Chilly Winds and Pilgrim's Flu

I've been a bit demoralized lately, for several reasons.

Five of the members of our "Saturday Evening Heroic ToC 10 Fun Raid" left the guild last week. Not only were they five of the guild's best players, but also five of my best friends in the game. I won't discuss their reasons for leaving in this blog, but both I and my wife, who enjoyed our 10-man raids immensely, were not surprised to see them leave.

The guild's 25-man raids are stagnant. The guild management and the raid leader decided to stop doing heroic Coliseum several weeks ago, and instead pursue hard modes in Ulduar. This decision has resulted in lots of QQ on our forums, fewer signups, and people leaving the guild. The morale of the remaining raiders are low.

The combination of no longer enjoying our 25-man raids, losing our fun 10-man raid group, and spending a week sick with the flu has made me spend my game time on things I might not have done otherwise.

I've been running Outland heroics with my wife to grind reputation with factions nobody really cares about anymore. I've been fishing. I've been doing cooking and fishing dailies I never bothered with before. I even bought Haris Pilton's fashionable bag for many gold coins (shopping is supposed to make you happy, right?).

So when a new in-game holiday shows up, I'm first in line to get those shiny achievements done. I have nothing better to do anyway, right?

But, to be honest, Pilgrim's Bounty is a pretty stupid holiday.

• The quests that kept sending you back and forth between Stormwind, Ironforge, and Darnassus wanted me to reroll a mage just to get the portals...
• Getting people to understand how to pass food around the tables is like teaching dogs to read and write.
• Killing 40 turkeys in a row in competition with 40 others? Everytime you reach over 30 turkeys you know there will be a gnome mage popping up, stealing your next turkey with an Ice Lance, and you will weep when you see your timer run out.
• Finding a rogue of each race to shoot with your Turkey Shooter? Good luck with that one...
• And how many times will you get ganked in Horde cities when you just want to sit down and enjoy their food and hospitality?

Well, at least it's Christmas soon...

Patch 3.3 Badge Tanking Gear

MMO Champion has listed the gear that we will be able to buy with the new badges, Emblems of Frost.

The tanking stuff looks really nice, and all plate pieces have bonus armor on them. I assume the extra armor is there to compensate for the reduced avoidance that we are facing in Icecrown due to the Icecrown version of Sunwell Radiance.

This is what we can look forward to:

Cataclysmic Chestguard - expertise and block value on the same piece of gear isn't very usual, but considering Blizzard showers tanking gear with hit rating again in 3.3, maybe that expertise will be needed. The armor, stamina, and strength on this chest piece makes my mouth water.

Gauntlets of the Kraken - straight-forward tanking gloves.

Verdigris Chain Belt - straight-forward tanking belt.

Sentinel's Winter Cloak - very nice cloak with bonus armor in addition to the usual tanking stats.

Corroded Skeleton Key - trinket with loads of stamina and a damage absorption use effect. But isn't absorbing 3200 damage quite low?

We don't know the prices of these items yet, but I will most likely pick up the cloak and the trinket first, since I have gear of item level 245 and 258 in the other slots.

There is a libram as well, but I won't waste badges on that one, since it's such a minor upgrade from the current badge libram.

Another Dead Bug

At least we are improving :)

I was away on a business trip all week, and felt a bit rusty when we started ToC10 this Saturday. But it ended well, and we could all add another achievement to the list...

Dead bug = sweet

Sweet kill.

Five minutes past raid end time, last attempt for the night called. We already knew there would be no follow-up raid this raid lock. And that's when we nail him.

We screwed up totally and wiped more than ten times on Faction Champions. Our mage was drunk, and our disc priest left because he didn't think the raid was "serious" enough.

The bug still died, and it was the guild's first heroic Anub kill.

It felt good.

Patch 3.3 nerf batch 1

The patch notes do not look good for paladins these days.

First, we had the changes to Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian:

• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

The tooltips for these two talents will be massive...
These changes have been called buffs or nerfs depending on who you talk to. For a raiding paladin, they are downright nerfs. The old version of the talents had much better damage absorption, but did require the paladin to bubble to not kill himself. The new version makes Divine Sacrifice without Divine Guardian (which is the most likely case for retribution paladins) a lot less useful.

What's the deal here? We have a damage absorption talent that cannot be used by a main tanking paladin, but still exists all the way down in the third tier in the tanking tree, which is hard to reach for both holy and (especially) retri paladins.

Apparently, this "raid wall" talent was too powerful and they had to move the raid wide part of the talent down to the fourth tier Divine Guardian (which earlier "just" increased the amount of damage absorbed by the then raid wide Divine Sacrifice), where fewer people will be able to reach it.

While these changes annoys me, they do not come close to the feelings I have for the following changes:

• Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (Up from 6 sec)

• Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

• Infusion of Light now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 sec.

• Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

Yes, you guessed it: PvE paladins get nerfed because of PvP. Again.

I don't PvP much with my paladin these days, but by looking at the number of PvP nerfs that has hit the paladins in WotLK, paladins must have been completely dominating the PvP scene (and still I don't see paladins dominating in the top-rated arena teams...)

The nerf to Sacred Shield makes it totally worthless for anyone except the holy paladin. As a tankadin, I often cast this on myself (if I don't have a holy paladin casting it on me) to reduce the incoming damage, but that is pointless now.

