… is that sometimes when you say ridiculous things in chat, they get screenshotted. And blogged. E-fame is, in fact, yours, Sloppies.

I love this job sometimes. :)

With thanks to @demeternoth and @stormcrack, and apologies to the Beatles, our take on going to Vashj’ir in a submarine.

On the realm where I was born
Lived a gnome who sailed to sea
And he told us of his raids
In the land of submarines

So we sailed on to Vashj’ir
‘til we found a naga queen
And we raided ‘neath the waves
In our yellow submarine

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

And our guild is all aboard
Many other guilds are just next door
And over Vent, we start to chat

(trumpets play over Vent chatter)

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

(Full speed ahead, Mr. Copperpot! Full speed ahead!)
(Full speed over here, sir!
… At least you nearly got my name right that time,
Captain Cloudkicker…)

As we swim in epic seas (epic seas),
Every one of us (every one) has all we need (has all we need!)
Replacing blues (lousy blues), and sharding greens (so many greens!)
In our yellow (yellow raiding!) submarine (submarine, haha!)

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

(fading)

We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all raid in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine

I feel this dog pretty accurately sums up my reaction to the preview. The shaman preview made me have to change my pants with joy; the warlock preview kinda sucked until I realized it was mostly outright or stealth buffs to my all-time favorite tree, demonology. I actually enjoyed reading the warrior changes more than this, and my warrior is level 24. The DK posts mostly left me going, “well, what the hell was that?”

And now, the blue post(s), with commentary. Follow along after the jump, ‘cos this is a big ol’ wall of text. As you may have guessed, there’s the occasional bit of foul language in this post.

So Tart was nice enough to shoot me a copy of the blue post featuring Ghostcrawler’s so called “Blood bomb” regarding DKs getting a legitimate tanking-only tree in Cataclysm. I wasn’t totally surprised - I’d already been hearing rumors to that effect for a while, and when I actually sat down and thought about how Mastery worked it was pretty much the best way to do it, but I kept denying that I thought they’d actually do it since it betrays the original design of the class - but I still went through a range of emotions, starting with anger (“Damn it, Blizzard, I like tanking in Frost”), bargaining (“maybe we can get some fun new toys out of it”), depression (“maybe I should just level my shaman”), and finally acceptance (signified by going to Acherus and paying the 45g to respec into blood. Shut up, I respec a lot).

I was up way too late last night chatting with our heal lead while knocking out explorer achievements and turning in Darkmoon Decks and he mentioned it as being “growing pains.” And I suppose, in a way, he’s right. We’ve gone from overpowered to horribly broken to doing okay to where we are now. It was a neat idea - having a class that can do either of its roles in any of its trees - but in the end, every tree ended up being best at something anyway, and now that I’ve been in all 3 for an extended period of time (even rocking two tank specs at once for a while), I have to finally ‘fess up that I agree with the decision because blood has been the most capable tree for quite some time now. And yes, I really did respec to blood.

However, I still have a wishlist of new toys. Game balance be damned, likeliness be damned, these are the things I would just like to see.

• Equivalents of Demoralizing Shout and HAMMERRRRR OF THE RIGHTEOUS. We already know the Demo Shout equivalent is on its way - that was part of the initial post - but as a tanking talent, Dancing Rune Weapon is really only good if you need a threat boost, which no one does anymore thanks to Icy Dickpunch. On the other hand, Blood’s AOE threat generation - at least for now - absolutely blows, unless you’re willing to sacrifice talent points and a glyph slot to increase damage and reduce cooldown on Death and Decay and/or talent into glyphed Corpse Explosion (which I will freely admit is fun, there’s just a lot of sacrifices I don’t like making in order to get it in blood). Suggestion for Blizzard: Bloodbolt Whirl. (Only, you know, not doing tens of thousands of damage.)

• I assume Rune Strike is going away thanks to the recent move away from on-next-swing abilities, but I could be wrong. I wouldn’t mind seeing it stay; one of the things I liked most about my warrior was punching that Revenge button when it lit up (and I hear you guys got a buff to it or something). Plus, well, Rune Strike is the one chance I have as a tank to see big ol’ crits. (You can take the DK out of the DPS, but you can’t take the DPS out of the DK.) Alternately, some kind of reflective damage on parry or dodge would be handy.

