Dragon Chew-Toy

Grunzford vs. Firelands, Round 2: Hard Mode Unlocked

2011-11-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

Killshots aren't quite as satisfying when there's no body to dance around

Second night seeing Ragnaros and we got a guild first kill. Not too shabby, I'd say.

Yep, well done. You do realize that means you're starting Heroic modes next week, right?

...I'm about to lose a lot of repair money, huh?

You have no idea.

What Do You Mean I'm Going to Firelands Tonight?

2011-10-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

So you finally got some raiding action, huh Grunz? I would've figured you'd have at least another week or two of gearing up.

Yeah, so did I. Your paladin friend and I have been running heroics for the last week or so, but I figured we wouldn't be seeing the inside of Firelands just yet. Imagine my surprise when I get home Wednesday and instead of heading off to do my dailies, I'm getting dragged inside of a raid I've never seen before to offtank. Apparently their normal offtank was sick that night.

Surprise raid, huh? Guessing you weren't quite up to speed on all of the boss mechanics beforehand, huh?

Up to speed? I knew absolutely nothing about that place going in other than "Ragnaros lives here" and "fire is hot". Those were the extent of my knowledge of Firelands.

Gotta love trial by fire.

Couldn't make it a whole post without a terrible pun, could you?

Nope. Back to the raid though. How'd it go, what with you being completely unprepared?

Surprisingly well actually. We one-shot everything up to Ragnaros and I picked up a few new pieces of gear. I did drop once on Shannox and once on Baleroc, but nothing we couldn't recover from. We weren't quite able to take down Ragnaros though, but we got him to about 10 million or so. Fun fight by the way - little hectic, but the fun fight's usually are.

You mean like Sindragosa?

Not funny. That's annoying, not hectic. There's a difference.

True enough. Sounds like the raid went pretty well considering you went in blind. Did they just have you read up on each fight before the pull?

My training was your friend, the main tank, gave me about 30-60 seconds of explanation right before the pull. It got a little more detailed for Ragnaros, but honestly that's the only one that really requires some preparation. The others are pretty easy to offtank from what I could tell.

Good to hear that the first raid went well for you.

Yeah, it was a good first raid after all that downtime. Group seemed like a nice bunch, so we should get along while you've got me on this assignment. Any idea how long this'll be?

Honestly? I couldn't say. We've still got no date for the Tyria trip and that other scouting mission I was looking at isn't for another couple months. Good news for you though is that with the recent news, you should have work for the foreseeable future. Might even have a new recruit to share the workload over there once I can find a suitable one.

Well, it's better than sitting around the office waiting for work with the rest of the team or packing for the move.

Grunzford, Carrier of Lowbies to 85

2011-10-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

So how's Alliance life treating you, Grunz?

First of all, you and the other guys are all jerks.

Duly noted. Seriously though, what've they had you doing over there? I know he specifically requested a tank, but that's the only detail I was given.

No tanking so far, but that would be due to my gear being somewhat, oh what's the word? Ah yes, garbage.

Yeah, we didn't get the chance to set you up with much Horde-side work other than some normal dungeons. So they've been running you through stuff then?

Not yet, but that's due to the main project I've been working on. I have fixed some holes with auction house piece. I'm also doing these Molten Front dailies I was told about that are supposed to eventually let me pick up some decent epic pieces, but from what I can tell I've still got a long ways to go before I start seeing any purple from those. Those Hyjal people want a whole lot of those Marks of the World Tree before they think my gold's good enough.

Fair enough. So what's this main project you've been working on that's important enough to postpone Operation Make Gear Suck Less?

Well your Alliance buddy apparently also recruited a rookie about the same time as he brought me over. Since it didn't make a whole lot of sense to run me through 5-mans just to have to repeat everything once he hit 85, we decided to wait until he caught up.

Makes sense to me, though I don't really understand how that's a project.

Who do you think carried him to 85?

Ah, gotcha.

On the plus side, made a decent chunk of change once he got to the higher-end zones and I could do the same quests. I wasn't able to do all of the quests with him since the neutral factions seemed to recognize me even though I'm a Worgen now, but I still made a few thousand out of it. Enough to pay for those heirlooms you asked me to buy. Have you already told Mordigg you're making him work over there later as a jewelcrafter?

Where's the fun in that?

We Assign Tank Jobs In A Very Diplomatic Manner

2011-10-10T17:40:00.000-07:00

Okay guys, we've got a job request from an old friend of ours. Apparently he's started running some raids with the Alliance and he wants to hire a tank. I know everyone's excited about Tyria and leaving Azeroth behind, but since we don't have a concrete move date, I can't really tell him no. That means that someone gets to take a trip and do some Alliance work until we're ready to go.

So who wants to volunt- Not it!

Not it!

Not... damnit!

Races of Tyria: All These New Options And You Chose Human?

2011-09-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

Seriously, you two chose Human over all of the other races?

What's wrong with choosing Human?

Odd seeing Humans without those little red names floating over their heads

Seemed like a perfectly serviceable choice for our professions. Besides, it's not like it's Alliance against Horde on Tyria.

I know that. I mean why, when we're looking at a world with four race options that are new and exciting, would you two decide to go with something as plain as Human?

Well, as a thief, human honestly makes the most sense. While there's no statistical or racial bonus as far as I'm aware for the race choice, there is the unspoken quality most Humans have: they tend to blend in very well in urban environments. The Charr that you're looking at stick out like a sore thumb. Same with those giant Norns Solagar was talking about. The Asura are really too comical looking for most people to ignore and I know it'll be hard for most people to not notice the walking, talking plants that are the Sylvari. In the grand scheme of things, a Human is the plainest being you're likely to meet in a city. First rule of being a thief: don't stick out. Seems like a logical choice to me.

Hmm you make a good point. I suppose I hadn't considered the whole "hide in plain sight" trait Humans had, but the only one I've ever really worked with is Tuknir and I don't think he's a good example.

True, that one's not quite right in the head. He'd probably make a good Norn though.

You want me to give him access to a race that dedicates themselves to booze, battle, and what the majority of us would call insanity?

He'd be in good company.

I'll think about it. Back to the whole Human choice thing. Mal, you always struck me as a pretty proud Blood Elf. I would've thought you of all people would be averse to going Human.

You are correct on the Blood Elf pride front. However given that my race of choice is unavailable in Tyria, I'm left with the five options available. After careful consideration, the Humans were actually the best fit for me. The Charr may have Elementalists and Necromancers in their ranks, but they make no attempts to hide their distaste for most magic. The Norns have a slightly stronger connection to magic, but their general outlook on life doesn't quite match mine.

What about the Asura? They're pretty heavy into magic and magitek or whatever they call that stuff.

Yes, but I just can't bring myself to be one. I'll admit that I'm not the most humble Blood Elf in the world, but even I consider them to be a bit over the top. That and I can't help but see gnomes when I look at them. Big eyed, lizard mouthed gnomes. Seeing that face every morning would give me nightmares.

That still leaves the Sylvari.

I was considering them for a while, but in the end I just couldn't bring myself to do so. They remind me too much of Night Elves. I realize it's an unfair comparison, but it's there and I have a hard time not seeing my tree-hugging cousins when I look at them.

So it was Human by default then?

