Yeah, I’m going to pick on warriors. I’ve been running instances from the teens up through the high 20s on Rhododendron and Brynhild, and while occasionally you’ll get something like Softi’s hunter with a growling, aggressive pet, or someone DPSing in Ragefire Chasm in bearform (because they don’t have cat yet, and evidently missed that part of the pesky tooltip for Maul (Rank 1) that says it causes high amounts of threat), the biggest issue I’ve had has been with warriors. Absolutely. Idiotic. Warriors.

Our latest shining winner, Darca of Drak’thul, ended up in a Stockades run with us after one of our DPS unexpectedly had to go, shortly before fighting Bazil. No, not Basil, Bazil. (Side note: Stocks sucks as Horde. The only thing I get out of it? Lots of wool.) Shoulda known something was up when as soon as she zoned in, she ran directly to the first mob in front of her, hit it with her sword, and Thunderstomped. Pardon me… what? Feral Faerie Fire, Growl, quit stealin’ mah mobs.

So we got to the three-way room before Bazil, and I couldn’t remember if it was him or Dextren Ward that has the fear (spoiler: it’s Dextren), so we went to clear the side rooms. I had no more than turned my fat furry bear ass to face the room before Darca … once again pulled. The entire room. My only response was "you know you’re not the tank, right?" No response. Once again, I grabbed threat back, we beat up all the inmates, we beat up Bazil Thredd, and we got our goodie bag. Our mage goes, "Requeue?" To which I have no objections; I figure if Darca keeps misbehaving, we can always boot her.

Unrelated: I wonder if the Alliance are ever confused about why their prison riot started? One minute they’re having a prison riot, next thing you know, a bunch of Horde warriors teleport in, smack down all the prisoners, and teleport out.

Also unrelated: I have to give credit to the Defias Convicts, for having the balls to backhand a bear.

We requeue, and huzzah, Stockades! Because the RNG has a horrible sense of humor. Darca immediately pulls; we finish and I say politely, "Darca, please let me pull."

Darca promptly runs into the room to our left, aggros everything in the room, and dies.

Then spirit rezzes outside.

And hearths to Tarren Mill.

So we four-man the rest of Stocks, with me periodically checking if we can boot Darca (I could’ve sworn they got rid of the minimum time to kick; if it was in the patch notes, it’s a lie), and manage to finish before the cooldown because this time we just went straight to Bazil Thredd. Beat him down, requeued, and… Darca picks no role.

Requeue. Darca picks no role. Requeue. Darca picks no role.

Vote to Kick Darca? You can’t kick people after the instance is over. What kind of idiocy is that?

So you might be asking, "what’s so unique about this story?" Nothing. If I had 50g for every arms or fury warrior wielding sword-and-board and trying to tank an instance when they queued as DPS, I’d have two damned mammoths. Does anyone have any idea why this happens? What is it about this particular class that seems to be attracting all the derp derp derp members of WoW society?

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

What is it with warriors?

Phase 1: Got this down to a science by the end of the night.

Transition Phase 1: Also went well. Watching people get flung off by Ice Spheres during one of our wipes cracked me up, though.

Phase 2: Well, we’ve got the next few weeks to work on this. Our raid lockout is being extended until the Lich King is dead. Don’t expect much interesting out of me in the meantime.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Defile is the opposite of love

Raiding

Progress in ICC continues apace; we steadily progress every week in 10-man, making it to either Valithria, Sindragosa, or the Lich King himself on night 1. Caffeine can easily field two 10-man teams during the week (truthfully, I bet we could do 3, but 2 is working for now), with my tank being able to attend one. My rogue has now poked his nose into ICC as well, showing up in an alt and "leftovers" run on Sunday night. Assassination is still fun – I have a weird love for daggers – but I think I need to keep toying with my spec some more. And the spreadsheets! Oh, how I love the spreadsheets. My raid leader pointed me at these when I was griping about my low DPS.

