tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87594436924976701032023-11-15T13:34:17.030-05:00Ebon PlaguebringerSchrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-59487757560605602332013-10-14T00:42:00.000-04:002013-10-15T13:17:49.053-04:00Gearing and Raid Progress UpdateHoly crap, I'm updating. It's nuts, isn't it? I've determined that I'm the worst blogger in the history of bloggers in terms of consistent update. Possibly an exaggeration. I go through spurts of wanting to write in it, but then... I get distracted by shiny things and before I know it, a month or two have gone by. In any event, here's my little update as to how things have been since I last updated.<br><br>
We finished out T15 at 10/13H. Dark Animus was the last fight we were working on and man, did it hurt a lot. But since we knew that 5.4 was coming out so soon, we just basically did our farm content for the last two weeks. The thought was to get as much gear as possible for the next raid without also burning people out. We've had a few people take some breaks here and there because of burn out, so we wanted to avoid that going into a new tier.<br><br>
Siege of Orgrimmar has been a lot of fun so far. Some fights have been stressful, some easier than expected, some that really seem to crap on melee (big surprise), the normal stuff. Currently we're 13/14N, Garrosh is definitely a tough fight as we expected. My biggest bit of news this tier is that I FINALLY got a weapon upgrade. I've been running <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=86386">Shin'ka, Execution of Dominion</a> (fully upgraded of course) since like our second kill of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=60999">Sha of Fear</a> and it has been just ridiculously frustrating that not even one two-handed strength weapon has dropped in ANY of our runs. I'm not even exaggerating. We literally saw none for all of T15. I was out for a week due to computer issues and they still didn't see one. So I was a little happy when <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=103945">Gar'tok, Strength of the Faithful</a> dropped on like our third <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71515">General Nazgrim</a> kill. Just a gigantic upgrade over axe.<br><br>
Speaking of upgrades and well, stats, I've gotten to a point in gear where mastery just is getting to ridiculous levels. I've been reading a bunch of threads on MMO-Champion about blood dks going for haste to increase damage, which sounds good in theory, but I just can't bring myself to do so. Many of these threads talk about "safe points" of mastery and each has a different amount they claim. This is very frustrating because I was always under the impression that mastery never really devalued unless A) the damage in the fight is mainly magic or B) you cap your Blood Shield quickly and sit there at max for awhile. Some of these values I've seen thrown around have been at little at 150%, but most commonly I see 180%. A few posts from Raegwyn suggest that the 230-240% range seems to be more than sufficient, which now that I'm around that level, I can agree with. I'm sitting around 245% mastery raid buffed. Aside from really hard hitting bosses (Garrosh), I can cap my Blood Shield at times while tanking a boss. So more mastery is probably not necessary. Up until this point, I have been shying away from stamina in terms of stat allocation. I hit and expertise (soft)cap, then go mastery wherever I can, taking avoidance as it comes. With the introduction of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=145676">Riposte</a>, avoidance has become a bit more appealing. As long as I'm tanking something, I can maintain basically a 100% uptime on it. I end up around 25% crit or so while it's up, obviously varying when Dancing Rune Weapon is up as well as some trinket procs. So stamina hasn't really even come into the picture for me aside from the few mastery/stamina gems in blue sockets when I'm already at hit cap. But since I've hit this "threshold" on mastery, it has become more appealing. I've switched my runeforge to <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=62158">Stoneskin Gargoyle</a> and even replaced the jewelcrafter only mastery gems with stamina ones.<br><br>
<b>So what does all this mean?</b><br><br>
Well, on a fight like <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71454">Malkorok</a>, which I firmly believe was created with a dk tank in mind, I feel ridiculously over-powered. On most fights, it's easy for me to gain a max Blood Shield while not tanking a boss, waiting my turn to taunt. But with the mechanics of this fights, it's insane. During the initial pull, I pop Dancing Rune Weapon to avoid as much as possible, Vampiric Blood to increase healing and Death Strike spam to build my Blood Shield and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=142862">Ancient Barrier</a>, Empower Rune Weapon for more Death Strikes. As long as everyone does their job and gets in the void zones, I never lose the Ancient Barrier and Blood Shield stays up 90% of the time. In addition to this, and this is something I only recently became aware of, Bone Shield will stay up indefinitely as long as I never lose Blood Shield and Ancient Barrier. I never realized that as long as any damage taken while Bone Shield is up is fully absorbed, you never lose a charge. Most times, we go into phase 2 and I still have all 6 charges up. Now, the over-powered part happens when I take the boss back from my tanking partner. Obviously I have a full Blood Shield at this point, which also means I have a maxed out Ancient Barrier as well, and my health is max as long as I never lost Ancient Barrier. So I get the boss back, with just over 1 million health, with a 1 million physical damage shield from Blood Shield, and a 1 million damage shield from all sources from Ancient Barrier. 3 million effective health? Yeah, try and kill me, buddy. I've managed to keep my Blood Shield up for the majority of phase 2, to the point where the Ancient Barrier buff from phase 1 is still present when we go into the <i>next</i> phase 1.<br><br>
Enough boasting, but can you blame me? That's insane. My guild is overall doing decent. Some of the fights this tier I'm not a fan of. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71859">Kor'kron Dark Shamans</a> is such a mess of mechanics. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71529">Thok the Bloodthirsty</a> hates on melee if you don't keep him in phase 1 (and we don't since we're caster heavy). But other fights are a lot of fun. Malkorok, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71161">Paragons of the Klaxxi</a>, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=71865">Garrosh</a>. Honestly, I love the Klaxxi fight because of the lore involved in it. When I hit exalted with them and went on that walk with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=66800">Kil'ruk the Wind Reaver</a> to the chamber below Klaxxi'vess and he spoke about Y'shaarj, I got so excited about the impending clash between the Klaxxi and us. Also, that fight seems so intimidating when you read about it. You sift through all the mechanics... which you think Blizzard was writing a book or something, and it's really not so bad. Our first kill happened in just 3 attempts. Seriously like the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=68905">Twin Consorts</a> of this tier, as <a href="http://holyworddelicious.blogspot.com/">Shanthi</a> said in our kill video. Garrosh is proving to be quite the challenge, but it's a very fun fight, aside from him randomly going taunt immune... still haven't figured out why that happens. But it seems to reset when he does <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=144985">Whirling Corruption</a>. Might cause us some trouble in phase 3 if he continues to do that. We've gotten into phase 3 only a couple times thought. Best attempt had him around 13%. Aaaand that's all the steam I've got for now. Until next time!Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-21465352648678593042013-08-07T23:02:00.000-04:002013-08-07T23:03:24.541-04:00Tanking Issues in Mist of PandariaI've been meaning to write a post about tanks in Mists of Pandaria for some time now. With all the changes that have happened since Cataclysm to now (<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=93099">Vengeance</a>, active mitigation, etc) tanking has become a very different experience all together. It's still the part of the game I love the most. I've done a little dps in Cata and in MoP as well, which is fun, but my heart just isn't in damage dealing. I find myself always putting survivability first, for myself and others, picking specific talents just to help mitigate damage to me or the raid. But really how much has it changed from say the Wrath model?<br><br><br>
<b>Reminiscing Time!</b><br><br><br>
Well, and I've probably pointed this out before, I played a protection warrior during Wrath of the Lich King until the last few months of the expansion when I switched to my death knight. Warrior tanks back then had a pretty rough playstyle, at least in terms of managing threat. See, vengeance didn't exist back then and there was no such 5x threat modifier from any <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=71">stance</a> or <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48263">presence</a>. As a warrior, I most definitely had to work for threat. I'm sure a lot of people remember that time. I'd charge in, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=6343">Thunder Clap</a>, move the mobs after they collapsed on me, use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=46968">Shockwave</a> to stun them and gain a decent amount threat and then start target cycling. Man, that was a fun time. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=23922">Shield Slam</a> one target, Thunder Clap, tab to the next, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=20243">Devastate</a>, Shield Slam, tab again, repeat until dead. Possibly have to taunt mobs back. Keeping track of what I've hit and what I haven't was fun before I started using <a href="http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/tidy-plates-threat-plates">Threat Plates</a>.<br><br>
Moving on, Paladins during that time had a much easier job in terms of threat. As I tend to joke, it was basically drop <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=26573">Consecration</a>, go AFK to make a sandwich, come back and everything is dead. For some reason their threat was crazy high for aoe. Warriors did amazing single target threat, but were completely outclassed by pallies. I was able to actually out threat paladin tanks on my warrior when it was just the boss, but that was the only situation.<br><br><br>
<b>The Here and Now</b><br><br><br>
Blizzard has done a decent job balancing threat between the tanks. It's still not perfect, but it's no longer as disproportionate as I illustrated above. In the past, tanks struggled to keep threat against high dps classes as gear would increase. Tank damage wouldn't really scale all that much and was quickly eclipsed by the dps. In response, tanks gained a 5x threat modifier to help counter that problem. But even after that it was possible to out threat a tank as a dps. So Vengeance came into play, and it's been pretty amazing. A lot of dps classes complain about it because it can increase the damage of a tank to dps levels and even surpass them on a lot of fights. This is very apparent while leveling in dungeons, but really, 5-mans aren't exactly the measure of balance when it comes to things like that. Nonetheless, this problem occurs less frequently in raids, but it's still present. Tanks can sometimes pull of some crazy high numbers depending on the fight. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=62397">Wind Lord Mel'jarak</a> and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=68078">Iron Qon</a> are two decent examples of that.<br><br>
So now Blizzard is nerfing <a href="http://ptr.wowhead.com/spell=93099">vengeance</a> to 1.5% of unmitigated damage. I don't see a huge problem to this aside from a pride thing for me. I liked doing enough damage to be competitive with the dps. But damage isn't my primary responsibility, so I'll quickly get over that. A lot of tanks are really upset over this change, which I don't fully understand. The change is being made to reduce the desire to single tank fights that weren't designed to be single tanked. But it is what it is. People will always complain when something is changed. Can't please everyone and all that.<br><br><br>
<b>So Vengeance is Great, Right?</b><br><br><br>
There is a particular issue I've had with vengeance for the entirety of this expansion that I don't see a ton of people touching on in forums and such. The issue is that three out of the five tank classes have their active mitigation scaling through attack power. So that means that they become more survivable as they take more damage, as odd as that sounds. Take paladins for instance, all of their self healing and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=20925">Sacred Shield</a> scale with spell power (which is based off of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53592">50% of AP</a> for protection paladins). This is why we were seeing a protection paladin tanking Wind Lord Mel'jarak solo and not only destroying all the dps on the meters, but also crushing the healers in HPS. A monk's <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=115295">Guard</a> ability also scales through AP. Warrior's <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=112048">Shield Barrier</a> does as well. While Guardian Druids and Blood Death Knights are left in the dust. The only thing they get from vengeance is more damage and threat, which, doesn't even compare to some of the monk's abilities such as <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=121253">Keg Smash</a>. That ability generates a ridiculous amount of threat.<br><br>
