Achievements

I recently reached 5500 achievement points on my paladin. I know this isn't very much (I'm not even top-10 in my guild), but it's a lot more than I have on my alts, who sit on around 1500 achievement points.

When the achievement system was introduced I thought it was nonsense, and vowed not to give a rat's ass about it. But I think we all get hooked sooner or later. For me, it was when Naxx started to get dull, and the only challenge left was to do the achievements in there.

Achievements have changed the way we play the game.

First of all it's the obvious e-peen of having loads of achievement points.

Second, achievements are now being used as a "proof" that you are capable of something. How often do we not see the "LFM VoA-25, link achievement"? Achievements are of course not a good measure at all of anyone's capability, but it will at least give a hint that the player knows what it is all about.

Third, achievements force players to stay at the current content longer. First you have to down the boss. Then you have to down him with less raid members. Then you have to down him while constantly jumping or running in circles. Then you have to down him while closing your eyes, standing on one leg, and reciting the Holy Bible.... backwards. It's an ingenious way of Blizzard to make content last longer, even for hardcore players. And by looking at the number of achievements added every patch, they are well aware of it.

Fourth, it gives the hardcore players a shot at fame and glory by giving them titles and mounts to strout around in Dalaran with. Everybody will get the epics in the end, but only the hardcore will have the titles and mounts.

And last, but not least, it makes the players' ties to their character stronger than ever. Do you think that holy paladin with 10k achievement points are willing to reroll anytime soon? For every patch, the amount of achievement points are getting higher and the hill to climb to "catch up" with a reroll is getting steeper. As I mentioned at the start of this post: My alts are about 4000 achievement points behind my main. Dropping my main for any of those will seriously hurt my achievement e-peen.

So, are achievements good or bad?

Well, the good thing is that they have introduced an entire new dimension in playing. Now the goal is not just shiny epics, but also shiny achievements, titles, and mounts. More incentives make more people play more (TM).

People are a lot less likely to reroll, since they just cannot stand to face redoing all those achievements again on a new character. This would mean fewer "Flavor of the Month" characters, but also stronger feelings for one's main character.

But there are of course bad sides as well. How fun is it really to kill the same boss in eight different ways? Or wipe an entire night on a farmable boss because you have to do it another way to get an achievement? Or having a single mistake by a single player ruin the entire achievement for everyone for another week (e.g. The Immortal). Or having to pick another 249 pink eggs to get a chance to get a drop which you will need to get another achievement?

Personally, I think achievements are good. They add a flavor to the game, and make some boring aspects of it more meaningful.

Our new Vindication

I'm very excited about the redesigned Vindication. The new Vindication will reduce the target's Attack Power by 574, which is the same as a warrior's talented Demoralizing Shout (or a druid's talented Demoralizing Roar). Considering that a warrior needs to spend five talent points to get the debuff up to par and 10 rage for every application of the debuff, Vindication wins hands down, since it costs a mere two talent points and is applied automatically and for free.

There are, of course, some caveats:

• Warriors still rule supreme when it comes to AoE damage reduction, since both Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout are applied to multiple mobs within range, whereas Judgement of the Just and Vindication are only applied to a single target (or up to three targets if one manages to apply them with Hammer of the Righteous).
• Demoralizing Shout has a 30 second duration compared to Vindication's 10 seconds.
• Vindication has a "chance to proc", which means that if one is unlucky or need to kite the mob, the debuff could fall off.

Still, Vindication is full of win. If you are running without a warrior (or druid for that matter) with five talent points spent on improving Demoralizing Shout (or Demoralizing Roar), you get the debuff for free. If you are running with warriors and druids who usually spend rage on keeping this debuff up, they can no save that rage for dps.

I feel the only competition left is the warlock's Curse of Weakness. If you have an Affliction warlock in the raid with two points in Improved Curse of Weakness, this curse is still a better option. The improved Curse of Weakness reduces Attack Power with the same amount as Vindication (574), but also reduces the targets armor by 5%. This curse not only frees up the warrior or druid from keeping up Demoralizing Shout/Roar, but also frees up the warrior from doing Sunder Armor, or the rogue from doing Expose Armor.

