, and it sapped me of all ambition and creativity. I couldn't write or play music, couldn't follow through on projects, or do much of anything really, and the last year of medication and therapy have slowly brought me back to life and a lot of that creative energy that I was missing has started seeping back into my life.

And with it come the constraints on time.

There is the small game-development company I'm working with as a designer and programmer. There are the numerous publishing projects I'm working on with my wife and a friend. There is my own writing to pursue, my first major play that I'm trying to finalize and find a company to read, my book that I want to draft and send to an agent, the songs I want to record...

Do I have time to raid? Do I have time to write about Warcraft?

I don't know. Not yet. I'm trying to do everything, and a lot of it is suffering from a lack of attention - but my philosophy about creative projects has always been to enjoy the process and not worry about the product, and that's what I'm doing right now. After two years of gray, dull depression, just being involved with these collaborative projects is enough to fill my life with color.

As my son gets older, that time squeeze will get tighter and tighter, and at some point I will have to do something to curtail my Warcraft time-slot. But that's still some time away, even though time seems to be accelerating. When I think of my son being a year and a half old, it seems crazy, how could so much time have passed by already?

But it has. And more will be gone soon. The patches keep on coming, the dungeons and raids get cleared, dragons die, gold is collected from sold auctions, we run our dailies, log in and out, make alts, laugh over vent on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and after enchanting the loots and cuts some gems to fill empty slots, we say good-night and turn off the monitor plunging the room into darkness.

And, as well all know, it doesn't end there, completely, does it? In the secret moment, in the instant of vulnerability when the day's exhaustion catches up, we sometimes experience an out of body moment of connection.

In the darkness, motes of light dance on the screen, illuminating the outline of my avatar, Innana, my identity present in Azeroth, Innana, a stronger, braver version of me with the strength to protect her friends from harm, with all of her issues, her stories, her nightmares and dreams, she looks back at me, waves, wondering who I might be, and I wave back, knowing exactly who she is, before she fades into the matte, shadow shimmer of the black screen and I turn slowly to climb into bed, well past midnight, and close my eyes, caught between her and me for an instant, between dream and reality, before sleep takes over.

I don't know if I'll still be here in 2 more years, but I know I'll be here 2 days, 2 weeks, and 2 months from now, and more than that, I'll just have to wait and see.

Thank you for sticking with me for so long.

Various and Sundry

2012-02-16T07:11:00.000-08:00

Bah-humbug.

Deathwing, after six-odd weeks of kills, has dropped two rogue axes, not once, not twice, but multiple times. In addition to the agility polearm and the bow for a raid with no main-spec ferals or any hunters, Deathwing can go DIAF. I'm tired of disenchanting the same goddamned things while pining for a Souldrinker and the rest of the raid is still using crappy 397 gear week after week.

In fact, the loot-tables have been just miserable. I don't think we've seen more than one or two healer trinkets drop and other than Resolve of the Undying (which drops every week like clockwork) we have seen no Tanking trinkets. I could also complain about the fact that this week we saw 4/5 tier token drop for the Hunter/Warrior/Shaman set which we have none of, but that would be just the icing on the cake.

Bah. Normal mode Dragon Soul has gotten super-boring at this point, as we're mostly finished with all of the achievements as well, except for the Gunship and Madness ones. At least we started working on Heroic bosses finally, which has been incredibly gratifying. We're also nearly finished with the Firelands meta achievement, which I'm eager to put behind us, and we're maybe three weeks from finishing the legendary. And then I never have to do Firelands again!

You know what would actually be kind of fun? Going back to T11 and doing the hard Heroics there. These Heroics are still a hold-over of the super-hard T11 tuning and they didn't really nerf this content so I'm kind of hungry to go see it. Heroic Yor'sahj kicked our ass for a while this week though, so working on the current tier isn't a bad thing either, for me.

Other than that, and some mid-level Arena, and occasionally playing my Death Knight, I really haven't had a whole lot to do in game. I wound up almost emptying my bank last night to buy a relatively cheap Deathcharger (60k) and immediately liquidated some assets on the AH overnight to get back up to 35k, so maybe I'll play the AH for a few weeks.

Mostly, I'm working on some off-line writing and programming projects, and I'm excited for MoP to start so we can leave Cataclysm behind for good. I did pay for the year-long subscription, but I likely won't be logging into Beta as I hate spoiling myself, or having to do all that work twice on the same character. I might log in to test the class changes and talent tree stuff and so forth, but I won't do any leveling or dig into the new zones at all.

As far as when to expect the game, my crystal-ball gazing has revealed the following to me:

Alpha: This month
Beta: Mid-April
Release: Mid-August

Unless I'm very wrong and my Insider Source(tm) has been misinformed.

And finally, have you guys seen the new Paladin tree? It's pretty interesting and I want to chew it over and write a full post about it. And for those of you freaking out about Ardent Defender missing from the talents, it has been made a base-line ability under protection. Relax.

Innana: Discovery (Fiction)

2012-01-31T16:45:00.000-08:00

I mentioned long ago about how much I enjoy getting into the heads of characters and when I race-changed into a Draenei, I had a lot of difficulty trying to get into the head of an immortal space-goat warrior that channeled energy from a talking and sentient crystal on a crusade for righteousness. So I swapped back to a human, and starting thinking about who she was and where she was in her life, what her day to day work was like, and what might make life interesting for her.

This is the start of what I came up with, I'll likely write this very slowly, and I wish I was an illustrator of any worth as I think this would make a fun, ongoing comic, but ah, well. Besides, non-funny Warcraft comics don't do well anyway, and this is far from funny. Anyway. I haven't drafted this as much as I wanted to but I'm trying to churn out more material more quickly and this was keeping me from other material that's a bit more urgent.

Read at your peril!

INNANA: DISCOVERY

There was once a girl who knew her place in the world. She would wake in the mornings and know the day ahead of her, and the day after that. Weeks and months unfurled like a written scroll, inscribed with foretelling and prophecy until the day someone set fire to her future.

Fire fell from the sky and reached out from the earth, horror consumed all of her tomorrows and when she woke up, her future was a wet clump of ashes in her hands. Her father's gardens were gone, her mother's maids were haunted and desperate women, shocked into senselessness. The men who served her father looted the house as it burned, and ran into the night, some into fire, others into axes and swords. Gold and silver scattered, the butchers uninterested in their gleam.

The girl, however, was too small to be noticed, too unimportant to matter, and when the butchering finished and the fire died, when the sound of horror faded, and she had slept and wept and slept again in the small hollow beneath the burned down house, she was illuminated.

A mailed hand reached down from the blinding light and she was lifted up from the ruins of her life into the comfort of a white tabard, staining it with her ashen hands.

Innana closed her eyes and sat in bed, the nightmares once forgotten were recurring more and more often. Outside her window, Stormwind bustled and there was life waiting for her to join, but she was far from it. Her maid, Alie, knocked and then entered, with a basin of water, and clothing for the day, and Innana put on her smile and attended to her bath.

There was always paperwork to be done. Documents to read, petitions to judge, treaties to be ratified, licences to be granted, wax seals dripping red on her untidy desk to press against one more parchment, and by the time she finished the last of it, the sun was in the west, and there was the Seminary lecture yet to give, a recounting of the Cathedral armaments to see if she could find the source of thieving and a personal consultation with a petitioner.

She had become another cog in the great machinery of the Cathedral of Stormwind, an instrument of the Light. From her window, across the plaza, she could see the holy edifice rising into the sky, the peaks of its steeples lost beyond the rim of her view. Priests, pages, knights, beggars, petitioners and the devout were always on the broad steps, flowing in and out of the Cathedral.

The girl from long ago had once walked similar steps in another land, in another time, in another place, with her mother, hand in hand, attended by servants, they had come bearing flowers and gifts, and standing in the pews while the church rang with the hymns, she felt the awe of divinity. Her mother leaned down to whisper in her ear, "You will wed here, one day as I did."

Her mother was wrong.

She was wed, but not in that church, which was burned and trampled beneath the war machine. It was here, in the Cathedral, that she was wed. Many years ago, and not to a man, no. For the second time in her life, she was illuminated by the Light - it descended from the great stained glass behind the Bishop. It was a small ceremony attended by the family of her brothers and sisters who stood with her, and a handful of petitioners who happened to be there - all strangers with only a mild interest in observing the ceremony, not the church bursting with guests for a great wedding as her mother had thought. The girl had knelt next to the other boys and girls, and then stood as a Knight of the Silver Hand.

She remembered the weight of the sword on her shoulder, the steel gleaming, "You are a weapon. A vessel for the Light. Woman no longer, you are an instrument of justice and righteousness."

And then the sword was in her hand, sword and shield, mace and censor, hands full of power, and there were wars, and terrors to overcome.

Innana closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. Where was this reminiscing coming from? This day was no more or less important than any other, no anniversaries to spark these distant nightmares and memories. She stood up, calloused, rough hands against the wooden desk, her left hand specked with red wax, and absently picked up her sword-belt. Even in Stormwind, without the armor, dressed only in her plain gray shirt and loose black trousers tucked into polished leather boots, she still felt the need to carry her sword. It was an extra limb, an extension of her will, and she buckled it, unable to withstand the rush of memory.

The girl from long ago had hated swords. She had hated weapons or violence of any kind, she loved the stories best where knights befriended the monsters and turned them into companions. Stories when love and friendship conquered what violence could not. Songs where queens and kings ruled in benevolence over civilized and chivalrous lands, and even the monsters were civilized, brought into the cities, discarding their bones and furs and taking the cotton and leather. She believed this was possible.

That was until the violence found her, turned her life around and left her to face a different world where violence was not just something meted out of anger but it had to become a shield to keep civilization from being washed away in the tides of barbarism and chaos.

Outside her door, in the hallway, there were other doors, some open, others closed, all filled with other cogs in the machinery working on their own paperwork. She set about her business. Visiting the Seminary did nothing to keep her from falling deeper into nostalgia. Her first weeks there as an orphan, getting used to sharing a large dormitory, no maids to help with her everyday processes, the two robes, one of which she was to wash herself every night to have it clean for the next day, the daily lessons in history, numbers, and the holy reed.

When she proved exceptional in her classes, she was moved into the more rigorous training - the deep mysteries of the Light, yes, but also rhetoric, logic, politics, trade, philosophy, music, arithmetic - the kind of education her brothers might have received had her mother born sons. Five years later, she was offered a seat into the priesthood, but she shook her head no, and undertook a new journey, even as her tutors of seven years stood gaping in shock, all of their attention and training wasted on a girl who would become a foot-soldier.

Here, now, she looked at the girls and boys who sat in a row of benches looking up at her, their faces open, and she remembered the woman who changed her life.

A woman with a hard face, short cropped hair with a shock of white running through it, her chin tilted from a blow making her too ugly for anyone to ever kiss, but who spoke with a grace that moved Innana to join her instead of the priesthood.

Today, would Innana speak with enough conviction to change the minds of one of these children?

The lesson ended, she blessed the class, her hand tight around the pommel of her sword, and rushed through her meeting with the Bishops, relenting to their wisdom in the matter of pilfered armaments, with little motivation to become involved in the matter. It was likely to be some poor footman or squire trying to feed his mother or pay his sister's dowry and the Cathedral could afford to part with some of its wealth.

The sun was low over the western hills above Stormwind proper by the time she rushed back to her office for the petitioner. Her stomach growled and she could not remember if she had eaten since leaving her quarters in the morning. Sometimes it seemed her entire life was spent trapped in this square, from quarters to office, office to seminary, seminary to cathedral, cathedral to quarters. Around the square, a team of men went about, lighting the lamps one at a time.

Her hand flexed. The hilt of the sword felt warm, the weight on her hip, the jingle of the chin holding the sword to her belt, and suddenly, she could have been in Northrend... there had been a life beyond this once. But there were worse memories to dwell on than her childhood and she returned to that confused stream gladly rather than her years in the field. She shut her eyes, willing them away, only to feel the horror and agony of all those years in an instant.

The frozen winds of Northrend blasted her, the hopeless chill of the Lich King was there, alive, in her head and the faces of the dead, her brothers, her sisters, the dead, the dead, the dead, the dead who came back, her friends who came back from the grave and the Light was in her hands, burning them as they screamed and they screamed... and she was screaming with them, until they sent her back and...

She opened her eyes. Something was wrong. This kind of melancholy and introspection was not unusual for her, but not this complete preoccupation to the point of paralysis. Perhaps some time with Mother Amina would clear her mind. She would write a note to her and have it delivered in the morning, petitioning for some time with her.

But there was one more task left for her to do before the day was over and she hurried up the steps into the administrative offices. Erik, the middle-aged clerk with infinite patience if not stamina sat at the desk on the first floor and looked up from the line of small text he was following with a finger, exhaustion evident on his face.

"Your petition is waiting in your office," he said. Innana glanced up the stairs were only two lamps flickered and all the other doors were likely closed and locked for the night. The office had no windows facing the west and it seemed all the more gloomy for it.

"Why don't you go ahead," she said, "I'll lock up."

"Thank you," Erik did not argue, gathering his cloak from the peg behind him, "I'll be good to eat dinner with the family for once."

Innana smiled at him and went up to her office as the clerk shut the heavy door behind her, eliminating what little sunlight remained in the office. She walked up stairs and into her room, unbuckling her sword belt and carrying it in her hand. A figure sat in a chair in front of her desk, cloaked and hooded, turned into a silhouette by the flickering candle on her desk that Erik must have left.

"Excuse me for being late," Innana moved around the desk to her chair, "It has been a long day and I appreciate your patience. I'm Innana, and I was given your..."

The figure lifted its head - her head, Innana saw the woman, a girl, really, a pale, sickly, thin girl with sunken, haunted eyes as if from nights of sleeplessness and the caved-in cheeks of a starving child. Innana slowly lowered herself into her chair, laying her sword belt on the desk, staring into this cadaverous face.

"... your petition to handle." She finished quietly.

"You're the wrong one," the girl hissed as if to foil eavesdroppers. There was something in the way she spoke that sent a chill up Innana's spine. The light in the room faded, dulled, the candle flame blinked, tilting to one side as if in a draft though the room was still, and then it was still again.

"What manner of help, sister?" Innana asked gently. Something was very wrong here. The cloak was far too bulky for a woman so frail. Something about her seemed very familiar. Outside her office, the hallway creaked, just an old building making noises in the dark, but Innana felt her hand reaching for the sword before stopping herself.

The girl whimpered, turned to look over her shoulder, and then leaned forward, "It wasn't supposed to be you," her face shuddered with terror, "No, no, no. They said it would be someone else who is not you."

Innana felt goosebumps running up her forearms, there was a feeling of dread building in her that warned of danger, close by, part of her felt flush with heat, another part shivered, thee smell of charred flesh wafted through the room then it was gone. The girl put her hands up to her head, holding it, and whined in a high-pitched tone that set her teeth on edge.

"Who are you?" Innana stood up, the sword lay on the desk between them. She couldn't remember the last time she drew her weapon in combat, a year ago, maybe? Two?

Something flickered around the woman, like an invisible barrier that enveloped her and then it was gone. The sword appeared in Innana's hand, she didn't remember drawing it, as she backed away from the desk, "What are you?" She hissed.

There, again, the flickering, and then it was gone for good replaced with the odor of rotting flesh laced with the sharp chemical smell of an apothecary. The thin face melted, and a cadaver stood in its place, the bulky robe hanging limp off of the frame of bones. Sunken eyes and cheeks vanished replaced by a mad flickering in hollow sockets and tattered skin stretched over pale bone.

"A mother," the creature said, her voice no longer that sharp tone but a guttural, wet sound, "A mother in search of her daughter."

Blizzard as a Political Entity

2012-01-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

I've always claimed Blizzard was a Center-Right company with many policies and in-game examples of this stance, but the (most) recent talk of homophobia has me thinking about it again and I wanted to take a look at Blizzard as a Political entity and try to articulate my feelings from having played the game for a number of years.

Full disclosure - I consider myself a fairly progressive individual with very liberal opinions on gay rights, equality for women and minorities, social welfare and a complete separation of church and state. Also, before I get too far down the road with this, I want to set aside the expectation that because this is a "medieval" game, Blizzard gets a pass for doing anything because they're being authentic to an anachronistic setting.

Bullshit.

When you can introduce dragons, magic, motorcycles, planes and tentacle monsters, you divorce yourself from any expectation of representing reality in your playground. And typically, the point of representing an anachronistic culture through art is to illustrate the stark differences between where we are now to what was once the norm. Not to revel in the injustices of the past.

Racism
The most recent blind example of this are the Pygmies in Uldum. You have a squat race of brown people with turbans who speak gibberish and steal from the noble Tol'vir and we're tasked with knocking them around with comical hammers.

As an Indian of Arab descent, I was looking forward to seeing Arabian, African and Central-Asian culture in the game, but I wasn't expecting this.

There are plenty of other example - from cannibalistic Trolls who are influenced from Island culture to the apologist noble-native take on the Tauren, there is a complete lack of clarity or foresight in the design team of how the game appears outside of their bubble.

Homophobia
From the videos posted at BlizzCon last year to the lack of any openly gay characters in the game, to the above-linked history wherein a burgeoning Gay community received negative attention from Blizzard in their attempts to come together and it took public outrage for them to reverse their decisions, we see a company that thinks making gay-jokes is funny.

I'm not suggesting they're homophobic, but I am suggesting that they are insensitive to the way the world appears to gay and gay-friendly people.

Diversity
Of the people who sit on the panels at BlizzCon, how often do we see women or minorities, especially in the upper levels of the design team?

The diversity is just not there, and that's part of the reason why we see the Azeroth the way we do - it's a one-sided view of the world. Their quest-team (from what I could tell of the article posted in the WoW Magazine) is entire male, for example. What would you expect from a team that had no women working in it? I'm not suggesting men can't write well-rounded stories or women-positive quests, but the incentive isn't there especially in a team where no one else might be making an effort of it.

Take this one step further and you can point at all the plate-bikini armor sets, the festival sets that make women look like lingerie models, Achievements that require us to target women and give them Playboy bunny ears.

Torture
There are a number of quests where torture is successfully used to extract information from victims. True, this is a common fantasy trope, but it still leaves one feeling queasy when the target is begging for relief and yet we continue with the torture. So much so that the NPCs suggest this is beyond them and they ask the player to engage in this behavior, as if the developers are chortling at the prospect.

Especially at the time that Wrath came out, Torture was a vital topic of conversation as America itself was dealing with the problem of figuring out where the lines were between interrogation and torture. It was ill-timed, thoughtless, impulsive and unfortunate at best.

Conflict Resolution
Consider the fact that seldom, if ever, do you run into situations where you can reasonably resolve issues in the game. It always comes down to physical conflict. I'm not suggesting Raids involve a riddle contest, or a conversation thread that makes it possible to bypass a boss, I'm talking more in terms of quest design here, and the general theme of the game itself. War is a viable solution to all problems in the game.

Jaina and Thrall have often been the only voices of dissent in the entire setting, and while they might be the protagonists, their hopes are constantly dashed and the conflict continues.

I appreciate that the Horde vs. Alliance conflict is vital for Warcraft, and I'm okay with it, but the level of ridicule and impotence thrown at pacifism in the game is a little strange when you sit back and think on it. At any point politically, you might imagine there is some contingent of a population that is working on peace and appeasement and negotiation. We never see those elements in the game. At least with Cataclysm we're seeing some fall-out in South Shore and Barrens and maybe it's a move in the right direction.

Now.

I don't think anyone at Blizzard is explicitly racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or war-mongering, or pro-torture - but I do think nobody sat down, to look at the races, or the armor, or the quests and thought, "Is this insensitive or offensive to some significant sub-set of our audience?" And that's kind of the point.

When you have millions of people in your audience, you are going to offend someone, that's inevitable, I don't need a squeaky clean game with no possibility for freedom of expression - far from it - I enjoy and consume vast amounts of media that explores inequality.

But really, for a game of Warcraft's size and scope, with the size of their audience, what are they getting in return for the level of offensiveness in the game? Is the latent sexism and racism vital to their storytelling? Is it important to the arc of the expansion? Are these points that Blizzard needs to make and stand behind?

Or is it just a cheap joke for a bunch of guys to laugh about?

HOW TO: Solo Tank Madness Of Deathwing 10

2012-01-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

My Paladin brothers and sisters, let us bow our heads and pray - for this is the battle in which we prove our prowess. Indeed, here we shine, and bear the brute force of our enemies on our shoulders alone, allowing our comrades to do the best of works - the culling of these enemies of life itself. Keep your shield close, your sword in hand, look the beast in the eye and know that the Light has given you all that is necessary, all that is best, to conquer even the Aspect of Death. Cloak yourself in truth, carry the shield of the righteous, cast your final judgment on the ender of worlds and know that this crusade has come at least to its end.

Ahem.

We've used this strategy a couple of times now and it is pretty damned fool-proof. Once you get the flow of the fight down, prepare for achievement spam. I'll assume you know the basic flow of the fight as you can learn from WoWPedia, WoWHead or any millions of other sites.

Composition
1 Tank (preferably a Paladin, but most classes can handle it)
2 Healers (we used a Discipline Priest and Paladin)
7 DPS (if you can get a DK to DPS you can make phase 2 very easy)

Glyphs
Prime: Truth, WoG, Shield
Major: Focus Shield, LoH

Un-glyph'd Divine Protection is very useful on Impales but Glyph'd DP can be very useful to deal with Bolt impact, Tetanus and other raid-wide magical damage, it's a matter of what's more important to you and what's killing you.

Phase 1
Platform Order: Green (Ysera) > Red (Alextrasza) > Yellow (Nozdormu) > Blue (Kalegos)

The order of kill is as follows on each platform:

Corruption > Bolt > Limb > Hemorrhage > Limb > Blistering Tentacle > Limb > Blistering Tentacle > Limb

The DPS benchmark is to make sure your raid can kill the Corruption before the Elementium Bolt lands. This ensures that you should only ever get 1 Impale per platform. This is crucial. As a paladin you CAN survive two per platform but you shouldn't have to as if you're consistently getting 2 Impales, the last platform will be troublesome.

So. You start on a platform, you can ignore the limb more or less, spread out a bit so people aren't standing in a line behind one another, and nuke the Corruption as soon as it comes up. Here is how you survive all the Impales:

Platform 1 (Ysera): Dream
Platform 2 (Alextrasza): Ardent Defender + Divine Protection
Platform 3 (Nozdormu): Guardian of Ancient Kings + Divine Protection
Platform 4 (Kalegos): Ardent Defender + Divine Protection

Bolt will be coming out very soon after killing the Corruption, so swap and kill the Bolt, then begin on the limb. Keep the limb below 75% - preferably right about 80% - until Hemorrhage happens. Take it slow - this is the mana-regen part for your healers, if you're standing around waiting, it's fine, let your healers get the mana back up, this is crucial with 2 healers, as the Tentacles will burn through their mana pretty fast and you really don't want Blistering Tentacles and Hemorrhage at the same time.

Once Hemorrhage goes down, swap and burn the Limb. Jump platform, repeat.

On the third and fourth platforms, you will have to deal with Blistering Tentacles as Alextrasza won't help you on those two - leave at least your top melee DPS who loose the most by swapping on the limb while the rest of the raid swaps and kills the Tentacles. We leave our Rogue on the limb. Ranged starts with the furthest Tentacles, melee on the nearest, and you should swap and help as well. I use Hammer here to splash some damage onto the Limb.

You might need to use Divine Guardian or other raid-wide CDs here, especially on the second set of Tentacles if the DPS is slow on getting them down and your stacks get high.

On the fourth platform you will also have to deal with the Bolt impact (as you'll easily kill it without the impact on the other 3 platforms thanks to Nozdormu). What's important here is that the Corruption is killed as early as possible before the Bolt lands, preferably with 5 seconds to go so you can all get well far away from the impact point to minimize damage from the crash. If you find yourself dying to this over and over, you can even use Heroism on the Corruption to get through this part. We have our DPS save all their CDs and Trinkets on the third Platform to use on the fourth Corruption and that's usually enough.

After that it's the same as third - Limb > Blistering Tentacles > Limb > Blistering Tentacles. This one can cut a bit close with the Cataclysm timer.

Notice this whole time the only thing you've had to tank is the Corruption, survive the impales, and pick up the Hemorrhage for a couple of seconds before they evaporate thanks to Kalegos' buff. There isn't a lot to tank and using two tanks is a massive waste. As you're tanking the fourth Corruption, you're likely to be closest to the impact point when it lands if your DPS is low - remember it is safe to use Divine Protection in that case. Don't be afraid to use it to save yourself as long as you're not tanking Hemorrhages or Corruptions.

This should never happen, but, IF YOU TAKE A SECOND IMPALE FOR ANY REASON, your only recourse is an immunity. Ardent Defender is part of your first-impale rotation, but you can use DivineShield or Blessing of Protection to survive it - hit the ability, taunt, wait for the debuff to run out, and cancel. You don't need to loose a melee to pull this off but the timing can be tricky. Remember you have 3 seconds to pull this off - plenty of time and GCDs.

Phase 2
The basic progression of this is to burn Deathwing, swap and kill the Elementium Fragments, burn some more, swap and burn the Elementium Horrors, burn some more, stop at 11%, deal with the second wave of adds, the second set of Terrors, then hit hero and burn to kill while ignoring all other adds.

The only thing you're needed for is to tank the Horrors. I pick both of them up right away and drag them into Nozdormu's slow-time puddle, our Frost DK taunts one off of me. The DPS jumps on that one and burn it super fast - Anti-magic Shell is more than enough to soak the few stacks of Tetanus. You on the other hand will have a lot of stacks of Tetanus by this time and will be chaining CDs to survive. I usually use Guardian of Ancient Kings here just as the first Terror Dies and keep a twitchy hand on LoH, AD, or anything else to survive the massive spikes of damage from the DoT. If you need to, you can have someone taunt off and kite the add for 2 seconds or so to let the DoT drop off but usually it isn't necessary. Play it safe, and you'll be fine.

The Horrors are really quite survivable - on the kill last week, I died to a Tetanus tick after the first set of adds died and our feral druid and DK tanked the second set of adds just fine - though we did use Heroism to burn the adds faster. Your only purpose in Phase 2 is to survive tanking one of the adds while DPS deal with the other.

Burn Deathwing to get him as close to 11% as you can, and stop. Deal with the second set of adds the same way and you're on the home stretch.

Once the second set of Horrors die, use Heroism if you didn't use it on the Horrors and just burn to kill. If a third set of Elementium Fragments spawn, ignore them and just keep burning. You can't survive the AoE damage sub 10% for every long with 2 healers.

Save Divine Guardian for when Deathwing hits about 6% health as the AoE damage spikes quite a bit at 5%. Chain Divine Guardian with other raid-wide CDs - we go DG, Discipline Barrier, Aura Mastery, our Boomkin starts to channel Tranquility and Deathwing is usually dead right about then. I throw in a Holy Radiance too because why the hell not. Remind everyone to use Dream if it's off cool-down at this point as well.

It's actually not a difficult fight to tank at all, despite my preamble. Once you get the order of kills and rhythm down, this strategy is very repeatable. The healing on the other hand is really intense and you will want to hug your healers the first couple of times through. But it is certainly not more difficult than 2-healing, Ragnaros I don't think.

Good luck!

Dragon Soul Nerfs

2012-01-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

This feels familiar, doesn't it?

I'm glad we've killed Deathwing a couple of times by now, and have the fight down pat and dry at this point or I'd be really pissed as I was over Ragnaros. As it is, I'm just shrugging it off, as I don't really see the point in further tuning this content as it is, if you'll excuse the elitism for a moment, relatively easy compared to pre-nerf Firelands, but difficulty is a relative thing.

That said, Madness of Deathwing is no Ragnaros. And Madness of Deathwing is certainly no pre-nerf Nefarian. It's more on par with, I don't know, Cho'gall maybe, or Ascendant Council in terms of difficulty. Once you know what to do, the fight is entirely a breeze and the right setup lets you breeze through so much of the fight it's not even funny.

To be fair, we had a number of wipes on Madness. Spine took us a night. But ever since we killed these bosses, it hasn't been a problem and we more or less 2-healed the whole place except for Zon'ozz and Spine. If we do all normal modes next week, I imagine we can clear out the place in less than three hours. Though I think our Raid Lead might want to do Heroic Morchok and Heroic Yor'sahj.

I don't know. I don't know that we're particularly great and our gear was more or less at normal-Firelands level when we started this tier. We even missed about two weeks of progression when we didn't have people over the holidays. So are the nerfs necessary? Not for us, they aren't.

But I think they probably are necessary for the guilds that were stuck on Ultraxion or Lootship or Spine. Those fights do have relatively steep DPS requirements.

Are you having trouble 2-healing in the 5th minute when you're getting hit with 300k every second? Can you get one of the adds down before the Sapper spawns? Can you take the hits of fire throughout the fight without loosing people? Can your tanks taunt swap and chain CDs to survive phase 2? Is everyone able to dodge fire and cones at the same time? Do Bloods overwhelm you in the third plate phase over and over? Do you just need a bit of DPS to get over the hump on that 4th limb of Deathwing or to clear the last 2% in phae 2?

If yes, then this will help you get over that little bump and that's not a bad thing.

Maybe another two weeks of gear will help, maybe you need a different strategy or composition, or whatever, but I've been there going in on the same fight, night after night after night and not being able to kill something and feeling the frustration with making absolutely no progress. I remember two years ago (holy crap) that the 5% nerf helped us down Sindragosa when she was wiping us with sub 5% enrages or something crazy for two or three weeks in a row, and then the week the buff hit, we killed her. It stung a bit, but I was just glad to finally be on Lich King.

As it is, my expectation and my performance is based on completing at least all of normal content pre-nerf and as long as I can manage that, I'm happy. And we've more than managed that this time around. To everyone else who's waiting to get over that hump - I hope you're able to make the magic happen before the nerfs hit, but if not, I'm sure you'll have those shiny titles after January 31.

Long Time No See!

2012-01-13T12:14:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I wrote!

There are a couple of themes that are going around the blogs that I read lately that I'd love to respond to but I don't really know how to. Either I'm not affected by them as strongly as the writers, or I feel like what I have to say is so private that I'd either e-mail the person directly or maybe just silent because I don't know the person well enough.

It's an odd time. Raids are quietly falling silent, people don't log in anymore, guilds are falling out of the game, or scaling back their commitments and I kind of see myself doing the same to some degree, but I still enjoy the game. I'm excited about arenas and pushing my team ranking up. I'm excited for whenever we start doing Heroic raids. I'm excited to farm Madness for more loots as we have a fairly repeatable and reliable strategy for killing him now.

I am absolutely loving being a paladin tank lately. We are the most imbalanced and over powered tank class in the game right now and I love it!

And yet, the game seems distant lately. I don't exactly know why. Some of it is the content being old, some of it is the anticipation I have for MoP, I'd rather play MoP than drag my heels in Cataclysm any longer, honestly, and part of it is wondering if I'm missing something when I read about other people dropping the raiding game or the game completely in some cases.

Why do I keep playing, then? People are leaving, apparently in droves based on forum posts and such, for Star Wars, and while I have some dim interest in the game, it's not enough for me to keep up two subscriptions at the same time. I might wind up playing it to fill in time anyway, but I'm not excited about it.

