The Divine Shield

The State..... two weeks later

2010-10-29T09:53:00.004+02:00

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

2010-10-13T10:57:00.002+02:00

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!

2010-05-17T10:55:00.003+02:00

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

2010-04-15T09:11:00.005+02:00

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

2010-04-15T09:07:00.002+02:00

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

2010-04-13T12:03:00.004+02:00

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

2010-04-08T14:44:00.004+02:00

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!

2010-04-04T23:05:00.004+02:00

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

2010-03-26T14:30:00.002+01:00

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

2010-03-17T21:29:00.003+01:00

The Lich King is dead.

Alive and Kicking

2010-03-15T11:46:00.004+01:00

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'

2010-02-18T14:37:00.004+01:00

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

2010-02-05T09:16:00.003+01:00

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

2010-02-03T09:35:00.003+01:00

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

2010-01-27T10:09:00.005+01:00

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

2010-01-22T10:05:00.003+01:00

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

2010-01-12T09:18:00.005+01:00

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.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T13:07:00.001+01:00

Merry Christmas everyone!
I hope you all enjoy the Holidays.

Icecrown Citadel: The Lower Spire Part I

2009-12-18T09:29:00.007+01:00

It was finally time to enter Icecrown Citadel, the Lich King's cosy little home. During our visit, we will meet some of the King's friendly house mates, but instead of shaking their hands and small talk about the weather and the financial crisis, we will bash their heads in and rob them of shiny purples. That's the price you have to pay when you chose to hang out with the wrong people.

The first thing everybody does when zoning in is probably to run around and check the Ashen Verdict quartermaster and the armor vendor of your class. Or maybe you are one of those who prefer to /dance with Tirion Fordring while waiting for the rest of the raid to show up.

You can see the first boss of the instance, Lord Marrowgar, all the way from the entrance, but there are some trash to handle before you reach him.

Most of this trash can be aoed down. Things to look out for is that the skeleton casters should be faced away from the raid since they cast an ice spike spell that hits everybody in its way. The big insect mobs web wraps people, which can be annoying. And a couple of BIG skeletons will wake up when people step on hidden traps on the floor. Those big guys need to be tanked faced away from the raid, since they have a nasty cleave. They also have an aoe spell interrupt that especially healers need to be aware of.

It's pretty likely that raids will wipe on this trash once or twice the first time they enter the instance. Don't despair. It's the hardest trash in the entire wing.

Lord Marrowgar

Lord Marrowgar is the first boss in Icecrown Citadel. He's a big boney guy who likes to take a spin on the dance floor. He also impales people.

This is a pretty easy fight. The general rules of raiding apply: Don't stand in fire, don't stand close to a mob that is whirlwinding, and free people who are impaled. We have all done this kind of fight before.

Things to look out for:

Bone Storm - this is his whirlwind. When he starts whirlwinding, just run away to make the healers' job easier.
Bone Spike Graveyard - impales people, and damage them for 10% of their health every second for 5 seconds or until the bone spike is killed. Make sure to kill these spikes as soon as possible.
Coldflame - a line of fire on the floor. Move out of it, please.
Saber lash - stack the tanks on top of eachother to split the damage of this attack, because it hurts.

Our first experience: It took some time to get the tanks coordinated, and we had a couple of tank deaths due to this. The first week, Marrowgar wasn't tauntable, so a few eager dps got killed as well. When tanks are coordinated, the bone spikes killed fast, and people don't stand in fires, this fight is cake.

Lady Deathwhisper

The second boss in The Lower Spire is Lady Deathwhisper. She has several male admirers who will spawn in the first phase of the fight, when your raid is trying to break down her defenses.

The challenge in this fight is to control the adds. In the first phase she is protected by a mana shield that would make any mage green of envy. This shield needs to be burned down. Seven adds will spawn and needs to be taken care of. During the fight, they might change form, to be more powerful, and also immune to either physical or magical damage. As a tank, make sure to pick up the fanatics before they kill a healer.

Things to look out for in phase 1:

Death and Decay - it's green and it's big. Don't stand in it.
Dominate Mind - she mind controls raid members. Make sure to CC them before they kill a healer.
Empowered Adherents do aoe damage and should be killed fast.
Deformed Fanatics hurt a lot and should be kited. Do not try to tank these guys.

When her mana shield is destroyed, phase 2 starts.

Things to look out for in phase 2:

Frostbolt - hurts a lot and needs to be interrupted.
Vengeful Shades - adds that hunt a player. If the player is reached, the shade will explode and do loads of aoe damage.
Touch of Insignificance - stacking debuff that reduces threat generation by 20% per stack. Due to this, two tanks need to switch tanking her when the stacks are starting to hurt the current tank's threat.

Our first experience: We wiped many times on this encounter since we didn't handle the adds well enough at the same time as burning down her shield. We hit the enrage timer a couple of times. The tanks (we use three tanks) have their jobs cut out for them, picking up the seven adds before they do damage to the raid. The dps need to be on their top game as well, since the longer it takes to kill the adds, the shorter time is spent on burning down the shield. Also, the longer the adds live, the bigger chance that they will be empowered or deformed.

There are two more encounters in The Lower Spire. I'll get to them in my next post.

Patch 3.3: First Impressions

2009-12-10T11:33:00.003+01:00

I was prepared for the worst after hearing stories about crashing servers and immense latencies, but my patch day experience was only spoiled by one disconnect, and I wasn't lagging at all.

The first thing I did was to respec. I moved my three "filler points" in the prot tree from Reckoning and put them in Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian. Otherwise my spec stays the same as before.

I managed to do my cooking daily before someone in the guild needed a tank for the new heroics. I hadn't read much about the instances, and didn't know much more than that they were three and that we were supposed to run behind Jaina's skinny behind most of the time. Even though we had a full group, we used the Dungeon Finder feature to be teleported to the instance.

Even though I love the efficiency of being teleported straight to any instance, it kind of takes away the feeling of being part of a "big" world. When you had to fly to every instance, it gave you a feeling that you actually had to travel a distance from your safe haven to get to the place where the vile monsters rip brave adventurers to small pieces. Now you can spend all your time in Dalaran, just waiting for a teleport to the other side of the world (literally), and when you are done, you will be safe back at the inn, with a barmaid willing to please just within arm's reach.

Why would I want a fancy flying mount if I won't be travelling anywhere?

Anyhow, we got the the first instance, went inside, and started pulling. After a couple of groups, I realized that the healer had been AFK since we zoned in, so I took a break and drank some mana tea. Beware of the OOM monster when you tank these instances!

As soon as the healer came back, I pulled a new group, and we wiped. It was a bit surprising to be honest, but shit does happen. After that, we burned through all three instances up to the Lich King himself.

Spoiler alert: The Lich King fight consists of the entire group running away like little girls.

On the last ice wall, I managed to lose our healer to a stray mob, and after that, the Lich King caught up with me and killed me. The rest of the group ran away to safety, and got their heroic achievements, while me and the healer got nada. So I guess I have to run the last instance again just for the achievement...

Even though I didn't lag or disconnect much, there was a VERY annoying thing that screwed up my tanking: All mobs wanted to run through me and fight me from behind. It didn't matter how I pulled, the same thing happened all the time. So I had to constantly move around while tanking, which my rogue and ret pally companions didn't enjoy much. I really hope this is a bug, because it made tanking alot harder and very annoying. I can't even imagine how nasty tanking Anub'arak's adds on heroic will be if they keep running through you and attack you from behind...

After the heroics, I went to the new 25-man raid. I'll get back to that one in a later post.

So far, I'm impressed with the patch. The new dungeons are cool (at least the first time you run them), the Dungeon Finder tool seems nice, and the new raid instance is sexy. My first impression of the patch is that it's much better than the disappointing 3.2 patch. But it's only been one day, so I'll probably soon find something to complain about...

Weekly Raid Rant

2009-12-07T08:54:00.003+01:00

Welcome to the Weekly Raid Rant. In this edition, we will look at the raids that my restoration shaman participated in this week.

First off was a PUG trip to Vault of Archavon (25). The good thing was that we one-shotted all the bosses in there. The bad thing was that Koralon only dropped hunter loot, and we didn't bring any hunters. As usual, nobody needed anything from Archavon.

Blizzard really need to split this raid instance into three (or four, after the next patch) individual instances. The people who are geared enough to down Koralon don't need anything from Archavon, and the people who need loot from Archavon don't have good enough gear to down Koralon. This will get even worse when Blizzard adds the fourth boss in here. It's insane to have a raid instance with bosses from four different Tier levels. It's almost like putting Yogg-Saron, Anub'arak, and Arthas in Naxxramas, next to Kel'Thuzad...

The next raid for my brave healer was Trial of the Crusader (25) with the guild's second group. This group consists of alts and players who are not picked in our "main" raid group. For the second week in a row, this group failed to kill Anub'arak. Yes, you read it right: A guild ToC run that fails to kill Anub'arak two weeks in a row.

