Hogi's Blogspot

Deathwing’s Demise

2011-12-20T20:59:00.001+02:00

It took us a couple more weeks than I expected but at the end we worked out a tactic that suited our raid group and the Destroyer has finally been vanquished. The world is saved, at least up until next week when we start out on hard modes *wink*

Many kudos to the gang for coming back week after week and having faith in all of us to defeat the encounter, despite continuing to clear Firelands for our legendary staff and the coming holidays. Here is both a kill video, captured and edited by Rokka our main tank for the fight and a screenshot after the successful fight.

Transmog: Berserker

2011-12-08T12:55:00.001+02:00

So here we are with a second finished product. I call it Berserker and it is a transmogrified set that I share between my main- and off-specs, on my main character, Hogi. I am actually still looking at some candidates for a choice of sword and board, since the character is a tank but figured I could just as well share the fury off-spec gear. The only real difference are the weapons and everything else are the same for both specs.

The idea started simply from the old warrior wrathful gladiator set. I loved the look of sharp spikes and rusty feeling. Like as if he was ready to go head-to-head with a giant rabid bear. It is also the only model and set where I also allow my helm to show. Usually I always have it hidden but I really like this one. I think it really brings out the true nature of a warrior, a berserker who will fight until his body simply too broken to continue.

Head: Wrathful Gladiator’s Plate Helm
Shoulders: Wrathful Gladiator’s Plate Shoulders
Back: Haunt of Flies
Chest: Wrathful Gladiator’s Plate Chestpiece
Tabard: Tabard of the Achiever
Hands: Wrathful Gladiator’s Plate Gauntlet
Waist: Verdigris Chain Belt
Legs: Wrathful Gladiator’s Plate Legguards
Feet: Boots of Kingly Upheaval
Main Hand: Skullstealer Greataxe (heroic)
Off-Hand: Skullstealer Greataxe (heroic)

Both the belt and boots come from old tier 10 but the color scheme fits really well with the the pvp sets. Finally the weapons, cloak and tabard finishes the look, giving it a little bit more vibrant looks, letting the set retain the rusty look but makes sure it is still not too dark.

Transmog: Vengeance

2011-12-06T16:21:00.001+02:00

I admit it openly, prior to the release of patch 4.3, I was too lazy to look for things to transmogrify. However, now right after the release I got the bug and began looking for interesting pieces for my various characters. The two I am currently focusing on are my warrior and paladin tanks. From the two, I have finally finished my paladin and it is looking pretty good.

I did not want to go for the judgment set, knowing every paladin between earth and sky was probably going for it. Instead I found a re-colored version which I am calling the Vengeance set.

Head: Mask of Penance
Shoulders: Justice Bearer’s Pauldrons
Back: Periwinkle Cloak
Chest: Breastplate of Many Graces
Hands: Life Bearer’s Gauntlets
Waist: Sha’tari Vindicator’s Waistguard
Legs: Cassock of the Loyal
Feet: Boots of the Watchful Heart
Weapon: Blackout Truncheon
Shield: Titansteel Shield Wall

It is a fairly easy set to assemble, as none of the pieces drop from raid bosses. The shield is a craftable (by blacksmiths) item from Wrath of the Lich King and the belt is a quest reward from a chain that begins at Area 52, in Netherstorm. Several of the items also drop from normal 5-man dungeons which means that you can farm them to your heart’s content. The rest come from heroic 5-man dungeons in Burning Crusade, all which are easily soloed by level 85 characters.

The only real frustration is the fact that there are many good looking models for 1-handed weapons but, for some convoluted reason, they are subclassed as either One Hand or Main Hand. The difference is that melee players, such as protection paladins use One Hand weapons, while casters, such as holy paladins use Main Hand weapons, and the two are not compatible for transmogrification. This is really annoying me because the problem persists for both paladin and warrior tanks, and especially for my personal taste, most of the really good looking models are made for casters.

For this paladin set for example, I had picked several good looking models, even farmed them before realizing the issue. E.g. imagine the Northshire Battlemace on this model and tell me it wouldn’t look awesome.

5 of 7 Hard Modes: Baleroc Down

2011-10-09T23:29:00.001+03:00

The march continues and one more boss has fallen down on the dirt road. This is no longer a DPS race however, unlike back in the day when the world first were made, when even on their DPS the guilds had to have fairly elaborate enrage plans to get him down. Now it is primarily a performance fight; master the tormented debuffs and the boss should die easily.

Farewell Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T08:18:00.001+03:00

Not in anyway related to World of Warcraft but I felt like it was appropriate to offer my sincere respects to the man who, with his courage and creativity, changed the world we live in today. For those who did not know, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of the Apple company and creator of the Apple computer passed away yesterday on October 5th, 2011. He was 56 years old.

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

4 of 7 Hard Modes

2011-10-03T15:24:00.001+03:00

So, Alysrazor has joined the crowd of dead hard mode bosses in Firelands, however, I find it difficult to maintain any level of excitement because of how easy these bosses are to take down. The nerfbat has hit the Firelands hard and a lot of the players, like me, who enjoy raiding for the challenge of it are losing their interest to the game.

I am actually several days late to posting this because I was honestly considering not publishing it. The pre-nerf Alysrazor would have been an exciting encounter but instead we got to kill a several gimped version of her. It is like someone made her fight with both hands tied behind her back.

But anyway, here she is, dead and we are moving onto the next boss.

Heroic Progression Continues…

2011-09-23T00:12:00.001+03:00

So, we started to revive our heroic Firelands progression and got two new bosses. Sadly we were really late to our progression and we are having to kill these bosses post-nerfs. Have to say it has annoyed a lot of the guys in the guild but I will write more of that later. Now I am just to update our progression status and post some pretty screenshots … or shot, as it may.

Shannox Heroic

2011-09-01T00:16:00.001+03:00

So we finally decided to start our hard mode progress, after farming for normal modes several weeks in a row, just so that we would have better gear when we began. Shannox turned out to be almost identical to the normal mode and kind of a pushover. It is absolutely undoable unless you can communicate well and coordinate the way the dogs are pinned in the crystal traps but after you’ve solved that the fight almost takes care of itself.

On normal mode you can basically ignore resetting the jagged tears debuff stacks on the tanks but on hard mode, it is essential. The dogs are not killed on hard mode, just trapped in crystal traps as often as possible to reset rageface’s feeding frenzy stacks, as well the jagged tear stacks on the tanks. It is made a little bit tricky by the fact that both dogs become immune to crystal traps if they run over immolate traps. Riplimb also runs faster and the jagged tears take longer to reset. The way we solved it was keep Riplimb close to max distance from the boss and a short distance from a crystal trap. When the boss hurls the spear, I would quickly kite the dog the extra distance to the trap and lock him in before he goes back to fetch the spear.

This maximizes the distance Riplimb needs to run and gave us just enough time to reset the stacks. Beyond that, just nuke the boss and rejoice in victory :)

Ragnaros Video

2011-08-15T09:49:00.001+03:00

Zafiere has come through for and edited a nice video from our last week’s Ragnaros kill. The only small problem is the contrast, which is a bit dark but the music and timing are all working really well.

Enjoy.

Ragnaros Down

2011-08-10T17:50:00.001+03:00

Took us a bit longer than I expected but after couple of weeks of trying, he is finally dead; Ragnaros is down. It was a properly epic battle, especially for our first kill and hopefully our guild master can managed to put together a video of what he recorded. My own decision to not fraps it was primarily based on the nature of the fight, which is that you will not be able to, really, see a lot from the tank’s perspective.

Now I wish I had though because I was one of the last alive when the boss finally hit 10% and the feeling for that is awesome. Like a lot of guilds, our first kill was fairly messy because we failed to take advantage of the second transition and get extra damage on Ragnaros, thus causing us to suffer a lot of meteors. For those who have experienced it, two meteors in the final phase is something of a goal. Three is not bad but is beginning to be pushing it, and taking up to five or six, like we did, is just insane. I have no idea how we managed to dodge so many of them, for as long as we did, but it made the kill feel appropriately epic.

Movie Time!

2011-08-06T00:37:00.001+03:00

Was high time I got around to making some kill videos from Firelands. My original plan was to take a little break between the two tiers, as our hard mode progression in T11 slowed down towards the end. I think a lot of us felt like a need for a break and truthfully, we also had issues just getting the raids together, due to the summer holidays.

When Firelands was released, I figured I would limit the videos for hard mode kills but a lot of things came in the way, like we continued to have problems forming raids and even more so because more people were taking breaks. Even now, we only have one 10-man team, compared to the two teams we had running before the summer, for which we even had several reserve spots. Now we usually only get the ten or eleven per raid, depending on the day and for a period of two to three weeks, we even had to skip raids due to the lack of attendance.

So I decided, once we kicked off progression again, to start making video of the normal modes as well, although I will not be making a video of each encounter. Tonight, I' have uploaded two of them; Lord Rhyolith and Staghelm. I will try to include at least Baleroc next week. Hopefully, we will also get our Ragnaros kill soon, so we can get on with some hard mode encounters. I cannot express how frustrating it is to hear everybody else talk about them and not be able to go and see for yourself. They sound like a blast for sure.

Anyway, I have already posted the two new videos on my blog and hope you enjoy them. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Majordomo Staghelm Video

2011-08-06T00:31:00.001+03:00

Staghelm is one of those fights that I, personally, expected to be pretty tough and complicated but ended up being the easiest fight in the whole dungeon. I think it only took us, maybe two to three wipes, just to see the different phases and figure how many stacks we can take before forcing a shapeshift from the boss, before we just steamrolled it.

For the tank, the fight is pretty simple. We pull him and then tank through the first scorpion phase. It is the phase when he deals the most damage in and a good plan to rotate various cooldowns, especially as his stacks grow higher, is a good idea. The cat phase is primarily just about debuffing both the boss and the add, and dancing around them, to prevent them from getting hits on you from behind.

A fun encounter but, in my opinion, was a little bit undertuned.

I used a very calm and melancholic soundtrack for this video, as Staghelm himself has a very dramatic and sad story, prior to becoming a flame druid and servant of Ragranos. If you have not yet done so, you can experience it by finishing the Legacy of Leyara achievement. The reward from the achievement triggers a quest that tells Staghelm’s story and personally found it really sad and tragic.

Hope I managed to convey that in the video. Enjoy.

Lord Rhyolith Video

2011-08-06T00:22:00.001+03:00

This encounter is not as much about being difficult but just being coordinated. We chose to do it with only one tank and the raid, other than those driving Rhyolith, stack close to the entrance, where I also tank all the adds. It worked out really well for us and we have since opted to always solo tank the encounter.

For me, the fight is very unique and a lot of fun. It is certainly very different and something totally new to anything I have seen Blizzard produce so far.

Slaying the Fiery Lords

2011-07-11T10:45:00.001+03:00

This is a fairly simple achievement to do, but requires some bit of background knowledge, as well a lot of patience. The idea is to slay four different elite mobs on the Sethria’s Roost; Searris, Kelbnar, Andrazor, and Fah Jarakk. The root itself is made out of several platforms, where you also complete the daily quest The Protectors of Hyjal, although most people actually only stick to the first platform and rarely venture on the second and third.

The mobs always spawn in order, starting with Kelbnar, Fah Jarakk, Searris, and finally Andrazor and should only spawn one at a time, although I have witnessed seeing two spawned at the same time. I am unsure if this is currently a bug but watch out for them. They can also spawn in rapid succession or take as long as over half an hour between spawns. When I did these, I saw Fah Jarrakk spawn literally within seconds after Kelbnar had been killed, and again Searris spawn faster than I could travel to him, at max speed, from Fah Jarrakk.

The best way to do these elites is to have a friend with you. If you are a DPS, bring a healer and visa versa. You will not need an actual tank, because as a damage dealer, you can actually solo some of these mobs, albeit being quite difficult. You also need to as quick as possible because you need to tag the mob in order to get the credit for its kill. A lot of people assume they will get credit but this is a fallacy.

Kelbnar

Kelbnar looks like an ancient hellhound, like the ones you see on the Molten Front, as well in Firelands. He spawns at the southern end of the first platform, so is the most prone to be tagged very quickly. His main abilities include charging on your allies and leaving behind him a trail of flame. So just stay out of it and you will be ready to face Fah Jarakk.

Fah Jarakk

Fah looks like slightly smaller and greenish version of Fiery Behemoth and spawns at the northern corner of the second platform. The platform itself is rather small and Fah’s biggest problem is that he keeps casting fire nova, just like Fiery Behemoth, except his deals a lot more damage and he casts them a lot more often. On top of that, he will cast high damage meteors from the sky and occasionally enrage, which makes him literally spam fire nova.

You need to absolutely avoid every meteor, because they really take a big chunk of health off you and, when he is not enraging, interrupt fire nova. If he enrages, Fah will grow in size and the best strat is to simply run away from him. The fire nova is uninterruptable, as he casts it so fast and often in this phase. If you can avoid all the above damage, you should be fine, but I would opt to bring help on this fight. Even with the druid allies from the daily quest, Fah is a real challenge to solo, even in descent gear.

Searris

Searris is a fire elemental, like the ones we’re used to seeing from Twilight Highlands, as well as Firelands, except he is bigger. Regardless, he is one of the easier lords and is completely soloable, particularly for warriors because he keeps summoning tiny fire elemental adds and we can easily get a victory rush proc from them. The only troublesome ability he has is a fear and fire dot debuff. The debuff deals pretty good damage so, if you intend to solo him, bring a pvp trinket with you and always make sure you have a VR proc available, as well your finger on your enraged regen button.

Andrazor

Like Fah, Andrazor is difficult to solo. I got some help from other people killing mobs on the area and yet only barely survived by dropping aggro and using every defensive cooldown in my arsenal. Had I been alone, I have no doubt I would have failed. Andrazor uses the same model as Alysrazor, the Firelands boss, and spawns at the farthest corner of the last platform, literally on top of where Seassir spawns.

The exact spawn point is in the air and you need dismount and instant attack him from the air to pull him as soon as possible. If left unattended, Andrazor will simply start flying around the Sethria’s Roost and will so an 8-loop until someone pulls him.

His abilities include a breath and a knockback, so you will need to get some healing and absolutely make sure you are not between him and the edge. You can, and will, be thrown off the edge and that will effectively ruin the pull for you. Same goes for being thrown on enemy mobs. If you’re top aggro holder, point him away from the rest of your allies and just hit him as hard as possible to take him down fast.

At the end, you will be rewarded with a shiny achievement, but, depending on the RNG gods, might take a few tries and just general, boring waiting.

Raiding the Firelands

2011-07-08T13:21:00.001+03:00

So, we are on our second week into patch 4.2 and the Firelands raid instance. I wanted to write this article sooner but by the end of the first week, we had not yet progressed to the half way point of the dungeon, so I felt it was not quite the time to write up my thoughts. As I am writing this, we are putting some serious attempts on Alysrazor, the 4th boss encounter and I feel more comfortable looking back and summing up the experience so far.

Firelands is definitely easier, than what T11 dungeons, such as Bastion of Twilight and Blackwing Descent were. This is a personal observation ofc and I am not basing this on just how quickly the top guilds in the world cleared the normal modes. I think that kind of comparison is inherently flawed because people forget that those guilds, not only overgeared the content to begin with, by going in in full BiS items from hard modes in T11, but also because they also had months and months of practice for the content back in the PTR. The rest of us are going in with more the type of gear that the instance was balanced for and with very little, if any, information about the encounters themselves.

But still, it is not like I have still not been enjoying the raiding in Firelands. On the contrary, I have enjoyed the encounters immensely because Blizzard did indeed succeed in making designing very unique and interesting mechanics. The Rhyolith encounter is a perfect example of this; where in you cannot actually hurt the boss himself but you apply dps on his legs to steer him around the area and try to get him to walk over small volcanoes. As such, there are no Patchwork type encounters where you just pull, and go pew pew as much as possible to kill the boss before the healers run out of mana. In a way, these are exactly the type of encounters I like because they are execution based, rather than gear based. Naturally having awesome gear helps a lot but you need to follow a very strict set of strategies of you will still end up wiping horribly.

Another interesting factor is how the trash functions in Firelands. Only a small portion of the instance is actually indoors and otherwise is an open-sky dungeon, with a lot of space and not linear at all. The entire space is literally riddled with trash pack, some patrolling and some remaining stationary. You can choose to remove only the necessary or more for reputation gained, as the dungeon is associated with a new faction, the Avengers of Hyjal and the reputation gained from killing bosses or trash allows you to purchase pretty good pieces of gear from their quartermaster. In this way, it is very similar to the Ashen Verdict, except there is more gear choices available.

The trash was a bit controversial for the first week though because it followed the same respawn timer as normal raid trash. However, Blizzard had to tweak it, so that it only respawned once every four hours. The reasons were that you had to clear quite a lot of the trash before you could actually engage the first boss. Shannox is a natural first choice since he is fought geographically closer to the entrance and he would only spawn after you had cleared that specific area. But the rub was, you only had two hours to practice the encounter before you would have to clear the same, huge bunch of trash again. You could get away with less trash by going to Beth’tilac before Shannox but it still amounted to an hour’s worth of trash, meaning a normal four hour raid night is easily cut short. Luckily, it is now fixed.

So what are the bosses themselves like?

Beth’tilac

Beth’tilac is a fiery spider and the encounter takes place both on the ground and up high, above her thick webs. I enjoyed it a lot, as you need to split your raid into two groups. A smaller group takes threads of web from adds and climbs to fight Beth’tilac herself, while most of your raid stays below and deals with a lot of add control.

Against tanks, Beth’tilac is bit of challenge to control because even through blocked attacks her physical attacks can deal between 30-40k damage. On itself that is not so bad, but every 4-5 seconds she will also deal around 20k fire damage to everyone above the web. This makes it quite healing intensive and tanks need to rotate cooldowns wisely to help their healer along. The team above needs to also jump down from time to time, to avoid a high damage AoE and then get back up quickly before she wipes the raid below.

The second phase, which is a burn phase, can only be successful if the team above the webs was able to do enough damage to Beth’tilac before the third Smoldering Devastation and it her stacking damage buff acts as a soft enrage timer. Eventually she will deal too much damage for the healers to keep up.

In essence, a fairly simple fight but one I enjoyed.

Shannox

Shannox is basically a hunter and follows a paradigm similar to the hunter class. He will lay traps, which need to both be avoided and utilized by the players. He also travels with two hell hound pets, which need to be dealt separately. The initial word we got was that tanks Shannox and his first hound, Riplimb but we found it to be unnecessarily cumbersome because both the hound and the boss are immune to taunts.

So we deviced a strategy where Shannox and Riplimb are tanked separately and as far from each other as possible. The distance cannot be too long because it will cause Shannox to enrage but it is still long enough that when Shannox throws his spear near Riplimb, the off-tank will quickly either kite him to a crystal trap or simply as far from it as possible. DPS are then tasked with slowing Riplimb down, so that the distance it takes for him to fetch the spear and return it to Shannox is long enough for the Jagged Tear stacks to fall off both tanks.

It is a simple strategy and much more straight forward to execute than tanks over-aggroing each other on two different targets. From there on, it simple comes down to killing the pets and then finally Shannox, while trying to kite the hounds to as many Immolation Traps as possible to ease the work load of the damage dealers, while avoiding the traps ourselves.

Lord Rhyolith

We originally figured that would need two tanks for this encounter, because while some damage dealers are directing Rhyolith over the volcanoes, by hacking at his feet, there are two types of adds spawning and indeed we did originally complete the encounter in this manner. However, there are several draw backs to this strategy. Firstly, the raid becomes very scattered around the platform, increasing the chance of getting throwbacks from Rhyolith’s stomps and getting caught in lava flows, the later which can easily kill a player from just couple of tics of damage.

Secondly, because we were scattered, getting enough damage on both add types was something of a chore. It worked but it was very cumbersome. On our second week, we changed it around and had our paladin tank switch to retribution and help out on the legs. We did this because, for some reason, turning the boss was a lot harder this time around and required more damage to make him turn in time, as we with only two DPS we kept having him walk into the lava pools and just wipe us.

With more melee on the legs, we stationed rest of the raid on the entrance and had just one tank pick up all the adds. We were skeptical at first but it turned out really well, because this way we had a much easier time of it to dodge the lava stream, as we were only exposed to a small portion of them. Also, the adds died just timely enough so we could transition from one type to the other. The only trick is that you need to kill Sparks before the Fragments spawn, and ofc visa versa.

All and all, I think this is one of my favorite encounters so far. It is very unique and fun to execute. You are fine as long as you keep concentrate and especially as a warrior tank I can really shine on this fight. Our mobility and good AoE threat really makes us a tank of choice for add control.

I would say that, if rest of the encounters in Firelands follow a similar success curve in design, the instance as a whole looks to be a very successful piece of content. The only concern I have, at this time, is that it only has seven boss encounters. Compared to ten or the twelve in T11, it is seems very few and if Blizzard follows their usual release rate, then we will quickly run out of content to play. Or will we? The top progression guilds are ofc going to clear all 7/7 bosses on heroic but looking at a lot of the other “lesser” raiding guilds (that also make up most of the raiding community) they were not able to get 13/13 HMs in T11. Our guild, Pro Finlandia, which can be counted as a relatively skilled and successful raiding guild only got 5/13 HMs in T11. So it might be just that only having seven bosses in this tier is the right amount.

We will just have to wait and see. For now though, the instance looks to be very successful from my point of view.

Warrior’s Journal: Bladestorm

2011-06-21T09:45:00.001+03:00

It is probably time I continue this journal, especially since the other day when I thought it was smart to link the earlier entries on mmo-c for new warrior levelers. Great for new readers but also means I cannot continue to slack. So, it has been quite a few levels since my last report and I gotta say, the fun never stopped. In fact, it only increased once I was able to hit Outland and consequently entering Northrend. There are some issues with speccing that I want to address in today’s post, as well talk about AoE’ing as arms warrior.

First things first, speccing issues. Anyone who has leveled an arms warrior in solely pve environment, since Cataclysm, will notice that there are a few hiccups in our talent trees. I’ll demonstrate it with a little bit of show & tell. If you look at the following spec, you’ll notice that we are an impasse, where we only have 27 points spent, we need 30 for [Bladestorm] but we have no more pve talents to pick.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LhbcfRMRuM:McZcaZ0

Personally, I found this a bit frustrating when I realized it, soon after entering Outland. The best choice I found was to take [Throwdown] and [Tactical Mastery], since, although limited, they have at least some benefits in pve. The first allows you to stun a target for a few seconds, which is sometimes useful when dealing with really large packs or in dungeons when the tank has problems controlling all the mobs, and Tactical Mastery lets us retain more rage when stance dancing. [Sudden Death] looks very nice but unfortunately warriors will not gain Colossus Smash until level 81. Alternatively you can spend those two points in [Field Dressing] but since levelers run solo I did not see it to be very significant. You can make use of it in dungeons but if you’re like me, a responsible player, then you should not be taking unnecessary damage and what little damage you will take is easily healable without it.

After that ofc, speccing becomes a no-brainer. After bladestorm, you will want to take two points in [Blood and Thunder], which lets you spread rend to nearby targets. In simple terms, bladestorm itself will make AoE’ing mobs really powerful and with B&T, it will be positively overpowered. Outland especially is an area that is designed with a lot of mobs in close proximity to each other, and you can take them by storm (no pun intended).

Something About Rotations

After linking my earlier posts and reading through them, I realized I had almost completely neglected to talk about rotations. I did mention something about it in my first post but in all honesty, the warrior rotation develops quite a lot as you level. At the very start it was simple, charge + rend + heroic strike. Simple enough and mobs literally died by the time of that first heroic strike.

As glyphs, mortal strike and overpower became available, my rotations changed toward more what they are at max level, which is charge + rend + mortal strike + overpower. You can still use heroic strike but I don’t recommend spamming it. If you are high on rage, by all means mix it in, especially after mid levels when mobs no longer die from two hits, and make use of it along side another ability (e.g. mortal strike) since it is off the GCD. Overpower becomes a good addition to the rotation, once you get full points in [Taste For Blood] but does not really have a big impact until level 60 or higher. Up until then, I would get the occasional OP off, especially if mortal strike was on cooldown but only after I entered Outland and Northrend did it really start to shine.

At early levels, your rotation will not be significantly different from your single target rotation, except you will substitute heroic strike with cleave. However, as you progress the same opener morphs into a powerful AoE rotation: charge + rend + thunder clap. After this use both bladestorm and sweeping strikes when cooldowns permit. Just be careful of pulling aggro from the tank and be mindful when you use these abilities. Otherwise follow your normal rotation and just make sure your rend never falls off.

It might seem strange to talk about specific rotations during a leveling process but the player really benefits from paying attention to such details early on. Think about it, once you hit max level, you will that much more ahead when you have done much of the ground work before hand. At that point you can start to fine tune your rotations and adding to it with more advanced techniques like stance dancing, proximity charge, and so forth. The effort will show immediate, particularly when you start doing heroic 5-mans and you will immediately begin to top the meters, while the others are still getting used to their classes.

So where does this leave us? The following is a good level 77 spec that I would strongly recommend. It heavily on AoE damage, since that is really what you should strongly emphasize during level up and will also yield more performance during early dungeon runs.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LhrcfRMRuMk0oZ0b:McRcaM0

Magmaw Defeated!

