Sleep Away The Afternoon

Bring In The Trash

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:30:11 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

One of the things coming out of the PTR for patch 3.2 is that the Argent Coliseum has no trash.

So? I hear you say. Trash rarely drops anything useful, and it’s there to slow us down.

Quite, I respond. It’s there to slow you down. This isn’t a bad thing, and it’s got nothing to do with how long it takes for you to clear all the bosses in an instance. Instead, the trash adds just enough delay to the instance. The delay is important. The amount of trash present is also important, in that there has to be not too much and not too little.

I’ll go further than that. I’ll say that ideally each boss should be prefaced by 10-15 minutes of trash. Not so much that it takes you ages to clear, not so little that it takes no time at all to get through.

The reason for it is this – Bosses are a time for concentration. Trash (which while being possibly lethal) is not in the same way. Sure, everyone needs to pay attention on the trash just as the boss, but by and large the trash is much easier than the boss, especially when it’s been learned, allowing a short space of time in which to recharge ready for full concentration on the boss.

Add to this respawn timers. Naturally there’s a short break between each attempt, but that’s too filled with analysis of what went wrong before, changes in strategy. By the time the ready check is made most players will be lucky if they’ve had thirty seconds of break. By adding a respawn timer (90 minutes may be the ideal, 2 hours is the most common) there’s an enforced break from the boss to allow raiders to recharge and return to the boss with a fresher mind.

Without the trash, I can see attempts on harder bosses within the Coliseum getting worse as the raid goes on, that tiny break provided by trash missing, leading to lack of concentration.

DKP? Say, Why?

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:13:39 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Matticus recently mentioned on twitter:

Guild sites should show: Where they’re at in progression, raid times, loot system, and an app link somewhere visible.

Sounds mostly sensible enough

How far you’re progressed? Definitely makes sense for a prospective applicant to know if they’re horrendously undergeared for your content.
Raid Times? Yep, makes no sense to apply to a guild if you’re never going to match their raiding schedule
Application link? Make it easy to apply, of course. If you don’t you’ll lose out on applicants who can’t find your application form.

But the other one? Loot system? I completely fail to see why that should ever be something that needs advertising. In my experience, there are two types of applicant. There are those who are interested in raiding for its own sake, seeing the gear obtained as a means to an end (seeing more content, beating more difficult encounters). And then there are the people who want to get the gear so they can stand around in Dalaran and /flex at lesser-geared passers-by.

I’ve written extensively on the subject of loot systems before. There are some good, some bad, they’re all capable of being gamed in different ways (and if you meet someone who says their system is perfect, they’re a liar). But when someone asks the question “What DKP system do you use?”, in my experience what they really mean is one of two questions:

“How soon can I get to looking hardcore in Dalaran?”

or:

“How long will I have to put up with this crummy guild before I’m geared enough to find a better one?”

Players in well-progressed raiding guilds are almost inevitably there to experience the journey, not the destination. By asking the DKP question up-front, a prospective member is showing that they are thinking of their reward in terms of the pixels they can decorate their character with, rather than the satisfaction of having beaten a tough encounter.

If you’re interested in progression for progression’s sake then so long as it’s fair (and let’s be honest here any progression-oriented guild has to have a fair loot system or they’ll implode into a black hole of drama) it shouldn’t matter exactly what that system is. Almost all the players who would want to join your guild should be there for the teamwork, not the high-ilevel purples.

Progress should be its own reward. So long as the loot is distributed afterward in such a way as to make further progress as easy as possible (however you choose to define that), it shouldn’t matter too much how it is distributed.

Tunnel Vision

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:43:21 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

One of the first things that I was good at, way back in my pre-warrior days, was learning not to stand in fire. Or poison clouds. Or any other sort of AoE effect that did Bad Things to my health. One of the first things you need as a tankis situational awareness, and I had bucketloads. Once I switched to my warrior, I had at least that down before I even started about the other stuff, like keeping aggro, and worrying about when and how to use my cooldowns.

Now, I’ve noticed something interesting happen. While tanking, my abilities at staying out of stuff that might hurt me remain unparalleled; however when healing, things are a different kettle of void zones altogether.

Let’s take The Nexus as an example. I’ve run it in heroic mode a few times, and it’s not been too bad – except for the fact that I forget to jump to clear the debuff too often, straining my own healing even further.

And then there’s the Four Horsemen. I won’t say I was an unmitigated failure at the back of the room, but I seemed to be far too slow to react when a void zone appeared beneath me, even when I wasn’t casting, as well as seemingly having lost every ounce of sense as to where to stand so that I was only in range of one of the bosses.

And there’s the thing. When you’re spending 90% of your time staring at a little black box which contains pretty much all the information you’ll need about the entire raid, it’s easy to miss things that happen outside it. It’s a matter of where the focus lies, and while it can improve with practice, there’s always going to be an inherent delay while things like casts finish.

So, when you wonder why your healers seem to spend longer getting out of AoE, it’s not because they’re inferior. It’s merely that they have a different frame of reference, which encourages tunnel vision. Sure, it can be broken, but it’s always there. Give them a break – they’re staring at their unit frames so intently so you don’t have to.

The Red-Headed Stepchild of Tanking Stats

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:02:39 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Block. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it…. Ah, no, hang on. Nobody gears for block these days, it’s a wasted stat. Back in Naxxramas it was godlike, a successful block taking a healthy chunk of the incoming hit. Nowadays, it’s a bit, well, like one of those games from years ago that you remember playing endlessly for hours and yet, when you come back to it, you can’t for the life of you remember why (Hello, X2: The Threat). Something about it just hasn’t kept up with the times.