I tried RIFT and was burned by barely playing the game until I canceled it three months in. LOTRO was the only other game I played consistently but it has changed a lot, and for the worse I think, since it went F2P and the audience it has picked up since then. I miss the quiet, mature audience it had before then even if the game was far more populated after the transition. I don't know how it is now, I haven't played it in a long time. Besides, there was no end-game there to speak of.

Anyway. I keep playing WoW because my friends are playing, because I'm enjoying the game, the raiding is great, the PvP is fun, but I guess I just wish I had something to do with my alts other than the same things I'm doing with my main. I don't know. Maybe I'm just... not burned out, exactly, but bored? I'm done with the leveling game. I love raiding, I love Arena, but the rest of the time I have to convince myself to log in.

MoP can't get here fast enough, or I'm going to have to play SW just to stay amused. Any SW guilds recruiting? :-P

Guest Post: Furtive Father Winter

2011-12-30T06:43:00.000-08:00

Hello All!

We may have not met before, but I'm Mia from Chronicles of Mia. Today, I am writing a guest post for Raiding After Dark for BlogAzeroth's Annual Holiday Post Exchange (a.k.a Furtive Father Winter)! I'm happy to write this post, mainly because I've never came across Saif's blog before. I may not celebrate the holidays, but I figured I would do something out of the ordinary for a new friend. I was a bit off guard when I had to think up a quick post or gift to Saif. I thought I had my blog's email account set to be forwarded to my personal gmail account. That wasn't the case. It was not set up, and I basically received a couple of emails late. This included who my gift recipient was , which was Saif. After looking around Raiding After Dark, I noticed the helpful Raid guides that Saif made. So as a gift, I decided to make my own little guide! Enough chatter. Let's begin! :D

How to Farm a Low Dungeon Pet on a New Server...

This guide will be helpful if you are looking to make some gold or to surprise a new friend.

What You Will Need:
- Having a character at least 55 or above
- Lots of Free Time

Directions:
1) Start off by picking your server - I chose a role-playing server named Moonguard. It's also the same server that Saif has a couple characters on, so I'm assuming it's his main server.
2) Next, make a Death Knight Character - I suggest you make your Death Knight's race based on what pet you are farming. If you are farming for the Deviate Hatchling, make a Horde character. If you are farming for the Green Wing Macaw, make an Alliance one. This will help you save time in the long run, and avoiding PvP. You are also going to be using free time to farm for a Dungeon pet, and it could take a while. Make sure you are able to have a bit of fun with your Death Knight's Race.
3) Do ALL the Death Knight Quests! - You should be at least level 58, and have 25 talent points by the time you do all the Death Knight Quests. You should also have all your equipped green items replaced by Blues from Quest Rewards. The last Death Knight quest takes you to Stormwind or Orgimmar depending on your Death Knight's faction.
4) Head out to the Dungeon and begin to farm! - I chose Deadmines to farm for the Green Wing Macaw. It only drops off the pirates at the end of the dungeon. If you are farming for the Deviate Hatchling, you have it much easier. The Deviate Hatchling drops off of Raptors at the beginning of the instance. Keep in mind that it may take multiple runs in order to get your pet to drop, but it WILL drop! Don't give up!
5) Sell or Gift your Pet! - After about three full dungeon runs of Deadmines, I got the Green Wing Macaw pet!

That's the end of the guide and I hope you all enjoyed it!
With Love,

Mia

P.S - In case you haven't noticed by now, that Green Wing Macaw is for Saif ^_^ Even though I don't celebrate the holidays, I hope everyone has has created lots of good memories from the year ^_^

Thank you Mia! I had just started reading her blog a few days ago when I got this post (and the pet) in the mail. As I've been crawling my way to 100 pets, and didn't have the Macaw yet, it was the best gift. Very kind of you. And as I have a rather cash-strapped DK on Argent Dawn, I think this guide will be helpful in getting some quick money when she needs it.

If you're curious about the post I gifted, it's here, on Bossy Pally. :-)

Avatar Improvement

2011-12-28T07:02:00.000-08:00

I swear I have like, 10 posts in draft that I can post, but whenever I go to retrieve one of them, I wind up with something new to write. Something is wrong here.

This is the first week in a long time that we didn't raid. Enough folks are missing that we just couldn't fill the holes. And I was kind of glad. On the one hand, I really want to kill Deathwing and be done with it. I think we just need one solid night on him to finish it all, but even just farming the rest of the raid would be a fun experience. I really enjoy smashing the first half and working hard on the second half. The raid is well paced, and well designed. I need at least my tier gloves and chest still, not to mention the shield and sword, and maybe a trinket and a ring.

But still, when we called it last night, before even entering the raid, I was glad. A few of us queued up for LFR and cleared the first half, and I called it a night an hour and a half early. It was odd, and nice, to just walk away rather than struggling to find people, messaging every I know and flailing like mad to make a raid happen. I just shrugged and said, "Okay." I wouldn't have done that even a month ago. I would have fought to raid.

I don't know if it's the Holiday that I'm willing to be more laid back about it, I don't know if it's the fact that our server has so many relatively hardcore raiding guilds that we're really just a tiny fish in a big lake, or the fact that maybe when I'm not raiding or doing Arenas, I really don't have much to do in the game. I keep trying to level my rogue, or get the rest of my alts up to 85 who're parked somewhere between 80 and 82, or gear up my DK Horde-side, but I just manage an hour or two of any of those activities and loose interest.

The one character I don't loose interest in, is my Paladin.

Whenever I look at her, I want to improve her gear, improve my understanding of her as a character, improve the way I play, push her achievement points into the five digits, get her all the pets and mounts I can, and make her perfect. Which, of course, is impossible.

The MMO by definition is a game that never ends, and goes on forever, where we just grind for gear, and achievements, and drops, and there is always just one more thing that we could use. I remember when TBC ended, I had been doing a bit of T5 and had some of that gear, but what I really wanted was the T4 helm from Prince. After killing him for months and months, he dropped it the last time we ever raided Karazhan at level, the week before Wrath came out.

I remember changing mains on the first day of Wrath to my Paladin (and never will I change again), and we were in ICC for a year and yet I was still hunting for one more drop or one more kill. Today, I look at my character and I know even after we kill Deathwing, we'll be raiding, wrapping up the T11/T12 heroics, grinding out Sinestra and Heroic Ragnaros, eventually even trying our luck with Heroic Deathwing.

But when Pandas come, it'll reset everything, won't it?

Maybe some part of me remembers what it was like to grind ICC. Two years ago, now, we started on that raid, and man, it was a brutal time. I remember how close I came to burnout, almost burned all my bridges, left the wreckage of two guilds in my wake before we formed the current guild and stabilized ourselves. And maybe that part of me doesn't want to slip into the desperate end-of-the-expansion must-finish-everything panic.

Sure, we've got months and months to go, but when I look at Innana without her title, without her mount, without her shield and sword, that part of me cringes, wants to post on the realm forums right now and get a PUG together so I can at least have a shot at some of that gear.

And another part of me says, "Relax. It's okay. If not this week, next week. The gear and the raid are here to stay. The only person you're playing against is yourself."

If that seems obvious, and normal, I assure you, it's a bit of an epiphany for me. Maybe it's a sign that I'm finally starting to let go of some of that hardcore edge I've always wanted.

To be in a group that was devoted to pushing through content, to grinding night after night, early in the tier, to be one of the first with the titles, the kills, the glory. To make Innana a Hero in her own right. The best gear. The highest gear rank. Because that way, I can get her as close to finished as I can - and rest, till the game paints more track further up the field.

HOW TO: Dragon Soul 10 - The First Half

2011-12-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

Dragon Soul has been a fun raid to tackle, the early fights are a bit easy, but they do scale up in difficulty as you go on, and while the encounters might not feel particularly original, they let you revisit old content with new skins and the old encounter models feel updated.

It's almost as if the Encounter Team was doing a best-of retrospective release, and instead of just picking old songs, they decided to remaster the sound, fix the levels issue on certain early tracks, and add in demos, alternate versions and extended takes.

I buy a lot of music.

Anyway - for the first four bosses, tanking is super straightforward in the Normal-10 mode. Quick and dirty tips follow.

Morchok (safe and easy with 2 tanks, can be done with 1)
Swap as 3 stacks, and then each time the Armor debuff drops off. When you're not tanking, you can go help soak a crystal so one of the DPS doesn't have to. You can easily solo tank the fight as long as you save CDs for when stacks get high before he goes into phase 2, and they should reset while you're running in and out. But two tanking it isn't a problem, unless you're doing some kind of speed-run. Use Divine Guardian if people are low on health and there's a stomp coming with a crystal up. You can cast Judgement and throw Hammers of Wrath while you're running away from the blood, but don't Exorcism spam or you'll OOM yourself.

Yor'sahj the Unsleeping (2 tanks)
Two tank this to avoid accidental death to Void Bolt. Remember that the adds aren't tankable, they focus random people. You can help with the slime when necessary, but they don't have a lot of health, and the DPS can kill them easily while the tanks just sit and swing on the boss. Use Divine Guardian as per usual in a set rotation with the healers to mitigate the AoE and voila. This is slightly more difficult for the DPS and healers, what with chasing the Mana Void and getting the adds down in time. We're just literal meat-shields on this one. Yawn.

Warlord Zon'ozz (1 tank)
The trash before this can be solo-tanked, as only the Claw really melees someone specifically. Burn down the eye, then the ranged on tentacles while melee swap to claw. The Claw might fling you away, you can just rush back with a ranged taunt if the Claw is trying to mutilate one of the melee while you're flying.

You also want to solo the boss so that you don't have to worry about the enrage timer as he does have a chunk of health. You want to line up 3 raid markers in a row. You'll be facing the boss away from the raid except for when he's about to cast the Orb. Keep a healer in melee with you, and try to split in a 5/4/1 formation, even if some ranged have to move into the melee clump just to keep the splash damage at a minimum.

Pull the boss facing the raid, let the orb come out, then flip him 180 degrees so his back is to the melee clump and the ranged clump. Try not to use any personal cool-downs until his stacks start to get high. We bounce the orb 5 times, sometimes 7 if melee doesn't get out of the way and the orb gets bounced back to ranged. I wind up WoGing a bit here, just to keep things stable right after a bounce.

When he goes into phase 2, group up, use Divine Guardian on a set rotation with the healers, and then back to Phase 1. Make sure you're not facing him towards the raid when you clump up.

After the transition, I like to keep him turned away until he casts his life drain, and then very quickly turn him around, but you don't really need to do it if you don't want to. The amount of health is regains can be a lot if he gets the entire raid, but with the amount of extra damage he takes as the fight goes on, it shouldn't be an issue.

If you do try to do this and mess up the timing so he winds up casting the orb behind you in no-man's land, you can run as soon as the cast starts, tell the healers you're moving, and you can catch the orb and bounce it back towards the raid. It's pretty fun to do this! :-) But the healers don't think so. :-(

Hagara (1 tank)
Remind your second tank to swap specs for the trash. You can solo the boss, but it's easiest to duo the trash. The gauntlet in front of her is annoying, just keep in mind that after the first set of adds, you'll get a few waves and these will have two clumps each, one from either side of Hagara's platform. Pick a side, and stick with it, while the other tank sticks to their side. Kill the casters first. Bring them together for an AoEfest, interrupt their casts, Avenger's Shield to silence them, Death Grip, whatever, but just be careful of the Tornadoes and Lightning Storms and Blizzards.

It's probably not your druids, shaman or mages casting those - if they are, ask them to stop and focus down the casters first. At the end of the gauntlet, there's a mini-boss who doesn't really do anything except put up some kind of Deathgripping snowflake thingie. The boss will move in when the mini-boss dies and float to the middle of the platform so pull the dude off to a side so you can prep before pulling.

Another boss to solo - doesn't really matter how you tank her as long as you're the only person in front of her. Watch the timer for Barrage and strafe away at a second or two left and you'll take minimal damage from it. Keep Hand of Freedom handy as she will slow you when you're out of range. When Tombs come out, have the raid clump up right before and that way you can help cleave them with Hammer of the Righteous.

During the Ice phase I don't do much except chase the walls, swing at whatever comes close, throw some Judgments and Hammers, and dodge falling snow. Yawn. The Lightning phase there is slightly more to do - kill the elemental on a node to make it explode, and then just stand there while the rest of the raid chains ahead of you while you twitch spasmatically as electricity courses through your veins.

Good luck!

More Dragon Soul Impressions

2011-12-22T07:27:00.000-08:00

Our first night in DS was very successful as we got through the first 5 bosses in two days, and then got stalled a bit of Gunship and Spine. For that reason, I didn't do the second half of LFR as I wanted to get all the content down on normal mode rather than cheese my way to the achievements.

We've spent, maybe two and a half nights on Spine to really get it down - and not for lack of effort. It is a fun fight that requires a bit of coordination and planning and the execution is solo-play dependent and at our current gear level and DPS level, we just can't 9-man it, so anytime we lost someone without a possible Rez, we'd wipe. So many wipes on the third plate, it wasn't funny.

It was one of those fights that was dead but didn't know it, and we needed one clean pull to get it done. And we got it last night without much fanfare and wound up on the platforms for Madness.

The first pull was... Madness. I didn't know where the Corruption showed up, I didn't realize there was a facing order to it till it slammed half the raid, and then the Elementium Bolt pulsed and wiped us. It looked like a long training period was necessary... so we came back in, pulled a second time... and cleared up to the third platform where we lost to the Elementium Bolt as we weren't prepared for its speed without Nozdomu. The third pulled cleaned that up as well, and we had a very sub-par DPS with us filling in, and we were 3-healing, 2-tanking it.

To say Madness will take us less time than Spine is a given, though with next week being a Holiday week, I'm not sure we'll have any progression pulls, but soon enough. My prediction of being clear through normal modes by Christmas almost came true, and if we'd been more diligent on Spine, we'd be there now.

Anyway - point being that I enjoyed the ramp-up Dragon Soul had. The first 4 were too under-tuned but they did get more difficult as the raid went on. Zon'ozz can be difficult on 10-man if you mess up the orb bouncing and there have been instances where I've gotten myself killed by not being on top of cool-downs when the orb winds up bouncing an extra time and the damage buff stacks get very high. There are some dangerous slime combinations on Yor'sahj and Hagara is supposed to be a coordination fight, though for anyone who did Ragnaros, pre-nerf Nefarian and LK, the synergy required seems quite easy.

Ultraxion was the first road-block boss - the real DPS check, though after a couple of weeks of gear, he has become very, very easy. We lost a DPS early this week to Twilight and still cleared it under 5-minutes. To be fair, people are starting to kiss the 30k mark on that fight across the board. Gunship and Spine are both much more difficult co-ordination checks, and I enjoy tanking them a lot, especially soloing Spine. The bloods get nuts at the end of the fight, I love it.

But Madness? The ultimate boss fight?

It just much easier for some reason. And it doesn't really feel like you're fighting Deathwing at any point. I get that we can't fight him, and the feeling of being in the presence of gods is there, but I don't know. There's something missing in the feel of the fight. And with how quickly we were progressing on him, with a very conservatively setup team, it seems maybe too easy.

With our A-team, we should be able to clear the 4 platforms fairly quickly. Of course, Phase 2 could kick our ass and stall us for weeks, but I'm fairly sure I can solo-tank this and if I can do that, then we have 6 DPS to eat the adds that much faster, and honestly, there wasn't that much damage going out either, I might even suggest trying a 1/2/7 combination to see if it's viable.

Anyway. Point being - the ramp up was very nice, but it seems to have dropped off right at the end. And that feels odd. Though if you look at the Heroic raids, KIN stalled on Spine for ages, then killed Madness in one or two night.

Odd to say the least.

Do You Need LFR Gear And Other Sundries

2011-12-20T07:49:00.000-08:00

Firstly:
I finally joined up with Twitter! You can follow me @RaidAfterDark if you like.

Secondly:
This post from The Reluctant Raider made me sad and a little angry.

When your Raid Leader is asking you to run LFR or loose your spot in the raid team for Dragon Soul, ask yourself the following questions:

Are you seriously going for and expecting to get Realm First Heroic kills?
Do you still need to seriously gear up in Hour of Twilight or Firelands?
Do you find your performance lags significantly behind the rest of the raid?
Do you have a lot of trouble killing more than 1 boss in normal Dragon Soul?
Is your entire spec balanced around your 4-piece tier bonus in 4.3?
Do you want to run LFR?

If your answer to any one of those questions is "Yes", then you might need some LFR gear. Otherwise, tell your Raid Lead that you are comfortable with your gear level and if he has a problem with your performance, to discuss it specifically with you. Being benched for not running LFR when your performance is equivalent is utterly, completely unfair and unreasonable.

And if you're a raid leader who requires their members to use LFR as an essential gearing element, you need to buckle up, setup a night and get as many core raid members into a 25-man group as you can before queuing.

LFR is not an easy nor a guaranteed method of gearing and a single boss can take an hour. You can't reasonably throw your raid members into that hell rudderless and expect them to come out with gear. If you want them to get that gear, you have to take them in yourself. Own up to your responsibility.

This isn't ICC 25 where Trade PUGs would clear 9/12 for GDKP runs in 2 or 3 hours. This is a million monkeys, gibbering and slamming their heads on their keyboards, hoping to kill bosses.

Lastly:
A Korea guild (I'm sorry, I can't anglicize the Korean characters but I think it translates to Kin Raiding) get World First Kills of both Deathwing modes, on 25-man. The world second kill of Spine was another Korean guild (In Extremis) and they're the only other guild in the world working on Madness right now.

Wow.

That's a sea-change I didn't see coming. And with US guilds having sat up there at 6/8 for ages and ages. Blood Legion and Vodka must be stunned, I know I am. This was the unseen bullet that came out of nowhere, and, yeah, I don't know. I wonder what the race would've been like with Paragon/Ensidia/Method in there, but it is a sting for US Guilds to deal with not claiming world first yet again, even without the EU competition.

Also: they're an Alliance guild. WIN! Glory to the Alliance!

Seeing things like this make me wish I could compete and play the game at a higher level sometimes. I love raiding with my guild, but we're a casual/semi-serious group that raids 6 hours a week and spends maybe 4 of those hours actually killing shit and the rest of it is spent in banter and camaraderie.

That is not a complaint, BTW! ;-) Just wistful thinking.

Raiding in Media

2011-12-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across a couple of pieces of interesting media items related to raiding. Both of these are worth your time, though the second item may be of more interest to the general Warcraft public than the nitty-gritty raiding discussions of the first item.

Raiding Research
This is a actually a blog by a Doctorate student in the UK named "Ladan"covering the raiding scene. She's been researching the scene for some time, and, I think at the behest of Paragon, put together a round-table discussion of the 4.3 controversies between some of the big-name guilds involved (Paragon, Method, Exodus, Vodka). It's posted on the Paragon site, and is part of their Raid Observer series of blogs.

The conversation is remarkably civil and quite enlightening in terms of getting a look into what the guilds were thinking, their reactions to the bans, and so forth. It also gives an insight into how some of these guilds actually prepare for a new patch, what their planning process is like, and so forth.

She goes on a bit too long about the US vs. EU thing, but the guests do a great job of presenting their views in terms of why they cheated, what their reactions are to the bans (generally positive, shockingly enough), the 10s vs. 25s debate (they seem to prefer letting the community decide if the brackets belong together or not), and their opinions about how the race will unroll (they correctly predicted that Spine and Madness will block most guilds in the second week and allow the banned guilds to catch up and compete on them with a week's lag in training and gear.)

Being banned must not have been fun, and one of the things they talk about is the amount of time off from work and school these guys put in for that's now wasted, and I hadn't even thought about that.

Anyway - recommended, and worth a listen even if you're into casual raiding or are curious about very high-end raiding culture.

Race To World First
This is a film streaming on the web over here, and it's kind of an agonizing look at the 4.0 race. We mostly see it through the eyes of Blood Legion - a US guild, but we get spinets and insights from Paragon, Method, Ensidia, and a couple of other guilds. Seeing the internal life of Blood Legion through the five members they follow is quite detailed, and times, too intimate. The documentary gets very close to some of the participants, and we see some of the open conflicts the membership and leadership has - and also the kindship they share with each other. The wrenching and anguished postmortems as the bosses start to fall and guilds rack up kills are the most human part of the documentary.

All that said, I wish it had kept from drifting into the "we all have to move on some day" angle that every film about MMO's seems to feel the need to tack on at the end. It's quite annoying. Still, for some inexplicable reason, I found the ending quite poignant.

If you're raiding, have raided, or will raid in the future with your guild, this is essential viewing. If you've ever played in an MMO, I'd still recommend watching it - while it follows the Raid Race very closely, the observations about interpersonal relationships in game, and the feelings of effort vs. reward are relevant to all players, no matter how casual. it's about an hour and twenty minutes, so get a snack and a drink.

New Season Shenanigans

2011-12-12T07:54:00.000-08:00

I swapped back to Innana to PvP with for this season and it is a massive culture shock.

Warlock PvP is all about control, very strict oversight of the field, making sure at least one of the opponents is being juggled and dotting everything up. While being focused so you're continuously self-healing and kiting as much as you can.

Palading PvP especially in 2's with a Rogue melee-cleave is all about burst. The longest fight we had was maybe 45 seconds last night. The number of stuns and interrupts the rogue has, plus my interrupt and stun, and the amount of burst I can dump within the first 20 or 30 seconds of a fight is just absolutely crushing at very low levels. I'm sure it'll even out very quickly as we get another week or two of gear in, but still, it was very shocking to go from such a nuanced play-style to essentially a burst-fest with occasional Stun/Hammer/Repentance/Blind chains on the healer.

Cleared an 8/0 win streak in less than an hour.

I do still want to PvP on my warlock, but I'll probably do more Battlegrounds and maybe see if I can sneak into a 3's team. Like a dummy I completely failed to realize I could have been gathering Conquest last week so I'm short, essentially, an item. Ah, well. It'll even out in the long run.

I also managed to find someone last week in Trade who had the tanking wrists pattern and had them crafted, and my Warlock bought the boots for Innana, while she picked up the Relic and Cloak as I can't get either of those upgrades from the raid. With the tier legs and shoulders I picked up two weeks ago, my gear is looking pretty good and I'm seriously starting to get into a situation where my gems are starting to slowly shift into the blue spectrum.

I'm considering actually re-gemming for full-out mastery just so I can swap out one of my mastery trinkets for a stamina trinket, but I kind of like having a sort-of DPS trinket on hand to get a bit of extra damage in (and a minute bit of parry as well) on demand. I don't know.

I'm excited for a 3-day raid week. I want a new title already, damn-it.

My Attitude Sucks

2011-12-07T10:31:00.001-08:00

My attitude in raids lately has been just total crap. My attitude in game is also a reflection of my attitude out of game, I've been going through a bit of a bad patch but that's really no excuse at all for my behavior.

Maybe it's because of my expectations of play - and sometimes I feel like my willingness to bring up points about performance is almost a detriment. I hold my play to a fairly high standard. If I let myself get killed, that's a problem, I look at my logs, I try to see what's killing me and I prevent it in the future. If I'm causing a wipe, I try very hard not to repeat my mistakes.

In the same way, if there is a difficult portion to a fight, I'll do my best to take it. I want to do the heavy lifting, I want to take the responsibility of failure if someone has to do a high-stress job, but as a tank, that's not always possible. Sometimes it's the healing and sometimes it's the DPS and sometimes it's one role that one person has to fulfill that I can't do as a tank and that's when my issue kicks in.

I begin to hold that person's performance to the same standard that I hold for myself, and that's just not fair. That person might learn some things faster or slower than mine, maybe I would take a week to figure it out and they'll get it in an hour, or maybe it's the other way around, but the point is - they have a role, and I have a role, and we're both there to perform it to the beset of our ability.

But when that doesn't work, I begin to get frustrated.

Ultraxion is a good example of this. It's a fight that sits in the hands of the DPS. If the healers can 2-heal it and get the raid to the 5 minute mark, that requires from the raid, counting the 2 tanks as 1 DPS, an average DPS of 27k.

Or 24.5k to finish the fight in 5.5 minutes which is about how long the raid can stay alive with 2 healers after the 5 minute mark.

That's a lot, even for a Patchwerk fight, which this essentially is, outside of the Hour of Twilight and Fading Light mechanic. That's expecting people to be just about perfect with their rotations, using every cool-down in the most efficiently lined up way possible, and limiting their time outside the Realm of Twilight to 2 seconds at worst. Factors having a say about this include such thing as Latency where the time you pressed your button and got to the other realm might be long enough to kill you, bad string of procs where you don't get any, a bad string of RNG rolls on your crit chance and any other number of things.

We were able to kill it last week, with numbers both above and below that average. Some bursty classes and better-geared people pulled ahead, and hit the 25k, 26k mark and others were in the 20k, 21k range, but the overall damage balanced to eke out a kill, and yet last night, we pulled a couple of times and couldn't get him to drop, wiping in the 3% range sometime after the 5 minute range.

And I was kind of loosing it with the wipes. Which is absolutely ridiculous given it's the second week and the gatekeeper boss to the hardest content in the raid.

I think there's a difference between assigning blame, and dissecting the fight. I'm always ready and willing and able to take responsibility, and do my best to improve. I might get testy, true, especially when I'm frustrated with myself, but I'll take feedback, even negative feedback, over silence any day of the week. And while we're not a hard-core guild by any measure, we do have a commitment to progression and that means we're going to dissect and fix our problems.

But I'm not dissection fights anymore.

I'm afraid I'm drifting into crazy-old-man grumbling about them DPS not pulling their weight territory instead of doing a proper analysis of the encounter and coming up with solutions.

The conflicts are getting all jumbled in my head and affecting my attitude in raids tremendously. I'm just super glad I'm not the one making calls and calling shots right now.

If I was my raid leader, I would've fired me by now.

Paladin Transmog Sets - Part 2

2011-12-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

Right now I'm sporting a mixture of the first set I made, with a different shield than the one I showed there. Mostly because Human Female model covers her entire face with the shield and it's not a lot of fun. Also, I quite like the model's face so I'm actually not using the helm right now.

Anyway, once I do start to build up some Tier 13 gear, I'll be switching to a more contemporary look. However, there are some issues I have with the full Paladin set. Mostly with the fact that it brings back the bare midriff. Ugh.

Thankfully, we also happen to have an amazing PvP set this season, and with Conquest available through daily Random BGs at a reasonable pace, we can build what I think is a truly unique and inspirational, Paladin-y set.

I really like this set and I think this is what I'm going to be wearing till MoP comes out. The added benefit is that you can get a LOT of this gear without ever having to set foot into the raid. The only thing you'll need from the raid are the shoulders. Almost everything else is purchasable with Conquest or Valor.

The Shoulders, Hands and Legs are all Paladin Tier 13 gear, but, you can also buy the off-set pieces from the Valor vendor, or get the off-set healer pieces from the raid. I'll have to wind up buying or getting the healer Belt and Boots somehow myself. The Conquest sword and shield are absolutely amazing. Some of the best art that has come into the game in a long time. They're beautiful, but functional, and they are absolutely on-mark for Paladins.

The chest, sword and shield are all from Conquest gear. I'll be doing Arenas on Innana this season, so I expect to be able to get the weapon and shield fairly easily, however, I won't be doing it as Protection so it'll be a bit of a point-sink just for aesthetics. But oh, so worth it. Look at those gear - just absolutely lovely and perfect for a Light-wielding warrior. The cloak is actually a throw-back to ICC, and is purchasable with Justice for cheap. I like the colors as they synchronize well with the blue in the shield.

If you're a fan of helmets, I would recommend you forgo the winged Tier helm and actually grab the PvP conquest helm as well - it fits in quite nicely with the rest of the set and actually makes you look a bit like an avenging and wrathful angel of some sort straight out of the Old Testament.

Here are the individual items in detail and a link to the base set for you to start messing with.

Gloves: Handguards of Radiant Glory (Valor alternative: )
Leges: Legguards of Radiant Glory (Valor alternative: )
Shoulders: Shoulderguards of Radiant Glory
Chest: Cataclysmic Gladiator's Ornamented Chestguard (Conquest)
Belt: Blinding Girdle of Truth (Valor)
Boots: Silver Sabatons of Fury (Valor)
Sword: Cataclysmic Gladiator's Slicer (Conquest)
Shield: Cataclysmic Gladiator's Barrier (Conquest)
Cloak: Sentinel's Winter Cloak (Justice)

Helm: Cataclysmic Gladiator's Ornamented Headcover (Conquest)

If you are still dedicated to using the Tier chest, you can always sport it with an undershirt to eliminate the midriff. It doesn't fit perfectly, but the result isn't terrible either. Lastly, you always have the option of using a good looking Tabard to cloak yourself - but if you do this, I'd recommend ditching the cloak. You have some pretty good options here, and the set is just lovely. I've linked alternate set pictures below so you can decide what works best for you.

With a Formal White Shirt.

With the Argent Crusader's Tabard, sans cloak.

I realize this set is expensive to make in terms of the time commitment required to get all the items, but I think it's worth it in the long run. It's one of the best looks I can imagine for a Paladin that's in the game right now. Enjoy!

Exploits in LFR & Valor Gear

2011-12-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

So. I'm looking at the Paragon (and every other top-tier guild, it looks like) exploit that let them loot the same boss multiple times, and I am left wondering why they had to exploit when they could, very easily have farmed the bosses in a much easier way.

So, you have 25 main characters you're going into Heroics with next week, You want them geared as much as possible but you don't want to exploit. Here's what you do. Form a raid in the following way:

2. Conqueror token
2. Protector token
2. Vanquisher token

Preferably, all of a different armor type (cloth/leather/plate/mail). You also bring along19 alts who you don't care about gearing at all. You form a raid and you run LFR. Everyone passes on everything, the main take whatever they want, hopefully getting at least a 2-set bonus each. At the end of the raid, swap out 6 alts, for 6 mains.

Reset. Rinse. Repeat. 4 or 5 times, and you're done. I'm sure it will only take Paragon maybe an hour or two to clear LFR, so you're talking about maybe 9 or 10 hours invested total. Yes, you're left at a bit of the random loot mercy, but this is not a bad way to gear up mains with no risk of violating ToS at all. It's fair, you're not breaking any rules, and everyone only gets 1 shot at the loot from each boss. It just so happens that you're stacking the rest of the raid with people who'll pass over and over.

Anyway.

Speaking of gear up quickly, somehow, I completely missed the fact that there are two BoE items available at the Vendor.

My poor Merricat who is already Valor capped will have to rorego that Trinket she was pining for and buy the boots for Innana while I'll run a dungeon or two tonight with my druid so he can buy Innana her bracers if I can't find someone with the pattern.

Innana gets all the good stuff the first two weeks of the patch! I must love her best among all my children.

I made my first Valor purchase in the Relic this week, next week it will be the Amulet, along with the boots and bracers, and then I'll have to evaluate where I am in terms of gear and decide what needs upgrading first. The Trinket looks pretty damned good.

The boots are quite good, almost comparable to the Mirrored Boots, with a Fractured Amberjewel in the Yellow slot. The bracers, on the other hand, are not so thrilling. The lack of Mastery and the single socket make the crafted bracers far more appealing. Now I just need to find someone on my server who has the pattern. I might just grind a few dungeons out on my Druid alt to get the bracers in the meantime anyway... but we'll see.

