Tuesday, October 25, 2011

4.3 and the PTR

There's a specific topic I've been stuck on lately and that's the assumption that Death Knight tanks just get trucked on most bosses. I will not dispute that we take more damage than other tanks. I've seen that myself and there are countless logs showing it's true. But I think some of the values people are claiming are a bit skewed. For example, that post on the blood death knight forum on EJ claiming that a dk tank will take, on average, a melee attack of 71k. I have never taken that much damage from Shannox before. I have taken that much damage in a single hit from Riplimb when his stacks got out of hand and he had basically one shot everyone else before coming for me.

The obvious cause for this higher damage intake is simply how our class is designed. We have lower armor, so we take more damage. We take more damage so we can heal for more with Death Strike and gain a larger Blood Shield so the next hit is smaller than what even a Paladin tank takes on average. It creates a ton of spikes in health. But that's "working as intended."

There have been times where I have been scared that I will be destroyed in seconds on bosses. Cho'gall during Flame's Orders comes to mind. But the problem there was mostly from having a healer chase the other tank back to the entrance, having another mind controlled, and then I have one left on me. If they have to move out of something, I'm not getting any heals. So it all makes sense. But generally speaking, I don't feel like I'm going to die in the next attack. I'm not afraid of being one shot, as it has never happened. So I'm a little lost as to why so many tanks talk about dks being one and two shot all the time. To me, it seems as if they're doing something wrong if that's happening.

One thing I will say though is that the current PTR is definitely geared in a way that destroys dks. Riggnaros has a video displaying exactly what I'm talking about here. Obviously, he isn't doing it wrong. He spoke with a GM about this issue on the PTR as well and the GM agreed that it shouldn't be possible for a dk tank to be killed inside of a GCD from full health. So we'll see how they address that. If they do not fix that issue, it may not be possible to bring a dk tank to raids in 4.3.



But speaking of 4.3, dks are getting quite a few tweaks to their abilities. Most of the dk tanking community labels these as band-aid fixes, but I'm actually pretty excited about them.

Death Strike will always provide it's heal effect even if the hit did not land. This is an amazing change. Most of my time is spent spamming death strike since, despite the actual chances of this happening, it very often will fail to connect upwards of 5 times in a row. The downside is that before if it didn't connect, the runes would immediately be refunded, allowing us to spam it until it actually did connect. It won't do that anymore. So damage and thus threat from this attack will go down a bit. Well, as a tank, I look to survive first. So I'm fine with that.

Veteran of the Third War now also reduces the cooldown of Outbreak by 30 sec. This is also amazing. Before if my disease were about to fall off, I'd have to make that call of reapplying them or getting another Death Strike in because they have the same total rune cost. For periods of high damage, Death Strike would always win. With Outbreak on a 1 minute cool down, using it sometimes felt clunky. But with my build using 3/3 points in Epidemic, this will allow me to use Outbreak each time it comes off cool down without letting diseases ever fall off, and not taking away a Death Strike.

Blade Barrier has been revamped and is simpler - You take 2/4/6% less damage from all sources. It's now passive. This I feel was not necessary. Many dks complain about the "rune tetris" they have to play to keep Blade Barrier up while keeping runes available for as many Death Strikes as possible. To me, keeping Blade Barrier up was not very difficult and I liked trying to have the highest up time for it as possible. I felt that using a blood rune right before the next one came off cool down wasn't too hard. Obviously Runic Empowerment can suddenly change things if it activated a blood rune, but I actually liked it.

Bone Shield now has 6 charges. This would be great if they fixed something about it. That being that the amount of damage it takes to consume a charge can be anything. Even something as little as 50 damage. Before 4.2, I would see Bone Shield up almost constantly for me so long as I continued to avoid attacks. Only melee attacks and direct magic spells would consume a charge, not AOE. After 4.2, that changed. It wasn't mentioned so far as I can remember in any of the patch notes or hotfixes. It's a little frustrating during encounters like Alysrazor and Beth'tilac where their raid wide AOE attacks that do damage every few seconds consume a charge of Bone Shield each time they tick. So if I put Bone Shield up right before the pull, the AOE will likely eat all my charges and it will still be on cool down when I actually start to tank something. I remember seeing a proposed change for Bone Shield where it would instead only use a charge when hit by a certain amount of damage, a spike essentially. That would make me extremely happy. But just changing it back to the way it was before 4.2 would make me happy as well.

