The Wondrous World of PUGs

Since the changes that made every boss drop Conquest emblems, and the daily heroic quest rewarding Triumph emblems, I have been running heroics with PUGs every day. Running with PUGs these days are not as bad as it used to be, mostly because the majority of people outgear the content, and not because people are in any way better players than before.

I respecced my shaman to restoration a couple of weeks back, which means I'm pugging as tank (paladin and death knight), dps (rogue), and healer (shaman). You can say that I get to see pugging from every perspective.

The smoothest runs are almost always when I run as tank. It's very obvious that the skill and gear of the tank is the biggest factor of success in a pug. It doesn't really matter if the healer or the dps are any good as long as I'm tanking with any of my over-geared tanks. As a tank, you set the pace and decide the risks. After the first couple of pulls, you know what to expect from the rest of the group, and adjust accordingly for the rest of the instance. I've only wiped once when running as tank, and that was when a dps pulled all nine adds on Palentress in Trial of the Champion.

When running as dps, you pretty much are in the hands of the tank and the healer. Sure, you can help out as much as you can by protecting the healer and only hitting the tank's target, but if they both suck, you are in for an unecessary repair bill.

As a healer you can make a difference, but only up to a certain point. If the tank can't hold aggro or does stupid pulls, or if the dps is trigger-happy to the extreme and ignore Omen, you will have deaths no matter how well you heal. I have to admit that the only times I have ever left a group is when I'm healing and it's obvious that the tank has no clue of what he's doing.

It really makes me sad to see that so many tanks are so terrible, even after Blizzard has made tanking so much easier than before. Tanks that fail at heroics at level 80 wouldn't have made it through the gates to the heroics in TBC.

But of course you get pleasant surprises as well when you find yourself in an amazing group, burning through the instance, making jokes, or maybe doing huge pulls just to test your limits.

PUGs can turn out either way. It can be a fun ride or a real pain. You never know, and I guess that is the beauty of it these days.

Additional Changes in Patch 3.2.2

I already addressed the changes to tankadins in patch 3.2.2 in an earlier post, but Blizzard has added some more changes to the PTR since then.

• Seal of Corruption and Seal of Vengeance: These seals will now only use the debuff stacks generated by the attacking paladin to determine the damage done by the seal and by the judgement. [This is actually a bug fix. It was discovered that several paladins using SoV ended up using the same stack of debuffs on the mob. Apparently, it was the smallest stack of debuffs that was used to calculate the damage, which both hurt the dps of retris and the tps of prots.]

• Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now grants 10% strength in addition to its current effects. Also, the strength and stamina bonuses from this blessing will no longer be lost when Blessing of Kings is removed. [With the changes to Touched by the Light, Blizzard had to add the strength multiplier to BoS to make it comparable to the almighty Kings. Just losing 10% agility, spirit, and intellect in exchange for 3% damage reduction and mana regen is finally starting to look like a nice deal.]

• Hammer of the Righteous: The damage from this ability is now considered physical instead of Holy. The threat generated by the ability has been increased such that it will continue to do approximately the same threat it did when it was Holy damage. [This is a change I do not like. It is obviously another PvP nerf. I assume plate wearers were whining about getting hit hard by holy damage that ignored their armor. The main reason I do not like this change is not because I think it is a threat nerf (it is a dps nerf actually, but hopefully not a threat nerf), but because it is another step away from the signature spell damage tank paladins used to be. I liked the fact that we were doing holy damage to mobs, and that we got threat multipliers from casters. Now we are just as dependent on Sunder Armor or Faerie Fire as warrior or druid tanks (but we do not have an ability like that ourselves).]

• Added a recipe for Drums of Forgotten Kings. These drums increase all stats by 8% for all players in a raid. Does not stack with Blessing of Kings. [All leatherworkers can now bring Kings to the raid.]

• The Black Heart: This item’s animation has been changed and no longer resembles Hand of Protection. [I think many of us got a heart attack when we first saw this animation on the tank. I really do not know what Blizzard was thinking when they picked this animation for the proc of the trinket.]

• Relics: All buffs provided by relics (idols, librams, totems and sigils) now share an exclusive category such that gaining a buff from one of these items will remove all other buffs gained from items in this category. [No more libram swapping, which I think is good since it was a stupid exploit.]
  

Overall, tankadins are looking at many nerfs this patch. Each nerf on its own is not devastating, but when you add them all up, I fear we will feel them.
Also, when looking at the QQ on the forums, and the blue responses to these QQs, I am quite sure we will see a nerf to Ardent Defender sooner rather than later.