So if you have a friendly Affliction lock in the raid: Give him or her a hug!
Otherwise, tell the warriors and druids to stop shouting (or roaring) to reduce Attack Power since you will be able to do it without effort. Let them spend their precious red bars on killing stuff instead.

Heroic Heartbreaker

After (finally) killing Yogg-Saron, we could start concentrating on the hard modes in Ulduar.
First on the list was Heartbreaker. I've already made a post on this for when we did it on 10 man, and XT has the same extra abilities on 25-man. He just hits harder and has more health.

I was tanking XT against one of the walls, so that adds wouldn't spawn from the junk piles on that wall. The other tank took care of Pummelers until hard mode was engaged, and after that he was picking up Life Sparks. Since I was tanking the boss against a wall, all I could see was a pair of giant robot legs.

We had a few wipes due to lack of moving when people got the bombs, or people getting killed by XT's tantrum. The healers really have their work cut out for them, and to ease their job, we made one of the shadow priests respec holy.

Eventually, XT was downed and our first hard mode loot was given to our hunter GM. That darn robot didn't drop the sweet tanking mace this time, and since Flame Leviathan refuses to drop Titanguard, I'm still stuck with Last Laugh.

On our Hodir kill for the night, I solo-tanked him without any frost resistance gear for the first time. I didn't really notice any difference in damage intake, but I loved to see my threat look better than with all that resistance gear.

Yogg-Saron down

After several weeks of weak signups, we finally got a solid group together so that we could do some serious attempts on Yogg-Saron. After only a few attempts we downed him (after a 2% wipe on our second attempt for the night).


This kill felt very good. Yogg-Saron has felt like a road block for some time now, especially seeing how me burned through the rest of Ulduar without any real problems (Mimiron was probably the second hardest kill, and after all the nerfs to him, that fight is now cake walk).

I just had to include the achievement we did just before the Ulduar raid. To get our spirits up, we did an Alterac Valley Blitz before entering Ulduar. I guess it helped :)

How To: A Tankadin Guide to Yogg-Saron

The Yogg-Saron fight has three phases, and the tankadin tasks for each are a bit different.

Phase 1:
In this phase, you need to kill guardians, which spawn from moving clouds, close to Sara until she dies (she takes about 12% of her health in damage per killed guardian).
We usually have three tanks (or two tanks plus a dps warrior or death knight in defensive stance/frost presence). The raid is positioned close to the entrance. The two main tanks pick up guardians and tank them close to the raid until their health is low. Then the guardians are kited close to Sara where a small group of ranged dpsers finish them off. As soon as a guardian is dead, the tank runs back to the raid to pick up a new guardian. The third (off) tank is picking up lose guardians and holds them away from the healers until one of the main tanks picks them up.
Things to look out for: Stepping in the clouds will make an extra guardian spawn, and if too many of them are up at the same time, the raid risks to be overrun by them.

Phase 2:
Tentacle time! Yogg-Saron appears in the center of the room and three kinds of tentacles spawn. Portals will open, letting raid members enter Yoggie's sick, perverted mind. The phase will end when Yogg-Saron's brain has taken enough damage from the people inside his mind.
However, a tankadin is more useful outside, so you won't be going into the portals.
As mentioned, there are three types of tentacles spawning outside.

• The Crushers channel a nasty debuff called Diminish Power, which reduces the damage the raid does with 20%. It stacks up to 4 times if you have 4 Crushers up (which is a REALLY bad idea). The channeling can be interrupted by hitting it with a melee attack. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, the Crusher also gets a stacking buff called Focused Anger everytime it is hit that increases damage done by 3%. This buff can stack up to 99 times. This makes it impossible to tank the tentacle, since it will one-shot anything with 40 or so stacks of the buff. The tankadin thus needs to "joust", i.e. run in, hit it, and quickly run out. Try to avoid getting more than 30 stacks of Focused Anger, so that the tanks don't risk dying.
• The Constrictors Squeeze raid members. When being squeezed, one takes 7500 damage every second. Only way to get people out of Squeeze is to kill the Constrictor. As a tankadin, you can bubble your way out of this. You can also use Hand of Protection on someone else who is squeezed. Save your HoP for a melee that needs to enter a portal, or for someone who otherwise would die.
  