I don't really look at the drops as anything that's attainable until it actually drops and my position in the Suicide Kings list grants me the item. After who knows how many kills of Baleroc, I saw the tanking helm drop once, while Maara was on top of the list. Yeah, I don't really depend on loot drops anymore as a viable thing.

The lack of Mastery on a lot of the new items is a bit annoying as I have to reforge/regem a lot to stay at block-cap but my overall mitigation has been increasing quite a bit. Raid buffed, I can get up to ~40% pure mitigation, even more if I have Windwalk procs rolling. That's 40% of incoming damage Missing, Dodged or Parried.

I can't wait to get some heroic gear.

Dragon Soul Difficulty And What I Want From It

2011-12-02T10:30:00.001-08:00

I've been trying to articulate my feelings about Dragon Soul and it is very conflicted.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, the bosses are just falling over each other to cough up their loot. We finished our second night of raiding with Ultraxion going down, netting us a genuine realm first kill of all things. We were having a bit of trouble on that fight with DPS not being able to kill him in time, so we swapped one of the healers to DPS, switched out one DPS who wasn't quite pushing the numbers we needed and bang. Purples.

That put us at 5/8 and I fully expect us to clear through all that content on our first night next week, kill Gunship and be working on Spine by the end of our raid week.

On the one hand, the new content is fun, and I really wanted to go back in last night to clear Gunship and start poking at Spine but a lot of folks couldn't make it and a few of them wanted to slow down and savor the content. But on the other hand, this doesn't even seem like content worth doing over and over. If the next two bosses are as easy as the rest of the raid has been, we'll be facing hard modes at Christmas.

Now, to be fair, if I look at Firelands, once we killed Shannox, Beth and Rhyolith, the rest of the dungeon kind of fell in our laps. Baleroc only took about a night or two, we killed both Alys and Domo the same week we pulled them. After that Ragnaros was the only issue. This was pre-nerf. Ragnaros, took us about 2.5 nights to kill, and the nerf hit in the middle of that, which meant he went down fairly quickly after that. This was the first time we failed to kill all the normal modes pre nerf and I still grumble about it.

So, our progression in Dragon Soul has surprised me, as we didn't even have all that much heroic gear, we were only in the 379/380 iLevel range when we walked in on Tuesday, none of us had done the fights on the PTR, it was as new as content gets. We really went off of the Dungeon Journal for the most part, supplementing Icy Veins when necessary. And still, in about 5 hours over two days, killed 5 brand new bosses.

We know the next 3 bosses aren't going to stonewall us. Nearly a thousand guilds killed Madness this week. In three days. I don't foresee these bosses being much of an issue. So, even pessimistically, two weeks to kill Madness, by Christmas, we're done with normal modes.

I'm worried.

Really, there's not much you can say or do at this point, this is what's going to happen, we're not going to see these guys being buffed at this point. But what we don't know, is what's going to happen after normal modes. And this is my hope for Heroics:

A progression with a gradually sloping,

linear scaling of difficulty.

I don't mind if I can kill the first boss or two in the first week. That's fine. You have to start gearing somewhere. But I want us to stall on the third boss for a full week.

I want us to wipe, I want us to sit and discuss strategies, look at our team and evaluate what to do with our resources. I want us to reforge gear for specific stats, re-gem, re-enchant, move talent points around. I want to struggle and when the boss keels over, I want vent to be indecipherable with all the cheers of relief earned after winning a hard fought kill.

The fourth and fifth boss need to be on a similar level, if not a bit harder. Ultraxion is a well tuned fight even on normal, we had to 2 heal it, but I want us to have to 2 heal and solo tank it just to make the enrage and come up with creative ways of letting someone tank the boss while I'm dropping off Fading Light.

I want lootship to add more mechanics instead of just an add priority with positioning challenges.

Spine and Madness should both be very difficult, they need to last us weeks, they need to make us gnash our teeth and shake our heads, they need to make us struggle and anguish about whether or not we push our lockouts because we're so close to a kill, but wouldn't another week of heroic gear help.

That's what I want.

But even then, eight bosses, we're talking about, pessimistically, March? April? Before everything is done even on hard modes? And we'll still have four months to go at the least before expecting MoP. I can't see the expansion before July/August. And a cynical voice in my head wonders if that's why the Beta was included in the year long plan, as a way to get us content even in its incomplete state...

Anyway. I'm worried. But I'm having a lot of fun at the same time.

Faction Pride

2011-12-01T07:12:00.001-08:00

There's a thread going on at the official forums about faction pride and the Developer's Water Cooler that was posted a few days ago.

As primarily an Alliance player, I have a strong interest and disagreement with the way Blizzard has presented itself to the community in terms of this conflict, and I tried to articulate it in this post. I'll repost it here, since I think it captures how I feel about the whole thing well.

I really do think the Developer Water Cooler post missed the mark.

Story is awesome, I am all for Story, please realize that I don't care if we win or loose, honestly, what I care about is pride and even-handed dealing.

Have you ever played a table-top game? I'm sure you have. :-) When you have a conflict between two characters, and the GM is managing the conflict, how do you feel when the GM is kind of winking and nudging at the guy you're rolling off against and saying, "Good lucky buddy, you got this!"?

That's what playing Alliance is like.

We're (or at least, I'm) not looking for a tit-for-tat Theramore means Horde needs to loose Crossroads or whatever - tell the story you have to tell, but please stop with the divide and conquer.

We constantly see "Horde pride" and such all over Blizzcon, from the developers, in your commentary but we seldom if ever see any such dialogue about the Alliance. That's the crux of the problem. It's okay if you guys all play Horde. I don't care. You guys make the game, you guys deserve to enjoy it in whatever way you like.

But what I care deeply about is how you present yourself at the gaming table when you're running the game for me. Don't make me suspect you're rooting for the guy across the table from me when you're supposed to be a neutral party.

That's really it. I have written enough stories, and played enough RPGs to know that winning doesn't always make the best story. But I do require that the person in charge of the story stay neutral and fair to all the players in the game. And I have never felt that way in Warcraft.

Patch Day Madness

2011-11-30T06:03:00.001-08:00

I was glad the patch dropped when it did - I think I was really bored with Firelands despite the fact that we were on Heroics. With how late we started work on that instance and how the tuning was all over the place with it, I always felt disconnected from the place. There was a lot of confusion about the raid where Blizzard seemed to mid-step change directions and nerf stuff across the board.

One of the things I'm loving lately is how stable the patch days have been. No instance server issues, no authentication server issues, really, no issues at all and you can log in and play. Even most of my add-ons were behaving fine except for a couple of LUA errors from DBM whenever I zoned into an instance. After the nightmarish patches of yesteryear, this is a sweet, sweet dream.

Remember 3.3 when you couldn't log in for two days? Or 3.4 when half the authentication servers were down? Hell, even 4.1 when Omnitron was broken and you couldn't get past him, if you could even get into the crashing instance server gateways? We used to move raid night to non-patch days because we knew we couldn't raid on Tuesday and juts hoped everything was stable by Wednesday night. Kids these days.

Anyway.

I logged in about 10 minutes before raid in typical fashion, ran around with my head cut-off for five minutes and only managed to 'mog my hideous shield and sword away for something better before clicking Accept on the Have Group Will Travel summons into Dragon Soul for the first time.

Where we proceeded to demolish the place. There is a serious tuning issue for 4.3 at least on 10-man normal modes. For better or worse, this is the easiest tier since the first wing of ICC. Even Saurfang and Deathwhisper had slightly more compelling mechanics on 10-man.

With no one having seen the bosses, no one having run the LFR, just based on the dungeon-journal, we one-shot Morchok and two-shot Yor'sahj, and I was DC'd for about a minute on that fight so my co-tank had huge stacks of Void Bolts but apparently our healers had no problem with it.

Zon'ozz took a little longer, but he died as well once we figured out a very easy way to handle the bouncing mechanic by lining up and turning it into a fool-proof ping-pong game while I jumped back and forth pointing him this way and that. He was the first boss that felt like a real raid boss with scary damage and positioning and an enrage timer that was somewhat of an issue (30 seconds left on enrage when he died, so not really but still).

We made one pull of Hagara before raid time to give our Rogue a chance to pickpocket her and got to work on her ice phase a bit, so we'll go back in and kill her tonight, hopefully and then the one fight that actually seems scary outside of Deathwing - Ultraxion. I'd love to get through both of those tonight as loot-ship looks as easy as the ICC loot-ship and that just leaves Deathwing to kill (twice.)

It could be that the first four are easy and the next four are really hard, or scale up slightly in difficulty as you went further in. Morchok was lolwut, Yor'sahj was an AoE heal, minor DPS check and a are-you-really-here check in terms of picking which add to kill each time, and Zon'ozz was a mild DPS check (he has a tight enrage timer at 5.5 minute/68 million health) and awareness check with more AoE healing. Did I mention there's a lot of raid damage? There's a lot of raid damage. And a bit of bursty tank damage too.

The one nice thing about these fights is that while the tanking isn't particularly difficult so far (I did enjoy solo-tanking Zon'ozz and looks like solo-tanking Hagara will actually require a bit of focus as well), there is a lot of ancillary stuff tanks can do to make the raid run easier. Tanking crystals with two DPS when you're not on Morchok for instance, or helping put out damage on the oozes, raid-walling with efficiency to chain cool-downs with the healers.... there is more stuff to do than just standing there and being a meat-shield.

I was lucky enough to pick up the off-set shoulders and tier legs last night, which was awesome. The weird thing is, despite loosing Mastery on both those items, without even reforging, and going for the set bonus, I was still at block-cap with Mastery food (though I am using two Mastery trinkets.)

Callooh!Callay!

I know in a month I'll be moaning about how boring normal modes are, but right now, man it was satisfying to smash through the instance and kill bosses so quickly and efficiently. Maybe we'll even be in Heroics this time next month. This was something I had known for some time - once we have a regular team of geared people who've been working together and gelled, we have zero problems in terms of progression. We can get this done. And we did.

A rather amusing side-affect of raiding so early in the week after patch is the following image:

It is, of course, an anomaly and a lie, but it is kind of nice to be listed as server first and word top 200, even if only for a day or two. We have a US top-100 guild on our server that killed Heroic Ragnaros back in early October, I think, so we're nowhere near the top, and I'm sure we'll get down-ranked very rapidly as other guilds get ranked (as is appropriate) but still.

Sometimes it's nice to lie to oneself for a minute and take a screenshot! :-)

Tonight: more raiding, hopefully knocking out the two dungeons I haven't done yet, and then mogging up my set, moving stuff into void-bank... so much to do! And so much more to write about!

It's Over Nine Thousand!

2011-11-28T10:18:00.001-08:00

This weekend between bouts of Turkey and Stuffing floating in an ocean of butter, I took the time to grind out a bunch of low-hanging achievements and a profession that has been hounding me since Cataclysm launched and crossed the Nine Thousand achievement points line.

At first I just went for the easy stuff - getting Pilgrim got me well within striking range. After that, the cooking/eating/drinking achievements easily finished with purchases from the Auction House, a bit of cooking, and a little help from a guildy who cooked up all the cookies for You'll Feel Right As Rain.

After that, I grabbed an easy rep grind over a couple of hour or so to get two achievements and a pet, and then win-traded my way to another achievement over at the Argent Colosseum. Jumped off a cliff and bandaged myself for another.

After that, being so close to the end, I just began to grind out Archaeology as I had never finished it, stalling in the 300-range somewhere, and began to rack up the achievements until the finale when with five points left to go, I racked up three in a row, all adding up to the big one.

All done. Now I'm kind of looking at that number and wishing for a 5-digit number, especially with how many achievements I haven't ground out (a few meta 25-man stuff from Wrath, a few more Holiday things yet, several PvP ones, etc.), it shouldn't be difficult at all to hit 10k points. But I can take it in a more leisurely fashion. With the buff Archaeology is receiving in 4.3, I might even go back to get some achievements from there - I rather enjoy a few of the rare items you can get from there.

It was surprisingly relaxing to spend a few hours doing a low-stress activity like this. I do hope we see some kind of account-wide achievement tracking ability in 5.0 as I do hate being on an alt and not being able to prove that I know what I'm talking about when I'm trying to PuG something. Plus, a few of the really hard PvP achievements are very difficult to duplicate multiple times and if I have it on any one character who's not my Paladin, it's really aggravating to try and duplicate that.

Anyway. If 4.3 hits tomorrow, the relaxing down-time will be over and it's nose to the grind stone time. I'll need to cap Justice and Honor next week on at least two characters for PvP gear and start getting Valor and Conquest capped again.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T08:54:00.001-08:00

With a holiday week and truncated Warcraft time, with 4.2 on its last legs, the last week of the PvP season, the missing guildies away to visit family, I'm left feeling nostalgic, so rather than my usual ranting, I'll take this opportunity to give my thanks to a few people in game that I don't say thanks to often enough.

Since my son was born nearly 14 months ago, time has become a precious commodity for me. With Warcraft taking up as much time as it does to play, I often think about what makes me commit my time to this game instead of something else that would be, frankly, a great deal less stressful as a relaxing hobby after very full days of work and handling the baby.

The main reason for that, of course, are my friends in game. I came close to leaving the game once, and then I met some people who're still keeping me here, and grounded, and when I log in to see them, I know I'm with friends and as long as they're here, I'll keep logging into Azeroth because it's a second home for me, not because of my loot or raids or achievements, but because that's where some of my dearest friends reside.

So, this is thanks to them.

Thisle, Issacc, Riley, Elrahd, Nettle - I've been raiding with you guys for over two years, through three guilds, across two factions, through rage-quits, through rants and raves, through fallen guilds, missing raid leads, weeks of no progression, no shows, all in pursuit of the euphoric highs of many, many, many kills.

Lava and Vesti - without you guys, the Turtles would never have been successful and we're lucky to have met you in our early days. Maara and Verm - you guys are like the missing chunk of our guild that we didn't know was missing till you joined us this year. I can't imagine the Turtles without your presence anymore.

Thanks also, to all the friends who moved on after raiding with us for so long - Rasc, Brusin, Hal, Ryan, Jiri, Suly, Bhambi, Raiku, Siandris... too many names and too many voices that have fallen silent but I'm happy to have known you while you were here.

Thanks to the people who got me here in the first place - Shinorah and Ehr, who were the leaders of my first guild, who trusted a plucky little bear to run his own little Kara group, to Elionene and Lal and Zeo and Marilee, who took over when I moved on and then formed their own guild. To Rish and Lailie, who were the core of my first 5-man heroics group and the first guildies I traveled to meet, late at night, in a diner in Baltimore.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart, with nothing but love, to Loch and Atvia, to Tel and Lafaera, to Nes, and Sheri - and all those people know exactly why, I hope.

To the guildies I've met in GenCon to play table-top games with, to the guildies I've met and walked the streets of Philadelphia with, to the guildies I went to a Renaissance Faire with, to the guildies I drank beer in a pub with, to the guildies I drove across Scotland with.

And to the friends I have yet to make and meet, and to the adventures we have yet to undertake.

Thanks.

Paladin Transmog Sets - Part 1

2011-11-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

In case you weren't sure, I'm really, really, really excited for Transmogrify. I'm a stickler for the way gear looks, I want my character to look powerful, regal and heroic. I want her to be dressed as a sword-wielding shield-bashing name-taking blood-spilling holy warrior of the Light would dress. That is to say, not wearing plate bikinis and exposing a flat mid-riff in the hopes of distracting her enemies.

So I'm going to make a catalog of various sets I'm planning to use - I'm sure I'll swap between these as the mood and whim strikes. I'll start with my hands-down absolutely favorite, best remembered set from the last two years that I actually gained and used actively while playing that I haven't worn in close to a year - the Sanctified Lightsworn Plate. This is the set in it's unadulterated glory:

It certainly isn't bad on it's own,and it might be fine for healing, or even DPS but I think tanking sets just look better without a skirt. I adore paladin sets with with plate skirts, but I think functionally they work as ceremonial or for healing at best. And besides, can you imagine her being able to kite mobs in that skirt? I don't think so. The set itself is dramatic and striking, the visor is unique, the glow and effects and the details of the ribbon are lovely and I like the way it works even when you color shift it for some glamour shots.

So, taking the head and shoulders as a base, and relying exclusively on Icecrown gear, I build into this.

Paladin Transmogrify Set: Modified Sanctified Lightsworn Plate
(link to full set)

The set uses a lot of stuff you can easily purchase from Vendors or get crafted:

Head: Lightsworn Faceguard (1100 JP)
Shoulders: Lightsworn Shoulderguards (695 JP)
Chest: Lightsworn Chestguard (1100 JP)
Legs: Pillars of Might (crafted)
Hands: Gauntlets of the Kraken (695 JP)
Boots: Boots of Kingly Upheaval (crafted)
Belt: Lich Killer's Lanyard (695 JP)
Shield: Icecrown Glacial Wall. Drops from Blood Queen Lana'thel in 25s - alternately, you can buy an almost-look-alike from the legacy PvP gear vendor in SW/Org called Wrathful Gladiator's Redoubt for 190 Honor. It comes in 3 colors so you can find the one you like best. It's not as nice as the Glacial Wall but for being so easy to obtain it's absolutely a good substitute.

The only thing you might actually have to go hunting for is this:

Weapon: The Facelifter. Drops from Professor Putricide in 10s - alternately, you can use the Soul Blade, a BoE sword from Bastion of Twilight that's fairly easily found and looks quite good.

Of course, I would have much rather used the purchased off-set Tanking chest piece, but it suffers from bare-midriff-itis. You can mitigate it with a black undershirt somewhat, but the colors and patterns don't quite match up. The caster belt helps transition between the warrior tier legs and the Paladin tier chest piece quite nicely. I don't use a cloak with it because it just looks much better without it.

UPDATE POST PATCH 4.3!!
It's one thing to plan an outfit and another to wear it. I found the shield and sword to just not be up to my standards in game, in terms of look and feel, and while it might work for you, the shield in particular was just too big and disguised my character's face far too much. I wound up using the Soul Blade and a vintage shield called Brutal Gladiator's Barrier that you can buy from the retro PvP vendor in Stormwind/Orgrimmar the same as the PvP shield I linked above for a small amount of Honor. Here's how I look in game right now:

Pretty snazzy, if I may say so myself!

Next time, I'll look at modifying Tier 13 to be even more bad-ass than it already is, by eliminating the bare-mid-riff and tweaking the look slightly with different weapons and cloaks.

I'm Shy!

2011-11-15T07:39:00.001-08:00

Online at least.

I really don't think I am in person, I'm fairly aggressive when it comes to socializing, and I don't really have any fear of speaking in public, meeting a new group of people, or whatever, but for some reason, when I'm taken out of my comfort circle in Warcraft, I do find myself acting in a very reserved and shy manner.

Specifically, I have an alt in a Horde guild on another server, and it's a large guild with a lot of people on and a lot of activities and I'm sure everyone is very friendly, but I seldom if ever pipe up to say anything or contribute much to the guild as a whole, nor do I get involved with it. As silly as it sounds for a man of my age to say, I feel shy and don't want to engage and make myself seem a fool! I'd rather sit in /trade looking to do stuff rather than ask in Guild.

Which is just insanely silly.

I remember back when I first really went looking for a new guild and joined a hardcore 25 man raiding group, I was the quiet guy who never said anything in Vent and used "Please", "Thank you" and smiley faces in nearly everything I ever said in Raid or Guild chat. When I got promoted to solo-tanking the really scary stuff in Ulduar, I was still really terrified to say anything, because there were 24 other people who were counting on me to keep pulls together.

It wasn't until months later when I got pulled into the selective 10-man group that was clearing a lot more content regularly that I began to feel like a part of the group and began to loosen up and some of those friendships are what led to my current guild, where I do feel very confident, and I work hard to assimilate new people in, though we are a much smaller guild by comparison.

All of this is well and good, but then I realized that it extends to a much bigger level when I think about my blog.

There is a large and vibrant and active blogging community - and I have never really participated in it. I don't really know how to, and I'm kind of scared to try to even start a dialogue. I don't know why I can be so much more confident and overcome any social anxiety in the real world where it can be a lot more overwhelming and when it comes to engaging in online communities, I get shy.

Anyway. There's not really a point to this other than that I logged into my Horde character, sat around for a few minutes staring glumly at /trade where nothing was going on, then I logged off and went to read a book.

So, um, sorry to be so inconclusive. As a bonus, here's a set I'm considering for my tanking transmog set!

Decency and Vote Kicks in PUGs

2011-11-09T08:57:00.000-08:00

"What the hell is wrong with you," said the healer to the Hunter, "Why did you run towards me? You got me killed."

Typical PUG grandstanding and raging over a wipe in a 5-man, nothing too new or unexpected. Except, this was on the PTR, on the last boss of a new dungeon that most of us were doing for the first time. I looked at the words on the screen and paused for a minute before beginning to type. I politely explained that this was probably the first time for most people here, and now that we know what not to do, we shouldn't have a problem.

"I just wanted to let him know he was being stupid for killing me."

Again, I began to type, and explained that since we didn't cover the fight before pulling, we couldn't know what to expect from a new mechanic.

"Doesn't change the fact that he's stupid."

I was expecting a vote-kick window to pop up in front of my face to get rid of the hunter, who hadn't said a word this whole time. I'm sure he was feeling bad enough without this guy ripping into him for no reason.

"I think you could have pointed out that he misunderstood the mechanic without being rude," I said, expecting that I would be kicked as well at this point for talking instead of pulling.

Except, that one of the other members chimed in, talking about the need for civility, politeness, and understanding when we're doing new content, and the hunter thanked us for not kicking him. The healer didn't find anything else to say at that point, so we pulled, killed the boss, said our thank-yous and went our way.

I don't know if that healer would have initiated a vote-kick if I hadn't jumped in right away, I don't know if the other two people would've just mindlessly clicked "Yes" when the window popped up, maybe they would have declined and one of them would have said something.

But I felt like I was taking a risk just for speaking up in the hunter's defense.

As a tank, my queue times are irrelevant so I wasn't really bothered about being kicked, the risk for me was minimal, but I can completely understand why the other two DPS stayed quiet.

They don't get an instant queue if they get kicked. They have to wait another 20 minutes, a half hour and maybe re-do the dungeon all over again. I know because I think the same thing when I'm PUGing on my Warlock - I don't want to do anything to give cause for vote-kicks. I don't want to draw any attention to myself. It's practically Orwellian how much power the group, in particular the tanks and healers have over a PUG.

I don't know how to fix it, but I think, based on what I saw yesterday, most people are going to side with polite behavior, and empathize, especially when the anger is as unjustified as it was in this case, so long as someone takes that first step - someone needs to speak up on behalf of the victimized member, even if a mistake was made.

No one deserves the kind of treatment DPS get, when they make a single mistake. It makes me want to PUG more just to add to the list of people who will vote "No" when frivolous vote-kicks fly.

Why am I logging in again?

2011-11-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

I've been having a "blah" few weeks in WoW that are leading up to severe boredom.

Our progression has stalled to a point where it's just log in on autopilot wipe on heroics for a while, then switch to normal and sleepwalk through kills. I don't mind it so much, it's just not very much of an incentive to log in and be excited to raid. It kind of doesn't matter how well I play, or how well 90% of the raid plays, if one or two people aren't pulling their weight, the raid fails.

I could use one more upgrade from normal modes, but otherwise, I could more or less walk into Dragon Soul with what I have on now and probably clear through most of that content without feeling undergeared.

I've been trying to play alts more, and getting to DPS on my warlock or playing my DK is quite entertaining, and I kind of want to focus on one of them a bit more, but I can't, really. I need to be on my Paladin for Raids since we're pretty low/short on tanks. And my DK is horde side on another server anyway.

Honestly, the only really fun stuff I'm enjoying in game right now are the PvP nights on my Warlock. I'm slowly, slowly, slowly getting better, I think. Our 3's team hit 1400 ranking after only two weeks of play. But we only do the 8 or 9 wins we need to cap out Conquest so it's not even like it's a long-term thing. It's just about two hours of fun and then it's done till the next week. Our Warlock/Priest/Rogue combo is pretty great... when we remember to save the healer from melee cleaves but otherwise we do pretty well for a team that's still finding its feet. I think with how geared we're getting we'll do very well in the next season as we zone in the first week in full Ruthless gear.

And I kind-of have fun on my Horde DK lately, as I've geared her up through at least T11, when I can find some PuGs for her but her server seems to be a bit slow in terms of PuGing content and I can't always find stuff to do so I just wind up running dungeons and being bored there too. I would actually love to DPS on her but searching for slots for DK DPS is pretty goddamned fruitless - still, Blood tanking is different enough from Paladin tanking to be entertaining.

But anyway. Again. What's the point? Working on my 'lock or DK would involve raiding with another group and I just don't have the time for it. I want the commitment I have to my raid group to pay off.

So it all leads up to, what's it all for? I don't know. When progression on my main stalls for me, everything goes out the window - all motivation to log in and raid just evaporates and I just roll my eyes when we swap to normal mode and kind of tune out, more or less. We've been killing normal modes for months now. It's literally like running a heroic at this point, down to one-shotting Rag last week with a death in phase two.

There are different reasons people play this game, and when I hear about how many other groups can't do Firelands or whatever, it doesn't matter - I'm never comparing myself to those behind me or ahead of me, I'm just comparing myself to the expectations I have set for myself.

I think that any decent raid group should get through more than 50% of the content provided to it. Normal modes are the first 50% of content in any tier, that's more or less how Blizzard has setup the raiding game. If you can't get through a majority of hard modes pre-patch, then that's content you're missing out on.

That's what I want to do. I don't want to go back and get kills after I've geared up in Dragon Soul, I want to kill these fuckers now when it's still relevant. When I'm not working towards that, I'm tapping my feet wondering why I'm logging in instead of working on another project.

HOW TO: Ragnaros 10-man

2011-11-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

Since the first six bosses in Firelands are rather silly and easy post nerf, I figured I might write up how we do Ragnaros as guilds might still be stuck on him. The way we do the Intermissions in particular are a bit different than most guides so maybe it'll be helpful for someone.

Also, it took me a while to do this because I wanted to experiment with making animated GIFs and see how that goes, so this is an experiment! :-) I don't know. Hopefully it's helpful! If you think I'm doing something wrong, please let me know.

There are also some Paladin Tank specific tips at the bottom.

RAGNAROS (10) NORMAL

2 tanks, 2 healers, 6 DPS
Unless your DPS is very high (which is to say, if you can push phase 2 with 5 DPS taking only 2 seeds and if you can handle Intermissions with 5 DPS), you want to do this with 2 healers.

6 DPS will also trivialize Phase 3 as you can get through it well before a 3rd meteor forms. If you have more than 3 melee DPS, you might have a bit of trouble but it should be okay with a bit of practice.

You want to set up your groups so you have 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 DPS in each group for ease of positioning in phase 3.

Phase 1
Main things to handle: Smash, Knock-back and Traps

This is a very simple phase - positioning almost doesn't matter. Melee should be tight up against the boss on the lip of his hot-tub to his side to mitigate Parry and they will never have to worry about Smash. The ranged and healers can position themselves at a angle to the Smash as it falls. The only way you might take damage here is if Ragnaros lines up a knock-back and a Smash so that you get knocked into a wave - just strafe towards or away from the Smash to mitigate this as necessary. Also, if a trap lands behind you, move away so you don't get knocked into it.

Dedicate a Mage to handle the traps - they will have no trouble with every single one, but failing that you can rotate paladins (bubble), Shadow Priests, Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks.... this shouldn't be much of an issue, just make sure you have the person call out before detonating it and making sure the raid health is high enough to sustain the damage. Doing it after a knock-back once the raid is topped off is probably best.

Tanks should swap off after 3 stacks of Burning Wound, and we found that taunts were actually messy if the debuffed tank kept DPSing due to very high Vengeance stacks. We found it better to just pull off for a few seconds to ensure safe swaps to avoid gaining a 4th stack of Burning Wound. With tight taunting, you can make sure neither tank ever has more than a 3-stack.

This phase should go very quickly and you will get used to the mechanics after a couple of pulls.

Intermission 1
We have a very strict positioning, that we use for both transitions. I'll illustrate using our composition:

Balance Druid - Rogue - Feral - Mage - Priest - Arcane Mage

At the very least, the 2 people at either ends should be ranged, but if you can get four ranged and have 2 each on either side, it would be even better.

This is not a strict formation - the DPS will have to adjust left or right and decide who takes 2 based on the position of the hammer. There will be 2 DPS assigned 4 adds and 4 DPS with one each. No matter where the hammer falls the DPS with single adds need to clean up their add first before shifting over to help with the spares. This is an animated image that will show all 3 positions of hammer.

We trained on the first set of adds with no help from the Tanks until we got it right. That way our DPS was used to handling it on their own and the tanks could cleanly pickup the extra adds in the 2nd intermission without having to worry about splitting attention between the sets of adds.

Now that we have it down, the tanks do help with the adds, but we've drilled it into the DPS that it's their jobs to get the adds down and the positioning is super-simple, as people just need to remember who they're standing next to and they will know where to go. The shifts aren't that complicated either. Just make sure your DPS at either end is careful of the last add on their side as it will go through the lava to get to the Hammer if it's on the left or right, and you do not want melee running into that. Healers can regen mana here for the most part. Also, don't run into the hammer. Hammer.

Phase 2
Main things to handle: Smash, Engulfing Flames and Seeds

Here is all of Phase 2. I spelled it out in detail below, but I think this illustrates it in an easy way.

Pick a side, doesn't matter which one, but you need to gather up while staying 6-yards apart. Staying within Melee is preferable unless Engulfing Flames is on the inner ring. Dodge the first Smash as it comes, wait for Seeds to land, watch out for Engulfing Flames and then as soon as Seeds land on YOU (the timers are slightly off for this, so you need to watch your own feet and move when you see the spinny thing under your feet)! Now, book it to the opposite side using any (safe) speed boost you have, and gather up on the other end as fast as you can.

The positioning is tricky here but every time you move you need to gather up on the boundary between the two nearest Engulfing Flames zones. That way as soon as it hits you can move in or back and not take damage from that. You can drop a raid marker on both sides to identify where you want to gather up.

Shortly thereafter, Seeds will explode and rush you - group up, use ONE raid cool-down here (Aura Mastery, Barrier, Divine Sacrifice, etc.) and AoE the adds down. Now, quickly, either step into Melee or spread out a bit because you're going to get another Smash shortly afterward. This is a not as tight a moment, as soon as the adds die, your raid needs to position itself for the Smash. You have a short amount of time to call it out and adjust. But it's very easy to get focused on one thing and miss the Smash here, especially as you'll have a lot of ground effects going on - know what's going to happen and be prepared.

Right after Smash is the ideal time for DPS cool-downs as you'll have a few long seconds of burn here with only Engulfing Flames to worry about.

60 seconds later, the second set of seeds land - same as before. Run to the opposite side on the boundary of the two Flames zones.

Now, this is the tricky part. 3 things will come at the same time right after the Seeds explode - the adds are rushing you, the Smash is about to come down, and Engulfing Flames is about to go off. This is the make it or break it moment. You WANT Flames to be in the middle or far back so your entire raid just moves onto the lip and avoids everything. That's ideal. But it won't happen like that every time. Chances are you will have Flames in melee range and you will have to do a lot of dodging to avoid the Smash in addition to moving back out of range.

The most tricky thing in both these situations is making sure you tank stays in melee range or Ragnaros will swing and murder anyone else who is in range - usually a rogue (sorry Vesti).