Yes, but that's not to say that I don't appreciate the race's qualities or history. In fact it sounds like an excellent match for a Blood Elf like myself. Nobility, political intrigue, magically-caused catastrophes - sounds like a good chunk of our history books. Plus I like their architecture. It's a far cry from the wonders of Silvermoon, but for Humans they do a passable job at being artistic.

Fair enough. Sounds like you two have put some thought into your choices. I apologize for being so sarcastic; I was kinda expecting a response like "we threw darts at a wall full of names and that's what came up."

Perish the thought.

Of course not! We have more respect for our work than that.

Good to hear. Guess that's it till next time, folks. Talk to you later.

Psst... you think he bought it?

Yes, but he won't if you keep talking about it.

Lips are sealed.

Good. Be sure to take down the rest of the names and darts from the wall of the breakroom. Pretty sure it was a lucky guess, but we don't need to give him proof.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 11: A Guild For Every Purpose

2011-09-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

Quick little break from the race posts to talk about something people might actually be interested in: guilds.

For our little group, we've looked at most guilds as sources of work. We'd take up a contract with whatever guild was willing to pay and treat it like a normal job, just with dragon murder instead of meetings. I'd say no paperwork too, but the boss never gets to avoid that stuff. Once we were off the clock though, that guild tag might as well not have been there. Sure, we had friends in the guilds we worked for; usually they're the ones that recommended us in the first place. There's a difference between being a guildmate and a contract laborer though. A guildmate will usually put the guild's needs ahead of their own. Contractors however look at the bottom line: if someone on our team wasn't being sufficiently compensated for their work, we either renegotiated or cancelled the job. Friendship is great and all, but we're running our own business here and I can't pay Orgrimmar rent with friends. Well, maybe if I was a goblin.

We were in an actual guild back in the old days though, The Greyside Gang. We weren't the biggest guild in the world (setting up a Karazhan run took a bit of creative planning some weeks), but we had the most important thing I've found for guilds that last - we actually liked each other. Whether it was from a shared sense of humor or just the timing of everyone finding a group where they could complain about their old guilds with others that shared their pain, this small group just clicked.

The only guild runs we've done as a group since those days have been a few Sartharion runs back in Northrend and the occasional 5-man dungeon there and after the Cataclysm. Some of us, like my team, have moved on to working for other guilds in the years after we stopped raiding. That didn't stop us from hanging out though. Even after all these years, we still get together to talk about other work we've found or to reminisce/complain about the old days. We may not have been on the cutting edge of raiding, but I'd be hard pressed to find many guilds that still do that after all these years. After some nights of raiding with other guilds, it was nice to head over to our meeting place and vent about some of what I'd seen.

Speaking of other guilds, you might ask why we ever did the contracting thing if we were perfectly happy with the Greyside Gang. Well, it's the same reason why anyone might go job hunting despite really liking their coworkers - if there's no work, you're not getting paid. There's also the matter of staying on top of your game too. Hanging out in a bar in Orgrimmar is fine for the occasional brawl, but it's not exactly up there with fighting a dragon. You usually lose money at those brawls too (that or in the drinking beforehand), so it kinda compounds the whole "no income" problem. As such we all had to take up with other guilds that weren't quite as good of a match for us personality-wise. Sure I got along with most of the officers and usually the other tanks, but we're talking big guilds here since that's what Sol and I usually got called for. It's hard enough finding nine people you like that know their jobs, let alone 24 plus all of the backups. Combine that with some of the rougher learning nights and there was usually a chain of whispers going between me/Sol and whichever one of our friends was on to laugh at our misery.

Looking at this, you can see the dilemma we've got: run with the guild that your friends are in or run with the guild that gives you work. You can only have one guild in Azeroth and, with the addition of guild reputation/leveling/achievements/etc., it made the decision to stick with one that much more of a pain. Tyria handles things a bit differently though.

Let's stick with my example of a guild for work and a guild for fun. Normally I'd be stuck having to choose which of the two I would represent. Whichever one I chose would be the only one I'd show up for on the guild roster (everyone else would have to "friend" me) and that guild would be the only one to benefit from any of my exploits. In Tyria however I'm no longer constrained to just one guild. Yes, I can only represent one guild at a time, but I can choose between them at will. Whichever one I'm currently representing will see me on the roster or talk to me through guild chat and I'll be able to use the tools they've unlocked through achievements and influence, such as the calendar or guild storage. Once I'm done there though, I can switch over to the other guild and do things with them. You could have a guild for running dungeons, one for structured PvP, one for world vs. world PvP, one for friends - as far as I've been able to find, there's no set limit at the moment.

I know what some of you are thinking though. You're looking at all of these lists of people and thinking, "I'm never gonna get a moment's peace in Tyria. There's always gonna be a list of people that can bug me to go do something from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep." Worry not! You'll also have the option to go incognito and represent no guilds. We've all had those moments where we just want to get something done without interruption and the Tyrians have seen fit to allow for just such an occasion.

That about wraps it up, but I do have one more quick thing to say about guilds. Remember the world vs. world PvP I mentioned earlier? I haven't talked a great deal about it yet, but those details can wait. The important thing here is how it's related to guilds. Right now there's no guild halls in towns like some of the bigger guilds have been requesting, but for those guilds that are into PvP? In those zones where world vs. world PvP occurs, there are keeps. Keeps that your guild can conquer for themselves and proudly display their flag for all to see. Keeps that your guild can use influence to upgrade and fortify against enemy incursion. I'm not sure how big of a role these will play in the grand scheme of the battles, but the idea of having a fortifiable base of operations in the middle of a battlefield sounds great. Would've been nice to have somewhere to coordinate from during the handful of battlegrounds I did in Azeroth, rather than using BG chat and hoping they would read it.

Races of Tyria: The Spirited Norn

2011-09-15T16:54:00.000-07:00

Do you have to use terrible puns for the bulk of your post titles?

Yep, got a pun quota and we don't post often enough to use witty ones, so puns it is. Anyways we're here to talk about another race and Solagar is here to present his choice for the trip to Tyria. So what race are you leaning towards, Sol?

Well, since I don't have a direct analog for a return to my old Blood Elf state, I've been looking through the options available. Out of the five you've shown me, I believe the Norn to be the optimal race for my travels there as a Guardian.

I'm still going Charr, but pictures like this made the choice kinda hard

Really? A Norn?

I take it you disapprove?

Not so much disapprove. It's more that the race isn't really, well, you.

Why would you say that? They're an honorable race of warriors and the guardian seems like a perfect fit for them.

For the class, yes. For you, not really. You are correct that they're an honorable race, but did you read any beyond that? Let's take a look at that first paragraph: "Boistrous, strong-willed, and passionate". I'll give you the second one. The third one's a bit of a stretch, but I suppose you can be passionate about your work at times. I'm gonna have to call you out on the boistrous part though. You're not exactly the rowdy party type, Sol.

You don't know that for certain. I had my moments during Blood Knight training back in Silvermoon and I've participated in events the guilds I've worked for put on.

Participating doesn't mean showing up, grabbing food, and leaving before someone makes you be social.

Fine, but the other parts of that paragraph work for me. "Steadfast allies and implacable foes" - that seems perfect for me.

You're right, there are parts that fit you better. It says right here they're "quick to anger, even quicker to smile, and treat each new day as a personal challenge". Dunno about the smiling part, but the rest of that seems spot on.