Anyway, ICC. ICC-10 is almost through the Lich King (it’ll only be a week or two more til one of our teams gets him down, I figure), ICC-25 is working on stuff as well, though sadly I can’t attend the 25-man raids most weeks due to the raids being on Friday and Saturday, which are designated for spending time with my girlfriend when she’s not busy studying for the Praxis II. I’m signed up for this weekend’s, though, so maybe I’ll get Festergut’s blood and finish off Shadow’s Edge. That’s right – after four weeks of buying absolutely nothing but the necessities, I have 25 Primordial Saronites. Well, four weeks of nothing but necessities, plus I bought several with Frost emblems, plus Thalois was nice enough to just give me one (thanks Thal!).

Honestly, there’s not a lot more to say. I have been noticing an influx of new DK tanks, though, and I’m going to recommend you go to Pwnwear and check out the contest and forums – especially the forums! – there. It’ll set you on the right track to redeeming our class-wide reputation again.

Guild

Still enjoying my tenure in Caffeine. I was asked to become an officer a week or so ago, and so I did. Huzzah! Looking forward to helping the guild move forward through Wrath and beyond.   Also hoping our next tabard design has a muffin on it. If I win, you’ve all been warned.

Non-WoW

Yeah, that’s right, I do non-WoW stuff. Sometimes I even blog about it. Sometimes I blog about it on other blogs. Surprise!

• I’ve been playing a few games here and there, including 3D Dot Game Heroes and Super Street Fighter IV. I’ve come to the conclusion I really need to invest in a good fightstick for SSFIV.
• I actually have two other blogs, sort of. If you need your daily fix of my non-WoW stuff, check out Midboss (which could be nearly anything) and iDevice (which is about my iPad, which is on the truck for delivery as I write this. Glee!). Oh, and I write – sometimes – for Polygamerous, which you should really check out. Mostly the Morning Quickies segment. I’m not on the podcast, though, but that’s probably for the best because I don’t talk much when I’m on podcasts unless I’m one-on-one, as anyone who heard me on the Twisted Nether roundtables can attest.
• I’m also shopping for a couch. It doesn’t get more exciting than that, loyal readers.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Small pieces (of posts), loosely joined (into one post)

Things have been rather sparse or, at best, fluffy around here lately. Why? Nib said it better than me. I just plain don’t have a thing to talk about because I haven’t done anything new in weeks. Breezing through the first six bosses or smashing against Putricide and, well, supposedly the Princes are on farm, but our luck hates them – we’ve gotten bitten two weeks in a row with the known bug where they summon important parts of the fight in the hallway instead of in their room; last week, it was Dark Nuclei, and I got by because I learned when to look for them, but now Valanar’s started summoning beach balls in the hallway. Add some attendance concerns on top of all that and it’s just become a weekly grind of breeze -> facesmash -> repair -> breeze -> facesmash -> repair. Tried to do Ulduar hardmodes on a raid night and 6 people signed up; did ToGC-10 for a little while, at least, and ran into the wall that is Faction Champs. I pretty much only log onto my DK for the facesmash repetitions; I need frost badges badly – 180+ of them – but I can’t even bring myself to do the dailies anymore.

In short, I’m halfway between frustrated and bored. Maybe I just need a week off or something.

A few days ago, Dechion mentioned the idea of "throwing everything up and keeping what sticks." (I bet now the pic of some sticky hand things makes sense.) Twice now, I’ve basically gone through an entire expansion with a single alt – granted, in TBC, it was an abbreviated amount of time, as I joined just before 2.3.2. After TBC, I immediately switched my main to a DK with no hesitation; my warlock languishes at 73, where – let’s be honest – she probably isn’t going to move up from anytime soon. I’m starting to think I might change again, because my DK is starting to lose his stickiness.

So who’s sticky?