By now, Ragnaros should be sub-50% and you should make a call depending on your DPS and the time remaining before the next cast of Seeds if you want to push him or take a 3rd set of seeds. With 6 DPS this is not a problem, and you can easily push it with 2, as a 3rd will strain your mana and you might not have a 3rd raid-wide cool-down to deal with a 3rd set of adds.

The less time you spend in this phase, the better.

Intermission 2
Just handle it exactly as you did Phase 1 - the only difference is that you want to keep at least one Son alive for a little while and kill it as close to the end of the phase as possible. Tanks should pick up one Scion each and bring them to the center, mark one for focus and DPS can swap to it as their adds are cleaned up. Ideally you want to get at least one add down before transition into Phase 3 but it isn't too terrible if you don't. Your raid will have to watch out for Blazing Heat and not give a fire boost to the Sons but it is generally not an issue with a bit of awareness.

If you can handle the Sons in phase 1, you can handle the Sons here. The only trick is to get one of the adds below 50% to slow it, use knock-backs, stuns, Death Grip, etc. to delay its journey as much as possible and really burst on one of the Scions. Cleaves and such will get the other one low - they each have 1.5 million health, so you'll need to hit a few short-cool-down DPS boosts to get one down before transition.

Phase 3
Main things to handle: Smash, Engulfing Flames and Meteor

Group up loosely in the middle, dodge any Smashes or Flames that come your way, get any remainingScions down quickly, hit Heroism and all your really big damage cool-downs, trinkets, take that potion and go nuts. You have a good, long period to really burst him here with very little, very predictable movement, and you can get him through as much as half his remaining health very quickly if you transition with no Scions.

About 60 seconds into the phase, the first Meteor will spawn. Ragnaros should have 30% - 25% health left. Immediately, your raid should split - remember how you split your raid into 2 5-man parties? Group 1 goes left, Group 2 goes right, and whoever is being chased by the meteor knocked it back into the center once they've kited it to their side. The raid just keeps on DPSing and dodging Smash and Flames.

Here it becomes a game of kickball - every time it's knocked back, the meteor will pick a different target and move towards them. It's also immune for a few seconds after each knock-back, so you want it as far into the middle as possible. Make sure there is one person on each side who's responsible for jugging it so everyone isn't just focused on Ragnaros assuming someone else will handle it.

Ideally, you want the meteor picking people on the opposite side so it has to travel to them before getting knocked into the center again and so forth. Chances are it will target people in the same group repeatedly and if it's very close, have the person run out and kite it to the opposite group. But if RNG isn't being really terrible, you should still be able to burn the boss with only one meteor up. More meteors will spawn every 30 seconds (or so it seems) after the first one, but I think the pace might increase after 3 meteors. On our training runs, we saw as many as 5 at a time. That was kind of. Crazy.

At this point, if you're able to deal with the meteor okay, you should be able to kill him. Knock back or kite, either way, you're very close, and all you need is one clean pull at this point. If Rag is at 15% or so, and the meteors are getting too close for comfort - maybe try and have a tank with high stacks or DPS run out with one all the way towards the back while the rest of the raid pushes Rag over.

I do believe that if executed correctly, you can easily get this phase down. The only trouble is that most people will not get a lot of time to practice this as the focus you need to get through Phase 2 and the second transition has drained you (and the healers) and you just kind of tunnel-vision into getting him down to 10% and meteors hit people and you wipe.

The other strategy is to simply have the person who's targetted kite it away from the raid and have the raid move away from the meteor but it requires a great deal of personal responsibility and if a healer gets targetted you need to hit it right away to get it switch targets. We were able to kill him with both strategies but splitting up and playing kickball made it seem more organized for us.

Also, with this other strategy phase 3 can wind up looking like this.

Please note that while I did make the other GIFs, I didn't make this (very awesome) one, I found it while doing random searches for information. Whoever made it is, obviously, awesome.

Paladin Tank specific stuff:

- Use WoG to heal your co-tank after swaps
- If you go into Phase Transition with a Trap up, you should take it, use a bubble after reaching the apex of your parabolic journey, and you should land okay.
- Use Divine Sanctuary for one of the two Seeds (co-ordinate with other raid-wide cool-downs so you don't use them all at once)
- Holy Radiance after Seeds while you still can (still grumbling about the added cast time to that spell in 4.3)
- You can take 1 meteor hit if you're Bubbled, or LoH someone who just got hit by Meteor to save their life

Good luck!

The Great PUG In The Sky

2011-10-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

A new motto for tanking, perhaps?

I'm not afraid of tanking. Any PUG will do, I don't mind. Why should I be afraid of PUGing? There's no reason for it - we've all got to PUG sometime.

And if you get the reference without looking at the tags, you probably listened to too much music while lying in your bed with headphones on staring at trippy lights moving on the wall like I did, when I was a teenager.

Petition Bump

2011-10-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

I know my blog is on the low (low) end of readership in the WoWoBloGoSphere, and I'm sure anyone seeing this link here must have seen it already, but just in case someone hasn't seen this yet, there is a small petition for Blizzard to make amends for providing a platform for homophobic language at BlizzCon - about 500 folks so far, but I'm hopeful more people will sign. If you support this kind of thing, please take a look and add your name to the list if it fits with your .

If for no other reason than that at least there's a list of names that winds up on Mike Morhaime's desk of people who don't appreciate homophobia mixed in with their gaming entertainment.

And I hope my anguished defense of heavy metal in the face of the homophobic rant wasn't misconstrued.

Raid Master No More

2011-10-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

I wasn't expecting this to happen last night, but I quit from my position as raid-lead.

It was in the middle of raid, and a rather embarrassing display of childish peevishness from me for the people in Officer chat, but I'm glad it's done. My guild has been kind enough to tolerate my fit as I wasn't G-Kicked, and there was someone ready to take over right as I pulled out, and we continued the raid and finished what we set out to do.

As I tend to do after raid, I keep thinking about what to do next, and so forth, but I keep being surprised at the idea that it doesn't matter what I think at this point. I'm not in the position to make calls about whether we're pulling a boss on normal or heroic, I'm not in a position to say anything about scheduling, when to call raid, deciding who to sit - anything like that is up to Thistle and Elrahd, and I can just show up and raid, having no more a voice than the rest of the raid.

After two continuous years of raid leading with absolutely no break, it's kind of a relief to finally give it up.

I've been left in the Officer position by the GM and I'm not opposed to playing second string or helping out if necessary, but the people in the guild are just fine, the new RL is going to be great and we're going to keep progressing at the same pace, if not better, with someone who's not burned out.

The germ was planted long ago that I wanted to stop having so much responsibility in game, but it was illustrated in a stark way the last time I PuG'd something with a friend's guild where all I did was show up and DPS. It was fun to just kick back and follow the plan rather than come up with and execute one.

Now.

The big question that's kind of hovering above my head is, how long will this last? I know I get itchy about running things from time to time, and I can't seem to take a break from RLing for too long. The last break I had was maybe, four or five months, which was enough time to really refresh me, and even then I was one of maybe three raid leads in a rather large guild.

Between then and now, I tried to follow along in the footsteps of another RL for about a month before I got frustrated with his way of doing things and I just quit and formed the current guild with Thistle.

Since then, if a raid was run, Thistle or I were running things. After last night, it'll be Elrahd and Thistle and I'll be the guy in the back seat, munching peanuts and reading a book, occasionally frowning at the landscape outside the window to say, "Didn't we pass that barn ten minutes ago?"

I hope I don't get too annoying.

Blizzard and Extreme Metal

2011-10-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher

Ever since Blizzcon the name of George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher has been floating around the forums and his (rather un-PC) rant about how much he hates the Alliance that was broadcast by L90ETC during their concert at the closing ceremonies.

I think that people are absolutely in the right to be offended by this, but I think there is some depth to this that's missing, and I thought I'd step aside from my usual WoWMusing to talk a little about extreme Metal, and why Corpsegrinder was the worst choice Blizzard could have made for a guest musician on stage during BlizzCon.

I'll begin by saying I've been a fan of heavy metal, particularly extreme metal (Black, Death, Doom, etc.) for a long, long time and have been active briefly as a music reviewer in the genre, and also as an amateur musician in that same vein with some home recordings, so keep that in mind as I go forward. I happily admit my bias up front.

Who is he anyway?

For those not in the know, Corpsegrinder is the lead singer of Cannibal Corpse - a rather extreme, if very innovative, consistent and important American Death Metal band. I've been a fan of the band for a long time, simply because of the level of integrity (if you can call it that) they have had to their vision of extreme, brutal, unrepentant, ugly and violent music. Now, in the American Death Metal scene, politically correct is the last thing anyone wants to be, and macho-one-up-man-ship is an art.

Which is not to excuse the rant - I don't condone any of the homophobic language Corpsegrinder used, and I find it unfortunate that the scene needs to exist in such a state. I feel the same way about Norwegian Black Metal and it's off-shoot ties to extreme right wing agendas like racism, fascism and nationalism.

But. The actions of a few don't and shouldn't tar the entire genre. The music is good and worthwhile and important.

Why is this music important?

Death Metal started in America, and here it has found its most extreme representation - the Death Growl is an American invention, as is the super-super-fast riffing that came left Thrash and Hardcore in the dust. Death Metal is deeply rooted in the horror of American films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the horror of American serial killers (particularly from the seventies) and the racism and violence in American media. These musicians fed off of this stuff, exposed it, and reveled in its most extreme states.

This is as American as anything, and I think that's an important thing to acknowledge. It is a uniquely American art-form that I don't think could have come from anywhere else. But it eventually gave rise to various genres of European Death Metal which innovated and contorted the extreme American Horror roots into epic Nordic themes in beautiful and moving ways.

On the other hand, Norwegian Black Metal, probably the most reviled and tarred of metal genres, has given rise to very important pro-environmental radical life-style altering Black Metal in the American North-West. It also gave rise to an Ambient/Experimental super-loud, very strange music that bands like Sunn O))) embraced to the point where they have become art-institutions. Sunn O))) played a concert in MOMA for instance, as a work of contemporary high art. You can't ask for a stronger acknowledgement of your relevance to the art world than that.

Finally, Doom Metal grew out this whole scene (and the Punk offshoot of Hardcore) which is a rather intellectual almost post-metal genre with some amazing music that has come out over the last ten years.

Do you have a point to make?

Yes, my point is, this stuff is ugly, but it is a part of human expression, an important part of our artistic history, and for Americans, this is part of our heritage. This music is important and this scene and sub-genre were the living cultures for many people and still are.

I think Heavy Metal is as important culturally as, say, Opera or classical music. And I wish that if Blizzard is trying to bring it into the open a bit more and expose it to people who don't know it too well, then they could have picked a better ambassador than Corpsegrinder.

It's tremendously unfortunate that Blizzard used Cannibal Corpse instead of, say, a band like Mastadon, who're much more relevant in a contemporary sense and a lot more palatable to the general audience and who wouldn't offend half the player base.

So, why was Corpsegrinder on stage?

The worst part is, Cannibal Corpse and L90ETC are worlds apart in terms of skill and mood and genre - the two bands sound nothing alike. L90ETC are essentially a retro-metal act, calling to mind the First Wave of British Heavy Metal (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, etc.) It's a bunch of guys playing music they liked as kids - and Cannibal Corpse are an extremely ugly and violent band with heavy, heavy riffing, indecipherable vocals, noise-laden solos and super-fast bridges that none of the guys in L90ETC could keep up with.

The two bands are worlds apart.

The only reason Corpsegrinder get on that stage was because of his rant, and because it tickled some bone among the Blizzard employees to have him up there, saying things they might not have wanted to say themselves.

Itchy Feet Again

2011-10-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

I think I'm getting itchy feet with regards to my character race again.

While I absolutely love my paladin, and being a Draenei has exposed a lot of wonderful animations and smooth textures and all that - I just can't connect with her as a character. The Draenei have a weird, alien culture and I just cannot wrap my head around it. Immortality is one of those things that I enjoy writing about more than experiencing it through a character, and it's making it very hard for me to get into Innana's head.

Do I really need to get into a character's head in order to play him or her?

For me, the game is about immersion, and the more I can view the world through a character's eyes, the better the game gets. The more I can empathize, and engage with, and really roll into the emotions of the character, the better the experience is for me. And with Pandaria, we're getting a third expansion in a row with absolutely no Draenei lore at all.

I can't keep playing this alien being trying to engage with the conflicts and issues of an alien world based on the prophetic words of a prophet who might or might not be going senile, and who has helped the Blood Elves to bewildering ends while gaining nothing in return.

When I view the game from a Human perspective, there is a lot more stuff going on to engage me. The burning of Stormwind, the reemergence of Nefarian on our doorstep, the story of Anduin and Varian as they grow into their roles, and with the coming story of escalating tensions - I kind of want to feel the outrage and pride.

I want a reason to say, "And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers." (I love me some Pulp Fiction.)

So - here I am, staring at Innana and wondering how long I can resist putting down $25 and turning her into a human. I won't be changing her name again, it just gets too confusing, and as a bonus, a human female model is far (far) better than the male model.

Would I ever switch back to Draenei? I don't think I would, I miss the level of engagement and immersion I had in the game as a human. I want it back.

Of course, I'll need to change my header image again.... damn it. Nothing's easy.

Two Problems With Pandaria

2011-10-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

5.0 sounds like a lot of fun, but there are two basic things that I think are worth discussing - one is not an issue at all, but has become a problem for the player-base, and the other is an actually sort of a problem but I haven't heard too many people discuss it yet.

First, the thing that might actually be an issue: Is Blizzard reducing Chinese culture to an expansion?

We've seen Blizzard co-opting culture before. Trolls for Caribbean culture, Tauren for Native Americans, the dismal portrayal of Middle-Eastern and African people in the Pygmy of Uldum (down to their gibberish gibbering), the one-dimensional Irish/Scots among the Dwarfs... is this another step in that direction, where a pop-cultural understanding of Chinese and Far-Eastern culture is being stuffed into the Pandaren where we're going to see mildly offensive stereotyping based on fantastical imagery rather than any basis in the reality of that culture?

I can't say, but I do think that Blizzard does a lot of this without thinking about things. I don't think there is a process in Blizzard that filters ideas - I think it goes from design to execution with little conversation in between in terms of thinking about what the impact might be culturally. If there was even a minor conversation in the vein of, "Do we think this might offend the cultural sensibilities of the people involved," we would never have seen the Pygmy, or at least not in that incarnation. Or for that matter, quests in which we torture people, but that's a different topic completely.

The most confusing and unfortunate part of it is that nobody ever calls Blizzard on it, and when they do, the argument is thrown out as it's a game and not meant to be taken seriously.

Well. As a brown person playing the game, I felt a little hurt seeing the Pygmy. I wasn't particularly offended, I wasn't going to stop playing the game, but it just made me wish that Blizzard had taken the time to have a conversation about cultural impact, impression and stereotyping before building those models or designing the race.

And I think the fact that they never even had that conversation is kind of the point I'm trying to make.

Without playing through 5.0, it'll be impossible to tell how the far-eastern culture makes out among the Pandaren, but we'll see.

Next, let's talk about the non-issue: "Pandaren area a joke race, Blizzard is ruining WoW."

The problem isn't with Pandaren, the problem is that it's not Wrath of the Lich King. It's not The Burning Crusade. It's not the Cataclysm. It's not about your world in danger, it's not about a threat, there is no angry, angst-ridden, gritty and horrible antagonist to rage against, and certainly no obvious Gothic elements to be seen. Armor doesn't have skulls and bones on it.

Do you remember the Diablo 3 fiasco with the color pallet issues? This is the same thing in a different vein.

The criticism leveled against MoP is ultimately in the vein of, "This isn't what I like." Now, measure that against a game with walking cows, pig people with crossbows, and gurgling fish men who chase you on land. It isn't about the silly nature of the Pandas, it's their lack of grit.

Pandaria is beautiful. It's breathtaking. There are no ruins, the buildings are alive and open. The landscape isn't scarred by war. The mountains are cloaked in mist. The forests still stand whole and pristine.

After 3 expansions full of war, grit, dirt, blood, and more skulls and bones than you can find in an abattoir, I think the artists were done with those themes and wanted to move on. I think the writers were tired of pushing the same styles of quests. The creative team wanted to stretch its muscle in a way it hadn't before and Pandaria was that venue.

I can't seriously have an issue with that - video games at their purest, are art. Artists don't just repeat and do the same thing over and over - they experiment, they modify, they grow. That's what Blizzard is doing with Warcraft - they're moving on to something completely new, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

A game doesn't need to be drowned in inches of blood to be good or interesting. People change, stories grow, and the game evolves.

This is a good thing.

Crazy & Radical BlizzCon Predictions for WoW's Future!

2011-10-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, the faithful gather and learn of what the Olympians have in store for us over the next year and a half, and how our world and lives will change. So of course, I'm going to play the Oracular role for a bit and throw somedarts and see if any of them hit.

I'm trying to think of Blizzard really making a reach for transforming WoW in a blue-sky sort of way, so some of this is super CRAZY-RADICAL. I doubt any of this is what they're actually thinking, but this is the kind of thing I would be pitching if I were a developer on the WoW team.

General

At least 7 new zones
Level cap to 100 (or possibly at achieving Level 100 you gain a title level like "Paragon" or something)
Guild Level cap to 50 (new cauldrons, new food buffs, lowering cool-down of the big abilities further (rez, summon, etc.))
Either PvP or PvE objectives in every zone related to dailies available to either side. Each type of conflict rewards its particular type of play (Maybe even link head and shoulder enchants to these matches, along with bonus materials (enchanting mats, gems, ore, elementals and herbs))
Spectator mode - subscribe to any dungeon, raid, BG or Arena and watch as an invisible member, able to move with the raid while tethered to stay within 10' of the raid lead. Raid lead can set their group as private, invite only, or open
BattleNet allows cross-realm grouping for Arena, Raid and BG

Classes:

New class related to the expansion. The new class will be a healer/tank/dps hybird using either leather or mail, start at level 68 ALA the DK zone
Tanking becomes more of a DPS role with a few defensive tricks tied to offensive abilities, talents and active mitigation
Disc priests Talent Specialization opens up Int Plate for them
All classes are now Hybrid. Mages are Heals (Absorbs/Cauterize)/DPS, Warlocks are Heals (Affliction drain-style)/DPS, Rogues are Tank (Mitigation)/DPS, Hunters are Tank (Pet)/DPS
Eventual goal to move beyond the Trinity by slowly opening players to widening the scope of their individual specs and classes

Dungeons & Raids:

Every dungeons in the game now scales up to Heroic and random dungeon opens up the entire history of WoW in the LFG potluck (with the option to queue specifically for a particular type of dungeon (All, Classic, Outland, Northrend, Cataclysm, Prior Tier(s), Current Tier))
No more 10/25 seperation - all Raids scaled to 15 people with a standard composition of 2 tanks, 4 healers and 9 DPS. All Raids have 3 difficulty levels - LFR (Easy), Normal, and Heroic. Possible to queue for Easy as a pre-made
Scaled down "Encounters" built into the game - a solo player can, with the help of NPCs play brief skirmish type maps with clearly defined objectives that scale up with difficulty. These can be scaled up to 3 players of any spec with more enemies and higher health for each person added. Rewards are always less powerful than the current tier of dungeons

Other Systems:

Archaeology has been rebooted - you can focus on a particular race, you have a chance to unearth horrors, run into competitors and trigger traps requiring some solo play to discover stuff rather than staring at a UI element. Rares aren't just about gathering mats - each Rare has a small quest or two associated with it. Epic Archaeology items have extensive quest lines that take some time to run through and might require grouping up at points to get into dungeons and/or raids
Path of the Titans is back in - it can be started once you hit Paragon level and finish a class-specific quest line with a lot of material gathering, dungeon and drop farming, and some other stuff - this will take a while, ALA Legendary quest-lines. Once finished, it will be possible to explore particular class-specific abilities and allow for more specs to open up - a Paragon of her class will master all possibilities open to her over time. Character growth and benefit without a time element tied to it, without affecting balance. Further growth possible in this venue...

As for the actual content? It almost doesn't matter, it could be swimming pandas and flying dolphins for all I care, but I would really love an Outland style Burning Legion expansion, though I doubt this is the one. I think the one after this is where the Legion either comes to us regrouped and in force, or we go to one of their worlds and take the offensive for once. That's what I really want in the end - to invade the Legion worlds.

So, that's what I've got! I'll be watching the live-stream tomorrow afternoon from home hanging out in Vent and in game with a couple of guildies. Stop by, or something! And mock my foolish hopes and dreams for this little game of ours as they're dashed one by one.

Changing How I PvP (Warlock Edition)

2011-10-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

I threw in the towel.

After two seasons of beating my head against the 1600/1700 rating matches in 2s where I kept meeting up against counter teams, and a 1500 rating wall in 3s where the total lack of sustained offense and nearly complete lack of closers and control blocked me again, I realized Retribution Paladins are just not good in Arenas in the hands of a mediocre player like me.

I do see some Retribution paladins in the top 50/100 rated teams in my Battlegroup, so I'm sure that those guys are taking the class and making it work for them, but for me, I can't seem to able to convert the abilities I have into meaningful kills, and my support is piddling at best, with how quickly I run out of Mana if I try to go that route in 3s.

Retribution Paladins in PvP are designed so defensively that expecting them to work on burst seems to cause a deal of cognitive dissonance. So I sighed, and threw in the towel and gave up all hope of being able to Arenas successfully on my Paladin (I do fantastic in BGs) until such a time as I can get a good and firm understanding of my Holy spec and try Arenas in that venue. With so many instant heals, defensive abilities and support spell, they should be good - I just need a ton more practice in a million BGs first as Holy first. With no Holy gear right now, I'm just going to wait till next season to start gathering it as this late into this season, I'll finish gearing up just as the new stuff is released.

For the time being, I've come to realize how much fun I can have playing my Warlock in PvP.

The two classes are almost completely different in terms of how they play - Retribution Paladin is about lining up cool-downs and abilities to set up a burst kill while catching your enemy in a window with no defensive cool-downs. It's all about the setup.

Affliction Warlocks are all about control of the situation - full-fears, multi-target DoTing, a reliable ranged spell-lock on healers, and super-quick interrupts, escapes and absolutely amazing self-healing.

I've been doing 2s with a rogue, and the two of us are having a blast - we're scratching at about 1500 after a month of matches. We only do a set of 8 wins per week and our win ratio is hovering around the 65% mark which makes me happy. There are teams that are absolutely counters for us - Blood DKs are horrifically broken right now and we have a hard time against them, Warriors with healers can give us a hard time, but overall, we're able to hold our own against most teams.

A personal joy is how I face off against Mages now. On Innana, I used to groan whenever I saw a mage. Now, I just scoff, banish their Elemental, DoT up the Mage, Howl his pets, and Drain Life the hell out of him while big crit numbers pop over his head while they blink here and there fruitlessly, especially if there is no healer and I can sic my puppy on them for locks.

In general, though, if I can get about 5 seconds of free-casting, the amount of damage output Warlocks cash push against an entire team of 2s and even 3s is horrifically frightening. Health Stones, Healing Trinkets, Haunts, and Drain Life (not to mention latent healing returned from DoTs and Fel Armor) all add up to the point where sometimes I out-heal healers. We've even managed to win matches after ten minutes where we were both able to stay alive for extended periods against a healer/DPS comp until we finally converted a kill.

With a pair of Firelands daggers (one of them Heroic), my Rogue buddy is able to gank like nobody's business. I'm looking forward to doing Arenas with her next season when she'll have the legendary daggers.

Anyway. The comp is doing well for us, and I have come to realize that while there is a pang of regret that I'm having to move off my main to do something I enjoy (PvP), the fact that I'm having a ton more fun while doing it on my alt makes up for it.

It might even work for me to keep Merricat as my PvP alt permanently, and Innana as my main in all other ways. It lets me play her on a high-level without having a conflict with my raid group and I do dearly love my Warlock.

For once: Win/Win.

Tanking Legendary

2011-10-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

We've been collecting materials as we kill bosses in Firelands and as I watch our Shadow Priest picked for the Legendary collect them, I feel a pang of jealousy. We didn't do a lot of 25-man content in Wrath, but I did run some 25s with big guilds, and I felt the same pang watching their DKs and Priests collecting Shards for Shadowmourne and Val'anyr.

And next tier, I'll watch our Rogue collect the Fangs of the Father.

At this point, every role has had a legendary except for tanks. Healers have had Val'anyr, melee DPS have had the Warglaives, Sulfuras, Thunderfury, and Shadowmourne, hunters had Thori'dal, and pretty much every caster could use Atiesh and Dragonwrath.

You could make the point that Death Knights used Shadowmourne to tank, but that still left 3/4 of tanking classes without a tanking Legendary.

Point being, tanks have never had a legendary tanking weapon, and a lot of the reasoning behind it is that there are way too many tanking classes that all use different weapons.

The bigger (and real) reason is that if you have a Legendary that only one or two tank classes can use, every raid will drop the other tanks to make room for them. If a raid was tanking with a DK and a Druid, they would drop one or both to bring in a Paladin and Warrior if there was a Legendary shield, and they would certainly be right to do so. And that completely screws up the tanking population and rightly so, isolates and insults those who can't get it.

Tanks are generally the characters who gear up the fastest in raids - they have little competition over drops and the more geared your tanks get, the easier it is for the raid to progress as they can ignore the "tank can't take hits" problem and focus on other issues of the raid. Tank gear matters and I can see balance issues with giving one tank a legendary and essentially making him a Main Tank which is a concept I absolutely loathe.

There are two tanks, they both do their jobs, swapping from one duty to the other as benefits their class abilities best. But I digress.

You hear about Blizzard doing a tanking legendary in the same way that they did Quel'Delar. It comes close but I can see Blizzard's point in rejecting that model for a legendary - something like that makes for an awesome questline and an epic item, but not for a Legendary weapon that needs to be instantly recognizable, is iconic, and, well, Legendary. An item, of monumental power, not something with multiple models.

So how do you reconcile this? I might have a thought.

Make a Legendary Mace.

Every tank class can use Maces. The model can stay the same.

Tweak it so that it can be used two-handed by Druids and DKs with a boost to stats to make up for a missign off-hand, and keep the same model for it across the board.

It is the same weapon in essence, it's just that Druids and DKs need to use it two-handed. Whatever stats and bonus it has should probably be tailored to tanking to keep it from DPS hands and you could probably have a tanking legendary.

Would I rather have a Palain specific questline and build a Holy Aegis that will sing with pathos and grace? A shield that would be a beacon in the darkest of places? A barrier against the most grievous harm?

Absolutely. But, you know. I'm willing to share with the other classes and settle for a mace. I'm sure there are other solutions out there, but I think this is a reasonable one even if it would require Blizzard to scale the item a bit differently between the 2-handed and 1-handed versions of it.

There are solutions out there, and I hope Blizzard keeps this in mind going into the next expansion.

Paladin Tier 13 Armor On Female Models

2011-10-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

I really love the Paladin Tier 13. I was looking forward to wearing this tier for a while. But then I saw how it looks on female models:

Sigh. I guess I'll have to find a shirt to wear underneath that'll blend well with the tier. For some reason I don't really have a problem with cloth-wearers or even mail or leather wearers having these kind of outfits. But doing it to plate just seems ridiculous. It could be that I'm reading way too much gritty fantasy where this kind of thing doesn't fly. It could be that I've been playing a female character as my main for nearly a year, now. And I know a lot of people don't have a problem with plate bikini or whatever as it's a fantasy setting.

But I find it absolutely ridiculous to wear a plate belly-shirt.

I really don't know how many women work in the Blizzard art-department, I'd be really curious. Maybe a woman designed this, I don't know, but it kind of doesn't matter, that still doesn't excuse this.

It just plain blows screaming chunks of suck and fail at the moon that I have to show off my bare mid-riff while tanking the god-damned Aspect of Death.

Catching Up

2011-10-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

There is so much going on in game, and at the same time, so little. This will be rambling, I guess!

After a weird week of suck on my part, we're back on track with killing new bosses and progression is chuggling along. I expect we'll get to 6 heroic bosses within a month or so - definitely before the next patch, and that makes me happy. I'd love to spend at least a whole week on Heroic Ragnaros with a rock-solid group before the next patch comes, just to experience it. But that's some ways away for us, we're just starting to collect heroic gear now.

Our main issue is still that last one or two floating spot that becomes difficult to juggle.

I was informed that one of our core raiders who has been with us for over two years now, is going to be retiring after Deathwing. Which is awesome, he's excited to move on with his life and stuff, and I wish him the best, but it does leave a rather large hole in our roster, and not just in terms of a slot to be replaced, but in terms of a person who was our friend for a long, long time. We'll fill the slot, but we can't replace the person.

Last night, our decked out and geared hunter's PC overheated to the point of making the game unplayable for her and she bowed out until she can afford a replacement machine but we brought in someone who was benched for the night and were able to do stuff.

I hope she's able to come back soon but we'll do what we can in the meantime. The issue becomes that if I do recruit another person to replace this hunter, I'll wind up in a situation where I'll have to play musical chairs again (and after the fiasco I went through last month with a raider upset about progression vs. gearing, I really don't want to deal with it again.)

Our Legendary continues to build, our first collector is about a third of the way through the Cinders and the second person collecting Embers is about two weeks from getting the Branch and we have a third person lined up for it after that. We'll get one Legendary out, I think, maybe get to phase 2 of the second one if 4.3 doesn't come out till late December. But still, it's nice to have it accessible - even if the process if fairly dull to collect mat rather than a series of awesome events like the extra boss.

Speaking of Legendaries, I'm seriously considering leveling a rogue just so I can do the quest-line in 4.3 - it looks freaking awesome. We only have one raiding rogue, and I'd be glad to build a second set of daggers. I love the sneaky, underhanded, do whatever it takes to win, not evil but not good by any measure, anti-hero protagonists like the new Prince of the Black Dragonflight is shaping out to be. Let's hope he is elevated to becoming the new aspect and reinvigorating the Flight and transforming them into what they were meant to be!

Of course, there is no tank legendary on the horizon, and I'll just cry about that over here after I've seen Valy'nar, Shadowmourne, and Dragonwrath crafted for other classes and specs. I look forward to crafting Father's Fangs for our resident rogue in the future.

After playing this game for so long, I just want one Legendary I can use on my main. I'll whine about this later, I have a feeling I have more to say on this topic.

Paladin Tank Stats in Normal Firelands Gear

2011-10-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

I recently hit the threshold of achieving an iLevel of 378 worn gear in my tank-set which makes me pretty happy as it more or less insulates me from Firelands drops. There are a couple of items I would love to swap in and out of course - the Mastery trinket I'm using isn't perfect, and my helm isn't ideal, but with a 4-set bonus and full block-cap with raid buffs, I think I'm pretty pleased with where my stats put me.

Here is my in-game character sheet with self-buffs, no flask or elixirs, but with mastery food:

This essentially gives me a mitigation rating of 101.23% - which is very close to 102.4% to achieve full block-cap. If I wanted to get to block-cap purely on my own buffs, I could probably use a Mastery Elixir and swap out some of the gems I'm using. Keep in mind, this is without things like Horn of Winter and the Dodge proc from the Windwalk weapon-enchant, which push the Parry and Dodge numbers higher, so in-combat, I'm typically at or over the block-cap.