In addition to this issue, I've also noticed some inconsistencies with vengeance. I currently tank alongside a Brewmaster Monk. Our gear levels are very close, around 2 item level difference. Yet he seems to always gain a fairly large amount of vengeance more than I do in normal tank swapping fights. When I trade, I have 70-80k vengeance and when I get him back, the monk has 110-120k. Neither one of us took any crazy spike damage and the duration was pretty much the same. I don't really understand this since vengeance is supposed to be calculated based on unmitigated damage. Unless, of course, it <i>isn't</i> really calculated that way. The only thing really different in terms of our mitigation is the fact that my baseline avoidance is higher, but his can easily surpass mine with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=115308">Elusive Brew</a> and my armor is obviously higher. But neither of those should factor in if it's truly based on unmitigated damage. It is based on that, right? RIGHT?!<br><br>
Shanthi and I were discussing tank classes just last night and brought up guardian druids. Neither of us could think of a single one that raids, so I decided to check out their abilities to see why they wouldn't be a desirable for a raid group. It seems like every single one of their abilities is designed to either dodge melee attacks or increase armor. So I'm sure they're good in fights with just physical damage. I mean, there's tons of fights in this game that fit that description. I don't know what Blizzard is doing with them, but right now it seems like they've been mostly ditched for the expansion. I can only hope that they'll get some love in the next expansion.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-38072785955033008322013-06-06T13:16:00.002-04:002013-06-06T13:16:50.350-04:00What happened to the players?I'll spare you the apologies for not updating. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you should realize by now I'm terrible at regularly updating it. To give you a quick update on my guild's progress, we're currently sitting at 2/13H in Throne of Thunder. Which, I might add, is a pretty fantastic raid. Normals are so much harder than they've been in a long time and, as a result, heroics are even harder. This is causing a lot of people to complain about how they can't progress. "It's too hard" and all that is on forums everywhere. Well, I respectfully disagree. It is hard, there is no debating that. But it's supposed to be harder than say, Dragon Soul. Since LFR has been solidified as a progression step for more casual players, normal and heroic raids could be scaled up in difficulty. Let's face it, LFR is ridiculously easy, and it's supposed to be. Could you imagine 25 strangers trying to complete ToT25 normal? I'm talking about the normal people you see in LFR. So people who AFK, people who constantly attempt to troll the raid, or better yet, people who don't speak the same language as others. So you can't even communicate strategies or directions to them.<br><br>
This leads me to my true subject of this post: player apathy. Let me start by saying that I run LFR each week with guildies for valor points. For awhile, it was to get some upgrades for my off spec that I used in an encounter or two. But now there aren't any upgrades for either of my specs (aside from weapon >.<). In the current LFR, all of the ToT mechanics are dulled to the point where following them apparently isn't worth it to most people. Knockbacks on certain abilities don't even exist in LFR. Standing in fire might not kill you. This type of thing drives me nuts. I'm all for making things easier because of the types of people you'll end up encountering and the fact that you may not even be able to communicate with those people. But there has to be some sort of incentive to actually move from that fire, and some type of penalty if you don't.<br><br>
But my personal issues about mechanics not being lethal aside (I'm aware that LFR is not designed for the level or raiding I normally find appropriate), the lack of penalty for those who simply refuse to play is what bothers me the most. People who go AFK constantly, put someone on follow, randomly pull things, tunnel into a boss constantly and ignore adds... I think you get the picture. I don't expect people to do amazing damage in LFR. I understand that a lot of these people are on second and third alts, maybe they only have the time to play 2 hours a week. All that stuff I understand. But not being able to damage the things you're supposed to while moving out of an obvious trap that <i>should</i> kill you is ridiculous.<br><br>
Just last night I ran this with the normal group of guildies and it was a nightmare from start to finish. One warlock decided they were going to pull everything instead of waiting for me or the other tank (from my guild as well) to pull it. And here's where I get really annoyed, when we tried to kick him after he kept doing it over and over, we constantly got the message "That player cannot be kicked for another 4 hours." Wait wait, so this person is intentionally being a jerk and making this harder than it should be, and we can't even rectify that? So... what consequence is there for those who do this? Nothing? I just didn't understand. During <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=68476#encounter">Horridon</a>, half the raid tunneled into damaging him for the entire fight. This is normal, as I've seen in other runs. But let me tell you how difficult that makes it for the tanks. Tanking all the adds on the 4th door, grabbing the warbears as they drop, just in time for <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=69374">Jalak</a> to drop down. More adds are spawning, people are still damaging Horridon, the other tank will need a swap swoon, probably can't survive tanking Horridon and Jalak, and I have all the adds. I used Army of the Dead to try to get some pressure off me from the adds while I grabbed Jalak. At the same time, the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=69221">Dinomancer</a> dropped. Despite my gear far exceeding what is found in LFR, I just barely survived. Not to mention it was a complete mess until the boss died. But again, no one cares.<br><br>
When we queued for the next section, we obviously got a different group. This one wasn't much better. During <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=67977">Tortos</a>, almost no one was damaging the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=69352">bats</a> that I was tanking. Plus there were <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=67966">turtles</a> everywhere. They, again, tunneled into the boss. The trash after Tortos is probably the worst spot for a group in LFR. There's a ton of it, and everyone will skip a lot of it. We do in our normal raids, but for some reason avoiding mobs that move is too difficult for a lot of people in LFR. That's not to say people aren't trolling and purposely pulling trash, as we soon saw in this attempt. We cleared to the second bell and move towards the waterfall section as we normally do in my guild. The amount of trash that everyone brought with was absurd. It literally seemed like people tried to pull all of it. I guess to some people that's funny? Yes, fighting a losing battle against that much, dying and then having to run back is funny. I can clearly see that now. Very amusing.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=69712">Ji-Kun</a> is always a mess in LFR because people don't want to fly to the nests. Not much more can be said there. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=68036">Durumu</a>'s maze continues to confuse people. Half the raid seems to die during it each week. For <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=69017">Primordius</a>, I still see people never getting transformed for the entire fight and doing very little damage as a result. But all this pales in comparison to <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=69427">Dark Animus</a>. The horrendous mess this is on LFR. I'm sure anyone who has done this knows what I'm talking about.<br><br>
I've rambled about this for long enough. To summarize, the people I encounter in LFR either play extremely badly and show no signs of improving, or they intentionally do poorly because they just don't care. The latter is my issue. If you don't care, then don't even queue. I'm not saying that everyone should be as obsessive as I can be about learning my class, the fight, etc. But actually doing what you're supposed to be doing... is that too hard to ask?<br><br>
This is the whole problem here. There is little to no consequence for being like this. You <b>might</b> be kicked from the group. But only if you're doing something obviously bad. Why is this behavior allowed? When someone confronts another about doing something wrong, even if the person is just explaining how the fight should be done, their response is almost always some variation of "lol this is LFR. it doesn't matter".<br><br>
I leave you with a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFWh9aY4pas">video from Preach</a> all about how there is a lack of incentive to try. This pretty well sums up my experience.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-71476741630311359772013-03-20T19:40:00.001-04:002013-03-20T19:41:51.635-04:00Tier 15 update5.2 has been out for a couple weeks now. My guild has been working on the encounters and making some steady progress through normal mode. I don't think I could ever get used to downing all the normals in the first week. I get that guilds that do such things are usually playing on the PTR to learn all the mechanics beforehand. But I just feel that doing so would get me to the "burned out" stage more quickly. I mainly just want to be competitive on my own server; which we are. Currently ranked 5th at 5/12 normal Throne of Thunder. Ji-Kun should be dying on Thursday. We had a 0.8% wipe on our last pull Tuesday. That was heart breaking.<br><br>
We finished out tier 14 with 5/6H(MSV) 1/6H(HoF) 4/4(ToES). Unfortunately that was only good enough for server 8th. We had a slow start though, so I'll attribute it to that. This tier however, things seem to be going a bit better...<br><br>
We got <b>Jin'rokh the Breaker</b> down in 3 tries on the first night. Very easy fight, almost Morchok difficulty. The debuff he places on the tanks is a magic effect and therefore can be prevented with Anti-Magic Shell. That's the only real tip I have for dk tanks there. If you do prevent the debuff from being applied to you and the other tank still takes him, feel free to stand in the puddle with the rest of the raid group for the added damage.<br><br>
<b>Horridon</b> proved to be a bit more difficult. Seems like such a cluster of things going on at once. It was definitely overwhelming, but we killed it after 16 tries. I ended up tanking the Gurubashi and Amani doors. The poison from the Gurubashi is brutal. The Amani warbears are probably the most annoying for me. They cleave and do a ton of physical damage. Anyone who isn't a tank can't survive more than a hit from them. To top this off, they have a rider on them that dismounts after the warbear is killed, which has it's own aggro table. When it dismounts, it likes to charge after the healers. Be wary of that.<br><br>
<b>Council of Elders</b> took another 23 attempts to down. Despite it taking longer than the others, we were still on pace with 1 new boss kill per raid night, which I found very encouraging. We tried a couple different tanking strategies for this encounter. One where we traded Frost King Malakk while keeping him next to Sul the Sandcrawler. This meant that the High Priestess Mar'li tank would have to grab both Malakk and Sul. The problem was when people would interrupt Sul or Mar'li during a swap. Those bosses would then move to the tank that isn't supposed to have them anymore. We wanted to keep Mar'li from Malakk and Sul. So we ended up not doing any swap at all. I tank both Sul and Malakk until they're dead. This means eating the stun Malakk does. Popping a cooldown or 2 for each stun is pretty much mandatory. Supposedly you can avoid the stun by preventing <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=136904">Frigid Assault</a> from stacking to 15. This is said to be possible with enough avoidance. So far, I have yet to be able to prevent it. But hey, I'm no bear tank with 60+% dodge.<br><br>