Blood Presence armor bonus is going to 55% from 30%. This would essentially put our armor on par with Paladins and Warriors. We'd still take more damage due to no actual block, but our overall damage would be less. I like this, but again I fear that further tweaks will happen due to the changes this will cause to Death Strike's heal. Less damage intake will result in smaller heals from it and thus smaller shields. But again, survivability is my main concern, and this should increase that overall.


Hopefully they can fix the balance issue that has been present for quite some time: block capping. Paladins can block cap already and Warriors will be able to in the next patch. This obviously skews tank damage quite a bit. If blizzard does intend on eventually addressing this issue, I'm sure the outcry from those classes will be huge. Much like when Paladin tanks complained about having to use Ardent Defender when they're low in health instead of it saving them automatically. I could go on and on about my pally hate, but I'll save that for another post ;-)

Friday, October 21, 2011

Alysrazor VS God Mode...

My guild has been working on hard modes the last month or so. At first, we were moving along very steadily, at least getting one new boss down each week. Shannox, Rhyolith, Majordomo Staghelm all fell at our hands. Then we moved on to Alysrazor. Now, I remember pounding our heads against the wall against her on regular back before the nerfs. It felt so incredibly impossible that most of us wanted to give up. Eventually, we got used to the pattern of things.

The hatchlings were a major problem back then. Tank dps wasn't high enough, survivability was seriously in question while a Tantrum was going on. The main thing that was maddening to me was the tendency for the game to give either tank Gushing Wound and then, right when we were about to hit 50% health, Tantrum. Then 4-shot in something crazy like 3.5 seconds. What's with that? Both tanks would look at the log and see around 200k damage in such a short period of time. All from melee swings from the hatchling. Eventually we go the pattern down. Tantrums didn't last more than a few seconds and while they were going on, our healers spammed their fastest heals on us while we fed them.

Now that fight is trivial with the nerfs on regular. But heroic isn't the same cakewalk for us. The changes on heroic are interesting. On paper, it seems like a ton, but it really isn't so bad. Hatchlings have less health, but you get three waves of them before the tornado phase. Meteors to watch out for and kill to create a line of sight element for her Firestorm attack. Meanwhile all other mechanics are going on. Initiates cast Fieroblast faster, everything does more damage, you know, the usual heroic stuff. The thing that makes the fight interesting to me is picking up the hatchling. The meteor lands directly in the middle of the 2 eggs. It's anyone's guess which direction it will choose to start rolling. Keeps me on my toes.

Last night, we were beating our heads pretty hard on this fight. There's so many things moving around you have to avoid, making one mistake is sometimes pretty fatal. I know I get hit with brushfires and the occasional lava spew from the worms. But I usually can avoid most everything. My movement is probably a bit annoying for whoever happens to be healing me though. On heroic, my hatchling rarely tantrums for more than a few seconds. Usually I'm either right by a worm or it's about to die.

On one attempt, the one my guildies know I'd be blogging about, someone went down before the first tornado phase and we used a battle rez on them. Later, the other tank went down right before his hatchling died. Oh no, we're screwed, right? Nope, at least, not right away. With two healers on me, I picked up both hatchlings on the next part of the cycle. Managed to feed them all the worms and had to tank one through a firestorm. Survival cool downs and amazing heals for the win there? It died soon after the storm. Well, now we have the third wave of hatchlings. Let's do it again. Sure enough, managed to do the same thing again. One left over when the tornado phase started. Tanking a hatchling during the tornado phase is bad. I'm sorry, it's extremely bad. But, with some more stellar heals, managed to kill that one too. So now she's down. Got some help from melee for interrupts on the casters, then had to solo tank her while she regained Molten Power from 50-100. I managed to survive there as well.

Unfortunately, people started dying at this point and we couldn't continue to see if we could keep this going. But man, did that make that fight interesting. To be honest, I'm usually pretty bored for that fight. I feel I've got it pretty well down. I make mistakes here and there, who doesn't? But it doesn't cause a wipe. So that was a lot of fun for me. Kudos to my amazing healing team on that one. Making me feel like a god.