2011-06-16T09:15:00.001+03:00

Summer has arrived and people are laying it back on a river boat or the beach, where life is good but still, to my sincerest delight, we still managed to get people together to kill a new boss. Magmaw went down after we got the ranged groups sorted out, although the fight seems really plagued by all kinds of weird problems. I died on during mangle simple because the chains refused to stick on the darn spike. Luckily, our second tank, Trencavel managed to stay alive long enough to tank rest of the bone warriors and the boss until the DPS took him down.

All in all, a fight I really enjoyed. Has a lot to offer to us tanks; boss taunts, add control, movement and cooldown timing, and so forth. A lot of fun :D

Pro Finlandia vs. Nefarian

2011-06-02T07:13:00.001+03:00

Was about time I got around to frapsing one of our Nefarian kills. The funny thing is, I expected this one to be difficult edit but it was probably the easiest in a long time. The soundtrack was just so obvious; I had barely managed to get the video tracks up on my Sony Vegas when I thought, “this is ZZ Top… has got to be.” I added the songs and from the first preview new it was a perfect fit.

Strange how some things just work out :D

Chimaeron Defeated!

2011-05-30T23:07:00.001+03:00

Another hard mode boss is behind us, as we move on from Chimaeron and onto Maloriak. I confess that I never liked this fight very much and has a lot to do with the fact that it depends a lot on just pure RNG. We wiped several times during the night and although we had some test drives on Maloriak’s hard mode, many of the wipes were simply caused by events that we could do nothing about. The last phase especially, the tanks need to get pretty lucky with their strings of avoided hits or DPS do not have enough time to kill him. In many ways, the entire fight is a gimmick and I’m pleased it done with.

Maloriak sure looks like a lot of fun, with less RNG elements.

Pro Finlandia vs. Halfus Heroic

2011-05-26T17:02:00.001+03:00

Finally, it is online; our second hard mode kill of Halfus Wyrmbreaker. It is not immediately evident on the video but it took me several days worth of struggling to make edit, compress, and upload to youtube. Had to give it several tries, due to youtube’s convoluted copyright politics.

But anyway, it is now on and with approved music, which is the main thing. Unfortunately it was not as a clean kill as I would have liked, with me personally messing up the use of some cooldowns at the end. I actually considered abandoning the material and wait for this week’s kill, but at the end decided to screw it and just put it online, so I can give you guys another hard mode boss kill, as soon as possible.

So please enjoy and until next time. High Definition version is ofc available.

Return of the Ashbringer II

2011-05-20T06:33:00.001+03:00

Anybody who knows me, is aware that I am not a big fan of Machinima and most of the time, even after watching a quite good video, the feeling is, at best, something along the lines “ok, that was kind of cool.” However, I stumbled upon something yesterday that made me rethink, completely the power of creative machinima, when it is brought to bare by talent and creativity.

The project that I am talking about ofc, is titled Return of the Ashbringer II, Raiders of Northrend. It is apparently suppose to be a sequel but no knowledge of the previous story is necessary. It is, by the author’s own words, no about action or combat, although both are pretty good imo, but about characters and drama. Now I was skeptical, to say the least, when I read that in the video description but only few minutes into watching the short version, I had to admit that it was pretty darn good and the director had surely nailed it.

It is actually quite long for a machinima, almost an hour and a half, and took the author over a year to complete, with over a thousand hours of work that he put into it. However, every hour seems worth it to me. I found the story incredibly moving, dramatic and well scripted. The movie has both elements of comedy and tragedy, woven into the storyline and some really good voice acting. In fact, Blizzard entertainment could very well hire some of the same voices to work on their projects, if you ask me. Jesse Cox for example delivers a very good performance in a number of roles in this movie.

The soundtrack is brought together from a many cinematic sources, including World of Warcraft itself, along with the Village, Battlestar Galatica, etc. The music really delivers the mood of each scene, amplifying the drama a hundred fold.

So I definitely recommend, anyone who like machinima and a good story, to have a look at this movie. It is a victory in movie making by any standard. There is a shorter 15 minute long version on youtube, so you don’t feel daunted by the length and you can assertain, a head of time, whether or not to commit for the whole thing.

Full length movie –> Warcraftmovies.com

Heroic: Atramedes

2011-05-20T05:44:00.001+03:00

This fight went down pretty easily for us and Atramedes fell only after approx. hour and a half after we entered the instance. It also did not need any major brainstorming for good strategies, as our raid leader had come up with something quite good already and it soon came apparent that it was the best way to do it.

The most important thing on this fight is simply, controlling sound and the most obvious source of sound are the sonic bursts; glowing discs that spawn under the boss and begin sliding across the floor. We stacked all the ranged in one spot and all the melee in one spot, except the tank, which effectively meant that the discs were always choose very predictable routes. The ranged group alternated between two spots, changes every time the discs appeared and the melee simply side stepped and return to their position, at Atramedes’ foot.

The night was young so we actually got in some good tries at Chimaeron’s hard mode, and we still have one full raiding night left this week. So ofc the goal for monday is a dead two headed dragon.

Ohh, and one more thing. A guild mate pointed out that my screenshots are too small, so I added couple of hundred pixels to my standard. So Fury, this one is for you. Let me know what you think :D

I have also installed custom fonts for my achievements, so should look more stylish. I will have them also on my names and titles, by the time of my next screenshot.

Fall of Halfus Wyrmbreaker

2011-05-16T23:06:00.001+03:00

It is better late than never, they say, but we have finally opened out hard mode count and the first to fall was Halfus Wyrmbreaker. The feeling is satisfactory though, in the knowledge that, while we indeed are late, the kill is accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment. Some fights have been nerfed since Cataclysm’s release but most are still the same you can account for most changes as fine-tuning than actual nerfs.

So there we have it, first hard mode kill for our 10-man evening group and hopefully the future still holds a couple more from Blackwing Descent, before we must move on to Firelands.

Go home team! :D

Patch 4.2 PTR: Lord Rhyolith & Beth’tilac

2011-05-13T19:44:00.001+03:00

Blizzard has finally opened the first raid bosses in the new Firelands raid instance for PTR testing and so far we have seen two different bosses, drastically dissimilar from each other. I did not have the opportunity to log in myself, and odds are I could not muster the patience to get through all the DC bugs anyway, but I did do some searching and the information has already started to pile in. Wowhead has two amazing amazing articles on the two boss mechanics and overall view of how the fights are current represented.

Youtube has also, naturally, risen to the occasion and there are already some videos of those fights available. On a quick glance, makes me excited as the environments do not just look great but the encounters themselves look interesting. The two bosses I am referring to, are ofc Lord Rhyolith and the spider boss Beth’tilac. Lord Rhyolith is a single tank fight, which consists of phases one and two. In P1, the tank will be on add control, dealing with two different kinds of adds, which spawn individually and in groups. P2 the tank will pick up the boss and he is burned down.

Beth’tilac is very different, although also consisting of two phases. For me, the absolutely coolest part is P1, where she will climb on top of her webs above the raid and a tank & healer pair takes chase. Their responsibility is simply to hold her attention and jump down any time she uses Smoldering Devastation and then get back up. On the ground, the second tank will be dealing with adds, both big and small, all which the raid needs to burn down quickly or they will wipe the group very quickly.

There is ofc a lot more to it than that but all and all, it looks very good and I cannot wait to get my hands on it. For detailed information on the mechanics, look through the linked articles below and also suggest you have a look at the youtube videos even further below.

Wowhead’s Lord Rhyolith article.

Wowhead’s Beth’tilac article.

Enjoy.

Tanking Primer: Racials

2011-05-12T14:59:00.000+03:00

Greetings everyone and apologies for the lack of content on the blog recently. I have been a bit busy for a while, dealing with various real-life issues, as well trying to maintain my in-game presence. One these was a pretty bad period of migraines, which I suffer from regularly, and had to, on one occasion, visit the emergency room. Anyway, I should have it mostly under control now, so without further due, lets kick start this day’s topic. I decided on this particular subject, simply because of the overwhelming number of people who are ask about it. I am not kidding when I say that if I had a dime every time somebody, at mmo-c or other discussion boards, asked this I could buy a cool new iphone instead of paying my rent. Another reason for picking this topic is because boards like mmo-c have a problem with people posting, simply for the purpose of boosting their post count, resulting in that the threads are eventually clogged by people saying every race between earth and heaven is a good alternative.

While it certainly holds true that any race fits the description just fine, as racial benefits are not very earth shattering, there are still choices to be made, particularly if you are interested in truly min-max’ing your character, as I assume most people are.

So what are the best races? To me, survivability is the key element to search for and with that in mind, it brings out the three most prominent alternatives; dwarves and elves on the alliance side, and tauren on the horde side. They are the three most viable choices, hands down. Some people argue for all sort of other attributes, like arcane torrent for blood elves and regeneration for trolls but the simple fact is that for tanks, survivability trumps everything else. This actually favors the Alliance side a lot more because we current have the strongest of the available racials.

Elves gain quickness, 2% extra miss chance to their avoidance, allowing them to reach 100% coverage on the attack table a bit quicker. Dwarves, however, have stoneform which not only removes all poison, disease, bleed effects but also grants a 10% damage reduction from all sources, including physical and magic, for 8 seconds. To me, that is easily the best racial you can get for a tank. For the horde, your options are a lot more limited and quite poor for now. Taurens gain endurance, which increases their base health. This was actually quite powerful back in Wrath of the Lich King expansion, where EH was the undisputed master of all attributes, but now in Cataclysm, EH is probably the poorest attribute that you can increase. It can help a little, for those tanks who still opt to stack stamina, but I do not put much stock in that paradigm.

Patch 4.1: Protection Warriors

2011-04-28T13:58:00.001+03:00

Yes, I know, a lot of talk about the patch 4.1 lately. Everyone is posting about it, which is why I only stick to protection warrior’s point of view for now. There is plenty of material out there about the new instances, dungeon finder, etc. Actually, it is surprising just how large the patch was, despite not featuring a new raid instance. A lot of things have changed, been redesigned, and altered to seriously change the way we play the game.

The official patches are can be found in the following link and obviously, you should always check them out yourself and see what is what. But I will try to cover some of the major changes and give a few thoughts on them. I resisted the urge to write about this yesterday, before I had a chance to get a feel for it.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2219878#blog

There is also a round of hotfixes that have been implemented, in response to many of the problems that came out with the patch, and suggest everyone will also have a look at that.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2220751#blog

Rallying Cry

First, lets go over the new warrior utility, Rallying Cry. Keep in mind; this is actually something all warriors received, regardless of spec, so the dynamics of its usage are rather interesting. It essentially functions like the Paladin’s Divine Guardian ability but instead of 20% less damage taken, RC gives the raid 20% more health for 10 seconds. It shares its CD with Last Stand and what that means is that if a tank uses it, he will not be able to use LS for another 3 minutes. Another warrior using his RC will not affect another warrior’s RC or LS.

The utility of this ability is innumerable and is only limited by the 30 yard range. That means that using it during the Nefarian encounter, phases 1 & 2 you will not grant you a lot of benefits, unless used by a warrior close enough to the main raid. Then again, in phase 3, used by a DPS warrior, it would be awesome for Electrocute. Other examples are in Halfus, Valion & Theralion, Cho’gall, etc. To me, this ability is just great and something the class has needed for quite a long time.

Spell Block

The warrior tank has always been, somewhat, more vulnerable against magic damage. Spell Block is a 5 second buff that gives us 20% reduced damage from magic when we use Shield Block. We need to spec into [Shield Mastery] but this is hardly a concern since it is must-have talent for protection warriors anyway. The important thing is that we finally have a raid-viable ability against magic damage and because it is bound to Shield Block, it makes how you spend that particular ability a bit more a question of time.

For most of the current tier’s encounters you are not going to want to alter your Shield Block routines in anyway, since most of them do not really feature powerful magic attacks. Ofc magic damage is present but it is much more useful to still give your Mirror of Broken Images trinket priority in dealing with them. The reason is simply because Shield Block still also functions as a means to mitigate physical damage and your goal should be to still maximize its effectiveness.

Personally, I would reserve Spell Block primarily against the three end bosses; Ala’kir, Cho’gall, and Nefarian, because those three are the ones that contain the most prominent sources of magic damage that cannot be entirely covered by the trinket. There are few other examples too however, like if you are tanking Ignacious of the Ascendant Council, when he puts up his shield and does a very powerful fire attack on the tank.

A good general rule, for me at least, is that it is not worth delaying Shield Block for more than 10 seconds maximum. The reason for that is because the ability is only on a 30 second CD and if you end up delaying its use by e.g. 20 seconds at a time, you lose a lot of physical mitigation, which is still very important to maintain. Some have made the argument that, well, tanks do not really die from overall damage done over a lengthier period of time, but I would say a bit reason for that is because warrior tanks have so much overall mitigation. So even if we take a few hits without blocking or avoiding them, the next couple will again be mitigated, which lets a healer catch up. If we degrade our ability to produce those heavily mitigated attacks (of which Shield Block is a big part of) we will end up taking more overall damage, making us more vulnerable and harder to maintain.

Spell Resistance

I think the cooldown change on Spell Resistance (changed from 10 seconds to 25 seconds) is two-folded; first relates to pvp, where a skilled warrior could potentially spell reflect crucial attacks by mages, priests, and other spell casters, thus making them unable to keep the warrior at a sufficient distance. Basically though, this is not a big problem in my books. Casters were already gaining a lot of downtime from a warrior by simple kiting and using slows, roots, and stuns that a warrior had to be skilled with SR to even be competitive against them.

However, coupled with the new Spell Block buff to our Shield Block, the change begins to make a whole lot more sense. Remember, both abilities are completely viable for use in pve and pvp. In fact, I have already created a macro for my arms pvp spec, that lets me pop Defensive Stance and Shield Block and I can see a lot more warrior using that now. For pve, in viable environments like 5-man heroic dungeons, we can benefit from both SR and Spell Block by semi-chaining them. Imagine, you can first pop SR for a specific attack and half-way across the CD, you time your Spell Block for another. That totals a lot of damage that you did not take and if SR still had its old 10 second CD, it would be seriously overpowered. You could pop two SRs inside Spell Block’s CD.

There is, of course, also the Glyph of Spell Reflection which now reduces SR’s CD by 5 seconds, instead of the old 1 second reduction.

Interrupts

As protection warriors, we received two changes total to the way our interrupts work. The first and foremost, shared by all classes, capable of interrupting, is that from here on out, any non-damaging interrupt does not require hit cap to successfully hit. Just like taunts, they now hit automatically, which means that tanks can go with their best survival gear even for fights that require us to perform interrupts.

Until now, we’ve had to maintain hit gear and special buffs to be capable of that job, which especially in 10-man environment has been a bane in our existence. Many do not realize just how much in survival stats we lose in total, when we have to spend them on hit rating, a stat that is otherwise completely useless to us.

Another major change has been the removal of Shield Bash, replaced now by Pummel. There was a lot of discontent about this fact, for a good reason, as Shield Bash is probably one of the most iconic abilities that protection warriors have. Unfortunately, it was removed but to me, in the end, the importance of a more viable interrupt makes more sense. Remember, Pummel is on the standard 10 second CD, unlike Shield Bash which was on 12 second CD. Those 2 seconds shed off our interrupt lets us solo interrupt a lot of abilities, like the prototype adds on Nefarian.

There were of course a lot more updates to this patch and again, I urge everyone to check them out for yourself.

Happy gaming.

Patch 4.2: Firelands Preview

2011-04-28T10:34:00.001+03:00

As promised, Blizzard will be pushing out the next content patch soon after 4.1 has been released. We are already seeing preview videos on youtube and it does seem promising. Some have pointed out that it looks like Molten Core v2.0 but since I never played in Vanilla, I have no issues with it. Definitely, at least, looks fantastic, watching the scenery, the terrain, lava flows and mobs inside Firelands. The textures are just amazing.

There are currently two previews that I suggest you have a look at; one for the daily quest hub environment, which will probably be very much like Tol Barad, and the second preview is on the Firelands instance itself. I am looking at the video, again, and cannot help but be excited when watching the encounters. The spider hanging from fiery webs, the night elf fire lord that transforms into a scorpion and giant flaming cat… almost wish it was coming out tomorrow.

Nefarian’s End

2011-04-28T09:24:00.001+03:00

It was a very pleasant feeling last night, after couple of long raid nights of practicing the fight, to finally see the last of the normal mode bosses, Nefarian go down. We almost called off the raid actually, since the initial attempts were plagued by disconnections as the world server was having a hiccup but we figured that lets try for another 15-20 minutes and if there is a disconnection, then we will call it. Thankfully there wasn’t and after only a couple of tries we managed to kill Nefarian.

Next stop, some hard modes while we still have the time.

Go home team!

Warrior’s Journal: In the Face!

2011-04-18T11:12:00.001+03:00

I believe my new warrior character was at level 31 when I last wrote about his progress. Few days have now passed and he has reached level 48 and so far, I cannot find anything about the Arms spec to complain about. It almost seems like Blizzard intentionally chose to make Arms the early level spec of choice, simply due to the rate of abilities you learn. At 15 you got everything you needed to begin tanking and the progression supports the protection tree. For DPS role, the early progression supports Arms a lot more than Fury. In fact, by the time you get to level 44 you will have learned all but a couple of your core abilities; including slam, rend, overpower, etc. After that point, the next upgrade does not even come until in the next expansion, beyond level 60 and from this point on, you will gain fury abilities.

So if you would prefer to level as fury, do not feel disheartened. Stick to Arms first until you begin gaining those Fury powers and then make the switch. I am fully enjoying my time as an Arms warrior so I will stick with it. Actually, I have so many of my Arms abilities that I cannot find a niche to use them, except with the odd “difficult” quest boss.

But enough of that lets have a look at the spec I am currently playing.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LhbcfMMR:MZMZ0

You will notice, from my old spec, I have switched two points from [Second Wind] over to [Drums of War], like I said I would in my previous article. I have also progressed through the 4th tier of talents. You will want to pick them all, trust me. They are all good for you but the difference is in the order you pick them. The reason is, if you check what level you learn Slam, it will not be until level 44, so until then taking [Improved Slam] is just not useful. [Deadly Calm] is an iconic Arms cooldown ability, but also not very useful during normal pve questing. So I started by picking two points in [Blood Frency] and then taking my first point in imp slam at level 43. That way, I would learn Slam at 44 and get my second point immediately after at 45.

Questing Zones

Someone asked me how I am picking the zones that I go quest in, so I figured I would dedicate a paragraph for it. Although, with that said, I do not really have any higher logic to that I pick which way to go. I only have two rules for the selection process and those are 1) somewhere I have not been to yet, 2) once started, do enough quests to complete the loremaster achievement for that particular zone. The simple reason is that I do not think the choice matters a whole lot in the end, not anymore at least, as Cataclysm has improved the zones so much. The loremaster achievement is just so that, if I want to later come back and actually get the titled of Loremaster, I will not have to figure where I left off with the quests but can just move from one zone to another and start them over. Not only that, but Blizzard has done a great job in weaving attractive storylines into each zones and you only truly appreciate it in the end, if you finish all the quests and get to the see the climax.

Ofc, there are some disappointments along the way. Not every zone can be as good, as the previous one. As a human, I naturally started in Elwynn and progressed through Westfall and Redridge Mountains. From there I went south to Duskwood and continued further to Stranglethorn Vale. The problem I ran into was that in Duskwood and especially in STV, the questing became much more scattered, with quest objectives piling in and marked all over the map, so it was much harder to work through them in an organized fashion, like I like to. The Cape of Stranglethorn was a particular bane in my backside because of the bug with the quest lines where you infiltrate the bloodsails. If you follow on my footsteps, make sure that after you start, do not logout before you have finished defending Booty Bay. The reason is that if you logout while you are friendly with the bloodsails, they will be marked hostile again after you come back in. They will not attack you but you cannot return any quests either. The only way I managed to reset it was to visit Kalimdor and come back, and I had to do that twice.

After STV, I figured Thousand Needles would be another fun place to visit, and it definitely was. I fully enjoyed questing in the area, even if some of the quests were rather annoying. The speedbarge was confusing to navigate, at first, and the mobs on the shore that throw alcoholic beverages at you… ohh man. Ever tried to swim when your character is drunk? It does not work. I am also notoriously bad at reading quests and just clicked “whateva” when they pop up. If I had read them better, I would have noticed that I had my own private speed boat at my disposal the whole time and would not have had to swim from A to B, to C, to D, to E, to F … and to P.

A true derp moment…

Warrior Training

The last tip of the day I can give you is to do not fret about visiting your trainer regularly. Always be aware of what you would be gaining and if the ability has no bearing on your current situation, postpone it. You will not find trainers at every corner and flying over to one and back can be rather time consuming. Some good and iconic abilities, ofc, you should go pick up but you can mostly go on for half a dozen levels at a time without any need to train in between.

That is all I have for now. Stay tuned and feel free to e-mail with feedback or leave a comment on the post. I will check regularly to approve them and I really cannot stress enough how much I would prefer to get those comments. That is what the system is there for :)

Binary Hard Modes

2011-04-17T20:40:00.001+03:00

I have a lot of topics I have wanted to write about for quite some time and this is definitely one of them. To those who do not know the term; binary hard modes are what is referred to as switching from normal to hard mode encounters, in World of Warcraft raiding. The name derives from binary numbers, as computers understand them, 1s and 0s and the fact that to alternate between the difficulty levels you only need to basically flip a switch.

As a concept itself, we saw a lot of experimentation by Blizzard during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, as hard modes only did their debut in the Ulduar raid dungeon, released 3.1 patch. Until then, in the Naxxramas “reloaded” the difficulty level was only based on raid sizes; 10- and 25-man, with the larger raid size sporting slightly more difficult encounters. Until then, hard modes did not really exist. In TBC everything was, essentially, hard mode. There really was not much distinction for the more casual player and the more hard core, progression raider and everything was the same.

I do not know a lot of people who dislike the separation of normal and hard mode, although a few have come across, who basically think everything should be hard mode, like it was in TBC but that’s, in my opinion, just silly. The very reason to create such a division was to let less skilled players stick to easier content and the really hard stuff is targeted at the more skilled players. It is a great idea actually, but the problem is, as usual, implementation. I have spoken with a lot of people about this and a majority of them agree that the current, binary system is bad.

Why is it bad?

Because it is not just boring but basically forces raiders to complete the dungeons twice. We saw that in Icecrown Citadel, where most raiders were so sick of the system and running the same encounters over, and over again, on whichever difficulty level. Cataclysm narrowed it down a bit by making 10- and 25-man raids equal in difficulty, so there are only two levels of challenge now. However, personally I think the original, Ulduar hard modes were the most interesting. Instead of just a flipping switch, you would issue an encounter by completing a specific mechanic within the fight. For example, on Freya you would not kill any of the three guardian treants before pulling her and thus allow Freya to gain new abilities from the guardians, or on XT-002, you would wait for the heart phase and then DPS the heart to zero hit points to start the hard mode.

To me, they were much more interesting and fun to do, rather just switch between normal and hard outside the instance. The only problem I can foresee about this method is that players might not be fully aware what is a hard mode and what is just an achievement because, lets face it, they mix together quite seamlessly. Then there is also, ofc, the fact that Blizzard would be pressured to come up with these unique mechanics, which while might not sounds difficult at first, but is always one more thing to add to an encounter and Blizzard is having problem coming up with new stuff as it is. I do not mean that as a derogatory remark, but simply an observation that a lot of the encounters recycle ideas. They might be slightly polished or minutely altered, but essentially still the same.

A good example is the “Marrowgar” encounter in Halls of Origination, or the Aegis Shield on the fire boss of Ascendant Council that demonstrates a lot of similarities to the Twin Valkyr encounter in the old ToC raid. However, I still think it would be more interesting to see the Ulduar type of hard modes and more to the point, more variety between hard more and normal mode loot. This is a pretty big issue actually because right now, once you figure out the BiS list for your spec, you can just farm it and then you simply aim for the heroic versions of those items. Once again, Ulduar showed a much more interesting method where as the hard mode loot were completely different to the items that dropped if you did the encounter on normal mode.

To be completely honestly, I think Blizzard has done a mistake in moving away from the Ulduar style dungeon. I love the fact that dungeons are smaller now but many things would be elevated to a higher level if Blizzard brought back the lessons learned in Ulduar. It is still widely held as the most balanced and well designed dungeon thus far in the game or at the very least since WotLK came out, and what is there not to like? It was stunningly beautiful, encounters were amazingly well designed, balanced through as you progressed deeper into the dungeon, and featured many things for the first time; such as a hard mode only boss, Algalon. I never got to kill him and even now, today, I wish to go back and simply experience it.

Now the logic of these type of hard modes is not solely to make them more interesting to play, but to avoid necessary repetition of normal and hard modes. Granted, most players will have to first complete and farm the normal modes for the necessary gear, in order to even have a chance at running hard modes. However, the world top guilds, and I am not just talking about the first ten but the first hundred, or even further than that, did not farm normal modes before moving to the hard modes. Even now in tier 1 of Cataclysm they simply did not have the time as they were racing for world and server firsts at killing those encounters. They have the skill and creativity to actually jump into normal modes with inferior gear, run them through and hop onto hard modes and just gear themselves by doing those, skipping normal modes altogether and bypassing the artificial block.