<b>Tortos</b> was next and took 27 tries. Getting the turtle kicking part down contributed to a lot of those though. Wiping on the first breath attack doesn't seem like much of an attempt. I ended up being the bat tank for this fight. Those little guys can be annoying to pick up. Deadly Boss Mods doesn't seem to have a timer for them yet. But they came up every 30 seconds or so. Death and Decay was either off cooldown or about to come off each time they came down. It seemed to happen after each <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=134920">Quake Stomp</a>, at least after the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=134539">Rockfalls</a> slowed down from it. They are immune to damage until they're completely down, which makes them somewhat frustrating. They also liked to go after the tank on the boss. Sometimes it made it easier to pick them up, but only if that tank didn't use really any aoe. For some reason Pestilence wasn't spreading diseases from Tortos to the bats even when I tanked them basically on him so the melee could cleave everything. I tested it with the Glyph of Pestilence as well. Perhaps they have to be basically right under the center of him.<br><br>
<b>Megaera</b> took another 18 tries before a kill. That fight seemed rather brutal, which might be why they nerfed some of the damage the following week after our kill. We used the strategy of just killing Venomous and Flaming heads the whole fight. For awhile, people were dying to <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=139458">Rampage</a> and the dot from <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=139822">Cinders</a>. Leaving the Frozen Head up the whole fight means that <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=139942">Hydra Frenzy</a> will stack pretty high. The breath attacks from the Frozen head weren't so bad. But the melee damage became a bit much near the end. I found using Dancing Rune Weapon would help a lot though.<br><br>
<b>Ji-Kun</b> is our current project. I have gone dps on this fight since unholy aoe is pretty crazy right now. Only issue I've been having is my ghoul. I was a little worried he would despawn when I would go to the nests since he'd stay attacking Ji-Kun for a bit while I was flying around. But he seems to be working ok with that, just showing up next to me when I start attacking the eggs much like a hunter pet. But sometimes he takes a few seconds to get there. So I'll be using Death Coil to transform him to do more aoe and he won't be getting the Dark Infusion stacks, despite the UI displaying he is. Annoying that Dark Transformation was lit up when I really only had 3 stacks on him and not the 5 it was displaying.<br><br>
Hopefully we'll get to Durumu the Forgotten on Thursday. I need to refresh on that fight a bit. The maze section seemed like it's going to pose the largest problem for us. I can see people panicking and running through a section they shouldn't be. But we'll see.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-86592895588001792332013-01-24T17:07:00.000-05:002013-01-24T17:07:34.785-05:00Raiding updateBeen awhile again. Eventually I'll become more consistent with this. I figured now is as good a time as any to get a little update going on our raiding progression.<br><br>
Currently the guild is 3/6H 6/6N 4/4N. We almost downed heroic Elegon the other night as well. Progression seems to be picking up again, which obviously makes me happier. Not to mention our heroic kills are getting more smooth. Our dps seems to be picking it up a bit, but we still seem to have issues that have been present for the duration I've been here. That being, dps doesn't seem to know when to stop killing things.<br><br>
The first time I noticed this issue was during our heroic Spine of Deathwing attempts. People would blindly kill the Amalgamations before they had 9 stacks. They found it difficult to monitor it's health percentage. I'm still at a loss as to how that's possible. Obviously not everyone made this same mistake. But once something is low enough in health (<20%) it can die extremely fast due to executes and such.<br><br>
Amber-Shaper Un'sok is another prime example of where we have issues. Dps would blinding destroy the tanks when they are in a <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=62701">Mutated Construct</a>. During phase one, the tanks are trying to stay in the constructs for as long as possible to stack <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=122389">Amber Strike</a> as high as they can. Also making sure that it will stay up long enough for the next tank to continue to stack it. So with the dps basically killing the constructs, we'd have to leave early and the debuff would fall off.<br><br>
Now we're running into the same issue on the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=60793">Celestial Protectors</a> during heroic Elegon. People are killing the thing before the tanks can pull it out of the middle circle. Some of this, I think, is lack of understanding. The protectors cast <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=117945">Arcing Energy</a> periodically, which has a cast time. So they obviously have to stop moving to cast it. I immediately see how that can be a problem, what with trying to move them out of the middle. But apparently not everyone realizes that. Too often have protectors died in the middle circle. If we tried to pull the protectors out earlier, they wouldn't die fast enough and a new protector would be summoned.<br><br>
Despite these issues, I'd say we aren't doing badly this tier now. It was a rough start, but we're at least staying competitive on our server. We've had some recent changes in some of our roster. Lost a person here or there, added a few to help fill out the ranks in case people can't make it. Seems to be working out alright though. The new raiders are pulling their weight, and that's really all that can be asked of them.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-7825169333866231082012-11-20T12:42:00.000-05:002012-11-20T12:42:39.899-05:00Getting back to this...maybeIt's been a few months since Mists of Pandaria has been released and I haven't updated at all. I know, blasphemy. Work has been sapping the life out of me lately. Same old song and dance and all that.<br><br>
So, how have things been, you ask? Pretty good. I took four days off of work when MoP first dropped. I leveled with Maralia from my guild. She's a bit less experienced than I am, so some of the leveling took a bit longer than others, but we were still within the first 5 in the guild who hit max level.<br><br>
Then started the reputation grind. I can't even put into words how draining that's been. I haven't gotten Shado-pan or the August Celestials to exalted yet, but I mainly just wanted to unlock all the valor point gear. Then it was just dungeons, dungeons, dungeons.<br><br><br>
The first week of raiding went rather poorly and, to be honest, we haven't fully recovered from that abysmal showing. It seemed like not enough of us took gearing up seriously. Many were still undergeared by the first raid night. This just equated to much fail and we didn't down the Stone Guard on the first night. In fact, it wasn't until the second week of raiding that we finally did.<br><br>
Raiding was pretty tough for the first few weeks. But as people started to replace their blues with shiny purples, it became easier and easier. LFR has been a decent place to get upgrades as well, and it isn't nearly as painful as it was last tier. Eventually we cleared Mogu'shan Vaults and had a decent progression standing on the server. We had issues beating the enrage timer on Gara'jal for a bit, so that slowed us down. Elegon, like with most guilds, gave us a lot of problems as well. But we managed to clear that raid just as Heart of Fear was going live.<br><br><br>
The week it did, we manged to clear Mogu'shan Vaults in one night. Practically one-shot every fight. Always a good sign when you can do that! Imperial Vizier Zor'lok proved to be quite difficult for us. Apparently moving to stay alive is difficult for a lot of people *rolls eyes*. For the first few nights of progression on him, I was the tank for the fight with our paladin tank going holy. We ended up switching this up since her gear in holy was a bit low and, despite my dps gear not being great, I could still pull numbers comparable to the rest of the raid. A night or two with this change and he fell.<br><br>
On to Blade Lord Ta'yak. Here we hit his enrage timer as well. Very frustrating when stuff like that happens. People had a hard time avoiding tornadoes as well in his last phase. Pretty much the same three people reached each side with no problem every time. Eventually we tried a method where we'd use the side walls in phase 2 that would push you back to get to the other side before he flew over to that one when he hit 10%. Usually we'd do this around 11% or so and leave one dps over there to ensure that he'd get to the required health percentage. It didn't take many attempts using this method until we got him.<br><br>
Garalon proved to be the most difficult boss for us so far. Kept hitting the enrage timer on this one as well. It becomes pretty obvious what our issue is when we keep hitting enrages. On most bosses in MSV (excluding Elegon), we wiped around 20-30 times before our first kill. We finally managed to kill Garalon last night, after 50+ wipes. To top it off, we killed him as he was enraging. So we all ended up dead, but so was he. I ended up switching to dps spec and gear with a tank trinket equipped just for added health. Our druid healer would pop <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=108288">Heart of the Wild</a> at the beginning of the fight so she could do extra damage (usually 3-4 million). Obviously we couldn't have beaten him without it!<br><br><br>
To be honest, I'm a little disappointed with our showing so far this tier. I know I'm not the only one. We have some really good players in this group, and I consider a great many of them my friends. But sometimes it's just depressing when people aren't performing as well as they could be or, even worse, making the same mistakes again and again. I'm not talking about perfection here, we are a pretty casual guild after all. Perhaps I'm a bit more obsessive about things than others. I just wish that more people in the guild would put in as much effort as a few of us do.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-55683225573861538002012-08-14T12:55:00.001-04:002012-08-14T16:47:09.181-04:00Game Design and Difficulty (Then VS Now)With Cataclysm coming to an end and Mists of Pandaria to be released in a little over a month, things have gotten pretty dull lately. My guildmates and I have been trying to keep occupied by running some older content for achievements, transmog, even just for nostalgia's sake. Ideally I'd like to get all raid/dungeon achievements for Cataclysm done, but not enough people want to go back to tier 11 and 12 to finish a few things up.<br><br>
During this downtime, I've spent a lot of it reading the official WoW forums as well as the forums over at <a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/">MMO Champ</a>. What I've been reading has been a broken record of QQ from the community. Comments of "Vanilla was better than Cataclysm" and "the game is too easy now" are extremely common. Well with so many people saying these things, they must be true, right?<br><br><br>
<b>Vanilla WoW: The Pillar of Game Design or a Lesson in Fake Difficulty</b><br><br>
I really don't think so. As <a href="http://holyworddelicious.blogspot.com/">Shanthi</a> and I have discussed recently, vanilla WoW really only <i>seemed</i> to be difficult. See, things weren't very accessible. You had to go on these long attunement quests through multiple dungeons and raids and travel all over Azeroth to complete even a small part of the quest chain.<br><br>
Even after completing said attunement, you needed to grind for gear in lower tier dungeons and raids before even thinking about stepping in with the big boys. This model continued to exist throughout The Burning Crusade as well. All the guilds who didn't finish content fast enough but couldn't access the new content. Hell, tons of guilds had issues finishing Tempest Keep before Sunwell Plateau was released. But people somehow think this was amazing. It was awesome that so few saw the original Naxxramas too, right?<br><br>
Blizzard obviously disagrees. Raids are now easily accessible to every person who runs random dungeons. "Welfare epics" give the player the required item levels to raid the current content. But those filled with nostalgia of how "amazing" vanilla was are upset about this. From my perspective, these epic items allow people to see normal mode content and raid casually with their guildmates and friends. I don't see what's so bad about this. Looking for raid exists for those that don't have a schedule that allows them to raid consistently. Or, maybe they don't have enough people in their guild that can actually raid normals. This I feel is perfectly fine also. Heroics are the measure of raiding ability currently in WoW anyways. No one cares how quickly you killed Morchok on normal. Hell, my guild was third on the server in that regard. But normals don't matter in terms of raid progression for "elite" guilds. Not saying my guild is of the type mentioned. We're somewhere in between casual and hardcore.<br><br>
In the end, it all comes down to accessibility. Vanilla and TBC weren't exactly great in that regard. Some people really enjoyed that aspect. But when the majority of players don't get to actually see any of the content, I don't really see that as a good thing.<br><br>
