Crusader's Evaluation

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

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

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.