People played like morons. Not enough dps on snobolds, mistresses, fel infernals, burrowers, scarabs, and valkyrs' shields. No cc or interrupts on Faction Champions. By shear brute force (thanks to several people actually out-gearing the place) we reached Anub'arak with only one wipe. We survived TWO missed stuns on Icehowl, several people getting killed by infernals on Jaraxxus, and a 15 minute long Faction Champions fight. The wipe came at Twin Valkyrs when they managed to heal themselves twice, and we hit the enrage timer.

I've noticed that people are getting sloppier every week when we raid in this group. Instead of improving from doing the fights over and over, people instead start making stupid mistakes and taking stupid risks. As a healer, the only thing you can do is heal your brains out and scream out in agony.

When the raid was called after just one wipe on Anub'arak (since it was obvious it wasn't worth continuing) I needed to use all that adrenaline I pumped into my system, so I went into a PUG Onyxia (25).

This PUG had all a normal Onyxia PUG has: An arms warrior doing 600 dps. A feral druid doing barely 1k dps. Mages that die immediately when the whelps come. Melee that don't run out of fire novas. And two holy paladins that healed LESS than the paladin tank did with his Judgement of Light. After a wipe, we downed the dragon on the second attempt. I ended up doing more than 30% of the total healing in the raid.

The worst healers in PUGs always seem to be paladins these days. Way too often I see paladin healers only spamming Flash of Light and not using Beacon of Light. They end up dead last on the healing meter, even when they are tank healing, and they always do less than 2k hps. Of course there are good paladin healers out there, and they usually blow the other healers away when using their spells in the right way, but they, sadly, seem to be the minority. At least in the PUGs I end up in.

Well, that's the end of this edition of the Weekly Raid Rant. I'm crossing my fingers for a patch release this week. I need new content to rant about.

Video of Anub Heroic Kill

2009-11-24T14:17:00.002+01:00

To add some flair to my otherwise colorless blog, I'm posting the video of our Mad Skill kill of Anub (10-man). It was made by our mage Fjrebqll, who incidentally was not drunk that fight (but I'm sure he was when he made his character's name up).

/salute Fj
I hope you enjoy yourself in your new guild.

Chilly Winds and Pilgrim's Flu

2009-11-23T09:18:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patch 3.3 Badge Tanking Gear

2009-11-16T09:53:00.004+01:00

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

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

This is what we can look forward to:

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

Gauntlets of the Kraken - straight-forward tanking gloves.

Verdigris Chain Belt - straight-forward tanking belt.

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

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

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

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

Another Dead Bug

2009-11-08T01:11:00.003+01:00

At least we are improving :)

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

Dead bug = sweet

2009-11-01T00:37:00.004+01:00

Sweet kill.

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

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

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

It felt good.

Patch 3.3 nerf batch 1

2009-10-28T08:58:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the reason for this nerf?

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

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

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

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

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

Giants Dancing on my Brain

2009-10-26T09:13:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True story.

The Beasts Are Down

2009-10-19T09:12:00.002+02:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did 3.2 Kill Serious Raiding?

2009-10-13T08:58:00.005+02:00

Now you probably wonder what in the world I'm talking about. Why would a content patch like 3.2 kill serious raiding? We've gotten even more raid instances to raid! Have I lost my mind?

Well, for our guild, the 3.2 patch killed serious raiding. With "serious raiding" I mean several raid nights a week spent on hard content, many wipes, high repair costs, grinding teeth, and adrenaline pumping.

Since Trial of the Crusader was introduced, our guild can't seem to get enough sign-ups for Ulduar. This is a shame, since we have so much left undone in there. We have several hard modes left, and thus we are very very far off from even seeing Algalon.

It's understandable that people aren't interested in wiping in Ulduar when they can easily farm Trial of the Crusader for shinier epics.

OK. So all this QQ about lack of serious raiding must mean that we have Trial of the Grand Crusader on farm as well, right? Well, no. We are still stuck on Northrend Beasts in TotGC-25. We always seem to lack the dps to kill off the last worm before Icehowl enters the arena. The reasons for lacking dps are two: Gear and people dying when they shouldn't.

So to increase our chances to progress we farm. On Wednesdays we do Onyxia-25, VoA-25, and TotC-25. That usually takes about 1.5 hour. After that we try TotGC-25 for a couple of hours. This means that the guild's entire 25-man raiding takes place in one night.

Later in the week the guild has several TotC-10 runs, and a couple of TotGC-10 runs. Farm. Farm. Farm. We actually farm 10-man content to be able to progress in 25-man content. Is it just me who thinks that is a bit awkward?

In a normal week, I do TotC-25, TotC-10, TotGC-10, and some tries on TotGC-25 on my paladin. I also do TotC-10 and TotC-25 on my shaman. Just guess how tired I am of farming that frigging coliseum? I'm killing the same stinking bosses five times a week! And they fall over easier than a twenty-dollar hooker.

Some people seem to be content with this. Farming easy instances to get shiny epics? What's not to like? Getting big upgrades to your gear without the risk of dying? Sweet!

And while people roll around in the purples from Coliseum, Ulduar is empty and unfinished.

Looking forward, at least Icecrown Citadel is more than one room.....

Busy Weekend

2009-10-05T09:21:00.004+02:00

After being away for a week, I had some catching up to do!

On Friday I did a 25-man VoA raid with my resto shaman, which gained him the T9 elemental pants and the T8 resto gloves (so that I now have that imba 4pc T8 bonus). The raid leader was a completely clueless and undergeared tank, but the raid went smooth thanks to a couple of good healers and some very good dpsers.

A group of friends put together a 10-man Trial of the Grand Crusader raid just for fun on Saturday. It went better than expected. We only wiped once (an annoying 1% wipe at Twin Valkyr) before engaging Anub'Arak.

I must say, the difference in difficulty between heroic 10-man and heroic 25-man is staggering. Most of us is wearing several pieces of 25-man gear, which of course makes it easier, but still...

We totally screwed up on the first Twins attempt, and still got them down to 1%. I was the last man standing, dpsing them both with everything I got, and sadly with Lay on Hands on cooldown (I had to use it earlier in the fight when my healer died due to getting hit by orbs). The cheering on vent was hilarious, especially when Ardent Defender ressed me and I kept hitting them ladies with my sword until the bitter (second) end.

Anub'Arak, on the other hand, was a hard nut to crack. We did 11 attempts on him before calling it since it was getting late. We got to phase 3 several times (best attempt 26%), but we seemed to lose people too often in phase 2, which made phase 3 very hard.

On Sunday I brought my resto shaman to the guild's second 25-man Trial of the Crusader raid. Since the nerf to Faction Champions, these raids now run smooth and with few deaths. Afterwards, we went to Onyxia and downed her as well. I have now done Onyxia both on 10-man and 25-man on my shaman, but I still haven't done any Onyxia raid on my paladin (you will get your chance Arnax, don't worry).

My wife got the retribution paladin helm from Onyxia, only days after spending 75 Emblems of Triumph on the badges helm. I can understand her frustration :)

We had an Ulduar hardmode raid scheduled for Sunday evening, but it was cancelled due to lack of signups.

I'm spending a lot of my game time on my shaman these days. Healing on my shaman is a lot more fun than healing on my paladin ever was (Arnax can feel safe with his prot/ret dual spec, since I don't see him ever doing any healing). Arnax is still my main, and I always bring him out for the serious stuff. I have loads of reputation and quest grinding left to do on him, but I'm the kind of person who needs variety in the game, and switching from tank to healer (or dps) in raids is a good way to keep the game feeling fresh.

But don't worry. This will not turn into a shaman blog....

Back at the Keyboard

2009-10-02T12:11:00.003+02:00

I'm back after spending a week in the deep dark forests of Finland, where I attended a training course for Software Architects.

In my absence, my guild has accomplished the following:

Forged the guild's first legendary mace (congratulations, Diabbix!)
Downed Onyxia in an official guild run
Cleared Trial of the Crusader with TWO guild runs

It's great that our guild can manage to run with two groups in Trial of the Crusader, since it means more of us can get to experience the fights, and get the nice loot.

It's too bad that I couldn't be there when Diabbix got his mace, but that's life. Getting the legendary mace is a nice guild achievement, and we have a couple of priests with fragments in their bags, waiting for their turn. But signups for Ulduar has waned significantly lately, so it might be hard to accomplish.

Well, time to log on. I have to catch up on some of the dailies....

The Wondrous World of PUGs

2009-09-16T09:16:00.003+02:00

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

2009-09-11T14:44:00.004+02:00

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

2009-09-10T09:04:00.003+02:00

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

2009-09-07T08:50:00.002+02:00

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.

My WoW History

2009-08-31T09:06:00.002+02:00

Since we are coming up to the five year anniversary of WoW, I decided to recap my own history in the game.

I entered the World of Warcraft about a month after its release. My first character was a dwarf paladin named Thorwald. I was attracted to the idea of a holy warrior that was wearing heavy armor, a two-handed weapon, and used a combination of magic and brute force to kill monsters. Thorwald was deleted when he reached mid-30s, since I got bored with the combat system (buff yourself, autoattack, and watch mobs die at random speed). I then tried out an undead rogue for 35ish levels, and then a human mage. That mage eventually became my second character to reach 70, and is now, at level 71, working as my bank character / enchanter.