What about boss mechanics? Surely bosses have become much easier! ...no. Look at the mechanics for bosses in say Molten Core. 1-2 basic mechanics (don't stand in fire, pay attention, etc) and you win. But why would mechanics be so simple and people would still claim it was harder?<br><br><br>
<b>40-man Raiding: A Logistical Nightmare</b><br><br>
Oh, that's right. You had 39 other people to worry about when you raided. Wait, that's really it? Organization was the main factor? Ok, so from a raid leader's perspective, that was probably ridiculously difficult. Trying to get 40 people to all work together had to be a nightmare. But that's why mechanics weren't that difficult. See? It all makes sense if you actually think about it. Gearing up was a nightmare as well. I can completely understand that. Fighting with likely 10+ people to gear up. But actual gameplay was not any more difficult than it is today. In fact, I'm 99% sure it was easier.<br><br>
Look at heroic Spine of Deathwing for instance. Count the number of mechanics. Tell me that's somehow easier than boss fights in vanilla and TBC. It's absolutely not. But hey, it's easier because it requires less people. This is why the 25-man versus 10-man debate is so vicious. I won't go deep into that topic for now, but I will say each has it's own strengths and weaknesses.<br><br>
To me, the total number of people should not dictate how simple the mechanics are. Blizzard seems to have agreed with me there and has made 25m and 10m pretty close in terms of mechanics.<br><br><br>
<b>Players Suck</b><br><br>
Another argument I've seen on the forums is that players aren't nearly as skilled as they used to be. Well, I tend to disagree. Sure, a lot of things are now easier in terms of accessibility, as I've discussed. But the thing people have to remember is that a lot more people are playing nowadays. There's easily 2-3 times as many people playing WoW presently than were playing in vanilla. So finding bad players is pretty easy just because of the sheer amount of people playing.<br><br>
And I use the term "bad players" rather loosely. There's a ton of different types of players now as well, with varying amounts of time invested in the game. At present, it's rare that I find people playing their main character when I run dungeons. Most mains are completely geared at this point so people are working on their alts. Let's face it, you never play an alt quite like you play your main. You just know what ability to use and when to use it with your main. You can feel out the right time to do everything. But on an alt, you might find yourself searching for an ability or staring blankly at all the icons wondering what one does what.<br><br><br>
<b>Subscription Decline is Due to Blizzard's Horrible Design!</b><br><br>
Clearly. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the expansion ending. Why pay for something you normally would play a ton but there's not a whole lot you want to do for now? How many subscriptions do you think will come with the release of Mists of Pandaria? This is a slow section of the game. Anyone who's every been around for the end of an expansion will agree. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, Orgrimmar felt like a ghost town. But when Cataclysm dropped, Org completely blew up with players. Lagged the hell out of my computer.<br><br>
Am I saying that some of the lost subs aren't due to Mists of Pandaria? No. I'm sure there's people who aren't interested in playing it. But that happens with every change. Personally, I don't like pet battles. I'm not a huge fan of the Pandaren either. So I'm not really going to participate in pet battles and I'm likely not going to make a Pandaren. Wow, that was a tough decision.<br><br><br>
<b>The Root of the Problem</b><br><br>
What is the actual issue here? It seems like no matter what, people are going to continue to make these claims. People will resist change and hold on to things that they feel were amazing and the right way to do it. This is nothing different than people who hold on to archaic values in society. It's human nature. In society, if you don't evolve and roll with the changes, you're doomed to be left behind. So, is this really any different? Things are changing constantly. Sometimes it's hard to keep up with them. But at least in the instance of WoW, Blizzard tries to help you adjust to these changes. People will still be unwilling to change and lay claim that the old way was better. But was it really?<br><br>
People will always find something to complain about. Blizzard knows this, they know they can't make everyone happy. But they try to make as many of their players happy as they can. Overall, I'm very satisfied with the time I've spent on this game. It's been a lot of fun learning things about it and playing with people who have become some of my closest friends. Sure, things have bothered me from time to time in terms of design and such, but Blizzard is constantly making the game evolve. As long as the raiding aspect continues to be engaging and gives me something to work towards, I'll continue to play.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-7560422869113214802012-07-14T19:10:00.001-04:002012-07-14T19:10:24.543-04:00Mists of Pandaria DK Changes...With all the changes coming in Mists of Pandaria, I've noticed all the QQ about how "My class is being completely changed. It's going to be unplayable." or "My class isn't getting any love." etc. So I figured I'd pipe in with my current thoughts of death knights as of now and what I think of the changes in Mists.<br><br>
<b>Blood Now</b><br><br>
As it stands right now, I feel blood is in a good place. Hell, I'd go out on a limb in saying it's in a great place. For Dragon Soul, dk tanks seem to be the way to go on most fights. There are a few places where other tanks seems to shine a bit better (Corrupted Blood tanking during Spine, Warmaster Blackhorn), but I feel as though I can pretty much completely negate some mechanics with my Blood Shield, some pretty deadly mechanics at that.<br><br>
Hagara's <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=107851">Focused Assault</a> used to cause complete chaos before I learned how to time my Death Strikes to heal myself back up and put up a shield large enough to absorb the remainder of the attack. Once I did that, the ability became little more than a nuisance to me. Not only that, but I didn't have to move her... at all. So ranged was free to spread around her and take turns blocking the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=105313">Ice Lances</a>. This cleaned things up quite a bit for our raid group. I can't imagine how much frustration other tanking classes must have running from her each time she does that.<br><br>
Impale from Madness is another mechanic that becomes a small bump in the road. Being able to stack my blood shield to over 200k and combined with smart damage reduction cool down usage, it's almost laughable to see the entire Impale absorbed.<br><br>
Before the change to Death Strike in patch 4.3, things could sometimes be pretty unnerving. Will Death Strike land and give me that heal and all important shield? No? How about now? No?! Third time's a charm? NO?!?! I experiment with a more hit/expertise heavy build at that time to see if it helped. I took more damage due to having less avoidance and less mastery. But I could almost certainly count on that clutch death strike to land. Although I've enjoyed how over powered blood shield has been, being able to stack it to it's maximum shouldn't be this easy. I think Blizzard realizes this as well, or rather, they always knew. But leaving us as the only tank with the active mitigation model would not work for class balancing. But come Mists, we're all on level playing field.<br><br>
As a side note, am I the only person in the death knight community that doesn't have a problem with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81229">Runic Empowerment</a>? All the hate I've seen in reference to it boggles my mind. I can count on Rune Strike proccing it with somewhat regularity. Yeah, it's not every single time. But it shouldn't be.<br><br><br>
<b>New Death Knight Abilities/Changes in Mists</b><br><br>
<a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=115989">Unholy Blight</a> is back in a somewhat old version. I hadn't thought of a specific use of it until I did some reading on the dk forums over on MMO Champion. People were complaining about how a dk tank's AOE rotation makes it impossible to get a Death Strike off early in the pull since they have to make sure diseases are present as both a threat mechanic as well as survival in the debuff provided. Sacrificing survival for threat is something other tanking classes don't have to think about, is what their argument was. Then it hit me. Pick up Unholy Blight, alternate it with <a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=77575">Outbreak</a> at the beginning of each pull. Yes, it's not perfect as the cool downs don't line up, but it certainly helps a ton and allows you to have runes available for that all important Death Strike. But wait, there's more! With the <a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/item=43826">Glyph of Outbreak</a> you can forget about Unholy Blight entirely! So yeah, don't know why none of this was thought of. It doesn't take long for a dk to accumulate 40 runic power.<br><br>
<a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=51986">On a Pale Horse</a> is now passive for all death knights. Can't really say much here. More movement speed is always nice.<br><br>
<a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=111673">Control Undead</a> is an interesting niche spell. Virtually identical to a warlock's <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=1098">Enslave Demon</a>, it's fun to think about where it can be used. But I don't see it being very game changing. How often do you see a lock enslaving demons in raids? Yeah, you don't. I see it being fun to mess around with while questing though.<br><br>
<a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=114866">Soul Reaper</a> is the new death knight version of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=5308">Execute</a>. Perhaps a bit more powerful, but from what I've gathered, it's cost is one Death Rune and it's on a 6 second cool down. This makes it impossible to spam, which is fine. I don't see a lot of use for blood, obviously, since it's more or less a dps ability. Death runes are better spent on survival. But in a fight where there's a tank swap and the dk is not longer tanking, I could see it being used there.<br><br>
A recent blue post was brought up where it's being discussed to change the cost of Soul Reaper, possibly to runic power instead of an actual rune. I think this would be pretty ideal.<br><br>
<a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=108196">Death Siphon</a> is another ability that requires a death rune to use. From comments, I see that it scales with frost/unholy mastery, seeing as it's shadowfrost damage, and it also scales from 40% of attack power. So on fights where <a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=93099">Vengeance</a> has stacked fairly high, it could prove to be useful.<br><br>
<a href="http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=119975">Conversion</a> is of particular interest to blood dks. Before a few changes, it seemed possible to generate enough runic power to keep this going for quite some time. As my friend <a href="http://holyworddelicious.blogspot.com/">Shanthi</a> and I discussed, using it in conjunction with Anti-Magic Shell while standing in fire or some other magic effect seemed like it could easily allow you to generate runic power faster than Conversion could us it up. It has no rune cost and no cool down. As long as you have the runic power to feed it, it can be used. Definitely a must have for any blood dk.<br><br>
After playing around with Conversion a bit on the beta, I noticed that each tick of health per second uses 10 runic power, but also if you end up with around 7 or so runic power (just less than 10) it will still give you one last tick to bring you to 0. This I think is of particular interest since it gives you the ability to keep it going a bit.<br><br><br>
I'm going to wrap things up here for now. I'll likely post more thoughts about the beta in the future. Hopefully people enjoy this a bit.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-61982875197626463402012-06-12T13:05:00.001-04:002012-06-12T13:14:58.828-04:00Heroic MadnessSo I realized I never updated about downing Heroic Madness of Deathwing. Shame on me, right? Yeah, we killed him the week after finishing Spine. Since then we've gotten 5 kills (did everything on normal the one week due to some misinformation). I've managed to get most of my best in slot gear for both my blood and unholy specs. Never got a normal <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=77191">Gurthalak</a> to drop, but I did manage to snag a <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=78478">heroic</a> one.<br><br>
But enough about that, I wanted to go over a few things to help my fellow dks out there. I recently read a forum thread on <a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/">MMO Champ</a> about a paladin tank having issues living through <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109632">Impale</a>. Now when I say he was having issues, I mean using multiple cool downs (3-4) and still dying to it. This completely dumbfounds me. Why, you ask? Because I solo tank heroic Madness. Now I'll go into the how...<br><br>
