The State..... two weeks later

Two weeks have passed since the 4.0.1 patch hit us. Changes are made to most classes, and paladins are not an exception.
So... are we at a better state now than two weeks ago? Well, some of my initial concerns have been addressed atleast.


Retribution:

The rotation is still very random, and it seems like Blizzard intends to keep it this way.
Ret damage was low, so they buffed several of our abilities. But numbers never really concern me, since they are easy to change.

Retribution is in the same place as two weeks ago.


Holy:

I was concerned about mana regen for holy paladins (at 85, at 80 nobody seems to have any mana issues). Blizzard added even more mana regen to Seal of Insight, in the form of 15% of the paladins base mana being regained when unleashing its judgement.

I complained about Holy Radiance only having a 10 yard range. It was buffed to 20 yards (which in turns seem to make it slightly TOO good). Edit: And yes, it has been nerfed.

Light of Dawn is still a situational heal, which requires the raid to group up. Most raiders are used to spreading out as much as possible during fights, so the need to group up to get healed will take some getting used to.

Word of Glory was buffed for Holy paladins, since it was too weak. Actually, ALL holy paladin healing spells were buffed. Again, numbers tweaking is easy to do.

Holy is in a better place than two weeks ago.


Protection:

The buff to Crusader Strike made it better for single target than our AoE move Hammer of the Righteous. For a while, tankadins used more or less the same rotation on single target as they did on multiple target. The buff changed that at least.

I was concerned about our ramp-up time. We need to build up three Holy Power before being able to hit the monsters hard enough for them to notice. Blizzard will address this by making Divine Plea generate three Holy Power when used. This means that tankadins can start a fight with three Holy Power every two minutes. This is a good change.

The prot rotation is still "939". It's not harder than the old "969", which, even though it was "easy", was an elegant and smooth rotation. "939" leaves a little bit of wiggle-room, since not 100% of our global cooldowns are used (but pretty darn close).

I was concerned about Grand Crusader. Our Avenger's Shield ends up low on our priority list, which means that we mostly ignore this proc, and just use our frisbee when it fits into our rotation. In AoE fights, the proc is more useful, since (unglyphed) the frisbee hits three targets in the face. Blizzard has stated that they will in some way buff the proc, since it is their intention to make it our signature proc.

Word of Glory is still a concern. I read about tankadins getting huge heals off when they have massive Vengeance stacks. This is broken, and will be fixed. Word of Glory is not supposed to scale with the attack power provided by Vengeance.
Blizzard is buffing Word of Glory for Holy, but keeping it as a modest heal for ret and prot.

I see the use of Word of Glory, but I still find it underwhelming. Compared to the self-healing on my death knight (Death Strike, Rune Tap, Bloodworms, etc), Word of Glory is really lackluster. And it still requires me to build up three Holy Power before it is strong enough to be noticed.

Of course, there wouldn't be patches and hotfixes without paladin nerfs!

Our blocking will be nerfed. As soon as I had installed the patch, I went to reforge my tanking gear. With very little effort, Arnax was block-capped (102.4% combined miss-avoidance-block). I know that ratings will suffer when we get to 85, but that was just ridiculous. Raid buffed, it turned out I had TOO much Mastery. When the block cap is reached, Mastery turns into complete crap for protection paladins (is there any other class that has a problem like this?).
Blizzard's solution to this was to nerf both Holy Shield (from 15% to 10%) and Mastery (from 3% per point to 2.25% per point).
Edit: I read the Holy Shield change wrong. Holy Shield no longer increases block chance, but increases the amount of damage blocked. So tankadins lost 15% block chance, but gained 10% block "value."

Blizzard also nerfed our Shield of the Righeous. It now scales a lot less with attack power (from 120% to 60%, ouch), but gets a bigger base damage. The issue they are solving is the massive damage that can be reached with full stacks of Vengeance up. I know some tanks got a hard-on when seeing 100k+ crits on Festergut, but that was obviously broken.

Our main damage reduction cooldown Guardian of Ancient Kings will also get nerfed (from 60% damage reduction to 50%). With a nerf both to our block mechanic and our main damage reduction cooldown, tankadin survivability just took a hit.

Protection is still on a rollercoaster ride, but is probably at about the same state as two weeks ago.


TL;DR Blizzard is still tuning paladins, and the tuning won't stop until we hit 85 and they see real numbers from a larger population than on beta. Holy paladins got buffed. Retribution paladins got slightly buffed. Protection paladins got mostly nerfed.

State of the Paladin

Last night, I was enjoying the calm before the storm, flying on my Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher across the land, and contemplating what was about to come.

Like everone else, I look forward to Cataclysm, albeit not as much as I looked forward to The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. For some reason, those previous expansions seemed more exciting to me. Maybe I'm just getting tired of the game?

In both previous expansions, paladins were changed a bit, but that was absolutely nothing compared to what will happen in 4.0.

Very late in the development cycle of Cataclysm, Blizzard introduced a new resource for paladins: Holy Power. It is very obvious they introduced this to make retribution rotations more "involving" and "interesting", so that good paladins would distinguish themselves from bad ones.

The way things look right now, the day before the changes go live, it seems Blizzard has failed. I'm convinced that paladins will get major overhauls in future content patches to make this new design work well. Because now, it looks like Blizzard is trying to push a square peg into a round hole.

Now, you need to take my QQ with a grain of salt. I have not been playing on the beta or the PTR (which almost wouldn't matter, since there has been changes to paladins in every build that affects rotations and spell choices).

I won't go into details describing changes and new spells and so on. That has already been explained by better people than myself all over the blogosphere. I'm just going to make some general comments.


Retribution:

Paladins got a new resource system so that retribution would be "harder" to play well. In their tweeking and nob-turning during the last month, Blizzard has managed to screw that up.
Initially, the idea was that Holy Power would work somewhat like combo points do for rogues and kitties: One uses a spammable ability to build up combo points and then spend them on a finishing move, but with two big differences: The combo points [Holy Power] are bound to the paladin and not its target, and the spammable ability that stacks the combo points has a cooldown (and is thus not truly spammable). Just like a rogue, the paladin is now supposed to
(1) stack combo points [Holy Power],
(2) keep Slice and Dice [Inquisition] up, and
(3) slam-dunk a finishing move like Eviscerate [Templar's Verdict] with as many combo points [Holy Power] as possible.

Blizzard also introduced some more procs to make the rotation more "interesting".