I'm enchanted as per normal, nothing special there, and I'm gemming to get my bonuses using Mastery + Stamina gems in blue slots, instead of full Mastery gems, to pick up a bit of Stamina as I was getting a little low compared to my Death Knight co-tank. What is interesting is that I'm using a Mastery trinket and a Dodge trinket with some of the Dodge forged into Mastery, just to balance mitigation stats a bit. My Epic Jewelcrafter gems are Mastery and my ring Enchants are Stamina instead of Strength (for Parry). I'm not using pure-Stamina gems yet, and I'm not using a Stamina trinket either.

Now keep in mind - this is purely in normal Firelands gear. Once I start picking up some Heroic gear, that block-cap will be over the magic number, and I will start swapping Mastery for Dodge and Parry further reducing the incoming damage.

I've long since given up my dreams of being hit-capped as a tank even though I still hate missing, so the Dodge/Parry sum will start to climb and the Block chance will draw down. I don't know where the pure-mitigation cap will be - maybe 35%? More than 40% with 4.3 heroic gear?

That's just silly at some point, where nearly half the incoming swings will be missed, dodged or parried. Tank damage at this point will drop and that's one of the reasons we've seen things like Chill of the Throne and Sunwell Radiance in the past to reduce tank mitigation in the last tier of raids.

And that was without the benefit of Mastery, which has gotten, frankly, just too good for Paladins. Are we going to see anything like that in the Demon Soul raid? Who can say.

I'm sure part of this is the fact that I've just gotten lucky with drops, and I'm sure the folks who've been farming heroics for a while now have a lot better gear and their stats look a lot better - but point is, even in just normal Firelands gear which is easily accessible at this point to any semi-serious raid group, paladin tank stats are kind of freaking crazy right now.

Moon Guard in the spotlight!

2011-09-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

A quick note to say that a rather generous and awesome player from my realm (the infamous Moon Guard) was featured on WoW Insider's 15-minutes Of Fame feature. Venita is someone I've passing contact with here and there for the last couple of years, and she's been nothing but wonderful for the community of the server, and the project she's working on now is nothing short of extraordinary.

We have a guild-member or two in common between us and there has never any question of integrity or poaching or drama or anything of the sort, not once in the years we've shared players.

Anyway - recognition well deserved - and so good to see my beloved home realm cast in a good light for once.

Paladin Tier 13 and Multi Specs

2011-09-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Is it me or is Blizzard in love with exorbitantly winged helms this tier? Compare the helm this time around with the Death Knight helm from Tier 12.

Uncanny!

Unlike a lot of non-paladins who are poo-pooing Tier 13, I actually like it quite a bit, the color-scheme is subdued but still noble, the shoulders and helm manage to look very ceremonial - I imagine it's the kind of thing you'd wear before a grand ceremony.

Laying swords on shoulders to create Knights, bowing with a long white cloak to receive blessings from the Bishop. Sitting atop a white horse leading a parade. Or just giving a speech to rally the lost, exuding the powerful image of a white-knight to inspire and uplift the broken and huddled masses. Can't you just see that white armor glowing when the Paladin casts Holy Radiance?

Does it sound like I'm talking a bit like a Holy paladin? Don't tell anyone, but I've been futzing and tinkering with a holy set. I respec'd the other night and ran a couple of heroic and didn't kill anyone - and it was even fun. I would kill for a triple spec (or even unlimited specs) just to be able to try out different play styles. In an ideal world, I'd have the following on standby at any point:

1. PvE Protection Raid Progression (for Single Target tanking and survival)
2. PvP Retribution (For Arenas & BGs)
3. PvE Holy (For Dungeons & fill-heals during Raids)
4. PvE Protection Dungeon/Farm Raids (for AoE tanking and damage)
5. PvE Retribution (For off-spec play in encounters where we only need 1 tank)
6. PvP Holy (To putz around in)

They're ordered in my play-style preference right now. And I would happily pay incrementally more gold for each spec. And having a lot (a lot) of off-spec holy-gear that I've soaked up helps as well. I think my Holy set is about at par to heal through up to Domo probably. My Holy set which is, like, my fourth set of gear? - let's see - Protection, Retribution, PvP Retribution and Holy, yep, fourth set, not counting off-set pieces for mitigation or threat or whatever. I'm addicted to hording gear. Help.

--

As for raids? Well. Let's just say ~~Monday~~ Tuesday night we cleared through 6 bosses in 2 hours and the only wipe we had was when I pulled 3 trash packs at the same time like a douche-bag. But you know what? I still had fun. And I know once everyone feels like giving heroics a shot, it'll be back to painful progression again, despite the nerf to heroics. And hey, this way, at least we'll be decked out in heroic raid gear when we face up to Tier 13.

I'll chalk this one up to a failure, and try to do better next tier. See? I can sound like a grownup sometimes. Man, this was a rambling post.

Now what?

2011-09-20T12:44:00.000-07:00

The nerf lists finally made an appearance today and man, they're taking the entire tier out at the knees. It's tremendously disappointing to me that we didn't clear Ragnaros, though things weren't helped by all the other crap that hit us in the meantime.

We lost our third healer two weeks ago and haven't had a third healer in that time other than our top DPS respecing to fill the slot really, really, really set us back. The last two weeks let us barely squeak past Domo on the second night let alone get 6-kill nights like I was expecting to after we cleared through Domo the first time and realized how simple things should be getting. Our third healer situation got so bad we wound up 2-healing Alysrazor just to make it go faster and it actually worked out just fine.

Though starting tonight I imagine it really won't be necessary to three-heal anything but maybe Baleroc, Beth'tilac and Domo. Or maybe we'll just do everything with three so that the night has that much allowance for mistakes...

I'll be frank, this has really taken the wind out of my sails. Even two weeks ago, I was dedicated to achievements, kills and getting a few hard-modes down before 4.3 but now it all feels worthless and pointless and I'm spending less and less time logging in or playing other games instead.

It's not even a hardcore/casuals thing honestly, it's a disappointment in myself and not achieving the goal I set out for myself a few weeks ago. A lot of my guildies seem to see this as me being upset with them, or with their performance, or me being critical of them, or of our server ranking, or whatever else, but it has nothing to do with any of that.

I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to achieve what I wanted to in the game, and now I'm looking at months of farming nerfed content with Heroic Ragnaros being the exception, and he's the other end of the pendulum in terms of difficulty - the Heroic Lich King of this tier that guilds will throw themselves at for months just to squeeze out that one kill.

A lot will depend on the raid tonight - if it feels like T11 and is just a faceroll as I'm expecting, then we'd better at least get Rag down, so I can, with my tail between my legs, go into Heroics next week and never look back.

But right now, I don't know. I don't know. Raiding is why I play this game. If I don't enjoy the one raid left to me, why am I logging in?

4.2 Nerf and the bitter taste of failure

2011-09-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

When the nerf hits next week, it will be the first time in a long time that we will have missed the end-boss of a raid pre-nerf. And it's killing me.

I've always taken pride in killing bosses in their normal incarnation and we've only had a little bit of time on Ragnaros this time around, we had a slow, slow start, it took a while for a raid-team to fall into place, and we're dancing around a million issues with the roster but I was confident we would get through it.

And then this news comes along and it's just crushing my motivation. Unless I push for an extension this week and just spend two nights straight on Rag with maybe a third night added for progression, I think we're going to miss killing this guy pre-nerf.

My pride is tied up into it, and I won't deny it, but that doesn't make the experience any less frustrating. We've always raided on the lower end of serious progression, but I've never let that check my ambition. When I play the game, I want to play it with some level of competitive end in mind - not competing against other people, but against our own expectations of what we can achieve.

A lot of folks in my own guild seem less disturbed by this than I am, and I guess that's good - I'm sure I'll get over it myself, but right now, it smacks of failure.

Ragnaros: Night 1

2011-09-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Phew. Ragnaros reminds me a lot of Lich King - very tightly tuned mechanics, very high individual raid performance requirements and a very fun fight.

Trash:
The first Lava dude puts slabs of lava cutting off travel over the platform every so often - we just kind of hopped around and it wasn't too onerous, but I saw that on the first cast, we were stacked and it forced him to put one right under his own feet and since he has a cast, if we backed up or moved up, we should be okay. Not bad at all.

Killing two Magmaws so easily is a bit sad. They put fire under your feet, dodge it. When they submerge and re-emerge, make sure tanks are in place to pick them up. Focus one down then the other. Doesn't matter which one you do first. Or it didn't for us.

Phase 1:
We actually cleared all the way through the first phase into the first transition on our very first pull! Of course, I'm pretty sure that was exclusively on the shoulders of the healers who got us through a ton of mistakes. But we quickly spent the next hour cleaning up Phase 1 so it has become a non-issue at this point - it's a very simple phase as long as a few things happen exactly the same every time:

Everyone has to be the right distance from each other and they need to make sure they're not getting knocked into lava from the knock back
The person who's triggering the traps (our awesome mage took every trap) needs to give the healers a heads-up and watch the timers to make sure two AoE's don't go off at once
Everyone needs to dodge the lava waves from the hammer (especialyl if there's a knock-back coming right afterward - tanks and melee need to be smart about how they're dodging the lava here)
The melee WAIT for the tanks to be in melee range before getting into melee - especially on the pull and after the knockback. Our feral kitty and rogue were dashing in over and over and getting hit for 150k until we figured out they were just getting to the boss faster than the tanks after knock-backs. Just have them wait 2 secs

That sounds like a lot but it's really not. It's very rhythmic and organic once you get into it.

Phase 2 and 3:
We didn't get too much time in this, but with so many abilities gone from this phase, it should be significantly easier (no knock-back, no traps). The Seed seem to be like the Defile/Valkyr mechanic - run out/group up/run out - but I think we should be okay, as long as we can dodge the flames on the ground. It feels kind of like a Heigan dance. While being chased by living bombs. And getting 30% of Rag's health down. But I'm not too worried about it. Yet.

Phase 3 replaces the seeds with Meteor tanking - which I don't know how complicated it is. We should be able to push him over before we get more than 3 hopefully as the more meteors we get the lower our DPS will be on Ragnaros. Our DPS has been pretty high lately, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed - our basic strat on LK was that if we got to phase 3 and all the adds from transition were dead, we could basically just kind of bum-rush him the rest of the way. Blunt, but it worked. I'm hoping the same sort of thing (or something similar) works here.

Transition Phase:
This is the hard part of this fight.

The first transition and second transition are the same except for the second transition having 2 extra adds that complicate things significantly. 8 adds spawn around the platform and rush towards a randomly placed Sulfuras and if they hit the hammer, it's a wipe. You need the 5 DPS and 2 tanks to split up and handle the adds, stun, slow and kill them before that happens. But the nature of the thing is that it's very random and the placement of the Hammer gives you about 5 seconds to figure out where everyone is going and what to do, communicate that, and get into position at the same time. So it took us probably ten attempts in the transition phase to put something together that looking like it was starting to work.

We had to be very explicit about where the melee were going and where the ranged were going with relation to the hammer - the melee and tanks would always take the 4 closest with specific people assigned left to right and the ranged would be on the rest. It worked a couple of times, but we were still having the odd add slipping through. I really want to nail this to the floor and put a rug on it before we get to the second transition phase because we need this phase to be like clockwork before we handle the two extra adds in that phase.

I was talking to Thistle afterward and she said she wished we could just replay the fight to get an idea of what's going wrong in the transition and I so wish you could do something like that. Starcraft lets you watch a whole match but there it's just a series of action that have to be duplicated, the amount of data in a 4 minute long raid encounter can be significant. Maybe I should try FRAPsing a raid...

It was a fun night learning this fight and I wish we had one more night to go back to him with, but we'll get there again next week, and we'll have another handful of items upgraded which should help numbers across the board. Every week we come back it will get easier, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm not ready to push lock-outs yet - maybe in a couple of weeks, but not yet. The way I do lock-outs is that I will push a lock-out on the first night, and if we can't kill him, we just go back the second night, drop the lock and do the other bosses - this lets us have the best of both worlds. If we kill him - yay! If not, we can still get our gear without risking getting stuck on an old boss for whatever reason and not getting to him on the second night.

Anyway. It's fun to have a really tough boss to sit on for a couple of nights. I'm already hungry for next week. Rawr.

Too Soon, Majordomo?

2011-09-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

Just an update on where I am raid wise. I keep trying to make time to write up some productive things but this last month has been crazy with Earthquakes and Hurricanes hitting New York City. What is going on? Anyway. I hope the coming months are more quiet.

We've had some really awesome raids over the last three weeks - consistent people, who're actually getting geared and learning fights - it's kind of crazy. And full guild groups too. Of course, it wasn't meant to last, and this is the last week for one of our three core healers for a little while as he goes off to college to settle in, and we'll miss him, but it's an awesome time in his life and I hope he makes the best of it.

That does leave me a bit in the hole, and I'm hoping to find someone within the guild to swap characters or step in to heal for a little while until our AFK Healer makes it back. That's an odd recruitment call to make, isn't it?

LF 1 Healer (preferable Paladin) in T11+ gear for progression raiding, 2 weeks only. PST.

Er. Not so much.

This week was our most solid performance yet, clearing all farm content and Baradin Hold in a little over two hours on Tuesday. Shannox is almost on auto-pilot at this point, and Beth'tilac is getting easier and easier - this time she accidentally snagged a few spiderlings and healed up but we were still able to get her down with only a bit of a hiccup. After that we went on to solo-tank Baleroc successfully for the second week in a row, and then cleared up Rhyolith to leave Alysrazor and Majordomo for Wednesday.

The loot tables were stacked in my favor and I was able to snag both Beth'tilac's Mandible and the Shard of Torment (tanking with a DK has its perks!) That leaves me with only the head and shoulders to upgrade. Last night, after Alysrazor went down after a few very good pulls, I hit Revered with the Avengers and snagged both the Mastery/Strength and Dodge trinkets for some awesome CTC action.

I've been at 102.4% for some time now, so now it's just a matter of balancing mitigation for total avoidance rather than blocking. CTC is awesome on Rhyolith where I single-tank the adds and barely take any damage (though my shield tends to break or turn red each time even if I repair right before the pull.)

In addition to Alysrazor, we also pounded Majordomo into the ground after just four pulls, after cleaning up orb tanking (wipe 1), healer placement (wipe 2) and seed management (wipe 3.) I love when we can be super coordinated like this and just knock stuff out of the park - this is what I mean by having a good group that shows up for a few weeks in a row. We could've been here a month ago if we'd had this team then. But I don't mind - we're here now. Tonight, we'll face up to Ragnaros and say hello. I imagine it might take a couple of nights for him to plunge back into his lava pool but we'll get there just as we got here.

And afterward? I'm not sure I really want to push us into hard-modes too much after we clear up Mr. Ragnaros. I think a good project to do next might be Heroic Shannox since he seems like a roll-over, more or less, and then farming out the mats for our Legendary. Maybe going back to Heroic:T11 for titles - maybe Sindragosa or Nefarian though Al'akir seems like he is the easiest of the three.

With the end of normal-mode Firelands starting to take shape, I want another project to keep us focused and working towards and Heroic Tier 11 and the Legendary seem like they will be less stressful than diving right back into Firelands Heroics.

Speaking of the Legendary I think we're at 12 fragments right now, which means another three weeks where we kill at least 6 bosses before the law of averages grants us the rest of the fragments and then our Shadow Priest can at least get the 378 staff. Then starts the long hawl towards the next part. Augh. I really hope we can complete the Legendary and get started on a second before 4.3 comes out.

As for Firelands - I'm quite enjoying these fights. They're challenging, but not back-breakers like a few fights were in 4.0. Majordomo is the only fight that seems ridiculously under-tuned. But hey, I don't mind, makes it easy to farm up some Tier. If we can manage this performance again next week, we'll be in solid shape to clearing farm content in a single night and leave the second night for Ragnaros.

The only fight I'm worried might give us trouble is Alysrazor but the more we kill her the easier it becomes. But at ~12 minutes, it's a long, long fight and requires solid attention the whole time.

Good times. I'm excited for tomorrow.

HOW TO: Solo tank Baleroc as a Paladin

2011-08-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

The first three bosses in Firelands are fairly simple in their current incarnation, though I do plan to write up brief strategies on how we do those anyway. The two challenging ones are Baleroc and Alysrazor, and both are heavily tank-dependent, so I'll do those first. I actually really love this tier as tanks have a lot to do in almost all the fights and solo-tanking Blaeroc is a good example of this.

We've been working on Baleroc for some time now and while our healers have figured out a rotation that works well for them, a couple of our DPS are struggling to meet the shard-tanking requirements while putting out the necessary DPS. We have come shavingly close to killing the boss, and our first kill was nearly 20 seconds past enrage with one healer and DPS remaining as DoTs finished him off.

42 million health in 6 minutes is a lot of damage you need to put out. It's just a pure gear and DPS check, and unfortunately not all of our raid is geared as well as it could be. So, even after we killed him, we kept coming excruciatingly close to Enrage for subsequent kill, and we decided to try and have me solo tank while the other tank went DPS just to eliminate Enrage as a factor in the fight. It worked out beautifully.

Using one tank on Baleroc lets you do a few things:

1. DPS can take only 9 stacks and stop there without having to worry about a person taking too much damage with 12 stacks or being short a person if someone clipped a shard accidentally and wound up with a debuff
2. It streamlines things for your healers who don't worry about taunts around Decimation Blade and being on the right tank
3. It lets you finish the fight sooner which will hopefully lead to one or two fewer blades and fewer stacks of Blaze

Glyphs and Gear:
I was at block-cap for this with 102.4% block + avoidance - double Mastery trinket, Mastery food, Mastery Elixir, the belt from Omnotron, the Thrall quest cloak, etc. You know what to do here, use your full-avoidance set. Once I get the Stay of Execution trinket I will probably sub it in and go with Stay of Execution/Mirror of Broken Images for this fight. Block capping is great for Inferno Blade and his normal melee which also comes hard and fast.

Prime Glyphs used were Word of Glory, Seal of Truth, and Shield of the Righteous. You want to push as much damage as you can.

Major Glyphs used were Focused Shield, Divine Protection (40% reduced Magic damage? Yes, please.), and Lay on Hands.

The default 0/31/10 spec was just fine for this. I suppose you could take the points out of Pursuit of Justice and put one into Reckoning and the other into, idunno, Arbiter I guess, for a tiny little bit more DPS but I doubt it would be significant. Stay with the default.

The Fight:
Almost the entire fight is about executing a good rotation of your abilities to maximize your damage while being very aware of your abilities and having a plan for using them at the right moment to survive whatever situation you are in. Put out some decent damage (I was ~11k DPS on our one-tank kill, but I could probably do better with some gear tweaks), don't get hit by shard (really shouldn't be an issue if your DPS is properly positioned behind the boss) and execute your plan to survive the blades - that's it. So let's have at it.

Pull with Divine Plea > Inquisition > Avenging Wrath > Avenger's Shield > Exorcism > Judgment > Crusader Strike to get a big lead so DPS can go all out right from the start, and from there it's just a matter of rotating survival abilities very, very carefully.

I was using Holy Shield exclusively between blades to soften damage when I got below 50% health from his melee swings. Word of Glory was only used to help top myself off if Holy Shield was on cool-down and I was still low on health otherwise all Holy Power went into Shield of the Righteous.

Inferno Blade is very easy to mitigate with Divine Protection (glyphed) and then the on-use Resist from Mirror of Broken Images if necessary after that should he land a few hits in a row (unlikely with block-cap). Keep 3 Holy Power banked for a Word of Glory in case things get wonky and it was almost too easy to deal with this.

I was also saving Guardian of Ancient Kings for the last two minutes of the fight if I got chains of Inferno Blade with my trinket and Divine Protection both on cool-down.

Decimation Blade is the tricky one. You must have two healers swap to you for this as the fight goes on - a single healer will struggle to top you off when they have to heal through 750k+ health. The third healer can easily keep up with the shards with DPS only stacking to 9 and having 2 healers on you to get you back up past 90% health before the second swing is a great security to have. Remember self-healing during Decimation Blade is pointless as you have a 90% reduction in healing every time the blade hits.

Hopefully he will not connect all 3 times - if he does, you are having some horrifically bad luck. Should you dodge even one, your healers will have enough time to top you off between swings. If he does hit one and the next one is coming and you don't see that heal incoming and you know you're going to die - you have to hit Ardent Defender. Survive that swing and you'll be okay.

If you are in this position with Ardent Defender already used up, you have to bubble taunt and then cancel immediately after the blow. I didn't have to do this as our healers kept up with the damage and I was able to mitigate a fair number of Decimation Blades but you do have that as a last-resort option to stay alive.

One last note - do not use Lay on Hands during Decimation Blade. It is a good cool-down to use once the healing debuff has dropped near the end of the fight, or during a very bad streak with Inferno Blade, but the 90% healing reduction from Decimation makes it useless there. Don't even touch it.

That's really all there is to it. This gives you six DPS to meet the enrage timer and we comfortably killed him with, I think 30 or 40 seconds to enrage.This is probably how we will do this fight from now on, and if I understand correctly, this is the preferred way to kill him on Heroic anyway, so might as well get used to it now.

This is a pretty fun fight and you grow bigger and bigger in size as the Blaze of Glory stacks rack up, so by the end of the fight you're a looming giant almost half the size of the boss with nearly a million and a half health - it gets pretty giddy near the end. Good luck out there!

Keeping Threat Stats Relevant For Tankadins

2011-08-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

Can I ever stop talking about threat stats? I mean, seriously, even I'm getting tired of talking about threat stats, and yet Blizzard keeping throwing reasons at me to keep talking about threat stats.

Sorry.

So, last night's post was mostly a "where are we?" wrap up, today I'm going to try to see if we can make sense of what GC said, what he meant, and what it might mean for us as Paladins.

The pitch
We covered why Hit/Expertise are now pointless for threat. We explained that this leaves tanks to do all the other stuff tanks do (all tanks and most healers know we do a lot more than generate threat) and that this is a good thing. However, we're still left with tank gear with Hit and Expertise on it, and I don't imagine that will go away because it would absolutely and completely eliminate all choice for gearing - get what you get, reforge, enchant and gem as necessary for your choice of mitigation or mastery. And that would be horribly boring.

Besides, Blizzard has done well to make gear a bit more generic - Expertise and Mastery on that helm? Sure, it looks like DPS, but that's almost as good for a tank with that chunk of mastery. Overall, I think Blizzard should (and will) continue to make tank gear with hit/expertise on it.

But with threat a non-issue, why do we need these stats?
That's the rub, isn't it? And GC talks about it briefly in his article, and Matt Rossi went into a lot of detail in his article yesterday which you should read, but the big thought right now that I can see floating around is Active Mitigation.

Active Mitigation:
The word "Mitigation" there is a bit of a misnomer, but the phrase has stuck. Active Mitigation is basically the ability to reduce incoming damage somehow through offensive abilities. A very generic way to think of it would be that the more Expertise you have, the less the boss is able to hit you. Or something along those lines. But of course, a lateral translation like that is just more Dodge/Parry with another name.

Death Strike on the other hand is the text-book example of this. Death Knights have a very strong Mastery called Blood Shield which activates when they connect with a Death Strike. Death strike heals up 40% of the damage taken in the last 5 seconds, and then turns 50% of that damage into an absorb shield. That's active mitigation - and DKs are balanced around it. Good DKs know how to store runes, and when to use them so that they stay alive and are stable health wise rather than spiking damage and draining healers dry.

Their resource depletes and replenishes automatically, but connecting with strikes is important for them to self-heal and trigger Blood Shield. Thus, hit/expertise are good for them, in theory. Blood tanks (I don't raid tank on my DK so correct me here if I'm wrong) like Expertise and a bit of Hit, but don't go out of their way to hit caps. This solution seems to work - but only kind of. And it makes their decision easy - hit Death Strike. That's it. Which is kind of boring.

What about Tankadins?
We already have our own version of Death Strike - Word of Glory. It's dependent on Holy Power which we generate from melee hits, and the more we hit, the more HP we get, and the more WoGs we can cast on ourselves.

Except that WoG has a long cool-down and the amount of Crusader strikes you can get in during that cool-down are enough that even with low hit, you can still generate enough HP to cast it by the time it comes off cool-down.

On top of that, we have Divine Protection on a short cool-down that we can turn into either a small overall damage reduction or a big magical damage reduction pre-fight. We have Guardian of Ancient Kings, Lay on Hands on a very long cool-down, Holy Radiance for a bit of healing, and... Holy Shield.

None of the above abilities use Holy Power so we can be lazy about generating it, we can horde it, and always have it when we need it the most as long as WoG is off cooldown. That makes our "active mitigation" pretty much this:

while(BossHealth > 0)
{
    cast Crusader Strike
    if(HolyPower = 3 AND SelfHealth < 50%)
    {
        Word of Glory
    }
}

Word of Glory is Death Strike in reverse - we hit Crusader Strike to gain the resource and deplete it automatically to heal. And thanks to the length of the cool down, we don't really need the Hit/Expertise so we can afford the misses. We have it easy.

But what if Holy Shield consumed Holy Power and shared a cool-down with Word of Glory like Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous?

You have a system where an actually sizable portion of your mitigation or self-heal, both of which you're balanced around, depend on your ability to generate the resource both need. And once you use one you can't use the other for a set period of time so you set out gathering more Holy Power.

And if both abilities had lowered cool-downs and lowered on-use affect so they stayed balanced overall? Now you do need to get those hits in and figure out what you're going to use it for.

You're actively mitigating and/or healing and making decisions on the fly.

You could turn Holy Shield into an aggressive anti-attack which goes off the hit-table.

Which is to say, you're attacking the incoming melee attack with your shield and need to "hit" with it. That would also make hit/expertise attractive, while contributing to active mitigation. Warriors have this, kind of, in Spell Reflect, except it just happens and doesn't depend on anything. With a shorter cool-down and reliable on hit, it could be an aggressive damage mitigation tool.

Do we need this kind of thing? I don't know. Tanking is going through a change, and the more we get towards 5.0 the more things seem to get more and more fluid - Blizzard is not afraid of slaughtering sacred cows.

I'm excited to see where it goes, and I do hope (and think) they will come up with ways to keep Hit/Expertise relevant for tanks. Because I like them and I'll miss my buddies if GC says I don't need them anymore. If you have any ideas for Active Mitigation, please leave comments, it would be fun to discuss them in a future post!

And lastly - because it always sounds so funny, it's not fun to miss. I've talked about it before. But missing is not fun. At the core of the thing, it's a game, I want to hit stuff, and see it take damage, not see miss...miss...dodge...miss...parry... because of some game mechanic. To the kid inside me killing dragons, that's not fun.

Threat Buffs Hot Patch

2011-08-17T06:40:00.000-07:00

Seems like Ghostcrawler has been thinking about the same things I have been grumbling about for some time on this blog. There are two major components to the coming changes, and this is a huge topic as the initial post makes clear.

1. How does removing Threat as a factor affect fights?
2. How do you make Threat stats attractive to tanks?

And beneath all this is the question I keep asking - it might be efficient, but is it fun?

Spoiler Alert: I glyphed out of Glyph of Truth for the first time since it was introduced.

I spent three hours in Firelands last night, with the buffs, so I can talk about what tanking felt like. I was tanking with Death Knight with slightly less gear than me, but definitely Firelands capable, and we had a hunter for the occasional misdirect.

First, let's talk about building Threat.

There is a significant boost to threat generating abilities. Ghostcrawler says:

The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done

Straight up buff to threat-gen, fine, this is just a multiplier to existing threat, and by itself it provides an across the board quality of life increase. It makes snap agro easier, and threat a non-issue on single-target fights.

Vengeance no longer ramps up slowly at the beginning of a fight. Instead, the first melee attack taken generates Vengeance equal to one third of the damage dealt by that attack. As Vengeance updates during the fight, it is always set to at least a third of the damage taken in the last two seconds.

This is the game changer. What this is saying, is that one third of the sum total of damage taken in the most recent 2 second period is used to determine a minimum threshold for Vengeance - which means, two second in a fight, I should have a significant amount of threat already. Two seconds is the period of time it takes melee to get into boss range, or for casters to finish their first cast, or for DoTs to start racking up. It also means lucky streaks will not let you loose all your Vengeance stacks though they might decay still a bit.

In that time, you're also actually hitting the boss at least once or twice and building threat at a rate of five-times the output instead of three-times. Then you take a hit, maybe two, and suddenly your Vengeance bar is glowing and that red bar on Omen is as long as a tree's shadow at sunset (Wut?). On top of this are the documented changes for Vengeance to pass on absorbed damage from bubbles and now you don't have to grumble about Discipline priests in your raid.

When you're AoE pulling trash in heroics, this is going to make threat a complete non-issue. As long as you take the first hits from mobs, and land some kind of AoE on the adds, you should be fine.

This significantly improves a few things:

The ability to snap-agro adds mid-fight where DPS needs to put out heavy AoE with a single Hammer of the Righteous or Avenger's Shield
Initial agro on a boss - Paladins should be able to use the Divine Plea > Inquisition > Wings > Exorcism > Judgment > Avenger's Shield &> Crusader Strike opening for a huge lead now that all those abilities will generate much more threat
Enrage meters become less scary now that DPS don't have to wait for threat to establish, they can start nuking 3 to 5 seconds into the fight and the healers don't have to keep a twitchy finger on the Fury Warrior's raid frame
Lets classes without agro drop feel less throttled - when I'm on my Death Knights I'm always very careful about initial agro and don't get to ramp up till late in the fight, whereas on my Warlock and Paladin, I can immediately go all out as I have a Hand of Salvation or a Soul Shatter if the screen is glowing red

So, this is an overall raid quality-of-life improvement, but does it actually improve game play? In theory, having one less thing to be aware of is good, especially on fights where you're focusing on picking up a lot of adds (Rhyolith), or steering the adds in a direction (Bethtilac), or watching interrupts, (Maloriak) or moving out of fire (Shannox), or dealing with tons of positional issues (Alysrazor) or snap taunts (Baelroc) or whatever else it is you're doing (all of the above on Nefarian pre-nerf, and I think on Ragnaros as well, though I haven't seen that fight yet).

Could this change have been replaced by giving classes without threat dumps some way to drop it so that players are responsible for maintaining their own agro? Maybe. But I also know tanks who don't go into LFG because their agro issues are such that they can't hold agro on raid-geared DPS going all out one second into the pull and being blamed for not holding agro and getting kicked. This change, while at the top end or even the casually raiding end might seem like overkill, for the vast majority of LFG tanks, this will be a boon.

Overall, I'm a fan of this change so far - I've been super frustrated with my own ability to hold agro at times, as we're actively dropping threat stats for mitigation and DPS just ramps up higher and higher. It's not uncommon to see DPS hitting 20k+ numbers consistently now, and threat was sometimes getting wonky.

All that said - how was actually raiding with the buff last night?

Freaking awesome. The things I was able to worry about instead of agro: pulling efficiently, chain pulling trash because I didn't worry about adds scattering, being able to have DPS immediately go all out on fights without any consideration for threat right from the start (Baelroc, where the enrage meter is actually an issue), and we were finishing each fight at least 30 seconds faster than before.