I have played every class in the game to at least level 55. The only classes that never made it to 70 were warrior, druid, and priest.

I didn't start raiding until I was 70. My first raid instance ever was Karazhan, and my first raiding character was a holy paladin named Isolde. Isolde had been around for a long time by then. After deleting my dwarf paladin, I realized that I still wanted one of those holy warriors, so I created a human paladin and levelled her as a holy/ret hybrid. She was my first character to reach both 60 and 70. These days she is stuck at 71, still dressed in her BT/MH epics, sitting at the inn in Valiance Keep.

I raided SSC, TK, MH, and BT on my holy paladin until I got bored with the paladin healing style. I then switched my main raiding character to my elemental shaman and spent some time spamming lightning bolts at stuff in raids.

At this time, I felt the guild needed another tank, and thus Arnax was born. I levelled him as protection from day 1. I still remember the mid-30s when I finally got Reckoning, which made AoE grinding alot faster. "Need to kill X boars? Sure, just round them up and hack away!". Switching between Seal of light and Seal of wisdom to keep them bars topped off while being attacked by a plethora of mobs was fun.

I tanked my way through all the TBC raids up until Council in BT when The Patch was released, which made it easier for everyone to finish off those pesky final bosses. Thus I never tanked Illidan before 3.0, and I always brought my shaman to Archimonde for an extra tremor totem until 3.0 hit us.

Arnax is now my main, and is the character I bring to progression raids. I have a rogue alt who I bring to our second raid group (Ulduar and Coliseum) and a death knight alt who I help out in Naxx with. My shaman has raided Naxx and Ulduar, but is now in the ice box.

I have deleted all my other alts, mostly to remove the temptation to level them as well. But I have found that the experience of having played almost all of the classes up to 70 has served me well. I know what to expect from other classes, and I know their strengths and weaknesses. Actually, the only specs I have absolutely no clue about are balance druids and shadow priests.

The only class that I have stuck by with through all these years is the paladin. My current main paladin was not my first, but my third paladin created. It just took some time for me to figure out which spec I enjoyed the most (I play a horde retribution paladin as well).

It's been a fun five years. The last three years my wife has played the game as well, which has made it even more fun. The time I have spent with the guild Guardians of Destiny has been great, and I thank them for letting me raid with them, and letting me switch roles from healer to dps to tank in our progression raids.

With Icecrown Citadel at the horizon, and Cataclysm later on, the future of WoW looks promising. I hope to enjoy it as long as it lasts.

Twin Val'kyr

2009-08-27T08:49:00.003+02:00

The fourth boss encounter in Trial of the Crusader is the Twin Val'kyr (a.k.a. The Twin Loot Piñatas). Even though the strategy for this fight seems very complicated, the execution is simple, and the encounter itself turned out to be the easiest so far.

Is it just me, or isn't a raid instance tuned badly when every new encounter is one- or two-shotted? Aren't we supposed to be wiping for hours to learn a new boss and than feel the rush of adrenaline and satisfaction when it's downed? Coliseum is nowhere near that. People can slack on learning tactics, slack on execution, do stupid mistakes, and we STILL down the bosses.

The Faction Champions were tough the first week, until people managed to change their mindset from PvE to PvP. This week it was a two-shot, and on the second attempt we barely had any deaths at all.

Anyway, let's return the focus to the Twin Val'kyr. As I mentioned above, the tactics seem a lot more complicated than they are.

There are two mobs: Edyis Darkbane and Fjola Lightbane. They share a health pool, so it doesn't really matter how you split your dps, but to split it about half on each is best, due to the nature of the encounter.

There are four portals in the room, two black and two white. When you click on them, you get a black or white buff. When you have the white buff, you take less "white" damage, and you do more damage to the black val'kyr. When you have the black buff, you take less "black" damage, and you do more damage to the white val'kyr. Split the raid, so that half gets the white buff and the other half gets the black buff. Target the corresponding mob and start the fight.

(Note: Darkbane is doing shadow damage, while Lightbane is doing fire damage. Fire resistance aura and Shadow protection are good buffs.)

Things to look out for:

Black and white orbs spawn in the room. People having the white buff will get an extra stacking damage buff if they absorb a white orb, and take some minor damage if they absorb a black orb, and vice versa. If the orbs reach the boss, they will also get the stacking damage buff, so that should be avoided if possible.
Light/Dark Vortex is a nasty AoE damage ability that does significant "white"/"black" damage to the entire raid if people are not having the right buff up. To avoid damage, everybody must make sure to have the right buff (i.e. the white buff if it is a Light Vortex). The spell has an 8 second cast time, so you have plenty of time to get to the nearest portal and get the correct buff in time.
Twin's Pact is a powerful heal that needs to be interrupted. The val'kyr that is casting this heal is shielded by a 250k shield. The cast time for the heal is 15 seconds, so that's how much time you have to burn through the shield and interrupt the heal. To be able to burn trough the shield in time, everybody has to switch buff to the opposite of the target (i.e. switch to the white buff forEdyis Darkbane). After the heal is interrupted, everybody should return to their assigned buff and target.

A random Vortex or Twin's Pact spell is cast every 45 seconds and is announced well in advance.

We tanked the two val'kyrs close to eachother between two portals. That way the melee didn't have to move so much when switching targets during Twin's Pacts and everybody was in range of healers at all times. Everybody is also close enough to both types of portals so that they quickly can switch buff before a Light or Dark Vortex.

As a tank, this fight is a faceroll. Get the right buff, and your threat will be insane if you get some stacks of the damage buff (by absorbing orbs). Switch to the safe buff before a Vortex, and then switch back to the assigned one as soon as possible afterwards. Damage is negligible. The val'kyrs have special attacks that are supposed to hurt the tank, but I didn't even notice them.

We wiped once due to the raid leader announcing the wrong thing to do before a vortex, which caused confusion and resulted in half the raid dying. The second attempt was a clean kill without any deaths.

It will be very interesting to see how Blizzard tunes the heroic version of this raid instance. The normal mode is just too easy.

Faction Champions

2009-08-20T08:43:00.003+02:00

Did you enjoy the Priestess Delrissa encounter in Magister's Terrace? Then you will absolutely love Faction Champions in the Coliseum.

The encounter is set up as a PvP-like fight against ten random mobs, all having about the same abilities as you might be used to facing in PvP.

There is not much tactics to talk about in this fight. It's more about fast reactions and controlling the mobs as much as possible. Crowd control can be used for some time, but the diminishing returns are ridiculous and the mobs will be immune quite fast (of course their crowd controls have no diminishing returns at all....). Basic advice is to control the melee, interrupt the casters, cleanse/dispel/purge, and burn down the healers as fast as possible.

This is by far the hardest fight so far in the Coliseum. We actually spent an hour wiping before we got the hang of the fight. Our kill order was holy priest, shammy, resto druid, mage, shadow priest, warrior, hunter, death knight, ret paladin, and rogue. We had a death knight kiting the rogue the entire fight, which helped a lot. Our druids were entangling the melee as much as possible, our priests were dispelling shields, our interrupters were interrupting heals, our hunters slowed mobs with traps and killed off totems as soon as possible, and so on. Everybody in the raid has an important task, and it was most likely not the task they usually perform in a raid encounter.

As a tank, I initially felt like a fish out of water. I tried the first couple of attempts as retribution, but realized I did little use actually dpsing. I spent most of my time cleansing and stunning. So I respecced back to protection and figured out my role in the fight:

Cleanse. There are massive debuffs being thrown around in this fight. Cleansing all kinds of crowd control on my fellow raid members and the worst of the DoTs is very important for survival.
Interrupt/stun/silence. With a 40 second cooldown on my Hammer of Justice, I couldn't interrupt as well as other classes, but the stun effect (until immune) was very useful. The silence effect on Avenger's Shield also turned out to be very useful.
Blessing of Protection. Clothies love me.
Taunt. Even though there is no "real" aggro table, it is possible to taunt the melee classes. This saved our clothies more than once. When I saw one of the melee go for the healers or casters, I taunted the mob and got his attention for a few seconds, thus saving the cloth-wearing target from certain death.

I performed all of these tasks better as protection. I could keep my mana up longer with Divine Plea plus autottack on random target, I could survive a melee class hitting on me after a taunt. I had a shorter duration on my HoJ. I had my frisbee. And I had twice as much health.

The PvPers in the raid loved the encounter. Some of the non-PvPers were complaining a bit about Blizzard putting a PvP fight in a PvE raid. It was noticable that it took some time for people to get used to the fight. It is not a fight you can plan in advance and execute according to that plan. This fight requires fast reactions, ability to improvise and adapt, and for each player to know how to best use his class in a PvP-like encounter.

After the kill we went to Ulduar, where Flame Leviathan finally, after 17 kills, dropped Titanguard for the first time.