Think of how much more interesting could be if you could have gone to the Bastion of Twilight, progressed to Cho’gall and instead of killing of farming the first bosses needlessly for a couple of weeks, as you practiced the last boss, and tried your hand at Halfus HM. You could even benefit from killing a first hard mode boss, get gear from that, before moving onto the last boss. At least to me, that would be awesome.

Warrior’s Journal: Charge!

2011-04-15T20:32:00.001+03:00

I have been gnawed upon by a problem with my main warrior character for quite sometime now and that is the limitations of dual speccing in World of Warcraft. I can see Blizzard's logic when they explain why they do not want to add options to maintain more than two permanent specs per character, the way that Rift, for example, allows. However, I am currently joggling to keep track of three tanking specs and two fury specs, one for pvp and one for pve. With the new 4.1 changes that are coming around, looks like I am finally forced to switch my pvp spec to arms, adding even more complications.

Some, more politically correct players would tell you that it is already a waste of time to play fury pvp, simply due to how easy it is to counter. But still, I enjoy the fury spec in all its forms, which is why the change is coming with a heavy heart. With that in mind I have decided to separate my pvp and pve into different characters. That way I can devote each character more fully into the task which I am designing it. That is not just good for me but more than fair for my guild and arena partner.

I have already leveled a couple of characters in Cataclysm but none of them were warriors and I figured would be a fun idea to keep something of a journal through the progress. I actually once planned on doing a similar, more mechanical journal for leveling a protection warrior and I might still return that, perhaps depending on my experiences with this journal.

Choosing a Realm

I chose to level my warrior on Neptulon, a pvp realm where I had the most access to heirlooms, and also because I more in my element when playing on a pvp realm. This is an important decision though and you should not adopt for a pvp realm unless you are comfortable with the fact that, from time to time, members of the opposite factions will jump at the chance to kick your parts around the landscape. However, do keep in mind that the legends surrounding pvp realms are largely exaggerated and often blown out of proportion by explosive examples. It is all true ofc; you are as likely to be attacked by those of your level and those above you, for other reason but to kill you for fun of it. Some max level players go hunting for low level players.

But still, it happens a lot less frequently then people are letting on. I remember leveling my main character, a warrior on a pvp realm, as well as other characters, like my mage and hunter. In all cases, I got attacked maybe a handful of times between levels 1 and 80. From those times, it was rarely by anyone who was actually good at pvp and mostly I would just kill them and go on with my questing.

Choosing a Spec

For now, I have reached level 31 inside two days of leveling and my choice of spec is naturally Arms. I am unsure how fury plays at lower levels these days but my previous experiences did demonstrate an alarming lack of rage. I do not want to go through that again so I specced arms and it is working out quite well. Without dual wielding, hitting targets is easy and mostly die within two globals. For the specific talent selection, so far I have distributed my points in the following manner:

War Academy & Blitz: This was an easy choice because both contribute to my damage and the more I can deal, the faster I can move onto the next quest.

Second Wind & Deep Wounds: This was a bit more tricky; [Deep Wounds] was obvious but [Second Wind] is only a placeholder talent for now, until I finally learn pummel. When that happens, I will switch the two points over to [Drums of War]. Second Wind is still a good choice if you do more battlegrounds than I, but is inferior for free interrupts. Not only is the rage you save valuable but at lower level pvp, if you get stunned, you are most likely going to die.

It is just a simple fact. I have been doing a couple of battlegrounds so far and the experience speaks loud and clear; the classes are not well balanced. Even an heirloom geared player can get 2-3 and if the opponent can stun or kite you, it is game over.

Taste For Blood & Impale: So far this has been the hardest tier to choose between my talents and again, if you opt to play more battlegrounds than I, suggest you alternate your choices a little bit. Hamstring is pretty useless for questing, so I left it out, same as [Sweeping Strikes]. That was a painful choice and I might actually still go back to put a sixth point in this tier. Especially once I start hitting more dungeons, Sweeping Strikes will do some good damage. Just for questing however, I figured getting those overpower procs would be more valuable.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#Lhbf0M:MZMZ0

I will continue the spec as I gain more levels.

Dungeons

Especially if you have access to a ton of heirlooms and a high level guild, doing dungeons between quests is a perfectly valid way to level up. There are quests at the beginning of every dungeon and most of them are still extensive enough to hold a lot of trash, multiplying the amount of XP you will gain. My first Wailing Caverns run gained me two complete levels, after I had returned the quests. You will also get some gear that helps out with quests in the world, reputation, and just simply bring a change of pace to your routine.

However, be warned. If you have ever experienced bad dungeon runs at max level (which I assume you have if you have ever used the LFD tool before), expect it to be worse at low levels. People have close to no patience, ninja pull at random, and care little whether the tank is ready or the healer has enough mana. Granted, much of the early dungeons like Deadmine do not even need a tank but courtesy should still be paid no matter what. I generally do not grind gear or run a lot of dungeons as I level, but just enough to complete the quests in the dungeons and to get the daily extra XP from random queue.

Getting On With It

There is not a whole lot else that can be said about it. Just get in there and start completing quests. The nice thing about the warrior class is the fact that you get some of the most iconic abilities early on. Both charge and rend, I believe, became available before I had left the starting zone. Soon I also gained overpower and heroic strike, both which I use regularly. My main opener is charge + rend + HS. By that time, most mobs die anyway and I rarely ever drop to zero rage. I have enough to spare for a quick overpower and mortal strike if necessary.

Overpower could very well become more prevalent when I gain three points in the Taste for Blood talent because it lets me proc it from rend. All and all, I cannot find anything wrong with my leveling process so far. Since the Cataclysm revamp, Blizzard obviously made a lot of adjustments to what level and order you gain your abilities and I really cannot complain. The warrior is equally ready to function as a DPS or tank once you hit level 15. Both are viable options.

Classic vs. Modern

2011-04-13T09:07:00.001+03:00

I see a lot of posts about this subject; close to every day in fact and decided it was time to write about it. If you are even remotely familiar with what goes on in the official World of Warcraft forums, or have even a passing interest at various different boards, such as mmo-c, then you shouldn’t be a stranger to posts that pine for the return of vanilla WoW, or similarly TBC. An innumerable number of posts have asked Blizzard to establish vanilla and TBC servers, just for those who liked those times of the game.

First of all, to get out of the system, Blizzard has so far refused and I completely agree with their reasoning. The simple fact is that the game has evolved, for the better in many cases (no matter what the critics say) and they prefer to keep the game going forward, instead of maintaining versions of the game that are outdated and outright flawed from their perspective.

Secondly, and this is the part that I feel people should remember, is that when people post stuff like “ohh but things so much better back then, there was an actual challenge to the game…” they are not really being perfectly honest with themselves. It is not actually just a World of Warcraft phenomenon, but human nature to often pine for the return of the old, by the assumption that it was somehow better. I remember when I, once upon a time, did a summer job as a janitor, I got all these old people coming to me (and my boss) to complain how I was doing it wrong and the old guy was much better than I was. I talked with the actual janitors there about it and who simply laughed and told me not to worry about it, that the old guy got the exact same flack I got. Apparently he had not been any better than I was, nor doing anything a whole lot differently. It is simply the human nature to endlessly complain and even make up logic to support their ridiculous argument.

Now I am not saying that, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the old expansions had their moments and many people rightfully enjoyed it but lets try to take some of the more valid arguments and consider them from a logical perspective.

#1 The Game was more challenging, as a whole.

I really doubt it actually was. Many things are a bit easier to accomplish in the modern game, like grind the necessary reputation to buy items from faction vendors. Back in vanilla it could possibly take months to just get one item, but that isn’t really challenging and it is the main pitfall of these arguments; that they assume grinding is difficult. It isn’t. It simply takes a lot of time which is just outright boring. The game has lost a lot of the grindiness (probably not a word but I’ll use it anyway) and that is a good thing. It can still take anything from 2-4 weeks to grind a single faction to exalted. I know Baradin Wardens took me a long time and so did the original Sons of Hodir faction in Wrath of the Lich King. Lets remember, a month of doing dailies every day is a long time and, at least in my opinion, anything beyond that is just excessive, particularly when that only pertains to one faction, out of half a dozen in current content.

#2 40-man raids were much more epic

Were they really? The reason why Blizzard changed the raid format down to 10- and 25-man was the simple fact that in most cases, it was not actually 40 people raiding. It was more like 20-25 who were raiding and the rest were just sitting on their hands, and getting carried. Not to mention the whole organizational nightmare of actually getting 40 people to show up on time for regular raids, to gear them up and have them perform optimally. How many guilds nowadays, have a problem with putting together and maintaining 25 skilled players? Most average guilds have to work in 10-man and even then, many still have problems. Now build that up to 40 people and you have a raid leader’s nightmare.

#3 Raid encounters are just a joke these days

No they are not. If you actually look at most of the encounters in vanilla for example, they are not very complex. By comparison, modern raid encounters have a lot more things going on simultaneously; where as vanilla encounters have relatively few. For example, the heroic lich king encounter in Icecrown Citadel has been described (by many world top guilds) as the most complex and difficult encounter thus far, a statement I personally agree. Much of the so called “challenge” actually came from the fact that you were most like utterly under geared for the encounter and that itemization was not ideal, by any stretch, back then. Some mechanics were also just outright broken; like healers down ranking their spells, tanks not truly having much in terms of aoe abilities, etc. Not to mention variety and game balance issues between classes.

#4 No more class specialization

When I heard this, I was just bewildered. The fact that in vanilla you might have had the need to, specifically, bring something like a dwarf priest just to get fear ward and some specs were not viable for raiding at all. So if you wanted to raid, e.g. as a paladin tank in TBC you had just an enormous world of hurt ahead of you because, at the time, and especially during vanilla, you only one viable option. Same goes for the healers. Now, we have four viable tanking specs and five viable healing specs. To me, this is awesome and lets people play the class that truly interests them. Many other things were actually simply broken in the game at the time. Just consider pvp in vanilla, where some classes were just useless and others were close to gods. Warlocks for instance could use detect invisibility to see through stealth. Some go the distance and say that literally half the game was broken, in one way or another.

Really, the whole nostalgia for old content seems to play more to the selfish need of importance to me. Too many are too proud of themselves for the sheer fact that "they started the game back in the day” as if that somehow made them better than others. The comedy of it all becomes obvious when you realize that, while many did started back then, they did not actually clear that much content. But still… they were there so it has to for something right?

Last but not least, by Blizzard’s own words, we know that this is not what the game was suppose to be in the first place. There are countless blues on the forums, trying desperately to make sink into peoples’ consciousness that the game was not supposes to be an effort in pain management. It was not supposed to be masochistic and all the changes the game has had ever since have been working towards the goal of getting away from that. Lets remember that a lot of the Blizzard designers came from old games like Everquest and the whole point of World of Warcraft was to step away from that style of gaming.

Tanking Primer: Combat Table

2011-04-12T17:09:00.003+03:00

This article will be targeted primarily towards warrior and paladin tanks, because out of the four classes, these two sport shields and thus use the block stat. DKs and druids have their own unique mechanics in dealing with damage reduction, in the form of blood shield and savage defense. To them, knowledge of the combat table is less important but still good to know, if you want to continue reading.

In its simplicity, combat table is a mechanic within the World of Warcraft game engine, used to determine if a mob scores a successful hit or not. Every time you attack, or are being attacked, the game rolls a random number between 0 and 100 and checks it against the combat table. As a tank, it is important that you are aware of what your combat table looks like. Put into a cohesive list, it looks like this:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Hit

There are additional entries on the combat table as well, such as Glancing Blow, Critical Hit, and Crushing Blows. However, as a tank you will have specced into talents such as Bastion of Defense (every tanking tree has its own version of this talent and picking it up is the first prerequisite to becoming a tank), which removes critical hits from the table and the chance for Crushing Blows was removed with the TBC expansion. Glancing blows only occur with white attacks (term used for autoattacks) and are not relevant in the context of this article.

If you look at your character sheet’s defensive stats, you will see four of the five stats listed there. The first, miss chance is always 5% and does not normally change, unless you are a night elf and receive the Quickness racial ability. Once you fill the combat table with the values of your character sheet, you should have a good idea what kind of hits you will be suffering. As an example, I will fill in my own current stats and the end result looks like this:

0% – 5% to miss
5.01% – 16.6% to dodge
16.61% – 31.94% to parry
31.95% – 93.29% to block
93.30% – 100% to hit

Notice how as our stats increase, the chance for normal hits (at the bottom) grows smaller and smaller? Since those are the hits that deal the most damage to us, our goal is to minimize, and ultimately remove, their chances of occurring. Eventually block will completely replace the chance for normal hits and since mastery has no diminishing returns, it is by far our very best stat. However, before you get all excited, there is a final snag to the combat table; the numbers you see above, only apply against mobs that are the same level as I am (alas level 85). Heroic dungeon bosses are ranked level 87 and raid bosses are ranked a step higher, level 88. This introduces a 0.2% less chance, for every level the mob is above you, for the mob’s attack to miss, get dodged, parried, and blocked, thus skewing the table by 0.6% on each stat (a total of 2.4%).

Taking this into account, against a raid boss, in truth my combat table looks like this:

0% – 4.4% to miss
4.41% – 15.4% to dodge
15.41% – 30.14% to parry
30.15% – 90.89% to block
90.9% – 100% to hit

It is something of an oversight in my opinion, as to why the character sheet does not take this into account. Blizzard could very easily include this feature, the same way they included a similar element on the hit rating (breaking it down to show different chances of hitting different level mobs). The easiest way for us to implement this last factor is to simply move the finishing line and instead of using 100% as the roof, use 102.4%. That means there is still a 9.1% chance for a raid boss to land normal hits on me. This is not bad by any means, but more work still remains to reach unhittable (a term used when normal hits can no longer occur). For a warrior tank, it is currently not a position that is possible to reach, even with the BiS hard mode gear. Paladins however, receive more block from mastery and have been able to reach the cap for months now. Warriors should not be far behind, once the patch 4.2 is released and we move onto the next tier of content. Some applications also take the additional chance to hit into account, such as Rawr. So if you use one, do not be alarmed if you cannot get the stats between your World of Warcraft client and the program to match up.

When spoken generally, on discussion boards, combat table coverage is often simply described as a figure that is the total chance for a hit to be avoided or block, thus; 5% miss + dodge-% + parry-% + block-%. In my case, that would be 93.3%. This is the most common way total avoidance and mitigation is described and is the value we are most interested in. Of course, understanding of the combat table is also important for other variety of reasons; e.g. gimmick fights like Chimaeron encounter of Blackwing Descent, which favors pure avoidance over block and mastery.

Tanking Primes: Intro

2011-04-11T18:29:00.001+03:00

Those who follow the mmo-c forums regularly, know I post there quite a lot, and most notably on subject of tanking mechanics. The problem is that, unlike some other sites, mmo-c doesn’t really have a good method in place to filter out repeated topics and we end up writing a lot of material over and over, and that’s quite draining. So I decided to start a tanking primer on my blog, to try cover some of the more common tanking mechanics.

Now before you mail about how the stuff I’ll be covering is basic and obvious, spare me. I am not trying to educate the educated, but teach the ignorant. It might make me sound a bit like a douche, but I do not use the word in a degratory manner. The simple fact is that a lot of tanks, even those who clear a lot of content, do not fully understand how their stats and mechanics work. E.g. if I had a penny every time the combat table is explained on the mmo-c forums, I could retire to the Bahamas.

In a way, this is not complicated stuff but then again, most of the tank theorycrafting isn’t overly complex, unless you get to the math of it all; e.g. how to figure the optimal benefits of parry and dodge, without suffering from DR and still taking Hold the Line into account. I might get to that as well, but I will start by covering the simpler mechanics and just see where it takes me. After all, lets face it, you don’t need to understand that stuff to be a good tank and unless you are really into that sort of thing, you will most likely only waste your time.

That brings us to the actual target audience of these articles; they will mainly be targeted at tanks of all flavors, but obviously less for others, due to diversity between the classes. Also, I play a warrior tank, so my main focus will be around mechanics that affect me personally. But like I said, there will be something for everyone.

So, stay tuned.

Training Ground

2011-04-09T19:46:00.001+03:00

Still over half an hour until the next Tol Barad encounter, so I have plenty of time to write down some thoughts on 5-man encounters. It is a subject that has been up on the forums quite a bit now and even come up on Mumble, along with some guildies. I am certain nobody is a stranger to the trend, lets bash bad players in 5s. After all, it makes you look good and powerful because you get to compare yourself against people with lower skill levels, not to mention earn free prestige amongst peers.

Here is the thing though and I will endeavor to say this as clearly as I can; it is wrong. Not only is simple, useless bravado but at the same time, you are just making yourself look like a tool. Why? Because most people will then go right off to moaning how there are no good players in the random queues. This bewilders me because if they go out of their way to piss on and kick the new players, how do they expect there to ever to be an improvement? Think about it, 5-mans are not that serious and while they are certainly more challenging then what they were in Wrath of the Lich King, you can just blow through them with little to no effort.

That means 5-man dungeons are the perfect training grounds for new players. In fact, they are the only training grounds available. Nobody learns to play their class while they level. They might pick up a few things while on the random dungeons queue before the level cap, or the top normal 5-mans dungeons but let us be realistic, at best you pick up a basic concept for your DPS or TPS rotations. You won’t learn about CC, LoS, complicated boss mechanics, survivability, or any other skills needed to be successful on a more serious level.

So if we are to have any hope of ever training new players, to actually expect them to excel at the game, we much allow them the opportunity to practice in those heroic 5-man dungeons. It will, beyond the shadow of a doubt slow down our valor point runs, ask us for patience as they figure stuff out, wipe a few times, pull back on DPS and push out more HPS, but it is simply a necessary hurtle that we cannot avoid. We seriously cannot expect people to just magically learn a game as complex as World of Warcraft, all the things that it has taken the rest of years to absorb.

Call to Arms: More Tanks

2011-04-09T10:45:00.001+03:00

I had some pretty mixed feelings when I read this update on mmo front page. I can appreciate that Blizzard wants to and is attempting to somehow fix the lopsided role distribution that has been plaguing World of Warcraft for god knows how long but I have limited faith in the current attempt. There are more variables to the fact that fewer people want to play the tank role, and to an extent, the healer role, and those issues will not be solved by bribing people with shiny objects. Some probably will at least make an alt or something, just for the chance to farm those mounts but otherwise, I doubt the situation will change that much.

The fact is that playing a tank or a healer in a group is a thankless job. You will occasionally get the odd pat on the back by people who truly appreciate your effort and skill that goes into filling those roles, but the majority do not understand and others don’t even care. Particularly a new tank, who is still inexperienced, not sure of the best way of doing things, maybe has less off-the-bat threat burst, and definitely not the best gear, has to endure a long and rocky road to success. The abuse, the shit, and drama you have to endure are, in many cases, not worth it.

Even experienced tanks don’t generally run random 5-man dungeons, unless for their daily dose of valor points because no matter how good you are, people will get on your tits no matter what. Who would volunteer for that crap? Some of us, who love tanking and have managed to win the prize of a regular raid spot as tanks, but even we can’t be bothered after we’ve exhausted the benefits from that.

The good news is that Cataclysm, as an expansion, did move us towards the right direction. When we started, DPS had a major wakeup call. No more blitzing ahead of the tank, blowing cooldowns on trash pulls, and just mindlessly standing there and getting your rocks off on the damage meters. CC was necessary and in some cases, it still is and if the DPS aren’t paying attention during the heroic boss fights, they will die pure and simple. To my delight, I still get to watch bad players get it and it almost makes the emo aftermath worth it but this is not enough. We are fast out-gearing the content and things can only get worse from here. Already any semi-decent group can completely ignore CCs and just chain-pull the dungeons. As the required level of tactic and strategy goes down, the old problems will grow more severe.

Personally, I feel this is the main problem associated with the lack of tanks and healers and is something that Blizzard should spend more time addressing. If they acknowledge this, it does not show because they have not just ignored the issue, but made it worse by nerfing almost every 5-man dungeon in the game; trash removed, damage lowered, encounters have lost entire mechanics, etc. At that level, the game is increasingly more about the strong tanks and healers, whereas the DPS can pretty much do as they want, with little to no responsibility. I can think of numerous ways of creating encounters that actually challenge the DPS that would bring some measure of pressure on them to actually appreciate what the tanks and healers go through every day.

Well, we can only hope that Blizzard’s new dungeon design paradigms work as advertised but for this latest update, I simply do not see it solving anything.

A New Beginning

2011-04-09T00:19:00.001+03:00

It is hard to describe how much I detested changing my guild but I would be lying if I said it had not been coming for quite a bit. I will not go into the details or specifics why I did this, but looking couple of weeks back now, I know I made the right decision. It is strange but, for the longest time, I unsure but now I am certain. By my side, my girlfriend also left the guild, something that made me quite pleased, although it wasn’t in anyway my plan.

So here we are, applied and got accepted to my old guild on Nordrassil and we’ve been included in the third raid team. I do feel we were extremely lucky to get into the same guild and what is more, the officer core here agreed to place us in the same raiding team. I really could not have things to work out better than this.

With this change, I decided was also time to update my blog and and breath some life into this place. I’ve hated the fact that I let it fall into such a state but I just could not find the time to keep blogging. Now I hope to change it and we are both looking forward with great anticipation. Raiding kicked off this week, which I was very excited about. The team was, apparently, dormant for a while, due to some members taking a break from the game, so both me and Atheqa are joining with a couple of old PF members, along with some new and less experienced raiders to form what seems to be a very solid 10-man group. Everybody knows what they are doing and despite some of our numbers having poor gear, we’ve done very well during our first two nights, one- and two shotting bosses with little to no preparation, other than a short strategy meeting before a pull.

Some of them have outright impressed me and definitely stands as landmarks to the statement that players over gear and skill above everything else. E.g. kudos to my tank partner, Stegal who was able to learn just a whole bunch of tactics and mechanics with very little warning. Equally, I feel we have a very strong set of healers, able to keep us even after some rather glaring screw ups.

So all and all, I think we are in a very nice place right now. Who wouldn’t be psyched? :-)

The New Azeroth

2010-11-21T21:04:00.001+02:00

I have not had nearly as much time to play at the PTR as I would have liked. Because of that, since originally having a sneak peek at the Cataclysm Event I specifically avoided playing the different builds that came along with the patches. Now however, I could not help myself from updating and logging into the 4.0.3a PTR version, just to look at the new login screen and simply gaze upon the new Stormwind City. Since then, what was only suppose to be a small look turned into a couple of days long testing phase, to see how the game experience has changed for the first 20 levels.

To make sure the change felt real and as close to a new Warcraft player as possible, I chose a class that has so far been completely alien, the rogue and made sure I did not cheat with gold or heirlooms. Darksun, my test character, is a human just simply because Elwynn Forest and Westfall are still my favorite zones in the game, even counting in Outland and Northrend from the previous expansions, and because (with the race/class combo changes) a lot of people will be rolling into this area. The fact that eight out of ten fellow test players I ran across were human hunters only supports this paradigm.

Game mechanic wise, nothing has really changed since the 4.0.1 patch, so I will not delve into those. However, the first thing jumps at you is the new intro and the huge changes made to the immediate environment. Stormwind has been damage, one whole district annihilated, the city’s castle has change completely, buildings like the bank and auction house have been upgraded to the new millennium. Even the street pavement has been updated and the first time you see it, you simply want to stop, walk around and look at the new city. It is absolutely gorgeous.

The city also isn’t the only thing that has changed drastically. While Elwynn Forest itself has not changed much, the first you walk into Goldshire a big, welcome update catches your attention; new flight point. Not just in Goldshire, they also added on in the Logging Camp to the east and the idea carriers onto neighboring zones as well; both Redridge Mountain and Westfall have several new FPs, making it a lot more convenient to get from end to end without spending ten minutes just running. Particularly before you get ground mounts, the time saved is just invaluable.

Westfall, as a location and zone, has undergone bigger changes than Elwynn Forest and although still feels like it used to, the difference is tangible. Questing all around has been updated and is more logical and convenient, often introducing the player to the zone piece by piece. Phasing plays a big role in Redridge Mountain where the quests will literally more you from quest hub to another, across the area. Since I do not wish to spoil it for many of you, I will not give out too many details but I will say, by the time I reached level 20, I was simply awed. Questing has become fun again and Blizzard has really put an incredible amount of work into this. You can feel and see the changes all around the zones. Old quests with quests items with ridiculous low drop rates or long traveling requirements are gone. It also no longer possible to just pass into a quest hub, pick a dozen quests before spending hours traveling the zone from end to end and completing them all. The quests are much more interesting, more engaging and phasing brings makes more quests available as you complete the old ones, without all long period in between.

So, if you have doubts about Blizzard’s commitment to redoing Azeroth, you can lay them to rest. If rest of the world is as successful as these three new zones I have now played, then I cannot wait for the patch to hit and let me at it. It will be glorious.