So far, so good.

But in their tweeking they have made the generating of Holy Power almost completely random. There are procs that give more Holy Power, and procs that make the paladin use finishing moves without needing Holy Power. Blizzard has managed to make the retribution rotation a priority list that depends on several procs that are completely random.

In my world "random" means that skill has very little to do with things. If you are lucky, and press the right buttons, good for you. If you are unlucky, too bad. No pew-pew for you.
And therein lies Blizzard's failure with the new retribution rotation.


Holy:

Mana regen has been nerfed for all healers, and for a historically spamming class like the paladin, that will hurt. Divine Plea has been nerfed so hard it's useless, and suddenly, paladins have the worst mana regen of all healers. Congrats!

Paladins get loads of new healing spells, including a crappy aoe HoT (with a 10 yard radius, yey!), and a situational frontal cone heal.

But Beacon of Light is still imba, right? Well... no. But it is still useful.
I am in no way an expert on holy paladins, but it seems there will be two ways of healing with a paladin in 4.0:
(1) heal the beaconed target directly and quickly get Holy Power that you can spend on a free heal, or
(2) don't heal the beaconed target directly and use Holy Shock as your Holy Power generator to get a free heal.
With low mana regen, free heals are teh sex.

Is Holy Power well implemented for Holy Paladins? Maybe. With mana being valuable, a second resource to use instead of mana for "free" heals will be nice. Is it enough? Well, in any case, paladins will not be mindlessly spamming one single heal all night long anymore, and that is probably a good thing.


Protection:

Then we come to the redheaded stepchild paladin spec: Protection. Too bad this is the spec I've preferred for several years, eh?

The idea of making tankadins use different abilities for single target and aoe tanking is good, and something that I have missed on my paladin. Being forced to cleave and consecrate all the time to build threat was not a good design.

But.... forcing tanks to tank with combo points is just lame. There. I said it. Holy Power (as it is implemented right now) sucks for tanks.
With this combo points system, I need to first build up three holy power before I can hit anything hard enough to make them notice. And the only way to build up Holy Power is with Crusader Strike (or Hammer if aoe), which, up until last week, was on a 4.5 second cooldown. I also need to cast a finishing move to get my Holy Shield up (should I waste Holy Power early to get my shield up, or can I wait until I can use all three Holy Power?).

This is a big change for tankadins. Before, we had the advantage of always starting with a full "rage bar" (a.k.a. the blue rage bar), and could run into a fight able to hurt stuff right away. Then Blizzard slowly started to nerf paladin burst damage due to PvP QQ. So we needed to wait for some time to build stacks on the target, and our judgement hit like a wet noodle.

With Holy Power, this gets worse. The tankadin runs in, starts building Holy Power, starts stacking debuffs on the target, and after three Holy Power finally can slam a shield in the mob's face. That used to be 3x4.5 = 13.5 seconds into the fight. Not good.

Blizzard has claimed that the tankadin rotation has been too easy. The "969" rotation is mindless and could be performed by a trained monkey (yes, because the bear rotation is soooooo complex, right?). So they decided to introduce Crusader Strike to tankadins, and then, slightly later, the amazing concept of Holy Power.

With the new abilities, the tankadins of the world started to create a new rotation. And the tankadins were not happy. There were holes in the rotation big enough to drive a tauren and his six buddies through. Theorycrafters calculated that there would be 6 empty global cooldowns per minute. Tankadins would not have any buttons free to press at any given time like they did in the golden days (yesterday, that is). It was an uproar on forums. Ghostcrawler was called all kinds of names. And Blizzard caved in, with the brilliant solution of lowering the cooldown on Crusader Strike (and Hammer) to 3 seconds (but only for protection paladins).

Five minutes later, tankadins realized that their rotation with the new change turned into an even easier and more mindless rotation than the old "969". We now have the "939" rotation, where we spam Crusader Strike every other global cooldown and fill in the gaps with Judgement, Avenger's Shield, and Holy Wrath.

This change also made our "signature" proc: Grand Crusader, utterly useless. Since all this proc does is reset the cooldown of Avenger's Shield, and since Avenger's Shield sits so low on our priority list, nobody will care if this procs or not. Bad design is bad design. I expect a change. Hopefully soon (TM).

My last complaint is our so-called "emergency heal". Blizzard expects us to use Word of Glory as a self-heal when needed. They have even introduced talents that boost the spell, and even the potential to create a damage reduction shield from it. The problem is, as always: it requires Holy Power to be used.
We need to sacrifice a truck load of threat to use it, but that is probably a necessary trade-off. For a while, Word of Glory healed for so little is was pathetic. Then Blizzard made the spell scale with attack power and spell power, and the heal was actually noticed on the tank's health bar.
But the big problem is: How can an "emergency heal" be based on the tank having three holy power stacks on him? The Holy Power requirement means that the tankadin needs to plan up to 10 seconds ahead before casting the self-heal. Anyone else than me see a problem with this? How often can you plan an emergency heal 10 seconds in advance?


Anyways.... I will download the patch, install it, and relearn my class. In a week or so, I will know if the concerns listed above still are true when I've had some hands-on experience with the new changes.


TL;DR
Some changes are good, but the mechanics of our rotation and self-heal is poorly designed. I hope that is something that can be fixed without too much fuss, and that we won't have to wait too long for it to be fixed.

I'm still here.... honest!

More than a month has past since my last post. That is, of course, unfortunate, but I have had loads to do at work lately, and since that is what pays the bills, blogging has been down-prioritized to a level where it competes with mowing the lawn and cleaning out the garage.

My lawn looks like a jungle, and there is hardly room for my car in the garage. So I'll just give a short update on what's going on in the game for me.

We have 8 out of 12 heroic encounters down in ICC25. Lady Deathwhisper, Putricide, Sindragosa, and Lich King are still up. Lady was our goal this week, but it didn't work out.

One of the guild's 10-man groups are working on heroic Arthas. The group I run with has had some problems with signups, but we are at 9/12 hardmodes (Putricide, Sindragosa, and LK left).

My casual ICC10 is working on normal mode Lich King.

There has been some minor leaks from the Cataclysm Alpha, but nothing to be especially excited about.

And we all know that the only thing that really matters is: What will female worgen look like?

Paladin Class Preview

The paladin preview is upon us!