Patch 3.2.2 Changes

2009-08-17T10:03:00.002+02:00

Yet again, I'm getting the news late. Taking the weekend off made me miss the announced changes in patch 3.2.2. Anyway, here they are:

Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%. [Straight-forward nerf to tankadin threat. Maybe we should have seen this coming, with the recent buffs and all. Even though I don't enjoy being forced to pump out less threat, I think this is a good change in the long run. Blizzard has had problems with scaling tankadin dps since our threat modifier was so big. I'd prefer to get threat from pure dps than from a modifier that won't help me actually kill stuff.]

Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds. [PvE nerf due to PvP. Ever heard that one before? Apparently, a stun on a 20 second cooldown was too good to be true in PvP, even though it was barely useful as an interrupt in PvE. For me, this is the final nail in the coffin for Hammer of Justice as a tankadin ability. I didn't put points into the Improved Hammer of Justice talent since I believed the cooldown was still too long, and now Blizzard has made it even worse. Just face it: They don't want us to be able to interrupt.]

Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina. [Another PvP nerf. Protection specced healing paladins decked out in spell power plate in Arena was the latest Flavor of the Month, and Blizzard decided to crush that spec hard and fast. With the nerf to Judgement of the Just AND Touched by the Light, that spec is now dead. For the normal tankadin, it is a small threat nerf, since we still have more than twice as much stamina than strength. But the change still makes sense. Stamina shouldn't be a threat stat, and Strength now got even better as a threat stat. In the long run, I think this also is a good change.]

Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack. [Seal of Cleave! Yes, sounds good! Since Seal of Vengeance sucks rhino balls on trash, this will make up for it. However, Seal switching is quite expensive these days. Having to switch seals between trash, bosses, and AoE packs will drain one's mana. Just imagine the Onyxia fight, when switching between the Broodmother and her whelps. That would require a seal switch every time.]

Patch 3.2.2 is already up on the PTR, so adjustments to these changes will surely pop up during the coming weeks. Even though the changes so far are nerfs to tankadins, I don't cry myself to sleep at night.

Lord Jaraxxus

2009-08-13T09:03:00.005+02:00

Lord Jaraxxus is the second boss in Trial of the Crusader. We found him to be easier than the first, three-phased boss encounter; Northrend Beasts.

There is a lot of damage going around in the raid, especially if the raid members don't move out of the fires, if the adds are not killed fast, and the boss's abilities are not interrupted, dispelled, or spell stolen. But seriously, all those tricks are Raiding 101 anyways.

We used two tanks: one tanking Jaraxxus in the center of the room, and one (yours truly) taking care of the adds that spawned.

The raid should be spread out in a circle around him, since he casts a chain lightning-like spell called Fel lightning which will chain to up to five targets.
Spreading out also helps against the Legion flames, a debuff that makes the target burn and leave a trail of flames behind when moving. If you move, make sure to move straight away from the boss, so that as few people as possible are affected by the fire trail.
Incinerate Flesh is another thing to look out for. Its target will have to be healed for 70,000 within 15 seconds, or he will explode.
Jaraxxus casts a Fel fireball on the tank, which needs to be interrupted since it deals a silly amount of damage. Make sure to have assigned interrupters!
Nether Power is a buff that Jaraxxus gains which increases spell damage dealt by 20%. This buff should of course be spell stolen by mages, since it stacks up to 10 times. If you have no mages around, make your priests dispel it at least.

The add tanks job is to pick up the adds that spawns. There are two different types of adds:

The Mistress of Pain spawns from a portal and should be nuked down as fast as possible by ALL dps, except those on interrupt duty. The Mistress hits quite hard and will also attack a random target with Spinning Pain Spike that deals 10-15k damage.
Infernals spawns from volcanos. A volcano spawns 3-4 infernals at the same time, so the adds tank needs to be quick and mobile to pick them up. They do nasty AoE damage and needs to be tanked away from the raid. It's not very easy to make them move with you, since they randomly target other players before returning to the tank. All ranged dps need to burn down these adds as soon as possible to avoid unecessary raid damage.

As the adds tank, I had my work cut out for me. It was alot of running, taunting, frisbee-throwing, stunning, and then some more taunting. I did miss instant Exorcism in this fight!

Our first try on this boss was a wipe since we lost too many melee to fires (standing in fire = bad). The second attempt went so well that our raid leader (who was relaxing while tanking Jaraxxus) yelled out that we should do an achievement by keeping two Mistresses of Pain up when the boss died. This of course meant more work for the poor adds tank, who now needed to tank two demons as well as three infernals at the same time. But I'm a paladin, and we all know paladins rock, right?

Overall, it's an easy fight, as long as your raid knows how to interrupt, position, dispel, and heal. Having an imba adds tanks helps too :)

Northrend Beasts (and a bugged XT)

2009-08-06T09:17:00.003+02:00

The first fight in the new raid instance is a three phase fight, where you encounter three different beasts.

First off is Gormok the Impaler. He's your ordinary neighbourhood magnataur. And he impales people. But overall, he's not a scary guy. There are basically three things to look out for:

Staggering Stomp does some AoE damage, so make sure to have ranged people at max range.
Impale puts a nasty bleed debuff on the tank. It stacks, so at 3 or so stacks, you should switch tanks until the debuff falls off.
Snobold Vassal is some annoying mob that sit on people's shoulders and stops them from doing anything useful. They need to be killed immediately.

As soon as Gormok goes down, the next phase starts and two big worms enter the arena: Acidmaw and Dreadscale. Acidmaw is greenish and has poison attacks, and Dreadscale is redish and has fire attacks. One of the worms are stationary while the other roams around. Every now and then, they switch places, so that the roaming one is stationary while the other starts moving.
There are two things to look out for:

They both do a frontal cone attack (fire or poison) so the tank needs to tank them facing away from the raid.
Acidmaw applies a Paralytic Toxin which makes the target immobile after some time. Only way to get rid of this is to get close to someone who has the fire debuff from the other worm.

I was tanking Acidmaw. When he was stationary, it's just full nukage since we wanted to kill him off first (due to the Paralytic Toxin, which we wouldn't be able to get rid of if we killed the other worm first). When he was moving, I kited him around the room, since he leaves behind a Grobbulus-like poison cloud.

Whenever I got the Paralytic Toxin, the two tanks moved closer to eachother, so that the toxin would be neutralized by the fire debuff from the other tank. If I had my bubble off cooldown, I just used that to get rid of the toxin. I love being a paladin :)

And remember that the worms do an aggro reset when they switch. We had some dpsers who learned that the hard way...

When the two worms bite the dust, the third and final phase starts as Icehowl enters the arena. He is a big, hairy, and angry wendigo. There are a couple of things to look out for:

Ferocious Butt is a hard hit which also stuns for 3 seconds.
Arctic Breath is a frontal cone attack that freezes the targets and deals damage over time.
Whirl is an AoE attack with a knockback effect.
Massive Crash is where the fun starts. He jumps into the air, lands in the middle of the room and, knocks everybody back and stuns them. Then he glares at a raid member and then charges him. The target needs to move out FAST. If Icehowl misses his target he crashes into the wall and is stunned for some time. However, if Icehowl hits his target, that person dies and Icehowl gains the effect next on the list:
Frothing Rage is a damage and attack speed increase of 50%.

We had some trouble with people not moving out of his way when he charged them, which lead to an even angrier wendigo which then slaughtered the poor tank.

Other than that, this fight is not hard. I tanked him with my back against a wall so that his frontal cone attack and knockbacks had little effect. Since there is an early warning on who he will charge, there should be no problem in moving out. Blizzard has even given the target a temporary movement speed buff which makes it even easier.

Northrend Beasts is an easy encounter, at least on 25 man normal mode.

The loot gods where good to me, and I got myself the Chestplate of the Towering Monstrosity and a Tier 9 token (Trophy of the Crusade). Now I just have to figure out how to use it...

When we were finished at the Coliseum, we went to Ulduar, where we got a nasty surprise.

XT is bugged to oblivion. There are MILLIONS of adds coming, and light bombs and gravity bombs being applied even during the Tantrums. A fight that usually takes about three minutes took us close to nine minutes. Since there were so many adds, the dps on XT himself was low, and I noticed on Omen that I had a 60% threat lead on the closest dps. This fight needs to be hotfixed ASAP.

We cleared all the way to Freya before calling it a night.

New specs for 3.2

2009-08-05T11:24:00.003+02:00

Patch 3.2 brings some minor changes to my specs (I'm dual-speccing prot/ret).

Let's start with my primary spec:

Protection

The most important change here is that I want two points in Vindication. To be able to get that, I need to steal two points from Conviction. There are no real alternatives here, since Crusade is more threat than Conviction, and I just cannot give up Pursuit of Justice.

The other change is a minor one. I decided to give up on Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian. Divine Sacrifice has been nerfed since I picked it (it's capping at 150% of the paladin's health), and with the changes to Sacred Shield (only one shield per player) I find the improved duration of Sacred Shield in the Divine Guardian talent to be less useful. I usually kept Sacred Shield up on myself, and then the improved duration (and absorption) was useful. Now, since I can only have one Sacred Shield up, I will let the holy paladin handle this.