Very funny. Let's look further down, shall we? How about the connection to the spirits they have? I may not have the shapeshifting part, but being connected to the world and spirits? That I have plenty of experience with.

Video's kinda old, but it's worth it to see the story bits at the end

I'm not sure a stolen, then freely given, connection to the Light really counts there, but I suppose if we look at the fact that you've trained some with the Sunwalkers, it could loosely count. Before you say it, your old connection to arcane magic doesn't count; it was a side-effect of your race's magic addiction. Besides you only ever used the stupid thing as an interrupt anyways.

So are you telling me to choose another race or not?

Nah, there's nothing wrong with your choice. I'm just giving you a hard time. Personally I think it'll be good for you to spend some time with the Norn. Besides giving you a good supply of war stories to pass along, they might help you loosen up a bit. You've always been too high strung, so maybe being around a bunch of impulsive shapeshifters will fix that. Plus you're certain to pick up some new combat maneuvers from working with them to share with the rest of us.

Ah. Well, thank you for being supportive. For a second there I thought you were trying to talk me out of this.

Of course not! Where else am I gonna find someone to get me tickets to Keg Brawl games?

...

Races of Tyria: Charr Do It With Steel, Not Spells

2011-09-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

I take it we're not going to talk about the other possible worlds we saw at PAX then?

Maybe if we find time, but it's been a few weeks so we should move on. Besides, that Firefall one (not sure what the actual planet's name was - Urth or something like that) we looked at is supposedly letting other people get more hands-on time in the next couple months, so I might as well wait for that. As for the other one, I'm reluctant to talk about it.

Didn't care for it?

No, I liked what I saw. The problem is I didn't see enough. You and I got to check out Tyria and the WildStar world for 40 minutes. In that 40 minutes we had time to check out combat, questing, gear itemization - pretty much enough time to get a feel for everything we care about. Here I only got 20 minutes and half of that was talking. Don't get me wrong - the quality of the talking was good. I was interested in what everyone had to say. Unfortunately I was also interested in doing non-talky things and there wasn't really enough time for both. I could comment on what I tried, but I feel that would be unfair with the little I was able to see.

Understandable. Where does that leave us for today's post then? I know Lokaja hasn't finished his Ranger profession post because neither of us has seen him for a while.

Actually got the idea from the guys that have been giving out all of the details about Tyria. They're doing a week of posts about one of the five races we get to choose from in Tyria, seeing as how the bulk of us can't just hop over there and expect to fit in.

Ah yes, I'd been wondering when we would get to discussing that. Will we be focusing on the same race everyone else is talking about at the moment?

Where's the fun in being topical? Nah, we're gonna do this the way we talked about the professions: we'll talk about the ones that we've picked out for ourselves. It just works out here because I know you and I are planning on the same race.

Correct. I cannot speak for the remainder of the team, but the two of us at the very least will be adventuring through Tyria in the guise of a Charr.

Seems a little more intimidating than Med as a Blood Elf, huh?

That's right, though I assume for different reasons. I'll be going with the Charr partly because, well, they're the closest match I have to being a Tauren. They're big, they have horns, they're fuzzy - seems kinda obvious to me. They're a bit more warlike than my people, though that's probably going to shift some because of Garrosh (I'm not bitter, no...). To be honest though the bulk of their fighting is retaliatory since this Ascalon place did apparently take their land first and this Flame Legion group of Charr was apparently subjugating the whole race for a while there. When you listen to some of them talk though and hear how much they enjoy their work, you can't really mistake them for peaceful folks. Really though, I think that's the main reason I like them.

As much as I consider myself a Tauren, we're a race of druids, hunters and shamans with some outliers. I'm respected, sure, but you know you're always on the edge of society to some extent when you take up the blade. With the Charr though, everything that makes me who I am is considered a virtue. They value strength in battle and fearlessness. They strive for discipline in everything they do. Most important to an old smith like me though, they honor being industrious, particularly when it comes to working with metal.

Ah, now you're getting to the good part. Sure they value skill in combat and discipline, but most importantly they strive for technological advancement. It just so happens that being in a constant state of war is a great way to make said progress. The Charr have made great advances in engineering and metallurgy over the years, making them militarily and technologically superior to the other races of Tyria.

I'm sure those Asura guys might question us on this.

I know a warrior should prolly be Blood Legion, but I like the attitude of these Iron Legion guys

Bah! Let them argue the point! It doesn't change the fact that they're behind. While they waste their efforts on technomagical constructs like those golems they all have, the Charr have proven their dominance not only with their war machines, but with their finest work: the Black Citadel. The entire city is a vast foundry and haven for crafting and engineering work. While some members of the Charr do practice magic, the bulk of the race places their faith in steel rather than spells. Honestly after reading what you sent me about them, I couldn't find any compelling evidence to choose one of the alternatives.

Yeah. I'm gonna have to find volunteers for the other races. We'll all be able to work on the same stuff, but it's always good to try and spread resources in case we're missing something. Might have to ask one of the gnomes to be our Asura rep though; I can't think of any of the regular crew that would want the assignment. I could be wrong though. For the next post we'll ask Sol which way he's leaning. I'll be the one doing the asking though, not you. Pretty sure he's still sore about the whole "transforming him into a Tauren" thing.

Sigh... It's been months. Sometimes scientific progress has a few side effects. Nobody died, so it's not like anything that bad happened. Besides he'd just have to change for Tyria, so really I gave him practice. He should be thanking me.

Yep, I'll definitely be the one talking to him instead of you.

PAX Hands-on: WildStar

2011-09-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

Ready to talk about the other world you checked out, Med?

Indeed. While I may not have been able to try out Tyria due to someone pulling rank, I did have one other world I was interested in. The week before we left for PAX I heard reports of a new potential world to investigate.

So what's the name of this place?

Well, the world is called Nexus, but all of the information I found was labeled WildStar. A codename perhaps, because honestly who would name a planet WildStar? Name aside I looked for information about this new world. The main feature was the trailer included below, but they gave a few details about the world itself.

Guessing man-eating plant dragons and hordes of robots weren't in the travel brochure

I'll discuss the world when I get into my demonstration, but suffice it to say I was intrigued and put it on my list of places to check out on our trip. Like your Tyria expedition, mine was also 40 minutes so I actually had time to work. It's still early, so the only race/class combinations available were those shown in the trailer: the Granok Warrior, the Human Spellslinger, and the Aurin Esper. I chose the Esper and began exploring Nexus.

*chuckle*

What's so funny?

Oh nothing, just the idea of you running around as a bunny girl. For some reason that's amusing.

Sigh, if I could've chosen male, I would have. I thought about trying the Warrior, but I was actually talking to someone working at the show and when I asked for a recommendation, he suggested the Esper. I believe he said he was the lead combat designer or something like that, so I assumed he knew what he was talking about. Nice fellow by the way - he was pretty much talking to me the entire time I was waiting for my turn and he answered quite a few of my questions.

The demo began with me in the middle of a crashed spaceship. Before you say anything, no I didn't cause said crash; it was like that when I got there. I was resuscitated by someone else on the ship, then sent off to begin the normal adventurer process of running items around and killing the indigenous population for quest givers. There was one small difference in that though and that would be the path I chose.

You mean your class?

No, that's separate. In addition to choosing a race and class, you also have to choose a path. Basically a path is somewhat of a supplemental way of gaining experience and treasure. You still have the normal quests that everyone does and there's always monsters and the like around to slaughter, but you can tailor it a bit to reward you for how you would prefer to work.