Conquering PvP Realms

2010-09-27T12:14:00.001+03:00

Good morning readers. Instead of sitting down with a cup of coffee and start up my WoW, decided to instead fire up my Live Writer and dedicate some thoughts down on a subject I came upon rather by accident. Credit goes to Tatiiana, a dear friend of mine who plays a mage of the same name on the Tarren Mill EU realm. The reason why this is significant is because I play on Neptulon EU, which places us both in pvp Realms. For those who do not know, this means that in pvp realms your pvp will flag on automatically in certain areas which makes world pvp so much more common and indeed, it is one of the reasons many choose to play on these servers.

However, in this article I decided I would delve into the misconceptions of playing on pvp servers because like myself actually, prior to moving here with my guild, many players who reservations, quite needlessly about the day-to-day routines on pvp realms and thus, in my opinion, miss out on a lot.

The main thing that a lot of people miss the quality of players, which is by average higher on pvp realms if you compare to pve realms. No, this does not mean that players on pve realms are not good or even better than many who play pvp realms. That is not what I am saying, but the fact is that people who get caught in pvp develop a certain level of awareness and skill that pure-pve’ers do not. Pvp encourages reaction, speed, and awareness. While it is perfectly possible to obtain this by just playing pve, it comes much more naturally to pvp players. This was our guild’s, The Increment, main reason for moving to Neptulon because we wanted to harvest on that potential of players, which we have.

Now, the main misconception people have about pvp realms is that people pvp all the time. That you, in fact, cannot go 100 yards from Ironforge without running into people pvp’ing and therefore, e.g. leveling a character is an utter nightmare to go through. This is an utter and complete load of bullocks.

First of all, your pvp will flag on only in contested areas. This means that major cities, starting zones and the immediate zone next to those are safe. This includes Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Dun Morogh, Loch Modan, etc. Areas where you should watch out are Southshore, Stranglethorn Vale, naturally all of Outland and so forth. But even in contested areas you will run into minimum trouble. I have personally tested this when I revitalized my warrior and leveled him from level 13 to 80, during which I got attacked total of two times. Most people you run across will want nothing to do with you. A good case of example happened just two days ago when I was exploring on my warrior and crossing the border of Southshore and Silverpine Forest. Just I went over the border, a level 80 blood elf mage rode past me. We both stopped about 60 yards of each other, most likely eyeing each other, checking what the gear looked like, the mount, titles, etc. Anything that would tell us if this was a fight we wanted to get into.

After only few short seconds, we both continued on our separate ways, figuring “no, screw it” and that’s how it usually goes. MAD
“Mutually Assured Destruction” is a powerful incentive and you never truly know how good someone is until you try. Many times the attacker actually gets killed himself, as happened between my death knight and a hunter when I was mining, couple of weeks ago. He landed and started shooting on the fly. However, I managed to beat him. Same case scenario when both me and a tauren shaman were farming the same rep in Outland; he actually attacked me while I was killing an elite mob and still I killed him and mind you, this was a guy in some pretty cool gear and with obvious skill. With that bare in mind that I am actually a total scrub in pvp and ofc these events were all very far in between.

Most of the time I got to run around, farm rep, doing dailies and gathering mats in total peace. Now, I am not saying that you will never get attacked, as shown by the examples above, but what I am saying is that it is a lot more rare than you think. I shall take a screenshot for you guys, the next time I go do my fishing daily in Sholazar Basin because almost every time I do, I complete it right next to horde players.

Naturally, you will die occasionally, it’s unavoidable but part of that just needs to be accepted as part of the realm and in fact, looked as part of the fun. One of the consistent world pvp events that I have seen happened in front of Icecrown Citadel entrance, where every raid night, we gather in mass to block the door and kill any horde who try to get in. It’s hilarious and naturally, they will occasionally do the same to us but none of it is done with menace or to be nasty. It’s all good fun; we kill few of them, they kill a few of us and always manage to laugh about it on vent.

So what am I actually trying to say here? That pvp realms are not evil, nor as chaotic and malevolent as many make them appear. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even notice the difference to a pve realm. There are indeed many benefits to playing on pvp servers and having experienced it myself, I definitely encourage everyone to give it a go.

The Journey Continues

2010-09-21T09:11:00.001+03:00

Fellow greetings again Internet. I know I have not been very active on this blog and I do apologize for the inconvenience. As it currently stands, I have taken up the duty of keeping up with writing raid tactics and our Guild’s insider blog on tankspot.com, which sadly eats most of the time I have for writing blogs. However, I currently find myself sitting in Dalaran and having plenty of time to spare before our next raid so I decided to start up my Writer and and put some words down.

First, for those who are interested you can check our Increment Insider blog at our tankspot. For those who insisted on screenies of our progression should find plenty in there. Progression-wise we are currently holding at 9/12 in ICC25 HMs. A fact we are very proud of and have had several experimental goes at three different HMs; Professor Putricide, Sindragosa, and Halion just to see which we would like to commit our time to.

A lot of news filter in about Cataclysm almost every day. Many times I’ve gazed upon them and thought to myself “that deserves a mention in my blog” but there are so many that it is impossible to keep up and in the end, this blog isn’t really about publishing latest news. Just what seems important to me. On that note, details about the new Tier 11 gear sets have been released, with a couple of screenshots.

The part that strikes me about these sets is the fact that tanks might again care about the Tier bonuses, which we clearly did not need to do towards the end of Wrath. Sure, they were a nice addition but was somewhat mellowed by the fact that Blizzard decided to add much more sexier gear pieces to both the frost vendor and drops from ICC. Looking at the Tier 11 bonuses I feel a certain excitement as a tank, a feeling that these might almost be a must-have thing.

Warrior’s Earthen Battleplate:

2pc - Increases the damage done by your Shield Slam ability by 5%.

4pc - Increases the duration of your Shield Wall ability by 50%.

Death Knight’s Magma Plated Battle Armor:

2pc - Increases the damage done by your Death Strike ability by 5%.

4pc - Increases the duration of your Icebound Fortitude ability by 50%.

I do wish Blizzard would get out of their habit of adding a threat boost to our tanking sets and more complicated elements, like added health regenerated by our Death Strike. The whole concept of threat has a very controversial feel for me. I wouldn’t want to make it trivial but nor do I want to generally worry about it. Some tanks have whispered about the return to TBC’s type aggro where tanks where holding aggro was the single-most hardest thing to do in the game.

That’s ridiculous in my opinion and I’m glad to report Blizzard has officially agreed with me on numerous occasions. Tanks should have all the tools they need for holding aggro, if they use all their respected abilities properly. If you’re only spamming one button through the entire encounter you deserve to lose aggro but otherwise, for players who know what they are doing, it shouldn’t be an issue and not warrant threat bonuses in Tier sets. To me the pleasure of tanking is in pulling, positioning, taking the hit and surviving it so rest of the raid can do their jobs.

Likewise, for me Tier sets represent an addition to your abilities, not their completion. Seeing that Shield Wall’s duration goes up by 50% is awesome and means I can survive for much longer. Seeing a threat modifier in the sets just means threat would be partially gimped prior to getting the set. That type of sets also inevitably lead situation during the next upgrade process, when you will not have that ability, thus making your performance rather poor until you get the two new pieces, or worse the next set will not have it at all and you run on half power for the rest of the patch.

Deeper into the Citadel

2010-08-06T22:06:00.001+03:00

I must say, after we got our 25-man lich king kill, feels like the game has started anew for us, as if the many encounters and corridors that grew old and boring have suddenly come to life with the advent of hard modes. Now every fight feels like an experience and the thrill of combat has returned. Before that, you pulled, you tabbed some buttons and it was over.

Anyone who enjoys challenges and does not wish to settle for mediocre, for easy kills and epics, should endeavor to experience these fights on hard mode because they really do come more alive once the margin for error requirements of performance go up. Our start was somewhat slow, almost as if we were feeling the strength of the ice with a stick and slowly explored and tried the various fights in Icecrown Citadel.

Now the exploration period is over and we’ve cracked up the gear. Eight out of twelve bosses have falled on hard mode, consisting of most of the lesser bosses. Of the wing bosses, Saurfang and Blood Queen Lanathel have been vanquished, leaving only Sindragosa and Professor Putricide. Only Lady Deathwhisper remains of the lesser bosses. She will be the next target, once the lockdown resets.

The past two weeks have been particularly good for us, as we’ve done a lot of good progress and improved our team in quite many ways. We’ve lost a few players to various circumstances, which is always sad, but we have still been able to move forward. If anything, our progress has surprised us and I have actually missed capturing several of our encounters because I did not suspects us to be successful the first time around.

I do have one new movie to offer though, which is the Deathbringer Saurfang kill. It was a kill we had to work for; getting him down to 10% or even less half a dozen times, but when he finally went down, the success is sweet.

Deathbringer Saurfang 25HM

Enjoy and stay tuned.

Ruby Sanctum Explored

2010-07-07T17:55:00.001+03:00

Time to breath a little bit of more life into this blog and no better time than, when you have a lot of thoughts to comment with. I will begin with this look into the finished product that is the Ruby Sanctum, last raid instance to be published in this expansion. I wrote a lot about before during the PTR so I will not bother going through all of that again.

Rather, I decided to provide a look through a new medium that I am exploring, which is video capture. With the LK down on 25-man, we are feeling good about our guild. Makes you comfortable that as a group, you have helped the guild build back up from the deep gutter that we were in, only couple of months ago. With that knowledge giving us a big boost of confidence, we are coming up with a few new projects and my favorite pet is the video capture of our encounters.

It has already started and through a lot of trial and error I have released two video captures. They are both from Ruby Sanctum, as it provided a perfect testing ground for a new editor. The two videos are our first 10-man and 25-man kills. No heroic tries yet, but chances are we will be going for those in the near future. Depends how we divide our raiding time between the ICC hard modes and the Ruby Sanctum.

Personally, I did not find the normal modes that difficult. Naturally, he hits a lot harder on 25-man difficulty and the challenge is primarily on surviving, especially in the Twilight realm where everyone is moving and healers have a lot to deal with. But any decent group will not have a lot trouble with this encounter. As of fact, most of us in the group agreed that the trash mobs in Ruby Sanctum are a lot more annoying than the bosses themselves.

Anyway, here are the links to my two vids, first the 10-man Halion and then the 25-man version. Hope you enjoy.

25-man Lich King

2010-07-06T14:03:00.001+03:00

The atmosphere is almost tangible, when finally all the hard work and effort pays off, as the encounter is defeated and the Lich King falls to the ground. It validates all the decisions and paths that we have taken as a guild, letting us know that we did it right. The right people were at the right place and at the right time.

Now it is time to look for future the horizon, raise the par even more and begin tackling the hard modes of Icecrown Citadel, while at the same time bring in those who couldn't fit into last night's kill, so we can all enjoy it.

Heroes of the Alliance, I salute you.

Ruby Sanctum PTR

2010-05-20T09:34:00.001+03:00

I was highly disappointed when I could not personally attend the latest PTR testing phase for the Ruby Sanctum. Was positively thrilled about having an early go and look at the new instance, below Wyrmrest Temple but due to whatever technical complications, I just could not get my character copied. But, at least now I can sit down and watch some of the first videos as they come out of the pipeline and what the encounters are all about.

In truth, I can only find vids about Halion, the Twilight Destroyer but much like Sartharion in the Obsidian Sanctum, Halion is the primary star of this instance. The minibosses, well… they aren’t all that important. From what I heard, quite a few guilds managed to kill Halion during the PTR testing, which is not at all surprising but keeping in mind that things can still change, including the encounter’s difficulty, as well as the fact that this was normal mode, we should still expect a challenge once the patch is released. If nothing else, the heroic version of the fight should prove interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_S277XtDvY

I will go over what I can about the encounter, or at least, what I think I have been able to learn from it. Please keep in mind that everything you read here is both subject to change and is all primarily speculation, a theoretical exercise summary of the things that I was able to find from various sources.

The fight itself occurs in a circular, confined area, that at least to me seems smaller on the video than what we had for Sartharion, so maximizing the space is important. It seems the best place to tank Halion, is actually at the edge of the area, turned slightly sideways so the frontal cleave and tail swipes aren’t a problem. This frees rest of the area for the raid to maneuver in and there are two things to mainly watch out for.

First is the Meteor Strike. It will target a random player with an effect that looks a lot (or exactly like) the warlock’s Hellfire spell. When that shows up, the target and everyone around him needs to move away before a large ball of fire explodes on top of it. This deals a fixed set of damage and spawns Living Inferno, which in turn is almost exactly like coldflame on the Lord Marrowgar encounter. On the vid, I actually witnessed the Meteor Strike even hit the MT, but either it did not seem to bother him much. Either the damage was trivial, or he popped a CD, or the healers were just awesome. We’ll have to see which one it is.

Second, and this is one that I am not certain what to call it, since the data mining at mmo-champion.com has actually come up with quite a few spells, is the Soul Consumption. What it seems to do is deal periodic shadow damage, until it either fades or is dispelled. As it ticks, it will stack a debuff called Mark of Consumption, which will explode and create a patch of flame on the floor, depending on how many stacks the target had. So I am guessing that dispelling it as soon as possible is important. Just need to make sure the target vacates to a more remote corner of the area before it is dispelled or you will probably wipe the raid when the patch of flame erupts in middle of your raid.

Those are the two abilities that you need to control and I have a feeling that this is not an encounter that relies on high dps, but rather the control of the various elements. From a tank’s point of view, I an offer very little because until you actually tank it (like I had hoped to do) it is difficult to garner information from the fight. It does seem there is a few points of very high damage, mainly from the boss’s breath weapon. Again, data mining has produced a couple of alternatives, the damage ranging between 26k and 50k, during rather short intervals.

Once you have the phase 1 under control, you will need to deal with phases 2 and 3. The second phase, which starts at 75% and Halion enters the Twilight Realm and the raid needs to follow in through two portals. This is where it gets interesting, because you will get an emote warning “The orbiting spheres pulse with dark energy!” When that happens, you see two orbs at the opposite ends of the boss, one front and one at the tail connect with a purple line. I have no details of its effects, but the raid obviously avoids cross it and the tank actually rotates the boss, with the raid constantly moving and staying on the one half of the area.

That goes on until 50% and phase 3 begins, at point which you need to split your raid in two. On the vid, the raid split between melee staying in the Twilight Realm and the ranged dps moving to the physical realm. For this, you need obviously a second tank, and on each side you need to continue to deal with the fight’s mechanics; meteors and fire on the physical world and the orbs in the Twilight Realm. During this, you can see a new UI element, on the top of your screen showing Halion’s corporeality which adjusts, depending which side does more damage and you may need to communicate to keep it in control because the more corporeal he is, the more damage he will take from the physical realm but also deal significant more damage on the physical world (functioning visa versa if there is more damage done in the physical world).

According to mmo-champion.com the extra damage on the tank can go as high as 200% which can probably begin to one shot the tank. If not on normal mode, it certainly will on heroic mode. So if you can deal with the corporeality, which shouldn’t be hard tbh, the fight is essentially yours and you can go home victorious.

As usual, mmo-champion.com (what would we do without those guys?) has come through for us and posted a complete loot table on their site. Some very nice pieces in there. Certainly worth taking a look. Naturally, there will be emblems of frost rewarded for the fight; 3 on 25-man and I assume, 1-2 on 10-man.

That’s all I have really. In the mean while, feel free to drop me a line, comment and add, or correct me, if something caught your eye. Like I said, a lot of this is speculation since I wasn’t actually there. Hope you enjoyed.

Disciplined Damage

2010-05-19T10:18:00.001+03:00

I recently rekindled my interest in my healer, including both raid and PvP environment. Concerning raids, it is really not a big problem. Specs and tactics are well laid out over the internet and never found it difficult to do the research it needed. In most cases, I am easily out healing most other healers with lesser gear. However, when it comes to PvP things get a lot more difficult; specs are highly adapted to play styles and even spell selections and priorities seem to shift greatly between players. Navigating this maze can be a bit daunting sometimes, so figured I’d upload some of the things that I’ve personally found.

There are really two ways to play a discipline priest on the arena, and PvP in general, and that’s defensively and offensively. If you only stick to battlegrounds, you might want to go defensive because you can count on your group doing the necessary damage but on arenas, at least when approaching the higher ratings, you need to shift more and more to the offensive and the common tactic is to hit the opposing team hard in the very beginning of the fight.

The way that discipline priests deal damage is essentially two folded; either via shadow spells, such as dots and Mind Blast, or through holy spells, such as Holy Fire and Smite. The camp is divided between these two schools and both have strong arguments towards them, so lets go through them.

Firstly, dealing damage through shadow spells means your primary burst spell is Mind Blast which is accompanied by Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain. It is a good combination but I find it inefficient due to how slow it is. Mind Blast has an 8 second CD and the DoTs tick really slow. But then again, it has the benefit of not requiring a lot of work on your part. You can just drop out of LoS, hit the target with DoTs and a quick blast, before disappearing again, and after that you can completely focus on healing again.

If you forego this method, you can try doing holy damage, but this specifically requires that you spec for it, while you can still use shadow spells with a defensive spec. Then again, there is no resistance against holy damage and the combination of HF + Smite + Smite does a lot of damage, very quickly. The only weakness it has is the fact that if you get counterspelled while casting, it will effectively lockout your holy spells, including all your heals for 8 seconds. Needless to say that can be very dangerous.

For a spec, I suggest you take a look at the one below. It often tends to draw a lot of negative feedback from disbelieving priests who do not understand its potential, but I have seen quite a few priests swear by it and do very well. Again, it also comes down to your personal flavor.

53/18/0

The most important talents for this spec are Divine Fury and Searing Light, and do not forget the Glyph of Smite. They all add to the damage of your smite attack, which can be 6-7k on a successful crit, depending on your gear. An argument could be made that speccing so high on damage takes attention away from defensive abilities and indeed, they are valid. Tbh, I cannot see the whole spec working unless you are sitting on some pretty good gear, which makes it possible to rely on it to supply the necessary protection.

You could make a case for taking the three talent points from Rapture and putting them elsewhere, like Grace, Improved Renew, or Spell Warding. However, having Rapture doesn’t just increase your own mana efficiency, but helps your partner pump out more damage. If you insist on letting it go, I would recommend either of the two last choices. There seems to be too much target switching to effectively use Grace. Improved Renew helps both you and your partner, and again, if your gear allows it, it might be better to forego the extra mitigation from Spell Warding.

No matter which route you take, remember that, as a healer your damage will never be awesome. It is simply a little bit of extra to help your partner out. Also, the specifics of your spec, like whether or not use Rapture, etc. largely depends on your team mate(s) and your personal play style. Find what works best for you and go with it. Be open to suggestions, but let no one tell you what to do, because at the end of the day, discipline is a highly versatile class.

Inspiring Loyalty

2010-05-17T22:45:00.001+03:00

It has been a while since I have written, I apologize for this. It has been rather hektic on both World of Warcraft and personal front. As a tide of big news, The Increment decided and followed up on changing realms, due to the lack of quality new recruits to strengthen our ranks, to allow us to press deeper into the ICC hard modes. We are now residing on Neptulon, much to my disappointment since it is a PvP server and all who knows me, I am not big on those. However, it has been a week now and live has continued fairly normally, though a time of mourning for many of us because we also consequently lost several old members of the guild of which, some, have been in the guild for a very long time.

The reason I picked this curious title for my next article was because during this change, decided to try my alt in a Neptulonian PvP guild, just to see how it is like and maybe get some quality PvP. It took me one whole day to find I did not like the guild and left – sent on my way by the GM’s grand statements about loyalty among members.

Loyalty, as in, honor and dedication to someone? Loyalty is inspired by respect, and respect in turn, must be earned. If it was taken for granted, you never really had it. So what is it within us that inspires respect and loyalty to a guild? Depends on the person, what each individual plays for but I’m pretty certain most people who actually play World of Warcraft value simple and common themes like dignity, honor, decency, humor, good manners and mature behavior. To judge a guild, you need to judge its character, which is made up from the personas who inhabit it.

This is where the danger lies; it is a common misconception for guild masters that people whom they invite, need to show and up hold standards, including loyalty and self-sacrificial ideals to be accepted as members of the community. However, in many minds, this only goes one way and often leads to conflicts when new members find they do not enjoy themselves. Most of the time, these can be settled amicably, in civilized manner but with millions of subscribers, you can count on finding few rotten apples in there. I personally experienced this not too long, when I specifically applied and even transferred realms to join a guild I perceived to be a good one. After a couple of months though, I quit, firmly but still politely informing them that it was not the kind of guild I was looking for and since, as long as I stayed on that server, met with a lot of hostility, even if I as much as passed them on the streets of Dalaran.

That is not the hallmark of a guild that inspires my loyalty and respect. A guild that expects us to sacrifice our evenings, join and give our full support, needs to return the favor. It is never a privilege to be a part of the community, as long as the relationship is only exploitive. For this reason, there are very few guilds, truly, who thrive whether they are big or small for running such a group is a challenge that requires a lot of talent from its leaders.

Any fool can put together a guild and invite anything from a dozen to several hundred players. It takes an exceptional individual to successfully make that guild thrive.

Some have been curious as to why, after only having been in this guild, The Increment, respectively for only such a short period of time, was I willing to spend the trouble and currency to change servers. The answer is simple: they have inspired my loyalty.

Sindragosa Down

2010-05-03T02:09:00.001+03:00

This has truly been a good week, progression wise. First we get the Lich King down on 10-man and now the path has been cleared in 25-man, all the way to the top of the Icecrown Citadel. The only thing between us and the completion of the whole normal modes content is the Lich King himself.

The battle is set and we will reign victorious!

Glance at Heroic Modes

2010-05-02T11:00:00.001+03:00

So the Lich King is dead and understandably, come next lockdown and we were all eager to sink our teeth into the heroic modes of Icecrown Citadel. But even with a lot of research on the previous days, I do not think any of us were quite prepared for them. After all, we knew they would be harder, but would they really be that much harder? In a word, yes, the heroic modes are an incredibly refreshing experience after the easy normal modes and we were really taken back just by the Lord Marrowgar encounter. I am going to go through the first wing of bosses, just reviewing some of our experiences and the changes to the bosses.

Lord Marrowgar

In a twisted way, for me, this is actually the hardest of the first four encounters. In simplest terms, the damage that the raid takes has gone up and is by no means trivial anymore. Both the bonestorm and fires are big killers, and the fight is actually all about avoiding as much as possible of it. Just on a plate tank, we recorded over 10k ticks from the whirlwind and our resto shaman reported that he can at best take 2-3 ticks of it before quickly dying.

We eventually went with a 1 tank, 4 healers, and 5 dps setup. One tank should be quite capable of tanking Marrowgar alone, and in fact, it simplifies the tank’s job when he avoids the fires. When bonestorms were imminent (5 seconds or so) the raid would quickly spread, healers divided between the two sides. This is so that when Marrowgar charges someone, he will only hit max 1-2 people, who quickly move out of the way. If you have good ranged dps, they will absolutely shine on this fight, because they are able to break spikes even from middle of fire.

Lady Deathwhisper

After Lord Marrowgar, we were suddenly taken back at just how much simpler Deathwhisper is. Essentially, the big change is during the last phase. The only change to the first phase seems to be a bigger mana pool and she will CC a random person, like on 25-man normal mode. It might have been just me, but also seemed that there were also a lot more martyrs among the adds. In several cases, we had easily three risen martyrs to deal with and dps really need to watch for them.

The second phase, unlike normal mode is tanked by the stairs, at the entrance because Deathwhisper continues to periodically summon one add. She will also summon one vile spirit, which must be avoided at all cost because it explodes with an 20 yard AoE and hits really hard. It always goes for a specific person, so that person should kite it around for a few seconds.

For tanks, Deathwhisper is more of a challenge because she is immune to taunts. We sort of went heads first into it and had no defining tactics for it. Because our stacks grew so high, the person tanking the boss, would also have to tank the add and once the stacks fell off, the second tank had to get tricks in order to catch up quickly. We got her down, but I am thinking there must be an easier way to control the stacks and get a much more cleaner kill.

The Gunship Battle

Out of all the encounters, this one really is a joke. There is a little bit more damage from missiles and axes, but in general, you will hardly notice that it is on heroic mode. Like always we sent two hardcore melee dps over to the other ship, along with a tank and the mage, even with a bigger health pool, went down like a rock. The only hiccup we had was apparently an axe thrower, who for some strange, unforeseeable reason, enraged and started hitting really hard, causing our resto shaman to die total of three times, giving us a whole lot of hilarity once we finally docked.

Deathbringer Saurfang

We actually did not get many good tries on this boss because we were running out of time at this point, causing us to miss the kill but I am fairly confident we unlocked the necessary mechanic to get him down as soon as we get our next attempts. The trick with Saurfang is controlling the adds. There is a lot more damage during the encounter, but it is still doable with just two healers. Make sure you have one holy paladin and one raid healer; priest, druid, or shaman, all are good choices. The healers need to pay good attention to the marks of the fallen, for there will be more of them (thanks to Saurfang’s bigger health pool) and none of the targets are allowed to die, or the boss will heal 20%.

But with competent players, the real challenge of the fight lies with the beasts. When they spawn, they move wicked fast and basically one-shot any nontank. You need to device a strategy to keep them in control, which is why you need really good ranged dps to kill them out. Melee dps can help out, but only if they do not pull aggro on them and the beast is not rooted. A rooted beast hits anything within melee range, which is usually an eager melee dps.