The three points from Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian were tough to find a new home to.
The alternatives were Divinity, Improved Hammer of Justice, and Reckoning.
I don't see Divinity as useful, since 3% extra healing won't change a thing. It will only give more overhealing done on me.
Improved Hammer of Justice was tempting, but the cooldown would still be too long to be really useful.
So the three points went into Reckoning for some extra threat.

My secondary spec is dps:

Retribution

In my earlier retribution spec I had Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian for some raid utility. These two talents I have now scrapped, since I needed five points in Holy.

Seals of the Pure is now mandatory in the Holy tree.
The new Vindication talent is sexy enough to warrant two points.

I also picked up Seal of Command again. I've been running as ret without Seal of Command for a while, since I only ever used Seal of the Martyr. I believe we will have some use for Seal of Command in fights where there is no time to ramp up the stacks of Holy Vengeance on the mobs to make Seal of Vengeance do enough damage. It will also be a better alternative in PvP.

That left four points without a home. I dumped them in Divinity, with the justification that it could be useful to get some extra heals from an Art of War proc Flash of Light.

I'm leaving my glyphs as they were before the patch. I'm going to revisit them later, when I've got the time. For now, the old ones have to do :)

Achievements

2009-07-31T13:22:00.008+02:00

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

2009-07-28T10:48:00.004+02:00

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

2009-07-23T10:33:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-20T09:21:00.004+02:00

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

2009-07-15T09:37:00.008+02:00

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

2009-07-13T15:20:00.008+02:00

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!

2009-07-13T14:38:00.004+02:00

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? :)

Heartbreaker

2009-06-28T12:45:00.003+02:00

Some of us put together an ad hoc 10-man group yesterday to try some hardmodes. Before one of our healers disconnected on Iron Council, we did the XT-002 hard mode kill.

The idea is to kill the heart on the first heart phase, which then starts the hard mode. Gravity Bombs will now leave nasty void zones on the ground, and Light Bombs will leave Life Sparks that deal nasty damage and needs to be nuked fast.

After some tries we realized that there were no more adds coming after hard mode had been engaged, which meant we didn't really need two tanks. I switched to retri, but kept my shield on at the beginning, so that I could tank adds at the start.

As soon as hard mode was started, we quickly nuked the remaining adds and I equipped my two-hander to help out with the dps. With an extra dps and the extra damage reduction provided by my Divine Sacrifice (which can't really be used while tanking adds), the girlish robot went down and we got our achievement.

Summer time

2009-06-26T23:42:00.003+02:00

It's summer time and everything slows down a bit. Raid sign-ups in our guild is low and several raids are cancelled. We don't have enough core sign-ups to continue on Yogg-Saron.

I'm mostly playing my rogue alt at the moment, except when I collect useless achievements (like the Flame Warden title achievement) on Arnax.

There are some big changes to paladins coming in patch 3.2. I'll get back to those in a post later. At the moment, I am on vacation and will not post much at all.

I hope you all enjoy your summer :)

Epic gems are coming!

2009-06-17T10:23:00.003+02:00

In the next major content patch, we will get access to epic gems. That means a lot of regemming of gear, and a major upswing in jewelcrafters' income (for some time atleast).

We will be able to get raw epic gems from the following:

Prospecting Titanium Ore
Alchemy transmutations
Purchased with Honor
Purchased with Emblems of Heroism

I still have a stash of Emblems of Heroism, but I can imagine that people will start grinding some heroics again to get more emblems to trade in for gems.

I better start doing the JC dailies again on my shaman, so that I can buy all the new designs I need... Oh, the day does not have enough hours for all this grinding...

Reaching Phase 3 on Yogg-Saron

2009-06-12T08:55:00.003+02:00

After the Yogg-Saron nerfs (see below), we managed to get to phase 3 in the fight. So far, our best attempt is 20%, and it feels like the kill is not far away.

The latest Ulduar nerfs are:

The Yogg-Saron encounter has received the following changes: Death Ray no longer hits players who are under the effect of Malady of the Mind, Guardians of Yogg-Saron no longer use Dominate Mind, the spawn rate of Guardians of Yogg-Saron is more forgiving, and these Guardians will no longer spawn if a player that is protected by Hodir’s Flash Freeze hits an Ominous Cloud.
The Flame Leviathan encounter has received the following changes: the bonus health Flame Leviathan receives per tower has been reduced, the ejection height from Flame Leviathan has been reduced, the snare effect of the Tower of Frost has been removed, and the cannons on Demolishers and Siege Enginers should now break Flash Frozen vehicles in 1 shot.
The XT-002 Deconstructor encounter has received the following changes: the health of the heart has been slightly reduced in heroic difficulty and the rate at which Gravity Lapse and Searing Light are cast has been reduced.

We haven't done the Flame Leviathan on hard mode yet, so I don't really know the impact of those changes. The XT-002 fight was already easy, so the nerfs feels a bit unnecessary.

The removal of mind control from the Guardians makes the Yogg-Saron fight easier, especially for a tank. I hated having several of them on me and then suddenly seeing myself casting Hand of Protection on them and then go on to stun a fellow raider, losing all aggro on the mobs and seeing them turn to healers...

The change in spawn rate was noticable, since I realized I had Exorcism off cooldown when I needed it more often than before.

Now we just have to perfect phase 3...

Vindication and Hammer of Justice nerfs

2009-06-09T12:41:00.004+02:00

More incoming PvP nerfs for paladins in today's hotfix:

When immune to the stun of following abilities, Maim, Bash, and Hammer of Justice will no longer cause player spells to be interrupted but they will still interrupt NPCs.
The Retribution Paladin talent Vindication no longer reduces the targets stamina or intellect but does correctly lower agility, spirit, and strength.

The first one means that sooner or later, the diminishing returns from the stun effect of Hammer of Justice will make the opponent immune to the silence effect as well as the stun effect.

The second one turns Vindication into a completely useless talent. Reducing the opponent's agility, spirit, and strength is not exactly useful.

So within a couple of weeks, several paladin PvP talents have been nerfed: Hand of Freedom, Eye for an Eye, Hammer of Justice, and Vindication. And of course the nerf to Exorcism so that it no longer could not be used on players and their pets. Even our retribution aura got nerfed!

If retribution paladins are so overpowered in PvP that they need these nerfs, why are we not seeing more of them in the higher brackets in Arena?

Failure at General

2009-06-08T09:13:00.002+02:00

On Thursday, we engaged Genral Vezax. This week we didn't have a death knight tank in the raid, and since I had successfully tanked the big squid on 10-man, I stepped up to the challenge to tank him.

It didn't go well at all.

The Surge of Darkness was not a problem. I used my bubble wall every other cast, and one of the priests used his cooldown every other cast. I was never even close on dying to the ability that should have been the biggest problem due to limited tankadin cooldowns.

Instead, it was the Searing Flames that got me killed. I had 43k health in the fight, which meant that I could survive two consectutive melee hits (Squid Face hits for around 20k on plate) if topped off. Due to lag, the assigned interrupters failed to interrupt Searing Flames a few times, which instantly lead to a wipe. The reason was the 75% reduction of armor on the tank, which meant that Squid Face could one-shot me.

After five wipes (due to four Searing Flames and one parry-gib), the Raid Leader brought in a death knight to tank, and I went retri for dps. The General went down on the first try.

Even though I agree that a death knight tank is better suited (i.e. has more tools to survive) to tank General Vezax, the comparison this time fails, since when the death knight stepped in, suddenly all the Searing Flames were interrupted, and the new tank didn't have to deal with losing 75% of his armor.

For future attempts (if I am ever allowed to tank Squid Face again), an additional cooldown needs to be assigned for when (or rather IF) the tank gets the Searing Flames debuff.

Patch 3.1.3

2009-06-02T12:38:00.004+02:00

I took a week off from raiding and spent only little time online, mostly doing dailies with my alts. I have four level 80s and they all need that darn Sons of Hodir reputation.... (two exalted so far)

This week it seems like we are getting a new minor patch. For paladins, it's all about PvP nerfs (again...)

Eye For An Eye: This talent now deals 5/10% of the critical strike damage taken by the paladin back at the attacker.
Hand of Freedom: The base duration of this buff has been reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds.

And then we have yet another Ulduar nerf:

Mimiron

The flight time of Rocket Strikes has been increased, and Rocket Strikes will try to prefer players at range.
The Leviathan Mk II component of the V-07-TR-0N will become stunned during Phase 4 when the VX-001 component begins to cast the P3Wx2 Laser Barrage ability.
Proximity mines now deal less damage and have a lower duration. A small arming time has also been added so proximity mines will not immediately detonate on creation.

Now, I must admit I don't mind the rocket nerf (I've got killed more times by rockets than I want to admit), and phase 4 could be a bit messy if the Laser Barrage occured just after a Shock Blast and the tank is repositioning the boss. But, seriously, why the nerf to mines? Did people actually die from these?