Short version: "Holy paladins get a new big heal and Beacon of Light will be nerfed. Retribution and Protection will get more complicated rotations since they obviously are faceroll specs. Any exact details are not available at this moment. Please hold."

Paladins don't seem to be getting that interrupt or gap closer we've been asking for, and that sucks.
Holy paladins will get a half-assed AoE healing spell, but seem to be stuck in the single-target nuke heal niche.


New Paladin Spells

Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

For protection, this is our version of the warrior's Shockwave. This is a good thing, since tankadins currently lack snap AoE aggro. It also gives Holy an AoE damage spell. I wonder what kind of cooldown this spell has, since I assume it won't be spammable. Also, how long will the targets be blinded, and will damage break the blind?

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

It doesn't say anything about spec restrictions, so I assume all three specs will be able to use this spell. I also assume it only scales with spell power, so it will be ridicilously weak for non-holy paladins. I'm sure it will have a VERY short range, so it will only be healing the people standing on top of you. So this is Blizzard's AoE heal gift to paladins?

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Retribution gets their own Gargoyle. Holy gets a smart heal. Protection gets another damage reduction cooldown. I'm pretty sure the damage reduction won't last a full 30 seconds. For a tanking cooldown, 3 minutes is a bit long. Maybe a glyph will shorten the cooldown?


Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

• Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.

Holy paladins get another damage ability. Protection paladins get another single-target damage ability. Retribution paladins hopefully get something sexier than the current lame strike.

• Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.

The dispel changes affect all classes that can dispel. It's more or less a nerf to all non-healers, which means that retribution and protection paladins will get a weaker Cleanse.

• Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.

I like the intention Blizzard has here, but I'm not sure it's enough. Paladin buffing is annoying (not as annoying as it used to be but still annoying). Merging Might and Wisdom is a good choice, since buffing druids, shammies, and paladins sometimes could give you grey hairs.
But what happens to Blessing of Sanctuary, since it is not mentioned here?

• Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

In the first post, it seemed that Holy Shock would only keep the healing part across specs. But later comments from Ghostcrawler indicate that it will still do damage as well. This would give retribution and protection paladins a new instant ranged damage spell. Didn't Blizzard nerf instant Exorcism because it was considered OP in PvP? And now they give us an instant ranged damage spell back?
Actually, Holy Shock might just replace Exorcism altogether. If it is an instant heal/damage spell, it would be identical to an Art of War proc for a ret paladin (either an instant Flash of Light or an instant Exorcism). I don't see ret paladins having BOTH Holy Shock and Art of War FoL/Exorcism.
For tankadins, it means another single target damage spell, and also another ranged spell to pickup runaway adds with. Plus an instant heal if needed.



New Talents and Talent Changes

• We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.

Everytime paladins QQ about how bad their performance is in Arena, or how OP other classes are at the moment, the immediate answer is: "So what? U haf ur bubblez, nab!11!!1!!"
Blizzard haven't wanted to touch the bubble, since they believe it's a signature spell in the paladin arsenal.
Now they are playing with the idea of reducing the duration of the bubble by a couple of seconds, so that a paladin won't be able to heal back to full health before it fades.
The only time I use my bubble as a tank is when I clear stacks of nasty debuffs, and I do it with a cancelaura macro. I only need a half-a-second long bubble :)
But I understand that this is purely a PvP balancing act.

• We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.

Blizzard thinks retribution is a faceroll spec and wants to make it more complicated.

• We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.

A 30 minute Sacred Shield sounds just like a new Blessing to me (with the caveat that it can only be used on one target). I'm not sure how this change would make a holy paladin a better group healer though...

• We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.

Like paladins NEED a bigger heal, right? Seems they will tone down Holy Light to a "normal" heal and add a new big heal.
But the big thing here is the part with Beacon of Light. Will it really only work with Flash of Light, the spell Blizzard states will be more expensive and rather weak?
Later clarifications on this indicate that Blizzard still haven't decided what to do with Beacon of Light yet. All they know is that it needs to be changed (i.e. nerfed).

• Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.

We already knew that.

• Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.

"Paladin tanks need more complicated rotations because they are a faceroll spec." So we will get a bunch of new abilities that we need to use? And two new cooldowns we need to choose between when tanking?
I seriously will not have room for all of this on my action bar. I already use at least five abilities in my normal tank rotation, not counting taunts and defensive cooldowns. Now they will add more, and different rotations for single target and AoE?
From this preview, we've seen Blinding Shield being added for AoE (but most likely with a long cooldown), and Holy Shock and Crusader Strike being added for single target. We will abviously see more stuff added.

• Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

Only time the charges wear off is when AoE tanking loads of trash, so this is just a convenience change.



Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Holy

• Healing
• Meditation
• Critical Healing Effect

Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.

Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.

Wow! A critting heal will HEAL FOR MORE. Imba Mastery!
Boring mastery which just keeps holy paladins in the NUKE HEAL niche. I thought the intention was to get them out of there?

Protection

• Damage Reduction
• Vengeance
• Block Amount

Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.

Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.

No surprises here.

Retribution

• Melee Damage
• Melee Critical Damage
• Holy Damage

Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.

Yawn! Boring.


With all the previews now up, I vote for the Shaman preview to be the sexiest. The Shaman preview really made me look forward to healing on my shammy. The death knight preview was just "meh", and the paladin preview just raised a lot of questions.

Class Previews Day 3

On the third day of previews, Blizzard gave to us: Hunters, Druids, and Mages.

I don't play either of these classes, and couldn't care less....

The short version is: Hunters won't use mana or ammo anymore. Resto druids won't be running around as giant broccolis anymore. Mages get heroism.

I know atleast one mage who creamed his pants when he realized he was getting heroism.

Changed your underwear yet, Fj?

Class Previews Day 2

Tomorrow is the big day: we will get the Paladin preview. Fingers crossed for some goodies.

This blue post worries me a little bit:

The fact is we're just not as far along on paladins as we are the other classes.

We haven't torn up the paladin talent trees in earnest yet, so the preview will likely be heavy on design intent and light on details.

The reason this worries me is that Blizzard should know better. They should know from experience that paladins are the hardest class to balance right, since most paladin abilities are shared between the specs, and there is no real punishment for using abilities from another role while playing (we don't have forms, or presences, or stances).

Saving the paladin to last seems to be a bad idea when you know it will be the hardest to design. That quote above states that they have barely started....

Anyway... the second preview day showed us the warriors, death knights, and rogues. Since I play a death knight, and since we got to see some tanking masteries, these were interesting previews.