• While it’s great as an oh-shit button or on fights where you need a lot of healing pronto, Vampiric Blood is not the kind of thing you would blow on trash. In Frost, I gleefully use Unbreakable Armor on trash and everything else. Some kind of equivalent like that for tanking would be fun, whether for survivability or threat. I have absolutely no idea what it would be. Heck, maybe it’s just Unbreakable Armor.

• Some kind of party utility. I think we can assume that Abomination’s Might and Hysteria have about an equal chance at this point of staying in blood or going to unholy. I for one wouldn’t mind some kind of unique buff, just deep enough in the Blood tree that DPSers won’t regularly take it, that provides some kind of survival or threat benefit to our fellow raid members or to us. Think Blessing of Sanctuary or Vigilance, though obviously not those same effects. Maybe a blood link - Blood already does a lot of self-healing, so maybe the ability to pop a buff on the highest DPS in our raid and let their damage heal us, too. Nothing more than what Blood Presence provides naturally, but just enough to be something cool we can do.

• An actual, real, true, honest-to-God stun. I mean, we’re the only tanks without any stuns whatsoever at this point, assuming I’m counting my tank stuns correctly (Concussion Blow, Shockwave, Bash, Hammer of Justice, probably a few more - you get the idea). This doesn’t even have to be something new - I’d be perfectly happy making Mind Freeze a baseline or talented stun.

I guess we’ll have to see what they have in mind for us, but the more I think about the possibilities that a dedicated tanking tree offers, the happier I am. In the meantime, there’s some discussion taking place in the Pwnwear forums on the upcoming changes, and Blizzard will be offering a more fleshed-out preview soon, so it’s pretty much a “wait and see” (or “wait and gleefully anticipate”) situation.

Really no content here: just a “Putricide down, hooray!” post. I’d put up a screenshot if I had one, but I don’t. I think Nibuca probably does.

You could tell the moment where everything just sort of clicked - people were executing, everything seemed to flow, and I slipped into that little groove where I can let my attention wander to whatever else is going on in the room because I’m tanking on feel or instinct. I like that groove.

Luckily, the click was on attempt 2 or 3 last night, so after we worked on getting cleaner transitions from phase 2 to phase 3 - really the important part - he went down.

…. and then we went over to Blood Queen Lana’thel. Why’s her damn room got to be so far away from the teleporters? WTB elevator to the Sanctum of Blood, pst.

Professor Putricide is starting to be a fun fight for me. The first few times we were in there, even as late as last week, I felt kind of like I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. After looking at it longer, I was doing a lot of unnecessary kiting of Putricide on phase 1, and phase 3…. well, we haven’t gotten seriously into phase 3 yet, so we’ll let it slide for now.

However, on phase 2, I finally perfected a little dance that I do with the professor that seems to keep things in line. I’ll even throw in some MS Paint directions for you on how we do phases 1 and 2. This does operate on an assumption that may be fairly big: that you get the professor to phase 2 during or shortly after the first Gas Cloud (orange add) spawns. (At one point, we got him to phase 2 almost before it spawned…) If this is not the case - if the Volatile Ooze (green add) was the most recent spawn - then flip all the directions. None of this is perfect, but if your tanks are flailing their arms wildly during the Putricide fight, maybe this will help give them a place to start, then you can adjust it to fit your raid’s needs.

As always, click to embiggen.

Phase 0: Understand the Layout

The black square at the bottom is the entrance. The gray circle is the circle that is on the floor of Putricide’s room - it actually has four little spike-like “corners” near each of the ooze nozzles, and two more closer to the entrance of the room. The brown rectangle is Putricide’s table; when you enter the room, he’s just south of it. The orange circle and green circle represent the ooze nozzles.