Our platform order is the pretty standard green, red, yellow and then blue order that most guides suggest. The buffs from Kalecgos (<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106040">Spellweaving</a> and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106026">Kalecgos's Presence</a>) have proven to be the most valuable of all the buffs. On the green platform, having <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106464">Dream</a> is great since it allows me to save my major cool downs for later platforms. So once the fight starts, I open up with disease on the limb and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49998">Death Strike</a> as much as possible to build a decent sized <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=77513">Blood Shield</a>. Usually through <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81229">Runic Empowerment</a> procs, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109776">Soulshifter Vortex</a> procs, and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=45529">Blood Tap</a>, I can end up with 70-100k worth of absorption. I usually try to time a Death Strike right as the timer for the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56471">Mutated Corruption</a> hits 2 seconds and then book it to the back of the platform. I open on the Corruption the same on each platform; Dark Command, Dancing Rune Weapon, and pop <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=107951">Fire of the Deep</a>. This is to try to avoid as many attacks as possible leading into the first Impale so I can continue to build up my Blood Shield. So long as the Corruption doesn't use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109629">Crush</a> on me, I can usually get up to a max Blood Shield (equal to my max health at the time). When the first Impale goes off, I check if <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49222">Bone Shield</a> is up (refreshing it if it isn't), use Dream and if my shield was maxed, I take no damage.<br><br>
Now there will be a second Impale on each platform and obviously, I can't take that one. But we're one tanking it. So what do we do? I'm sure you've read guides that have shadow priests taking them and such. What we do is have all melee, myself included, run out of melee range on the corruption ~4-5 seconds before the next Impale and our hunter runs into melee and pops <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=19263">Deterrence</a> so he doesn't get destroyed by melee attacks. The Corruption will attack whoever is in melee if it's highest threat target is out of range. If no one is in melee range, it starts to cast <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=107029">Impale Aspect</a>. What this does is also forced the Corruption to Impale the hunter now, who uses <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=5384">Feign Death</a> to interrupt the cast and take no damage. Then I taunt while running back in. Timing is key here. Sometimes the timers are a bit off depending on if a Crush is going out. But generally this has worked well for us. Around this time, Deathwing will begin to cast <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=105863">Hemorrhage</a> which brings out the dreaded <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56263">Regenerative Bloods</a>. I drop <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=43265">Death and Decay</a> on their spawn location to bring them over to me and pop <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48707">Anti-Magic Shell</a> to prevent too many applications of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109626">Degenerative Bite</a>. At this point it's a race to kill the Corruption before the next Impale while trying to kill the bloods before the stacking debuff becomes too much. Once they're all dead, the platform finishes like it does on normal. What I do, is try to maintain my Blood Shield at max by the end. I'll usually time one last Death Strike when the limb is around 4% and immediately start moving to the next platform. Once I get to the yellow platform, which we're just skipping over to get to red, I use Death Strike on that limb once more to keep the shield going. When I get to the red, I open with Death Strike to continue the shield.<br><br>
For the red platform, the only change is Dream is replaced by <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48792">Icebound Fortitude</a>. Which means I still take no damage from Impale provided I was able to keep that shield maxed. Everything else is done exactly the same way. I still maintain a max shield going on to the yellow platform as well.<br><br>
For yellow, I'm without my own major cool down. So we look to one of our discipline priests to put <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=33206">Pain Suppression</a> on me. Again, if I was able to keep my shield maxed and kept Bone Shield up for the Impale, I take no damage from the Impale. This platform goes the same way as the previous two and we move on to the blue platform.<br><br>
Blue is a bit different due to the Elementium Bolt now hitting the ground which causes <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109601">Elementium Blast</a>. Also, I could not have maintained a max blood shield going from yellow to blue. So I have to start over again. I also have less time to build that initial shield since the timer for the Corruption begins as soon as you land on the green platform. To combat the possibility that my shield might not be maxed at the start of the Impale cast, I use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=46584">Raise Dead</a> soon after reaching the Corruption. I still continue to stack my shield as much as possible, and once the Impale cast begins, I use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=47568">Empower Rune Weapon</a> in an attempt to get a couple more Death Strikes in. Usually this allows me to get close to a max shield before the Impale damage hits. Again, provided Crush didn't hit me right before, which will almost always wipe the majority of my shield away. Icebound Fortitude is used again on this platform and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48743">Death Pact</a> is waiting to be used in case I take a ton of damage from some bad RNG. The bloods on this platform are probably the most painful, as I'm forced to use Anti-Magic Shell for the Elementium Blast and not to prevent applications of their debuff. The other change on this platform is that our rogue takes the second Impale instead of our hunter. The reason is our rogue can use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=31224">Cloak of Shadows</a> to deal with the blast, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=5277">Evasion</a> so the Corruption doesn't swat him to death, and <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=1856">Vanish</a> to cancel Impale. The rest of the platform goes like the others did.<br><br>
For the final platform, things get hectic but the buffs all coming back are a godsend. I save Dream for <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109598">Shrapnel</a> or use it when fighting the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56710">Elementium Terrors</a> if I wasn't targeted with Shrapnel. The Terrors are always nerve wracking to tank. I usually wait until I get ~4 stacks of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=109604">Tetanus</a> and then use Anti-Magic Shell to prevent further applications and make the current duration expire, resetting my stacks. Dream obviously makes this much more bearable. Dancing Rune Weapon and Fire of the Deep are alternated to further help. For the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=57798">Congealing Bloods</a>, our hunter drops <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=82941">Ice Trap</a> on their spawn location to help slow them. I use Death and Decay and spam <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48721">Blood Boil</a> as much as I can.<br><br>
To prevent getting Congealing Bloods while other adds are up, we stop dps before Deathwing hits 15 and 10% and basically power through the 10% bloods and the next ones at 5%. Usually stopping at 17% and 12% allows us to focus on other adds and not worry about Deathwing dipping too low and spawning the bloods early. The <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56724">Elementium Fragments</a> will likely spawn at the end before finishing him. We just ignore them and kill Deathwing. Same goes with the Terrors. I just grab them so they aren't eating someone's face.<br><br><br>
But that's pretty much it. I know that death knights are a bit overpowered for this fight. This fight is one where avoidance isn't a huge factor, but absorption is king. Stacking my shield to max and smart use of cool downs allows me to take no Impale damage for the entire fight.<br><br>
[22:45:26.791] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (209213)<br>
[22:47:54.511] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (209213)<br>
[22:50:31.049] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (225949)<br>
[22:53:22.543] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (209213)<br><br>
Those numbers seem kinda low in terms of damage, but that's from our first heroic Madness kill. It's possible our pally healer threw <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=6940">Hand of Sacrifice</a> on me just in case. In addition, my healers are pretty awesome and make sure I'm over 90% health, if not at full health, before each Impale hits me.<br><br>
And to prove I'm not amazing, this is our most recent kill...<br><br>
[22:59:44.680] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 166791 (A: 78380)<br>
[23:02:12.875] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (196137)<br>
[23:04:50.657] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 220667 (A: 73538)<br>
[23:07:34.471] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 120098 (A: 125073)<br><br>
Yeah, I failed a bit there.<br><br>
Anyway, I hope this helps my fellow dks out there. And I'm still confused why a paladin would die from Impale with 3-4 cool downs on them O.oSchrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-71828850702333740592012-04-24T16:26:00.001-04:002012-04-24T16:32:16.263-04:00Heroic Spine of Deathwing down!I'm actually quite terrible at keeping up on this, as it turns out. Been busy with work, playing a couple betas (Diablo 3 and Tera), and continuing our heroic progression.<br><br>
As of last Thursday night, my guild has hit 7/8H progression. Spine of Deathwing, which had been completely destroying us for the better part of 5 weeks, has finally been completed. After the first few weeks, we could consistently get to the third plate, but would just get completely overrun with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=53889">Corrupted Bloods</a>. Our disc/shadow priest, <a href="http://servingpenance.blogspot.com/">Zindaria</a>, got an addon to monitor the number of active bloods. Let me tell you how ridiculous having 60-70 up at one time is. When our blood tank would die from just far too much damage, I'd gain aggro on them all and die in about 2 seconds. But after wiping over and over in basically the same part of the fight, we realized something had to be done. Too many bloods were obviously up. So either we aren't killing enough or we aren't getting through the fight fast enough.<br><br>
When I compared the total damage we did to bloods and divided it by the health of one, we'd end up around 120-130 bloods killed on our longest attempts. This ended up being on par with other guilds on our server. But we still hadn't finished the fight. We'd only have gotten through the first <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=53890">Hideous Amalgamation</a> on the last plate. So more bloods would likely be dying. Probably a lot of them. When comparing our fight length versus other guilds, we were on par with their kills, but hadn't gotten the kill yet. So it was pretty obvious we weren't getting through the fight fast enough.<br><br>
Despite only having 2 amalgamations per plate, we were still behind. We would try to synch the timing of the amalgamation death up with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=105490">Fiery Grip</a> to make sure no one would be gripped while the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56575">Burning Tendons</a> were exposed. This seemed to work well enough in that we achieved our goal of having no one gripped. But still, we were behind. We'd manage to get the tendons to sub 40% from the first time it was exposed on each plate. So, back to the drawing board?<br><br>