Warriors
Warriors get Heroic Leap, an ability that paladins have been asking for for a long time. I'm not going to QQ just yet, because I don't know what paladins will get. But paladins really really need a closer, an ability to quickly cover the distance between here and there. Paladins are still extremely easy to kite in PvP, and we are the only tank that cannot get to a mob "instantly" (death knights have Death Grip, but that cannot be used on bosses, so they also suffer from this).

Shouting becomes "free", Whirlwind becomes a "true" AoE, fury will be able to dual-wield one-handers again.

Then we get to the tanking masteries:

Critical Block Chance: As we mentioned in the stat changes preview, block rating is changing to a chance to block 30% of a melee swing's damage. Protection warriors have a chance that the block will be a critical block and block for 60% of a melee swing's damage instead. There will likely be talents available to push the amount blocked even higher.

Paladins will most likely get a mastery like this as well (hopefully with some individual flavor). It sounds reasonable and will make block useful again.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (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 give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make 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 overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

This one I'm not so sure about. Tanks deal more damage when they get hit? And the buff scales with the damage done to the tank?

Doesn't this mean that more avoidance and more mitigation lead to slower stacks of the buff being applied? So the better gear the tank has, the slower his AP buff will stack up? Why?

And how does it work for offtanks, who won't get hit as much as the main tank? What do they do to keep threat up? How do an offtank stay "second on aggro" if he doesn't get this buff?

Well, guess we have to wait and see.


Death Knights
After being all psyched out over all the goodies that my shammy was going to get, the death knight changes seemed a bit lacking.

Outbreak will be a nice opener, making it possible for the DK to apply both diseases with just one GCD. But it will have a long cooldown (1 minute), so it will take some practise to learn how to use it best.

Necrotic Strike is the DK version of Mortal Strike.

Dark Simulacrum is the DK version of Spell Reflect.

None of these excites me much. Mortal Strike and Spell Reflect are PvP abilities, and I don't PvP with my DK anyways.

Blizzard is changing the way runes will charge, so that Dks can spend them more efficiently. This will probably take some time to get used to, but is probably a good change.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Blood will become the dedicated tanking tree. Instead of a block mastery, DKs will get

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

So the more a DK heals himself, the more mitigation he gets.

The DK dps masteries are quite boring.


Rogues
I haven't raided with my rogue since early Trial of the Crusader, but there were a couple of good changes I noticed in the preview.

The rogue can transfer combo points from one target to another. Passive abilities, such as Slice and Dice, no longer have target requirements to be activated (which means you can use the points from a recently killed target). Combat Readiness makes the rogue less squishy. Weapon specializations will be removed (no more respeccing everytime you get a weapon upgrade).

And Smoke Bomb sounds like a lot of fun.

Class Previews Day 1

I know, I know. We paladins have to wait another week before we get to see what Blizzard has in store for us. But there are other classes to take a look at before then.

Since I play quite a bit with my shaman and death knight as well, I'm eager to see what kind of changes those classes will get.

Ghostcrawler dropped a DK bomb already the other day by declaring that Blood will be the designated tanking tree for death knights. This was a change that I've been expecting for some time. Blizzard probably realized that designing meaningful Masteries for all three DK trees, when having all three being able to both dps and tank, would have been a game design nightmare.

So they took the easy way out, and we will now see Blood as a tanking tree, Frost as a Dual-Wield dps tree, and Unholy as a Two-hander dps tree.

Anyway, we will see more of the DK changes tomorrow. Today the classes previewed were Shaman, Warlock, and Priest.

I don't play a warlock nor a priest, so I don't really understand the impact of the changes presented. I guess locks are happy to finally get rid of those shards.

This, however, is really cool:

Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or "Life Grip") is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can't seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

The shammy changes presented made me happy. I rarely play as enhancement, and I kind of feel like enhance shammies got the least exciting changes of the three specs. The other two specs got the following candy:

Elemental:

• Elemental shammies get a more useful AoE damage spell in Earthquake, which sounds fun.
• Spirit on gear turns into hit for elemental shammies, which means restos and "ellies" will finally be able to share gear.
• Totem of Wrath will no longer be a static buff, but a 4-10% (depending on spec) spell power buff.
  
• Spiritwalker's Grace (see below) will make it possible to dps while moving.
• Elemental Overload Mastery seems cool. Moar pew-pew!
  

Good stuff! A useful AoE, "hit for free", scaling spell power buff, and no more "lightning bolt turrets".

Restoration:
Before I start, check these two new talents out:

Healing Rain (level 83): An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell that calls down rain in a selected area, healing all players within it. There is no limit to the number of players who can potentially be affected; however, there are diminishing returns when healing a large number of targets, much like the diminishing returns associated with AoE damage spells. This should give Restoration shaman another healing tool that improves their group-healing and heal-over-time capabilities. 2-second cast time. 30-yard range. 10-second duration. 10-second cooldown.

Spiritwalker's Grace (level 85): When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.

OMGawesumsweetnessyummy!

Healing Rain sounds so sexy I want it right this instant! Imagine a healing spell I will cast outside of my little Grid world! I will actually have to move my eyes from Grid and target something in the actual game to heal. People can run in and take a healing shower and move out when topped off.

Spiritwalker's Grace is like getting pie after eating some cake with a plate of cookies as the side dish. The hardest fights to heal as a shammy is the fights will lots of movement. I mean, you only get so far with Riptide, and Nature's Swiftness do have a two-minute cooldown. This new talent will make it possible to heal on the move when it matters the most.

Other:

• A new go-to heal in New Healing Wave.
• Bye-bye Cleansing Totem (/cry).
• Spirit Link is back. Well, maybe.
• A very nice Mastery: Deep Healing.

Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target's health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points.

• And a shammy version of the paladin judgement: Unleash Weapon.

Unleash Weapon (level 81): Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects (see below). A dual-wielding Enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both of their weapon enchants. Instant cast. 30-yard range. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable.

I look forward to healing on my shammy in Cataclysm!

Now, bring on the death knight changes! Then we will have a full week to recover before the paladin preview is upon us!

LK25 Down!

Well, that is a messy screenshot but we were all quite excited after the kill and standing still for a picture is hard when you are in that mood. I'm missing half the raid in that picture. I hope somebody got a better one made.

Last week we got to phase 3 for the first time. I guess the 10% buff finally pushed us into the last phase, which turned out to be the least challenging. With only the practise from the 10-man fight, we killed the Lich King only the second time we really got into the last phase.