A Day at the Coliseum

Before our Trial of the Crusader raid yesterday, I pugged a VoA 25 with the normal pug perks:

• A holy paladin who refused to buff kings because "he was specced for improved wisdom". He also didn't bring enough reagents to buff the raid for more than two wipes.
• A rogue who dpsed Emalon by throwing stuff at him because "his gear broke".
• Loud ninja discussions when said holy paladin rolled and won dps gear.
• People dpsing the wrong targets at Emalon.
  

However, Koralon was kind enough to give me a new pair of shiny T9 gloves, which I quickly gemmed and enchanted before the night's "real" raid.

We burned through Trial of the Crusader. No wipes and almost no deaths at all, and the place was clean in less than an hour. We ran out, and set the raid difficulty at "25 player heroic" for the first time. We entered with our heads up high, pumped up, and ready for action.

Ouch.

Heroic Northrend Beasts hurt.

We ran with three tanks, and our warrior tank kept getting killed by Gormok. We changed healing assignments, changed the tank rotations, and started to manage to get Gormok down. Then the worms stomped us good.

We still haven't seen Icehowl on heroic, but it seems like Gormok's Impale stacks and the worms' poisons would be the hardest part of this fight. The damage on the tanks are insane. This encounter really is a gear check, and not just for the tanks. The healers need to be able to pump out some serious healing, and the dps must be on their top game to burn down the mobs before the next wave comes. On most of our tries, Gormok was at about 20% when the worms entered the arena.

I love being a paladin tank, though. Being able to bubble the Impale stacks off rocks. And Ardent Defender procs a lot more than I really feel comfortable with :P

I've read that some of the hardcore guilds complain that heroic Coliseum is too easy. Well, I guess they play in a different league than we do.

Anub'arak

We downed the last boss (Anub'arak, a.k.a. Anoob'arak) in Trial of the Crusader already last Wednesday, but I haven't had the motivation to write about the fight until now. I guess I was disappointed in how darn easy he turned out to be.

The way I see it, Faction Champions is the only encounter in normal mode that is even close to challenging. I can see raids getting stuck on the PvP encounter due to it being just that: a PvP encounter.

Anyways, back to Anoob'arak.

Anoob'arak is a big bug that you probably already met once in Azjol-Nerub. The tactics to kill him in the Coliseum are very simple:

Pull boss -> stand on ice -> loot boss.

But you probably want me to tell you more, so here goes...

The fight has three phases. The third phase starts when he reaches 30% of his health. Before that, phase one and two can occur several times.

Phase One:
Have ranged dps shoot down as many frost orbs as possible. When these orbs hit the ground, they turn into Permafrost. Permafrost is a thick layer of ice which a) slows movement speed by 80% (good for kiting, see phase 2), and b) stops mobs from burrowing down underground and heal.
Have one or two offtanks to pick up the two Nerubian Burrowers that spawn. Make sure to tank them on Permafrost so that they cannot submerge, since they heal to full health if they do. These bugs put a stacking armor-reducing debuff on the tanks. It's up to the raid leader if you want to kill off these adds in phase 1, or if you focus your dps on Anoob'arak until he submerges and then switch to the adds.
Annob'arak has a frontal cone attack, so only the main tank should stand in front of him.

Phase Two:
Every now and then (if he isn't tanked on Permafost), Anoob'arak will submerge. While underground, he will pursue a random player. If people are standing outside of Permafrost, Anoob'arak will be impaling targets around the person who is pursued. This is very unecessary damage, since it can be easily avoided by standing on Permafrost, where no spikes will hit you.
Loads of small adds are also spawns. These should be kited through Permafrost and killed off by ranged dps, since they put a stacking nature damage debuff on people they hit.

When Anoob'arak is resurfacing, he goes back to Phase 1. At 30% health, phase 3 starts.

Phase Three:
This is a dps race. The big bug puts up Leeching Swarm, which leeches 10% of people's current health and heals him.
Best advice to give here is: do not keep people's health at 100%, since that means he leeches more and thus heals more. Keep health bars at about 50% (except the main tank, who of course should be topped off).
Blow cooldowns. Kill him. Get achievement. Loot. Be happy.

We wiped once because some people decided that standing on ice when being pursued by giant spikes was a bad idea, which resulted in half the raid being killed in phase 2. Second attempt was an easy kill with no deaths.

We cleared Trial of the Crusader (25 player) in less than 90 minutes. Instead of starting the heroic version of it, we went to Ulduar to get the legendary mace to one of our druid healers. He has the fragments, and all we need is a Yogg+3 kill.

The Trial of the Grand Crusader raid scheduled for Thursday was cancelled due to too few signups, so I still haven't experienced Coliseum on heroic. But I've heard it's hard, so I look forward to the challenge.