The four path options are Soldier, Explorer, Scientist, and Settler. At the demo only Soldier and Explorer were active, so I don't have first-hand experience with the latter two though I have seen reports of how those are supposed to work. Starting from the top though, Soldier is pretty self-explanatory: you like to kill things. The Soldier path will support this by giving you the opportunity to prove yourself in combat. Everyone has some opportunity to do this: there were experience bonuses for kill chains and some pseudo-quests popped into my log while I was working that said, "Hey, you're good at killing these monsters. Think you can kill another eight in two minutes?" The Soldier however can take this one step further. At certain points he can basically drop a challenge flag and waves of monsters will come towards him. If he survives the waves, he'll then have to fight a mini-boss of sorts and should the Soldier survive that, he'll be rewarded.

I chose the Explorer path since Scientist wasn't available. I'm not normally the explorer of the group (that's more Lokaja and Daikaja's preference), but I enjoyed myself with the few explorer missions I was able to accomplish. Basically you'll be running around and every so often you'll receive a call over your radio asking you to place a beacon somewhere or investigate an anomaly. When you go to the spot on the map where the quest is marked, you'll see some sort of environmental obstacle.

The first one I found was a mountain with periodic landslides that I had to either dodge by hiding behind rocks or I had to time my double-jumps to leap over the waves of snow. For the second one I ran into what looked like a sheer cliff face, but when I inspected it further I found a secret path that led to the top of the rock where I could place the beacon. Finally the third one had me following a strange energy signature. When I reached the first spot where the floating energy ball had been sitting, I was infused with power that allowed me to leap to great heights which allowed me to follow the energy ball up to the top of the rock spire it had flown up to. In each of these cases, I received treasure and experience for doing something that many of us would've done on our own simply out of curiosity or boredom.

Yeah, I remember my old wall-walking days back in Vanilla when I had nothing to do in-between raids other than sell Lionheart Helms and Stronghold Gauntlets.

The other two paths are similar from what I've been told. Scientist examines things out in the field and they can unlock bonuses like extra damage against monsters or finding items in the environment to heal their party members. They also find out more about the world itself since the path is all about digging in for more information. Settlers are a bit more social - you get tasks like using an item to buff nearby people or to fix something that's broken in a settlement. I still believe I'll be going with Scientist when I get another chance to work with this, though I did have fun with the few Explorer missions I was able to work on. Would've actually liked to finish the last couple I found, but I had priorities.

Not enough time to do all the quests?

For more than one reason. Back to my demo though. Combat was somewhat of a mix between what we're used to in Azeroth with a little from Tyria. The Esper was a caster class like I'm used to, but it had combo points and finishers like rogues. The nice part about the combo points though was that pretty much every ability that wasn't a finisher generated combo points, so you didn't feel like using heals or self-shields was a waste of a GCD. There was a bit more standing around than in Tyria since my main combo point building attack had a cast time, but it was significantly more mobile than Azeroth due to the dodge mechanic. It operates similar to how the Tyria dodge works, but it had an additional bonus. Remember how I said there was an experience bonus for kill streaks? There's more bonuses like that and not all of them were limited to experience. If an enemy was charging up for a big attack (for example, the yetis had a cold breath attack you didn't want to be hit by), you could dodge the attack completely. When you did this, the enemy would be vulnerable for a few seconds and you could do bonus damage to him during that short window. This worked two ways though: if you didn't dodge that attack, it would probably knock you prone and it would be you that suffered all that extra damage.

Since I couldn't really play and film at the same time, watch TotalBiscuit's video

All in all I probably did a bit more stationary work than your druid friend that was trying the Warrior, but it was probably something like 50-50 and most of the movement was me dodging. A nice change of pace from the raids we've seen where it's "stand still until this happens, then run to the other side of the room and stand still until the next movement trigger".

Sounds pretty good so far. Shame you didn't have enough time to do everything though.

Depends on how you look at it.

I thought you said you couldn't finish the Explorer missions.

Yes, but those were side missions. There was a main storyline through the bulk of the missions and that's what I focused my time on.

Story was that good?

It was good, but it was less because of that and more because of what the people at the demo said.

Which was?

Well someone at the booth mentioned extra swag, so I asked that combat dev I'd been talking to about it. He said that everyone got a shirt, but that if you were able to finish the demo before the timer expired, you'd get something extra. I took that as a challenge.

Were you successful?

What do you think?

The closest we're ever going to get to "beating" a MMO

Back from PAX: Guild Wars 2

2011-09-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

Well, that was a fun trip and we finally got to try some Tyrian combat.

Correction: you got to try Tyrian combat. I got to do the rest of the work since there was a bit of a line and you called 'dibs' on going first.

Oh come on, that's not fair! We were both at PAX to check out some possibilities for places to move after we leave Azeroth. We had to hit everything we could, so it just made sense to split up the tasks and not have both of us trying the same thing at the same time. It would've been nice if you could've had a little hands-on time, but unfortunately it felt like every other adventurer in Azeroth was in line with me there.

I would have an easier time believing the sincerity of your words if not for your attitude after you finished trying it out. The sight of a giddy Tauren gushing over combat techniques and dodging is not a pretty one.

What? I had fun. It's important to enjoy one's work after all and I was certainly enjoying my time in Tyria.

I take it that means it was everything we've been hoping for?

Well, I wasn't able to try everything I wanted since I only had about 40 minutes before I got sent back, but what I was able to try was great. I chose to go in as a Charr warrior for obvious reasons. In that 40 minutes, I got to help fight back a ghost that possessed a giant statue (at level 1 no less!), help out at a forge and a junkyard by gathering tools and defending it from invaders, and help out at this lake thing by slaying giant lizards. There was also some giant thing that hurt like a truck that I took down with the help of some other adventurers wandering about. The last eight minutes or so centered around myself and a group of three or four other adventurers, all below level 4, trying to push our way into a cavern filled with fire turrets and level 6 Flame Legion Charr. It didn't end up going in our favor, but we managed to hold our own for quite a while.

Sounds thrilling. What about the weapons themselves? How did the new mechanics you mentioned work out?

They felt great. Switching weapons on the fly was quick and learning new techniques went fairly quickly. I think it was something like three or four minutes with my starter sword skill until I learned my second one and maybe six or seven for the next one. I didn't test the fourth and fifth techniques because I was trying other weapons, particularly the rifle. It's still not entirely natural to me to fight at ranged, but I was starting to get the hang of it during our epic struggle to enter the cavern.

Dodging is going to take some getting used to. It's easy enough to do, but you can only dodge so often until you need to let your energy regenerate. It's fairly quick, but it does mean that you need to pick those moments when you need to move.

Since you mentioned swapping weapons, did you get the chance to look at equipment?

Indeed and compared to what we've been working with all these years in Azeroth, it'll be a nice change of pace. You've got four attributes to work with: Power makes all of your attacks hit harder, Precision increases your chance of getting a critical hit, Toughness reduces the damage you take from physical and magical attacks, and Vitality gives you more health. No haste or hit rating to cap, no dodge or parry to balance against one another - just four numbers to work with.