I had the job of tanking the Lich King himself during the fight. That job mostly consists of positioning and surviving Soul Reaper. We had our warrior tank spec Safeguard to give an external damage reduction cooldown for me for every Soul Reaper.

As soon as we got the defile / val'kyr combination under control, the fight went a lot smoother.

After the kill we went to Vault of Archavon where we did the Earth, Wind & Fire achievement just for fun.

It was a great raid night.

Thank God it's Friday

I'm writing this sitting at an airport waiting for my flight home. Work keeps sending me out-of-town, which was all good when I was young and single, but is becoming dull now when I'm married and have a kid. But I gotta pay that mortgage, right?

(Oh noes, I have exposed the fact that I'm married! Now all the hordes of female blog-fans chasing after me will move on to the next sexy blogger hunk. What will I do without all those virtual panties that have been thrown at me allt his time?)

I just only had time to install the 3.3.3 patch before leaving home the other day. I didn't see any paladin changes, which is a very rare thing. No Pvp nerfs. No redesigned talents. No AoE threat nerf. It must have been a mistake, which I'm sure Blizzard will correct with an unannounced stealth hot fix. Or maybe the paladin team is so exhausted from all the previous changes that they needed a vacation this time around.

When I'm checking my earlier posts I realize that I stopped writing ICC guides when I got to Professor Putricide. Well, I guess that's proof enough that I hate him. When I start explaining tactics on Putricide in our casual 10-man, I throw up a little in my mouth, and quickly make a raid vote to go to Blood or Frost wing instead.

I'll try to pick up the guide writing, even though it feels a bit late to write them at this point. I might just go for heroic guides instead, but I'm just starting doing the heroic fights now, so it'll take some time for me to digest them.

In unrelated news, Arnax finally got a brand new hat. He's now wearing his first piece of T10 (iLvl264). The competition for Conqueror marks is fierce in our raids, since we run with six (!) paladins, threeish warlocks and fourish priests. It doesn't help that for some reason, the Conqueror marks drop less than the other two...

Boarding time. Time to squeeze into a metal tube with a hundred others traveling home.

Thank God it's Friday!

Arnax the Kingslayer

The Lich King is dead.

Alive and Kicking

Don't worry. I'm still here. I'm still playing the game. I've just had loads to do at work, which have made it almost impossible to do anything WoW-related (except raiding) lately.

I've joined another guild, and we are currently working on Lich King on 25-man. We have one 10-man team doing hardmodes, while the 10-man team I'm running with are pushing Lich King slightly below the 30%-mark of his health bar.

In addition to that, I'm also running a casual 10-man with some friends once a week. I usually go on my resto shammy on these runs, but I might use my death knight sometimes depending on the raid setup.

So there's a lot of Icecrown raiding going on.

Now when I have seen all the fights in ICC, I can finally have an opinion on the entire raid instance.

The Good
The Lich King fight is awesomesauce.
Most of the boss fights are well-designed.

The Bad
Professor Putricide is the most boring and annoying fight in the instance.

The "meh"
Gunship Battle is wearing thin, just like I expected from the first time we did it. It's a cool fight the first handful of times you do it. After that, it's just a time sink and free epics. It is truly the "Chess Event" of ICC.

After the horrible ToC, Blizzard promised us trash. Well, the trash in ICC is underwhelming. I might be an endangered species, but I enjoy trash. I liked the challenge of the trash in TBC raids. Trash pulls require a different set of skills than boss fights, and it was cool to get to use them on trash that actually could wipe the raid.

In ICC, we start with promising trash before Marrowgar, but then it kinda dwindles down to trash packs of a few mobs at a time which can easily be AoEd down. After the Lower Spire, it's mostly running up some stairs, kill five mobs, then run up some more stairs, kill five mobs, and then you are at a new boss. With the exception of two dogs and two val'kyrs, there are no patrols.

And the fact that there was no trash at all before the Frozen Throne was a big let-down.

But it's probably just me being old-fashioned. Trash and respawns are probably considered "annoying" by a majority of players.


Other things that have happened since my last post:

• Lots of Cataclysm info, which I will ignore on this blog until we are closer to release.
• Lots of patch 3.3.3 info, which so far includes nothing regarding paladins (but my frost death knight will be buffed!).
• Paladin AoE threat will be nerfed. Bummer. Ridach, over at Righteous Defense says exactly what I feel here.
  

But the most important blue post the last week:

Yeah it just takes one person to press Need after everyone's pressed Greed on the Frozen Orbs and you miss out. But the good news is that in patch 3.3.3 this won't be the case anymore -- the roll for Frozen Orbs will be an automatic Greed roll. Rejoice!

Or not.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Yesterday, I left the guild I have been in for three years. It was a hard decision to make, but I didn't really see any other options.

The guild introduced me to raiding back when Karazhan was new. I had played the game since its release, but never really gotten into the raiding scene until TBC.

The raiding days in TBC were a lot of fun. The guild was far from cutting edge, but we had fun while raiding, and slowly made progress. I know it's easy to forget the hard times, but I have a lot of fond memories from those days.

The main reason for leaving was that 25-man raiding had become a lot less fun. The raiding atmosphere was bad, raid morale was low, and I didn't agree with the leadership style of the raid leader. The state of raiding was so bad that we barely got enough signups to go raiding at all.

All guilds have their ups and downs, and during the three years I was a member in this guild, I stayed and helped the guild through bad times before. This time, however, I don't see any change for the better anytime soon, and I no longer have strong enough emotional ties to the guild to be prepared for a long haul.

Many of my in-game friends have left the guild, and other people I respect and enjoy playing with have either stopped raiding or play alot less than they used to.

It came to a point where I realized that logging on my paladin wasn't as much fun as it used to be. So I decided to leave and start afresh someplace else.

Will the grass be greener on the other side? I hope so. Only time will tell.

To my former guild mates I'd like to say: "So long and thanks for all the fish feasts!"

Hot-fixed Paladin Stamina Nerf

Several paladins noted the other night that their health suddenly dropped. I must admit I didn't notice it myself, but I can imagine the confusion it must have caused.

Blizzard did an unannounced hotfix where they, in short, nerfed paladin stamina with 4%, while buffing death knight stamina with 2%.