Death knights are ideal for using chain of ice and I found the best tactic is to actually spam roots on one beast, while the second is slowed and zerged down by the combined ranged dps. Once the first one dies, they finish the second one off and the ideally, neither of the two beasts never get far from the boss to begin with.

All and all, we had a lot of fun doing these heroic modes and if you’re any like us, finding the normal modes boring, you should enjoy the heroics a lot more also. The changes aren’t truly severe, but there are more actual mechanics to overcome and the margin for poor performance has been almost completely removed. If you are focused, the encounters should not be overwhelming but wipe fest starts the minute you lose your concentration.

Good luck everyone.

Fall of the Lich King

2010-04-28T03:39:00.001+03:00

I was suppose to report our latest Sindragosa kill last night, but held off the news in the event that our Lich Kings would be successful before the next reset. To all of our great delight, the Lord of the Scourge finally fell, after many attempts and tactical refinements, and when he hit the much anticipated 10% the joy was tangible in our local vent channel.

To a great misfortune, our paladin tank had to endure bad connections throughout the night, which eventually cost him his lich king kill, with achievements and loot when he dropped offline right at the very last moments and did not resurface until we were all staring at the loot boxes. Hopefully the GMs can fix this for us, giving him the credit he deserves along with the rest of us.

Loot included nice pieces, such as Windrunner’s Heartseeker and Troggbane, Axe of the Frostborne King, both eagerly received. Now we can finally get to work on the heroic modes and I dare say, next week’s lockdown will be very exciting.

Thanks for all nine who were with us. Nice work.

Blood Tanking in Cataclysm

2010-04-15T12:12:00.001+03:00

My apologies for the long absence everyone. The inevitability of changing apartments was ahead and that always causes downtime on conserved time online. It could not have fallen on a worse spot though, with class reviews being published and I’m now playing catch up on reading on all the changes and trying to make sense of them. For death knights, my favorite class, the changes are significant and I have a feeling we still have not fully able to grasp just how much the class is changing. For the most part is all seems for the better, at least on paper, but until I get down to actually testing it I will hold all hope of improvement. Yes, might sound pessimistic but as the good saying goes “a good idea is worth 10$ but a good execution is worth 10 million $.”

So, lets continue on where we left off last time: blood tanking.

The tanking tree for death knights seems to have been locked down, which is the blood tree. Naturally, this has stirred up a lot of uproar from all sides. Some are upset that their favorite dps tree is going (since apparently they are incapable of respeccing) and others are upset that the unique quality of triage trees is leaving the class.

Personally, I’m pleased that we are finally getting a dedicated tanking tree. For one, all good and meaningful tanking talents are now piled into one tree and Blizzard can actually not perfect DK tanking, instead of trying to make it possible for every john to tank in whichever spec they want, despite the fact that the viable specs will be set around 1-2 trees anyway.

However, while I have nothing against blood tanking, I was perhaps voting for frost. Why? Because blood tanking is revolving too much around the idea of self-healing and it is a major problem with death knight tanking. A lot of people hold that, even in the current game, the fact that blood tanks self-heal, makes them the most survivable tank. However, if you think about it, the harder bosses hit, the less it matters. If a boss can kill a tank with 2-3 hits, the fact that you can heal yourself something like 5k somewhere in between doesn’t really mean squat. Instead, mitigation works directly in your favor and that’s exactly what frost tanking is based around.

Now, this might all change. They say in Cataclysm damage will be a lot like in ICC, with enemies that hit for less but we have less avoidance. I am not truly convinced of this though. Anyone who has tanked Festergut, Sindragosa, or the LK know that these guys hit like a pack of tonka trucks. So if Cataclysm is anything like ICC, we should be prepared for the diminished benefit of self-healing. However, like I said, I am holding out on making my mind because we are also getting Healing Absorption:

“When you heal yourself, you'll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.”

So, perhaps with extra mitigation, self-healing actually becomes more viable.

One ability that confuses me, is the new level 81, Outbreak:

“Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.”

While on the surface this seems like a great idea, it leaves Plague Strike and Icy Touch in a difficult position. For further confusion, Blizzard has announced that they are not looking to make Outbreak a de facto replacement for these two abilities. So, now we need three abilities to apply/refresh diseases? In a world, with the new runic system that actually slows DK attacks down, this feels really strange.

Maybe if we separate Outbreak for dps players only, then it makes more sense, but still, something is really wrong with the picture. If you want to introduce the idea that applying diseases is a concern for just one ability, then it’s fine, but perhaps rather remove one disease from the class entirely then? The more I think about it, the more appealing this actually sounds. Consider it, already, if you want to do any meaningful AoE threat, you must spec frost and use a single disease rotation anyway. The only time you use two diseases is when tanking bosses and even then, Blood Plague feels like a third wheel.

I agree, taking one disease out from the class feels like stripping it of something unique, so far, this is what logic suggests. My guess is, if we end up with three abilities in Cataclysm, depending what abilities generate the most threat, we will go down one of two roads; we dump IT and PS, to simply just use Outbreak, or we dump Outbreak as a bad experiment and continue on with IT and PS.

One ability which the reviews have revealed, is Vengeance:

“This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.”

This, I think we all agree is universally good news. Tank threat has suffered its share of hardships, growing worse whenever we move towards the end of the expansion. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, it is mainly due to the fact that tank damage, and there for threat, has no scaled as well as the damage of dps players. Since threat is still primarily damage x threat multipliers, it means tanks do about the same threat as we did in the beginning of the expansion, while the threat of the dps players goes up.

If you have not yet read up on it, mmo-champions have a nice review compilation.

Blood Tanking

2010-04-07T10:07:00.001+03:00

After weeks of waiting, Ghostcrawler has finally dropped the bomb on death knight tanks and how we will fundamentally change in Cataclysm; we will all be converted into the Blood tree. Yes, you heard me right, we are finally getting a dedicated tanking tree, in the same spirit as paladins and warriors have the Protection tree. A lot of people did not believe such a thing could happen and even personally, I was skeptical, though I hoped, and seems Blizzard has prove us all wrong, for better or for worse. Ghostcrawler will be posting more news on the death knight changes, tomorrow on 8th of April which is when we will be getting more details but we can still collect our thoughts on this change.

After all, this is probably the biggest change to the class that we will see. The actual details of how the class will work are interesting, but just this knowledge, of one, the dedicated tree, changes everything for us and it is not difficult to begin seeing the consequences up ahead.

Was this a surprise? Not really. If you look at the history behind DK tanking in WotLK, there has always been one, the best tanking tree and it has usually always been Blood. Sure, all three trees are viable but Blood has always been the best, thanks to self-healing abilities that it provides and that really is the bottom line when tanking big and hard hitting encounters. It is difficult to describe just how valuable that is sometimes.

Originally, when the class was released, death knights were balanced as having larger health pools and the ability to regenerate it with their special abilities. Much like druid tanks, we needed it because we did not carry shields for extra mitigation. This is something I hope Blizzard can bring back to us, not how we were overpowered back then, but a level of equilibrium between the classes. Today DKs are squishy and it takes a lot of experience and skill to play the class because we rely heavily on our cooldowns to provide what other classes get for granted. Relying solely on death strikes to equal it out is a bad idea, at least in the current game because the fact that you can regenerate %5 (or ever 10%) of your hit points AFTER a boss takes away 80% of them with one hit, is not helpful. But perhaps this is an element that will balance out better in Cataclysm, where we are being told health loss is not quite such unforgiving. Death strike becomes only truly useful in a setting where attacks nibble your health down at a slower rate, where there is more chances to resist the loss and the road from 100 to zero takes longer.

Another big question becomes, how will they now balance the tanking elements from all three trees into one. In its current configuration, the Blood tree has a big drawback, which is AoE. Even a deep frost spec requires a special glyph to speed it up to the level that warriors and paladins run it. Compared to them, in standard AoE setting, we are crawling because we need to setup diseases before we can actually create viable threat. With a total revamp of the trees, this can of course be solved rather easily and my guess is we will perhaps get a glimpse of the mechanic that they are working on. However, regardless of how it is fixed, the point is, it needs to be fixed.

What about dual-wielding? Again, we will see tomorrow but I think we can safely assume DW is an element that will continue to stay in the frost tree. It could become a viable tanking spec, if the necessary talents are somewhere very low in the frost tree and Ghostcrawler did not provide any hints as to the state of this possibility. We shall see what information they decide to provide us tomorrow.

Discipline

2010-03-23T11:17:00.001+02:00

I found myself in a strange situation this morning, when, for some weird reason, some guild mates of mine began to speak condescendingly about discipline priests. The thought of the day was that we (I say “we” because discipline is a favorite, chosen spec for my priest healer) are not very viable for Icecrown Citadel because our heals are weaker compared to others. Is this truly the mentality among current gamers?

Perhaps this is just something born from ignorance and only a phenomenon in my current guild. I do hope, but in case it isn’t, I thought it would do well to iterate more closely on the benefits on having a discipline priest in your raid.

As a whole, discipline priests operate somewhere between tank and raid healers, as our abilities lend a helping hand to both of them. The first and obvious benefit is the proper use of PW:S. One discipline priest can easily sustain shields on a 10-man raiding team, starting with priority on tanks and then rest of the raid. It does not look sexy on recount but when it comes down to it, those shields mitigate a lot of damage. For two tanks, the priest can also sustain three stacks of Grace, each, which vastly improves the amount of heals the paladins can put on them. With bosses like Festergut, a single tank holding two of the Blood Princes, or 3rd phase of Professor Putricide, this can easily be a lifesaver. The stacks are easily applied with a single Penance per tank, and quickly reapplied with a single Flash Heal.

Speaking of which is the number one healing spell for our spec and is equally useful to helping out the paladin, when the tanks are taking big hits, or the raid healers when the whole takes chucks of damage. To this we can add Renew and Prayer of Mending that can be maintained to help out whenever possible and off cooldown. To add to all this, our spells also produce useful buffs like Renewed Hope and Divine Aegis.

Also what other healers lack, are useful cooldowns that can be applied to both the raid and thanks. First is Power Infusion, which is just as useful for yourself, or another healer, in case of an emergency or can be used for warlocks or mages when entering burn phases. Basically it acts like a 1-man Heroism. Last, but certainly not least, is Pain Suppression; an extra tank cooldown to save them when big hits keep landing and everything else fails.

When it comes to mana management, we rarily have issues. Like paladins, we have large mana pools and good measures in place to replenish it. In a 6 minute fight, I have squeeze off two Shadowfiends, if properly timed and in case I still risk running low, I can use Hymn of Hope.

So, what do you think? Does all of this sound completely useless? I think the lack of respect for discipline priests stems more from simply lack of understanding. We are, almost without exception, at the bottom of the statistics and a poor experience with a bad discipline healer can easily put you off. It is one of those specs that is more difficult to master – the same way that death knights and warriors are harder to play than paladins tanks.

I should maybe spend more time on my priest, considering this and just letting my guild mates see the benefits of my spec in action.

Warlock PvP Overview

2010-03-17T12:03:00.001+02:00

Aye, was about time I sat down to write something again. It has been somewhat crazy at this end for a couple of weeks now. Had to replace my Nvidia graphics card when the old one decided to step out, neatly right when I was about to take the factory in Isle of Conquest. This, in fact, gave me the idea for today’s entry; it has been a working process to gear my warlock for pvp and now that I am there, it’s a good idea to gather my thoughts so far.

Currently, Tië is a destruction warlock in full PvP gear, sitting with ~1k resilience, 2655 SP, and 24.7% Crit. Fairly nice numbers, considering that my gear is fairly basic. At the moment, no wrathful pieces, only a full furious set and relentless off-pieces. Still do not have any PvP weapons, but once I tackle arena, should reach 1800 rating for a Wrathful Gladiator’s Battle Staff.

I fine on battlegrounds, usually ending up running a few with some other guildies. As a class, warlocks are pretty awesome when it come to PvP. We have two working specs on that field, destro and affliction, both which are deadly when properly played. I chose destruction for the burst damage that it provides, essentially letting me blow stuff up with only three spells. The big downside for being a warlock is that everyone, especially warriors and death knights will look you up wherever you go. Warriors in particular are devastating if they can nail you in their bladestorm. The ability is getting a slight nerf, but nothing that would really affect us, so if you’re playing as well, remember to always make an escape route –> Demonic Circle: Teleport.

In some cases of course, we have the luxury of going completely unnoticed, which makes things really festive for us. Quite a few times, seems people have gone through trouble to ignore me, letting me basically just sit down and nuke the crap out of everything that exhales.

If you are building a warlock for PvP, make sure you understand the stat distribution between the specs. In general, they both need SP but destruction prefers high Crit and Affliction benefits more from Haste. As a destruction lock you will generally setup for bursts with Curse of Elements, plus Immolate and Conflagrate. From there, spam Chaos Bolt and Incinerate. One of the tricks is actually getting to the burst and for that, we have a nice array of CCs; Shadowfury, Howl of Terror, Fear, and Death Coil. Even with a druid healer, if properly executed, you can keep him in CC while you setup and finally blow him up with a burst. Alternatively, if running with a mate, you can just focus on CC’ing while your mate goes medieval on him.

The choice of minion varies between warlocks but generally they come down to two choices; the succubi or fel hunter. Some use the void because the sacrifice gives such great protection, but other than that, he’s pretty useless. Succubi has seduce and fel hunter can devour magic and silence. I find the hunter more useful, because your opponents will so often be spell casters and seduce gets broken easily by a clueless team member.

All and all, I enjoy playing warlock on PvP. Like the mage, we combine damage with a lot of control, making the part we play very crucial. Getting started is still the Achilles heel of the whole PvP side of the game. To be successful in battlegrounds, you need a lot of the corresponding gear and getting it is a slow process. Though once you get there, it is rewarding. Patch 3.3.3 is also going to provide us with a small relief to the endless honor grinding and there are even more useful updates down the pipeline. So if ever, seems now it is worth the effort to get into it.

Icecrown Citadel Hotfixes

2010-03-05T09:11:00.001+02:00

This is a bit of a misnomer, they are not really fixes, as in fixing bugs, but rather diminishing the difficulty of some boss fights. Anyone who reads wow.com or mmo-champion.com has already seen this. For me, I am still digesting and wondering what is going on. We already received a buff to the instance on all three fronts; more health, more damage, and more healing. Now, we are receiving nerfs that are about to completely trivialize the encounters, or at least some of them.

Lets examine the Lord Marrowgar encounter for instance; I was rather pleased when there were aspects to the fight that involved more on my part, than just standing in one spot and going round and around my tanking rotation. For one, I had to continuously dodge the cold flames. Second, I have to work together with my fellow tank, always sync our movements when dodging the flames. Thirdly, was my responsibility to taunt the boss after each bladestorm.

Except, now the bladestorm no longer resets aggro, which means I can just stand still during the storm and resume randomly smashing buttons when he returns to me. I understand that there are many fights in the instances that represent a significant challenge to players, but this is not one of them. I have seen tanks fail at aggroing the boss after a bladestorm and each time, I would wonder where they learned to play.

It is the easiest thing in the world, just dodge the coldflames and be within taunting range of the boss when the storm fades, and watch the DBM timer. Since taunts are effective for three seconds, you need only wait until there is less than three seconds on the timer and hit taunt. I promise, if you are not a horrible tank, you will have no problems resuming and building aggro on the boss, thanks to that taunt and neither a healer or any dps are in danger of being killed.

Another nerf to make tanking almost trivial is on Rotface, where as part of the excitement was that Mutated Infections arrive faster and faster as the fight progresses, making finishing the fight a fun challenge. Now, that speed no longer exists, at least not to an extent and running around the room with a goo behind you, seems no longer very exciting.

There are not a whole many tanking challenges in this instance, if you really begin counting them. Mostly it is about switching aggroes via taunt at certain stacks, which is conveniently eased by the use of DBM. Encounters like Rotface make tanking a joy, when you really have to do something and focus on execution. I was delighted the first time I did Rotface, as the mechanic was something new and fun for me.

At least I can hope Blizzard can refrain from nerfing Icecrown Citadel any further. Just ignore the moans about difficult it is. People who complain about it, obviously do not know how to appreciate it properly. They just want to run in, faceroll a bunch of stuff and come out bragging they killed the Lich King.

For full source of the changes, read the blue.

Stats in Cataclysm

2010-03-03T03:29:00.001+02:00

Without a doubt, most of you have already seen and read about the updated information about, how stats are going to work in Cataclysm. Of course, we should keep in mind that we have yet to see but a small portion, or a much bigger picture. Because of that, I would suggest caution from assuming too much. An overhaul of stats like this, in the entire game, is going to have an enormous impact on every aspect of the game. Even leveling up will be affected, as Blizzard has already released that they will be altering most, if not all items in the game; from random drops, to dungeon loot, and quest rewards.

All and all, I am still excited though. It cannot hardly be any worse than it already is, when you are leveling a character. If anything, new stats will only make it more interesting, when going to dungeons and completing quests will again have an impact on your character, beyond just awarding experience. Most of the time, these days I just buy greens from the AH whenever I level up. Efficient but incredibly boring and unrewarding.

Concerning end game play, we are finally getting rid of the biggest baggage that seriously character have; gearing up tanks. I remember when I was subjected to the harsh reality of trying to reach my def cap on Durithim, desperately scratching together enchantments and whatever small pieces of gear I could find, to reach the magical 540 number.

In cataclysm, we no longer have this issue, and we will not have to burden our talents points with it either.

“Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.”

Makes perfect sense, and is in its way, a genius solution. We already associate certain stances with tanking, which you must have on, continuously or you will fail before you even manage to really start.

So what can we expect for tanking stats on plate in Cataclysm? Funny enough, the exact same stats that we have come expect; Str, Sta, hit rating, expertise, and avoidance stats. With the one big difference, defense is gone. Makes you wonder how things are going to actually change? I am certain it will, but as always, trade speculations are over blowing it with unjustified foresight. The main big one is the fear that the game is turning to become easier. I very much doubt it. It will become clearer and simpler to manage, but I highly doubt all challenge will be stripped from it because of a few stats.

PvP Standards

2010-02-28T15:56:00.001+02:00

Alrighty, a fresh cup of coffee and some thoughts to conclude and record. I chose the title because, to me, it seems the stardards in PvP have dropped and in fact been low for a long time now. Blizzard themselves have emitted that their design in WotLK to boost the game play in PvE, where as the roles were reversed in TBC; PvP was dominant, with easy loot to gain, and PvE suffered.

So what do I mean by, low standards. Anyone who runs PvP has had issued with this, increasingly so. Now, I am not talking about arena here. Arena does not really suffer from this because there is very little RNG factor in it; you get to choose those you play with, make sure they know what they are doing, have decent gear, etc. But battlegrounds are another story entirely.

I was thrilled when I read the news about the next minor patch, where Blizzard released that they will be adding a random battleground finder. Think of all the applications it could have? It could match you even teams; no more 6v10 WSG or 10v15 AB. It could also make sure there were healers on both teams and that everyone had at least minimal PvP gear. Could even go as far as create brackets in gear, matching those who just run PvP for fun without the gear, those who have started to gear up but are not quite there yet, etc.

But as it seems, Blizzard has dismissed all of these. So far my PTR testing has yielded no such benefits and the teams tend to still run rampart. Truly, the only benefit so far seems to be extra honor and the fact that we can now queue for all the battlegrounds at the same time. Actually, the one thing that the random finder is going to do is hinder premades, because you can only queue five players for a random match at the time.

It is fine to queue in for a battleground here and there, with or without gear, and just have fun but the painful lesson of that is that you will just be excess baggage. Any properly geared PvPer will walk right over you and rest of your team will essentially be outnumbered. The equation only gets more complicated by the fact that many people are not even motivated to get PvP gear because it is so ridiculously difficult.

You can get the tier equivalent set from emblem vendors yes, but the costs are usually double what they are for the same level PvE set and that set will not actually take you very far. It only makes up for about 1/3 of the gear you need, which needs to be farmed by doing battlegrounds. From these pieces, an average item costs about 30k honor and atm, a successful match will give you between 1k-1.5k honor, which equals to 30-20 matches per piece, and only assuming you win every single match, which you won’t.

I am pleased that Blizzard is taking an effort to raise the honor rewards gained from battlegrounds, but the biggest problem still remains, which is that it takes way longer and is way more painful to even put your gear together for PvP, while you can start on heroics in instant green/blue gear. And once you actually have your gear, it is often an unpleasant experience, resembling more a wipe fest for the opposing team than anything else, because in the end, it is not about how good or geared one person is, but how good or geared the entire team is, plus the team setup issues (like having zero healers).

So do I think this can be revived? Absolutely, and Blizzard is continually taking action to up PvP, at this very moment. However, it is happening in Blizzard’s annoyingly slow pace. While I appreciate the random finder, easier honor farming, the coming rated battlegrounds in Cataclysm, and so forth, I would like to see them address the issue of team balance because that is where most of the matches are currently being lost. Yes, PvP is essentially incalculable, but we can still do certain things to at least give the teams some proper setups. Firstly, include role checks, include team number balancing (to make sure teams are at least close to even), and gear checks.

Battlegrounds Refreshed

2010-02-22T13:58:00.001+02:00

There are only two primary aspects to the coming 3.3.3 patch; class upgrades and battleground changes. Specifically, the patch notes are promising a very exciting change to how honor is rewarded. The first one, my favorite, is the fact that you will be earning a lot more honor in battlegrounds, from here on out, or at least, moderately more than you did before. If you are on the winning side, you have a chance to earn oodles of it and even if you lose, you can earn as much, by average, the winner currently earns, as you can see from the screenshot below.

This is really awesome and I do not use the word lightly. Currently, it is a complete pain to gear up a character for PvP. It is almost as if, while concentrating to give us new emblems, tiers and raids, Blizzard slightly forgot about this aspect of the game. It is easy enough to farm heroics and get a very good PvP armor set, but sadly that is not even half the picture. You are still missing chucks of gear and from there on, you are stuck gaining honor to buy pieces that can cost between 30k-60k honor.

Doing the math, on the winning team you will currently earn around 1k-1.5k honor, and that is only if your team does well. However, if your team loses, you are probably on around 500-700. To make things further frustrating, your success depends heavily on the rest of your team. Even if you are a glorified PvP guru, if your team does poorly, so do you.

To also help along with the process of doing battlegrounds, Blizzard is giving us the random battleground finder, which works almost identically to the random dungeon finder. Doing random battlegrounds just earns you extra honor, instead of emblems. Speaking of which, Blizzard has also promised to remove battleground marks of honor from game. Although, this has not yet been implemented on the PTR servers. At least as of yesterday, I was still given my marks of honor and the PvP vendors do not seem to have had their inventories changed yet.

3.3.3 for Death Knights

2010-02-21T13:26:00.001+02:00

Seems perhaps the dawn is finally rising for us death knight tanks, for Blizzard is blessing us with some more buffs on this patch. Concerning our class, the changes, which seem rather significant, are almost entirely tank related – a much welcome change for we have been under the wind for a long time.

The first and biggest joy for me personally, is the change to Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence.

Why, you ask, am I so glad about this? Because as a DK tank, it is mandatory to spend the first 3 seconds of the fight assigning diseases on your target. This slows your initial aggro considerably because in 3 seconds, your dps can fire out minimum two spells. With this change, the first spell we land, already starts the process. Also makes grabbing stray mobs up a bit easier, if your taunt and death grip are on cooldown.

Some other highlights…

Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health.

Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.

Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up from 5/10/15%.

Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up from 10%.

It is hard to not get excited about these changes. It also really pleases me that Frost spec is getting some attention, because it is still my favorite spec, and dual-wielding is becoming more and more incentive with upped threat and a better cooldown.

Ofc, these changes are not permanent and might change or get updated at anytime. Suggest everyone keeps an eye on the patch notes. The PTR is naturally up so you can go test it out yourself.

Vulnerable

2010-02-16T13:58:00.001+02:00

It is common knowledge that death knights are more squishy by nature than our warrior and paladin counterparts. The trick is, how to counter-balance it; which we can do to a length, through game mechanics but it is always going to hurt us and I figured it would serve well to right down something on the subject, to all those of us who, at times, struggle to live up to our peers.

Some of us remember the happy days, before the huge load of death knight nerfs that literally killed our health. I am not saying many of those nerfs were not warranted, but I said it then, and stand by my argument that there were too many cutbacks. From the start of the Wrath, death knights lacked shields, therefore the developers gave us higher health to balance it.

Now, we are on par with warriors and paladins, overpowered as they are, can even go beyond us when properly specced. So what can we do about it?

At this point I will ensure that you have a proper specc and at least moderate gear, concerning the level of content you are playing, and skip those parts. If you think you lack in these areas, have a look at Ensidia’s death knight tanking guide for 3.3. I had a look and it is really good and thorough.

I would bring attention to one piece of gear though, which is your sigil. It is very important that you use the right one. Right now, my personal choice is the sigil of insolence. I went by a dps sigil during ToC, for threat purposes, but now in ICC, insolence is the best.

Another piece that should belong in your inventory are potions; specifically Indestructible Potions. On my server they are very cheap and you should carry a truckload of them. In ICC in particular, even on trash because everything in that place hits rather hard. Pop one right before you enter combat to start the cooldown, and if the fight (doubtful with trash) lasts longer than that, pop another after it expires. Same goes for bosses and generally you will need to use two for every boss kill.