Phase 1: The Pull, and the Easy Part

Putricide isn’t really dropping anything besides neon green ooze puddles on the floor that your off-tank, in the abomination, will be eating. If you can do so without dragging him too far away from the top part of the room (where he’ll be for most of phase 2), do so. Have your DPS control themselves, and between 83% and 85% (depending on how many dots people have up, how quickly people respond to directions, etc.) have DPS stop on Putricide, burn down any adds that are up, and let the abomination eat ooze puddles that are on the floor. There should be plenty of time to do these things if people are on the ball. During the pull, we have our off-tank charge in to the table, then I pull Putricide off of him, leading to an initial pull where he’s right here:

Then during or after the period where the DPS is burning down the green slime, I’ll typically either try to hold him by a slime pool, or move him to here, which is often roughly the same thing:

I usually hold him here for the rest of phase 1; an orange Gas Cloud will spawn, and your raid should burn it down before continuing into phase 2 - this starts at 80%. Let the abom mop up spare puddles, let the DPS burn down the Gas Cloud, then burn the professor into phase 2.

Phase 2: The Putricide Tango in Earnest

This is where the fun part starts. This is also where I used to run around like a kid high on Pixy Stix, leading to me running out of range for heals sometimes or leaving Choking Gas Clouds in weird spots for the DPS to maneuver around, which is just all kinds of nastiness. This works much better. Step 1 is to pull him near the orange slime container, as close to the alcove where the tables are as possible. Trust me, it makes sense.

Putricide will do these three abilities, and in my experience they always come in approximately the same order: Malleable Goo (very easy to avoid if your DPS is on the ball), then Unstable Experiment, then Choking Gas Flasks. Sometimes the last two get swapped, but they’re always very close together, and they’re your signal to move! Think of them as traffic cones telling you to get the hell out of the way. They are not, in any way, snow cones. Drag Putricide to the opposite side of his alcove, again, as near to the corner as you can manage.

During this time, a green slime will have spawned due to Unstable Experiment, and your DPS will have burned it down and will be back on the Professor. He’ll once again use Malleable Goo, Unstable Experiment, and Choking Gas Flasks, and the original set of gas flasks will have gone away. Once he tosses down the new one (and the orange slime is probably chasing someone), here’s what you do (I bet you’ll never see this coming):

Stunning, I know. However, essentially, you’ll be alternating between those last two dance steps for most of the fight. It’s not a very complex tango. Po sitioning adjustments will have to be made, of course, if Putricide drops a slime puddle right where you expect to be standing, but most of the time, it won’t be an issue. Enjoy your dance time with the Professor - tanking it is honestly a pretty effortless job, other than paying some attention to what’s going on - and watch his health very carefully.

Stop before 35% (I’d say 38% to 40% is safe, assuming you’re not bumping up against the enrage timer), eat all the slime pools, and burn down any adds that are up, then knock Professor Putricide down to 35%.

Phase 3: ???

I told you we haven’t finished this one yet. I have a pretty good idea of how to do it, though. Truthfully, we need to make that phase transition a little more masterfully - I wasn’t watching Professor Putricide’s health as closely as I should have, and so my warning for the phase transition as a Gas Cloud was spawning went something like this: “sh*t, he’s at 36%, stop and burn that–oh, well, never mind.” Then the orange cloud zoomed around at full speed and smacked us all in the face.

Phase 4: Profit!

Collect yer phat lewtz.

Apologies for the sudden unexpected silence. I’ve had bits and pieces of posts bouncing around in my head; none of them fully fleshed themselves out, so here they are glued together into some semblance of a post.

Patch 3.3.3 for DK tanks

And yes, no matter what Gravity tries to tell you, it’s 3.3.3, not 3.33. ;)

Blood tanks: our plan B is now plan-B-ier. It’s also even easier to understand: Damage that would take you below 34-35% health or taken while you are at 34-35% health is reduced by (4-5/9-10/14-15)%. Voila. Will of the Necropolis is now better, but still sort of a worst-case scenario. Frankly, I just want to know when it kicks in - does WotN put something in the combat logs? Does anyone know?

Frost tanks: If you’re specced into Improved Icy Talons, it (1) now double-dips to give you more melee haste and (2) should now be taken whether you have an enhancement shaman along or not for basically that reason… if you’re dual-wielding. DW got more boosts, in the form of more off-hand damage. (That also kind of makes me want to look into frost DPS again, but I’ve not been keeping up with the latest math wankery on whether frost DPS is competitive again. Plus I need new weapons.) Two-handed frost tanks… please stand by.

Unholy tanks: … sorry, I got nothin’.