After a few weeks of a bunch of us looking up different guides and watching videos of first kills, we found something that at least I feel was the key. Don't worry about synching up the death of the amalgamations and the fiery grip being cast. Instead, when the amalgamation is channeling <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106264">Superheated Nucleus</a>, kill the remaining <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56162">Corruption</a>. This will reset the timer on fiery grip since a new corruption spawns. It also adds a new amalgamation and thus another <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106199">Blood Corruption: Death</a> debuff. But if planned for, it's easy to manage and gives another stack of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106213">Blood of Neltharion</a>. You end up losing some tank dps on the tendons, but as long as your dps is fairly strong, it shouldn't be a problem.<br><br>
Once we made this change, the number of active bloods during the third plate went down tremendously. I think on our kill, we had around 50 up instead of 60-70.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-978881424057767142012-02-10T23:43:00.000-05:002012-02-10T23:43:16.443-05:00DK tanking in Dragon SoulFor this little guide, I'll assume everyone is familiar with each fight. I originally wrote this out and had explained each part of the fights, but that was just ridiculously long and it seemed like I lost the point of the entry. So basically I'm just going to go over when I used each ability I have, if there's a specific point in the fight I feel is ideal to use them and all that.<br />
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<br />
<b>Morchok</b><br />
<br />
For this fight, I tank Morchok the entire time while the other tank is on Kohcrom, but I have tanked both. Morchok does 3 <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103494">Resonating Crystals</a>, and I have to move him near each one to make sure all those soaking them will still be within <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=108571">Stomp</a> range. This isn't hard since it has a 25 yard range. I put up a range check of 20 yards to help out here. Having a hunter in your soaking group sometimes makes this a little annoying since they have that dead zone where they can't shoot at all. I try to time <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48982">Rune Tap</a> (with <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=43825">Glyph of Rune Tap</a>) after each Stomp if possible. I also use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=55233">Vampiric Blood</a> right after a Stomp if I see the crystal explode around the same time so the healer gets a little more healing power to bring everyone back up. Obviously I use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48792#.">Icebound Fortitude</a> when the boss is sub 20%. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48707">Anti-Magic Shell</a> is used whenever I'm closer to the crystal initially than one of the soakers to ease healing. I've also soaked crystals when people have died while tanking the boss, so obviously it's good for that as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Yor'sahj, the Unsleeping</b><br />
<br />
I feel this fight is catered to dk tanks. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103628">Deep Corruption</a> I would think would be a problem for a lot of tanks. But none of my self healing adds any stacks to it. It's rare that I even get 1 stack from healing sources; although I know healers are also very aware of which of their spells don't add stacks. I use Anti-Magic Shell usually right before the 5th-6th application of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=104849">Void Bolt</a> to absorb the initial hit as well as some of the DoT. Icebound Fortitude is usually reserved for the one combo where we don't kill the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=104901">Glowing Globule</a> since Void Bolt stacks higher and there's just generally much more damage going out. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49028">Dancing Rune Weapon</a> is usually used when there's adds out as I can sometimes get a bunch to stick to me (although that's all RNG). <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=42650">Army of the Dead</a> is usually used for the second wave of adds during that combo with the Glowing Globule not killed.<br />
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<br />
<b>Warlord Zon'ozz</b><br />
<br />
We just recently got this guy down, so I can give a little guide now. Since the introduction of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=73975">Necrotic Strike</a>, I've been searching for a time to actually use it. In PVP, I'm sure it can be quite useful, but I don't PVP. Enter <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=104322">Psychic Drain</a>, the bane of my existence. I use Anti-Magic Shell and stack Necrotic Strike on the boss in the time leading up to his usage of it. The problem for me always seems to be <i>when</i> he uses it. See, <a href="http://www.deadlybossmods.com/">Deadly Boss Mods</a> has a timer for it, but it rarely lines up. Sometimes he uses the ability immediately after the timer runs out, other times it can literally be 7 seconds after the timer reaches 0. But my favorite is all the times he does it 1-2 seconds <i>before</i> the timer reaches 0. Since the cool down on Psychic Drain is shorter than the cool down on Anti-Magic Shell, I alternate it with an old favorite trinket from tier 11, <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=68713">Mirror of Broken Images</a>. Vampiric Blood I use for the start of each dark phase.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Ultraxion</b><br />
<br />
Anti-Magic Shell is my best friend here. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103327">Hour of Twilight</a> does around 50% of my health when topped off if that's the only cool down I use. I usually add Icebound Fortitude to it as well. This usually drops me about 10% instead, which is just crazy. Dancing Rune Weapon is used each time it's available if I'm currently tanking the boss. Vampiric Blood is used on cool down as well since the raid damage gets pretty insane. Rune Tap I pretty much use on cool down here as well provided I'm missing any health really. 5% isn't a lot to the other 4 people in my group, but every little bit helps.<br />
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One last thing to note here, before Thrall gives the tanks the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106080">Last Defender of Azeroth</a> buff, if you're tanking the boss, use <b>all</b> your normal tank cool downs. Don't use trinkets, just your normal cool downs. Why? As soon as you get the buff, it resets all the cool downs on them. Vampiric Blood, Dancing Rune Weapon, Icebound Fortitude, Anti-Magic Shell, even Rune Tap are all effected by it.<br />
<br />
<br />
Unfortunately that's as far as we've gotten on heroics so far. We've been working on Hagara next. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=107851">Focused Assault</a> does a ton more damage on heroic, but stacking my Blood Shield up beforehand seems to work well there. Common complaint I'm getting from the ranged in my group is moving her too much. I don't like moving her much to begin with since melee then has issues getting damage on her. I know moving her also makes blocking the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=105313">Ice Lance</a> beams difficult for ranged as well. At the same time, standing there means almost certain death. I try to keep her around the center as much as possible. But I also have to bring her to the side where we're going to start each transition phase to try to limit the amount of time we spend in it. So yeah, interesting balance I need to find there.<br />
<br />
Hopefully this helps out my fellow dk tanks a bit. Again, this is just how I tend to use my cool downs for these fights. If you find a better spot to use any of them, I'm always open to advice.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-79206158637423977752012-01-15T15:20:00.000-05:002012-01-15T15:20:15.994-05:00Heroic Yor'sahj DownThat's right, my guild is now 2/8 heroic. After a major hiccup in terms of dps output (roughly 40 million damage behind), with some respeccing and a change in raid composition, we managed to get the dps required to finish him off. Previously we had been attempting to three heal that fight. But with the tight enrage timer this proved to be impossible. So we went with a discipline priest and holy paladin. It seems that a holy paladin is almost required to heal that fight properly. In addition, our marksmanship hunter respecced to survival and our frost dk specced to unholy. Also, our other healing priest went shadow.<br />
<br />
On our first attempt with this new setup, we hit the enrage timer and wiped with him at 2%. Had we just ignored the last set of oozes, we probably would have gotten him. But hey, hindsight is 20/20, right? I've experimented with my spec a little to help with overall damage. Seems tank dps makes a bit of a difference on heroic. I managed to increase my dps output to around 17-19k on most attempts. I'm no bear tank, so I'm pretty happy with that. I changed out the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=45804">Glyph of Death Coil</a> for the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/item=43827">Glyph of Death Strike</a> a little while back and haven't bothered changing it. Seems to really help when I can hit a Death Strike for an 80-90k crit. I experimented with helping to bring the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56231">Mana Voids</a> down in health while the rest of the raid went to kill each ooze. It definitely seems like the key to that fight is managing those. Leaving the first one up but bringing it low in health, then killing the first after the second has spawned and drained mana again.<br />
<br />
Our composition for our kill was:<br />
<br />
<b>Tank</b><br />
Blood Death Knight<br />
<br />
<b>Healers</b><br />
Discipline Priest<br />
Holy Paladin<br />
<br />
<b>DPS</b><br />
Survival Hunter<br />
Frost Death Knight<br />
Feral Druid<br />
Arcane Mage<br />
Fire Mage<br />
Demonology Warlock<br />
Shadow Priest<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
One thing I've been thinking of writing about has been tips for dk tanks for each encounter, such as when I use each cool down. I honestly don't know how many people actually read this anymore. I see referring links from <a href="http://repgrind.wordpress.com/">Repgrind</a> a lot as well as some other sites that I haven't even been to. I really do appreciate that. I didn't think anyone would really want to read what I have to say.<br />
<br />
If anyone has any suggestions on what I should write about, feel free to let me know in comments. Also, let me know if dk tank tips would be something that you would find interesting as well.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-53905919898183368382012-01-08T00:38:00.000-05:002012-01-08T00:38:56.725-05:00On to hard modes!Hello everyone... ok, maybe it's like 5 people who read this, but whatever. I haven't had a lot of time to update this in the last few months, as you've probably noticed. Work has been keeping me busy (remote start season), and with the new tier of raiding, I've been spending a lot of time doing that, reading up on fights, sifting through world of logs and all that good stuff.<br />
<br />
So, how has my guild been doing you ask? Not too bad. Currently we're 1/8 heroic, in like a 10 way tie for third on the server. Took us 62 attempts to finish Madness of Deathwing. That was a little discouraging, but then we one shot it the following week. So, at least we retained all that knowledge.<br />
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Heroic Morchok seemed so easy on paper...or, internet text rather. Splits in two, divide the raid, designate a <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=56747">Stomp</a> soaker, keep the boss moving towards each <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103494">Resonating Crystal</a> so all those soaking that will remain in range of the Stomp. Not so bad. But man, did it not go well. Since that fight is much shorter than Madness, we had almost as many wipes (57) in just two nights of work on him. But we eventually got him. Some of the info on websites like Icy Veins may not be entirely accurate. For example, we noticed the double share of Stomp that the tank and someone else takes doesn't seem to be based on proximity to the boss like most sites state. Rather it seems it's based on proximity to Morchok's (or Kohcrom's) main aggro target. So stacking on the corresponding tank seemed to work well in controlling who received that double hit. Let me tell you, a clothie taking a double Stomp is devastating. We also noted that Morchok ends up summoning three crystals each phase before channeling Earth's Vengeance and starting to cast <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103785">Black Blood of the Earth</a>, while Kohcrom only gets to summon two crystals. This makes the tank on Morchok have to move the boss more often.<br />
<br />