There were upgrade slots in most of the equipment I found, but I didn't have anything to put there so I can't give a first-hand impression, but I don't believe anything's changed since last week's crafting post so that should still be valid. I also didn't have any procs to play with, but since I was in the Charr starting area, that's to be expected. An associate of mine got the chance to try an Asura engineer in one of the later zones, so I might ask him if he can write something up when he's not busy.

Really? An Asura? He seriously chose one of those overglorified technomages over the Charr, the proven masters of engineering and war machines?

I know, I know, it's weird but it's what he wanted to try out. I certainly wasn't going to follow him in his madness, but to each their own. Now lemme think if I've forgotten anything...

Oh yeah! All those public quests I was working on? Pretty much every time I did something to further the goal, whether it was killing Flame Legion or just gathering tools for the forge, I earned some Karma. Now we already knew that there was going to be a currency for the events, but I didn't realize it was the same currency. I got quite a bit of karma from doing that event and the one with the lizards, then found my way over to the karma vendor by the forge. There was also one out in the fields that sold some armor I would've liked, but the one by the forge had all of the different weapons and honestly that was more important to me. I had to try out the rifle after all.

I think that's about everything from my short excursion into Tyria. Definitely looking forward to spending some more time there though. I did find a few other contenders that we'll be considering though, but those are for a later post. You have any luck, Med?

Indeed I did. While I may not have been able to try engineering in Tyria, I was able to get some time in with two other worlds that suited my tastes for all things technological.

Sounds good. We'll save those for next time since we've already run a bit long. Well, that and nobody's gonna want to ready about two different worlds in the same post. You want to tease people with something before we head out?

I believe I may have something to pique their interest until next time:

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 10: Crafting or "That Moneysink You Did Because It Gave You Extra Stats"

2011-08-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

I know we've still got one profession to cover and there's still all those posts I need to write up about the lack of tanking and all that, but since Med and I are taking our research trip later this week, it seemed like I should try and find something simple. Something I could write up that wouldn't, you know, change after I wrote it up.

Little bitter about that, huh?

Eh, more that it's editing that I'll need to do at some point when I should be writing new stuff. From what I read, it made sense. Learning weapon skills from using weapons and using energy just for dodging and not for your skills - those both seem logical to me. There's also the bit about how to learn your non-weapon skills, but since I haven't really covered that yet, it's not a problem.

So if you're not talking about the changes, what is the topic today?

For today's post, we're going to be talking about crafting, a particular area of interest for me. That's one of the things I've always pushed with the team: everyone picks up trades and everyone works to perfect them for the benefit of the group. Besides that, I've always taken a great deal of pride in my work as an armorsmith (not blacksmith - I did that long obnoxious quest chain, so I earned that title), miner, and chef. I know Sol feels the same way about his work as a jewelcrafter and Med has made it abundantly clear that he is an engineer, not a warlock.

The sooner I can be rid of this tiresome reliance on fel magic, the better!

I know, you've told me. Repeatedly.

Just think. You get to listen to that all weekend on your trip.

I'm hoping to leave him by the engineering stuff and just pick him up before we head back. Regardless, let's get back on topic. We all know how crafting works back in Azeroth, right? You pick two primary tradeskills and you level those up. Unless there happens to be something you could use along the way, you find out whatever the most efficient method of leveling your trade is, then you grind out those items until you're done. If the stuff you made happens to sell well, you can recoup your costs. Otherwise you send it to an enchanter friend to disenchant for dust and essence. I know I made many, many worthless green items on my trip to master blacksmithing.

Yeah, I remember burning through stacks and stacks of green gems and ore you mailed me. I'd just stand next to a vendor while I worked. Cut gems till my bags were full. Sell all the cut gems. Go back to step 1. It was a little monotonous.

Yep, especially when you took into account the times you had to work on a yellow or green recipe. You'd keep throwing materials at the recipe for that last skill point because even though it kept failing to give you a point, it was still the most efficient way to level or it was the only recipe you had that would give you a skill-up. I remember some stretches of smithing where I was basically living in a zone for a week to gather ore. I'd long since stopped getting skill points from those veins, but I needed another three bags worth of that ore to catch up to the next tier.

Okay, we've managed to cover what was tiresome about crafting back home. What makes things different in Tyria?

Well, you still only have two tradeskills at a time. However you no longer have to "waste" a skill on a gathering skill. Everyone knows how to harvest materials from the world. That'll provide the bulk of your materials, but you'll also be able to find some on creatures you've killed or being sold by merchants. In addition there's a kind of disenchanting that anyone can do. If you get a salvage kit, you can use it to destroy old equipment and reclaim some crafting materials from it. You even have a chance to get upgrade components when you do so. These are kind of like gems in Azeroth, though they do have two distinct differences: they only work with specific kinds of gear (e.g. light armor, melee weapons, etc.) and in addition to being stat bonuses, they can also do things like adding effects to your attacks or adding a visual effect. I can't find any information about whether or not you have to level up your harvesting skill, but I imagine even if we do, we'll need more materials for crafting than we'd need to level harvesting anyways. Besides it won't be nearly that bad to harvest materials in Tyria.

Are you sure about that? I seem to recall the days of Hellfire Peninsula and Howling Fjord where we rushed in with every other member of the Horde. Finding ore back then took ages, especially for the mountain of ore I used for jewelcrafting when you had a good chance of not finding any gems in the ore you prospected.

Ah, but here's the difference. Let's say you and I found a vein of ore while we were out questing. Now back in Azeroth, the ore would go to whoever was faster, so your cheating "I get a 10% faster mount because I'm a pally" self would get the ore.

Jealousy doesn't suit you.

Bite me. Anyway, over in Tyria, both of us would get the ore. You might've got the vein first, but it's still available for me to hit. If we were running around in a full group and found a vein, every single person in the party would get a chance to mine for ore.

That's certainly an improvement over the old system. I can think of a few herbalists who would've loved that system when they were competing with Grunzford and his flight form. So you've established how we get our materials and that we can have two tradeskills. What are our options and what makes things different on the actual crafting side of things?

There's eight choices for tradeskills. For those looking to make armor, you've got tailoring (light armor), leatherworking (medium armor), and armorsmith (heavy armor). If you want to craft something to kill monsters with, we've got weaponsmith (melee weapons), huntsman (physical ranged weapons), and artificer (caster weapons). Lastly you've got jewelcrafting, which should be pretty familiar for you, and chef which is now a full-fledged tradeskill.

I assume that you're looking at armorsmith and chef?

Armorsmith yes, but to begin with I should probably pair that with weaponsmith. By the time we're likely to need buff food, I can powerlevel that. Weapons on the other hand help all of the melee people on the team.

So you're planning on dropping weaponsmith at some point then? What if we need a weaponsmith again? You'll have to do all that work over again unless you're planning on making someone else on the team level the profession.

Ah, but therein lies another difference here. Let's say I did level weaponsmithing up to the cap of 400 and then decided to drop it for chef. Now let's say I went to the trainer to relearn the skill. When I do so, I not only relearn the skill at my old level, but I also retain any recipes I may have known.

Sounds quite useful. I always wondered why I immediately forgot everything I knew about mining when I dropped that for inscription. I assume there's some system in place to discourage you from leveling every single profession yourself, because if there wasn't, you'd just do all of it and not bother to tell the rest of us that crafting existed.

True enough. To discourage people from doing so, the cost to relearn a skill goes up with your skill level. The system allows for those like me who want to know everything while still encouraging people to focus on something and trade with others for what they're missing.