And now, are things changing? Well, maybe. In the patch notes, we see that bonus shield block value on items is being doubled. “So what?” I hear you ask. “My regular tanking gear has almost no bonus SBV as it is”. True, neither does mine. But hidden away in the cupboard, destined only to come out for certain fights, is another set of gear, my Shield Block Value set. And I can see things changing here – rather than some people using Frost Resistance gear on Hodir, I can see all of us moving to using SBV gear because it will mitigate Frozen Blows in its entirety.

There’s the rub. This change isn’t huge, but it does introduce choice in how we gear that was less present. Sure, for someone like General Vezax, who hits for 30k, isn’t going to be the fight you use your SBV gear on – a chance for a 10% reduction in incoming damage is nothing – but there are plenty of other fights where the melee hits come more often and for less. A good example might be the crusher tentacles of Yogg-Saron, where a good amount of block value (especially with shield block up) would help immensely.

Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of these changes – maybe a change in the percentage block you get per point of block rating will crop up too – but I’m intrigued as to what we’ll end up with. More choice over what gear is feasible can only be a good thing.

Tier 8 Bonus? Overrated

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:04:27 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

The protection warrior tier 8 set bonuses have cause some consternation; the 2-piece bonus which boosts the critical strike chance of Devastate by 10%. A small threat boost, but nothing huge. And then there’s the 4-piece bonus:

“Shield Block also grants you 20% reduction to magical damage taken”

On the face of it this sounds absolutely fantastic. However, having looked closer, I’m not so sure. Just taking the tier 8 content into account that I’ve seen so far (ie, everything up to General Vezax), exactly how useful is it?

Flame Leviathan. You’re in a vehicle. Nothing to see here, move along
Ignis the Furnace Master – well, there’s Scorch, so it might be useful if you’re an offtank standing in the fire for a long time, but that’s about it
Razorscale – Useless in phase 1, nice to have in phase 2, but Flame Breath comes too quickly to negate it all the time. So kind of useful, but by the time you have 4 pieces of tier 8, you probably have good enough gear to survive the breaths anyway.
XT-002 – Pretty much all physical damage, except for bombs, and if you’re getting hit by those you have bigger problems
Kologarn. Again, all physical damage. Move along, nothing to see
Assembly of Iron – Fusion Punch was made for the bonus. A nice reduction on an ability which can be reacted to. A decent use for it at last.
Auriaya – well, if your raid’s doing it right, Sonic Screech will hit for so little as to be trivial. No really good uses here either.
Hodir – Well, Frozen Blows might count, but odds are that if you’re wearing full frost resistance gear, you don’t have the 4-piece bonus. And if you don’t have full frost gear, you’re likely to be wearing SBV gear (Frozen blows that are completely blocked do no frost damage).
Thorim – Steadily increasing physical damage. Not really much help
Freya – Nothing hits very hard, really. I guess it might be useful for holding Exploding Lashers in place, but really, why dice with death when you don’t have to?
Mimiron – Leviathan Mk2’s Plasma Blast was made for the set bonus. But after that? Maybe to relieve your healers a little in phase 2.
General Vezax – again, if the tank’s taking magical damage, someone’s doing something wrong.

So, not great, really. In a fit of curiosity I looked over some old Sartharion + 3 drakes log parses to see if it might have been useful there. It definitely wouldn’t help enoughwith main tanking Sarth himself – the breaths come too often for that. For Shadron, Tenebron and Vesperon, maybe, but not a huge amount.

So, yeah, there you go. I wouldn’t say to knock yourself out trying to get the 4-piece warrior tier 8 set bonus, at least not yet anyway. There just aren’t enough practical applications to make it the killer upgrade it might appear to be on first sight.

EDIT: Veneretio points out that the set bonus comes into its own a lot more once you start to attempt some of the hard modes. I can see how that might be the case, but as I’m not yet running hard modes, I’ll wait to see them before completely reversing my opinion. On top of that, not everyone cares too much about hard modes.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:27:18 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

The World of Warcraft is many-faceted. It’s easy to forget what the world is like outside the confines of my raiding guild - that there are many players of varied skills and social abilities. And, as I took my first steps into the world of pugged heroics, I was plunged into a world ever-so similar but utterly different from what I was used to.

And of my first experiences of heroics, how have I found things? Let’s examine each in turn.

Utgarde Pinnacle. Yes, my first heroic was one that I was expecting to be hard. We had a reasonably geared tank, and DPS who knew how to behave correctly (even if they ignored the expected tactics on occasion). A couple of wipes on the gauntlet, mostly due to no-one noticing the casters trying to take me out with shadowbolts, and the rest was pretty straightforward. All-in-all, a nice confidence booster.
Caverns of Time: The Culling of Stratholme. Again, manageable once I’d got into the swing of things. Unfortunately Arthas bugged after the second boss so it was wait ages for a GM to reset or give up on it. Shame, because it was all going rather well.
Utgarde Keep (attempt 1). Things began to fall apart here. The last pull before the first boss, with no issues up to then, I was unceremoniously booted from the group for someone’s better-geared friend. To say I was annoyed was an understatement.
Gundrak. We opted for the kiting strategy and killed the second boss first. That wasn’t too bad except for the DPS who insisted on standing in purple goo. And then the kicker – the snake boss, which I remember being brutal back when I tanked it, was horrific. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I was getting verbal abuse from the DPS, especially the DK who thought he was a tank (he wasn’t supposed to be), pulling multiple packs at once then cussing me once he died. After a single wipe, he was off, a barrage of swear words his only goodbye, taking the other DPS with him. The tank, however, was extremely gracious in defeat and was very understanding when I told him I didn’t want to go on.