On some attempts, it was noted that the healing required to keep me alive wasn't a large amount. That whomever was healing me could take a little extra time to heal others. Some of those attempts the healers died and I was left to survive without them, which apparently I could do very well. This played a part in our final strategy. We decided to put me on Morchok and only had one healer on that side. See, because this week we only had 3 healers. Most guides recommend two or four healing this fight. So, two healers on the Kohcrom side and only one on the Morchok side. This seemed to work well. Now this isn't to say that it's ideal to divide healers that way, rather that since I didn't require as much healing, only one healer was required to be in my group. This last raid lockout, we had a hilarious downing of him when the Kohcrom side died with the boss around 1-2% and we finished Morchok off. Not realizing that despite their shared health, Kohcrom didn't die when Morchok did. Instead, while looking at the loot, Kohcrom came over and killed most of my group. Luckily I was able to finish him off before he could kill me.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
As I've continued to gear up in this tier, I've noticed that Blizzard seems to have done a pretty decent job in terms of making sure dk tanks are still quite viable. The PTR had me quite worried, but they did a great job fine tuning everything. As it stands right now, my survivability is incredibly high. For the Madness fight, I can sometimes completely absorb an <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106444">Impale</a> while using a damage reduction cooldown.<br />
<br />
[22:55:22.345] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (155664)<br />
[22:58:09.026] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (124531)<br />
[23:00:53.396] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 184719 (O: 71570, A: 2911)<br />
[23:01:29.147] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 118164 (A: 43836)<br />
[23:03:54.337] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 112100 (A: 211900)<br />
[23:04:30.470] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 155664<br />
<br />
<br />
[23:48:17.795] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 45552 (A: 92816)<br />
[23:48:53.550] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 191994 (A: 2406)<br />
[23:50:52.413] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (124531)<br />
[23:51:28.515] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 123299 (A: 71101)<br />
[23:53:42.604] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 129772 (A: 64628)<br />
[23:54:18.740] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 57009 (A: 83088)<br />
[23:56:46.919] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 115732 (A: 59228)<br />
[23:57:23.064] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (50435)<br />
<br />
During our last downing of Madness, I died to an Impale because my <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48792">Icebound Fortitude</a> hadn't come off of cooldown yet. A problem when we kill things a bit faster than usual. This was definitely my error for not realizing before the Impale was being cast. But a battle rez solved that problem. Only issue then was when the other tank died on the final platform after the first wave of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/npc=56710#.">Elementium Terrors</a>. Somehow the healers were able to keep me alive through the second wave of them. I don't know how, but it worked very well. I don't see <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=47788">Guardian Spirit</a> in there, so I'm at a loss as to how I survived.<br />
<br />
<br />
The last thing I want to talk about is how things have changed since coming to the guild. When I first came here, I was obviously an outsider. But I've gotten to know most of these people and they're fun to play with. True, it's not peachy all the time. But that's to be expected. I came in to be the second tank, essentially. But after the first weeks of Dragon Soul, whether it be to gear or otherwise, I've become the main tank. I have a 395 item level now. I know part of that is due to me being present for every raid and the raid leader making sure I got my four piece bonus early. The utility of an extra raid cooldown is pretty great. As it stands right now, my tanking partner (warrior) is at a 387 item level. Still very respectable, but obviously a bit behind mine. Unfortunately he's a busy man as well. Poor guy is always so tired from work. But at the same time, it seems as though his class is at a disadvantage compared to mine. He has reached full CTC, but there are so many times where the damage is magic or unavoidable. That's where my class shines with all that self healing. Before this patch I thought about going back to playing my warrior tank as my main. But now, I think I've made the right choice sticking with my death knight.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-42130677298778623062011-12-03T11:50:00.000-05:002011-12-03T11:50:15.116-05:00Dragon SoulI've been slacking again with this. Just needed some new material, I think. So with 4.3 out and guilds going to town on Dragon Soul, I figured now is about the time to update.<br />
<br />
The main thing I seem to keep hearing from other players is that Dragon Soul is very easy. I don't know if it actually is, seeing as this is my first time entering a tier in heroic gear from the previous, but they might be right. My guild one shot Morchok with ease. Seems most guilds are going at least 4/8 in the first day or so. We've managed to get to 5/8 and still have one more raid night before reset. I think the only thing that's been holding us back in simple mistakes. Standing in fire (or ice), just generally being noobs when it comes to these fights. In all honesty, we are. We didn't do any of these on the ptr and haven't done any raid finder as a group. A couple people have done some of that, which is why they have a little more insight. But generally speaking, we have no idea what's going on with these fights aside from what we've read and watched in videos.<br />
<br />
Honestly, if any guild is having issues with Morchok, they're doing something wrong. He doesn't even hit tanks all that hard. Yes, there's a tank swap. Yes, I died at one point due to a taunt being a little late and me taking a ton of damage due to the stacking <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103687">Crush Armor</a> he puts on us, but otherwise it was a simple kill.<br />
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Warlord Zon'ozz is a really interesting fight. The game of ping pong you have to play with the purple orb he summons is very different. After a few wipes, we found a good position to allow better control of that. Too often was melee having to run out to get in the path of the orb and then the tank had to drag the boss into it's path if we wanted to reset <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=104543">Focused Anger</a>. I suggested having the tank just move the boss to the side very slightly and face him towards that side which then put the melee stack right behind him and thus right in the path of the orb. The boss was also still in the path as he's huge like all bosses in wow. So that made it easy for use to move out of the way when we wanted it to hit Zon'ozz. Healing was extremely rough once the orb hit him. But with people rotating cool downs, we got him down.<br />
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Yor'sahj the Unsleeping is another interesting fight. Summoning different Globules and having a kill order dependent on which ones he summons. Took some refining, but he wasn't so bad either. Some combinations proved to be extremely difficult for healers, but others seemed like a vacation. Tank damage is fairly low and despite the tank swap, there's a significant amount of down time in terms of that damage since he doesn't melee the tank while summoning the globules. This allowed me to heal myself back to full each time while the healers followed the group around killing the chosen globule. When all was said and done, I ended up with my t13 leg token.<br />
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Next up was Hagara the Stormbinder. This is basically the Alysrazor of this tier, though I feel there's less going on. It's still an execution/stay alive and win type of fight. Lots of obstacles to avoid. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=105314">Ice Wave</a> proved to be an issue for a lot of people since, seemingly like all things in wow, the graphic and actual effect didn't match up. So you could appear to be 5-10 yards from the graphic yet still get hit with it and die. The other issue we ran into was breaking people out of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=70157">Ice Tomb</a>. We eventually had our hunter call out which tomb had priority and tried to get both people affected with the debuff to run into the center before they were encased in the tomb. This proved to be very helpful. Melee had to do less running around and the first person, usually a healer, was broken free fairly quick. One wipe we had was at 1%, so maddening when that happens. We ended up not killing her the first night and came back for our second raid night and finished her off. I received my t13 shoulder token from her as well.<br />
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Ultraxion has to be my favorite encounter of this tier so far. That fight seems to be designed specifically with a dk tank in mind. All the magic damage going out combined with the tank cool down reduction makes it extremely easy for me to stay alive through seemingly everything. We had some wipes due to people not understanding that <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=110073">Fading Light</a> works like <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=98450">Searing Seeds</a> from Majordomo Staghelm. The debuff is applied with a random length before the ability actually happens. For Fading Light, it's between 5 and 10 seconds. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106108">Heroic Will</a> only lasts for 5 seconds, so you have to activate Heroic Will only when you have less than 5 seconds left before Fading Light goes off. Many deaths were had due to this. Eventually people got it down. I suggested taking all of Ultraxion's <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=103327">Hour of Twilight</a> attacks as I would always have <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48707">Anti-Magic Shell</a> up and every other time I would have <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48792">Icebound Fortitude</a> (50% damage reduction through Blood talents) up as well. With the two up, I was somehow only taking 8-9k damage from that attack. With only AMS up, I would take 100k. Either way, I could easily survive it and still have multiple cool downs to choose from to use in combination with AMS. After working out the kinks, we got him down. Healing at the end was once again insane. Seems this tier is all about putting the healers through hell at points in the fight. As for loot, the shared boss table tanking ring dropped and my tier chest token as well. I felt really bad about already getting 2 pieces, so I passed on the token and just rolled with the other tank on the ring. He won it yet still offered it to me. Good guy, but he definitely deserved to keep it.<br />
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Pro Tip: If using a dk tank for Ultraxion, have them use <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=42650">Army of the Dead</a> before Thrall gives out the <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=106218">Last Defender of Azeroth</a> buff. For some reason it resets all cool downs. This might be because until the hot fix today, Army was being affected by the buff. But at least when I used it at the beginning with another dk (frost), I was able to use it again right after getting the buff from Thrall. My original Army was still up and so was his. So we ended up with 3 armies up. It was pretty funny to see.<br />
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Warmaster Blackhorn is the fight I have been fearing this tier. Riggnaros was in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9Vh-Ot95o">video</a> I linked a few entries back where he was destroyed on the ptr by this boss. I wonder if he had more than 2 stacks of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=108042">Devastate</a> on him at the time since it reduces armor by 20% per application. Either way, add control was proving to be an issue for us. We started work on Blackhorn late so we didn't expect to get him down. We should get him Monday night when we next head in.<br />
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Looks like I'll have to read more in-depth on the Spine of Deathwing encounter then. One thing I will say about these fights, they're fun, at least for me. I'm mainly happy to know that dk survivability isn't in a bad place right now. We'll see how that holds up once we get into heroics. For fights like Morchok, Yor'sahj and Ultraxion, it was fairly easy for me to max out my Blood Shield before taunting the boss off the other tank. I gotta say, sitting there at max health with a 200k physical absorption shield really gets me pumped. The addition of 2 more charges to Bone Shield seems to be working pretty well. AoE fights still give me trouble keeping it up as it seems Blizzard still hasn't addressed that yet. I'm sorry, but 200 fire damage from an AoE should not eat a charge from Bone Shield. That's crazy considering I'm going to get hit with like 10 of those in succession in most fights with raid wide AoE. My only hope is to get Bone Shield up close to a minute before the AoE starts so I can put it back up once the AoE is done.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-269487172328087222011-11-15T12:13:00.000-05:002011-11-15T12:48:15.450-05:00A change of scenaryJust so everyone is clear, I have left my guild, Electric Mayhem. It was not an easy decision to make. My raiding experience there has been awesome and the people are fun to play with. But Shanthi, Naishee and Vorlen have moved to a new guild to be with a friend they have known for 10+ years that recently transferred to our server. Since the 3 of them are some of my closest friends, I had to make the decision to leave.<br />