Next are your cooldowns, particularly as Frost or Unholy, you have the choice of Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield, both which also help your initial aggro. I have personally noticed that before the first hit lands on the tank, healers can primarily only wait. So by reducing the damage that the first big hits deal, you are prolonging your life-expectancy.

Next comes Antimagic Shell, one of the cooldowns you are using near constantly in ICC and it never hurts to use it elsewhere either. The good thing is that when to use it, is also easily predictable because it usually involves casting, effects landing from the sky, or breath weapons. Magic damage is simply everywhere, and not only does it heavily mitigate the damage, it provides you with oodles of runic power.

Last I’ll bring attention to avoidance. While it is true that effective health outranks avoidance, little bit of extra cannot hurt, from wherever you can get it. I am still using the Heart of Iron trinket, thanks to the avoidance boost. You can also gem for dodge/stamina in gear, if the socket bonus supports it. A general rule is that if the socket bonus provides +9 stamina, you can go for it. Anything less is a waste.

Reliving the 60s

2010-02-13T11:47:00.001+02:00

The love is in the air festival has crossed over its peek and is now slowly declining, as fewer and fewer people keep hunting achievements. As a personal observation, this time around, the world event was much easier, even compared to the few previous ones this year, like brewfest. Compared to the same festival last year, there is almost no relation.

Last year’s love fool festival was about random chance and mindless grind to roll together all the achievements – one of the big reasons I did not attend it much. It is one thing to make a task challenging, but when it takes dumb luck instead of skill, just puts me off immediately.

What was your experience from this year? I found it relaxing and something that was pleasant to go along with, on the side while still attending all other daily activities. Although, I would perhaps ask Blizzard to re-visualize their concept of what is a “lovely dress.” I bought the box of clothing for both male and female chars and when I dared to preview them on my banker, almost had my eyes jump out of their sockets and run away screaming.

So what is next? Naturally the Lunar Festival, starting tomorrow, 13th of February. Unlike the many festivals that have come before, this will be mainly a grind run; to acquire all the ancestor coins, sprinkled literally every corner of the known world. But at least it will give an excuse to get the Explorer title, to those who have not yet done so.

Toravon the Icewatcher

2010-02-03T20:06:00.001+02:00

Battle for Wintergrasp sure did not lack excitement this evening, when literally half the realm descended onto the snowy plains and attacked the horde fortification. Lag was so bad that no one could possibly even think of any proper strategies or tactics. Got our 2 2nd lieutenant ranks before we had even finished taking all the quests.

The lieu of sieges machines that left the first workshop was just staggering and breaking the walls was just simply about driving up the hill and bashing on the fortress. Targeting, much less actually killing anything was a gamble of cards due to the sick lag, with the game mostly just yelling that your target was not in LOS or range, although to your eyes, seemed like the blood elf paladin-kind-of-thing was still standing calmly in front of you.

Getting a VoA group afterwards took exactly two microseconds and the general consensus was to immediately go for Toravon, the new boss of the instance. The mechanics themselves are extremely simple, but at least during my 25-man group, seemed like the dps could not focus on the simple matter of killing the adds quick enough.

As a tank, your job is extremely simple; stand on top of the other tank and you switch between three stacks of Frostbite debuff. This is essentially just a debuff from the boss’s Frozen Mallet strike that deals periodic frost damage. The latest DBM has already been updated for the fight and each time a stack is applied to a tank, the addon notifies you of it. Occasionally, since the debuff is a Chance-on-hit ability for the boss, the stacks appear irregularly; they may come quickly or slow, but just make sure that your old stacks have faded, before you taunt or you will most certainly die. If you notice that you are building stacks and your partner cannot taunt yet, blow a useful cooldown.

The boss also has a soft enrage timer, in the form of another stacking debuff, Whiteout that is cast over the entire raid every 45 seconds. Each stack increases all frost damage taken by 25%. Eventually, becomes impossible to heal through.

The real tick of the encounter is dealing with the Frozen Orbs that the boss summons every 30 seconds. There are always three at a time and each deals periodic frost damage to everyone within 8 yard radius. It is imperative that all DPS switch to quickly kill the orbs, though might be enough if you just have all your ranged switch. Again, latest DBM has a timer that shows when the orbs are about to spawn.

The only other mechanic is Freezing Ground that freezes and roots the target and those close to him on the floor. This needs to be dispelled away and a sharp disc priest is very good for this job.

The fight is really about controlling the orbs and the debuff on the tanks. If your group can master both tasks, you will likely not have a problem with the encounter.

Falric and Marwyn

2010-02-02T11:21:00.001+02:00

The Halls of Reflection is are probably considered, by the World of Warcraft community as a whole, the most difficult and annoying heroic instance in the game. Frozen Throne has two other instances, but neither is really as frustrating as this one. The reason is because Halls of Reflection really stretches both the tank’s and healer’s skill, under a lot of pressure. Much like the original Oculus, back in the day, it is very hard to get through.

I have recently gone back and farmed myself some black icicle weapons for my dual-wield spec and watching some of my friends try get through it last night, decided I would put together this small overview and tips how I usually tank it.

Specifically, the first two bosses, Falric and Marwyn, in on themselves, are easy. The problem is the eight waves of mobs that spawn in between the boss fights; four waves before Falric and another four before Marwyn, each wave getting consecutively harder to get through.

In essence, the tactic is simple; there are two smaller chambers to the left and right from the entrance. It is, by far, easiest to control the mobs by bottling them at the small and narrow entrance. For us, as DKs, this is easy by laying a Death and Decay just few seconds before the next wave becomes active. Rest of the group should hide behind the small corners in the room, to prevent the mobs from targeting them first. Of course, they inevitably will but that is what the DnD is for. It will take the small initial aggro for you, while you group all the mobs and hit them with some real AoE.

I always tank this in my frost spec, because you really need to take everything out of your AoE in this encounter, and frost has the best AoE abilities from the three DK tanking specs. Each of the mobs have their special abilities, but only few are worth the mention.

Healers and casters, should, once the fight starts, back to the far wall of the chamber, to avoid silences and stuns (which can easily be a leading cause of tank death). There are two ranged type mobs, the dwarf rifleman and the human mage. As a tank, after laying down my DnD, I always back up a few steps, once the ranged type is within death grip range of the doorway, pull them in and rest goes smoothly.

Issues rise when eager dps starts on the mobs before I have a chance to pull the ranged in, because before that, there is no point wasting aoe spells on them. Another annoyance is when you have two ranged types, both the mage and rifleman. Usually then one gets left outside the chamber and a top dps dealer should run out and waste it as quick as possible. There just is no way to build aggro on it while you are dealing with rest of the group.

As for the rest, you want to focus the night elf priest first, if he is present. He can heal himself and his buddies. Next, I always go for the mercenary rogue, because he shadow steps and shanks people almost randomly. His poison ticks hit very hard, even on the tank, so kill him quickly. After that, it’s all the same and by that time, with only 2-3 mobs left, you healer should be getting some slack.

The bosses themselves are fairly simple. Falric is a healer test because he does a lot of aoe damage and can chain fear you. Much of the damage actually get received while everyone is feared, so as a healer, you need to top everyone up between fears. Usually the healer performance drops towards the end, so any extra dps is welcome to bring Falric down fast.

Marwyn is barely a breather compared to everything before him. He creates evil purple circles on the floor, usually under random players but other than that, he is a puppy. His Obliterate ability hits pretty hard and he can make his targets take more shadow damage and lower their maximum health but to be honest, I never had an issue healing through him, even with substandard equipment.

Loot System: DKP

2010-02-01T10:35:00.001+02:00

Got around to check the latest weekly mormot from Lore this morning and figured I would bring this up myself. Unlike him though, this is not an overview of various system, rather I felt would be beneficial to explain how DKP works in Pro Finlandia; the guild that my main character is a part of.

So far, it is a rather unique from what I have seen and it works great. Like one of the variations that Lore mentioned, in this DKP system everything has a set price; tier pieces cost 65 dkp, 2H-weapons 65 dkp, epic mounts 100 dkp, etc. Everything is properly prized.

In turn, dkp is gained with small tidbits; 1 dkp on time bonus, hour bonus 1 dkp, etc. It might not sound like a lot, but the gist of the system is that you can bid on an item, even if you have no dkp. Let me explain – if you have 30 dkp and you bid on a tier piece. That will make your total dkp –35 = 30 – 65. So, you can actually have less than zero dkp. This means that you can always bid, but ofc, the lower your dkp goes, the less likely you will win the bid.

At first glance it seems ridiculous, but actually works beautifully. After all, in the end, it does not matter if you have below zero dkp. The system stays in balance because as usual, the more you spend, the lower you go. It prevents spite bidding and usually prevents anyone from gaining so many dkp that they can bid whatever they want.

This last feature is ensured at the beginning of each new tier patch, when all dkp is nulled and we all start over, so that in between tier patches, no one can gather up ridiculous amounts of dkp. It is fast also very fast because there is no bidding circus; anyone who wants an item just types “bid” and the loot master checks who has the most dkp.

Of course, all guilds have different needs, but this works for us and in my opinion, is really great.

Run! Forest! Run!

2010-01-24T09:49:00.001+02:00

I had my first come back to my death knight character last night, after a long break doing other things, and there is no place like Icecrown Citadel to have you wake up call. My first Rotface (tankspot vid) encounter was a fun experience, particularly since our MT was a warrior, thus falling on me to kite the oozes.

Usually when you’re the less experienced in the bunch, you tend to be given the safe assignments, but mine was pleasantly enjoyable.

For those of you who do not know the encounter, essentially the idea is that while the MT tanks the boss in the middle of the room, the OT stays on the room’s edges. The reason for this is that periodically the boss will drop Mutated Infection on a random person. When it is removed, it drops a small ooze, which cannot be tanked or taunted.

The idea is to get two removed at the same spot, so that in close proximity, they unite into one big ooze. This ooze is tauntable, which is the OT’s job. It will one shot you dead if it catches you, so you need to move and keep kiting it around the room. More small oozes will drop and they must be dragged in front of the big ooze, so it will swallow them and eventually, after five small ones, explode.

It required a few takes, but eventually, we got it and was just, simply a whole lot of fun.

The challenge is basically just the fact that a) quarter of the room is constantly flooded with slime that slows you down and b) towards the end of the fight, smaller oozes will show up at an accelerated rate. We had an extra big ooze on the floor total of three times. It can be bad, since the OT needs to then out run them both, but if you can get them to collide, one of them will instantly explode, since they still act like smaller oozes.

Welcome back to Azeroth Durithim :)

Rawr for Warlocks

2010-01-23T09:33:00.002+02:00

I originally, truly began to use this program when I leveled my warlock. However, it has since then dropped very low on my list of priorities. If you are not aware of, this is a program that lets you optimize your characters, by changing gear, talents, etc. to produce something that is more highly tuned, without constantly respeccing and time consuming experimenting in-game.

However, as nice as this sounds, the program has been having a lot of let-downs lately. When I first brought my results up on some forums, I was informed that Rawr is actually broken, at least for warlocks and you should not trust the dps optimizer as far as our class is concerned.

Ohh well, I can still use it to swap gear, change specs, and experiment with various buffs on. But recently, even this has started to get wrinkled. The problem is, Rawr does not recognize nearly all of the useful trinkets and items that I want to equip. Just take the first set of T10 gear. None of it appears in Rawr’s item list. It is also such things as Circle of Ossus and Purified Lunar Dust.

This starts to put a bent in the program that is really has to ignore and I find myself back to using spreadsheets and excel tables to keep track of the gear I want to get. I suppose the good news is that Rawr’s bug tracker has been made aware of these, but remains to be seen, just how soon it will be fixed.

In the mean time, I recommend caution to anyone using the program, it might not always be telling you the truth, so don’t forget to double check your results the old fashion way.

Running Affliction

2010-01-16T09:43:00.002+02:00

Without a doubt, this has to be my favorite warlock spec. I used it both for leveling my warlock and gearing as I ran heroics. Naturally, since I love it so much, I cannot bare to part from it as the raids have started. Do not ask or tell me whether it is the best spec – it is not the worst and the rest depends so much on what encounter(s) you are running. The debate between affliction and destruction is ongoing and so far, I have not seen a conclusion to it. Especially since it has to be restarted every time there is a patch.

But since the spec has worked so well for me, I figured I would share it with the community.

Leveling Affliction

Leveling affliction is fairly straight forward. You need not worry much about gear, but the benefits of the warlock class are slow to manifest. This is why most people do not spec for affliction at low levels and truth be told, you will depend on your demon a lot during the first stretches of your career. The voidwalker is your most priced asset until level 30, when you can finally re-spec and get on with affliction. At around level 40 you should change to felhunter and you will notice why; your minion simply cannot hold on to threat anymore and the demon dog does a lot more damage than the dark bubbleman.

As you level, make sure you understand only one concept about gear; spell power is priceless. It is the only thing you should concern yourself with, all the way up to level 80. Your goal is to get 100 spell power by level 32. This doubles every 15 levels or so. That means, you should aim for 200 spell power by 45, 400 by 60, and 800 at 75.

This might sound a lot but is actually extremely easy to accomplish with nothing else except quest items. The only time I ventured into dungeons, was at level 60, to Hellfire Citadel. The trick is to always try do group and dungeon quests, if you find you are lacking spell power. The blue items are invaluable and once you reach those limits, you will steamroll the quests.

Other than that, playing Affliction is very simple. Let your dots and pet do the work for you, replenishing your mana and health as needed with dark pact, life tap, drain life / soul. You will find that you can easily run from mob to mob, having anything between 2-5 on you at any given time. You should carry food and water with you, but you have almost never a need to use them. Let me put it this way; each time a new type of water came available, I would buy a stack of 20 of it and usually have over 10 left before I reach a new type again. Instead, mana and health potions can be extremely valuable, in cases on emergency when you accidentally pull too much.

End Gaming

I would actually divide this into two more categories, heroics and raiding. You are at your weekest, in heroics because gear has advanced to a point where your group will simply plow throw both mobs and the bosses. Why is this a bad thing? Because affliction needs a more lengthy fight to bring its dps to up. Dropping Loken in 51 seconds does not give your dots a lot of time to do their job.

Make sure you always have your spellstone, fel armor, and life tap on. If the fight has a lot of aoe damage going on, refresh your life tap with dark pact instead but keep these buffs up, or your dps will be second grade, no matter what you do.

On weaker mobs (meaning anything outside the Frozen Throne) I end up spamming seed of corruption and shadow bolt. If the group is 4+, I hit a couple of them with the seed and finish with rain of fire.

For boss encounters, affliction is maybe the easiest spec. As always, do not think about rotation, think about priorities, which is to keep your dots up and fill in with shadow bolt when you have nothing else to do.

Start with Haunt, before moving to CoE and Corruption. After that, cast UA and then a quick Shadow Bolt. From there on, your main concerns are to refresh you haunt and UA, whenever they are about to expire. The main skill is to not clip your dots and only refresh them at the very last moment when they are about to end. This requires you to constantly monitor the dots and the best tool for that is an addon. I personally like ForteXorcist, which is a good tool regardless, regarding your warlock.

Other tricks are how to move and switch targets, like in the Emalon fight, without losing your dots on the boss, or stop to aoe adds on XT-002, again without losing dps on the boss. However regardless, it is always about maintaining your dots. Shadow bolts make up a lot of your dps in between, but if you dots fall off, even for a few moments, it usually shows in in the statistics later on. So some practice is required.

So far, the best spec I have found is the 56/0/15.

For more leveling details, suggest you have a look at this leveling guide. It will outline most of what I said and quite a bit more as well.

Shadowmourne Released

2009-11-20T08:10:00.003+02:00

Blizzard has finally released some concrete information about this new legendary weapon, known so far as Shadowmourne. The first thing that became available was small preview of the item's lore and hints of how the weapon would actually be crafted, itself alone a fair epic in nature. We were giving three of these clues, and although not very specific, it hints to the line of questing that goes into a legendary weapon.

"... Shadowmourne must be hewn from piles of impure Saronite; the hardened blood of the Old God, Yogg-Saron treated only by master metal-shapers."

There are several clues here, one which is the obvious that whatever "impure saronite" is, it must be taken to Ulduar and somehow interact with the last boss, Yogg-Saron. Much the same way that Val'anyr had to be thrown into Yogg's mouth before slaying him. Perhaps saronite is imbued with Yogg's blood or yogg's blood is just another component. The words "master metal-shapers" might just be a NPC smith in Dalaran, but could also mean that you will need a fellow guild member to forge the components together, either a grand master miner or blacksmith.

With the weapon itself forged, we have this:

"... it is vital that Shadowmourne be drenched in the souls of the most potent servants of the Scourge"

To me this seems very self-explanatory; just go ahead, armed with the weapon, behead enemies in the Icecrown Citadel raid instance. The fact that it mentions "most potent servants" suggests that you have to slay an X amount of raid bosses. How many or what the exact process is, I cannot say.

"... Shadowmourne is to be adorned with fragments of the Frozen Throne."

Again, as the last step, very self-revealing prerequisite, in which you must face Arthas at the last chamber of the instance, and defeat him - multiple times, since "fragments" is in plural. And then, finally in the end, from all the trouble, you will eventually be able to receive Shadowmourne as a just reward. As a level 284 item, it will most likely last you a very long time. Way into the next expansion.

Sounds definitely worth the trouble to me.

Priest Transformed

2009-11-16T08:12:00.004+02:00

It has been a long time coming, but finally my priest has arrived in Northrend. The relief is tangible after a long haul in vanilla and Outland. The last was not as bad, but still frustrating enough. I have said it before and I will say it again, the best feature about Cataclysm, World of Warcraft's next upcoming expansion, is the fact that much of the vanilla world will be remade entirely. Personally, I cannot think what really is worse about playing this game, than leveling alts through useless content.

Sure you get quest rewards, you can do dungeons, you gain professions and all that, but in the end, 95% of it is pointless and you can do without. Just spam quests as fast as you can and break through it into greener pastures. Only in Northrend, does it finally start making sense, as the gear and rewards you get begin to not only look good, but also provide a useful function.

Anyway, enough about ranting. Achn has made it to Northrend and the fun has really started. You may have also noticed that he has gone through a serious transformation; not only his name but exterior has been altered. Achn is no more, and instead before us, is Barunn, son of Ironforge. I made the decision for the race change primarily because I wanted the dwarf casting animations, which are way cooler than that of a human. Made me sad to see Achn disappear, but I am still happy with the end result.

So much has changed, but for the better I think. Me and Ylinya, whom have since the beginning, leveled together, have already started our first dungeons, Utgarde Keep and Nexus. So far, everything has gone swell and we are on our way to max level. For me, Northrend has again provided with a play challenge, much like when doing Outland dungeons did. I have reached such spells as Prayer of Mending and Penance, both high end and only now, finally getting to use them, does the class seem to truly come together.

It is a fun experience to go through and I imagine, once heroics become involved, the game will again change to a certain extend. We will see, just how much, one we get that there.

Tribute to Insanity

2009-11-15T08:41:00.006+02:00

It was a rather happy and proud moment for us all that evening, when the achievement finally glowed on all our screens; the Tribute to Insanity. It took us a bit by surprise, as none of us were really aiming for it, at first. On the contrary, I was pessimistic about our run when I foolishly died tanking Gormok in the beginning, however, it turned out to be the best run we have had.

That makes it the third 10-man group, within the Pro Finlandia guild that has reached the achievement and none of us can but feel proud because of it. It was nice timing as well, since patch 3.3 is arriving shortly and seems like a good way to end one chapter, and start a new one.

Thanks for the photoshop-enchanced image goes to Heidi, my partner and love, a.k.a Atheqa.

New Emblem Gear

2009-11-13T15:52:00.003+02:00

I almost did not think it would come out before the official release date, but finally, PTR has been updated and the new Emblem of Frost Quartermaster has some exciting new gear for us to ogle. I am uncertain of the exact prices, as the items are not actually for sale yet. No prices exist but we probably guess at the proper amounts. More interesting are the items themselves.

The four new trinkets include Corroded Skeleton Key, Purified Lunar Dust, and Maghia's Misguided Quill. The melee and ranged dps trinket has not yet, at the time of this writing, been added to wowhead, I am afraid. However, rest assured, it looks as appetizing as the three previous. Personally, I cannot wait to get me one of the stamina trinkets.

For death knights, the two new sigils are Sigil of the Hanged Man and Sigil of the Bone Gryphon. Personally, I am more interested of the second choice, as raiding in top guilds guarantees that I need to buff my threat generation as much as possible, especially in preparation to the dropped avoidance, thanks to chill of the throne debuff.

In terms of cloaks, we have such nice pieces like Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky, Drape of the Violet Tower, and Sentinel's Winter Cloak to name a few. The first choice is obviously ideal for mages and caster dps classes. The second cloak, I can already see it on my discipline priest. There are total five cloaks, so if you felt left out by the choices, don't - there is most certainly something for everyone.

Other items, which are definitely too numerous to be listed in this humble article, include chest, hands, and waist pieces. The only let down was the disregard for a non-block wielder tank chest, but I am certain I will be able to compensate with tier10 set piece.

Speaking of which, I still could not locate the tier vendor the new set. They were not included among the Emblem vendor inventory, although it could very well be they just have not been added yet. As a good feature, the same vendor also turns emblems of triumph to emblems of frost and sells a new buzz item, Primordial Saronite. We do not yet know what this is for, however, a good guess suggests it will be a key ingredient in the Icecrown Citadel craft designs.

As a last change I noticed, are a series of new items in the Emblem of Triumph vendor, which has the been supplemented with reputation badges for all major northrend factions, each providing 520 reputation for their respected factions, and each costing a single emblem of triumph. This should make it a whole lot easier to grind the expansion factions for the various enchants, mounts and patterns.

Into the Shadow

2009-11-13T07:47:00.002+02:00

Patch 3.3 is approaching fast and the latest changes to the changes are beings scrutinized even more carefully. Personally, I have two character that I am mainly interested and since the death knight, for once, is not getting any major character changes, I can focus some attention on my priest.

Not many changes are involved to the healing specs and for good reason as well. They simply do not require tweaking. Healing priests are, for the moment, in a sweet niche where they are a joy to play and not in a bad habit to outshine their peers. However, shadow priests are getting a lot of buffs on this one. I do not personally play much on shadow, except when leveling but for me, the changes are quite welcome.

First of all, Vampiric Embrace is turned into the spell that it should always have been; a personal buff on the priest instead of a debuff on the monster that it is now. I cannot image what was going through a designer's mind when that spell was first conceived, but for me I always felt like wasting copious amounts of mana, having to apply it on every mob between pulls.

Now, with this change, shadow priests can join warlocks in large mob pulls, with dots and healing mechanics to compensate, speeding up our game considerably. Sure, we could pull lots of mobs before, but you had to first apply Vampiric Embrace on one of them and then actually avoid killing it, in order to gain healing from the damage you make. To make it further annoying, you had to apply it again on the next pull, spending awful amount of for nothing.

Next up, the Improved Devouring Plague spell will gain an increase of damage, to 10/20/30% per rank, instead of the old 5/10/15%. Not having raided as a shadow priest, I am unsure if this is actually necessary but if the Blizzard wants to throw a damage buff my way, heck I am not going to complain.

Also, Mind Flay is having its range increased, up to 30 yards. Wooah!

Changes to Shadowform are close to my heart in particular, as a priest who is still, in fact, leveling. Not only Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, and Vampiric Touch benefiting from haste, mana cost for changing forms is dropping from 32% to 13% of base mana. Along with Vampiric Embrace, casting a quick heal on myself during a big trash pull has to be the single-main reason why I oom quickly.

So to sum up these changes; I do not see any major, big changes to the priest play style or damage output. A small nudge to our damage yes, but mainly I see these as welcome changes that will streamline our game a lot. They will lower down time and the class simply just more efficient, as it should be, if go about and compare to e.g. warlocks, our closest compatriots as dotters.

Chill of the Throne

2009-11-05T16:48:00.003+02:00

When the news about this debuff came out, there was a visible shock among the tank community. What it essentially means is that when you enter the final raid instance, Icecrown Citadel, the dungeon will apply a constant debuff on everyone in the raid - lowering all dodge by 20%. While I am a stamina tank, all the way through (meaning I care a lot more about my total health than about my avoidance) it did make me stop on my tracks as well.

While going for mitigation, such as armor and health, is and has been more effective a long time now, tanks still need to rely on avoidance for much of their survivability. Now imagine that as a tank, your avoidance suddenly drops from 50% to 30%. That is pretty huge and makes you wonder what Blizzard is thinking.

However, once you reflect a bit, you begin to see the wisdom in it. The rattle among many tanks is still going but personally, I am not worried too much over it. The issue mainly stems from the cascading arms race, between tanks and raid bosses. Our gear, both health and avoidance have been steadily climbing, which forces Blizzard to create encounters that hit for more and more damage.

I am certain that many tanks will agree with my own frustration of tanking bosses where you are basically, constantly on the verge of dying. The rotation of two hits and a heal makes your health look like a yo-yo in desperate need of decaf. One slip, or just bad luck, gibs the tank, usually sending what's left of him rolling down hill - in seven pieces.