So, after taking several hours out to calm down, it was back in with:

The Nexus. My faith in my fellow players was restored, big time. Despite having an obviously eBayed shadow priest with us (”What are Emblems of Heroism for?”) We made pretty short shrift of the place, even surviving after a bad fear on the first boss. Then, this morning:
Utgarde Keep (attempt 2). Brought in as a subsitute healer (hey, I needed the badges) after the first boss, the place was fine, except for Ingvar the Plunderer, which we wiped on once (and almost a second time) because I didn’t know anything about tactics for the healer. I apologised, explained I’d never healed the place before, and they were very gracious about it.
Azjol’Nerub. Almost a non-starter, we wiped a couple of times in the first boss’s packs thanks to things eating me, and we nearly called it. Again, everyone was polite and there was no insulting anyone. I’m glad we tried a third time, though, because after that we proceeded to one-shot everything.

So, then, out of seven runs, four-and-a-half were fine. 70% isn’t too bad at all for a first weekend’s healing, and it’s brought me to realise one thing - things go a lot more smoothly where there’s understanding between everyone in the run. The bad runs were directly accountable to one (or more people) who had no respect for other people and insisted on doing everything their own way. So some have found their way onto my ignore list (the abusive ones), while some of the others I’ve made a note to be cautious about. When I was struggling, and people noticed, but were polite about it, things went a lot better than when a barrage of “heal ffs” was the most polite thing said to me.

I’ve got my Idol of Lush Moss, though I haven’t been too lucky on other drops so far. Roll on next weekend, when I can get in more practice!

…In which Namthe admits defeat

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:01:06 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve documented before my utter hatred of macros, especially castsequence macros. While I have a couple of timesaving ones bound, for the most part I try to stay away from anything that restricts my choices.

However, recent WWS parses have shown me a problem. My uptime on Demoralizing Shout is utterly abysmal. And on top of that, I’m refreshing Thunder Clap about twice as often as I need to. I know why this is, too – Thunder Clap is bound to the 2 key, Demo Shout to shift-2. At some point along the way I’ve lost the muscle memory needed to hit shift when I want to apply demoralizing shout.

There are two approaches to this problem, and I’m taking both of them. The first is to force myself to hit shift when I mean to use Demo Shout. The other, and it pains me to say it, is a macro:

#showtooltip

/castsequence reset=30 Thunder Clap, Demoralizing Shout

This takes the place of my old Thunder Clap key (and Ctrl-2 is bound to just Thunder Clap, if I need it).

An interesting feature of castsequence macros is that if a spell in the list is cast outside the macro, it still moves on to the next action. So if I hit the right button for Demo Shout, the next action taken will be Thunder Clap. If I hit “2″ instead as my muscle memory tries to make me, Thunder clap will still be available the next time I press the key.

So, it’s a crutch, but while I’m training myself to do things the right way again, it’s a useful one. And it’s a useful compromise between helping the raid not wipe and improving my own game back to a point where I’m satisfied with my performance again. Last night’s raid showed an immense improvement. I can only hope to keep it up once I remove the temptation of button mashing again.

All the Beautiful Things

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:52:38 GMT

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

Every day I wake up and wonder why
I’m alone when i know I’m a lovely guy.
Birds come down from skies so blue,
see all the beautiful things you do.
Why can’t I just get with you?
Every night I carry out my plan -
pray to god that one day I can be your man.

Birds come down from skies so blue -
See all the beautiful things you do.
Why cant I just get with…

You’d be my only friend in the world.
Or you could just be
My Girl.

And if I do run away from this life,
it wont be much for me in the afterlife.
Although I know that you don’t even care,
I’d rather stay in a world where…
Birds come down from skies so blue
See all the beautiful things you do
Why can’t I just get with
You?

Joining the Clique

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:28:24 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Despite its title, this isn’t just a post about healing. Tanks, don’t skip this one over…

There comes a point in every character’s leveling career whereby instance levelling begins to get ever-more difficult. Not because the instances are too hard (they aren’t), but because the number of people willing to run those instances slows to the barest of trickles.

I’ve hit that point with Druziraa - halfway through level 79, and there are four instances I want to run. Halls of Lightning, Oculus, Caverns of Time: Stratholme, and Utgarde Pinnacle. They give me XP, they give me loot that will be useful when I start to run heroics in half a level’s time. Unfortunately, this is where the demand for instance runs seems to peter out. Nobody wants to run the plain old 80 instances and I spend a lot more time in LFG advertising my presence than I did a couple of levels ago.

However, I’ve had enough practive to get the hang of click-casting now. I’m still not 100% there, but definitely good enough that I can keep everyone alive without too much hassle. For the odd thing (Innervate, maybe, though I really haven’t had much cause to use it) I’ll go back to the old ways. Soon my healing spells won’t even be on any action bars, removing the temptation altogether.

Healing, enjoyable as it is, isn’t what I enjoy the most though. I’m still very much a tank at heart, and as such a lesson learned while healing isn’t a good lesson unless I can apply it elsewhere. And in this case, while my unit frames are staying as they are on Namthe (Grid’s displays just tell me too much I don’t care about, and aren’t pretty enough), Clique has come with me, for two abilities in particular:

Intervene
Vigilance

Mousing over a raid-frame and shift-clicking to intervene to someone seems a lot easier than trying to find them to click in whatever’s going on on-screen, especially if they’re out of your current camera angle. Similarly, ctrl-click on a unit frame to change the Vigilance target on the fly during a fight works particularly well, for those times when your main vigilance target isn’t doing as much threat as your expected, or is dead. It feels a lot like the original design of the Vigilance talent (akin to Hand of Salvation) and isn’t nearly as disruptive as I’d thought it might be.

My raiding UI has changed somewhat since the last time I posted it over a year ago; sometime soon I might get around to a post discussing why it’s changed, and how it’s helped me.