How about leveling the skills themselves? What are we looking at for recipes? Trainer with a smattering of random recipes from reputations and vendors?

Yes on the trainer bit, but there's more. There's a discovery system. I know alchemists and engineers already have one back home, but this one actually makes sense. Those guys would be making things and all of the sudden get an idea for a recipe. May not have had any connection to the recipe they were working on, but they got the new recipe.

The audio cuts out pretty early on, but this is the best view I could find. Just try to ignore the repeated attempts to learn something from the exact same item combinations.

For Tyrian crafters though, you discover recipes through somewhat of a guided trial-and-error system. Let's say I've got 10 kinds of materials in my bags. I'll put one of those on the table while I'm working on discoveries and it'll say something like "8 recipes available. Add more components." That means that there are eight recipes I can learn from that one component type, but I need to add more to narrow it down. If I add something that doesn't work, the number goes down to zero and I know I've made a mistake. If it's correct, the number goes down and I repeat this until it says "We have a match. Craft the item to discover the recipe." At this point, I craft the item and now that recipe is added to my list. Because I learned this recipe on my own, I could choose to either share this recipe with my friends or I could keep it to myself if it's likely to be a profitable recipe.

Until there's a crafting wiki that shows every possible combination of every material known.

Well yeah, but for those glorious few hours, you could have a unique recipe. Regardless you're actually discovering recipes by working with the materials that recipe uses, so it's research that makes sense.

That's all well and good, but what about leveling the tradeskill itself? Are these discoveries capped by your skill level?

I believe I heard someone mention that in that video, but I may have misunderstood. As for actually leveling your trade, that's actually the best part. So you know how we were complaining about leveling through ambiguous yellow and green recipes? Never knowing if you'd actually get those last couple of points from the recipe. Well with Tyrian crafting, there's no ambiguity. Your tradeskill has an experience bar just like your profession. When you craft something, you gain experience and when the bar's full, you go up a point. No wondering if your recipe will give you a point or not - it's all simple numbers.

Any possibility of failure? Some of those other worlds you were looking at had crafting failure as a possibility.

Thankfully no. Can't imagine who would think that was a good idea. There is however the possibility of a critical success.

Like my perfect green gem cuts?

Thankfully no since that destroyed the market for any non-perfect cuts. If you get a critical success, you either gain extra experience or you don't use all of the materials while crafting your item.

So far the system you've described sounds fairly reasonable. Two crafting skills, but everyone can gather and you can learn new things without sacrificing old progress. Gathering that isn't determined by whoever has the fastest mount or has memorized vein locations in the zone. A discovery system with a sense of order to it. No failures, but the potential for bonus rewards.

Yep, that about covers everything. We still have to figure out who's doing what later on, though I assume you're sticking with jewelcrafting.

I see no reason to switch. It is a specialty of mine, after all.

That can wait for later though, since we're not looking to make the move any time soon. Hopefully I'll dig up a bit more on the trip, but I'm going to be focusing on combat and being a warrior.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 9: I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again

2011-08-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

Did you seriously use lyrics from that terrible song for this post?

Cut me some slack, I've been on vacation. Gonna take a bit to get back into my game. Consider yourself lucky it's not more puns. If you've got a better title for a post about the downed state, I'm all ears.

Without delving into some more obscure music, I do not. Regardless I thought you were going to talk about the traits system or how healing and tanking is supposed to work in Tyria. Wouldn't the downed state fit into the latter of those two posts?

I am trying to cut down the size of these walls of text. I usually fail, but I try. That's not the main reason for this though, but I'll get to that later. Back to the task at hand - today's post is about the downed state and how it's different from what we're used to back in Azeroth.

I'd feel sorry for the human, but I can't blame the big guy for being mad about an axe to the groin

You mean being dead?

Exactly. For you or me, when we ran out of health, that was it. You were down until someone decided to resurrect you or you released your spirit to run back to your body. Until one of those two events occurred though, you were just sitting there staring at the floor.

So how many raid dungeon floors have you stared at over the years?

More than I care to think about. Hell, with AQ40, you could've shown me a picture of the floor and I would've been able to tell you what room it was from and probably where in said room. Man, I hated that raid...

Schadenfreude aside, what exactly is there that could be different in how dying works in Tyria? Seems fairly standard from a biological perspective: your body takes a certain level of punishment and once that threshold has been passed, you expire.

The difference would be that downed state I mentioned. It's sort of an intermediate state between okay and corpse. Picture it like this: you've been fighting for a while, but you're running out of steam. Something hits you and you go down, but you're not dead yet. You're hurting and not able to jump back into the fray, but you've still got some fight left in you.

In this example, that spot where you went down would be where we would run out of health and die back in Azeroth. That bit where you're on the ground and still fighting is all new for Tyrians.

So basically in Tyria, you just get this extended bit of health bar for combat then? Still able to do what you could before, but now you're stuck in place? That also doesn't address the fact that you're still out of health and dying. The way you've described it, you're basically just getting off a few extra shots while you're on the ground but you're still going to die.

Let's start with that first bit there. Yes, when you're on the ground, you can still attack your foes, but not the same as when you were standing. When you're downed, you've only got four attacks available to you. One of these is a shared shout skill to protect yourself and the other three are based on your profession - they're weapon independent. For warriors like me, we've got a shout to buff our comrades, rocks we can throw, and a type of last stand ability to bring us back up to fight. That last one may sound really powerful, but it has a catch: once it wears off, you're defeated. That's basically the equivalent of dead for us in Azeroth; you're stuck until someone comes over to revive you or you teleport back to a waypoint on your map.

Do you choose where I respawn at? Seems unnecessary if I'm running back to my corpse.

That would be true, if you were in fact running back to your body. With Tyria though, if you pay to respawn back at a waypoint, then you are back up and running. There is no need to return to where you fell unless you need to return there for quests or you just feel the need for vengeance. If you went down and you were finished in that area, you could decide to come back in town and save yourself the walk back to clear out your bags.

Sounds convenient. Back to the skills though - what do engineers have available to them in this downed state?

Wish I could tell you, but unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up those skills for engineers. Got them for the other professions though. Guardians get some holy type skills. Elementalists get an immobilize, a lightning attack, and a vapor form that lets them move their body if they want to get out of the fray or move closer to someone that can revive them. Similar stuff for the other professions.

Okay, you've described all of these attacks that you can do while you're downed, but that still doesn't address how you get out of said downed state. Is this just an extra way to put in some damage before you're in the same shoes as an Azerothian, waiting for a respawn or a resurrection?

Ah, but there is a difference here. Sure, you can be revived by your party members like we're used to. I believe this can be done in combat, though it's somewhat awkward given the time required. The reason you have those abilities available to you is because you have the potential to rally yourself back into the fight. Basically if you or your pet manage to kill something while you're downed, or even if you get experience for something dying while you're downed (say, from a monster that your party member managed to get the final blow on), you are rallied. This means you get a quarter of your health back, a second of invulnerability while you get your bearings, and whatever energy you happened to have when you were rallied. At this point you can return to the fray, though you most likely want to use your self-heal before doing so; 25% isn't one foot in the grave, but it's not exactly fighting fit. It's also possible that you could be rallied by your allies. Some professions have abilities that can rally nearby allies when they kill an opponent or some similar trigger.