Now in Icecrown Citadel, Blizzard is attempting to rectify the problem by lowering our avoidance, so they can design more interesting encounters. I am all for this change and it is reassuring to know that this is also the way they will go with Cataclysm; encounters that have more interesting mechanics that affect way more whether you die or not, rather than just raw damage output.

This is not to say Icecrown Citadel will be easy. I imagine it will be the hardest of them all, for obvious reasons. The bosses still swing at the same rate, but will hit a lot more often, with less damage per hit.

However, I am greatly concerned by the fact that lowering avoidance will have a secondary effect on death knights; we rely on avoidance to give us rune strikes. This is our single-greatest threat generating ability. This is why, once we lose aggro, it is hard to get it back because when the boss is no longer swinging at us, we get no rune strikes, and also why we do not have snap aggro.

Reading the latest patch notes for 3.3 might see a fix for this issue, promising a 17% threat increase to rune strikes, to compensate. But still, I worry. Does 17% more threat compensate for the loss of 20% in avoidance? I hope so but will wait for the patch to go live before I count my eggs.

Busting Leveling Myths

2009-11-04T13:59:00.002+02:00

Indeed one of my favorite TV shows and day-off activities, is debunking persisting myths about subjects that interest me. As it is, for me, World of Warcraft is a paradise for old preconceptions that may or may have been true at one time or another. Not surprisingly, once put into circulation, they almost never die. Even after long periods of time, you can guarantee someone, somewhere is still convinced they are true.

This time, I am focusing on leveling guides. Zygor anyone? I was actually an avid user of Zygor for a long time. I thought there was nothing as good in the world, at the time, than Zygor that helped me level easily and quickly through the dry content. However, recently, after not using it for some time have come to question my old logic.

Is using a leveling guide, even as advanced as Zygor really necessary? I do not believe it is. One of the selling points of these products is that they promise it is possible to level at incredible speeds. I believe someone level from 1 to 80 in no more than a week. This may or may not be true, I am not even convinced it is, since there is very little convincing evidence to examine, but even if you work under the hypothesis that it is, so what?

The requirements for leveling at that speed are mind boggling and certainly, the part of a leveling guide plays very little in that role. More than likely, what you really is two or more characters, armed from tip to toe with heirlooms, dual-boxing with recruite-a-friend bonus, and nonstop playing from day to day.

However, this is outside the capability of most average gamers, which the World of Warcraft population is mainly made of. It is true, leveling guides have streamlined the quests that are best for leveling, and the order in which to accomplish them. However, recently leveling various classes, as well previous experience, tells me that this streamlining provides only a marginal benefit.

This is simply because your time is mainly consumed by the quest mechanics themselves - namely by those quests that require you to kill X-type mobs for Y times Z drops. Sometimes these are easy, but often times the drop rates are so low, or luck not your side, that you end up killing dozens for just a few of the items.

Believe it or not, this is the single reason that questing takes a long time. The rest of the factors are controllable with some practical reasoning. The only real tool, I believe everyone needs, is just Questhelper or a similar helper addon that provides the direction and location of the quest objectives. My own favorite is Carbonite, especially now that it is free. While Zygor provides this function, it is not enough to justify paying for it in my books.

Here are some of simple guidelines that I follow when leveling. They are easy to remember and represent just simple commonsense.

Get yourself a quest helper addon.
Arm yourself with as many heirlooms as you can. Not only do they provide total 20% XP bonus, but also act as blues of your level, raising your performance.
Always start by locating a zone of your level, preferably one where your level is at the bottom of its level bracket.
Locate a major quest hub within that zone, pick all the quests you can get, filter out group and dungeon quests, check your quest helper and mentally picture a route across the map that you can take which lets you complete them all.
Make your route, return to the hub, return all the quests, and just rinse and repeat.
Keep in mind that in vanilla WoW, there are two zones for every level. Some zones even have overlapping level brackets, so you can quest in several zones to avoid the quests that would be particularly difficult for your current level.
An occasional dungeon is not a bad idea. Gives you an opportunity to gather better gear, other than what the AH has to offer, and also lets you complete a rare dungeon quest

Finally, do not forget the fact that we are not all born equal. It is wrong, yet a reality in World of Warcraft. Some classes level more easily and quicker than others. A case of study can be found in my warlock and mage characters. I am currently in process of doing the same quests on my warlock that, not too long ago, I completed on my mage.

However, playing my warlock is just so much more easier. I can kill more mobs, with less effort and less downtime, than I could ever with my mage. Hunter and shadow priests fall under this same sentiment. Death knights, particularly if specced DPS in the blood tree, are also a joy to play because of the amount of self-healing and no need to drink for mana.

Does not sound complicated does it? That is because it isn't and yet, still just as effective as using a leveling guide. If anything, for me, it seems leveling guides just remove the necessity of thinking for yourself. Helps people, without skill, level more without actually acquiring the skill and knowledge they later need at top levels.

I am not saying everyone has to be an elite player at max level. But a lot of people overlook the fact that leveling provides valuable practice for beginners to learn the mechanics of the game. Even such simple things as flight points, boat routes, and portals are not obvious to some. Even worse, automated game play produces people who think too much for granted. Like people who sit in Stormwind and spam the trade channel for stockade boosts because they are too lazy to do a few quests that would provide the same effect, in the same amount of time they wasted in futile complaint.

Cataclysm

2009-10-29T08:52:00.005+02:00

I have deliberately been holding back on writing too much about this particular title, with the reason being I hate hype and it does not feel all that relevant at the moment. However, after some exhaustive deliberation, figured was time to put some of my thoughts more firmly down. All and all, like everyone, I am very excited about this expansion.

However, my main excitement is because the expansion has the mandate to fix some of the big issues that World of Warcraft currently has. Of course we have all sorts of cool updates coming, like new races, professions, level cap, etc. but still for me, the other changes, specifically to older content, are more important.

First and foremost, Azeroth, the old zones of vanilla WoW are getting a thorough make over. Why is this such good news? Because the old content is hopelessly out of date. There is no saving it and is one of the most painful things to play through. Sadly, it still represents of 48% of the game's content. Not to mention, simply the content that we spend most of our time leveling through.

Dungeons design, quest organization, gear drops are all things that continue to plague this part of the content, making it unappealing and dry. So much has changed and Blizzard's design team itself has grown since those times that makes looking at Northrend and vanilla like day and night. But no more. We are getting two new races, starting to zones, new zones, and the old areas are updated. Awesome, is what I say.

Second most wanted on my list is a revamp of the character stats, a subject that keeps hindering the game a lot. Simply put, it is just too complicated. Aside from hardcore players, most do not know, or even want to spend hours calculating. Yes, looking at new gear, checking and planning how to get the best results has its appeal and is part of the fun but also distracts you from the game itself.

Especially, when you have to judge items on the fly, with less time to make up your mind than you would reserve for peeing. This is immanent on a lot of raid loot, where e.g. a weapon might drop, that has a lot less attack power than your current weapon, but than again it has useful stats like expertise and armor penetration on it, so is it actually better or not?

This is all going to get streamlined in Cataclysm and I for one, will be happy to see them go.

Spell Power: Will be removed and instead, intellect will provide both mana and SP at the same time. Just makes you wonder why the game did not work this way to begin with.

MP5: Will also be removed and replaced by spirit. To compensate, healers will also gain a meditation-like ability to help them regain mana more efficiently.

Armor Penetration: Aye, this one is on the boot-list and I am happy to see it go. Looking at the ArP history, it either never worked, was over-powered, or just downright confusing. Rest in peace.

Defense: Is going to be replaced by talents that provide tanks with the uncrittable status. It, essentially, is not a confusing stat, up until you begin to wonder how much benefit you are truly getting from stacking more than the necessary cap limit. All around better though, will make gearing for tanking a lot easier.

Attack Power: The same way as SP, this is going to be removed and replaced by agility and strength, for leather/mail and plate wearers respectively.

In general, more weight is shifting to emphasize the importance of the basic stats, like intellect, strength, etc. While currently, the two different groups of stats are locked in a struggle for dominance. It will be clearer and simpler in my opinion. A much desired change.

There are a myriad of changes to the game in cataclysm. Too many to be listed here. For more information, I would starts with the official site, and work your way through wow.com and the mmo-champion.

Preparing for PvP

2009-10-25T00:56:00.007+03:00

This morning I finally wrote and posted my humble review on PvP Leveling in World of Warcraft; a very viable and interesting way to level a character. I have personally had a lot of fun tackling horde, stealing flags, and laying waste blizzard and fireball. However, I believe my success so far has been largely thanks to the preparation I did before hand, or during my pvp career.

Here are some very simple steps I suggest everyone considers for themselves, when making the decision to level using battlegrounds.

Heirlooms

I cannot stress it enough, how important these are for you. When you level mostly using battlegrounds, you will be short on both gold and gear from instances. Sure, you can run a few instances on the side, but it will not make up for the difference much. Heirlooms act as blues of their equivalent level and improve the same time your level increases, so they will always be up to date.

There are enough heirlooms available to give any class you choose, a weapon, two trinkets, and two pieces of armor. In order of priority, the items go armor, weapon, and trinkets. The armor is first because each gives a 10% increase to all experience gained from quests and the killing of a target or monster that yields honor. In case you are wondering, they stack.

In patch 3.3, we hear from wow.com that there might be new heirlooms available, for data mining has shown that there is an item or spell that provides a 5% experience increase; A little extra XP bonus.

The weapon is important, for obvious reasons, as they are often the most important and sought after items that relate to your dps. Some classes can choose from different weapons even, as is the case of the rogue, depending if you are going for combat or assassination specs.

In my case, I chose the following for my mage;

Tattered Dreadmist Robe

Exquisite Sunderseer Mantle

Grand Staff of Jordan

Discerning Eye of the Beast

Inherited Insignia of the Alliance

Notice the fact that three of the listed items are pvp in nature. They are available, not from the Dalaran heirloom vendor, but from within the Wintergrasp fortress, for pvp badges. The rest of the slots for my gear, I mostly buy from the AH or get a high level to quickly run me through a low level instance.

If there is one item I suggest everyone buys, it is the last, pvp trinket that frees you from movement impairing effects. It is an absolute must have for every pvp player and will save you from a whole bunch of grief, since playing pvp is half struggle for control and it is achieved through stuns, roots, etc.

Professions

Every player should level his or her First-Aid skill, as high as their current level allows. It is true, you can buy bandages but for me, it is essential that I can create them myself. There is never a shortage of cloth at the AH, and if you level like most do, with quests on the side of BGs, you will also gather some yourself.

As items, bandages are a lifesaver in any battleground match, particularly when short on healers (and you always will be); head to head matches often leave, even if you survive, starving for health, and though you are still standing, the next opponent only needs one arrow or spell, or stinking breath, to put you down.

There are a variety of professions that can be useful to you, particularly crafting professions that allow you to easily put together the best craftable items, to supplement your heirloom gear. However, I decided to choose herbalism and alchemy.

Healing and mana potions, the first more than the second, are crucial for me. The two professions allow me to both gather and prepare my own potions, as well as gain Lifeblood. It has saved me more than once when out running the horde, their flag in hand.

Class Capabilities

It is very important to learn and understand the capabilities of your class. Particularly how they play in pvp, since when going head to head with other players, the game changes drastically. Few, if any of the skills you had in pve, will apply on battlegrounds. Some abilities are only useful in pvp situations learning what your class can do is the only way to shine.

Also do not let anyone gouge you into picking some select, so called "best" classes. Personally, I enjoy playing less obvious choices and it bores me to tears when I check the match roster and realize five from ten in the enemy team are rogues or hunters. Particularly on certain levels, like the 10-19 branch is infested with players of those classes, since they are the obvious, strongest contestants.

For my mage, I was told to be a poor choice for battlegrounds and that I will be ganked by rogues and warriors of lower level than I am. However, so far, I find rogues less imbalanced and more just annoying, who are incapable of anything else except stealth, backstab, and try kill you before the stun wears off.

If it doesn't, or if I can reveal the rogue with an aoe, the rogue better pray for quick reinforcements before he becomes a jar on my mantle piece.

The Battlegrounds

Just like knowing your class, knowing the terrain and purpose of the battlegrounds you play is equally important. It is not a rare sight, to see people wonder aimlessly on arathi basin, not fully understanding how the battleground works, or know the best ways to infiltrate the enemy base in warsong gulch.

Game Mates

Finding people to play battlegrounds with can cut a lot of frustrations from the road ahead. Pugs by nature are chaotic and usually only go with the one tactics; which is to say, they don't have any. Basically, just zerg the enemies, while trying to accomplish the battleground objectives. After you take part in a match, with clear strategies and roles, you realize how much of success depends on people who are willing to communicate and evolve strategies.

And even if you cannot find any pvp guilds to join, just grouping with a friend or two takes you a long way.

PvP Leveling

2009-10-23T17:50:00.004+03:00

Everybody knows me as not the best friend of PvP, nor the best skilled in its arts even. However, since battlegrounds now award its participants with experience, since patch 3.2, I simultaneously the subject merited investigation. Naturally, in my typical nature I was not going to with any easy class, e.g. hunters and rogues, like say 90% of the pvp populations. Instead I finally adopted a mage character.

True to my assumption, mages are rare, at least on most low level battlegrounds, which makes playing them all the more interesting. Particularly facing less experienced players, who are used to ganking other rogues and shamans, a mage produces a lot of pleasure when you can kite a pack of hordies around in a circle, literally forever.

Many people think mages are far from the best class for battlegrounds and it is true that the class is far from being dominant, the same way that hunters and rogues are. But where we lack the raw power of a hunter, mages make up in finesse and control, and that is where the class truly shines; sheep, frost nova, frostbolt, to name a few are some of the mage's best tools.

So what is the verdict; is fighting on battlegrounds a viable leveling method? I believe it is. As a show case, I give my gnome mage, now a level 29 fire and frost hybrid. The moment I hit level 10, I started pvping and refused questing in all forms until two days and 24 levels laters. For a leveling pace, that is not bad at all.

The experience is gained, as per quote from Blizzard "for completing objectives and actions that yield honor (honorable kills not included)." This makes it all very straight forward. Think capturing flags on Warsong Gulch, conquering contested points of resources on Arathi Basin, and so on. So, of course, the side that wins, gains the most experience as well.

However, there is a catch to leveling on battlegrounds, which is true to all team efforts; you can only do as good as your team as a whole. So whether you like it or not, your success is in the hands of your teammates. In fact, now since twinks have been pushed to their separate battlegrounds, away from us casual folk, the encounters consist of a wide variety of people, of all levels and experience.

Also, if you do as I did, leveled using only battlegrounds, be prepared for heavy-handed ganking on the lower tiers of your level bracket. The horde, and without a doubt the alliance as well, enjoy nothing more than jumping on a level 11 or 14 just for the fun of it. They will, in fact go through lengthy trouble to kill you.

Personally, I spent over five minutes, running across the field of Warsong Gulch twice, from my base, to their base, away from the base, zig zagging tree trunks and stomps, while three horde players chased on my heels. Quite ridiculous actually, which was made only more hilarious when I lead them straight into an armada of blood-thirsty allies.

But still, if surrounded by reasonably skilled players, not outnumbered or -geared by higher level players, leveling with battlegrounds can be efficient and a whole lot of fun. However, if this has peaked your interest, I suggest you come prepared. There is much you can personally do, to optimize your game play. After all, the same rules apply to battlegrounds, as apply to raiding; you are not alone, you are part of a team, and if you stink, the rest of your comrades will also pay for it.

Since this post will already be quite long, I will leave some of the means I used to prepare, for my next blog post. So stay tuned.

Managing the Priest

2009-10-15T11:04:00.005+03:00

I have been writing a whole ton of posts, recently about death knights and tanking, so I decided to take a trip down a different road this morning. Most of you have probably noticed that my priest has been leveling up some and he has indeed been the focus of most of my gaming for the past week. The reason was simple, I had just finished the Tribute to Skill achievement and consciously decided to take a break for something totally different.

And what could be more different than playing a healer? A total opposite to what I usually play, however something I have always, as a tank, felt close to; a bond if you will, between those whom I keep safe and whom struggle and do their very best to not let me be squashed. Aye, never an easy task, but we make due ;)

Achn is actually a character that I have, since inception, been leveling with a partner, my real life partner in fact. Anyone who has not tried it, have my recommendation, for it is a match made in heaven. Her human paladin tanks for me, while I heal and dps for her. I started out all out in holy spec, for I wanted to get to know the class from a healer's point of view. But now, after we have crossed the level 60 threshold, I have moved to two specs; shadow and disc.

I use the shadow spec for our quest marathons, for it is a minor inconvenience for me to occasionally heal her, while doing extra dps to get the mobs down quicker. When going to instances, like the Hellfire Citadel dungeons that we have recently been nearly farming for gear (I know, it is not sexy to care about gear when leveling, but bite me), I will of course go disc.

Why the change from holy to disc? My own personal choice tbh, but I did not very much enjoy the constant threat of ooming as holy. Also, after simply trying disc, with my mana problem removed, I fell in love just the style in which we heal. However, juggling these specs and getting some real healing experience as a level 59 in Hellfire Ramparts, I began to question some of the addons I was using, or rather, the lack of proper ones.

First of all, a proper cast bar. There is no question about it and the only viable option I managed to find was Quartz. There is almost no contest; Quartz is highly configurable and has the most efficient features.

The second a must have addon is ForteXorcist. This is a massive addon, centering around the idea of micro managing all the small whistles that most classes have. These include shards and healthstones for warlocks, cooldowns, spell timers, messages, and so on. The list is almost endless and configuring this mammoth can easily seem daunting. However, it is a lot less complicated than it seems and it truly is invaluable.

The main feature I use for my priest, is the spell timers. I could not possibly live without them, especially in shadow spec, which relies on the exact management of dots on the target to produce quality dps. Xorcist shows me all the spells I have cast on the target, in easy to read rundown bars, with timers.

For my discipline spec, I use the spell timers to keep an eye on my Power Word: Shield and Weakened Soul debuff. Before you say that I can also manage the same by watching the debuff frame, yes, I know and that is what I did before. However, at least in my minimalist UI, the frame is tiny and watching the debuff tick around clock-wise is not very optimal.

Third, but not least, is a reliable way to track your Prayer of Mending. This is actually something I have yet to test, for I will not be able to learn the spell itself until level 68. However, it is something to think and prepare for. One options that I have heard a lot of good about is PoM Tracker; I love the simplicity and that it will be yet one more feature on my screen that will not take a lot of space. Also, what I read is that is a lot more reliable than many of its competitors. For one, it does not get confused by multiple prayers.

That is all for the moment. I would consider the three above mentioned addons crucial to any priest and high recommend you have a look at them, if you have not yet done so.

Good luck and enjoy.

Into the Abyss

2009-10-09T08:43:00.007+03:00

The first time when I entered and played through this instance, it was not only normal difficulty but also had many of the mechanics hardly in use. This was true particularly with the boss fights, which lead me personally without a sense of satisfaction. The instance is well designed, atmospheric and just beautiful to look at. The same is true for the Forge of Souls.

However, I a much better sense of the mechanics this time around and I even had the sense to grab a couple of screenshots. The nice thing about it is that, unlike so many other instances, Pit of Saron is not linear. You can go about killing the first two bosses whichever you want first, as well as free 20 slaves from wherever pleases you.

At the moment there are more slaves in the pit than you need to be able to save, so you are free to take your pick about your route and targets. The first boss, Forgemaster Garfrost is simple enough. As his health drops, he will stun you party and jump between his forges where he takes out a new weapon every time.

The only tricky bit of the fight are the adds around Garfrost's forge. Neither the boss or the adds can be pulled separately, so you have to quickly burn the adds down so you are not overwhelmed. Other than that the fight is still extremely simple; just tank and spank him.

Next up is the leper gnome on his private hunchback minion; Krick and Ick. I was happily surprised, particularly by this encounter because the first time around it was almost like fighting trash. Krick will drop poison buddles much like Grobbulus and needs to be kited. And by kiting I really mean it because the little twat is obsessed by his buddles.

He will also occasionally chase on your party members, when he uses an ability called Pursuit. I am unsure what else they can do at that point, except just run like the wind. It was not an issue for us, for we were insanely over geared for the encounter, but I can see it particularly nasty for low-gear level 80s.

Additionally, he will occasionally go through cycles of using poison nova and small arcane bombs around his immediately surrounding. He does not need to be tank during the bombs so both the tank and melee can, and should, freely circle around him and avoid the purple domes. The poison nova is a fairly high damage, so like during overloads on both the Iron Council and Mimiron, the party should get out of range.

The next part is definitely my favorite, as you must run through a gauntlet of undead, including a tunnel that is currently collapsing. Remember Hodir and the falling ice? Same deal, except you will tank trash and must keep moving at all times. Any tank who loves mobility and AOE tanking, this is the place for you.

The last boss has not changed much since my last visit. Tank him approx. where he lands but mindful of the frostbolts that his mount drops on your party. They fall fairly randomly and easily freeze you where you are standing. The good news is that the person who gets hit is marked by a hunter's mark, so you always know who it is.

Other abilities that he has include Forceful Smash and Overlord's Brand. The first is just a very strong hit that your tank has to soak. It hits for about 15k on heroic, so your party healer can keep the tank topped up, it should be a small problem but can be an issue if the healer gets frozen for instance.

If healing is scarce, the tank can always use a cooldown to help out. The brand is more annoying, as when it hits a dps player, all the damage produced by that person is diverted to the tank. If the target is a healer, all healing is directed to the Tyrannus.

All and all, the instance is only getting better as the PTR goes on and I think we can see the entirety come together as a very nice and coherent dungeon. If you are interested to see some video feed of the dungeon, I came across a good quality look at youtube.

Pit of Saron + Forgemaster Garfrost

Enjoy.

Death Knight Tier 10 Review

2009-10-08T10:00:00.009+03:00

Odds are I was the only person in the world who was clinging to the hope that we would not have to joggle yet another set of tier gear. Small hope I agree, but I believe justified because as a progression raider most of your game actually revolves around those blasted pieces and not sooner than you actually have managed to gather a set, you are already shopping for a new one next week.

But enough ranting and lets have a look what nice things we are getting this week.

The new death knight art actually looks very nice this time around. Tier 9 was fine but seemed a bit too contained, too neat and polished for someone who is essentially a warrior with a permanent bad temper. The new look is a return to tier 8; death motifs and rustic. Definitely a nice job by the designer.

The tier bonuses look slightly more dubious. Since I a tank night and day, I always look at those set bonuses first and I am getting mixed feelings this time:

2P Bonus: Increases the damage done by your Death and Decay ability by 20%.

4P Bonus: When you activate Blood Tap, you gain 12% damage reduction from all attacks for 10 seconds.

As always, the first set bonus is a threat amplifier but I am worried that the target this time is Death And Decay. True, it is my default opener to any fight, so a good choice, but the problem is integrating it neatly into your rotation. You will of course try to recast it during an encounter but odds are you will not be able to, at least not as often as you would prefer because it actually takes three different runes to use and getting all three refreshed at the same time is not an easy feat.

Also for highly mobile bosses e.g. Hodir, Ignis, and Dreadscale it is particularly difficult because you are then stuck tanking the boss within the confines of the spell.

The second set bonus does make me raise my eyebrows equally. Is this meant as an extra tank cooldown? Seems improbable because blood tap already plays a pivotal role as part of my normal rotation to get extra hits out on the boss. To be forced to save it as a damage mitigator seems out of this world to me.

I am thinking it might provide a nice respite to heavy damage during a fight though. Remember damage of Ulduar hard modes or ToTGC bosses like Gormak and Anub'arak? Using blood tap like I do, whenever possible to make use of a death rune will provide some amount of mitigation just randomly during a fight, and if available, as an emergency cooldown but there is a downside also; random damage mitigation means spiky damage and we all know how healers hate spiky damage.

Sure, you can use Ora2 to announce cooldowns and that way healers can know when you're using it but to me spells hard times for healers though.

Shadowmourne

2009-10-05T20:51:00.003+03:00

I consider myself fairly up to date on what goes on in the World of Warcraft workshop and was, among, without a doubt, millions who were reading the news from last Blizzcon, as they were flooding the internet. Yet I still completely missed news of this new legendary weapon. For me, it came completely out of the blue as I stumbled upon it by just sheer accident.

So what is this sword exactly? Information is very scarce at the moment. No stats have been released yet but we do know that it is a two-hander axe, aimed at melee classes. This means primarily warriors, paladins, and death knights (both dps and tanks). While it could possibly be wielded by other classes, Ghostcrawler has iterated (source) that the stats will favor the above classes.

It will be available in the Icecrown Citadel, the same way that Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings was available from Ulduar. Myself, I wonder about the name of the weapon. It sustains a striking resemblance to the Lich King's signature weapon, Frostmourne. I hope there is some rational lore attached to the name, for otherwise it is an uncomfortable recycling of ideas. By all means, I am thrilled that there is a legendary melee weapon coming out, as the last one was clearly a caster weapon, but will feel like a slight cheat if it is just a makeshift version of the real thing.

Some people point out strongly that the legendary weapon from Icecrown Citadel should have been Frostmourne itself, but I strongly disagree, as do most who care at least a tiny bit about the game's lore aspects. To allow it to be fallen into player hands would mean that it would have to be defined into logical parameters would only demean and weaken it, reducing it to "just another legendary" since it obviously could not corrupt the player character the same way it was responsible for creating the most iconic villain in the game.