In General, tanking Vezax is a pain

Sun, 31 May 2009 16:05:57 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Our first attempts at General Vezax were less than stellar. It’s all too easy to stay in the saronite clouds too long and commit suicide, or misjudge an interrupt or your distance when kiting him.

However, our strategy was eventually formed, and it’s a little different than what I’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than kite the boss, we aimed to keep him in one place all the time. This helped immensely with spacing as well, giving us one less thing to worry about. Of course, the problem is that there are new things to worry about. However, by treating the fight like the three drakes fight, and arranging cooldowns accordingly, we were able to arrive at a strategy that worked reasonably well.

We used the following:

A Warrior tank with Improved Disciplines, Glyph of Shield Wall and Glyph of Last Stand
A Holy Priest
A Discipline priest

The cooldown on Vezax’s tank-splatting move, Surge of Darkness is sixty seconds. Armed with that knowledge, we were able to use the following spell rotation so that the boss didn’t have to move:

1st cast: Shield Wall
2nd cast: Pain Suppression, Last Stand and dodge trinkets
3rd cast: Shield Wall
4th cast: Guardian Spirit, Last Stand and dodge trinkets
5th cast: Shield Wall
… and so on

A different strategy to what’s recommended, I know, and one that’s slightly more healing intensive, but it works for us. And once our DPS have learned to not suicide in the saronite clouds (best attempt was 6%), then I’m pretty sure we’ll see him dead.

Barbarella

Sat, 30 May 2009 22:33:46 GMT

Originally published at Sleep Away The Afternoon. Please leave any comments there.

The feeling is growing -
We have to keep up with the Joneses.
We have to keep up the demand,
Because the supply is getting more.
Well there’ll catastrophic circumstances -
If the e-mail and dot-com’s capture the world,
And cyberspace is a holiday place,
And your best friend lives on Mars.
Do you remember glamour on Sunset Boulevard?
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
When ladies were ladies and men were men?
But now the future’s taking over -
We’re out of control again.

It’s more like Barbarella, Barbarella,
It’s not like the old 50’s glamour.
It’s more like Barbarella, Barbarella,
It’s not like the old 50’s glamour.

Coming out of the noughties,
Everybody thinks we’re getting wiser.
Coz we’re seeing three dimensional,
And we’re filling up wide open space.

Interactive, the word of the moment,
Laughs the old gentlemen in the face.
A generation we can never replace,
Never, never replace.

Do you remember glamour on Sunset Boulevard
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
When ladies were ladies and men were men?
But now the future’s taking over -
We’re out of control again.

It’s more like Barbarella, Barbarella -
It’s not like the old 50’s glamour.

Nearly hit the history books,
It starts all over again -
Virtual reality, yeah, isn’t real.

It’s more like Barbarella, Barbarella
It’s not like the old 50’s glamour

Do you remember glamour on Sunset Boulevard?
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
When ladies were ladies and men were men?
But now the future’s taking over
We’re out of control again.

It’s more like Barbarella, Barbarella -
It’s not like the old 50’s glamour.

A Professional Professional?

Wed, 27 May 2009 20:54:29 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

For the first time in approximately forever, I find myself missing a raid because I had to stay in the office late. And while I’m disappointed with that (especially as my girlfriend is sitting close by healing on that self-same raid), I’m also fine with it. Anyway, that’s not what I’m writing about. Missing the raid has given me time to think about putting keyboard to blog.

Since patch 3.1 landed, I’ve had very little time to play with my Druid, preferring instead to devote my online time to keeping my gold supply high. Now, though, through minimal dailies, it’s hovering around the 2.5k mark. It could be much higher, but why farm when I don’t have to? What’s there is a more than adequate supply for a few weeks’ raids, especially now I don’t need to flask up for so much content - it’s back to the old favourite elixirs.

So recently I’ve found the time to play Druziraa again and, while some things never change - I’ve still not sorted a click-casting addon - some things do.

My first taste of failure came, as it no doubt did for so many others, in the Halls of Lightning. And with retrospect, the fact that I was expecting to fail doesn’t really come close to covering it. Our tank, a level 77 paladin, would be fine, right up until he got hit by a crushing blow. Then he’d be dead, as I failed to keep up. Two undergeared players in a dungeon slightly too high for them falls on the wrong side of fail. Of course, once we moved to Halls of Stone, I could more than cope.

But my real question is this - I had been vaguely pondering taking Inscription and Herbalism on Druziraa, in the hope of avoiding the Sons of Hodir grind. But are there better options? I’m already familiar with the benefits of Alchemy, and they don’t strike me as being that great. Engineering, great as it was in TBC (the good ol’ Tankatronic Goggles lasted me from Karazhan to Sunwell) really doesn’t have enough going for it these days. Jewelcrafting is about to get horrendously nerfed. The only things I don’t know much about are Tailoring and Leatherworking, but half of me wonders if they’ll be as equally disappointing as all the other professions. I don’t want to make money from them, I just want something that will help me. Trouble is, I don’t have the time to research it during lunch breaks these days and it’ll either be a stab in the dark (bad) or end up not picking anything at all (worse).

I wonder, where does Dru go from here?

A Sense of Entitlement

Fri, 22 May 2009 12:27:59 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

It’s happening more and more, and I can’t help but be irritated by it as time goes on. I’m in the Ironforge Auction House, or in Dalaran running errands, and before too long, I get a whisper:

“hey m8, wanna run Naxx 10?”

As a matter of fact, I don’t. One of Namthe’s rules for a stress-free life at the moment is:

Namthe does not run Naxxramas. At all.

This is mostly due to the fact that after running it so much pre-ulduar, I don’t want to see it again. In addition, it’s an ugly, ugly dungeon that really feels like more could have been done to it to bring it up to date when it was re-released.