• My warlock? When the class changes came out and I realized how much they were going to buff my favorite spec, I went demo on her again, only to find that, well, the urge to stick to her wasn’t there. I throw the pet at the mobs, I throw the magic, and the magic is gone. Leveling her would be hell for leather. Has completely lost her sticky, much like an old toy.
• My death knight? WotLK was a rollercoaster of a time to be a death knight. Overpowered, underpowered, middle of the road, one-and-only flavor-of-the-month specs, other specs utterly nerfed into oblivion for entire patch levels. It’s a little mentally exhausting. Plus I switched roles and I did it fairly thoroughly. Hell, I barely remember how to DPS anymore. Is my DK losing his sticky? Maybe.
• My rogue? You’ve never met a bigger failrogue than me. I really need to just use this guy to farm junkboxes for my DK’s insanity. Not sticky.
• My warrior? I don’t level this toon much, but when I do, it’s always a fun time. As a DK tank I’m a little envious of all the fun buttons warriors have to push (Vampiric Blood just isn’t all that appealing when I could be Thunder-Clapping or Shockwaving or Last-Standing or Shield-Walling or Devastating or, or, or…). The announcement of an alternative to Titan’s Grip is also nice – I admit I’m a fan of single-handed weapons, but they’d need a serious boost to keep up with the stat boosts alone from TG right now. However, with my warrior, it’s just finding the urge to level her. In short, she’s sticky, but not enough yet.
• My hunter? I want to get into my hunter, I really do. I have many hunter blogs in my RSS reader. I just can’t summon up the mojo to level her past 45. Unsticky.
• My shaman? I was leveling my shaman pretty consistently for a while; come hell or high water, I was determined to get him out of Outlands. And out I got him, and now he’s parked at 68 in Valiance Keep, where I keep telling myself I’m going to take that resto spec and go heal some instances. I really do keep telling myself that. Inconsistent stickiness.
• My priest? My priest has been my little side project for a while now. I really only mention her at any length to Tart, who is my pocket advice priest. ("Oh, God, where do I put these talent points?!") And as you can probably surmise from her Discipline spec, I’ve been leveling her almost solely through instances. It’s not entirely instances, of course – whenever she reaches a new level, I gather every newly-available dungeon quest available for the dungeons in my queue list, and usually can gain a level or two from those – but she’s only level 20 (on the verge of dinging 21). She’s got a long way to go to even be considered a main, even moreso than my warrior. But the important part is that she’s fun. It may be just because of the complete change in role – Brynhild is only for healing, at least for now – but I like that healing rush, the feeling of keeping a group alive against odds that they probably shouldn’t have lived through (like three underleveled DPS and me taking on VanCleef because we’d waited 20 minutes for no tank). But right now, Brynhild is very sticky. Those twirly red braids may as well be made of glue.
• An alt I don’t have yet? At this point, if I don’t have an alt of some class, I’m probably waiting on Cataclysm. I fully intend to level a worgen druid or mage, which is the main reason I don’t have either of those. As for paladins, well. I’d love to have a paladin, and if I could get one past level 15 without getting utterly sick and tired of him, I probably would by now. Maybe once 4.0 hits and new baby paladins have a button to push, I’ll look into it, but right now, paladins bore me senseless to try and level.

The dilemma is: if I focus entirely on one alt, I risk burnout on that alt (see also: DK, warlock, shaman), but if I don’t focus on that alt, I’m an incredibly slow leveler. At least in my opinion. I know plenty of people whose progress feels like they’re speed demons, and I figure I’m the slow one. Or is this all pointless wankery – do I just stick with my DK? I mean, he is my only 80, my primary source of cash and heirlooms, and my only actively raiding toon. And no one can deny that we need all the tanks we can get – but I’m looking to maximize my fun here, as well as provide something useful to my guild.

It’s a set of questions that I don’t have any easy answers to. If anyone else is going through the same thing, I’d appreciate any insights you have.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Keeping what sticks

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.

New Death Knight Abilities
Outbreak (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.

It was cleared up in a Q&A (which is reprinted below) that Outbreak is one of those new "free" actions that we’re going to be applying now that we’re not pressing a button every single second of the day. Assuming there’s some way to lower the cooldown on this (and, well, let’s face it, a minute isn’t that long, it’s still every few rotations), Glyph of Disease just got obsoleted. I, for one, would welcome the ability to get the GoD’s effect without giving up a more useful glyph for what is essentially a "quality of life" glyph, but this seems sort of… well, underwhelming.

Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike — the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.

This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.

A PvP ability? Bestill my beating heart. (Actually I figure this’ll be something more like Mortal Strike for Arms warriors – its primary utility is in PvP, but PvE still hits it because it’s a button that does damage.) Still, this is unimpressive, in my opinion. I’m sure some hardcore PvPers will disagree with me.

Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent’s next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can’t reflect an ability, you won’t be able to copy it either.

Okay, that’s kinda cool. Assuming it does what it says on the tin, it’s a nice little addition to our arsenal, even if it is just a copy of Spell Reflection wherein we get hit (and wherein we put a debuff on the enemy instead of a buff on ourselves). My one issue with it is that it’s only going to work in melee range, but that’s really a minor gripe.

Rune System Changes
While we’re satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we’re making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here’s the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.

* In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they’re unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.

Rogue comparisons are something they seem really keen on making. I’m a little displeased; if I wanted something that played like a rogue but wasn’t a rogue, I’d finally give in and roll a druid.

* A death knight’s runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn’t have any free global cooldowns to use them. We can’t grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it’s impossible to save resources for when they’re most useful.

* Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight’s attacks are weak. The death knight’s rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player’s timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren’t able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.

These two points are simply matter of fact. Anything that requires split-second non-stop button pressing is of course affected by latency; getting a rotation even slightly off can result in a ridiculous loss of DPS. This is the main reason why simulator and dummy DPS is often leagues higher for us. Oddly, though, I’ve never really felt like I wasn’t making much impact with my individual attacks, except when I’m doing something like PvPing in all tank gear.

* The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra "storage"), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.

Oh good, a use for haste besides speeding up white swings. This seems usable, at least. Off the top of my head this seems like it will slow down most rotations, especially on the second pass. Initial rotations will probably be unchanged but once our diseases are up and ticking, and we dump some RP, it looks like we’re going to be waiting a bit longer between each strike, which is probably where new free abilities like Outbreak will come in. I’m very wary about this – yes, our current DPS rotations are so tight that if we needed to add something new we’d have to use Unholy Presence, but fundamentally changing the way the system works?

* As this is a major change to the death knight’s mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class’s current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.

Meaningful is probably just developer slang for "hits a little harder." Try and make a Blood Strike meaningful for anyone but deep Unholy.

Going to divert from the notes here to insert Ghostcrawler’s answer to rune system questions. I feel it clears up a few things.

I’ll take a stab at explaining the rune mechanic. Once you see it in action, it’s pretty easy to understand.

Just focus on Blood Runes for the moment. The big change is that rune #2 will never start filling up until rune #1 is full. They always fill 1 then 2. Today 1 and 2 can both fill at the same time.

In Cataclysm, when you’re killing things, you use rune 1. Then any extra "red" in rune 2 will fill rune 1 back up again. If both of them are full, you can use 2 Blood Runes immediately. But after that, rune 1 will fill up first and then rune 2. If it helps, imagine rune 2 is the extra tank.

I’m still not sure he’s phrasing this right – I suspect it’s a flawed analogy – and if he is, then what the hell? This sounds like if I use one rune, the second rune will start "draining" into the first one. That can’t be right, because then rune 2 has to fill up, and I’ve essentially blown two runes by using one.

This sounds like it will slow down DK attacks, and it will to a point. That’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish. We can then fill those extra GCDs with things like free abilities or runic power abilities or we have room to add talents that make runes fill faster. Remember, slow attacks can hit harder though. Instead of DKs hitting fast like a rogue, they’ll hit slower and harder, like a warrior, which fits a lot of player’s image of a DK anyway. Dual wield will hit faster of course.

However, I’d rather not be standing around doing fuck-all while auto-attacking. Frankly, there’d better be a lot of these free or runic power abilities that are interesting enough to punch in combat, because this sounds like an enormous slowdown.