The official announcement came out later:

Paladin

• Sacred Duty now provides 2 / 4% Stamina, down from 4 / 8% Stamina. The cooldown advantages of the talent remain unchanged.

Death Knight

• Frost Presence now provides 8% Stamina, up from 6% Stamina.
• Icebound Fortitude now provides 30% base damage reduction, up from 20% damage reduction. For a geared tank with high defense, this translates to 50% damage reduction, up from 40%.

It's a nice buff to death knight tanks, who have been a bit of an underdog for a while now.

For paladins it's of course never nice to get nerfed (especially not unannounced), but the comments from blue posters seem to indicate that the nerf to stamina makes it less likely that they will nerf Ardent Defender, the source of endless QQ from other tanks.

Since I prefer a fully functioning AD to 4% stamina, I'm all good.

Now we all have to wait and see about that AoE threat nerf that seems to be incoming...

First Time for Everything

Since the raid leader for the ICC10 raid I was in left the guild and did a faction change (he didn't like the state of raiding in the guild, and I don't really blame him), I decided to do some raid leading on my own.

I've never been a raid leader before. It has never really interested me to take the responsibility to get people together, finding replacements, explaining tactics, and police/guide the members of the raid. It just sounds too much like WORK to me, and it is stuff I do eight hours a day, five days a week already. Doing work on my spare time as well didn't sound all that compelling to me.

But since I want to do ICC10, and since my wife has been shut out from 25-man raiding, and since I knew there are a couple of great players who do not have the time to raid several days a week, but still want to do some casual raiding, I got ten people together and went into Icecrown yesterday.

Getting healers for the run turned out to be harder than getting tanks, and since I wanted to have a shaman in the group, I decided to go on my resto shaman instead of my paladin tank.

I have to admit, it was a challenge to raid lead for the first time while being a healer instead of a tank (which I have a lot more experience with). As a tank, I always have to be aware of the mobs and the surroundings, which means it's easier to guide the rest of the raid. As a healer, I was focusing on health bars and sometimes got tunnel vision staring at the colored squares in Grid. Well, at least I could be certain to what hurt or killed anyone in the raid...

Four of the people in the raid hadn't done ICC before, so I had to explain all the fights in detail, which slowed down the pace a bit. But even with almost half the raid being new to the content, we only had one death on boss fights up until Festergut. On Festergut we had our first wipe, but we downed him on the second attempt.

Rotface turned out to be too hard for us this time. With so many newcomers, healers not used to the fight, and a tank who hadn't done the kiting before, our tries quickly turned messy.

It was getting late, and we had four tries on Rotface before calling it and going to Naxxramas to do the weekly raid instead. With more practice, both for the kiting tank and for the rest handling the small oozes, and with stricter healing assignments, I have no doubt we will down Rotface as well next time.

It was a fun raid. I enjoyed leading it since the raid members were doing what they were supposed to, even though they've never done the fights before.

Next time, there will be a lot less explaining of tactics, and we will be able to steam roll the Lower Spire and get more time on the rest of the instance.

Thanks to the people who joined the fun and didn't make me look too bad :)

Icecrown Citadel: Festergut

Festergut ain't good-looking, that's true. In fact, if you'd make his voice just a little bit more annoying, he'd be like a skinnier version of Roseanne Barr.

Festergut is an orgy of farts and vomits. Blizzard really caters to its customer base: 5-year old boys in kindergarten with a poop fetish. I guess the rest of us just have to deal with it.

Stinky

Stinky is one mean doggy, and needs to be killed to access Festergut. He has the following abilities:

• Mortal Wound - a stacking debuff on the tank that reduces healing by 10% per stack. Tanks need to taunt off each other when the stacks get too high. The debuff stacks FAST.
• Decimate - reduces the entire raid's healthpools to very little. A decimate combined with high stacks of mortal wound is BAD for the tank.
• Plague Stench - raid wide aoe that just needs to be healed through.

First time we pulled this puppy, most of the raid was dead within seconds. Healers really need to be on their toes, especially right after a decimate.
When the dog is dead, move on to Festergut.

Festergut

Festergut is a dps race with a very tight enrage timer. On 25-man you'll need about 7.5k dps per dpser, and in 10-man about 5.5k dps. Tank healers will also have a stressful job.

Festergut will be tanked in the center of the room. Melee and a majority of the healers (especially the tank healers, since they should not be forced to move at all) should be standing on top of the boss. The rest of the raid spreads out around the boss. The people who are spread out need to be ready to collapse into groups when Festergut unleashes Gas Spores (more on that later). They cannot stand grouped up during the fight due to Vile Gas, which disables the target and deals damage to nearby allies. In addition to this, everybody in the raid needs to make sure to get three stacks of a shadow resistance buff that the Gas Spores spread.

Tanks need to switch tanking Festergut when stacks of Gastric Bloat get too high, and tanks will take lots of damage when Festergut has cast Inhale Blight three times.

Confused yet? Don't worry, it sounds worse than it is.


Gas Spores
Festergut farts Gas Spores on the raid (2 in 10-man, 3 in 25-man). After 12 seconds, the spore will explode and deal damage to everyone around the target. The thing is: YOU WANT PEOPLE TO GET HIT BY THIS. If you get hit by the damage from an exploding Gas Spore, you will get a shadow resistance buff, which you will need to survive later in the fight. Always make sure everybody gets hit by this.

Best way to handle this is to have two or three (10- or 25-man respectively) collapse points. One will be on the tank who is currently tanking the boss (since he will also need the resistance). The other(s) will be at range away from the melee group. During the fight, make sure that one spore explodes on the tank and melee, and the other(s) explode in the collapsing group(s).


Vile Gas
Festergut casts this on random targets. The target starts vomitting and deals damage to everybody around him. It lasts 6 seconds. During this time the target is disabled and also takes some damage (it can be broken by bubbling or using Every Man for Himself). Vile Gas is not cast on melee if there is at least 3 or 8 people (10- or 25-man respectively) standing at range.
This means that people standing at range must spread out during the fight, and only collapse into groups when Gas Spores are about to explode. It also means you cannot stack everybody on top of the boss.


Gastric Bloat
Festergut casts this on the current tank. It is a stacking debuff that increases damage done by 10% per stack. At 10 stacks, the target will explode and most likely wipe the raid. Tanks must switch at 9 stacks, they cannot switch earlier since the debuff lasts too long (it lasts 100 seconds, and each stack is applied about very 12 seconds).