No, no, no I say. Frostmourne is unique because it is undefined and its powers a mystery to us. It belongs in the possession of the Lich King, where it maintains its power and provides us with an unforgettable gaming experience.

Sigils

2009-10-04T08:44:00.004+03:00

Since this is a subject I have personally struggled a lot; which is the best sigil for each spec, I decided to put it up here. Sigils are essentially to death knight what totems and librams are to shamans and paladins, and it is not always so straight forward to pick the right one. Each tier set has been, so far, accompanied by a couple of new sigils and the variation of their abilities makes them difficult to interpret.

Like so many things, these are issues that some of us gladly leave to those with math degrees and generally too much time on their hands, to calculate proc rates, rotations, and overall output. The only good news is that both dps and tanks generally use the same sigils. This is due to the fact that death knights generate aggro through dps output. So basically what you have is a bunch of threat amplifiers, like Death and Decay and Frost Presence, and then the rest is up to your dps.

Frost has it the easiest, alas the best sigil for them is still the Sigil of Awareness. This can be bought cheap with emblems of conquest from your local Dalaran vendor. Since the patch 3.2.2, both blood and unholy now use the Sigil of Virulence, which basically acts like a miniature version of the Darkmoon Card: Greatness, procing your strength by 200 with a very high up time (estimated 80%).

The downside is that the Sigil of Virulence costs 25 emblems of triumph, so it can take many daily heroic quests for you to get it. However, Sigil of Vengeful Heart is still a very good spaceholder until you get virulence. It is sold by the conquest vendor as well, for 19 emblems, and of course it also has a chance to drop from 25-man XT-002 Deconstructor.

Tribute to Skill

2009-10-03T21:33:00.003+03:00

There are moments when you are allowed to feel good about yourself and this is definitely one of mine; having completed the Tribute to Skill achievement on 10-man totgc instance this evening, with an awesome crew. It was particularly satisfying after having endlessly farmed both 10- and 25-man normal modes with little to no challenge of feeling of accomplishment.

Grand crusader however, was quite a struggle. The encounters we found the hardest were the Faction Champions and Anub'arak. The first severely more than the last, where the champions just simply kept wiping the floor with us. Anub'arak proved mainly a performance challenge, as it has a lot more in-built difficulty than the normal modes.

Firstly, you only have six grounds of frost to use, the burrowers now cast Shadow Strike that needs to be interrupted, and the damage is a lot more severe. The two primary obstacles are performing successful interrupts and keeping them from burrowing. We used a shaman, though a rogue would probably be a lot more optimal, with a focus kick macro as the adds and boss are tanked side by side.

It also comes to a bit of luck, when Anub'arak himself burrows, the OT will most likely still have two adds on his hands. Because the proximity to the boss, the spikes will probably hit the ice he is standing, breaking it, possibly even killing the OT if he is not maxed out. The OT must vacate the patch of ice before the spikes hit it and kite the adds to a new one without letting them burrow themselves. Since this ability is on a timer, it is has a lot to do with luck.

However, if you can master these two aspects, the fight should go through fairly easily. The only crunch is when phase 3 starts and the OT is not only taking the constant aoe damage from the boss but also melee hits from the adds.

But the fight is well worth it, even if you have to struggle. I had the luck of getting Lothar's Edge, hitch hiking my stats up a notch once more. So for now, I could not be happier but am already looking for the next peak to climb.

Return of the PTR

2009-10-03T12:20:00.007+03:00

If you are anything like me, you have been following the 3.3 patch news with great anticipation and interest, as they have began to flood through from wow.com and mmo-champion - people hard at work data mining and exploring what is currently available in the test realms.

So far, the most interesting news have come from both Blizzard themselves, in the form a Frozen Halls info page, and mmo-champion data miners, whom have been able to discover some very interesting updates. The first and foremost of course, is the Icecrown Citadel. Anyone who has flown around it a few times realized a long time ago that it will be very expansive. The structure alone is impressive and massive.

So far we know that the citadel with not only host the new raid, with the Lich King as the final boss, but will also contain a new dungeon, with both normal and heroic version, and a total of three different wings; in order the Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection. You must complete them in sequence to gain access to the last one and contain a lot of interesting new aspects.

So naturally when I saw people on general channel, looking for likeminded adventurers and explorers I just had to jump at the chance. We entered the Pit of Saron, whether or not because they had already done the first wing or if it was the only one currently enabled, I cannot say. But the first time stepping inside the citadel was very exciting. Essentially, we have two objectives; free as many slaves as possible and also kill the bosses.

The second boss Ick, which after falling to us gave up a startling revelation, Frostmourne currently resides alone, in the Halls of Reflection. Whether it will be just an event or possible a boss encounter, remains to be seen but opens the possibility that the way to defeat the Lich King is by taking away his most dangerous weapon.

Like all dungeons, normal and heroic alike, tanking the instance was heavy on the aoe side. You can switch to blood on bosses if you prefer but all and all, was a very standard issue tankwise. The bosses themselves do a lot of burst damage and had very little actual technicalities to overcome. Tyrannus at the very end had some twists to provide, but seems we encounter either a bug or another disabled feature, because once we quickly downed him, the first was suddenly over.

Why is this odd? Because Tyrannus first presents himself on the back of a frostwyrm and on such an occasion, you would expect to fight both the two-legged and four-legged counterparts. Our encounter however started with Tyrannus coming down and ended when he fell.

We had no luck investigating any possible loot because nothing was dropped, but odds are high this will change quickly, once the loot tables are finished and enabled. Mmo-champions did report an interesting set of new daily quests though, or rather, weekly quests. I managed to confirm them with the usual daily quest giver. Exactly like the old Wintergrasp quests, these can be completed only once a week, but instead provide x10 Emblems of Frost.

Also, instead of heroics, the quests are completed in raid instances. These range from Naxxramas to Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader. Basically just like the previous heroic dailies, you have to kill a boss to complete the quest. I could not locate a vendor that currently accepts the new emblems but I am prepared to speculate they have to do with new gear. A new set of tier gear?

Personally, I am voting against a new tier set. It takes our all the fun out of, the otherwise exciting gear, when you have to struggle to change it every damn patch. But time will tell. For now, will continue to follow the blogsphere and explore the PTR. Will keep my readers informed.

How to win PvP

2009-10-02T10:52:00.003+03:00

I did not link this video originally when I first saw it but now, looking back, I just have to. It is the most accurate and hilarious representation PvP in World of Warcraft I have ever seen. Definitely worth watching. Enjoy.

Good Will

2009-10-01T11:26:00.004+03:00

During my every morning routine visit to wow.com, something oddly unconventional caught my eye; Doing something nice for other players. Makes you think back and just how rare this sort of thing is in the modern World of Warcraft. Aye, it is not as bad as it first seems, but the simple truth is that large portion of players find it stimulating to jerk off at other people, safe behind the impenetrable shield of anonymity.

What is worse, it is everywhere; both general and trade channels, battlegrounds, raids, guilds, and even random people you meet outside an instance. The recent moments, for me personally was when I was waiting for a friend of mine to come out Caverns of Time, standing outside the instance where a friendly level 80 warlock threw "noob" at me for being below level 60.

Any of my readers happen to be working on a doctorate for psychology? I am pretty sure this sort of gratification disorder, the need to jump on other people for no good reason, other than that their moms held them too tight or not tight enough would just fascinate you shrink types.

But of course, after some reflection, we can gladly conclude that while their numbers are high, they do not make up the whole of the gamer population. There are lots of friendly and decent people around. True, I have to say that although I hold myself to this group, I do not practice the kind of open charity as the person described in the news post.

The reason for that is that while those of us, who enjoy helping others, do not do it very often or to total strangers only out of the goodness in our hearts, is that most newbies are not nearly as grateful for the help you offer. Several exemplary cases come to mind, one being that after you do help out, maybe pull extra mats from your bank and make some toys for someone, they tend to get too used to it.

The end result is that they continue to whisper you for more help; can you help me with this quest, where can I find A or C, and if you can loan them some more gold for a new piece of armor. That is just not right and incredibly infuriating. Another winning case is when you polite tell someone you cannot take them to your pug because of their shabby gear.

Aye, it does suck to be turned down but all willingness to give you tips and hints where to get better upgrades wash away when you start throwing "fuck you" and "shit yourself" at me for trying to help you. We have all been there, in that position. The difference is, we worked hard and got out of it, without the need for drama.

Some part of the problem itself, I believe is inherent in the game itself and what it represents. A common problem with kids these days is that they spend so much time online and in the virtual world that they totally lack social skills. They do not know how to communicate with the common bloke and the game itself promotes an environment where they do not even have to.

This is the big reason why I refuse to give into using much of the WoW slang that exists in the game, because it was invented by socially awkward 14 year olds. I choose to hold on to my persona and will not sink into the pit hole of lame idiots who hardly know how to spell xenophobe.

Onyxia is Back!

2009-09-30T20:55:00.003+03:00

Like so many other things that are reinvented, Onyxia seems to divide the World of Warcraft demography. As always, the most vocal side are the ones not happy with Onyxia's reincarnation, finding a long list of faults in her new forms but personally I am delighted from the update.

The very first reason to like her is the fact that a huge portion of us never got to fight her in vanilla WoW and have only seen her, mainly lying on her back after being zerged by a bunch of level 80s. I, myself took her down with just the three of us, and even from our tiny group two of us were tanks. To make it further ridiculous, the paladin tank also functioned as our healer, who is the same paladin who I know 1-manned her.

This is the case with all old raids and for my life cannot see what the point would be to not redesign them, so they can provide a logical function in the game - instead of just being the occasional punching bag for nostalgic old timers.

The second reason is that now Onyxia is a lot more approachable, instead of feeling like teeth being pulled. Naturally, for some this is a bad thing. Of course, I bet it was a blast to spend over 40 minutes fighting one raid boss. With luck, someone screwed you over because of their teenage angst and you would be starting all over again.

Third but not last, with Naxxramas, Sartharion, and Malygos becoming obsolete we desperately needed a new raid into the game. Granted, it is only one boss but it is better than nothing while we wait for the release of Icecrown. Of course, I do not mean that in condescending, but rather pointing out the fact that those of us who have completed Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader only provides so much entertainment.

So what is Onyxia like these days. After research (and listening to old timers whining), I do not see how the fight is so much different; you go through three distinct phases and a lot of moving around is required to get through them.

Phase 1 is a simple spank phase. Your main tank should tank her against the back of the cave, so the push back does not blow him away and everyone else should stay around or behind Onyxia, to avoid the frontal cleave that can easily turn a clothie into some shredded wallpaper.

Phase 2 begins when she walks back across the cave and takes off into the air. As in the vanilla version, everyone should group up in the middle of the cave, where the floor declines into. Whelps will fly from both sides and your (preferably an aoe capable) tank grabs them while dps aoes them down.

There is an elite type of add that also comes from the entrance, which must be tanked and killed as quick as possible, for they hit rather hard and will overwhelm the tanks if not taken care of. Most notably have your cloth wearers dispel the Ignite Weapon as quickly as possible, for it adds 25k extra damage to their attacks for five seconds.

This phase ends when the ranged dps succeed in bringing Onyxia to 40%, after which your main tank must quickly grab aggro and place himself against a wall, or she makes wind chimes of your raid.

From there the fight continues much like phase 1, except for an occasional inconsequential whelp, fear, and fire cracking from the floor. If you get her this far, you should be able to nail her, as long as you healers do not run out of mana.

All and all, a very enjoyable raid in my opinion.

UI Makeover

2009-09-30T20:09:00.005+03:00

Inspired by my fellow World of Warcraft players, I decided to take on it once more and redo my UI. I was mainly intrigued by the popular addon Kgpanels and I wanted to make look really unique - something I had never had before. I must say I am quite pleased with the look. It still has same sense of minilism that I enjoy but also looks really nice.

I had already previously moved from Pitbull 3 to Pitbull 4, after I got fed up with the clunky configuration and just outright anarchy that resides inside the addon. The new pitbull has succeeded in streamlining the layout much more with a lot less chaos than its earlier incarnation.

Aside from Kgpanels, I also added SLDataText to replace the uncomfortable Fubar texts, as well as to compensate for the lack of a microbar, so I can always see my latency, memory usage, and frame rate. The last newcomer is caelNamePlates for prettier nameplates, however I am not complete satisfied with it. The plates tend to crowd and blow the view.

Esthetically, I have separated the public channels into their own chat window on the right. The minimap addon is still the same, Sexymap, however I did consequently change to a more prudent skin.

For a view of my older UI, feel free to read up on Rhin's User Interface. Promise though, it like a monkey's ass compared to this one.

For future features, I will most likely experiment for a proper castbar addon, such as maybe Quartz and Aloft for a better nameplates.

Nerd Rage

2009-09-21T09:08:00.003+03:00

I am sure that anyone who has been playing World of Warcraft for more than a week is no stranger to this phenomenan. In a way, the game is a perfect analog for rl sports, where cheering for your team and defending the ethnic correctness is defended to the last one and it is not just in-game. It spreads like wildfire, infecting discussion boards, news groups and just everyday talk between buddies.

Sometimes I wonder if it is the only aspect of the game that some people know how to do. The examples sure are more numerous than one could list, e.g. horde vs alliance. Aye, seems rediculous at first but people tend to take it very seriously and the hatred for anyone not of your faction is thick enough to cut with a butterknife. Same goes between guilds, especially if you are unlucky to be in one that aroused the ire of the community, you might not even be accepted to PuGs because of it.

One of my all time favorites is asking or just talking on trade or the general channel. The trigger can be almost anything really, like asking if someone wants to take part in your group quest or just asking directions where a specific quest is completed. Perfectly understandable isn't it? After all, though it reads "Suggested for groups [5]" doesn't really mean it is meant for groups. It is perfectly soloable in the uber gear that we are all privied to.

Other good examples include pvp, which is an instant combustion for the losing team, certain classes, of death knights are a prime example (after all, was our fault that we were so overpowered back in the day when earth was still flat), poor gear, mistakes on instances and raids, or just happening upon the same bond that someone else is already fishing in.

I understand many play the game with great passion. Personally, I am very much the same. I love playing it and I try to do so every day, but it does not make me hate the world and certainly cannot find it in myself to degrade and ruin someone else's gaming experience just because I am prone to psychotic episodes. In my mind, people like this have no place in the game and personally hope Blizzard would implement more strict tolerance for it.

It is still a game, one have volunteered to subscribe to, and the joy of playing is the only valid reason to continue playing.

Crusader's Evaluation

2009-09-13T18:56:00.005+03:00

3.2 has been out for a good long while now and we are soon to be taken into 3.2.2, along with the newly realized Onyxia's lair. However, it took some good while to get all of the new encounters released so I have been saving some of my thoughts until now.

Personally, it is one of my favorite raid instances in the game, as of this time. Ulduar was not bad but it could never really rise to point where I was excited about it, at least the same way I was about Naxxramas and now Trial of the Crusader. Oddly, it is the very nature of the instance that I like so much, which is, it has minimum of the fuss that most raids have. Of course, I am talking about trash.

Ulduar was particularly painful at times because trash itself often had to merit their own tactics. There were a large variety of them and while the challenge was welcome, after it became a routine, the tactics became tiresome and not at all satisfying. On the contrary, whole group would sigh when being held from reaching Vezax, Auriaya, or Mimiron because you had to stop to mark mobs and focus on taking them down with the care often only associated with the bosses themselves.

When it comes to TotC, I was never one to hold back my skepticism about the four tier difficulties; 10-man, 10-man hc, 25-man, and 25-man hc. Seemed overly complex to me but then again, it seems to work very well for this instance. Once your group gets the hang of it, if decently geared, it should have no trouble clearing the normal modes. The instance itself has no trash so this can even done as a side note, if your guild still wants to focus on clearing some of Ulduar's hard modes.

Also, because the five encounters can each be cleared under a decent time, you can even do two in one day, which not only helps gearing up but also collecting of emblems, a large quantity which you will in fact need to get a full tier 9 set. The encounters themselves are successful in my opinion, as so far, I have not once been bored by them. They have a nice balance that you have to pay attention but not overwhelming to a point where you need to have a degree in high WoW science to complete them.

Northrend Beasts is a three phase fight where you fight three completely different encounters in quick succession, each with their various strategies. It is also a fight that seems to set the tone for the whole instance, which is good coordination within your group. The fight is not difficult if you are coming properly geared from Ulduar, but every does have their job to do and if they are not carried out, the fight will inevitably turn against you.

Lord Jaraxxus is one of those fights that is extremely simple for the MT and just won't leave the OT alone. Once against it has various aspects, like add tanking, random flames to mind, and abilities interrupt, so the whole group has to coordinate to get through the fight successfully. A well aoe capable tank is preferred for the role of an OT, since you will be dealing with several adds, all which the dps needs to burn down.

Faction Champions is one I have never before seen in the game, which is a pvp encounter. It follows most of the rules for pvp and is unlike you will find anywhere in Northrend. For tanks, you will not actually tank anything. Rather your duty is to keep one of the major dps on you as much as possible. For a death knight, this provides numerous tools in the form of Chain of Ice, Dark Command, and Death Grip. You cannot get real aggro, so be prepared to use the following powers the second they come out of cooldown.

For DPS and healers, it offers all the pvp elements; use abilities to snare others enemies and burst damage down one target at a time. Healers need to run and heal almost constantly as the enemy dps will try to go for them nearly constantly, se be prepared. The fight does not actually require pvp gear, which equal resilience, but a pvp trinket would not hurt if you find yourself constantly as a target of CC abilities.

The Twin Val'kyrs are one of those mind games, which essentially means the whole fight is one big prank. The whole fight revolves around the idea that you have to have the opposite colour aura to the color of the boss you are fighting. Joggling and changing to the right aura plays a crucial role in realizing just when to change aura and when to go for which boss. It takes time to get used to but is essentially a very simple fight.

The last fight is against Anub'arak, a boss everyone should find familiar from Naxxramas. Basically, it is both a challenge for both tanks and healers. The OT who deals with the tanks will be taking a lot of damage, especially on 25-man where cooldowns are necessary to survive the debuff stacks applies by the adds. The boss also does a load of constant raid wide damage so healers need their best game to get through it.

All and all, both the encounters and loot has something for everyone and is every bit worth battling through and farming for the best tier gear. As an added bonus, the trophy emblems that are needed to cash anything but the easiest set of gear are universal for everyone. So there are five trophies per run to be shared by everyone, instead of getting annoyed when a murphy's law designates that only half the raid gets the badges they need and the rest spend the evening grinding their teeth.

All and all, a very enjoyable raid for myself.

Death Knights in 3.2.2

2009-09-13T11:04:00.003+03:00

I am the first to admit that I have not been keeping up with all the 3.2.2 PTR changes, until today, when I finally decided to see what is expected for the next patch. In fact, for the first time I had high hopes because so far death knights have not had a very graceful patch history and the rumor around the block was that we are getting actual buffs.

If you are doing the same, I suggest you do not trust (at least not at the time of writing this) what it says on the official World of Warcraft PTR patchnotes. They do not yet include the changes PTR testers are experiencing on the servers. Naturally, there were a lot of various changes but here I am limiting to are relevent to death knight tanking, since that is my real forte.

Heart Strike now has a its total damage increased by 10% for each of your diseases on the target to the primary target, and half that to the secondary target.
Vampiric Blood now lasts 10 seconds (down from 20 seconds).
Frost Presence now reduces damage taken by 8% (up from 5%).
Threat of Thassarian now also affects Rune Strike.
Unbreakable Armor now increases your armor by 25% and increases your Strength by 10% for 20 seconds.

Reading the above makes me personally happy for all those death knights out there, who like me, are tired of being nerfed and beaten to perform less and less. But, as always, I find something in these notes that I cannot quite understand and we will get to that soon.

But first, lets talk about the goods news. The two most exciting news for me, personally, are the buffs for Frost Presence and Unbreakable Armor. The first of course, is self-explanatory because as a class without block, death knights are extremely squishy compared to warriors or paladins. More mitigation will take us a long way.

The second is that Unbreakable Armor finally becomes a useful cooldown. Up until now, it has provided with a fixed damage mitigation, based on your armor: 5 * Ar *0,01. After the patch, it should get a major buff and become 25% increase to your total armor. Lets examine what this means for a typical DK tank with a healthy 25k armor.

In the current game, this will provide a 1250 points of mitigation from every hit that you take. Come 40k hits from General Vezax and it doesn't take a genius to figure using this talent is useless. True, it gives a strength bonus so it is good for threat but that is hardly a selling point. Now after the patch it will instead provide a nice 6250 armor increase. For anyone wondering how much this mitigates, on a level 83 raid boss it is an extra 27.3% of mitigation.

This makes frost death knights viable for a lot things, which includes tanking encounters where your life expectancy is depended on your cooldowns, the examples which are quite numerous, like Iron Council hard mode, General Vezax, or even tanking the adds on Anub'arak (that's in Trial of the Crusader ofc).

Alright, moving on.

The Threat of Thassarian is an obvious one, it never made sense why that talent would not include Rune Strike, considering the Blizzard ever had the intention of making two-weapon tanking viable for us again. No Rune Strike, no tanking. As simple as that.

Now for the nerfs. The first does not really hit me that hard personally, for I rarily find myself in a situation where I try to aoe tank anything in blood spec. True, when tanking the adds in Anub'arak (still in Trial of the Crusader) blood spec's cooldowns and self-healing are crucial, so the ability to hit for nice threat on both adds with the same strike has its benefits. But we will coup.

The nerf to Vampiric Blood definitely annoys me. Much less for fights where you only temporarily need a cooldown like surviving a surge of darkness on General Vezax but you will feel it for fights where the longer you can prolong your cooldowns, the longer you live. When in 25-man of Anub'arak (yeah I'm using this alot aren't I?) and when your debuff begin to stack 15+ the hits are coming down too hard to survive without cooldowns. If dps takes too long to bring them down, you die.

Naturally, both the Glyph of Unbreakable Armor and Glyph of Vampiric Blood have been updated to fit the new upgrades. For Vampiric Blood, I would say that even if you have not glyphed it up until now, it becomes almost mandatory after 3.2.2. For Unbreakable Armor, the increase of armor goes up an extra 20% so if you plan to take full advantage of this new cooldown, the glyph will be necessary.

Avoidance vs Stamina

2009-08-25T10:03:00.004+03:00

This is one of the hot topics of tanking and has been for a very long time now; essentially an argument, with one side arguing for the supremacy of their choice of tanking style, based on either avoidance or stamina. This means that one side prefers to stack gear that increases their dodge and parry, allowing them to avoid most of the hits that a raid boss throws at you. Stamina based tanking still has a lot of avoidance, but relies instead on a large health pool, letting more hits land and survives because he can take the hits.

Reading discussions like mmo-champion forum threads, gives me a strange sense that we have entire culture of tanks clashing, with avoidance tanks carrying themselves a lot like french nobility, sophisticated and demure, believing in supremacy through class. Their attitude towards stamina tanks seems very much like talking to hicks and hillbillies. Of course, this is not true but the general attitudes are fascinating :)

So, which side is right, which is better?

I would like to say that everyone are born equal but this is not true. Sadly, stamina tanks are just more reliable than avoidance tanks. The answer lies in studying current raid design, with bosses that hit massive. Anyone who has been tanking Ulduar hard modes know how much damage is flies around with bosses like Freya or the Assembly of Iron.

The general rule is that you have to be able to survive at least two boss hits without a heal. Shrewed but so is life. With Freya's hard mode, the hits that she lands on you are consistently around 18k. That means that as a tank, you much have more than 36k health after all the raid buffs, along with a healthy sortment of cooldowns because extra damage from ground tremors.

A tank with 39k health can survive this no problem. An avoidance tank, with 35k health will dodge most of the hits, but that is like playing russian rulet. Eventually the minority occurs and he will take two hits in a row, quickly dying, taking rest of the raid with him. This is what it essentially comes down to and each time the stamina tank is simply more reliable.

From a healer's point of view, this is even more desirable because healers like predictability. As a death knights, I'm no strange to healer-rage about taking heavy spike damage, so this is especially important for me. Avoidance tanks are prone for a lot more, big spikes of damage that can lead to unnecessary wipes, even in easier raids or even heroic dungeons, if a healer is unable to react quick enough.

And before you spam my mailbox, shouting that it doesn't happen with good healers, do not bother. I have been tanking with healers of all shapes and colors, so I know it happens more often than some like to admit. The same story is told by many avoidance tanks, feeling unfairly treated when they are removed from raids because of low health pools, even if they have the achievements to proove they can do it.

However, you cannot blame this on raid leaders. An experience raid leader wants reliable tanks. Running with an unreliable one is like driving a car with nitroglycerin for gas; could blow up at anytime and even more with pugs, can blow your raid up along with it. In the end it also just comes down to raid design and Ulduar is a prime example of this; an encounter's difficulty curve is not so much in the mechanics, but just in surviving the massive damage.

Take the hard mode of the Iron Council; once only Steelbreaker is left, it comes down to a dps race. The tanks literally sacrifice themselves to buy that time for them, with the first tank blowing his cooldowns until he blows up and then the second tank does the same thing. There, if you do not have the health to survive, you are useless and this is true for most Ulduar encounters.