Inevitably I turn to my approacher, and notice that invariably he has me targeted- he’s inspecting me. Nothing wrong with that in itself - I’ve often been known to inspect other players to see what they’re wearing. However, more than that, I’m being vetted.

Most of what I’m wearing these days is i226; I don’t (ordinarily) wear gear with an ilevel below 213. This appears to make me ideal for their purposes, being both (apparently) available and ridiculously outgearing the content they want me to run. Invariably the person approaching me is wearing a mix of i187 and 200 blues and maybe a couple of Heroic epics.

If I’m feeling curious, I’ll reply, along the lines of “I have all the gear I could possibly want from Naxx, plus 350 badges. What could I possibly want from there?” The answer is always “Badges, for gems or frozen orbs,” like they didn’t bother to read the question in the first place.

What I find more surprising is that often these people aren’t even looking in LFG for a tank; they’ve spotted me and real soon now they’ll find another eight people to fill in their dream run. I suppose that what I’m really wondering is this - why do people I’ve never met have this strange idea that I might be willing to run a dungeon that I quite obviously massively outgear for them?

No idea what happened there…

Tue, 19 May 2009 23:21:44 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

But anonymous commenting is once again enabled. Puzzled as to how that changed as I’ve never even been near that options screen before. I should have suspected something sooner - my spam queues were suspiciously empty…

Victorious Interventions

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:44:21 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Hodir is one of those fights that’s highly mobile, and if you (and they) are doing it right, involves the dps generating far more threat than most people would ordinarily think sensible. It’s a fight where I’m constantly keeping one eye on Omen, one eye on the ground to make sure I’m not standing in a rune, and another eye on where the moonbeams are now. Admittedly that’s three eyes, but what the hell.

Anyway, good DPS will all be threatening you all of the time in terms of pulling aggro. You can yell over teamspeak for your teammates to watch their threat, but that will only get you so far. You can ask for Hand of Salvation to be cast on someone, but again, there’s the little issue of the cooldown on the spell meaning it can’t be used that often (and in any case, the Paladin is probably a little too busy doing things like keeping your plate-covered arse alive).

No, warriors, and especially warrior tanks, have a secret weapon when it comes to keeping at the top of the meters. Intervene isn’t very useful for most single-tank fights, but there is one occasion that makes the Hodir fight so much better than most for it - Flash Freeze.

The moment that Flash Freeze is cast, I target the person who’s highest on Omen and Intervene to them. If your raid is sufficiently clueful, they’ll be standing next to a snowdrift, so that moving across the room isn’t going to be a problem - you’ll have plenty of time to get into a safe position. If your DPS are nowhere near a safe place, then intervening to them and getting frozen yourself is the least of your problems.

If you can afford (or even need) to be mobile while a boss is casting something, don’t be afraid to intervene. The extra DPS that might allow the raid to squeeze out can make all the difference.

Cool down!

Thu, 14 May 2009 12:35:45 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Recently I’ve been taking two tanking specs to Ulduar - the good, ol’ Deep Wounds threat spec, and a new and shiny spec - Cooldown spec. When paired with the Glyph of Shield Wall and Glyph of Last Stand, it brings the cooldown of each of those two abilities to 2 minutes, each. I’ve also taken a few more talents to reduce my incoming damage rather than increase my outgoing threat.

When fighting the Keepers of Ulduar, how has that impacted on me? To be honest, most of the time, I don’t miss the extra threat, the main place it’s a problem being the Hodir encounter, when I’m not wearing conventional tanking gear anyway.

It’s saved me more than a few times in fights we’re just learning, where healers have a lot of other things to cope with, such as the Auriaya’s Feral Defender running amok in the raid, or people being just that little bit too slow to avoid getting frozen on Hodir (Happily, this doesn’t happen very much any more).

So, in answer to Spink’s question, When to use Shield Wall? My answer is “All the freakin’ time”. These days my old threat-oriented spec only gets aired when I’m soloing or outgearing content. The rest of the time, knowing that my cooldowns will still be available later on is a fantastic motivator for me to use them now, too.

It’s not quite a case of “If it’s off cooldown, you’re doing something wrong”, but it’s a nice middle ground between that and saving it in vain for a more perilous situation than I’m currently in.

Pride comes before a fall

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:32:58 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

In order to get some idea of how the upcoming bosses in 25-man Ulduar work, I’ve been running the 10-man version on Sunday afternoons. And our latest run was nothing short of specatularly successful - we ended up wiping on Mimiron’s Trash by the end of the raid (aside: I see what you did there, Blizz. Hoho.).

And there’s the rub. Because we’re 25-man geared, we were afforded the opportunity to screw up far more than we otherwise would have. Things like missed interrupts on Iron Council, me forgetting to equip my frost gear on Hodir until the split second before it was too late. We still one-shotted him, but I’m sure that healing would have been easier on me if I’d remembered what I was doing in time.

Thorim was a walkover - we killed him on our second go; Freya too was a fairly straightforward encounter, her trash taking longer to kill than she did.

So, after a few hours’ break, it was back to Thorim again, full of expectations of a kill. After all, the main difference was that we had more people, right? Then reality showed up to provide a much-needed kick in the arse. Much like Yakra had done once before, I’d forgotten just how much more forgiving 10-man Ulduar would be to those raids who were almost entirely geared up in 25-man Naxx gear with a fair bit of 25-man Ulduar gear thrown in there.

Of all the attempts in the evening, we got as far as Thorim’s balcony a grand total of once. The most frustrating thing about the fight is not knowing what’s happening to the other group, in the arena - all we can see are the steady stream of raid frames turning black. It’s hard to offer suggestions when you can’t see anything of what’s going on.

So, next week, back to it. Will we down Thorim? Of course. Will it be a pushover? Hell, no.