Actually, I don't even see the point to keep Sacred Shield as a baseline ability for paladins anymore, since it is useless without Infusion of Light, which is deep in the holy tree. If Blizzard wants only holy paladins to use this ability, then just put it in the holy tree and remove it as a baseline ability. Now the untalented Sacred Shield is a joke.

The nerf to Aura Mastery is clearly also a PvP nerf. It's the exact same nerf that Hand of Freedom got a couple of patches ago.

And then we come to my favorite "change": Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

What has Blizzard been sniffing this time? Gnomish Ultra Glue (c)?

Lay on Hands has saved by butt so many times, I cannot count them all. It has a looooooong cooldown, so I save it for those very special moments where my healer is dead and the boss is starting to chew my face off after I have been auto-ressed by Ardent Defender.

Removing the self-cast on Lay on Hands would remove one of the few tanking cooldowns paladins have. I have even suggested getting LoH off the global cooldown, so it would be a more reliable tanking cooldown....

What's the reason for this nerf?

PvP? I don't think so. You cannot use LoH in arena, and you will only be able to use it once in a battleground. That's hardly a reason for a nerf.

PvE? I can only assume that it is because of the extra survivability it gives paladins when they solo content. Is that really something you want to balance talents around? Or is it because raiding holy paladins sometimes use it to get mana back when they have the talent glyphed? We are still talking about an 11 minute (talented and glyphed) cooldown, guys!

I read a new post from Ghostcrawler where he says that they have removed the change to LoH in their internal build. That doesn't mean that we can rest assured that the change will not go live. It means that Blizzard considers this talent broken, and that they are not finished messing with it yet.

Personally, I don't like where these changes are going. I am also very tired of getting nerfed because of PvP.

Atleast Icecrown Citadel looks cool. Although I'm not exactly thrilled about that the first boss in there wipes raids by passing gas. Is Blizzard catering to the 6-year olds now?

Giants Dancing on my Brain

I missed our Ulduar hard mode raid yesterday due to migraine, which sucked. It's not really possible to raid when it feels like you have two enraged giants tap dancing on your brain, while a ravenous shark is gnawing away at the back of your head.

So I missed out on the Iron Council and Hodir hard modes. Since we did the Flame Leviathan and XT-002 hard modes on Wednesday, at least I got those checked off on my list.

Our little ten-man group got heroic Anub down to 17% a couple of times on Saturday. 17% is still miles away from a kill of course, but we feel that we've got the kill in sight. My gear for the fight is shaping up, but I'm still short 8% from being passive unhittable. The gear set is still making a difference, since the amount of damage made to me is significantly lower than it used to be in my EH gear.

Before the giants started their dancing lessons on my cerebrum and the shark still hadn't reached my medulla oblongata, I attented a 25-man Trial of the Crusader raid with my shammy as dps. I have now completed Trial of the Crusader as all possible roles: Tank (paladin and death knight), healer (shaman), melee dps (rogue and warrior), and ranged dps (shaman).

As in almost every other raid, ranged dps is the easiest role. You tab between targets, keep up your rotation, and make sure not to stand in fire. That's it. Kudos to people who don't fall asleep while doing this every raid ;P

I'll try to make my next post a little bit more useful. Like discussing patch 3.3 and the pleasure of tanking in a dress again, or something.

P.S. If you were wondering: The giants were of course singing as well:

We're dancing on his brain
Just dancing on his brain
What a glorious feelin'
We're enraged again

True story.

The Beasts Are Down

We finally downed Northrend Beasts on 25 man heroic yesterday, and it was a darn good feeling. Getting the heroic version of the tanking chestplate was also a good feeling (and adding the stamina trinket from normal Faction Champions just an hour before that made my loot day complete). That chestplate has three sockets and insane stats and will make a nice addition to my gear collection.

The reasons for our success yesterday were mostly better dps and better survivability. We reached Icehowl several times with only one or two dead, and the last worm almost dead. On our kill, Dreadscale was even dead before Icehowl entered the arena.

We run with three tanks; a warrior, a druid, and yours truly.

I pick up Gormok at the start, popping wings and swinging away all that I can. Even with stamina gear I can keep our dps behind me on threat (when they start catching up, it's time for the first tank switch). When the worms enter, I grab Gormok while the other tanks get a Hand of Protection from our two holy paladins. As soon as Gormok is dead, I bubble off my stacks of Impale and taunt Dreadscale off the druid, who by then should have the first Burning Bile, which he spreads to whoever needs it (often the warrior tank).

The druid and I switch tanking on Dreadscale depending on Burning Bile application. When he enrages, I usually pick him up. And when Icehowl enters the arena, I pick him up as well (Dreadscale should be dead by then).

On our kill, we actually failed on one of Icehowl's charges. I watched him go all big and red, quickly popped Bubble Wall, saw Ardent Defender's self-ress proc, and then I was finally topped off and could continue tanking. That was a couple of sweaty seconds...

We had a couple of attempts on Jaraxxus, but the portals and volcanos were not killed fast enough, and poor me was swamped in mistresses and infernals on every attempt. We then called the raid early to celebrate our progress.

In our 10-man on Saturday, we got heroic Anub down to 23% even though we had switched out half the team. We always leave him with more than 20 attempts remaining, since it's just a "fun raid" that has a stricked time limit, but it's nice to see that we can get that far with a casual raid.