A Night in Ulduar-10

2009-05-24T11:27:00.002+02:00

Last night we got an ad hoc group together to do some mob-whacking in 10-man Ulduar just for fun. We brought a mix of people, including some who had never been in Ulduar before.

Five hours later, General Vezax was dead and we went down to have a look at Yogg-Saron before we called it.

I'm quite surprised about the difference in difficulty between 10-man and 25-man Ulduar. 10-man Ulduar is a walk in the park; The mobs hardly make a dent in your armor, and the bosses have so little health they go down faster than a popsicle in Sahara.

We were running with me as main tank together with a feral druid. That meant we didn't have the imba cooldowns that a death knight tank has, but it didn't become a problem anyway. For Mimiron's Plasma Blasts, we had both tanks tank him in turn to use their individual cooldowns to survive in phase 1.

On General, I used my Divine Protection together with a priest's Guardian Spirit and a paladin's Hand of Sacrifice (since the priest didn't have his Guardian Spirit glyphed) to survive the Surge of Darkness.

Mana was a non-issue in the General fight as well, even though I only have 1 point in Spiritual Attunement. Every time my mana went below 50% I stopped using Consecration, and then my mana started going up again, thus allowing me to start using Consecration again.

It was a fun raid. Very relaxed compared to the 25-man raids. I passed on all the tanking gear that dropped (the off-spec tanks were happy about that), but picked up the Tier helm from Mimiron, so I could get the 2-piece bonus (I have the T8.5 skirt from Freya-25).

If you are wearing Naxx-25 gear, Ulduar-10 is a nice and easy way to learn the encounters before stepping it up to Ulduar-25.

Patch 3.1.2

2009-05-19T09:56:00.004+02:00

Patch 3.1.2 should hit live servers this week. Not much of interest in this patch, except the Wintergrasp honor grind nerf (daily quests are changed to weekly quests) and the introduction of Equipment Manager.

It will be interesting to compare Equipment Manager with addons such as Outfitter, ItemRack, and ClosetGnome.

For paladins, there are only two minor changes:

Blessing of Wisdom and Greater Blessing of Wisdom: Now grant 92 mana per 5 seconds to prevent being overwritten by Mana Spring Totem.
Exorcism: Can no longer be used on player-controlled creatures.

The first one eliminates the very annoying situation where all the nicely buffed Blessings of Wisdom are removed as soon as one of the shammies drop their totem. Paladins rejoice! You will no longer have to waste reagents, mana, and time when buffing in a group with shammies who don't pay attention!

When Blizzard changed the mana totems to not stack with BoW, it was like going back a few patches to when Battle Shout removed Blessing of Might.

If I may ask: Why are things like these not caught during testing?

The second change is a down-right PvP nerf. Apparently, paladins were "one-shotting" hunter pets (I don't see that happening when I look at hunter pets' health pools and the damage I do with Exorcism with a loooooong cooldown, but whatever...).

Blizzard is constantly trying to nerf the burst damage of retribution paladins, a class that is designed around burst damage. It's an interesting dilemma.

Yogg-Saron

2009-05-18T09:54:00.004+02:00

We spent several hours wiping on Mimiron this week, and this limited our time on Yogg-Saron. Next week, we really need to down that toy robot faster, so we have a chance to learn the Yogg-Saron encounter.

The Yogg-Saron fight is really messy. And we haven't even gotten past phase 2!

For phase 1, we position the raid close to the door. One tank, a healer, and some dps go into the center of the room. The first guardian is picked up by the center tank and killed. The second guardian is picked up by our kiting tank, whose job it is to move adds close to death to the center tank. When additional guardians spawn they are picked up by me, standing between the raid and the center tank group. I keep them on me and away from the healers until the kiting tank takes one of me to be dpsed, kited to the center, and killed.

We wiped several times due to dpsers being too eager to shoot at everything moving, which meant adds were running all over the place, and some even exploding in the raid. With some more practise, this phase will probably be over fast and easy. It is possible to speed it up by running into the clouds to get some more guardians at the same time.

For us, the second phase was chaotic to say the least. We didn't have enough time this week to practise on it, and we had to leave the encounter a bit overwhelmed by everything that was going on.

It really is en epic fight.

Professions for a tank

2009-05-16T15:12:00.004+02:00

Professions boost your tanking stats in different ways. There is no mandatory profession for a tank these days, but some are better suited than others.

I am listing the useful ones below, describing what each of them will contribute:

Jewelcrafting
* Up to three prismatic gems, which will give you 41 stamina each. Will also help to satisfy meta gem requirements. Three 41 stamina gems would be 51 stamina more than using three "normal" stamina gems.
* One of the best tanking trinkets out there: Monarch Crab. Stamina and on-use avoidance coupled with two sockets.

Blacksmithing
* Two extra sockets. This could give you 48 stamina, 32 dodge, 32 defense, or whatever combination.

Mining
* 50 stamina.

Enchanting
* Enchanting rings with 24 stamina each.

Leatherworking
* Fur lining on wrists worth 90 stamina. That is 50 more stamina than the normal stamina wrist enchant.

Alchemy
* A very nice stamina and avoidance trinket (Indestructible Alchemist Stone).

Inscription
* Better shoulder enchant (Master's Inscription of the Pinnacle). It's 32 dodge more than the Sons of Hodir one.

Engineering
* Glove enchants (800 armor).

As you can see, Blizzard seem to have balanced the professions so that they give about 50 stamina each. Some of the professions are more versatile than others.
The best combination is probably blacksmithing and jewelcrafting.

Personally I'm running with mining and blacksmithing, but that's just because that is what I have had since I started playing. A tank that could create his own armor, and also farm the mats for it just sounded "right". :)

General down

2009-05-11T00:01:00.004+02:00

Yup. General went down.

I did this fight as retri, since tankadins face potential mana issues (especially since I'm running with just 1/2 Spiritual Attunement). We started by using a warrior tank who kited the boss during the Surge of Darkness, but he ended up being killed early in every attempt. So we switched to a death knight tank who just tanked him where he stood and didn't move at all during the fight.

As retri, this fight is extremely simple. I don't have to interrupt the Searing Flames like the other melee classes, and I don't have to worry about mana since Judgement of the Wise is totally imba. I just stood behind the boss and nuked as hard as I could for about 4 minutes, and then the boss was dead.

I know the rest of the raid was running around looking for green puddles to get mana back, and the interrupters had a crucial task of interrupting the Searing Flames. I, on the other hand, just stood there and nuked.

We ran into Yogg-Saron's room to check him out and quickly wiped since people stood in clouds that spawned loads of adds. I was still in retri spec and found myself trying to kill the Guild Master while being mind controlled.

I think the Yogg-Saron fight will take some time to learn.

Keepers down

2009-05-09T18:36:00.004+02:00

Yesterday, the little toy robot Mimiron went down, which meant we defeated all the Keepers after two visits this week. I watched the kill face down on the ground after dying to a rocket landing on my head. I claim that the distraction of having to roll over my dead body over and over again was the true reason for him going down.

After the kill, we cleared the remaining bosses (Ignis, Council) before moving on the our next target: General Vezax.

That's one ugly dude.

We had two attempts before we called it.

Afterwards, some of us started a 10-man Ulduar run. We one-shotted Leviathan, XT-002, Kologarn, and Auriaya and went on to Mimiron. We downed him once today... let's try it again!

I left the raid to get some sleep after two attempts, which both reached phase 4. I'm sure the rest of the people stayed a while to wreck havoc to the place.

Tankadin Shield Enchants

2009-05-08T13:18:00.005+02:00

There are three available shield enchants, each catering a different flavor.

Defense - Increses defense rating by 20. Good avoidance enchant.

Titanium Plating - made by blacksmiths, this increases the block value by 40, and also reduces disarm effects. Good threat and mitigation enchant.

Major Stamina - old school TBC enchant, this increases stamina by 18. This enchant has not yet seen an upgrade in WotLK. Good enchant for efficient health.

Tanks love avoidance. Tanks love health. Tanks love threat. So how do you choose?

The answer is to enchant your shield so that you strengthen its strengths, not to cover it's weaknesses. Then you keep a couple of shields in your bags, and switch to whatever the current encounter requires.

As an example, in Naxx I ran with the Titanium Plating on my Wall of Terror as a threat/block shield on trash, and with Defense on my Hero's Surrender as an avoidance shield.

In Ulduar, I replaced the enchant on Wall of Terror to Defense and use that shield as a default shield. The reason is that I want the stamina on it as well as the block rating. If I put on Hero's Surrender, I am no longer block capped. I am currently juggling the new Ulduar gear around to stay block capped, and so far, I need this shield.

Last week, Northern Barrier dropped. I passed on it since it's a side grade to Wall of Terror. But if I ever get it, I will probably put the Titanium Plating on it to make a serious threat shield.

Emalon the Storm Watcher

2009-05-05T10:15:00.004+02:00

Did the 10-man version of Emalon the Storm Watcher yesterday.