Shamananananing

My shaman has been receiving a bulk of my attention lately. I like shamans! It took a while for the totem mechanic to grow on me, and I can still see a number of fights that my DK is doing now where totems would be more or less very awkward to use, but it doesn’t make me like it any less. I’ve been leveling elemental, and doing a few Outland dungeons as elemental so I can get used to it in groups. It’s a real culture shock, after being a death knight solely for so long - what do you mean, I have to not use up all my mana? Bloody hell, I’m an aggro machine! And so on.

I also got unexpectedly pressed into resto’ing (as elemental) in Underbog when our healer decided to plop his fat dwarven butt on the ground prior to the naga section and, y’know, not tell anyone, nearly causing a wipe. Once he got punted, I was asked to heal until we could find a healer, and so I swapped over to Earthliving, put my 3 heals on my bars, and along I went. I … liked that too! I sense 1000g is coming up in Kallech’s future to make him dual-spec ele/resto. Y’know, right after the combined 6000g for epic and cold-weather flying.

Money

Finally makin’ it. Thanks Jewelcrafting! And thanks primarily to Hydra and Rip for the advice. :) I won’t be hitting the gold cap anytime soon, but my total grows little by little and I’m no longer scraping the bottom of my empty change purse to try and pay for repairs or raid consumables, and that’s an improvement in my book.

WoW is like Pokemon

No, seriously. At a very high level, there’s a lot of unusual similarities, especially in playstyles.

First, you’ve got the people who play for the leveling, or for the story, or both. These people might do things that seem strange to some of us, but they like what they’re doing, and sometimes they’re 9 years old, and who can fault them for that?

Then you’ve got the people who get really, really srs bzns about it. These people crunch math, look at stats, find advantages, and in the end they boil the ‘acceptable’ standards down to certain combinations of stats and maneuvers in tiers. For WoW, these might be hardcore raiders or arena folks; in the world of Pokemon, these are competitive battlers. Hell, both games even have simulators that allow you to engage in full-on math wankery in an idealized version of the game environment.

Oh, and altoholics? Come on, that one’s easy: gotta catch level ‘em all.

Pokemon even has its own version of Elitist Jerks: it’s called Smogon.

No wonder I’m such a fan of both games.

Caffeine is still recruiting

Especially healers. Seriously. Join us. Joinnnnnn ussssss. Now 7/12 in ICC-10, after a decisive Orb-Whisperer-included victory over Team Edward The Blood Princes.

Hey you! Yes, you! Are you looking for a guild to call home? Caffeine, located on Khaz Modan (US, Alliance side) is recruiting healers and ranged DPS of all flavors. If you’re interested, you should go check out our site (linked conveniently above), and if you like what you see, pop onto Khaz Modan and talk to any of our guild master’s toons.

Here’s a few details about Caffeine.

• Caffeine is a 10s raiding guild, with an eye towards moving to multiple 10s teams, then 25s raids once our numbers are up and we can get people consistently signing up, showing up, et cetera. Current progression in ICC is 6/12 - Lower Spire, Festergut, and Rotface are on farm, with current good progression attempts at the Blood Princes and Putricide.

• Caffeine uses Ventrilo - a lot. We’re often on Vent while running dailies, pugging heroics, and of course while raiding. Get a good mic and use it. Being on Vent is a fun way to socialize, plus it can prevent a lot of the nonsense and misunderstanding that simple emotionless text in guild or raid chat might cause.

• Caffeine uses EPGP for loot - if you’re not familiar with it, you may want to familiarize yourself. (Full disclosure; if a healer or ranged DPS that I recruit stays for the full 30 days and moves from Recruit to Raider status (or Safety Hazard), I get a big ol’ EP bonus. You win, I win, everyone wins.)

• We’d like to see people who are there to help the group succeed consistently, not just there to farm up some purple pixels. Don’t be a dick.

• The raiding hours on our website don’t seem to be quite accurate; on all the nights I’ve been there, we’ve raided from 10:30 PM-1:30 AM EST (9:30 PM-12:30 AM server time, 7:30 PM - 10:30 PM PST), on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Wednesdays are designated as a day off (it’s Hump Day - go use it for what it was made for), weekends may have something pop up but don’t count on it.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of things. If you have any questions, hit me up here or on Twitter, or our guild leader - also available on her blog, Mystic Chicanery, or her own Twitter account.