Paladin tanks can bubble out of the debuff if they need to, but since it is a dps race, tanks most likely want to have the damage buff to help with killing the freak.

At 9 stacks, the other tank taunts, and the first tank turns into a dpser. That means turning off Righteous Fury, changing to Blood Presence, leaving Defensive Stance, or going kitty. The tank turned dps probably wants to get a Hand of Salvation, since threat might be a problem with a 90% damage increase.


Inhale Blight
Festergut inhales some of the gas in the room, to grow stronger. Everytime he does this, he starts doing 30% more damage. Inhale Blight stacks three times, which means that after the third Inhale Blight, Festergut deals 90% more damage than normally. At this point, it is wise for tanks and healers to use cooldowns to keep the tank up. After the third inhale, he vomits and goes back to normal strength.


Pungent Blight
When Festergut vomits, he deals a MASSIVE amount of shadow damage to the entire raid. This is why you need everybody to have 3 stacks of the shadow resistance debuff.


Gaseous Blight
The final thing to worry about is Gaseous Blight. It's a raid-wide damage done during the entire fight. Everytime Festergut inhales some of the blight, the damage is reduced. After vomitting, the damage is back to the starting damage.

This means that healers need to be aware of timers and abilities more than usual. When Festergut is hitting the tank with "normal" strength, the entire raid is taking higher damage from the gas. When Festergut is hitting the tank REAL hard, the entire raid is taking less damage from the gas. Make sure to have healers switching between tank and raid healing depending on the gas status.



Melee dps have the easiest job in this fight. They just stand behind the boss and nuke their skulls off. They might need to take a step forward when the spore is about to explode to make sure to get hit by it, but otherwise it's just pew-pew.

Ranged dps need to be aware of who got the spores and where they should collapse to when the spore explodes. This means moving, which a majority of ranged dps hate.

Healers will be very busy dealing with high tank damage as well as constant aoe damage to the entire raid.

Tanks need to ready with cooldowns at the third Inhale Blight, as well as be sure to make the switch at 9 stacks safe.

Icecrown Citadel: Rotface

Rotface ain't good-looking, that's true. In fact, if you'd throw on some plastic boobs on him, he'd look like a fat Amy Winehouse.
Nevertheless, he has a friend; A not-so-cute puppy called Precious. Obviously, the first thing your raid will do is kill that doggy.

Precious

Precious is a mini-boss that needs to be killed to access Rotface. He is a plague hound with some nasty abilities.

• Mortal Wound - a stacking debuff on the tank that reduces healing by 10% per stack. Tanks need to taunt off each other when the stacks get too high. The debuff stacks FAST.
• Decimate - reduces the entire raid's healthpools to very little. A decimate combined with high stacks of mortal wound is BAD for the tank.
• Awaken Plague Zombies - summons a big group of zombies in a circle around the doggy. This is where Holy Wrath and Concecration shines for a paladin.

When the mutt is dead, it's time to put that freak Amy... eh... Rotface out of his misery. Consider it a mercy killing.

Rotface

Short version of tactics: Tank boss in center of room. Kite big ooze around the room. Loot.

The challenge in this fight is handling the oozes that spawn. The small oozes spawn from raid members that have been infected my Mutated Infection, either after 12 seconds, or when they are cleansed. The oozes will stick to that person until it can merge with other oozes, creating Big Oozes. Big Oozes must be kited around the room, since they can one-shot even tanks. They also deal aoe damage, so the kiting path must be away from the rest of the raid.

When five oozes have merged, the Big Ooze will explode, dealing aoe damage and sending sprays of ooze around the room. The raid needs to move out of this to avoid damage.

This doesn't sound too hard, right? Well, the Mutated Infections are cast at an increasingly faster rate over the fight. Towards the end of the fight, there will be LOADS of small oozes that needs to be handled correctly.

Things to look out for:

• Mutated Infection - deals some damage and reduces healing received by 50%. After 12 seconds (or when the debuff is removed), a small ooze spawns.
• Ooze Flood - one quarter of the room will be filled with slime, which deals damage and reduces movement speed by 25%. Only the kiting tank should ever be in these.
• Slime Spray - Rotface rains slime in a cone in front of him. Deals quite a lot of damage, so the raid need to try to avoid being hit by this.
• Sticky Ooze - both the small and the big oozes can spit out sticky ooze in front of raid members. The sticky ooze deals damage and reduces movement speed by 50%. This is especially bad for the kiting tank to get stuck in. Avoid!
• Unstable Ooze Explosion - when the oozes have merged five times, the big ooze will explode. Run away!

Hints:

• The people who gets the Mutated Infection should run to the kiting tank, get cleansed, and make sure that the small ooze that spawns merges with the big ooze that is following the kiting tank before they run back to the raid.
• The main tank can use cooldowns to survive the Unstable Explosions, and thus does not have to move at all in the fight. The hardest thing for the main tank in this fight is avoiding falling asleep.
• If you get more than one Big Ooze (which is BAD), try to make them merge into a single one as fast as possible.

Using a paladin as the kiting tank has many advantages:

• Paladins can cleanse the Mutated Infection debuff. If the kiting tank handles all the cleansing, it can be controlled better.
• Paladins can build threat on the Big Ooze from a distance (Hand of Reckoning, Avenger's Shield, Exorcism, Judgement), and will thus not risk being one-shotted by the ooze.
• Paladins with Pursuit of Justice will run faster than other tanks, which makes kiting easier.
• Paladins can use Hand of Freedom if they get stuck in Ooze Floods or Sticky Ooze.
• Paladins are sexy and their pure awesomeness will make Oozes think twice before hurting them. And if they do hurt them, paladins have Ardent Defender.

If you get the job to tank the boss, prepare for a snooze fest. If you get the job to kite the oozes, prepare for some serious stress.

The kiting tank's job depends on how raid members move when they get the Mutated Infection. No tank in the world can save the raid if people run too late or to the wrong place or get cleansed at the wrong time or decide to hug the big ooze or hug other small oozes with their own small ooze. Not even paladin tanks can Taunt Stupid or Cleanse Retard. Maybe in Cataclysm, though.

Icecrown Citadel: The Lower Spire Part II

Due to a nice long Christmas vacation, I've fallen way behind in my write-up on Icecrown Citadel. The next wing is already open, and I will of course write about that one in a later post.

But first, I have to finish writing about the first wing.