I was the adds tank, which meant I wanted to pull four adds at the same time at the start. This was best solved by me running in first, putting down a consecration under the boss and all adds, and then walk back into my corner while the other tank taunted the boss off me and ran into his corner.

We made sure there was enough distance between the two tanks so that the boss' Lightning Nova didn't hit the adds tank. The tanks should, however, not be too far apart, since this would make the lives of melee dps harder when they have to switch between the boss and the overcharged add.

As soon as an add got overcharged, I targeted it and put a skull on it. All DPS focused on this add and burnt it down as fast as possible. Shortly after the add was killed, it respawned near the boss and needed to be picked up by me.

I accidentally killed a couple of the adds while building threat, and that forced me to pick up more adds than necessary. I'll remember until next time to try to avoid killing any of the adds to make my job easier. Only the overcharged ones should be killed to reduced the number of adds needed to be picked up during the fight.

Sadly, he only dropped PvP gear this time.

Tankadin Weapon Enchants

2009-05-04T13:56:00.004+02:00

What enchant to put on your favorite weapon is always a dilemma. If you are a lucky looter, you might have multiple tanking weapons with different enchants in your bag, one for each type of encounter.

Currently I'm running with Potency on my Last Laugh. It's an old school TBC enchant that starts to feel a bit too old school. There was no upgrade to this enchant in WotLK, since they changed the potency enchants to give Attack Power instead of Strength.

I've been looking at the other options available, but cannot find anything that stands out as being exactly what I want.

Threat

With good enough gear, Accuracy is the best threat enchant, granting you both hit and crit. I like this one, since I'm currently a bit low on hit, and crit is always fun. But it's damn expensive, so I'll save it for my first Ulduar weapon instead.

Aforementioned Potency is the second best threat enchant around, granting strength which gives you both Attack Power and Block Value, two of the tankadin's primary threat stats. It also grants a minor mitigation due to the Block Value. So threat + mitigation = yummy. It's really sad that it didn't get an upgrade in WotLK.

A third (and cheaper) option is the Titanium Weapon Chain. It grants hit (useful) and shorter disarm duration (not so useful for a paladin).

Avoidance

Blade Ward is a new enchant in 3.1. It procs an increased parry rating (avoidance) followed by extra damage when parrying (threat). Sounds good? Maybe. The proc rate and internal cooldown aren't public, and tests are still ongoing. Personally, I dislike enchants that proc instead of having a static value. This enchant can proc at useless times (like when hitting XT-002's heart or Kologarn's arm) and thus wasting the internal cooldown. And what if it doesn't proc when you REALLY need it? I'm waiting for the test results to see if this is worth it.

Exceptional Agility is another avoidance option. It grants agility (d'oh) which gives you dodge (avoidance), armor (mitigation), and crit (threat). What's there not to like? Well, I just like strength better than agility...

Mongoose. Yet another old school enchant. Grants loads of agility and some attack speed "occasionally". Increased attack speed doesn't matter much for a tankadin, and I have already stated my dislike for proccing enchants. What good is 120 agility if you don't get it when you need or want it? Leave this enchant to the rogues.

Other

Blood Draining is a new enchant in 3.1. The enchant stacks Blood Reserve up to five times when striking an enemy or inflicting damage with bleed attacks. When you reach 35% of your health, it heals you for some amount depending on the number of stacks. This is a weird enchant. You only have use for it when you are close to death, which means when your healers are slacking. It kicks in at 35%, which is a really bad time for a tankadin, since that's when our Ardent Defender kicks in. If you are really unlucky, this enchant can put you just above the 35% marker and thus make you take full hits when Ardent Defender should have lowered the incoming damage instead. The enchant also works on bleed effects, which paladins do not have. It's obviously not meant for tankadins, but for druids and warriors.

Conclusion
I only see three viable options: Potency, Accuracy, and Exceptional Agility. At this point, I'm sticking with Potency a while longer.

Thorim loses a 1v25 Arena game

2009-05-04T09:21:00.003+02:00

Yet again, my guild downed a new boss when I wasn't around. Last night they defeated Thorim after several nights of wipes on him. I'm gonna need to get the details of what was done differently this time around (except for me not being there...) to analyze how to tweak it even more for next week.

Mimiron is up next, but we will save that fight for next week.

Blue confirms Ulduar nerf strategy

2009-04-30T13:06:00.003+02:00

Daelo over at the Raid and Dungeon forum says: "We want to allow additional players to experience more of the cool Ulduar content."

That pretty much confirms the strategy that Blizzard has to nerf Ulduar already after two weeks of playing. And the nerfs are very noticable.

We started a new Ulduar run yesterday, and one-shotted Flame Leviathan, XT-002, and Kologarn, and downed Auriaya after a wipe due to a bad pull. All that took just over an hour. Then we spent the next two and a half hours wiping on Thorim... But my point is: Already two weeks into the new content, some of the bosses have been nerfed so much they are no longer a challenge.

It's now obvious that Blizzard will keep nerfing Ulduar so that "everybody" will be able to see all the content on normal difficulty, but that the hardmode fights are aimed at the more hardcore raiders, and will thus be tuned thereafter.

Freya down

2009-04-29T12:59:00.006+02:00

My guild downed Freya for the first time yesterday, in my absense. Our 10-man group has downed all but two bosses in Ulduar.
Since Guardians of Destiny isn't a hardcore raiding guild, I wonder how the hardcore raiders feel about Ulduar. Do they think it's too easy?

I can't really rate Ulduar yet myself. It's a bigger challenge than Naxx (but so is crossing the street or brushing your teeth), but we manage do down bosses after just a handful of attempts. In TBC, we wiped for weeks in Black Temple to progress, and when we started SSC and TK, wipe nights were more of a standard than an exception.
Is Ulduar easier for us because we are better players now? Or is Ulduar tuned down to make progress easier for the larger population?

Some of the bosses get nerfed every week. Ignis is the perfect example. First day, he was close to impossible. Hotfix after hotfix has nerfed him to the ground, and now he is not much of a challenge. Is Blizzard afraid of losing players if the bosses are "too hard"?

We haven't reached Mimiron in our 25-man yet, but I know our 10-man group wiped a lot before downing him. I've heard hardcore raiders say he is the first "hard" boss in the instance. That's why I don't want to rate the difficulty of Ulduar just yet. I need to see all the boss fights before I can compare to our previous experiences. At least Ulduar isn't the "free epics" Naxx was.

Seal of Command

2009-04-29T12:37:00.004+02:00

As my secondary spec, I use 0/17/54. I'm not very happy about all the points that are spent on less useful things, but the retribution tree today is so slim-downed that you always end up with lots of left-over points. An "interesting" point is that I haven't bothered picking up Seal of Command.

According to the statistics on Quick Armory, only 59% of the retribution paladins are speccing into Seal of Command. This used to be the staple talent in the retribution tree, and in vanilla WoW, it was THE damage seal. Today, you do more damage with Seal of Blood/Martyr, and Seal of Command is only used in PvP or in fights where the damage recoil of Seal of Blood/Martyr is a problem. As it is now, Blizzard could just remove Seal of Command altogether from the game, and only a few would mourn the loss. I would like to see a change to the seal, so that it atleast is a viable alternative to Seal of Blood/Martyr.

Looking at more statistics on Quick Armory, I see that 2% of the tankadins have specced into Seal of Command. Why on Earth would you do that? For threat and damage, the seals of Vengeance, Blood/Martyr, and even Righteousness are better. In addition, since Seal of Command is a "proc per minute" seal, the damage, and thus threat, is spikey and unreliable.
It also seems like 6% spec into Vindication, and 1% into Eye for an Eye, so maybe the people who spec into these three talents are PvP protection paladins.

I like playing as retribution, but I think Blizzard needs to redesign Seal of Command and/or Seal of Blood/Martyr (the recoil makes even less sense now when Spiritual Attunement has become a protection-only talent), and also add some more useful things into the retribution tree (or in the other trees, as long as it has synergies with the retribution talents).

Hot Pockets and the Ice Cream Man

2009-04-27T12:18:00.003+02:00

Ignis (first kill), Razorscale (second), and Hodir (first kill) downed in yesterday's raid.

We decided to kill Ignis, because he has been killing us so many times before. We changed tactics and just nuked him, ignoring the adds altogether. I tanked Mr Hot Pockets in the water, so that the scorch was neutralized, and all dps just went full out on him. We wiped a few times due to damage on me being too high at the same time as some healers dying to adds. But this tactics was loads easier than what we tried before, and he soon went down.

After the Ignis kill, Razorscale was just a formality. Don't want to leave any boss standing behind us in the instance :)

The Hodir fight was easy. I put on some frost resistance gear and solo tanked him the entire fight. Our first attempts failed due to people not standing where they should. The enrage timer seemed pretty tight at first, until we started utilizing the NPCs better. Then the fight was a cake walk. The Ice Cream Man went down!

Crazy Old Cat Lady

2009-04-26T10:15:00.005+02:00

On our Friday's run, we downed Auriaya for the first time.