I assume that these rallying effects have some sort of limiting factor, correct? Given how liberally most raiders use combat resurrection spells, I could see that being quite powerful.

It's definitely powerful, but yeah there's limits. For one there's a rez timer like we're used to. Basically the more you go down in succession, the longer it takes to revive you. Yes, there's always the rally effect for that instant revive, but you only have so many foes available to provide that rally and when you're down, your allies may going to have a harder time finishing the fight. If you keep falling down, they may not be able to avoid being defeated themselves. Still it does give you more options to get back into the fight other than stacking druids for combat rezzes or running back to the dungeon. Anything that reduces downtime is great in my book.

True enough. Anything else to add on this topic?

Nah, that about wraps things up. It's not a real stretch from the dying that we're all used to, but it is different enough that it should be addressed. Nothing like the healing and tanking stuff that I'm gonna have to figure out how to write.

And when can people expect that dissertation?

That one's gonna have to wait until we get some hands-on experience.

I was wondering when you were going to mention that particular fact.

You can't just come out and say these things. You have to build up to them - it's called showmanship.

It's called "burying it at the end of a post, so less people are likely to read it".

Bah. Anyways, what Med's talking about is a little trip we've got planned next week. We found out about a place that's going to give us a chance to have some hands-on experience with how stuff works in Tyria, so Med and I will be attending. Can't bring anybody else from the team for this trip (not sure where this "Seattle" place is but it's not cheap getting there), so it'll just be the two of us taking notes for this trip. We are however going with a couple of other people that are looking for a change of scenery from Azeroth, so we might be able to get some impressions from them once we're there. Personally I'm hoping to get some video while I'm there, but since I've never been to this show, I don't know how easy that's going to be. I'll definitely have some notes though, so be ready for that.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 8: A Mage That Uses More Than One Element? That's Crazy Talk

2011-07-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

It's time to talk about another Tyrian profession. For today's post we've got two people chiming in: Malador the team's fire mage and Daikaja, our resident shaman. Before we begin, I'm curious why the two of you are looking at the same profession. I understand why Mal's looking at the elementalist seeing as he's a mage and all, but why would it interest a shaman?

Well there's not exactly a shaman profession available over there, so I have to look elsewhere. As for why I'm looking at this and not something else, it just feels like a better fit. There's no healer profession, so that's out. I could go dual-wield melee as a warrior or a rogue, but both of those are all physical combat. I'm a shaman and maintaining that tie with the elements is important to us, so the only real option available is elementalist. That being said, it's not as big of a stretch as you might think. I have been known to dabble as elemental dps from time to time, so I'm familiar with being a caster. At least I know how to use more than one element...

How dare you! I'll have you know that I've had plenty of experience with other specs.

Okay, that's enough from both of you. You're not spending this whole post bickering. Mal, let's hear why you're looking at the elementalist.

Certainly. As you know I'm an experienced mage in Azeroth. I've spent my whole life practicing with the elements and the arcane, using them to freeze, incinerate, or blast my foes. Given all of that experience with being a cloth-wearing wielder of the elements, I feel that it's an obvious choice that I should be the one to discuss this new profession.

That establishes why both of you are interested, so now let's get into the details. Weapons have seemed like a good place to start with the other posts, so let's have Mal talk about the elementalist's weapon selection given that he's familiar with the mage offerings.

The weapon offerings for the elementalist would feel very familiar to a mage looking at the profession. Staves are the only two-handed weapon available and those are primarily an AoE weapon, offering such skills as Meteor Shower and Chain Lightning. For main hand weapons, elementalists cannot wield swords like mages in Azeroth, but we gain the ability to wield scepters. These provide a variety of medium range spells both single and multiple target, such as Phoenix and Shatterstone. There's also daggers for the main hand and those are mostly close range attacks (e.g. Dragon's Claw) as well as many of our self-defense techniques (e.g. Shocking Aura).

Little more impressive than making a glowy red patch on the ground, huh?

For off-hand weapons, the elementalist can choose an additional dagger if they want more supportive abilities such as Fire Shield or Geyser. Alternatively they can use a focus like the ones we had in Azeroth. Rather than merely providing raw spell power though, these give access to powerful close range abilities like Flamewall or Lightning Field. In addition to merely being strong point blank techniques, these are also typically used for setting up cross-profession combinations. Have you addressed those yet, sir?

Sigh... no. That's another one to add to the pile. Back on task though. It sounds like you've got quite a few options there. Not only do you have all those weapons to choose from for your combat sets, but it sounded like you have spells from all four elements to choose from on each weapon as well. So how exactly are those elements mixed up amongst the weapons? Is it like one skill of each element or are there some that are heavy towards a specific one?

I'll take this one. It's actually neither. For each weapon, we basically have four sets of the five skills - one for each element. The elementalist can attune himself to an element and that switches out his skills. The attunements give the caster some passive bonuses and the skills tend to have a general theme to them. Water for example can heal your allies passively and the skills focus more on slowing foes and providing additional healing, whereas fire is heavy burning and AoE damage and causes fire damage to anyone that touches you. Air's a lot of lightning damage and blinding attacks in addition to shocking nearby opponents, and earth provides the caster with more passive defenses and lots of skills to protect themselves and their teammates. As such, an elementalist basically has four weapons for each weapon they own.

You have no idea how hard it is to resist using every electricity pun I know here

Nice, so in combat you essentially have eight different skill sets you can flip between with your second weapon?

Unfortunately no. We can change attunements, but we cannot change weapons while in combat. If you start combat with a staff, you're stuck with it until everything's dead. On the plus side though, switching attunements basically serves the job of switching weapons anyways. You might not have the perfect weapon available at all time, like if you start at range and everything's closed to melee, but you'll be able to find skills within the four attunements to accomplish the task just fine.

Hmm, not fond of being restricted to just one weapon at a time, but that's the warrior in me talking. Still seems like you'll have options in a fight, so I guess it all works out. Let's move on to some of the stuff that makes the elementalist different from the mage and shaman. Mal, you're up.

There's a few areas, though the attunements that my shaman "colleague" mentioned are the primary difference. Another area would be the use of glyphs. These are temporary enhancements the elementalist can use to augment their abilities. They can be simple bonuses like the Glyph of Elemental Power (simply makes all of your attacks critical hits for 10 seconds) or they can be a little more imaginative like the Glyph of Elemental Storage (allows you to store a skill from your current attunement for use while in a different attunement).

Signets are another difference between elementalists and mages, but those have been covered in the other profession posts. I can give a few examples, but there's not really anything new to discuss there.

Ah, forgot about conjuration for a second there! While elementalists may not be the "vending machines" that many consider us mages to be, they do have some ability to conjure for others. Rather than being limited to food and drink however, these conjurations serve a combat purpose. Each element has a different conjure spell that can be used to create elemental environmental weapons such as the ones you discussed last week. For scenarios where you're placed up against a foe with an elemental weakness, either natural or caused by someone in the party, equipping everyone with an elementally attuned weapon could significantly increase your damage output.

The last major difference that I can think of would be in area of effect spells.

What is there to be different? I think I only ever saw you two cast a couple different types of AoE. Mages summoned it on one spot or did that Arcane Explosion thing. Maybe once or twice you guys used a cone attack. Shamans dropped a totem to make it pulse fire, then they dropped Chain Lightning on things. What exactly is different?