Big Red Heimdall sez, “UPDATE YOUR DAMN BLOG!” And so, a screenshot post. I’ve got a couple months worth, this could be fun. As always, click to embiggen, or hover to read snarky alt text..

First up, one of my favorite sights in WoW: a dead Rotface. As of last night, Caffeine has officially put him on farm status. :)

Before leaving Kael’thas, I did finally (finally) get my last book for Higher Learning. I’ve since ran into at least four people doing some, uh, adult RPing in the Archmage’s room.

I also went and sat on the throne in Blackrock Depths. Think that’s enough to declare myself king?

This is how I get psyched to fight Deathbringer Saurfang.

Noticed while leveling my baby warrior: is it just me, or does that tower in the distance kinda look like…? Naaaah, couldn’t be.

Truthfully I don’t know why I took this one. I think it’s because it was raining in Stratholme? Either way. It might make a good blog header, if I cropped it a bit…

Or perhaps I should edit it to showcase King Ymiron’s taste in art.

Just do your best to pretend that’s actually a picture of Rotface being downed by my guild on our last attempt of the night and not a picture of Rotface rotated 90 degrees, would you kindly? We forgot to take a screenshot, and besides, my toon was piss-drunk off of an entire Brewfest Pony Keg, because I was thoroughly sick and tired of staring at Rotface and his chin-dick and his angry poo-poos and “Good news everyone! The slime is flowing again!”

And now we get to do it all over again this week. It’s cool, though, we’ve totally got him on farm now. Totally. /cough

A couple tips to my death knight brethren (and a few for anyone) who might, in the course of tanking, end up kiting slimes on Rotface. Especially new tanks, like yours truly. These are all from personal experience, so I’m sure others will have other things to add.

• This is one of the places in Icecrown where Unholy truly shines. Bone Shield will give you a 20% damage reduction while it’s up, meaning you can usually run through the slime pipes (though not the slime from the oozes!) with relative impunity, Magic Suppression (if you’re talented into it) will lessen the damage you take from most things in the fight (though not the Big Ooze’s melee abilities… that thing hurts like a bitch), and Anti-Magic Zone (if you’re talented into that) has a couple uses that maybe aren’t so obvious:

  • Making it really obvious where you are. This is a no-brainer, especially if you have someone who gets caught up in the moment and runs totally the wrong way. “Head for the big pink bubble!” works a lot better than “Come to me!” when there’s slime flying everywhere.

  • Protecting raiders during the merge. If you manage to get a merge where you can actually stand still - doable if someone merges their slime into the exploding slime, meaning you’ve only got 1 or 2 immediately afterwards - sometimes it can take people a second or two to get started. If the bubble’s popped on top of them while you’re trying to get the Big Ooze’s attention, you might save them a tick or two of radiation.

• Death and Decay is really, really effective for getting threat on Big Oozes - they’re not the fastest creatures in the world, and will soak up several ticks on the run. It’s even more useful later in the fight, when there will almost inevitably be two Big Oozes up at once (especially late in the fight, when he starts pooping oozes out like mad). If you have the tanking 2T10 bonus, this is probably the one place it’s actually useful. (I kid. It’s never useful. It’s downright awful. It’s Glyph of Death and Decay.)

• If for some reason you haven’t already, turn on nameplates. And get really, really good at targeting correctly and taunting on the run - if you need to get an ooze out of the center, the last thing you need is to miss and accidentally have Rotface running at you. (This is really a good tip for all tanks, I guess.)

• Chains of Ice works on the little slimes. Useful to pin them in place before dragging your Big Ooze over them.

And probably the biggest Rotface tip I can give, to anyone of any class on any difficulty:

• Stay calm. I can’t stress this enough. The more that your nerves or anyone else’s get jangled, the more likely someone is to make a boneheaded mistake and cause a wipe. Rotface is, above all else, about flawless execution (or as close to it as you can get). If there are multiple wipes and you can tell things are getting tense, give people a short de-stressing break. If your raid needs to constantly be doing something, and if you haven’t done it yet, we found killing Sister Svalna to be a useful way to get away from Rotface for a little while.