I’ll try another comparison. Imagine that all rogue abilities cost 100 energy. They have to wait until they get 100 energy, and then immediately use an attack so that they aren’t wasting future energy. That’s how DKs play now, except they have 6 runes to watch. Now imagine the same rogue except all his abilities cost 50 energy. If he hits an attack when he has 60 energy, then 50 is consumed but he has 10 energy still left and a head start on the next attack. That’s the way we want DKs to play.

If that still doesn’t make sense, then focus on what the experience will be, which is that you’ll have more breathing room in your rotation and won’t have to hit a button every single GCD. If you don’t use a strike the second it’s available, that’s more okay because the extra tank will store extra rune resources rather than just wasting it. You’ll still be hitting a lot of buttons though. We’re keeping double rune strikes and Death Runes and disease multipliers and all of that. We’ll have to make some changes in some abilities to accommodate the resource change, but it won’t be unrecognizable to you.

This is the part that actually makes sense, because his analogy of an "extra tank" is kind of flawed. Let me try another one: we’re like rogues, except with three energy bars instead of one, and each one’s broken in two halves. If I use a Blood Strike, I now have tank 1 at 0% and tank 2 at 100%. Now tank 1 starts filling up: 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%… but if I hit Blood Strike again, tank 1 is still filling up 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, but tank 2 is now empty, and tank 2 just sits there until tank 1 hits 100%. Then tank 2 fills up. Like I said: for initial rotations, this isn’t going to matter, but we’re going to find ourselves with breathing room in the second half of our rotation.

If there’s enough Fun New Buttons™ to punch, Frost may actually have to start running in Unholy Presence again – as you’ll see below, being primarily in Frost gives you melee haste, and assuming there’s no difference between haste and melee haste, their runes are going to fill up faster than everyone else’s and they’ll probably want to look into UP if they need to punch more keys. That reminds me of the old glory days of Frost, when it just had so many buttons to push that the GCD was an enormous constraint.

We’re not sure DKs even need Rune Strike any longer. If it survives, we’ll turn it into an instant swing. But if we turn it into an instant swing, then it really isn’t that different from existing strikes so it’s possible we can just make a tanking rotation without it.

Then just make it work like Revenge, or get rid of it. /shrug.  It’ll make all my macros shorter, at least. And frankly with Vengeance (see below) making everything hit harder basically all the time, I don’t think Rune Strike – primarily a single target threat buff – is necessary anymore for us.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled preview notes, already in progress.

Talent Changes
Next we’ll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we’re planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we’re intending each death knight spec to perform.

One of the biggest changes we’re making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it’s less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn’t as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We’d rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the "correct" tree out of three possibilities.

Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood’s niche was self-healing — fitting for a tank — as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.

Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.

Well, thanks for not telling us a damned new thing. This is the content of the "Blood bomb" a few days ago, only summarized. The only solid change mentioned was that Bone Shield will jump over from Unholy. I’m okay with that. I still have a huge concern, though, and that is Blood’s AOE threat. Blood AOE threat, unless you talent specifically for it and thus gimp yourself somewhere else like single-target threat or survivability or utility, is in the shitter. There’s only so many Icy Dickpunches I can throw around.

Additionally, I’m not sure how dual-specialization makes having a single tanking tree necessary. In fact, if anything, I’d say it was the only thing that made multiple tank setups worked – back when I was still actively tanking 5-mans, I had to carry two tank specs – one to throw around massive AOE for you half-retarded douchebags in random heroics who attach your AOE attack of choice to every key on the keyboard and slam your face into it, and the other for when I’m tanking raids with actual skilled WoW players. The anti-douchebag spec did, at least, have the wiggle room to let me take Anti-Magic Zone. I love that big pink fucking bubble.

Whoops, off-topic. Moving on.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
Blood
Damage reduction
Vengeance
Healing Absorption

Frost
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Runic Power Generation

Unholy
Melee damage
Melee and spell critical damage
Disease Damage

Nothing too surprising, really.

Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you’ll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.

I haz a bubble! Seriously, though, that’s kind of cool, and moves Death Strikes up in our priority, unless they’re planning to make more than one move self-heal in Blood. Well, and Rune Tap. They could change it, but right now, Bloodworm and Mark of Blood heals aren’t considered self-heals (Bloodworm heals come from the worms themselves, while Mark of Blood heals – according to my combat logs, anyway – come from whoever you put the Mark on.)

Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.

Another statement they keep throwing around without justifying it. Does this mean Frost is going to get something to do with all that RP besides spam Frost Strike?

Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree’s play style.

Unholy DKs: now even more like warlocks in plate.

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

You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won’t see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking.

Vengeance is probably the one change I actually got excited about, but I read it in the warrior changes, so it really kind of wore off by the time I got to the DK changes. I did some napkin math on this, and assuming "unbuffed health" means "unbuffed health with all our armor on," let’s take Icecrown as an example – most bosses hit for somewhere in the 16k range, so I’d be gaining 800 AP (roughly) per hit, up to a max of around 3100. That’s pretty impressive. Shouldn’t have a problem holding onto a single target pretty much ever, and this will make doing dailies or questing in tank spec a lot more fun.

Again, though, the majority of what this amps up is single target threat. Still no answers as to how we’re going to handle AOE threat. Maybe we’ll finally get a damage shield, since we’re the only tanks without one unless some druid is kind enough to give us thorns.

Bonus round! DJ Zarhym on the ones and twos:

Here are a few points of clarification:

We want to provide a 2-handed style for Frost since we recognize that pets are an acquired taste. We think we have the design space to do that now that we don’t need to support Frost tanking. We’re definitely committed to making Frost work as a dual-wield tree though — that isn’t going away.

Welcome back, 2H Frost, my old friend. We missed you. Also, it’s not in our Q&A, but it was confirmed somewhere else that there will be Strength-based one-handed DPS weapons available again, for dual-wielding Frost death knights and Fury warriors using the new Single-Minded Fury talent. Huzzah!

Outbreak is free with a 1-minute cooldown. It’s not supposed to completely replace Plague Strike and Icy Touch.

I mentioned this above.

We’re not sure how we’re going to handle presences yet. We recognize the oddness of Blood death knights playing in Frost Presence and Frost death knights not playing in Frost Presences. We might rename the presences or take some other action.

Cosmetic, but it does seem backasswards that Frost DPS uses Blood Presence and Blood tanking uses Frost Presence. I worry about what "take some other action" might mean.

And now back to Mr. Greg "TO THE GROUND" "Ghostcrawler" Street.

Quote:
GC, does this mean that important cooldowns won’t require runes? Instead we’ll see things like Strangulate, Bone Shield, Ghoul Frenzy, UA and stuff cost runic power or just be free? They would be incredibly frustrating to use with such long rune cooldowns.

I don’t think we can make them all cost runes. That would be too hard to manage. If I had to guess, some will be runic power and some will just be free. If we did move Bone Shield to Blood, then that one might be okay as a rune since it’s something you do pre-emptively, but we have some more talent tree work to do first before we can really answer that.

This is the one scenario where I’d fully support the removal of Rune Strike – moving survival tools onto RP.

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Death Knight Cataclysm preview, much like everyone else

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.

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Witty blood pun here

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. Positioning 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.

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The Putricide tango; or, anecdotal advice on positioning the Professor

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.

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Bits and pieces

Though my current account says December ’07, I actually started playing WoW in the fall of ’05. Specifically, sometime around Patch 1.8.0 or its successors – I know it was just prior to the opening of the gates. I had graduated from college, and got in touch with a friend of mine who’d moved out west to pursue a graduate degree at the Colorado School of Mines. We were chatting about various things we’d done together in college (memorable D&D games, etc.) and she told me that she’d recently started playing World of Warcraft at the urging of her new boyfriend and really loved it, and that I should totally check it out. I don’t remember my excuse for putting it off, but I had one, and I managed to stick to it until one day in Best Buy, when I walked by and saw that World of Warcraft really wasn’t all that expensive. Huh, I thought. Maybe this’ll give me something to do. (I was in kind of a console game – and MMO – slump at the time, having burnt out on Final Fantasy XI.) So I picked it up, took it home, installed it on my creaky little Mac Mini G4, and dived headfirst into World of Warcraft.