Violence-free Gold, Fast.

Sun, 03 May 2009 21:21:32 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

For a long time, protection warriors had to struggle with not being able to kill things quickly, as did healers. Nowadays dual-spec has reduced the problems of grinding, as has the buff to prot DPS. But there are still going to be those people who for whaever reason take two healing specs or can’t otherwise farm effectively. Luckily there’s a veritable cornucopia of daily quests that require absolutely no killing whatsoever.

Here’s a few of my favourites, in some semblance of a tour guide:

King of the Mountain. Just 30 seconds work gets you 13G. Not a bad time/gold ratio. Despite this being a a PvP quest I’ve never once come across a member of the opposite faction while doing this. There’s a free taxi ride to the nearby Skybreaker (or Ogrim’s Hammer) from Dalaran, too.
Vile Like Fire! Fly over the hill, jump on a proto-drake, set fire to things. Job done.
Shoot ‘Em Up On your way back from (or to) the above, jump in a harpoon launcher and shoot anything that moves. A minute later, less if you can group with someone else, job done.
We can’t forget the Argent Tournament, especially Among the Champions (23G reward!). While we’re here, the killer combination of A Valiant’s Field Training and Taking Battle to the Enemy will do you very well, too if you’re in the mood for a little bit of killing stuff. 36G in return for killing 15 nearby scourge can’t be beaten.
Moving to the east and staying on the Argent Tournament theme, A Chip off the Ulduar Block can easily be done without aggroing anything. Just don’t tell Brann Bronzebeard you’re destroying his precious relics.
Most people have probably had enough of the Sons of Hodir by the time they get to exalted, but Thrusting Hodir’s Spear is a quick quest with a decent reward. And after you’re done with it, you can move on to
Back to the Pit (if it’s up). If not, some of the other quests offered instead are almost as combat-lite. And there’s always that slim chance you’ll end up with a Polar Bear at the end of it.
Head down to K-3 and Overstock. Unfotunately the reward here isn’t as high as most quests, but then, there’s no risk of having to fight things (directly) either.
In Dalaran there’s the daily fishing quest, from Marcia Chase. You do fish to get your food buffs, right? Bit of a lottery this one, the rewards can be anything from 10 to 100G, but on the other hand it helps get your fishing up. And fishing is the only way to get a 40 stamina food buff that doesn’t require Northern Spices.
Just across the street from Marcia (for alliance, anyway), there’s the daily Cooking quest from Katharine Lee. Unfortunately only Cheese for Glowergold is killing-free, but the others involve only lower-level animals in Northrend’s starter zones and shouldn’t be too much of a chore. On the other hand, if you don’t need the spices, they can sell for huge amounts of money on the Auction house (7G each, for example, on my server)

At this point quests start to be a bit spread out, so if you’re not desperate for gold I’d probably stop here. If you’re venturing further afield, though, Aces High shouldn’t involve deaths if you’re doing it right and is invaluable practice for the Malygos fight.

All in all, theabove should do you fine. It’s not quite a night of wiping for me, but it’s a good start towards one.

Player versus… Ally?

Sat, 02 May 2009 17:38:33 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Ahhh, Childrens’ Week! I don’t know why, but it’s one of my favourite holidays. Probably because the activities revolve around a small storyline and have a definite linear conclusion, unlike the “drink yourself stupid” activities of Brewfest or the “Why the hell do the Alliance even particiapte in this?” puzzle that is Hallow’s End.

This year, as usual, I’ve picked up my orphans from Stormwind and Shattrath, plotted out a course that minimises the amount of backtracking I have to do, and gone forth sightseeing.

However, there’s something else to be done, too, as there is every in-game holday - achieve a new title and progress toward that ever-elusive Violet Proto-Drake.

I’ll admit that I was dreading Childrens’ Week for exactly that reason - I took one look at the PvP achievement, School of Hard Knocks, and knew I was in for a challenge. I’m a prot warrior. I barely PvP, and when I do it’s usually because of a holiday achievement. I have memories of pain any time I tried PvP in the past, so I stay well away, especially for Warsong Gulch where I don’t think I’ve won, ever. So how, in the end did I find the process?

Warsong Gulch

Easy. Easier than easy. As a protection warrior what I don’t have is a lot of DPS, but what I do have is something much more useful for chasing down enemy flag carriers - Warbringer. Combine this with the stuns from Concussion Blow and Shockwave, and while I can’t kill a flag runner quickly, I can bring one down. Got the achievement in the first battleground, before I’d died even once.

Arathi Basin

Harder than WSG, but not by much. In fact all I had to do was waltz in past the horde that were defending a flag from my teammates and capture it. Plenty of opportunities here as bases change hands so often.

Eye of the Storm

I was expecting this to be tricky, but in fact within seconds of the BG starting (I had slow fall), the flag was in my hands and then delivered to the Mage Tower. I can imagine if I hadn’t been first to the flag, things would have got much sticker and I’d have been there for hours.

Alterac Valley

The pain point if ever there was one. There are four towers to capture in AV; once captured they are unlikely to change hands again (at least in my battle group). So during a prime-time Alterac Valley match, there are likely to be 40 people all who want to capture a tower. That’s a success rate of only 10%. Suddenly the battleground takes on a whole new direction entirely, as the need to slay the opposition turns on its head and it’s a race to the finish line. The first time I failed miserably because my Mammoth wouldn’t fit through the gateway of the Horde base. The second time I was just too slow. Paladins with their speed boosts taking a non-optimal way there and still getting there faster were a big annoyance. What eventually prompted me to throw in the towel for the evening was being overtaken at the very last second, at the top of the tower by people using speed potions.