The instance also just felt like it was more fun. Other than taunting stray adds, my tanking focused on speed and efficiency, not a harried tab-spam of madness to keep threat on everything. Back in ICC days, I used to keep a threat set where I was hit-capped and well past the expertise soft cap. I enjoyed my ability to put out threat that was competitive with the DPS and they didn't feel throttled.

Now, everyone can enjoy that - and it wasn't skill that made me do this, it was gearing, and a relatively obscure way of gearing to new tanks who don't pore over this stuff like I do. I don't think that's a bad thing. It will encourage new tanks to stick with tanking, as tanking is just plain more fun when threat isn't an issue.

I fully understand, appreciate, and empathize with tanks who feel this isn't good, and that the game is being simplified ("GG Blizz catering to casuals"). I'm not one of those tanks.

Tomorrow I'll talk about the other half of this conversation - now that threat isn't an issue, why do tanks want Hit and Expertise?

It's good to be king

2011-08-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

Some days are better than others. Tanking can be a bit of a bore, a chore, as it were, and the nights bleed into one another.

And then you have days like this, when it all comes together into a glorious burst of awesomeness.

PuG Blues

2011-08-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

Man, this is the longest gap I've taken from writing in some time. Mostly because I've been kind of glum in game as raids haven't been very engaging - not that I don't want to raid, but our raid group has been having some trouble gathering up and actually raiding and it's starting to wear on me.

I feel like we're just in this hanging phase, where all we need are a couple of good, solid, three-day weeks to push through to Ragnaros. This is exactly what it was like when we were on Nefarian - except that was one bsoss and here we have an entire raid to learn. Our core is kicking ass as usual, it's the last couple of slots that worry me. We've been picking up people, and if I look at the roster, there are 21 people who could conceivably raid... and yet I'm PuGing at least one slot every week.

There are a lot of things that happen when you have to bring in someone new.

1. You have to let your entire raid comp adjust to this new person, personality wise. We're a nerdy, smart, funny, laid-back group and we've had people join who immediately began poking, poking, poking at someone's performance, I think jokingly, and it got to be an issue. While I'm trying to figure out DPS distribution, I don't want us to be distracted by people management.

2. Things are just going to take longer. Even if they've done everything, they might not just gather up scorpions to AoE and then move out as stacks grow. Maybe they kill Shannox a completely different way, or they're used to being on the top with Beth'tilac and don't know how to manage adds on the bottom. Or worse, they don't know the fight at all and now the raid is sitting there for five minutes while you explain their role to them and suffer wipes while this person gets up to par. We're not to a point in Firelands where we can just cruise through a boss with a person down. And there is nothing worse - nothing worse - than explaining complicated things to one person while eight other people sit on their hands doing nothing.

3. The rest of your raid suffers from having to adjust around this person. Maybe you're moving people's roles around, maybe someone is playing an off-spec, and you go through all of the above with your own people. Admittedly this is less onerous, but it is still an issue where the alt-spec gear might not be up to par, or the person might be rusty or less adept with that spec, and you're wasting more time getting them used to the fight in a different role.

4. You have no reliability. The person might just have joined to get the sword from Shannox and then drops group right after the boss dies. Or they were in your raid because their own guild benched them, but suddenly asked them to swap in as one of their members left. Or maybe they forgot that they had another obligation and when you said "10 server" they thought you meant "10'o clock their time" which is an hour after you started. Sorry. And now you're stuck a boss or two in with no hope of finding someone to come into a locked instance.

5. The night is shorter because of it. You might have wasted time at the start of raid finding someone and by the time you zoned in it was 15 - 20 minutes past your start time. Now you're pulling, and explaining at the same time, and maybe someone gets confused typing or talking and half your raid just got punted off the ledge. Or you wiped. Or even if you get to the boss quickly, instead of just pulling, you're sitting there explaining again. Now it's 50 minutes after raid time was supposed to start and you do your first pull on Shannox. At this rate, you're looking at no progression work at all, and by the time Beth'tilac dies your raid is so shot and grumbly from relearning downed fights, that you might as well go see if your faction has BH just so you can come back in tomorrow with fresh brains. And you better hope like hell someone will show up tomorrow to fill that PuG slot because your odds are slim that they'll show up again.

6. You have absolutely no way to separate the good from bad. This is probably the worst problem. You can look at their armory, you can look at their gear, you can look at prior raid experience, you can even check the dates of their achievements on kills to make sure they killed Nefarian when he was far more difficult - but all of that won't guarantee a good player. Maybe they were carried through, maybe it's their girlfriend's account, maybe they're having a bad night or swapped spec because you needed a DPS and they went Shadow just to step in and haven't actually played Shadow in months. That vetting you did, checking their amazing gear, raid experience and availability for length of time just went to crap and you might not even realize it until you get to a boss.

All of that said, I'm just grateful to those who PuG with us for two things.

1. I've met some of my favorite raiders through PuGing. Three members of my core right now are people who responded to my "LF1M" calls on LFG. That's what keeps me PuGing - knowing that there are amazing people out there, looking for a chance to raid, and every time I PuG with someone, I don't know if they're going to be the next core member of my raid group.

2. I do get to go into Firelands and kill things. This is started to feel a lot like late summer from last year when we were literally begging for people to get a raid, any raid, off the ground. And other guilds are struggling far more than we are just to get started. So the fact that these PuGs let us raid and kill things is enough to make me very grateful for them.

What makes this worse is that I actually quite like Firelands and would love to get to work on it with a good, consistent team. I am enjoying these raids so much, both T11 and T12 have been fantastic raids to work on.

But. The patch is relatively young still and if our record is anything to go by, I think we'll clear the normal modes and at least a couple of hard modes before 4.3 drops, though our progression rate might move at the pace of our guild's namesake.

I hope you're having some luck out there! And if you're looking to raid, poke that link.

Atrocity Asylum (Fiction)

2011-08-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

This is a bit stream-of-consciousness, and honestly, it was inspired in part by Plex of Jinxed Thoughts' latest post about the everyday activity of her characters in game. I liked the sentiment, and was more interested in the in-character voice that my warlock Merricat might have, as I've been playing her a lot more lately. This is what emerged. I enjoyed this and might write more in this vein, as she's a lot more fun to think about in-character than my paladin. I find it hard to write from a Draenei perspective.

Anyway - enjoy.

ATROCITY ASYLUM

I remember who I am, and I realize I'm standing in Stormwind, in the Dwarf district. I had forgotten who and where I was. That happens often enough that this sudden confusion is not uncommon. Sometimes, the world vanishes when I focus on the voices in my head.

The city buzzes, are there more people now, or is it just an impression? I let the conversation drone drown out my thoughts and the voices among them. Passing the fountain, I catch a glimpse of myself, and suddenly, I don't know how I feel about my hair, so I go to call the drake rescued from Ulduar as a whelp to be raised to this beast, and it seems a travesty to use this beast for such a base purpose, to cross a city. To do the same by food would feel just as shameful - to draw forth a demon from a nether plane to ride a few streets.

Besides, neither of them are here, not here in the city where their horror would not be appreciated, no, they are far in distant lands though only a beck and call away. Instead, I walk the few blocks to the barber. Goblin hands turn and fold, snip and trim, color with strongly scented chemicals until I'm satisfied. The face in the mirror is less obvious, more plain and practical, which is how I feel lately. This modest dress, these slippers, these affections of a life that isn't mine.

The day passes in a blur, the city buzz ebbs, but doesn't die, under moonlight it's as potent as it was under the sun. Summer heat lingers in the stone streets, radiating into the starry sky. After dark the world is different, here in the borders of the ruin, where the city gives way to a crater, where years of civilization, hundreds of cultivated lives, delicately constructed moon-wells filled with waters from a distant land, all evaporated in a blaze of dragonfire, in the blink of an eye, in the beat of a heart.

Why do we cling to this fragile civilization so fiercely? A voice answers in my head, but I ignore the words.

All the world seems dim and perilous. Death at every corner and yet, this is where I come after dark to look into the hollow crater and see reflected back this fact - that there is a hole in the heart of creation, and it is ruin. To ignore it is to folly, yet to worship it is weakness.

The voice in my head turns, a broken language speaks in my ear, and I understand the sentiment, reply in kind, and there is green fire in the sky calling me. It's not really there, of course. I see things that aren't there, sometimes. Sense things happening in far and distant places.

In the mountains to the north, hunting among the crags, I hear the call of Razorscale's whelp, her metal bindings grating as she moves. If I was a kind woman, I would have killed her to spare her this hideous, painful existence. But appearances must be maintained. I have a reputation to keep, after all, and she is grateful for life, in the end. What else is there, but the darkness? And given a choice, wouldn't we all take pain over nothing?

My head is full of voices now, but I master them all, and they diminish. Their names are burned into my thoughts, seared and branded, and the agony of the process was great, but today I cannot imagine my identity without the brands. Bound together now through felfire and pain. We are lovers together, in nearly every sense except the most practical, and the most banal one.

At night, I sense the eyes of people on me. I wear this dress to hide my body, I make myself plain, as ugly as I can, and yet men stare - but perhaps I flatter myself. Perhaps the eyes are not full of desire, but fear. Or maybe pity. Do I seem different to others or do they seem different to me? Am I alone, or are they a community? Perhaps it is all of that.

Thirty years of voices in my head, twenty years since the first brand was pressed into me, burning hot, green fire, searing heat and singing wounds, the name sounded like a garbled sound but soon I learned there was more. And then, through the years, new names, new brands, until I suppose my eyes no longer look as they did. Or perhaps again, this is all in my head. Like the voices.

Lovers? The voices are as close as I can get. Thirty years of life, thirty years of horror and pain and insecurity - but not lonely years, no, never alone. There is something to that, at least. I see the mad, the babbling, the broken, and I wonder if they are truly sad, for they always seem to have company of their own, even if the company is invisible

As if on cue, something pricks my hand, a drop of blood rises on the palm, and I feel a breath on the back of my neck, hot and sulfurous, a growling, angry voice, and I shudder, willing it away.

Just my fantasy. The voices stay away until I call. I tell myself that it's true.

But not tonight. They won't be quiet, if they have begun to prick, then they are eager, have been denied their share of blood for too long. I return to my rooms. I have lived here since I cam back from the horror of Northrend. Does the toothless old woman who lends me this space gain something in return from voices of her own? I have never paid, guided here by my last contact, a guard who died shortly after I left him, body too mutilated for a proper burial so he was burned quietly. Coincidence, or part of a greater plan? Does the old woman know what happened to her predecessor? How long before I'm discarded myself in the same way? An unrecognizable mess of flesh to be burned in a nameless pyre. And yet she smiles and offers me food, treats me like her long-lost child, talks to me in a voice and language I know is not hers.

The rooms are bare. A closet for clothes, bed for us to sleep in, hard chairs to sit in, and a fireplace to burn things in. Only the kitchen seems like it might belong in an ordinary house. Full of spices that hang in bunches from the wall, a wood table laden with bowls of fruit and flowerse, and shelves filled with grains and bread. And always, the fresh, bloody meat. I have never traced the source of the bloody, quivering, warm flesh - the taste of it in my mouth warns me against knowledge I'd rather not know.

She's waiting for me, and in my room, I see she has already laid out my things, hidden among the boards - the clothes dancing with shadow energy, the weapons, amulets and trinkets, woven with black magic. The voices rise in my head, I shed my clothes, and she helps me dress. Each item feels like a clammy, dead hand for a second before my skin remembers the familiar touch of unholy things. The voices whisper, eager to be let out, each one hoping to escape its confines just for a short while, to burn, to mutilate, to rend, to consume... I shudder and look to the woman, who smiles back, a kindly tooth-less grandmother, but her mouth opens and a litany of horror escapes the black hollow.

The voices gibber madly, but there is something greater than them. I wonder if this woman is an avatar to dead and forgotten voices, not just the voices lost among the Nether. Voices that once had real power. Voices that once ruled the world.

I turn away and catch a glimpse of myself in the small mirror behind my door, an item left to serve what shreds of vanity remain. The woman in that mirror is not the woman I saw in the barber shop. That woman was plain, easily forgotten, banal and ordinary. What I see in the mirror is a dead face, masked and wreathed in doom. I see a slave to powers that are beyond her comprehension. And I see a little girl, screaming, screaming, screaming, as the first name is branded into her soul, in black and endless nightmares.

"Go, now."

The old woman smiles at me, a mother encouraging a daughter down the Cathedral aisle in wedding robes. The dagger in my hand shimmers white, but there is nothing holy about it, just the reflect light of a disengaged goddess.

Outside, the summer heat has finally passed, a slight chill descends from gathering clouds. I lift my hands up and shadows rise to fill me, I weave a pathway through space and time and dimensions. One of the voices rises from a pool of black. It growls, arches its backs and lowers its maw to the ground, it goes on the hunt.

It blends in with the patchwork shadows filling this grassy back streets, a friend now for two decades, a trusted companion, a guardian in the most desolate and dangerous places, a terrible horror that would not be here if not for my intervention. An aberration that would end if I were simply to walk in the other direction, and throw myself into the ruin in the heart of the city.

I contemplate this for a second, and then, I follow in the demon's wake, ready to commit atrocity.

More About Paladin Threat

2011-07-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

After my last post, it was nice to hear from a couple of folks that they were also having trouble with threat, so I'm not just being a baddie (for once).

So. I'm mostly interested in solutions, not just complaining. How do we get around this? Let's take about threat from the top.

Hit and Expertise are the two threat stats we're concerned with.

Hit is fairly obvious, it lets you hit things more accurately. The way it works out, you can refer to the following table to see how much hit you need at any given moment. Keep in mind, there is no mob in the game more than 3 levels above yours when you're at cap, so right now, raid bosses are level 88. As an aside, this means for your PvP set, you only need 5% hit.

Difference in Level	Hit needed
0	5%
1	5.5%
2	6%
3	8%

Expertise pushes your target's Dodge and Parry off the combat table. Melee DPS only need to push Dodge off the table as mobs can't parry attacks from behind, but tanks will need to worry about Parry. Expertise used to be really good for mitigation, as some bosses would gain a haste-buff any time they parried an attack, which gave tanks an incentive to stack Expertise, but that mechanic was taken out of the game and is no longer a factor. Expertise is purely for threat now.

The amount of expertise you need is the same for any mobs of a level higher than yours, but basically, 26 Expertise is the magical number you're looking for to kick Dodge off the table. Chasing the Parry cap is a loosing game and not worth the effort.

Okay, so why did you put that Hit chart up there?

Because you need to consider your environment, and what kind of threat output you need for that environment. The only mobs that need 8% hit are raid bosses. No other mobs in the game need 8% hit. Even heroic dungeon bosses are only level 87.

Why is this important? Get to the point, man!

Sorry, I tend to ramble. Unless you're tanking a farm raid-night to get through all of Tier 11 in 2.5 hours, you (generally) never need to worry about threat on a raid boss. Even if you don't have a hunter or rogue to give you Misdirects or Tricks, you should be able to have the raid sit on their hands for 5 to 10 seconds and with Wings, Inquisition and a small bit of luck, build up a solid lead before DPS goes nuts.

However, when you're clearing trash, when you're in a heroic dungeon, once you get some raid gear, build that threat set and use it.

So let's get set up for tanking dungeons and trash like threat kings.

A Hit cap of 6% means you need 720.65 hit rating. That isn't too much and honestly with items like Soul Blade, Elementium Earthguard, Retribution Tier pants, or even the Valor Hit trinket you can easily get there without giving up a lot of mitigation.

Paladins have it easy with Expertise. Glyph of Seal of Truth gives us an amazing 10 Expertise rating right off the bat. That's almost half the expertise you need total, from one glyph. You should always have this on. The rest you can get with some items here and there, or if you're feeling gutsy, with a Heart of Ragefrom Chimaeron.

The nice thing about those trinkets, is that they have a random on-equip strength boost which is also a very nice thing to have kick in now and again to give your threat and damage output a nice kick in the pants.

One more thing - Glyphs and Talents.

If you're mostly only doing dungeons, you probably don't need Glyph of Word of Glory. You can safely swap it out for Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous. This one glyph will boost your DPS output to amazing levels on AoE mobs.

And again, if you're mostly doing dungeons and don't expect to raid tank, make your talent spec something like this (0/31/10). It gives you everything you need for AoE tanking and pushes your threat stats up front and center. Keep in mind you're giving up a fair amount of Word of Glory utility so you'll need to be on your toes with survival cool downs.

If I didn't use my off-spec for Retribution all the time, I'd run with two protection specs. (This goes into another rant about why Blizzard need to remove the spec-cap, but that's a different story)

So, you have your threat set. You've changed your glyphs and talents, and you're ready fro that bear run. Right? Well, before you head out, check a few things first.

Make sure your healer is okay with this. If a healer is under-geared, the slightly increased damage you take could make things messy, especially since you won't have WoG to fall back on. When you do get into a scuffle, play defensively - use Holy Shield wisely, and be careful not to over-pull. I would run this with a guildy healer or someone I know before doing the LFG thing with it.

I tested mine this weekend with the amazing Vidyala healing me (I love the cross-realm grouping with the Battle.Net system so much!) and have been using it ever since for everything but raid bosses. I ended that experimental Z'A run even with the DPS on damage done and had absolutely little trouble with threat. And I was pulling like mad on that run, as it turned into a spontaneous bear-run with 2 PuGs and no vent, and we still managed to get to Lynx boss with 2 minutes on the timer (but didn't make it).

Anyway. That's how I went about making a threat set and I'm loving it. If you do something similar, have any thoughts or try any of this in the field, please let me know, I'd love to tweak or change things around to optimize this in any way possible!

Good luck out there. :-)

Paladin Threat in 4.2

2011-07-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

It's my vengeance and I'll cry if I want to.

Am I the only person having issues with vengeance stacking, then dropping then slowly building up again so my DK friend who does 20k+ DPS in 5-mans winds up sitting on her hands a minute in the fight while I build a lead again?

Vengeance has become the be-all-end-all thing when it comes to threat. Tanks will gain attack-power capped by their stamina (which scales up with gear) as a fraction of damage done to them (which scales up with tier). Brilliant. Except for when I get a lucky dodge or parry streak and my Vengeance goes from 9k AP to poop and my threat bar slows to a crawl as the other bars race up to my nose like it's a sprint to the finish. Firelands loot has a fair amount of threat stats on the gear, especially some of the vendor stuff, but I reflexively take that threat and dump it into Mastery or Dodge because that's what's ideal for Paladins, so say the learned and mighty masters of Paladin tanking.

"Don't worry about threat," Ghostcrawler pipes in on the side, "Vengeance is your friend, it'll take care of you."

"Alright!" I say, heft my shield, grin at my 99% block-cap without procs and stride up to smack the boss with my mace and suddenly the boss who was snarling at me a second ago has pivoted away and is using the Mage like a chew toy.

I kick at his leg and throw out a taunt, "Hey, drop it!"

That gets the bastard back to me and I'm building Holy Power to smack it harder as fast as I can, but that invisibility is about to drop any second, and now the DK is going all out because we're so close to the enrage timer on this fight, we can't afford to waste time. A couple of hits land, and I've got a full bar of golden, glowing Holy Power. Now's my chance! I swing my shield.

Whoosh.

I spit out an expletive, spit sprays, I can barely see through the streaks on the screen, I cast a Judgment to fill the time and smack that Shield again.

Whoosh.

Omen is blinking red and yellow, suddenly alarm appear, red and spinning, and someone is blowing an air-horn in my ear. Wait, why is the goddamned *Hunter* chasing the meter? "Misdirect," I squeal into my microphone, "For pity's sake, give me some threat!"

Bang. I take another solid hit, my Vengence is now buried in the red, and I grin and bloodied grin, as the glowing Shield from Power Auras alerts me that I have Sacred Duty proc up. YES! NOW! Swing that shield! Hit! Hit! Hit!

And does it? Who knows. By this point I've screamed at the DPS so much they're all pouting and holstering their weapons, in search of a better tank and the healers chase after them and suddenly, the boss is carrying me away and I kick and flail helplessly, while he digs a hole to bury me in.

(The boss is, apparently, a puppy.)

Right now (for Paladins at least, correct me if I'm wrong about other classes, though I know on my DK I love mastery as well) block capping, mitigation balancing and survival gearing necessitates exclusion of threat stats, which in turn, along with threat at pull, and a lack of hits from abilities is leading to a very knife's edge situation with threat... but it's not that way all the time. Other times, everything is great, I manage to grab threat and drag it up so far, so fast, I might as well white-swing and AFK till the fight is over.

Here's the thing - I don't mind fighting for threat. I don't mind gearing or working hard for it. What I mind is the gross inconsistency of threat from pull to pull.

If I do go for threat stats, I'm increasing my damage intake. So I gear for avoidance and rely on Vengeance.

But Vengeance isn't an ideal tanking tool. But in execution, every time I dodge or parry a hit, I'm reducing my ability to push threat, and as a Paladin every time I miss with Crusader Strike I'm not building Holy Power or every miss of Shield of the Righteous, I'm loosing a major threat burst. Sometimes, it's my Censure ticks that's all the damage I'm doing in a three or four, second interval.

I don't want to just bash the idea, it's great in theory - it scales very well with gear and encounters - it's just that its effectiveness diminishes with scaling mitigation and the buff can be completely wasted with missed attacks, and it's not there when we arguably need it the most - at the start of the fight.

However. All of this is besides the point - it works, more or less, and is generally an okay way to deal with the old issue of DPS scaling a lot faster than threat. I know that the math behind the builds makes sense, I like math, I don't have an issue with it. But is it fun? Hell no.

It is not fun to miss three Crusader Strikes in a row. It is not fun to have a full bar of Holy Power, a Sacred Duty proc and miss twice with Shield of the Righteous till the buff drops off. It is not fun to just waste GCDs on nothing.

That's my issue. Missing is not fun.

H. R. is my least favorite R.

2011-07-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

I haven't been talking about raiding much lately because I haven't been able to do much raiding (well, real raiding, which is Firelands) lately. When 4.2 dropped, we went in to Firelands the first two weeks and had a lot of trouble. One of our healers was severely under geared and we had a lot of trouble keeping the raid alive.

This week, we decided we'd go do some hard-mode/T11 clearing for some gear and upgrades and then go back into Firelands for the second night, and then the roster issues rose up again. Next week I'm on vacation and that means the earliest chance I'll have to see Firelands again is 7/26. Which is not a pleasant thought. It's not that I'm trying to compete with the guilds on my server - most of them have pushed forward fairly quickly and many congratulations to them, however, it's frustrating to be side-lined.

Last night we wound up PuGging to go clear some raid achievements because hey, 2 missing raiders means I don't want to wipe for hours on Shannox, so we cleared all of T11 (which, BTW, seems easier than Zandalari these days) and Halfus on Heroic.

Our roster is growing more stable, slowly, one person by one person. We picked up one semi-regular friend from another guild which is super-awesome, and last night, yet another PuG who was raiding with us last night wanted to join after the night ended, and I hope his attendance will be stable.

Right now a third - solid, geared, aware, and reliable - healer or tank would make life a lot easier. That's the big gap in our roster right now. My co-tank has swapped to healing and one of our top DPS has taken to tanking, but I miss her epic DPS (though she's a fine tank as well) and their off-spec gear sets are not as well-tuned to these roles as their main-spec sets are, naturally.

There are maybe three or four other raiders who are on the roster, and they are all awesome and I would love to see them attend consistently, but their real-life obligations make them hit-and-miss and I can understand that, and they know that if I do find stable positions they would become bench-warmers, but these HR problems continue to crop up, and I hear about it even from the very top-end guilds on my server who never used to have a problem with their rosters.

I'm wondering if I'm noticing it so much because of the smaller size of our guild (before we formed Turtles, we were in fairly large guilds with many people and often had folks to step in to fill raid (even if they were sometimes less than ideal, which is a completely separate issue)). Or is this a Cataclysm issue? Is there just a lot of burnout with Cataclysm in general? I don't know.

There is also the time factor. I do think that the new encounters are just, plain, harder, and the biggest resource they require to clear is not gear (though it helps) but time to practice and learn. So many guilds are doing at least three nights, and often four hours per night. We're doing six hours a week, total. I can't help but stare at that fact and wonder if it's a factor in our stalling progress.

Solving HR problems is the hardest thing for me - thankfully my GM is amazing at recruitment and when we find good people PuGing with us, she is relentless at getting them to accept a Guild Invitation. I don't know how anyone can resist her pursuit. It's like the adds on Maloriak casting Fixate - she just doesn't let go until you say yes! The problem is finding good people who are reliable.

Anyway. This post is just a ball of QQ and I didn't intend for it to be that - I'm trying to remain optimistic and it was actually a pretty fun night to kick back, crack a beer and just steamroll T11 while picking up achievements and yak with friends. Isn't that what raiding is supposed to be about, anyway?

Next week, I'm off to Cape Cod at a beach house with my wife and baby, so the only thing I'll be raiding is the Oyster bar. Lots of yummy, briny Oysters to shuck and slurp, while reading lots of books and dreaming of Dagon sleeping off the coast of New England.

You guys have fun, and I'll see you when I get back, unless I get inspired and write from vacation-land.

A Summer Of PvP

2011-07-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

Man, is it me, or is the blogosphere quiet lately? Most of the blog I read are, anyway. I probably need more blogs to read. I suppose I'm part of the silence lately as well.

Anyway. 4.2 has been out for two weeks now, and I've been enjoying the game quite a bit lately - the dailies and progression along the Molten Front is actually fairly engaging, and I really love the achievements you can get out there. My favorite one so far has been King of the Spider Hill. I died way up high on my first attempt and had to take a spirit rez for the first time in who knows how long.

Last week was also the first time a few guildies and friends pulled together a ten-man and ran a couple of Rated Battlegrounds, and we actually won our third match against a guild from our server. It was fairly hectic but a lot of fun, and my 2v2 partner and I also moved up to a 3v3 team and went 50/50 in our first week with what is, I think, a sub-optimal composition (Retribution/Holy Paladin/Shadow Priest) but I think we'll get better as the season goes on.

We're still getting used to having a third person in our team and figuring out how to incorporate her - I'm thinking Shadow Priests might be in the same role as Affliction warlocks, which is more of a pressure-and-control role and I'm finding that I can bring a lot of burst forward when I put my mind to it. Thanks to our mid-range MMV from last season, we were up against some fairly decent teams, and we saw one very good team three times, winning 1 and loosing 2 against them. They were kind of like our twin - two paladins and a warlock.

I'm finding 3's to be more interesting and dynamic in terms of what's actually going on - there's less of chasing a healer over half of creation just to get them to OOM and more about setting up kills with your team which is far more engaging, and crowd-control is a vital, vital tool and I often have to decide whether I want to eat a CC or break out of it. I also really need to get better at my Repentance usage and being better at off-heals.

After about 15 matches, I think our strength, as it was in 2s, is against any kind of cleave team - we have so much off-healing and survival, that if we play defensively and survive whatever burst they throw at us in the first 30 seconds of a match, we have the game.

Tonight we're going to try a few more rated BGs and see how it goes - hopefully we have enough people and are able to post a guild team. Whenever I start to feel the game getting a bit dull (not that it is, what with all the trash to farm, new bosses to kill, dailies to unlock...), PvP is always there to make things interesting again.

Hyjal is backwards

2011-07-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

Ever since I did Hyjal back in December, I've been thinking about why I don't like that quest line. And I think with 4.2 and the invasion quests, it finally makes sense to me. Hyjal is written backwards. It starts where it should end and then tries to back out of that, and winds up feeling trivial instead of challenging and threatening.

I think one of the big problems with Blizzard is that they are writing on such an epic scale they can't see what makes stories good - they do not let us as characters experience struggle. And yet, it is exactly struggle that makes heroes what they are. It's in the wake of loss that victory has meaning. That is why Wrathgate was so widely accepted as a genius move - it was about the heroes making a massive mistake and being absolutely ruined because of it. It was about the loss of names we thought were immortal.

Cataclysm - and Warcraft in general - could use some more of that.

Think about what happened in 3.1 through 3.3 - nothing. Did we as heroes ever loose ground? Did we have even one setback? Was there ever a point where we saw Dalaran under threat even though it was a 30 second flight from the Citadel? Did the Lich-King more or less tolerate a Renaissance Faire on his doorstep for months? By the time we killed Arthas, it was a foregone conclusion. We were on a relentless march forward with barely a false step along the way.

The victory was not earned in blood and we felt cheated.

In general, Cataclysm feels half-done. We know why we're in Throne or Bastion - there are clear indications even if a few quests leading directly to raids would have helped, but what about Nefarian? There is absolutely no questline devoted to his threat in the end-game. Even something local to Orgrimmar and Stormwind where the old Lady Prestor and Lord Nefarius stories could easily have been done as they tried to re-gather their resources and suddenly we were aware of their threat and moved in before they could get too far down that line - which would explain the limited resources Nefarian seems to bring to bear.

Anyway. Back to Hyjal - I'm going to take a stab at it by looking at Hyjal and seeing how it might have been done so as to follow this back-and-forth swing of loss, regroup and victory.

So imagine, if you will, a different Hyjal storyline. One in which Hyjal is whole, or as whole as it was before the invasion - nascent forests, lush and green, blue streams of water, rich with animal life when an urgent call goes out for help to put out forest-fires. You arrive to see a small volcano and elementals - nothing too much to worry about but as you fight and quest, you find that on returning to your quest hubs, they are overrun, and you have to move back, further up the mountain to regroup - echoes of what happened when the Scourge came.

Over and over, you try to contain the fire but are pushed back, more and more powerful Fire Lords appear, and take over the lower levels of Hyjal and you continue backwards, imploring the Ancients for help but even their intervention isn't enough - only after all four are summoned are they able to put up a defense, but it's too late - by then, much of the forest is already gone, the forces of Ragnaros are on the doorstep of Teldrassil and the world-tree is truly threatened on all side, as Ragnaros' lieutenants wander openly, transforming Hyjal into a part of the Firelands itself.

We are left with dailies to combat the skirmishes against wandering fire elementals and rescuing druids from behind enemy lines and such - we are under siege. You are sent as an emissary to call for help, but the world is too fractured, too busy dealing with their own local problems to care much about a tree on some distant land.

Desperate for something to happen, we become a part of Malfurion's gambit - while the bulk of Ragnaros' forces are on the offensive, he suggests a daring attack against the enemy. He calls for resources to be gathered from the enemy, that he will collect and use to open a gateway into the Firelands itself - dangerous dailies with rich rewards, perhaps.

Imagine, further, a small instance within the barrow-dens. With all this disruption, the various prisoners held by the Wardens are breaking free as the Wardens are called out to battle. Staghelm is making a move, aided by unknown forces that have infiltrated the Dens, perhaps even druids who lead us in and then mislead us while they rescue Staghelm, we see the betrayal and corruption of Druids first hand - a sign of things to come later.

4.2 finally arrives and Malfurion, along with the Aspects and the Elders having gathered enough resources finally opens that gate - straight into the Firelands itself, bypassing all the defenses Ragnaros has put in place. The Avengers of Hyjal take a skeletal crew into the Firelands along with the adventurers and begin their own invasion - one of foliage. The quests can continue as they do now - we plant our own trees in the Firelands and solidify our foothold even as Ragnaros recalls some of his forces, aware now of his exposed flank.

The fight is two-fronted - the invasion and the repel - do dailies in Firelands to grow the trees, and do a new (shorter) questline in Hyjal to retake the land. As quests are completed in Hyjal, the Guardians move forward, take new land, open new dailies and quest hubs, regrow their lands bit by bit.