I don’t remember my first character’s name or the ones immediately following him, and I kind of regret that, but from day 1, I played Horde. My very first character was an undead rogue on Feathermoon, and I didn’t let my friend know about him – just yet. After all, I wasn’t sure I was gonna stick to this game or not. I remember falling in love with the areas around Deathknell and Brill, and how cool it was that I could jump (veterans of FFXI and Guild Wars may understand my amazement as well). I gleefully remember stealthing up to that little camp of Scarlets and stabbity-stabbing them to death, and I probably got my rogue to level 5 or 6 before deciding to try a second class.

My friend, Cassie, was a tauren druid. So I figured, why not? I rolled a tauren druid. Mulgore totally has a different flavor, and by now the variety had gotten me hooked. Cassie hooked me up with some leather gear and other generic piles of mats so I could level my own leatherworking, as well as some low-level greens, and I plowed through early quests in Mulgore and found my way into the Barrens. I remember using my newfound jumping skills (shut up) to get around to the guys above Wailing Caverns, before I had ever realized what an instance was (or that Wailing Caverns was an instance). I also remember that I had the pattern for a Deviate Scale Belt (I believe Cassie or her now-husband had blendered that instance for me so I could do some quests), and that I really, really wanted to make myself a Deviate Scale Belt – all by my lonesome. Self-sufficiency was the name of the game.

Have you spotted the problem yet? This was a long time before Patch 2.4, which would turn all the elites outside instance into non-elites… and no one had ever explained to me what that little gold circle meant. (I just thought it meant they had better loot.) So here I am, a little bitty druid around 15 or so, with what I’m sure was an absolutely moronic selection of gear (I didn’t know yet how utterly useless Spirit was), trying to solo elites – sometimes 2 and 3 at a time. However, I never gave up, at least until I did. I concluded that I sucked at this game, and wasn’t any good at it, and that’s the story of how a Deviate Scale Belt made me quit WoW.

At least until December 2007. I’d built a new rig earlier in the year – a fairly powerful one, to replace my stolen MacBook and underwhelming desktop – and had Gamestop gift cards, and that 19.99 Classic + TBC battlechest called my name…

How did you get started playing WoW? What kind of boneheaded mistakes did you make as a newbie? We were all there once, after all.

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We were all boneheads once

So that’s been making the rounds, so there you go. I love it, especially Illidan’s little cameo, and – oh God – is Archimonde humping the World Tree? What has been seen cannot be unseen.

After finishing up my Fool for Love requirements, I finally took the jump yesterday and made my second spec a tank spec. My primary spec for raiding, at least for the last two weeks, has been a variant of Gravity’s single-target raid blood spec – somewhat adjusted for AOE, by moving 3 out of Spell Deflection and into Morbidity, like so. I may just end up copying Gravity entirely, though; I just informed my raid that my AOE would suck, and they adjusted accordingly. Second tank was a bear, and the two of us took it up to the plague wing, so I’d call it at least a moderate success. Also through Sister Svalna and, for a change, took a poke at Valithria Dreamwalker. I can also DPS in this spec if I absolutely have to, like last night when we 7-manned (or 8-manned, my memory’s fuzzy) XT for the weekly (just under the wire).

My other spec is now a pretty stock 2H Frost with IIT build. This one is explicitly for five mans; it ends up with about 1000 less health than the blood build, and in my opinion feels moderately squishier, but in heroics that hardly matters – it’s just being able to build snap AOE threat, and that’s one thing this build excels at (barring, of course, stupid DPS – like the fury warrior I ran DTK with yesterday who insisted on, if I paused for a second to get HB or DnD, pulling himself with Heroic Throw > Charge > Whirlwind. I should’ve let him tank, by which I mean tank the floor, more often than I already did).

I guess that’s that, then. No real progress to speak of, a few new shinies on my equipment list but I still can’t get rid of those damned blue boots. It’s starting to get a little ridiculous. At this point I’d put just about anything in that spot. Wish me boot mojo!

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The World (of Warcraft) Is Just Awesome