The key to winning at anything is to stack the odds in one’s own favour, whether it’s by being a paladin, using temporary speed boosts, or anything else that will give you an advantage. My only advantage was knowledge - outside of peak there would be fewer people queueing for the battleground and hence less competition. So, I came back the next morning. Even on a weekend, mornings are quiet. So quiet in fact that in the first AV I joined, only myself and one other person were chasing achievements, and it was as easy as the others.

A lot of people, most notable WoW Insider, have said that they expect the Hard Knocks achievement to be removed from the meta-achievement. It won’t. The end reward is supposed to be hard to get, but not impossible (hence the changing of some of the harsher RNG-based achievements from past holidays). In this case it’s much easier to stack the odds in your own favour, by either coming up with a cunning strategy (such as the best time to try) or simply forming a group to achieve the objectives together. There’s no single way of doing this - it’s up to you to come up with your own strategy. Players have a lot more control over the PvP achievement than they do the random number generator.

Hardcore Pwnography

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:11:02 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Though I’m sure it wasn’t meant as anything, Jacob accused me of being “hardcore” below, after I mentioned my surprise at parts of Ulduar being nerfed after the instance had been out for only a week. I’ll admit I was fairly taken aback by that. Me? Hardcore? I have a life!

The problem is that no-one believes they are hardcore. In the past, I played a lot more than I do now, for sure. Perhaps I was hardcore then. But if that’s the case, why did I rarely see a 25-man raid, and fail to beat the third boss in Zul’Aman? These days, I have even more time to give to things outside of WoW. I don’t spend every waking hour thinking up new boss stategies, I don’t spend my days poring over spreadsheets trying to work out the best upgrade (well, OK, maybe I’ve been known to do that, but only on my lunch break, and not very often).

A famous man once said:

“Anyone more progressed than you is hardcore, and anyone less is casual or a slacker”.

It’s true, to an extent. But only to an extent. I know hardcore players that haven’t even set foot in Ulduar (and have only seen Naxx a couple of times). There are several people in The Hidden Circle who come to raids but just aren’t around that much the rest of the time.

To understand my feelings on how Ulduar should feel, I think it’s worth going back in time to the launch of Zul’Aman. I was in a position of having cleared Karazhan multiple times but couldn’t hold on to enough people for Gruul’s Lair (that’s another tale). ZA was hard, and that was with the best players in the guild in a run. It was a logical (but difficult) progression from Karazhan. We walked away from that first week with just a single boss down. And that was on the first instance with a normal and a hard mode (timed bear runs).

This was what I was expecting from Ulduar. We had the power to progress, just much more slowly than zerging everything down in a few weeks. Instead I’m still seeing ever-increasing nerfs, even to optional bosses (Ignis and Razorscale, for two). The argument that I’m obviously hardcore because I hold a title afforded to one in five people who’ve downed a single 25-man boss (I looked it up) doesn’t sit well with what I see as belonging to that label. Yes, there are hard modes, but I sit in the uncomfortable position of being not hardcore enough for hard mode (we’re nowhere near even getting XT-001’s heart killed) and being too casual for the hard modes (at present).

And there’s the problem. No-one will admit to being hardcore, unless they’re in the top 2%. I think when it comes down to it, hardcore is a state of mind.

From one of my guildmates:

This is where I spend my leisure time, so I want it to be fun. I want it to be the raiding guild it is, which is an inclusive one, where there is space for the ‘characters’ of wow… The nab huntards who pull the entire dungeon, or who let their pets pee up Kirin’s treeform, or who fry Grog’s Brown Rabbit… Where there is space and time to wait for the little Parisian gnome who fall off slippery pipes and tries to find his way back, or dumb shadowpriests who fail at voids…

To me this says “We are not hardcore”. We’re progressed, but not hugely so.

Labels like “Slacker”, “Hardcore” and “Casual” are simply too wide ranging and encompassing to be useful to anyone. There’s far too much stigma, frequently unintended, attached to each for anyone to truly wear such badges with pride.

Who trashed Ulduar?

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:24:58 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

Another week, another few bosses down. Farewell to Ignis the Furnace Master, Kologarn and Auriaya (though on 10-man only). But wait. What’s going on with the trash?

The first time we took a look at the trash in the Antechambe of Ulduar, we wiped. More than a few times, in fact. There were runes to stay away from, Baron Geddon - style blowings up of people and, well, general carnage. Maybe not so much of the wipings with Ignis’s trash, but getting to him too was a challenge. Now? It’s a foolish raider that gets himself killed on trash. Somewhere between the first week and the second, something happened to Ulduar. The trash got easier. And the bosses got easier too. XT-001 had his enrage timer extended, as did the Assembly of Iron (massively, in fact).

The question I have to wonder is - why? At a time when hard modes are being buffed, why make normal modes easier? It’s not as if they were excessively difficult. The Hidden Circle are a country mile away from hardcore and yet we made some good progress in the first week.

In the second? The only trash to cause us major issues was Auriaya’s. I’m somewhat disappointed that things have been nerfed so swiftly and brutally. I’m aware I said this before, at the release of patch 3.0, talking about the Black Temple, but this time it’s only a week since the content’s release.

There’s still a challenge, but how many more stealth nerfs are going to sneak through?

Karazduar

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:57:55 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

It doesn’t seem like a week has passed since our first foray into Ulduar, but it very nearly has. So far, I’ve seen five bosses and beaten four of them. Ignis was the only one that defeated us, though to be fair, we didn’t spend very long on him at all. So, what are my thoughts on the instance as a whole, rather on any of the bosses?

It’s all very Karazhan. And for all the bitching, and the moaning that I made about the place after seeing it week in, week out for over a year, it was still a fantastically designed instance, far more than any of the other raids in the Burning Crusade, some of which seemed to have no story at all (Zul’Aman) and some of which just didn’t seem as epic as they could have (Shade of Akama in particular).