Meanwhile, the fight continues in the Firelands - adventurers raid against Ragnaros refusing him the opportunity to advance against the tree himself, and tangle up his strongest lieutenants. 4.2 ends with the fires of Hyjal finally extinguished, and Ragnaros finally defeated.

This keeps things very close to the way they are but it just changes the tone of things and adds a palpable sense of desperation to things - it brings a sense of danger. Something sorely lacking in the game right now. With phasing technology being so evocative in its ability to change the world, I think the storytellers can afford to be a little more risky and let us loose things at the end-game a little bit.

It'll make the victories all the more meaningful.

Post Patch Post

2011-06-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

What? I like alliteration. Don't judge me.

My patch-day-jitters were ill-founded, and though I still hold on to some trepidation, things seem stable for the time being. I think we have - more or less - a steady group at this point with only one or two floater spots and I hope to fill them in soon. We even picked up a new Hunter on Tuesday night. Anyway. Enough of that - let's talk about how the last couple of days have been.

HOLY SHIELD:
After two nights of using Holy Shield - I'm still getting used to having an extra cool-down. Trying to figure out when to use it is interesting, I keep expecting to use 3 Holy Power immediately to keep Holy Shield rolling, but of course, I don't need to. Using it as a mini-cool-down every 30 seconds is fine, but I keep finding myself wishing I had it up again right after I use it and the cushion drops after 10 seconds. I'm going to need a lot more practice before I'm comfortable with this little bastard.

Right now, I suppose I'm happy to have it rather than just loosing 10% damage from blocks, which Blizzard could easily have done and called it a day.

TIER 11 in 4.2:
I wanted to do one last run-through of Tier 11 and grab a few items to slot in those blues, and boy howdy, the nerfs are something. The most common comment from healers? "I'm bored", and "I'm swapping to DPS." I'm pretty sure everything can be two-healed with a steady and solid group (except maybe Nef) and pretty much any mistakes you are making can be covered by three healing everything and just blunt-DPSing through the mechanics. We were breaking prior kill records by a minute to two all over the place. Though I suppose it's now tuned to people in blues and a few epics rather than a team with an average iLevel nearing 359.

We finished all of Bastion of Twilight in a little under an hour and all of Blackwing Descent in a little over one hour. The only wipe we had was on Nefarian when there was a miscommunication in Phase 2. Anyway. If you've been waiting for Tier 11 - now is your time!

FIRELANDS:
The raid itself is... well, not lovely, but it looks epic, and the layout is well-designed, I'm not quite sure how big it all is, but it feels roughly the size of Stormwind, maybe a bit larger. It's on par with Molten Core, AQ 40, Black Temple, and Hyjal anyway, in terms of sheer space. The amount of trash is also a pretty shocking sight to take in at first, even after BoT's trash-filled rooms. And it's fun trash - for the most part you can just pull, AoE tank and burn it down, and when we did use CC it made the trash stupidly easy. The Hellhounds are the only except, and treating them like the kitties from Ulduar's Crazy Cat Lady helped.

It took us about two hours to clear up to Shannox without really pulling aggressively with a couple of wipes, and we did a pull or two wondering why taunts were not working (hint: they're taunt-immune) before we lost a healer and with the 2-hour trash re-spawn looming we had to run out and reset. Only later did I find out the Shannox trash was on a 4-hours lock out. Cest la vie.

We pulled much more aggressively and got all the way up Beth'tilac in about 30 minutes, which was much more reasonable. A few pulls went into Beth but we had trouble figuring out DPS balance between Drones, Spiderlings and Spinners, and with raid-time looming and people being tired, we just killed some more trash to get everyone up to Friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal so that they could pick up cloaks.

Aside from rep, there were some trash drops. My co-tank picked up the Scales of Life trinket from trash, and I picked up the Tanking boots pattern for my Blacksmith so I'll be crafting those once I get my hands on some Living Ember. By the way, the tanking cloak from Avengers reputation vendor is terrible for Paladins with Parry and Hit. Ugh. The quest reward is significantly better with Dodge and Mastery. I have both enchanted and am swapping them to see which I like better - the higher stat budget, or the purely better stats.

This is our three-night raid week so we will go back in tonight and I'm hoping we can kill one of the two bosses we saw last night which will give us a head-start for next week. I'll report back with details once I've hammered some out - likely after next weeks raid.

Good luck out there!

Patch Day Jitters

2011-06-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

It's 4.2 day and I'm excited to have a new zone, quests, new raid, and three-nights to attack it with, all in the same week! Excitement abounds and I can't wait to go home and revel in the disconnecting, crashing, buggy hell that is Patch Day Raiding! But who cares, after all? This is what we're looking forward to!

Evidently, I've been looking forward to 4.2 for some time with anticipation, excitement, hope - and no small amount of trepidation.

There is a small worm twisting in my thoughts, a dark cloud behind that silver lining, and I can't keep a bitter note from ringing through this excitement. I don't exactly know what it is that is making me nervous, what's to happen will happen and much of it is out of my control.

After the recruitment hell of 4.0 and 4.1, I'm worried about going through that all over again, especially with summer looming. The guild leveling thing is an issue that murders me dead every time I PUG someone awesome, check their recruitment status and they tell me they don't want to leave their level 25 guild. Most of my guildies are playing alts in other guilds or servers (and to be fair, I'm hiding on an alt myself lately), and I'm just worried that 4.2 will be no different from 4.1 for me, and I'll have to beg, cajole, plead and drag people to fill a raid team.

On another hand, while I'm not very competitive on the raiding ladder (I think the best we crawled up to was the mid-teens in ranking last tier after we killed Nef?) I don't really want to fall too far behind either. When I see people walking around in raid gear and titles and mounts, I start to get a bit ornery and grumpy and jealous because I know I can play at that level, and what's holding us back isn't gear, or ability, but the pure logistics of filling a raid.

Anyway.

The last tier of raiding just about broke me. It is the closest I've come to quitting the game out of sheer frustration. I've written about all my issues before, and I won't rehash them again. Running raids and guilds isn't always fun, or joyous. There are certainly moments when you realize why you suffer and struggle through it, and those moments just about make up for all the shit.

But standing here, at the mouth of a new patch, staring down three or four months of raids - I'm worried. I don't know if I have the stamina to go through this again.

Holy Shield & Paladin Block Capping

2011-06-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

This is a tanking post and I'll go on a bit excessively about Paladin tanking, so you may skip it if you're not too interested. Go ahead, I won't be offended.

/jam hands in pocket
/kick a rock
/sulk

And I don't even play a Blood Elf. Zing!
I know I moaned and complained about it. I changed my mind. I take it all back. Holy Shield change is good. Let's move on.

So, block-capping looks like it's becoming more and more important for us, as the change to Holy Shield essentially says - go ahead, if you can block cap, you can treat Holy Shield as a guaranteed 50% (51% with the right meta) reduction in physical damage for 10 seconds, on top of armor reduction.

Think about that for a second, and now think about tanking Halfus while he has the Haste buff from Nether, Think about the physical component of Cho'gall's swings, think about the physical damage from Mangle, or tanking adds on Maloriak and hell, phase 3 Nefarian just before a reset.

In every one of those situations, you will be blocking so much damage your healer will wonder what you did to your gear. After taking massive damage from the adds on Nefarian, I ditched every bit of stamina I was using to survive Ony's breath attack and converted it to Mastery and got to 99.6% towards block-cap and my health suddenly became incredibly stable.

Yes, Holy Shield will go from a steady +10% all the time (long as you were on top of Holy Power expenditures) to a +20% for 10 seconds cool-down, but still, point is, it's a good thing. It makes paladins a little more challenging to play - the good ones will be able to mitigate damage efficiently through super play and bad ones will smack Holy Shield on cool down.

That preamble hopefully makes the point that block-capping is worthwhile. Let's see how we can get there.

I seldom throw stuff out that is in the current tier and one tier behind the current one, so I have all the 346 gear still just in case, and when I went about building my Mastery set, I was surprised and delighted to find a couple of items - a ring, a DPS trinket - that I could use to push my Mastery up without loosing too many other stats, so if you have those old, or off-set pieces lying around, take a look at them for Mastery and Dodge - those are the stats you're going to want (we already have tons of Parry).

First, a macro. Run this in game to see how far you are from block-cap. It will give you a current sum of your Mitigation + Miss + Block chance:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Need 102.4 combat table coverage. Currently at: "..string.format("%.2f", GetDodgeChance() + GetBlockChance() + GetParryChance() + 5))

Ready? Okay. First step is enchants:

Hands, Feet, and Shield should have maximum Mastery enchants on them. Go for 50 on feet - you get your speed boost from Pursuit Of Justice.

You probably already have that, so let's take your gear and reforge it. Your defensive gear will have 3 combinations of stats possible. This reforging assumes you have less Dodge than Parry - if you are already at equivalent, balance appropriately. If you've got a lot more Dodge than Parry, swap the reforges to Parry from Dodge instead.

Dodge + Parry - Reforge your Parry to Mastery
Parry + Mastery - Reforge Parry to Dodge
Dodge + Mastery - Leave it alone, it's perfect

In addition you might have some items with threat stats woven in there:

Dodge + Hit / Expertise - Reforge the threat stats to Mastery
Parry + Hit / Expertise - Ugh. Same as above
Hit + Expertise - Double ugh. I'd personally reforge the Expertise into Mastery

Hit that macro - how does it look? Not there yet? No worries, here are a couple of other things you can try.

Take a look at your gems and use the following:

Meta: +1% Shield Block Value (Eternal Shadowspirit Diamond)
Red: Parry + Mastery (Fine Ember Topaz)
Blue: Mastery + Stamina (Puissant Dream Emerald)
Yellow: Mastery (Fractured Amberjewel)
Prismatic: Mastery (Fractured Amberjewel)

You're going to loose a chunk of stamina here, but it should be okay - unless you're in a very heavy magical damage fight, you won't miss it. I personally like to go for a few socket bonuses, but if you don't want to you can just keep slotting as many Fractured Amberjewels as you want.

Hit that macro - getting closer? Okay, trinkets:

Tol Barad is awesome for trinkets. This is the single best, cheapest, easy to get, tanking trinket in the game:

Mirror of Broken Images - I talk about this trinket all the time in my raid guides. Lots of mastery and a 1-minute cool-down on-use magic resistance? Yes, please!
Impatience of Youth - this is a DPS trinket, but the on-use Strength will give you a bit of Parry and threat and the mastery is amazing. Not ideal but not bad by any measure.

Hit that macro. If you're in a few epics, you should be around 90% - 95% at this point. From here on out, it's just a matter of making your gear choices very carefully - make sure your Dodge and Parry remain about even to minimize loosing too heavily to diminishing returns, and looks for those pure tanking items to replace the ones with threat stats.

Buffs:
The last touch to try to get over that last little bit is to swap from using stamina Flasks to Mastery Elixirs and Mastery Food.

Drink: Elixir of the Master (225 Mastery)
Eat: Lavascale Minestrone (90 Mastery)

That's another big step towards block-cap.

Caveats
Am I suggesting you do this all the time, 100% of the time? No. It's a situational thing - it'll be great for trash, it'll be great when you're add-tanking, it'll be great on a boss who swings very fast but bosses with a ton of magical damage (dragon breaths), all this Mastery might not be ideal if you don't have enough Stamina on your gear. But that's what double-stacking Stamina trinkets is all about. Also, keep in mind, if you really want to be at block cap, you can always take an Elixir of Resistance along with that Elixir of the Master to smooth out that magical damage.

Threat
This is probably a longer topic, but my disdain for threat stats is not something I'm comfortable with. For one, I absolutely loathe missing, I hate that I can't keep building Holy Power every time I miss, and I hate that sometimes bad RNG will totally screw up the the burst of agro I need on pull to stay ahead of 20k+ DPS. I hate that I'm so reliant on Vengeance to build threat. I'm not saying the threat stats don't have a place, I'm just saying at this stage of gear, you're not going to be able to hit both block-cap and hit-cap and expertise soft-cap all at once.

Not yet. Who knows what Deathwing gear will look like! I know in Firelands gear, once I'm block-capped and Dodge/Parry are even, I'm probably going to start picking up a few threat stats here and there. I'm aware that moving Mastery to Dodge and Parry would be a bit more efficient, but threat is going to get out of hand on pulls if we don't pay some attention to it and hitting things is actually more fun than hitting Crusader Strike with 1.5% hit and missing four times in a row.

For now, I keep three sets:

Progression: a set with high iLevel items for the best stats, at least one stamina trinket and at least one on-use trinket for an extra cool-down. Threat is not a factor in this set in any way, all threat is reforged as per above.
Mitigation: This is my full block-cap set or as close to it as I can get without sacrificing too many other stats
Threat: I use this for dungeons, and very easy raid bosses where I'm starting to threat cap DPS and that is more of an issue than survival

Now keep in mind, I probably only have an extra six or so items that I swap in and out of my main progression set to make the other two sets work - I'm not talking about full sets with different gear and enchants on each item.

You can certainly do that but that is way too much work for me. :-)

To My Esteemed Raiding Colleagues

2011-06-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Raiders Upset About The Coming Nerf,

How are you, dear friend. I am sorry we haven't been able to speak as often as we used to, or even write like we did once, but our schedules match up so rarely.

You, after all, have your three, four, five night raiding schedule, while I'm limited to my meager six hours and when I am not absorbed in a raid, my son and my wife, my other hobbies and the banality work take up so much of my time. Where does it all go, my friend? Why can we no longer just get together and ride across the breadth of Azeroth as we used to, lo so many years ago?

But I digress.

The purpose of this missive is not merely to catch-up, I confess. There is a weighty matter at hand to which I will attend presently. Let me be plain - I am disappointed in your reaction to the news of upcoming nerfs to the current raid content. If I may be plainer still, it smacks a bit of class-warfare, of the haves being angry about a privilege being passed on to the have-nots

Let us consider this through the prism of time. When the patch arrives, our present enemies, at least in their normal incarnation, will have been available to us for some seven-odd months.

Still, let us grant some smaller guilds a generous leveling and gearing period of two months (which is how long we took to get started).

And let us grant a lease for the scaling of difficulty from the enemies we faced prior to this recent Cataclysm (and let us not lie to ourselves as gentlemen and ladies - even casual guilds were one-shotting T9 every week from the point of launch, and clearing all of T10 as it was released except perhaps for the end-wing bosses and the King himself).

And let us grant, lastly, that some might have trouble with their roster due to the general lack of interest and malaise that has gripped even the staunchest and most secure of guilds (we lost 4 long-time core raiders and any number of intermediaries).

That might leave them, perhaps, only a handful of weeks or months to try and bring down 12 enemies, strong enemies boasting techniques and tactics more difficult and arcane than the ones we have been used to. It took time, to study them, to train forces, to retrain new recruits who stepped in to fill the gaps of fallen comrades and deserters, to acquire weapons and armor that could stand up to the onslaught, to teach every member of the unit to divine the enemies intentions, to sidestep his feints, to avoid his traps.

And still, some of us fight on, still some of us struggle, and still, some of us endeavor even to pass through the barrier held before us, against enemies that seem unassailable.

But what of you, my dear friend? You have had enough time, no, enough time and more, time in abundance to sweep all of our enemies from the slate, yes? You and your allies in a guild of great somberness dedicated to progressing our cause (as you care so much about the raid difficulty, I take it you are likely still engaged in a most serious raiding guild). You have been done with this content since - and let us be generous here - March? Early April?

You moved on a month to two months ago. Perhaps even longer.

What does it matter, then, that these enemies are being shorn down? Their heroic counterparts are left alone, they will be no different on Tuesday than on the Monday before the change. If you struggle against these still, you will not miraculously be able to overcome obstacles that have held you back. Your challenge will be no less than it is today.

Sindragosa still waits for us, as potent as ever, beneath the Bastion of Twilight.

So I ask again - how does this affect you in any way?

This change allows our friends - those with children, those with responsibilities, those unable to devote the time that you, or even I in my own meager way, have devoted - to face these enemies. It gives them the opportunity to see them fall, to rejoice in their own way, as you and I have. Let them reap the rewards we have - in weapons and arms, in the spoils of titles and yes, even the glorious Phoenix.

These things do nothing to diminish your achievements. Believe me in this, my friends.

I trust that there is nobility and perhaps even a spark of empathy within you and if on taking a step away from the prize you gained after an herculean effort, should you consider this, not with pride, but with empathy - I think you will agree.

Go, then, after the new enemy rearing his head to breathe fire on us - I will be at your back, at your heels, holding the rearguard even as you blaze a new path, and we will fend off this threat while our allies ensure the brutes put down months ago never regain their strength and assail us when our flanks are most exposed.

I do not wish to linger when my point, I think, is abundantly made. We prepare for war again, so let us secure what last armaments remain to be acquired and walk to Hyjal, leaving our old enemies behind.

We will meet again and soon, Ragnaros awaits in the Firelands.

Dutifully yours,
A Raider Completely Fine With The Coming Nerfs

The Encounter Journal Has Killed Raiding (Not)

2011-06-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

With the Encounter Journal coming out, and every boss ability laid out, bare and squirming, for all the PvE guilds to dissect and build strategies around, the raiding game is done, right? All that's left is execution. Might as well stop raiding now. Right?

Well...

So, we're not a top guild by any means, we're casual leaning a bit towards progression oriented, but we finish content at our pace, and by the time we're pulling a boss, there are a ton of guides, videos and a lot of information uploaded to the usual suspects - certainly far more information is available to us than is in the Journal. Alternate strategies, ideal specs and glyphs, all that sort of thing.

With all that knowledge, you would imagine we could clear content with no problem, and yet, let's look at Nefarian.

The accepted ways to doing this fight were just not working for us. Phase 1 and Phase 3, the way they were planned and executed by most guilds just did not work for us, so despite knowing everything about the fight, we had to develop our own strategies to balance our particular raid composition and our particular play style.

I don't know anyone who runs Nefarian on normal mode 10 man with 3 tanks and 3 healers, but we do.
We put Nefarian in one corner of the pit while the adds are kited over the majority of the center while everyone else more or less stays put, instead of putting him in the center.
Rather than play the rotating game with Ony, we just plant her butt in the middle of the raid and let everyone deal with tail slams.
We Hero in phase 1 to make the transition to phase 3 that much faster while still getting 3 crackles before Nefarian lands for the second time.

And it took us (a brutal) four straight nights of work to get to that point. We didn't have roots, reliable CC or any other means of gathering the adds up so we used a third tank. We were having too much trouble with fire with Nef in the center, and it took excruciating amounts of wiping over and over again sub 20% till we come up with a way that worked for us. We really had to unravel the fight despite knowing everything about it in every possible way.

We've done the same on most of the really complicated fights - our Cho'gall positioning is fairly odd, for example, but it's perfect for us. We don't spread out as much on Al'akir as most 10-mans do, instead preferring to have double healer coverage. We don't have all the DPS swap to kill Sparks in phase 2, I manage them on my own as Retribution.

All these little tweaks and adjustments that have to be made are done on the fly, on the ground is what raiding is all about. The fights require us to make these decisions not based on "I know what this boss does so I know how to deal with it," but rather, "I know what this boss does, but lets figure out together, how we can manage it."

That right there, is why I love raiding. The team-work and friendship that grows out of that is really, really hard to get over.

Exhausted

2011-06-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

I went through this last year after we killed the Lich King and it's happened again now, where a lot of folks are just done with raiding and nobody logs in. It is so frustrating to deal with this kind of thing after working so hard, and it's not like I haven't set expectations - everyone knows I wanted to progress into heroics but this week has seen a steep, steep drop-off in attendance. 40 - 50% of the raid just didn't show up. And I'm left scratching my head.

Am I doing something wrong?

As usual, I assume I'm at fault, I have done something wrong in terms of motivation, or setting expectations, or maybe it's my personality that's responsible for turning people off to raiding, I know I push hard for progression and I can be a bit stubborn when I decide a boss needs to die, to the exclusion of everything else, extending lock-out to return straight to a boss despite a brutal night or two of wiping the week before - but I think I know when we've got the gear to do something and just need to pull together a strategy and when we're wiping to enrages. I try to make reasonable calls on that end, and not just rush against a wall when we lack the gear.

If we hadn't done this, we would not have gotten Nefarian down. I have no doubt in my mind on that point - we got Nefarian because we pushed so hard against it. But maybe that's not what people want. The difficulty level of this tier is absolutley no problem for me - I enjoy the difficulty and I enjoy the challenge and the only reason we didn't finish Nefarian a month or two ago is because we had shit attendance and had to PUG week after week after week till we got a semi-stable group for about a month and a half.

And now it's gone. And I really want to blame someone or something and the only person or thing I can point at is leadership and myself. Even if it isn't some failure on my part in terms of leadership, I can point at our rules - the laissez-faire attendance requirement, the casual loot-rules - which I put together because hey, we are usually raiding with friends and you don't want to deal with this kind of shit with friends. But when you're recruiting, you look like a totally casual guild to even semi-serious raiders and they move on.

It all comes back to decisions I have made.

Now, it could just be burn-out, and people will come rushing back for Firelands, but it leaves me with a deep anxiety. Will the raid survive more than a couple of weeks or am I going to be recruiting all summer long? I don't mean everyone of course, I have a rock-solid core of people but the last few positions seem just impossible to fill with people who can raid week after week. And I know that core is going to fluctuate over the summer. It just always does - it's the nature of summer raiding.

And I'm sure those people who want to go but can't all have reasonable reason for not raiding, I don't begrudge them, this is a frustration with the situation not with the people involved. I understand that reality imposes itself onto a game frequently and with little consideration for one's plans. And when these people log in - I love it, I really, really wish they could come regularly, a lot of these people are my friends.

But. When I'm wiping on stupid bosses with PUGs, just to keep the raid group together, when I'm re-training and re-gearing recruits from scratch, when I'm trying to get back to where we were a month ago... it just leaves me feeling like I'm spinning my wheels.

Honestly, if I have to beg, plead, chase, and cajole people to raid again; or worse, if I have to PUG through 4.2... Firelands might well be my last tier as a Raid Lead.

I really don't want it to be. I really want to keep raiding with my friends. I want it so much I can't put it in words. This is why I raid - to play with my friends. But I'm left with no choice other than to assume that the raid team falls apart over and over and over again because of me and it's time I stopped trying.

I'm exhausted of solving the same fucking problem since January. I'm beyond exhausted. It's time to fix it, move on, or quit.

Tier 11 done - again

2011-06-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

My first major project on this blog is now finished. I wanted to write detailed and full guides to doing every boss in Tier 11 and I posted the last of it yesterday.

It's very gratifying to wrap up writing projects, and I hope the guides will be of some use to people, particularly the guilds going into T11 after 4.2. I will likely do a pass over all the bosses in one post as an addendum after the nerfs hit but the guides should work fine after 4.2 as well. If anything, they'll play things a bit too cautiously and that's never a bad thing.

Whew. I'm kind of exhausted after that and I'm surprised how much I thought about having to finish this up - but I'm glad it's done. Here is everything:

I'm hoping to be more timely with the Firelands guides - I'll probably wind up writing them up as we kill bosses.

Speaking of killing bosses in Firelands, we seem to have had a steep drop-off in raiding interest since killing Nefarian and I'm looking for some folks who actually want to continue raiding consistently and pushing into heroics - I play Alliance side on Moon Guard and raid twice a week (Tuesday and Wednesday nights from 7 to 10 server, which is Central).

You should come help me kill Ragnaros. Hit me up here, or on our guild forums.

HOW TO: Nefarian

2011-06-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

This is part 9 of a series where I'll cover the way my guild does all the normal-mode encounters on the 10 person difficulty in the current raiding tier. I'll cover the fights in general but also talk specifically about tanking from a paladin perspective and give any hints I can about how we assign DPS and healing.

This is a very Paladin-tank specific view, and you'll excuse me for that, I hope.
Nefarian
2 Tanks, 3 Healers (3 tanks)

This is it, the grand finale of Cataclysm. Nefarian took us the longest time to figure out and kill, about 4 full raid-nights all told. It is an incredibly demanding, technical and challenging fight and you don't really have a chance to have down-time at any point but the transitions.

Let's take it from the top.

Phase 1: Onyxia
You will need a dedicated tank and a dedicated healer on the Onyxia tank. That person should jump down first into the arena (hop onto the platform to minimize damage, and then drop to the ground and if you have a DK have them Glyph into Path of Frost for reduced fall damage.) Immediately build threat - Avenger's Shield and Judgment should both land right after each other and you can back up towards the wall to the right swinging at her the whole way. The rest of the raid will drop down right away and gather up behind her butt in her tail.

You will never need to move her, but it will make things a bit complicated for healers - watch your own health, her breath and tail lash - if breath and tail lash are coming together, hit a cool-down or ask for one. Use WoG exclusively and keep yourself topped off. With your healer stunned you will kill yourself on breath and melee if you're low. This is crucial - you really need to be on top of this. Keep her positioned like this and it gives everyone else room to position without getting to her sides and you mitigate the Lightning AoE part of the encounter entirely but you will have to deal with tail-whips instead.

Add Management:
As the fight starts, Nefarian will raise a few adds - this is where having a third tank makes life incredibly easy but if you don't have a third tank, or don't want one, you can use plate DPS or Kiters to pick up the adds. It really depends on your composition and skill-level. Keeping a DPS in Blood Presence alive through all the adds beating on them was unreliably tough. We were having luck with a mage and elemental shaman, but there were crunch moments where an add took a second or two longer to die and wandered over to a healer and so forth that for us, having a third tank gather them all in a clump and AoE tank them safely out of the way of everyone else against a wall eliminated a lot issues for healers. We used our DPS DK to do this.

Nefarian:
As he comes in, the second tank picks him up and drags him all the way over to the other side of the platform. As soon as threat is established all the DPS swaps from Onyxia to Nefarian. By this point, we have typically shaved roughly 2.5 million health off of Onyxia. As soon as the last of the adds dies and the 3rd tank (now essentially in DPS mode) swaps to Nefarian, we hit hero and push Nefarian to 79% taking two Electricutes rapidly. Make sure the raid is topped off for this each time.

It is super important to coordinate tail-whips, Electricutes and Onyxia's Crackles and breaths. The Onyxia tank in particular will be taking massive damage and I use a major Shield Wall style cool-down for the first Electricute and two soft cool-downs at once for the second.

After the second Electricute everyone swaps back to Onyxia - she should typically be down to 2 million health or so just from tank damage, and you should have enough time to push her over before her energy meter hits 100 (we usually get her down with the meter ~90 with with a third tank.)

Phase 1 Transition:
Everyone should swap over to Nefarian and quickly DPS or DoT him up while running over to their (pre-assigned) platform, and then swim up to the adds to interrupt and heal. Using some kind of resistance boost for the fire damage helps tremendously here. I usually bubble myself.

Do not take an Electricute here unless your healers are able to heal up a million or so health on people as they scramble and separate. Just, don't do it.

Phase 2:
Keep the adds interrupted and beat them down. The first AoE will happen even as you're scrambling on top of the pillars - the adds have massive hit-boxes so you can interrupt them from the lava if you absolutely have to. Do what you need to do as even a single cast of AoE plus the Shadowflame Barrage will wipe you.

Have ranged swap to the boss as their add goes down, or once two adds are down, however it works out better for you. Nefarian should easily be close to 73% health or so from phase 1 and any lingering DoTs and you can take another Electricute here - just make sure each paltform has some kind of raid damage reduction ability. Keep DPSing him while the third add dies and then get ready for phase 3. Unless you are very confident your healers can handle it, do not attempt a second Electrocute in the second phase. It helps a great deal in phase 3 but it can also wipe you very easily or at the very least cause deaths that will loose you any time you bought.

Phase 3:
As soon as you jump, the Nefarian tank needs to pull Nefarian to the opposite side of the arena from where the adds are piled up. We deactivate all adds in the northern end of the platform and drag Nef to the Southern end, holding him with his flank pressed into the wall and the raid along his side in a clump. The raid has two jobs:

Stay alive
Kill Nefarian

That's it. If you don't need hero in phase 1, you should use it here, and early, to shave as much health off of Nefarian as possible. Keep the Electricutes in mind and do not hit those thresholds before your healers are ready. This is a burn phase, but with a bit of finesse required. Watch your health and use personal damage reduction abilities or immunities to ensure your survival. Watch your footing if fire creeps up to you. A dead character does 0 DPS.

The Nefarian tank also has two jobs:

Stay alive
Do not let Nefarian breathe on adds

We'll talk about the add-tank in a minute but it is possible (probable) that at some point the add-tank will have adds in a position that they might get breathed on and you do not ever ever ever want this to happen (mostly - some people use Nef's breath to activate adds - I find it to be a dangerous option.) If this should happen, both tanks should recognize this early, and the Nefarian tank should wait for the next breath and then flip him so he's facing the opposite side giving the add tank a great deal of room. The Nefarian tank might need to flip him a couple of times depending on how fast DPS is burning the boss down and how fast fire occupies the arena.

The Burning Hell Of Kiting Skeletons:
This is the most difficult thing I have ever done in the game. You will need a dedicated healer, preferably someone who's okay with healing on the move. We have our restoration druid with me on this.

You will also need BigWigs or some other add-on that gives you very, very explicit and detailed timing on when Shadowflame is incoming - a general "5 seconds till Shadowflame lol" warning isn't sufficient and BigWigs does a good job of giving you an audio counter (go into settings and check it for explicit warning)!

The goal here is to kite the adds away from the spreading lines of existing Shadowflame and removing the adds from the location of the next shadowflame patch without spreading the fire so quickly that it takes over the arena and kills the raid. That's it. Sounds simple, right?

And if you want to get rich just buy low and sell high on the stock market. Simple.

The Adds have an energy meter that will slowly trickle down, and as it goes down to zero, they will reset, collapse, give you a brief breathing reprieve, and their stacking damage buffs will also drop. When Shadowflame (inevitably) gets to them, they will come alive again, with full energy but no stacks of damage buffs so they will have to rebuild from scratch giving you a chance to kite for a longer period of time.

Any exposure to flame - whether the fire coming from Nefarian, or the fire on the ground, or Nefarian's Shadowflame breath - will reset their energy to 100 and then you will have to deal with adds doing massive amounts of unhealable damage. As the fight goes on, Shadowflames come faster and faster, eventually capping out at once per 10 seconds making the kiting more and more hectic and fire starts to take over the room.

So. Let's take it from the top.

The reason you had them all in a clump was so that the first shadowflame will activate them all at once and give them all an even level of energy so they all reset at once. Move them out of fire a good ways, watch the pace that it's creeping up to you and make sure you keep them out of it, and wait for the next Shadowflame to be cast.

You want to move the adds between 1 and 1.5 seconds before the fire is cast just so all the adds start moving - if you wait for it to be cast before moving it is likely that one of the adds may tarry due to server lag, network lag or something else and you might wind up with one of the adds being clipped by fire giving you an uneven stack which is almost worse than having all your adds get hit.

There will be a purple mark on the ground where the fire will land but realize it will splash in a larger puddle than the marker - move the adds off completely and hold. Wait for the fire to begin moving towards you, position yourself so you know where to move and then strafe rapidly to get the adds away from the next cast. You should move enough so that the creeping fire isn't a threat but not so far that you spread the fire too much.