Although I know of guilds reporting they have successfully one tanked the hatchlings, we had never tried it before with much success. Once a tank goes down and we don't have a rez for them, we pretty much wipe it. I pride myself in being hard to kill and always try for the moral victory. If there's a hatchling up and almost everyone is dead, you better believe I'm over there trying to kill it before it kills me. I may be a spikey bastard, but I think I hold my own.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

These aren't the stats you're looking for...

As a tank, stats used to be pretty straight forward in WotLK. You stacked stamina to high hell and that was it. Right? Right. After defense rating was eliminated, even I went that route. But again, I decided to go for more hit and expertise mixed in there for threat since our dps could essentially pull aggro any time they seemingly wanted. But what about now?

Cataclysm introduced many changes. Aside from the introduction of mastery (which is pretty fantastic for every tank), boss mechanics changed too. Bosses no longer do enough damage to one or two shot tanks. Healers don't have to spam heal them all the time anymore. So is stamina as useful as it once was?

While gearing up my death knight, I still went by the wrath standard of stam, stam, stam. Everything was stam on me. When running heroics my healers and I noticed that I was extremely spikey. Well, I'm a death knight. That's normal, right? Sure, to some extent. After some experimenting, I decided to go the mastery route. For a dk, gearing can go one of two ways: mastery or avoidance. When raiding in t11, I experimented with an avoidance build for fights when I was the add tank. My shields from my mastery would constantly be destroyed in seconds with so many adds, so avoidance seemed logical. Although it seemed good in theory (multiple mobs and therefore many melee swings), RNG did not tend to smile upon me enough for it to work for me. That's essentially what I took away from that experiment. Avoidance builds, although completely viable, are too dependent on RNG for me to feel comfortable. I like the amount of control over my own survival the mastery build gives me. Also, it's kind of a sense of personal satisfaction when I can do some crazy things and survive in most cases when other tanks would surely die.

When my guild first started doing heroic Firelands, I took it very seriously. I went to Elitist Jerks and read everything I could about gearing for heroics. It seems a good majority of dk tanks have gone the stamina route due to high boss damage. The reasoning being that bosses are designed to challenge tanks survivability, aka paladins with full CTC. So the death knight gets the short end of the stick there, with us taking more damage than any other tank class. We started with Shannox, as most guilds did. I remember reading a post on EJ detailing the average amount of damage per melee swing from him on each tank class. The ridiculous 71k average swing on a dk tank got me worried, and I continued to read more to see what tanks did to help out with this. Stamina, that's all they mostly talk about here. Using stamina trinkets, stacking stamina gems, using Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle... anything and everything to make their health pool larger. They also went more towards hit and expertise cap to guarantee Death Strike would connect. That clutch heal needs to connect. So, I decided to try it.

I ended up increasing my health pool around 50k with raid buffs. It seemed like an absurd amount of health, 221.6k at the time. So away we went. I noticed I didn't seem any more spikey than usual. My shields were noticeably smaller due to gearing. My Death Strikes didn't fail to connect, which was nice. But the shield was so small and was popped immediately in the next swing that I still had to spam Death Strike. We downed him and moved on to other regular bosses.

When I reviewed the logs from a couple regular bosses that week versus last week, I saw some pretty crazy numbers. When comparing Beth'tilac on normal, my healing on the stamina build had increased around 400k. More Death Strikes landing and Rune Tap healing for more. But I took around 1.4m more damage. All our healers had higher healing numbers than the previous week as well. This could be from people making more mistakes, but also because I had to be healed more. Although I could clearly see they were capable of healing me with this build, it seemed to essentially be doing the exact opposite of what I like to do as a tank; make the healer feel as useless as possible. Forcing a healer to use larger, less efficient heals on me isn't right. I want to make the healer feel secure that a slower, smaller heal will make it before I need more healing. The cast cancel game isn't a fun one for healers, I imagine.

The second thing I was shocked by in the logs was the average melee swing damage on me: 36k. Where did that 71k figure come from on EJ? Was the death knight tank wearing dps gear and in unholy presence or something? 36k was pretty typical damage from Ragnoros on normal to me. So, back to the mastery build I went. At present, I sit around 185k health, 36-37% avoidance, and mastery increasing my shield to 151% of the heal from Death Strike raid buffed. These numbers seem more than sufficient for the content I'm currently doing.