• The Corruptors spread four kinds of debuffs: a magic one, a curse, a disease, and a poison. Help the healers to cleanse these, especially the mana-draining poison.
  

The tankadin's duties in phase 2 are to joust the Crushers to interrupt Diminsh Power, cleanse the debuffs from the Corruptors, and help people get out of the Constrictors' Squeeze (either by killing the tentacle or using Hand of Protection).
Things to look out for: Your Sanity might take some hits due to Brain Link, Malady of the Mind, and Psychosis. Make sure to refresh your Sanity at one of the Sanity Wells, because if your Sanity hits zero, you are mind controlled for the rest of the fight (and your raid will mock you for it when they kill you).

Phase 3:
In the third phase the ranged memebers of the raid will dps Yogg-Saron. The melee dps will spend their time killing off the Immortal Guardians that spawn every 10 seconds. These guardians hit very hard at full health (they will one-shot everything except the tanks), but hit like a smurf when low on health. The guardians should be tanked at least 20 yards away from Yogg-Saron since he casts Empowering Shadows on random guardians, and letting Yoggie heal himself is a bad tactic.
Yogg-Saron also casts Lunatic Gaze every 12 seconds. All raid members must face away from Yogg-Saron when this is being cast.
We bunch all the raid up away from Yogg-Saron, preferrably close to a Sanity Well. All healers face away from Yogg-Saron during the entire fight. We use two tanks: one to pick up the spawning adds before they kill someone, and one to tank them until they are at 1% health (when Thorim will kill them off). Melee dps single targets the guardians to burn them down as fast as possible, since they hit so hard at full health.
As a tankadin, you can either be the tank picking up spawning adds with your many ranged pick-up tools (Exorcism, Avenger's Shield, Hand of Reckoning, Righteous Defense, Judgement), or you could AoE tank the adds while spamming Righteous Defense on your fellow tank, to keep all adds on you until they die.
Things to look out for: Again, keep an eye on your Sanity.

It is an intense and long fight where simple mistakes will make the encounter very difficult.

Good luck!

Tankadin changes in patch 3.2

These are the changes (so far) that the tankadin will face in patch 3.2:

• Block Value: The amount of bonus block value on all items has been doubled. This does not affect the base block value on shields or block value derived from strength. [Blizzard is desperately trying to make block useful again. The first "fix" is to increase the block value of items, thus increasing the mitigation block gives warriors and paladins. In addition, it will increase the threat these two tanks can dish out.]

• On-Use Block Value Items: All items and set bonuses that trigger temporary increases to block value have been modified. Instead of increasing their block value amount by 100% like other items, they have all had their effect durations doubled. This applies to Glyph of Deflection, Gnomeregan Autoblocker, Coren's Lucky Coin, Lavanthor's Talisman, Libram of Obstruction, Tome of the Lightbringer, Libram of the Sacred Shield, the tier-8 paladin Shield of Righteousness bonus, the tier-5 paladin Holy Shield bonus, and the tier-5 warrior Shield Block bonus. [The amount of block value would have been too high if these items would have had their block value doubled. Making the duration longer gives the desired mitigation buff without insane spikey threat. The duration buff makes it possible for several of these items and set bonuses to have a 100% uptime.]

• Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings. [Blizzard wants Sanctuary to be THE tanking blessing. The problem is that Kings is still better. I prefer 10% more agility (avoidance, mitigation, and threat), 10% more strength (mitigation and threat), and 10% intellect (mana) over the 3% damage reduction and mana regen.]

• Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization. [Thank you, Blizzard. Finally!]

• Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage. [Threat buff? Thank you!]

• Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%. In addition, the benefit from additional block value this ability gains is now subject to diminishing returns. Diminishing returns occur once block value exceeds 30 times the player's level and caps the maximum damage benefit from shield block value at 34.5 times the player's level. [The reduction from 130% to 100% is understandable since the amount of block value has been doubled on items. I don't really understand how the diminishing return works, though.]

• Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Any damage that takes the paladin below 35% health is reduced. This reduction applies only to the portion that pushes the paladin below 35% health (example: a paladin at 50% health takes a 40% hit; the first 15% hits as normal while the next 25% is reduced). In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead heal the paladin for up to 10/20/30% of maximum health depending on the paladin's defense rating. [Wonderful and interesting. The first implementation Blizzard put on the PTR was too overpowered. But even this nerfed version is still good. In a way you could call it a passive Guardian Spirit on a 2 min cooldown.]

• Guarded by the Light: This talent will no longer cause Divine Plea's duration to be refreshed by using Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Justice, or Judgement of Light. [I assume this nerf was introduced to stop protection-specced PvP healers to keep mana regen up indefinitely. It's still lame. I find it very useful to be able to judge to refresh the Divine Plea timer in fights that require a lot of moving or tanking of several roaming adds.]

• Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout. [Blizzard nerfed the heck out of Vindication recently, due to its effects in PvP. When they realized that the nerfed version was completely worthless, they decided to redesign it to a paladin version of Demoralizing Shout. I like it. It frees up rage/mana and a global cooldown for DPS warriors and warlocks. And it's yet another passive buff/debuff that the paladin can set up without interrupting his/her rotation.]

• Agility and Dodge Nerf, Parry Buff: The avoidance gained from agility and dodge will be nerfed by 15%. The avoidance gained by parry will be buffed by 8%. [This is just me simplifying the changes made. I'll let the math champions battle this one out. I think Blizzard's intention is to make parry more attractive and also to slightly nerf avoidance overall. They don't want another Sunwell Radiance aura "fix".]

• Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players. [The only real nerf for tankadins. Blizzard is trying to make it up to us with the changes to Hand of Reckoning (see below). I will miss being able to pick up mobs with Exorcism. Single target pulls, I always use Exorcism. Multi-target pulls, I use Avenger's Shield and Exorcism. Picking up new adds at Thorim or Yogg-Saron, I always use Exorcism. When I want to push for threat over everything else, I use Exorcism instead of Holy Shield in my rotation. I will still be able to pull with Exorcism, but I won't be able to do it will running in or while fighting something else. I will surely miss Exorcism.]

• Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied. [This is a nice change, since it makes it a much better taunting tool. The old version often failed if the person with aggro kept dpsing the mob, and I didn't have the cooldown or range to attack the mob directly after the taunt. It will be nice to be able to just cast this, and not have to follow up with a judgement or something. But while having the mob's attention, this does not bring the extra threat Exorcism did.]
  

Overall, these are some very nice buffs. Paladin tanks will be stronger than ever in patch 3.2.

Patch 3.2 is sneaking up on me!

I'm back from my vacation, and when I take a quick look at my usual WoW-related sites I get a minor shock. What happened while I was away? I was only gone for three weeks!

Patch 3.2 turns out to be alot bigger than I initially thought it would be. A new Tier set? Already? I only have 4/5 of Tier 8.5 (I won't be wasting dkp on the shoulders anyways, but I haven't even seen them drop yet), and they already are prepared to release a new Tier set?

I barely know where to start to digest all this new information.

• Tankadin Tier 9 looks amazing. Truly amazing. No more block rating, which is useless to almost everyone these days. Especially if you get the amazing stats from Tier 9 :) The amount of defense and stamina on the gear is insane. All the socket bonuses are +Stamina. There's a mix of block value, dodge, parry, hit, and expertise. I really like it, and it also looks better than both Tier 7 and Tier 8.
• The Coliseum raid instance can be run in both normal and heroic mode, for both 10- and 25-man raids.
  
• There's a 5-man instance that drops Naxx-25 level gear.
• There's no trash in the raids. It seems to be just a series of encounters.
• Loads of new recipies, designs, patterns, etc. New craftable BoE items.
• Epic gems are introduced.
  
• Raid ID extensions allow players to extend the raid lockout period.
• All instances will drop Emblems of Conquests to make it easier for new players to gear up.
• Some major changes to the paladin class. All three trees are affected by the changes.

There's probably more, but I have just got back, remember? :)