After killing the skinny tart Lady Deathwhisper, the raid jumps onto an elevator and takes a short trip to the lower part of the roof of Artha's little house. Up on the roof, Horde and Alliance are fighting over who has the coolest ride; The Skybreaker or Orgrim's Hammer. As all guys know, discussions regarding rides can only be solved in two ways: a) Bash eachother's brains in, or b) compete in a race. And that's what the third encounter in Icecrown Citadel is all about.

Bash in some Horde skulls (if you're Alliance, otherwise that would be bad) and make a run for the Alliance ship: The Skybreaker. Now it's a race to the top, and all dirty tricks are allowed.

Gunship Battle

When taking a ride in The Skybreaker, you are putting your lives in the hands of grumpy drunken dwarves. If that wasn't bad enough, the orcs onboard Orgrim's Hammer has decided to make the trip even more interesting.

This fight is the Chess event (remember Karazhan?) of Icecrown Citadel. It's pretty hard to fail, except when the encounter bugs out horribly.

Before starting the event by talking to Muradin, make sure everybody has had a chat with the dude next to him so that everyone has a rocket pack equipped. With this rocket pack, a player can fly between the two ships, and this is needed to beat the encounter.

The raid is divided into three groups: Defenders, Gunners, and a Boarding party.

The Defenders' jobs are quite simple: Kill everyone within range. The enemy is trying to board your ship every now and then, and these attackers need to be tanked and killed. Whenever there's no attackers, this team should help out killing things in the enemy ship. Therefore, ranged dps is best suited for the Defenders team, since they can attack both the enemy's boarding party as well as the axe throwers on the enemy ship.

Gunners use cannons to damage the enemy ship until it breaks down. They need to avoid overheating the cannons, and whenever the cannons are frozen by the enemy battle mage, they leave their cannons and help the boarding party kill the battle mage. Gunners could be either melee or ranged dps.

The boarding party jumps over to the enemy ship either to just kill off the battle mage who is freezing the friendly cannons, or to kill off rocketeers and axe throwers as well.

A tank should always jump on to the enemy ship first, and leave it last, since the enemy commander (Saurfang in Horde's case) will engage any unfriendly visitor to do some serious hurt. The tank should stack avoidance, since Saurfang gains a stacking buff everytime he hits something which increases his damage done. If the buff reaches 20 stacks, the tank will most likely be one-shotted. The buff resets after Saurfang hasn't hit anything for 20 seconds.

This means that the boarding party cannot stay too long at the enemy ship before they have to retreat and let Saurfang's buff reset. Make sure not to leave pets or totems on the enemy ship when retreating, since this will prolong the reset time of his buff.

The main purpose of the boarding party is to kill the battle mage as fast as possible, so that your gunners can start using their cannons again.

Things to look out for:

• All mobs gain experience and get stronger the longer they live. It's important to kill off all mobs as fast as possible to reduce the damage they will deal. Make sure to prioritize killing order based on how experienced the mobs are.
  
• Battle Fury - this is the stacking damage buff that the enemy commander gets. Make sure that it doesn't stack too high, because then the tank in the boarding party will die.
• Below Zero - this is when the enemy battle mage freezes your cannons. The battle mage needs to be killed as soon as possible, so that your gunners can continue damaging the enemy ship.
• Rocket Artillery - the enemies are bombarding your ship with rockets. Big runes on the deck will show you where the rockets will land. Try to avoid these, since they hurt. The more experiences the rocketeer that fires the rocket is, the more damage the rocket does.
• Sergeants - these are the most dangerous members of the enemy boarding party. They whirlwind and does mortal strike. Make sure these guys don't get too experienced, or the defending tank will most likely die.

Our first experience: This encounter was seriously bugged the first week. After winning the battle, our ship never docked, and since our master looter had died on the enemy ship, he couldn't be ressed and we couldn't distribute the loot. Since this seemed to happen to a lot of raiders, I guess Blizzard had a busy time handling tickets regarding loot distribution from the gunship battle the first week.

To minimize the risk of the tank in the boarding party dying, you can keep the boarding party on your own ship until the battle mage appears. Then move the entire party over to the ship, kill the battle mage and the most experienced rocketeers, and jump back before the damage to the tank gets too high.

Alot of people seem to think this encounter is the shizzle. Personally, I think it's a bit annoying. It's hard to fail, and it just takes long to execute.

When the fight is over, your triumphant ship docks and the next boss is waiting for you.

Deathbringer Saurfang

We all knew death knights were overpowered, but this guy is taking on 25 opponents without flinching. And like any other death knight, he's cheating by healing himself whenever he does damage. Nerf death knights, I say!

The key to this fight is to limit the damage he and his adds deals to the raid, since the damage done heals him. One way is to try to shorten the fight time by making one or two of your healers respec dps to kill him faster. Healing in this fight is easy at first, but gets real nasty the longer the fight lasts.

Two tanks are needed, since Saurfang will put Rune of Blood on his current target, which heals him for 10 times the damage he deals. That's when the other tank taunts and keeps the orc's interest until he gets the Rune and it's time for a new swap.

Tanks should wear avoidance gear, since Saurfang gains 1 Blood Power everytime he hits the tank. When he reaches 100 Blood Power, he casts Mark of the Fallen Champion on someone in the raid, and that's when it gets exciting for the healers.

The hardest part of the fight is probably controlling the Blood Beasts that he summons. These nasty buggers need to be kited and killed as soon as possible. If they hit someone, Saurfang gains Blood Power, which is bad, thus the job of kiting and killing falls on ranged dps. The beasts can (and should) be slowed as much as possible.

Things to look out for:

• Mark of the Fallen Champion - the people who get this will take lots of damage, and will heal Saurfang for 5% of his health when they die. In addition, when marks are up, Saurfang gains Blood Power more frequently. You have a choice here: Keep one healer spamming the people with the mark, or just let them die. On 25-man, letting them die is usually the most efficient choice. On 10-man, it's not recommended.
• Rune of Blood - make sure to tank switch as soon as this is up, since it heals him considerably.
• Call Blood Beasts - melee dps (this includes the tanks) need to stop ALL aoe damage when the beasts spawn, so that the kiters have a chance to get aggro on them. If one of the melee gets aggro, he needs to run away to avoid getting hit.

Our first experience: We wiped on Saurfang until we learned how to handle the Blood Beasts. When we had those under control, the fight was no longer a problem.

My next Icecrown post will be about those handsome fellas Festergut and Rotface.