Before someone goes off about pre-nerf versus post-nerf, the nerf to Shannox on heroic was 15%, not 50%, and he definitely was doing close to 50% less damage to me than what was previously stated.

The main thing I took away from all this is that while stamina is still important, it's not at all what it used to be. Bosses are not one or two shotting me. Maybe heroic Ragnaros will, I don't know. We're not there yet. We're only 3/7 heroic. But for the content my group is currently doing, stacking stamina is not necessary and only strains your healers. So don't do it. Instead, just go for socket bonuses, which are always stamina on plate tank gear. Use some hybrid gems that have avoidance/mastery with stamina on them to achieve those bonuses. But prioritize avoidance or mastery above all else. You'll get plenty of stamina that way without giving up potential mitigation.

Monday, October 17, 2011

A brief intro, I suppose

I'm still a little unsure as to what I will inevitably use as a theme for this blog. Obviously it will be WoW based. I thought about using it as a how-to in terms of playing a death knight, but there's already far too many of those out there. Maybe a collection of my in-game experiences? Again, many of those exist as well. The problem is that it's very difficult to actually come up with something original. As I am no expert in writing, sadly I don't believe I'll be able to offer anything of major interest. Maybe I'm just being hard on myself. Meh, whatever.

To start, I've been playing WoW for a little over two years now. Yes, I am indeed a "Wrath baby." Bring forth your judgements! I currently play on Kargath server in a raiding guild that is somewhere in between casual and hardcore. I feel that I tend to lean a bit more towards the hardcore end a bit more than others. But at the same time I enjoy having free time and the little personal life I have is important to me.

My main is a death knight tank. Oh, here we go. More judgements. It's true, the majority of death knights are people who just leveled a character to 55 so they could play a dk. Most of them just faceroll the keyboard and do top dps, blah blah blah. Yeah, try that while being a dk tank. Sure, holding aggro isn't hard, even before the major threat buff. But dks are spikey as hell. Even more so if they don't know how to properly manage their ridiculous number of survival cooldowns. A good dk tank is one that a healer doesn't have to heal that much. We'll always be spikey, that's our nature. But our self healing and shielding is designed to negate a lot of the need for heals. Often I hear from my healers that they feel like they can ignore me for a bit and heal others that stood in fire or something and not worry about me dying so suddenly.

Gearing has always been fairly important to me from the time I first started raiding on my warrior tank. Maybe that's why I ended up the loot/gear officer in my current guild. I've thrown around different methods, tested the EJ approved ways of doing things, made up my own gearing strategies. In Wrath, I was constantly ridiculed by other tanks and raiders because I didn't stack stamina in every possible socket. I, instead, went for an effective health model. Gearing towards defense rating to raise overall avoidances and then stamina in all blue sockets. When pugging during that time, I laughed as all the stam stacking tanks would spike up and down in health. Probably giving their healers a heart attack in the process. Meanwhile, when it became my turn to tank the boss, my health was fairly steady. When the other tank died due to a huge melee swing, I lived long past the amount of "stacks" a tank should have safely taken before the other should taunt off. No, I didn't rub this in everyone's faces. But I should have.

Pugging to me is a dirty word. I can't stand those who cannot do their job with a certain degree of competence. Unfortunately it seems as if my luck in the dungeon finder is terrible for that. I know I'm not alone there. But I refuse to tank for any pug unless I have friends with me. Tanking is a thankless job most of the time. I would imagine healing is much the same. There's no real way to measure how good a tank or healer is aside from no one dying, which most people assume is all due to the healer. I will not downplay the role of the healer. Some of my best friends are healers, amazing ones at that. But the tank is also responsible for the group's survival. So try not to rag on a tank who isn't doing everything perfectly. Sometimes this is hard for me as well. I tend to backseat tank. I must be a terrible dps when I use that spec, always looking for a way to help the healer or pick up strays adds that got away.

Well I did say this would be brief. Clearly I'm a liar. I suppose this will be a blog about the two things I mentioned at the beginning. Sounds like as good a plan as any. Stay tuned for more awesome?