I try to keep the adds moving in tight arcs to give myself the space I can manage without taking any risks with clipping. Do not try to move backwards, you'll be moving too slow. You need to strafe or run straight back (not recommended unless it's an emergency and you hope you don't get crit from behind.)

You will need at least 2 resets before you raid is able to get Nefarian down to zero. The first reset is typically easy to manage as the Shadowflame comes fairly spread apart, but by the time they awake from that, you will be at the ten-second flames mark and you will be moving just about constantly. Coordinate with the Nefarian tank if you wind up on the side of the room that he's breathing on, and make sure you do not get a whiff of it on the adds. I've had adds with 10 energy get the faintest breath and all wind up at 90 and then kill me shortly thereafter. Utterly frustrating.

Once you can manage a second reset, you can typically just hold the adds out of fire without concern for their meters until Nefarian keels over as his health will be around 20% or so and you can manage to tank the adds through that amount of damage especially with a major cool-down.

This was tough and it took me a while to get it figured out.

I wound up regemming and reforge all my gear into mastery just for add-tanking phase 3. Paladin tanks should try to get to block-cap or as close to it as they can get. The amount of incoming damage you shave off is massive as all the damage the adds are doing is physical. I was close to 100% but still about 3% away from total block-cap.

Remember your healers will need to coordinate this with regular bursts of raid-wide damage from Electricutes. Try very hard not to use two of your cool-downs for anything other than for Electricutes. It took me a lot of discipline to get that part down - Glyphed Divine Protection for the first Electricute, Mirror of Broken Images for the next, and then you just rotate those back and forth. That's it.

Call for cool-downs from your healers if you absolutely need it - our priest tried to stay within range of me near the end so that she could hit wings on me if things got bad. You will need magic resistance on top of the physical damage during Electricutes and without it, you're dead. It's that simple. Exercise that restraint, and knowing that DP and Mirror are *only* useful against magical damage will help you from hitting them when the adds are doing a lot of damage.

Save Ardent Defender for the oh-shit-I'm-going-to-die and-Nef-is-down-to-2-million-health moment (it will come, trust me) and Guardian of Ancient Kings for when you miss that second reset and you're trying to stay alive so the raid can push Nef over before you drop (it will happen, trust me).

On our kill, we had Nefarian just below 20% right as we got the second reset and after the last Electricute, I just held the adds off to one side and didn't move except to shuffle out of fire while tossing Hammers of Wrath at Nef for some additional damage till he keeled over.

This might or might not work for you depending on your composition and DPS - it worked brilliantly for us, but it took us about four days to get to this point. Having a third tank in phase 3 was great to collect adds in one neat clump and was also insurance of a sort because if I missed a reset and Nef was really low, I could have the 3rd tank jump back into Blood presence and taunt two adds from me and hold them a little while longer while the raid works on Nef.

You might not need a third tank, which will help your phase 3 and with 5 DPS in phase 1 you might even be able to save hero for phase 3 and make it go that much faster - this is ideally how I would like to do it but for now, this is what works for us.

That's it. If you're add-tanking phase 3 - you have my respect. If you have a chance, do it now before this fight is nerfed to death. It's incredibly rewarding. :-)

HOT TO: Conclave of Wind and Al'Akir

2011-06-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

This is part 8 of a series where I'll cover the way my guild does all the normal-mode encounters on the 10 person difficulty in the current raiding tier. I'll cover the fights in general but also talk specifically about tanking from a paladin perspective and give any hints I can about how we assign DPS and healing.

Conclave of Wind
2 Tanks, 3 Healers

The Conclave is made up of these three dudes:

NEZIR (north): 1 tank and 1 healer
ROHASH (east): 1 healer and 2 ranged DPS on east platform
ANSHAL (west): 1 tank, 1 healer and all remaining DPS

The basic, general rule about this encounter is that you don't leave any platform alone unless the boss on that platform in casting "Gather Strength" after being "killed." Otherwise you will gain a raid-wide silence and AoE that will wipe you rapidly. Yay!

All three have an energy meter that goes from zero and climbs up together so all three will regain energy at the same pace. When it fills at 90, they will each do an ultimate ability. You can move between platforms unless the bosses are casting their Ultimate abilities. Make sure you hit the bridges right in the center with your camera faced the right way or you might be blown off course and spend time being floated back to the platform - they can be a bit buggy.

East platform
Dodge winds, attack the boss, don't get knocked off. That's it. Shadow Priests are *awesome* to have on this platform but any Priests, Resto Druids, Warlocks, Hunters, Elemental Shaman will be fine.

Ultimate: Everyone but the designated eater of the ultimate will move to North platform at 80 energy. The remaining person must take care not to get knocked off by the slowing turning wind attack and after getting thrown into the air must make sure to use a slow on the way down after being knocked up or have a way to get up to max health. Shadow Priests are ideal to stay here as they can levitate down and their latent healing will keep them alive till a healer can get back to them. I imagine Affliction warlocks can do the same and maybe teleport out of the fall damage?

West platform:
Keep the boss mobile and never ever leave him in the middle. Move him out of his healing circles and have the tank try to pick up adds, but DPS should mow them down fairly quickly - adds are always a priority or they will eat your healer.

Ultimate: I haven't found a way to keep him from healing a bit during his port to the middle phase, but that's why you want to avoid having him in the middle to keep the healing circles out or he will heal way too much. Whichever tank and healer are here should just try to burn him down a bit (I use wings) to keep his regeneration low and everyone else must be up North.

North platform:
Keep the boss faced away from the healer and move out of ice slicks underneath your feet. The frozen debuff stack will get high before the first ultimate and paladins can't cheat and bubble off the stacks anymore, but the damage isn't too bad - hold off on CDs and use the strong ones after the first ultimate.

If you goinh to swap, do so with the West tank before the second ultimate. The tricky moments here are when your healer swaps - make sure you're topped off and use a soft CD and any self heals (I use Divine Protection, Mirror of Broken Images, Gift of the Naaru and Radiance during the swaps). Make sure taunts hit quickly as you land on the other platform.

The Grand Plan:
Staying too long on the North platform will cause a a stacking damage taken debuff that will eventually get too high, so the healer and tank from the North will need to swap with the healer and tank on the West platform to let their debuffs drop. Swaps should happen in the following way:

Healers should swap between North and West around 70 energy every single time. Tanks don't need to swap each round, but that depends on your healers - if you're having trouble with tank deaths on Nazir then you should swap every round, otherwise, you only need one swap before the second ultimate.

If you're healing through the first Ultimate, time the swap around the middle of the second round right after Anshal is kited out of a healing circle so that there is no chance of an accidental heal. Tanks will need to taunt the bosses to gain threat as per normal. In this scenario, after the tanks swap, the healers can as well, once the tanks on their platform are healed up. Coordinate this over vent.

Meanwhile, everyone else is DPSing merrily away. You want Rohash and Anshal to go down together first. Rohash will go down a lot faster as he doesn't heal, so after the first Ultimate have one of the DPS from Rohash go west instead to help burn down Anshal while Rohash DPS should burn him down to 100k or so and hold off any damage. Once the West platform tips Anshal over, have the healer and DPS burn Rohash and everyone on both platforms should port north. Hit Heroism, burn Nazir down and you're done.

It is ideal to wait for two Ultimates to be cast before killing Anshal and Rohash as it will give you time to get Nezir down very low and you will be easily able to kill him within the one minute you have after the first boss dies before that boss regains all his health and wipes you.

The Other Plan:
Now, as your DPS escalates, you're going to find yourself limiting DPS to keep from tripping one or the other boss down - what we do right now, is just burn Rohash down super fast so that he's sub 1 million before the first Ultimate and move everyone but one DPS and one Healer over to Anshal as per normal. That lets us get both East and West transitioned before the second Ultimate and we kill Nazir during the second ultimate.

This also eliminates the need for tank swaps and makes the fight super fast, but make sure you have the DPS for this - you will only have one ultimate DPS phase on North so if you don't get Nezir down low enough you might not be able to tip him over within the time frame you have left before the others activate. You don't need to do this certainly, and if you can hold off East and West till after the second Ultimate the kill will be a lot easier, but when we have a full-A team with very high DPS this is how we do it.

Paladin Pro Pointers - Thanks to the number of cool-downs you can use to keep tanking Nazir with growing stacks of the frozen debuff, you are well suited to tank him. You can also use Divine Guardian during the ultimate to save some raid damage. If you lack resistance from a healer, hitting Aura of Resistance can be good as the stacks get high (the physical damage isn't bad anyway). If you do need to swap platforms, use Hand of Freedom to get through any ice patches along your way going North to West. Go be a hero!

If you're in the West, keep the boss kited a bit - do not glyph for Focused Shield as you will need it to pick up the adds he spawns and save Avenging Wrath for when he ports to the middle and heals himself during the Ultimate. Tanking this guy can be a bit messy if the adds don't go down fast enough and if the adds are hitting on DPS too much, don't be shy of throwing off a taunt here and there. Go be a hero!

Al'Akir
1 Tank, 3 Healers

This is probably the easiest of the end-wing bosses. A three phase fight, with phase 1 being the hardest and phase 3 being the easiest. Phase 2 requires a bit of coordination to manage a debuff on the boss and the entire encounter will test your raid's coordination as you dodge long squall walls that circle the plat form constantly and you run in and out of wind burst.

Tanking this is a brute simple affair if you can manage the movement - keep threat, dodge squall lines, don't get blown off, minimize the time you spent out of melee range, and keep threat on sparks. However, I've never actually tanked this fight, so I don't have many Paladin Pro Pointers. :-(

Positioning:
We use the design on the ground to spread out in an even and orderly way. Spread out on the lines between the fleur-de-lis pattern evenly stacking melee closer and ranged and casters on the outside. It looks a bit congested but when you're on the larger platform you'll be fairly spread out.

The reason we like this positioning is that it allows for two healers to reach just about everyone and the tank has triple coverage. The players on the edges on either side should be the most raid-aware people you have, as they will occasionally have squall-lines forming directly on their position and they will need to make independent calls on movement to dodge the lines. It is quite doable for the few seconds they have to hold that position.

Phase 1:
Open with a heavy, heavy burst of damage with full cool-downs and make sure your tank is able to hold threat. Misdirects and Tricks are great, but you don't necessarily need them. The objective is to get through 20% of his health in as short a period of time as possible. But you have to Zerg intelligently.

Squall Lines - you absolutely cannot get hit. move back and forth (not sideways) as necessary to get into the gap.
Wind Burst - occasionally you will get knocked away - make sure you're close up against him or you will get knocked off. If squalls are incoming, you might need to make some lateral movement to ensure you don't get thrown back into the squalls - either go through the gap before the burst or move ahead of the squall so you don't get knocked into it. If you're completely trapped - get knocked off. There's a chance you'll be okay.
Lightning Strike - this is the big AoE move - Al'akir will face a player and cast a chaining bolt and it will likely hit at least three or four people, make sure your healers are ready for this.
In addition, he will be putting out a sleet storm that leaves an icy patch on the ground slowing movement and doing some damage.

There is a lot of stuff going on and the best thing I can say is, do a few pulls. Just keep working through it, see how the abilities come out and gradually you'll see how the abilities come and what to do - this is all about experience, intuition, and a bit of luck. RNG does play a big factor in this phase - Double Squall + Wind + Slow, right after Lightning Strike, while tank is running back and getting Electrocuted - you can't do much but wipe and come back.

Phase 2:
Once you get to 80%, the Electrocute Lightning Strike and the Ice Storm go away, you get Acid Rain - a stacking debuff that does increases damage as the phase goes on and Al'akir will spawn Stormlings on a regular interval. Also, you can stop blaming RNG on deaths at this point - it's all in your hands and it's all about personal execution.

You want to create three clumps - the tank by himself, all the ranged and healers in a clump towards the back and all the melee in another clump to the side. Or you can have everyone group up if you don't mind the Stormling's latent AoE. For us, positioning this way meant only some people had to move at a time for Squalls instead of everyone at once.

Things are less hectic in phase 2 - no lightning strikes to heal through, no ice storm to slow you down, just watch the Wind Burst/Squall lines and be especially alert if they come close together and have a plan in place - IE, dodge Squall then get knocked off, or whatever. Have multiple people calling both the directions the lines are coming in from and also where the gap is (we call "near", "mid" and "far") in relation to Al'Akir. There are variations ("near...ish", "mid kinda far, but not too far", "you know how far down the neck a beer bottles is in relation to its total length, it's kinda like that distance from the center towards the boss"). That last one was made up.

You will also want either 1.5 or 2 people dedicated to killing Stormlings. Each one killed will leave a stacking debuff on the boss increasing his damage taken by 10% - you will need this to get through phase 2 before Acid Rain wipes you.

Let your tank pick them up as they come out and they will naturally dwindle a bit to AoEs and latent damage, but when the third one spawns, have your main killer swap to them and kill one. He should mark them in order of killing so that he can keep track of them (key binding marks helps tremendously here) and as soon as one dies, he should either start working on the second to get it low or swap to boss if the second to die is already low. When you have 5 seconds of the debuff left, swap and kill the second one, re-mark the adds still up (they will keep spawning on a regular interval) and DPS the boss when you can.

At some point, you will fall behind on damage as you keep swapping and waiting and moving and dodging and so forth, so if you're getting down to crunch time, call for help. If you're having to move, ask ranged to take over and kill one quickly. You do not want to loose the stacking debuff. If you do, you'll probably wipe to Acid Rain - you want the stack on Al'akir to get around 6 or 7 stacks high as you will need that additional damage to get through it. Make sure the person who is killing adds has an add-on that lets them track the debuff on Al'akir very clearly and how much time is remaining on it.

Meanwhile, Acid Rain is building stacks on everyone, and when it reaches 10 the damage will start getting a bit out of hand. Ask everyone who has immunities to use them to drop the debuffs at this point - Paladins can bubble, Mages can Ice Block, Rogues can Cloak. Everyone else should start using personal defensive measure to minimize damage and make sure you have Nature Resist at this point.

You will want to blow Heroism here. We hit it at ~40% depending on stacks and DPS. It'll let you push over that hump and get him transitioned into Phase 3 at 25%.

Phase 3:
Al'akir breaks the platform, scattered everyone in all directions and you start flying! Squalls go away (finally) and it's essentially a slightly more difficult or easier version of Malygos phase 3, depending on what you find easy or difficult.

Choose a gathering spot and move to it immediately. We use the bottom of his cloak as it's the most obvious landmark. Everyone's priority is getting there.

The tank should be aware that there will be a stray Stormling around - keep it taunted so it doesn't attach itself to a healer and if Al'akir still has the debuff going, kill it first so you can keep it going for a little while longer. Stay grouped up tightly near him so you don't get blown into the storm by Wind Burst, and have the person with Lightning Rod move out to avoid killing the raid.

You can now DPS and heal as per normal and threat is really irrelevant here. Like Malygos' lightning storms that we shifted left and right for, Al'akir has a similar attack - clouds will form on the vertical level of some player and 5 seconds afterward erupt with continuous lightning. So - you want everyone gathered up on the same vertical plane and as clouds come out, move up by hitting space-bar.

Just keep doing this and at some point you will hit the top of the sky-box. If Al'akir isn't dead, everyone should prepare to hit personal defensive cool-downs, get topped off and hit X to go all the way down to where you started. You will take some damage from passing through a couple of cloud layers, but then it will clear out as they despawn after some time and you can start over from the bottom.

You can keep this phase going as long as your healers have mana but it doesn't last that long - usually you'll kill him your second time going back up even with a couple of people down.

Keep in mind - your first couple of times in phase 3 might be wipes just as people get used to moving and gathering and all that - don't freak out. If you're getting there you can do it. We wiped a few times sub 25% before killing him. Also keep in mind that you want your graphics low if your machine isn't top-end - there are a ton of environmental effects in phase 3 and we had a few wipes to people's machines just locking up or turning into slide-shows. Start at Low and see how it goes.

This isn't my favorite fight by any measure, but it's fun, and getting to fly around the zone after you kill him is awesome, and the zone music is insanely cool like in a Miyazaki film. The design isn't anything to scoff at either. And he's totally worth killing now since they added tier heads and shoulders to his loot-table. Not the shampoo. Like, actual tier tokens.

I Still Queue As Tank For Dungeon Finder

2011-06-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

I've talked earlier about my bad experiences in the Dungeon Finder system and I'm certainly not immune to the frustrations that come from dealing with DPS and Healers who have refused to recognize that I know what I'm doing, that the way I'm doing something is feasible and has worked in the past consistently, and refuse to accept the slightest criticism or suggestion offered up with a smiley.

But I still enjoy tanking for Dungeon Finder as there are some rewarding experiences to be had - I ran a few cap-heroics last night and here is how they went:

The Power Clear
Three DPS guildies and I ran through Heroic Shadowfang Keep in about 30 minutes, chain pulling like mad and the Dungeon Finder healer was having a blast as she scrambled furiously to keep up with us. I kept apologize for the pace but she was happy to try to keep up, said she enjoyed the challenge - and her gear was not anywhere near what it needed to be for me to pull as aggressively as I did but she did great. I don't think we had any deaths at any point. We chatted for a minute afterward and then parted ways. I wished she had been from our server so I could've added her to my friends list.

The Carry Option
I queued for another one with a healy friend who needed to gear up her shaman and we got Stonecore. None of the DPS had ever been there, I was doing 40% of overall damage, a hunter couldn't even find her way back after a wipe, the healer was OOM constantly from healing people who stood in stuff - but nobody was bossy, nobody was complaining, people apologized and tried to do better and we only had three total wipes because all the people needed was a bit of instruction and we still wrapped up the place in 45 minutes - maybe 10 or 15 minutes longer than if we were power clearing but certainly not bad, and it was nice to help some folks out or get them some gear.

The Avergae LFG Experience
Last was a Z'G run I queued for with two DPS guildies. We logged in to a Paladin healer who was super shaky - which I don't mind, I tried to talk to him, but they were playing the silent card other than the occasional "R". He healed through till the cat-boss and then dropped after the first wipe (we had one wipe on the snake-boss when he couldn't heal any one other than himself or the tank). Dungeon Finder dropped another healer in and she did a great job - we power-cleared in 10 minutes with her.

But what if that healer hadn't dropped? I'm sure he could've healed through it, he just needed practice, and it wasn't like anyone yelled at him, we just talked about the fight before the pull and I told him what I was going to do, I know tears were interrupted, he just couldn't heal through the damage of cats pouncing him and when I told him he needed to be a bit more defensive on this fight and to use defensive cool-downs, he dropped. I think that's a pretty lame attitude to have. It wasn't like I was yelling and I use happy friendly smiley faces to soften the blow (hopefully). :-)

The healer and Mage were both fantastic - more people I wish I could add to my friends list.

Overall
I don't think any of those are all that bad - I've had some horrific experiences with the Dungeon Finder and I almost never drop group while I'm tanking because I know if I have a decent healer and at least one decent DPS I can get through any dungeon. This is mostly because the issues were performance based. It's the social mismatch that causes most problems in groups, I think.

Lower Bracket
I've also been playing a Death Knight (just DPS for now) Horde Side on another server and the Dungeon Finder experience at lower levels is... interesting. Every now and again, I have had to pop into blood presence to keep the group from wiping but in general, it's curious to see how the experiences are different. You get a lot more casual players, the pace can be slow with a new tank or super fast with a tank in full heirlooms, wipes are common and yet, almost nobody ever drops group. People are a lot more chatty and there is a fair amount of nostalgia.

The Hellfire and Zangarmarsh dungeons were super easy and fast and I don't think anyone ever died in these, but the Auchindoun instances were surprisingly difficult for the tanks - we had multiple wipes here and it made me chuckle, remember how I used to tank these heroics on my bear, with massive CC and furious swipe-tab-lacerate-roar-tab-mangle-tab-lacerate AAARGH style of play. Sadly, I transition out of Outland at 68, I didn't get to try out the 70 instances at part of the Dungeon Finder experience and even though I really wanted to do a few 70 heroics, I can't due to reputation and key requirements. Those really need to be removed.

Anyway. I haven't done too many dungeons in Northrend yet, but the ones I did do were okay - and they were starting to get douchey. I had a mage in one group who wouldn't stop pulling despite the requests of the tank and healer and kept pulling because, "he could."

Tank wise, Feral Druids seem the most shaky, they just did not seem to have the threat. I haven't seen too many warrior or DK tanks at all, but I did see a lot of Tauren Paladins tossing shields about (not a single Blood Elf). I wasn't expecting to see that much class (and race) monotony.

So. Dungeon Finder is still exciting for me, at end-cap or not, with friends or alone, DPSing or Tanking. I still plan to continue queuing for it, as tank, and for the record, Call To Arms has not been any sort of motivator for me.

If you see Innana from Moon Guard with a sword and shield in your Dungeon Finder group, say hi! :-)

New Banner

2011-06-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

So far, I have been using screen-shots of night-time Stormwind or from the Blood Queen's boudoir as the Blog Header but I wanted something a little more personal and I was jealous of all the blogs with their own, custom header images.

One of my guildies and old, old friend Arte who is a wonderful artist offered to make something up for me when I was whining about it on Vent and this is what she came up with. Pictured are the two main characters that I play - Innana, my Draenei Paladin and Merricat, my Human Warlock, having a night out in Stormwind and spotting someone to make trouble with.

However cool the banner is, it diminishes the awesome detail that Arte put into the characters, so I will show you the original sketch she did as well so the detail can be appreciated (don't kill me, Arte!)

The great thing about it is that the drawing captures the themes and moods of these characters that I haven't done any roleplay on in a way that gives me a solid grip on their identity - Innana's cocky, kind of reckless devil-may-care attitude comes across loud and clear (which is so different from the human I used to play my paladin as before Cataclysm, it's enough to give me whiplash), and Merricat's moody, secretive, dark nature is somehow made absolutely adorable - yet still a bit dangerous.

She promised me more drawings in the future and I'm super excited to share them with you, or she can share them herself when she decides to start her Warcraft art blog. Thanks so much, Arte! :-)

HOT TO:Maloriak and Chimaeron

2011-06-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

This is part 7 of a series where I'll cover the way my guild does all the normal-mode encounters on the 10 person difficulty in the current raiding tier. I'll cover the fights in general but also talk specifically about tanking from a paladin perspective and give any hints I can about how we assign DPS and healing.

Maloriak
2 Tanks, 3 Healers

This is a really, really fun fight. I enjoy this a lot no matter how many times we kill him. Dynamic, fluid, and challenging, but not too tough. But. He hasn't dropped my mace yet. So I'm upset at him. -_-

One tank on the boss, another tank on the adds, 3 healers and any configuration of DPS but the more interrupts and ranged you have, the better. I usually tank Maloriak on this encounter and I take all of his AoE interrupts - it's very easy to do and the Maloriak tank shouldn't waste DPS time with it.

The tricky interrupt is the Release Experiments one. Assign a dedicated interrupter for this. You want the first set of adds in phase 1 (say, Blue) then interrupt the rest, and you want the first two set of adds in the next phase (Red), then interrupt the rest. In Green phase, you should still be interrupting the AoE's but have at least one other person targetting Maloriak so that any more summons get interrupted. You do not want any summons in Green phase. We usually have a DPS do this as we can afford to loose one person on the adds and still get them down very easily.

Paladin Pro Pointer 1 - If you don't trust your muscle-memory, remove Avenger's Shield from your rotation on this fight. It has a high possibility of interrupting a summon you want to go through. Threat really shouldn't be an issue after the initial burst and you're better off making sure you don't screw up the add-spawns and potentially causing a problem in green phase. Go be a hero!

Red phase - gather up on Maloriak tank, move out far to the side if you have the Engulfing Flames debuff. Ocassionaly the Maloriak tank will get it and obviously they can't move so make sure you hit a heavy cooldown.

Paladin Pro Pointer 2 - Resistance Aura helps a lot more than Devotion Aura if you don't have any other resistance options for the raid. If the raid hasn't gotten topped off between breaths, you can always hit Divine Guardian and/or Holy Radiance to help. Go be a hero!

Blue phase - spread out, and for Pete's sake, wait for the person getting hit with tomb to be topped off before breaking the tomb. Don't you remember Sindi? Jeez.

Green phase - we actually begin moving to AoE the adds a touch before green to take full advantage of the damage buff from green phase. We hold Maloriak off to one side while everyone kills the adds then swap over to Maloriak.

Paladin Pro Pointer 3 - If you're running behind on DPS, hit wings and pile on the damage on Maloriak in this phase. Go be a hero!

If you have 12 or 6 adds in the first phase, it's still doable, have the add tank hit a really big CD while gathering the adds just before the Green phase and have them kiting them the rest of the time with some help from your mages and hunters and shaman with snares and slows across the back of the room. Worst case, you can have a plate DPS pick up 3 and hold them to one side while the tank holds 9.

Our group usually has Maloriak at about 30% around the second Green phase and we make sure to clean up all adds before burning him to 25%. If you transition him early with the minions alive and your add tank has to hold them and the Prime Subjects at the same time, you're probably going to wipe. Just relax and wait for adds to die, even if it means Maloriak goes into a red or blue phase - you'll push him into phase 3 soon enough and the enrage timer is super generous.

Phase 3 is an easy burn phase. Keep Maloriak by his cauldron faced into the wall, everyone should be close to Maloriak except the add tank who holds the Prime Subjects towards the front of the room near the steps so they only fixate on him.

The Maloriak tank should dodge the Magma Jets - go into DBM and turn on the announce - you are not meant to be healed through that. Strafe, and you'll be able to keep him in one corner of the room easily, faced away from the raid, as the fire on the ground dies out fairly quickly. Don't be afraid of using your CDs to stay alive - if you die, the other tank can hold the adds and boss for a very short while but it's not easy by far. As long as the raid dodges the white snow balls, there is very little raid damage other than some mild, latent AoE - Hero and burn him before your healers run OOM from keeping the add-tank up while he's being fixated by the Prime Subjects.

Chimaeron
2 Tanks, 3 Healers (can be done with 1 tank)

I like this fight in theory and I hate it in execution. It's entirely on the shoulders of your healers and you can't do much to help. Sure, you can WoG yourself to stay above 10% but that's about it if you don't want to spend a ton of time regaining mana. Still, it's the best contribution we can make to the fight.

Make sure you're looking at your heal comp and if you've got more than one restoration druid, it can be a bit messy. You might want paladins or holy priest to spec out of DPS to heal, and have your extra resto DPS instead. Just mechanically, druids are good for tank heals but lousy for raid heals. They can't get people up to 10k quick enough with HoTs and Nourish spam will make them go OOM. That said, Tranquility is awesome for Feud and even non healers should hit it on a rotation.

Also, make sure that your DKs, Warriors and Warlocks take their self-harm for damage buff abilities off the bars. They will kill themselves. Many times over. Remind them before you pull and make them take those abilities off their bars. Muscle memory will kill them. Trust me.

Start with specific assignments and split your raid into three groups - 1 healer with 2 tanks, 1 healer with 3 DPS and 1 healer with 2. Make sure the assignments and positioning are explicit and only ask for cross-heals if a healers group is topped off - each healer is responsible for themselves and their group first and the other groups later. It's like those oxygen masks in airplanes - help yourself first before assisting the healer next to you! Trust the other healers to manage their group.

Massacres will require quick healing of the whole raid and everyone should do their part to use any self heals right after the Massacre.

Assign one melee tank and one Double Strike tank. The melee tank will have him 95% of the time and only needs 10k health at any given point (except for Feud, of course). The Double Strike tank will take all the Double Strikes and is the only person who needs to be topped off (or close to it) at all times. The DS tank should taunt as soon as Chimaeron gets the Double Strike buff, eat that hit, then the melee tank taunts back. Make sure the taunts are clean, setting up raid frames to show your targets buffs helps immensely with this. This is not a DPS race so neither tank out threat the current tank. Sit and swing, you're a leaf on the wind, the damage is manageable, trust your healers.

The melee tank role is the one you can swap an actual tank out for a plate DPS with Fury or Blood Presence on if you really want a lot more DPS in phase 3 as the incoming damage really isn't mitigated anyway and 10k health is 10k health, whether on a tank or a DPS but your mileage may vary. We use two tanks just because it's simpler that way and because Paladin tanks bring a ton of raid utility as you'll see below.

When he enters a Feud phase, group up on the tanks and make sure you healers follow their big AoE heal rotation - you might have a Holy Priest take the first one, a Shaman take the second, a Discipline Priest take the third, etc. and if you have DPS with any AoE heals (Druids, Paladins, Shaman) or damage reduction abilities (Antimagic Zone, Earthclaw Totem) make sure they get used as well and get the whole raid as close to topped off as possible. Once the three caustic slimes go out, everyone goes back to their original starting spots. This cycle repeats till he's ready to transition.

Paladin Pro Pointer 1 - Save Divine Guardian for Feud, and hit it either just before the first Caustic Slime or just before the second. If you hit it right, it'll give you protection for two hits instead of just one and that's a huge amount of savings. If you have 2 paladin tanks, alternate each Feud. It is a massive cut in damage. Go be a hero!

Paladin Pro Pointer 2 - Make sure you use Divine Plea on cool-down between feud phases to regain mana, and hit Holy Radiance to help top off the grouped up raid during Feud. If you need to white swing for a few seconds, do that, as threat won't be an issue due to the taunts, but you really need your mana for Holy Radiance during Feud. HR is on a 1 minute CD so you should have it up for every Feud. Go be a hero!

Paladin Pro Pointer 3 - Save your Holy Power for Word of Glory in crunch moments. When you're low and the Double Strike tank is low and a massacre just hit and he's swinging on you in 2 seconds while you have 27 health, you'll be glad for that heal. You can easily push yourself over 10k - if not for the WoG cooldown, nobody would do this fight without Paladin tanks. Go be a hero!

When he hits 27% or so, you need to take a look at your timers and decide what to do - if another massacre is imminent wait for it to hit, heal up and then push for transition, otherwise go ahead and push through, but you need to make that call early and commit otherwise you might get hit with a massacre just as he pushes over and you're done. It might be easiest to get him low, wait for a Massacre then push as the raid is getting healed up to full, but it will depend on your group - discuss with healers!

Phase 3 is all about the fastest burn you can put out. Remind healers not to heal but to wand or moon fire spam or something. If you can catch him in a Feud just as he transitions, I guess you might be able to get him super low before he casts Mortality but I personally wouldn't risk it.

Paladin Pro Pointer 4 - Just before transition to phase 3, I usually hit LoH to top myself off, take a couple of hits (hopefully not Double Attack) and when I'm below 10k, I actually use a PvP Trinket to push myself back up over to take another hit (there is absolutely no need to use stamina trinkets on this fight), and then I hit Ardent Defender to take one last hit before I start relying completely on a dodge streak (unless Forebearance has dropped off, then I can bubble and keep DPSing for a few seconds longer). We've managed to have kills where no-one died in phase 3. Go be a hero!

I know I said we can't do much, and honestly, all of this off-healing and mitigation helps doesn't amount to much, it's nice to have, but at the end of the day, your healers have to do horrific amounts of triage to keep the raid up above 10k or topped off depending on the phase, and it's tough on them. Give them a hug after this - they'll be whimpering and shaking.

DPS on the other hand can really tunnel-vision and hit their rotation perfectly and only move to group up every time you have a system failure. Gather with the tanks so melee can keep, uh, meleeing. This is as close to a Patchwerk fight as we get these days, I suppose.