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I tried to get in contact directly with Averry since he's GM and my raid leader. But unfortunately the long hours at work have been taking their toll on me and I've been in bed by 10-11pm recently. Kashina came out and asked me if I was leaving. As I'm not the type to lie, I of course told her that I was. She was obviously upset about it. I've known her for roughly a year and a half, both of us raiding in HSM back in WotLK. Unfortunately nothing I said made her feel any better about the decision. She felt overall rejected. I kept trying to be clear that this wasn't an easy decision to make and that it wasn't that I didn't like raiding with EM, but it just wasn't making her feel any better. I am truly sorry that I have upset her and anyone else in EM for that matter.<br />
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Now, what I've come here to talk about is how Blizzard is struggling to balance the 4 tank specs. If you've read any of my previous entries, you know that I feel death knight tanks are awesome but extremely spikey and that, in 4.3 combined with boss damage scaling to further challenge block capping tanks, will possibly make bringing a dk tank to a raid a liability.<br />
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As it stands right now, in order of least damage taken, it's Paladin - Warrior - Druid - Death Knight. As I have said in that past, even with a dk's ability to self heal, surviving the damage upfront is the actual issue. If you die before using Death Strike, what's the point of your self healing and Blood Shields? This order will change in 4.3 with Warriors being able to reach full CTC. Mastery will continue to be a valuable stat for Warriors even after reaching full CTC due to Critical Block, which gives them a chance to block double damage. While for Paladins, it will become useless after reaching full CTC.<br />
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At present on my dk, I'm sitting at 382 ilvl, 32,029 armor (55.13% damage reduction), 35.69% total avoidance and 173,603 health. Equally geared Warriors and Paladins have 8-10k more armor than I do, while Druids... don't get me started. Their armor makes mine look silly. In addition, warriors and paladins have slightly less avoidance (before block), usually around 4-5% less (<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53323">Rune of Swordshattering</a> for the win?), druids have more avoidance. Friend of mine has a 368 ilvl and already has 36% dodge.<br />
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Now some of this will change in 4.3 due to the heal from Death Strike no longer not happening if a dk misses or is dodged/parried. Dks will still have spikey damage, but will be guaranteed that clutch heal. The problem is, and really has always been, surviving the incoming damage so you can react to it accordingly. If you get no time to react, all your tools mean absolutely nothing. Taking 200k damage in a single global cool down will kill any tank. Not amount of quick reactions will save you there. Preshielding via Blood Shield or Power Word: Shield still won't be enough. Especially if that amount of damage is becoming more and more common. Eventually something will give. So what to do here?<br />
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I've been a huge advocate for making full CTC not so easily achievable. Not only will it balance incoming damage a bit, but bosses could then be retuned so they don't have to destroy someone who doesn't block every hit that isn't avoided. But Blizzard has clarified their stance on that...<br />
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<i>We decided not to prevent or discourage block capping for paladins and warriors, because it would have required several corresponding changes to compensate for such severe nerfs and the risk of getting things wrong or asking players to change gear was just too great. Instead, we decided to buff DK and druid tanks to improve their ability to handle streaks of bad luck. In the DK’s case, we increased the armor bonus of Blood Presence</i><br />
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Don't get me wrong, buffing dk armor will be great in that the spikes we take won't be quite as huge. But we're still going to be destroyed by any hard hitting boss. The buff will bring armor up to Warrior and Paladin levels. Here's the thing though, when will a warrior or paladin take an unmitigated hit? They won't, plain and simple. It will be dodged/parried or blocked. Period. As bosses have scaled to challenge them, damage has increased quite a bit so even a string of avoidance through block still requires a substantial amount of healing. Take block away and you have a ridiculous amount of damage, and likely, a flattened death knight.<br />
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At one point, it was proposed to have Bone Shield work in a way that it would only lose charges when the death knight takes a spike of damage. Obviously this would have to be percentage based to make it scale correctly with health and damage. I feel this change would have been the answer. Adding charges to it is meaningless if even the smallest hit can remove a charge.<br />
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The sad truth is that unless some changes are made, it may become impossible for me to seriously raid on my dk in 4.3. If I cannot survive a couple hits from bosses, I'm holding the group back. In which case, it might be time to dust off my warrior. He needs some gear love. Or, I could *gasp* go dps!Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-13928278670380257312011-11-01T16:55:00.000-04:002011-11-01T16:55:08.093-04:00Well, haven't updated this in a bit. Work has been a bit stressful. Stupid stealerships trying to throw me under the bus.<br />
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Anyways, so we downed Alysrazor on heroic last week. It was actually pretty awesome. People kept making little mistakes and, of course with heroics, it meant they died. After a couple wipes I gave a little speech about how we know this fight inside and out and we should have this down. And hey, we downed her on that pull. Looks like I should give motivational speeches more? I don't know. I'm just really happy we finally killed the bird.<br />
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So that now puts us to 4/7 heroic. We have our sights on Baleroc now, which is turning out to be very different for me since we usually two tank it on normal just to make sure one doesn't die to <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=99352">Decimation Blade</a>. Although we quickly found out that isn't necessary. So now I'll be going unholy for that fight since our other tank is mostly set up for pvp in his off spec. Yes, I said unholy. I will not conform to frost dps!<br />
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I feel out of my element as dps at times. No matter what, I'm always thinking about some way to help mitigate damage while playing. So in a couple of our attempts, I ran up to the other tank to drop <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=51052">Anti-Magic Zone</a> during <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=99350">Inferno Blade</a>. Usually I was the Inferno Blade tank and would eat a lot of the damage with Anti-Magic Shell. Since I know Warriors don't have much in the way of magic damage mitigation, I figured that would help.<br />
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Like it was when we were first learning the fight on normal, this just seems like dance steps that we need to learn and we should have it down easily. <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=99516">Countdown</a> is an interesting mechanic. Trying to find the right way to meet someone you're connected to while not spreading <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=99403">Tormented</a> is proving to be challenging. But I think we'll get that with time.<br />
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We put in a few attempts on heroic Beth'tilac this passed week as well since we didn't have enough ranged to deal with the crystals for Baleroc until later that night. But those didn't turn out too well. We'll save that for after we get Baleroc down.<br />
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In other news I've been on an achieve rush. Been farming reputation with most of the Outlands factions as well as grinding out Loremaster achieves. Very slow going, I have to say.<br />
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I'll have a more serious update likely later this week. Perhaps I'll talk about the interesting things I saw when finally watching the Blood Legion vs Vodka challenge at Blizzcon?Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-6301529973734122902011-10-25T12:58:00.000-04:002011-10-25T13:15:56.998-04:004.3 and the PTRThere'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, <a href="http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t125290-blood_dk_endgame_tanking_4_x/p2/#post1987217">that post</a> 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 <i>have</i> 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.<br />
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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."<br />
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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.<br />
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One thing I will say though is that the current PTR is definitely geared in a way that destroys dks. Riggnaros has a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9Vh-Ot95o">video</a> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49998">Death Strike</a> will always provide it's heal effect even if the hit did not land.</b> 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.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=50029">Veteran of the Third War</a> now also reduces the cooldown of <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=77575">Outbreak</a> by 30 sec.</b> 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 <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81334">Epidemic</a>, 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.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49501">Blade Barrier</a> has been revamped and is simpler - You take 2/4/6% less damage from all sources.</b> 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 <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81229">Runic Empowerment</a> can suddenly change things if it activated a blood rune, but I actually liked it.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49222">Bone Shield</a> now has 6 charges.</b> 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.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=48263">Blood Presence</a> armor bonus is going to 55% from 30%.</b> 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.<br />
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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 ;-)Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-47524889548370531392011-10-21T21:23:00.000-04:002011-10-21T21:40:59.282-04:00Alysrazor 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.<br />
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The hatchlings were a major problem back then. Tank dps wasn't high enough, survivability was seriously in question while a <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=99362">Tantrum</a> was going on. The main thing that was maddening to me was the tendency for the game to give either tank <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=99308">Gushing Wound</a> 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.<br />
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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 <a href="http://www.wowhead.com/spell=100744">Firestorm</a> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-54452217320651085012011-10-19T13:27:00.000-04:002011-10-19T13:31:35.105-04:00These 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?<br />
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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?<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8759443692497670103.post-58958585027760367442011-10-17T17:08:00.000-04:002011-10-17T17:16:34.497-04:00A brief intro, I supposeI'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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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?Schrikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14692092030848906588noreply@blogger.com3