No, there’s a polish there that seems to have been lacking in my raiding for a while, and I like it. The difficulty level is maybe pitched just a little on the wrong side of “easy” for some of the regular modes, but not so much that I’m overly complaining.

Doing Kara before patch 2.1 felt a lot like doing Ulduar does now; there’s a dead easy boss first up (Attumen / Flame Leviathan), followed by a set of harder bosses only some of which need to be defeated to progress. The trash is a threat -we even wiped more times on Assembly of Iron trash than we did on the Assembly themselves (so, yes, I think they’re probably too easy).

I only worry if the rate at which Ulduar gets easier week-on-week is the same as Kara. Hopefully Hard Mode can put paid to that.

Let’s Go Farmin’ Now…

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:07:33 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

For me, one of the gret mysteries of Ulduar was “How can the instance crash in such a way so much?” on Wednesday night. At least between the place being unplayable we were able to down the Flame Leviathan, which granted me a new toy. We were able to clear Ignis’s trash too, but just before the first pull, the instance crashed. By the time it came back up again, trash and all, the raid had been called.

Thursday was an altogether different story. This time we cleared the trash to Ignis, and actually got to engage him. After a couple of goes, and talking to other guilds, it emerged that the bugs reported (shattering not working, meleeing people in the slag pot) were still present.So we moved on to Razorscale. And in one sense, eveything fell apart.

That would be a good sense, though. The encounter wasn’t a faceroll. It was difficult, and we made some definite progress on it by the end of the evening. It was the sort of difficulty that might in the past have resulted in people screaming to go back to an easier instance to farm more gear. But as there isn’t any more gear - we’ve been farming Naxx for months, it’s all down to our own execution.

So.

Total repair bill over 2 days: 250G
Money spent on flasks: 100G
Having an instance with isn’t nearly as easy as I was beginning to fear: Priceless

Looks like it’s time for me to actually do some dailies for a change…

Timber!

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:37:28 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

So, what are my initial thoughts on healing as a resto druid? Having spent some time yesterday, as promised, healing my way through instances rather than facing the quest grind, I specced tree and put on my very best (read: probably pretty awful) quest healing greens I’d picked up along the way.

First up was Draktharon Keep. Admittedly at 77 I’m probably a little high for the instance, but my gear sucked and I thought it best to start out with something easy-ish. And we ended up with a level 80 druid tank (though not one that was particularly well geared). About the only time I struggled at all with the healing was when we had 3 groups pulled at once. I had a bit of problem decursing on the second boss but nothing too bad. A nice ego-boost, at least after I’d looked at the healing meters and verified that yes, it was all me.

Then, a much fairer challenge. Gundrak. This time the tank was an average-geared 76 paladin. Everyone was around an appropriate level. And here there was a sign of a little bit of a challenge. The first boss, in particular, we downed, but only just - I died before he did and only my HoTs were enough to keep the tank up. Other than that, a pretty short and successful run again. But what have I learned?

I really, really need to get a click-casting mod and learn how to use it. There were a few times when I tried to heal the wrong person because I just wasn’t targeting fast enough
Coupled with the above, I just wasn’t fast enough on decursing / poison cleansing as I should be.
I need to pay more attention to my health. I was often too busy looking at everyone else’s health bars to notice my own sinking down.
I wholeheartedly and unreservedly apologise to any healer for whom I’ve tanked and consistently run out of LoS, or pulled when there isn’t really enough mana.

Anyway, Ulduar appears to have finally materialised on my doorstep so it’s back to the plate for me. No doubt I’ll come back to the healing soon, but I’ve already learned a lot about tanking from this other side, and there’s no doubt more to go.

Cutting down the largest tree in the forest with a herring

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:56:43 GMT

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

The more astute readers of this site will have realised that a second armory profile has appeared in the sidebar. Druziraa was the very first character I created to tank, long before Namthe was even considered, let alone created, and before even the Burning Crusade was launched. It was the heady days of patch 2.0, it looked like druids might actually be excellent tanks (Dead Code Elimination even ran Zul’Gurub with a druid main tank). Of course, eventually the Burning Crusade arrived, and I went back to my main, leaving the poor druid at level 34, forgotten and gathering dust. By the time I came to level a tank, it was becoming increasingly obvious that bear tanks would cut it for a lot of content, but warriors just had it easier.

And now? Once I reach 80, it’s my intention to play a healing character, to see how the other side lives. In the meantime, though, having played through much of the levelling and questing content of the original World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade and now Lich King, I can see some differences in how quests are implemented but in many ways they’re fundamentally the same.

In the Burning Crusade, quests were very much a continuation of the tradition started in classic WoW - go out and kill a certain number of mobs. Unfortunately, inflation kicks in and eventually you get to requirements to kill silly numbers of creatures, like fifty ogres (The Twin Clefts of Nagrand, I’m looking at you). Things have changed in Lich King. The most I’ve had to kill for any single quest is twenty creatures, something of a step down. So, Lich King has significantly improved the quest to killing ratio. Or has it?

Sure, there are lots less of the “Kill everything stone dead” type quests, but what of it? We’re killing nearly as many things, but instead we’re fetching items that have a 100% drop rate, or finding things that are strewn across the area. Sure, there are many more interesting quests, like the vehicle quests but it just feels like a bit of a distraction from the exact same grind we had before. Borean Tundra in particular felt like this, though I can’t really explain why. Superficial differences are all that seperate the new quests from the old, with the exception of the vehicle “gimmick” quests.

In an effort to make the levelling process interesting again I’ve turned to something else. By speccing resto and running dungeons, I’m seeing a different way to level that may or may not be what I’m looking for. I’ll report back on my experiences in a few days.