The hardest part of this fight is the pull itself. The crazy old cat lady is patroling the area with her four cats. When engaged, the four kitties pounce the aggro target, and since they all buff eachother by increasing their fellow kitty cats' damage with 50% each (for a total of 200% extra damage when all four are close to eachother), they will quickly kill anybody in their way.

The idea is to make sure nobody is in the line of sight for the cats, so that they cannot pounce a single target to death. So we all hid behind a pillar and let the death knight tank put down a Death and Decay on the ground in front of the boss when she came strolling up some stairs with her cats. When the boss and her feline friends came running around that pillar to gank the death knight, the other two tanks (including yours truly) picked up the boss and a few of the cats.

Since they were still stacked, the cats still made some serious damage, so using survivability cooldowns were necessary. I pre-popped Holy Shield, Sacred Shield, Divine Plea (glyphed), and Divine Protection when I picked up two or three of the adds.

We had several wipes due to bad pulls, or tanks dying in the first couple of seconds in the fight. When we finally got that part of the fight in place, the rest of the fight was not that bad. She spawns mini-adds that I picked up with consecration, she spawns a bigger cat that is untankable and leaves a nasty void zone when dying, she fears, and she does a real nasty AoE damage attack (that thankfully can be interrupted).

When the cat lady where down, we continued to Hodir for a quick attempt before the raid finished. It was a wipe, but now we know what the fight looks like.

During the run I got my first Ulduar loot: Greaves of the Stonewarder. When I replaced my previous boots (Kyzoc's Ground Stompers), I gained some armor, strength, stamina, and block value, but I lost quite a chunk of avoidance. I'll keep my old shoes in my bags for a while.

Return to Ulduar

2009-04-23T13:18:00.005+02:00

Last night we downed Kologarn after a couple of attempts. It is a pretty straight-forward fight that for some reason cost us several wipes on our last visit here (until he bugged and decided not to come back). I was assigned to the adds that spawn when his arm is killed. That job was easy except for the times when I got gripped just before the arm died, which meant I was thrown to the other side of the room when the adds spawned, and didn't have the time to run back before the adds were all over the raid.

We then returned to Ignis. This boss has been nerfed a lot since last week, but we still could only get him down to about 30%. We are mostly having problems with the adds ganking healers and not getting killed fast enough.

I have been main tanking Ignis himself on our tries so far. I kite him around the raid who stand in the middle of the room, making sure Ignis is facing away from the raid at all times. I make sure he puts down scorches close to the water before I move him to the next spot. The adds tanks try to kite the adds thru the fire to melt them and then into the water to make them brittle.

Tonight, we will go for Auriaya, Hodir, and more tries on Ignis.

Ulduar Day 4

2009-04-19T23:48:00.005+02:00

After some mean trash we stood before the Assembly of Iron.
I tanked the big dude, Steelbreaker, which also was our first kill target. For the first time in ages, I had to use my wings to keep ahead on threat when the DPSers got the damage boost from the blue runes on the floor. Second kill target was Runemaster Molgeim. Easy rule here: stand in blue stuff, but don't stand in green stuff. Third kill target was Stormcaller Brundir. Since he wipes his aggro table after every air phase, I ended up tanking him most of the remainder of the fight as well.

We only needed a few tries on this group of bosses before they went down. This was a pretty easy and straightforward fight.

Next, we moved to Kologarn. I was assigned to tank the adds that spawns when his arm is killed. We had loads of wipes on this boss. His Grip, his Breath, and his Eye Beam all caused deaths.
Just when we were getting warm and had him below 30%, the dude bugs on us and doesn't respawn.
End of raid.

So the first week we had four days in Ulduar, and we downed four bosses. I'm already looking forward to next week.

Oh, and I got my Glyph of Divine Plea. Some guy was selling it for 150 gold at the AH.

Spec and mana in 3.1

2009-04-18T10:24:00.003+02:00

I went with a 0/53/18 spec in 3.1. To get full Crusade, I had to skip one point in Spiritual Attunement. This had been proven in theory to be enough by the mathematically gifted tankadins in the world.
After a couple of days of raiding in Ulduar, I can say that mana is not an issue at that difficulty level. The mobs in Ulduar hit hard, so that one point in Spiritual Attunement is well enough.

Whenever I see my mana getting lower than I like, I start Divine Plea. With the new changes to the prot talent Guarded by the Light, Divine Plea is up constantly as long as you hit something. This works wonders when offtanking, which earlier had been a problem for tankadins. I can now go full out as an offtank and still have mana to spare. Very nice.

I haven't tanked any 5-man heroics since the patch, so I can't say how well mana regen works in those environments. But I assume that if mana shows to be a problem, the easiest solution is to pull more mobs, or just sit down and take some extra hits. Those tricks most tankadins are used to since TBC anyway.

So far I am happy with my new spec. I finally got the points to put into Pursuit of Justice, and the extra damage and crit makes me a happy pally :)

However, I still haven't found that darn Glyph of Divine Plea...

Ulduar Day 3

2009-04-18T00:09:00.005+02:00

This time we decided to beat on a robot with a squeeky voice and some broken toys: XT-002 Deconstructor.

I was tanking all the Pummelers (the big adds), which turned out to be a fun role. Before the first adds spawned in the fight, I also used the new ability Divine Sacrifice for the first time during the raid wide AoE spell Tympanic Tantrum.

We wiped most of the night, with a handful of attempts landing below 3% (worst wipe was the one where the boss had 100k health left...)
In the end, the robot went down, and we got ourselves a nice achievement, since nobody died to any bombs.

The paladin healing bracers dropped, and they were a let-down. My bracers from Naxx-25 is alot better. What is Blizzard thinking with the holy itemization on gear?

Ulduar Day 2

2009-04-16T23:41:00.005+02:00

This time the servers stayed up. After a handful of wipes we downed Razorscale. This is a really fun fight. We split up the area in three slices and let the three tanks handle the adds spawning in those areas. DPS were also split up in groups. When Razorscale herself lands permanently, we took turns tanking her to avoid too many stacks of the debuff she puts on the tank.

Towards the end it got a bit messy, but she went down with only a few dead in the raid.
The tanking gun dropped, and we didn't even have a warrior tank with us...

We then turned our attention to Ignis. Oh man, does he hit hard. We spent the rest of the night wiping on this dude. I don't think I have died that fast to any boss before when main tanking. This fight is ridiculously hard.

We'll be aiming for XT-002 tomorrow.

Ulduar Day 1

2009-04-16T12:09:00.005+02:00

After getting my dual spec in place and sorting my addons out, it was time for Heroic Ulduar.

We zone in and one-shotted the Flame Leviathan. That boss is very easy when done in "easy mode", I guess we will try it with towers up next time. Then we move on to Razorscale since that boss has less trash. We wipe twice (damn those adds hit hard and never die) and then the instance server decides to take a nose dive. Raid over.

Noticed a blue post stating that they will nerf the damage and hit points of those adds. Guess that will make my job easier :)

Now I only have to find someone to make me that Glyph of Divine Plea....

Prepared for Ulduar!

2009-04-13T18:28:00.005+02:00

The patch will be upon us this week or next, and I was cleaning out my closet in preparation. The following tanking gear will be what I bring to the coming raids:

Head
Primary: Helm of Vital Protection
Secondary: Tempered Titansteel Helm (for stamina set)

Neck
Primary: Nexus War Champion Beads
Secondary: Heritage (avoidance or threat set)

Shoulders
Valorous Redemption Shoulderguards

Cloak
Primary: Cloak of the Shadowed Sun
Secondary: Platinum Mesh Cloak (avoidance or threat set)

Chest
Primary: Dragonstorm Breastplate
Secondary: Valorous Redemption Breastplate (for Power Ranger look)

Wrists
Bindings of the Hapless Prey
(Still missing the Bracers of the Unholy Knight)

Hands
Valorous Redemption Handguards

Waist
Ablative Chitin Girdle

Legs
Primary: Valorous Redemption Legguards
Secondary: Dragon Brood Legguards (threat set)
(Still missing Legplates of Sovereignty)

Feet
Primary: Kyzoc's Ground Stompers
Secondary: Inexorable Sabatons (threat or block set)

Rings
Primary: Sand-Worn Band and Signet of the Impregnable Fortress
Secondary: Keystone Great-Ring (EH set)

Trinkets
Primary: Repelling Charge and Essence of Gossamer
Secondary: Defender's Code (EH set), Valor Medal of the First War (avoidance set), Rune of Repulsion (avoidance set)

Shield
Primary: Wall of Terror (stamina will be buffed on this, making it the primary shield)
Secondary: Hero's Surrender (avoidance set)

Weapon
Last Laugh

Pretty mount

2009-04-13T08:54:00.004+02:00

Yesterday we did Sartharion with 3 drakes up again. We tried a different tactic this time, with a void walker tanking Sartharion. It went very well, and it only took us a couple of tries to get the drakes down and commense the looting.

And I got the Twilight Drake!