Well, all of those things are still available. We just have more options for them. I know I certainly would; Fire Nova just hit whatever was around my Flame Shock target and Chain Lightning would hit whatever it felt like hitting in the area. I suppose they did get Earthquake, but that was while I was running around as enhancement.

The shaman is correct about the expanded options. Bear in mind that while mages may have had all of those different types of AoE available to us, the options in each category were limited. Point blank was Arcane only unless you dropped one of the channeled spells on your head. Targeted area and frontal cone had two choices, but they suffered from the other problem mages had: our spec limited our options. If you were arcane, then you really only wanted to use Arcane Explosion. Frost mages preferred Blizzard and Fire mages just used Flamestrike. Well, technically just Blast Wave since Improved Flamestrike made using the actual Flamestrike spell meaningless unless you were desperate to conserve mana. Regardless, as much as the shaman will make jokes at my expense over this functional restriction, it was one built of class restraints over personal preference. When your fire spells hit 40-50% harder than anything else, then it's hard to justify using those spells.

With the elementalist however, our area spell selection is expanded to all four elements. The bulk of these being staff spells as I addressed earlier, but there are a smattering of other AoE spells amongst the other weapons. In addition with the trait system we read about, we'll be able to work on all of our attunements at once, rather than being forced to use merely one or two elements due to a lack of talent points.

Ixnay on the aits-tray. Still digging stuff up for that post.

Ah yes, sorry about that. That about sums up the elementalist, I think. Anything else to contribute, Daikaja?

Nah, I think we got it. Only elementalist stuff left to cover really is the cross-profession skills and the traits and it sounds like the boss is gonna be writing up that stuff.

Yeah, I'll be taking care of that stuff, though anything you guys can dig up will be appreciated. Won't be until after I get back though.

Off on your own research trip?

Something like that.

Do try and "research" something other than the bottom of a beer mug.

I make no promises. See you guys in a couple weeks!

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 7: The Thief - Making Stealing More Than Part of Your Ambush Macro

2011-07-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

Time to cover another one of the professions we're all looking at for our move to Tyria. We've got three left to talk about. Well, technically four, but anyone who knows about that one is apparently sworn to secrecy, so we'll deal with that when I've got more to go on than idle speculation.

For today's post we've got something from our resident rogue, Takkal. I'm going to assume that you're here to talk about the thief, right?

Might as well stick with what I know, right?

True enough. What's with the accent? Well, lack of one.

Something else I've been practicing. Believe it or not, there's not exactly a lot of trolls like me in that place. That and I've yet to see a single group over there that talks like I do.

So they all enunciate?

...Yes.

Sorry, couldn't resist. So you're doing this to fit in more?

Correct. After all I'm not a very good thief if I stand out and if I'm the only guy around who talks like this, then I'll be remembered and that's never a good thing in my line of business.

Makes sense. Guess we should start at the beginning. What drew you to the thief profession? I'm well aware of what the name implies, but let everybody know what the similarities are between being a rogue and a thief.

Well, the general feel is the same between the two. I mean, the two names mean the same thing to most people: we've a group of men and women who specialize in sneaking around, stealing, and attacking from the shadows. Both the class and the profession involve proficiency with dual-wielding. I suppose there's a few other areas that are sorta similar, but it's a bit of a stretch considering just how much is different in those areas as well.

Sounds like almost every other report we've had so far on the professions. Let's move to the weapons since those define most of your combat skills. What're you looking at as a rogue?

Well, I've still got swords and daggers like I do as a rogue. For ranged combat though, I've got pistols and shortbows. Like the rest of you found, all of these weapons serve their own specific purposes. I can only wield a sword in my main hand, but it gives me skills for enemy control and evasion like Crippling Slash and Dancing Blade. A dagger in my main hand lets me jump into the fray with quick attacks like Twisting Fang and Backstab, while an off-hand dagger can help me cripple foes as well as vanish from their sight. Pistols can be used to make my opponents vulnerable for further attacks as well as aiding my mobility or hindering my opponent's. Finally there's the shortbow for moments where I need AoE attacks as well as letting me shadow step around the battle.

So you'll still have access to your old rogue Shadowstep?

Yes and no, though calling it my old Shadowstep is somewhat wrong since there was no chance in the Nether of me ever going Subtlety. Back on topic though: while this shadow step still serves the same function as the old one, it's not locked to one ability for one specialization of the profession. There's a variety of skills that serve the function of helping the thief move around the battlefield and not all of them act the same. Infiltrator's Arrow lets me pick a location and fire an arrow to teleport there, while the Shadow Step utility skill just teleports me to the foe. There's even some dual-skills that mix the two: I could shoot my foe with a pistol then teleport in for a dagger strike, or I could reverse that with a melee opener that ends up with me attacking from range.

For some reason this video makes Fan of Knives seem a little underwhelming

Dual-skill?

Correct and here's where dual-wielding gets interesting for thieves. Back in Azeroth a dual-wielding rogue for the most part was only concerned with his off-hand so far as making sure it was the correct speed for his spec and the correct weapon type: daggers for Subtlety and Assassination and anything but for Combat. Looking at Tyria, we've moved on to actual weapon techniques like you showed in that first post and for a few of you, you've even learned how to use two different sets of skills if you're wielding two different weapons at the same time. There's no mixing for you guys though: it's always something like your first three skills are from your main hand and your last two are the off-hand. For thieves though, we've learned how to mix the two together.

Instead of three skills from your main hand and two from the off-hand, we've got two from each and that middle skill is now a dual-skill: a combat ability that mixes traits from both weapon types. I gave a couple of examples earlier in the section on shadow stepping, but we've also got some fun ones like Leaping Death Blossom for double daggers, Unload for a pair of pistols, and Pistol Whip for pirate wannabes with a sword and a pistol.

Tag, you're it!

Looking at those examples you gave earlier, it sounds like both techniques used a dagger and a pistol. How do you have two different techniques for the same weapons?

It's simple really: it's which weapon's in which hand. If I've got my pistol in my main hand, then I'll be using Shadow Strike so I'll need to be in melee range at first to use that ability. Reverse the order of the weapons and now I've got Shadow Shot and I don't have to wait until I'm in melee to use it. In essence these dual-skills serve as one of the two ways I can expand my weapon options, the other being through stealing.

So stealing actually has a purpose for you now other than a way to get free copper and vendor junk?

You have no idea how frustrating that was. The only reason any of us ever bothered to pickpocket back in Azeroth was to get lockboxes or we'd make it part of our normal Backstab or Ambush opener. Suppose that's why we went with rogue for our class name instead of thief. That or they thought it would be funny to give us a class name that would be constantly confused with a type of women's makeup. I swear half of Orgrimmar doesn't know how to spell...

I've tanked with people who spelled "gonna" with an H in the middle. Figure that one out.

Stupidity of some of our fellow Horde aside, most of us really didn't give a second thought to stealing. In Tyria though, stealing opens up a world of new weapon options for us. You know that last post you did on environmental weapons?

Yeah, they act like normal weapons and give us a new set of skills to work with. We've all got access to those. You find a boulder, you can throw it. Find a stick, you can beat someone with it.

Okay, now picture that a thief can pretty much take one of those from every single opponent he fights. For example I could be fighting a bird and try stealing from him. Some possible examples of environmental weapons I could take are an egg that I could use to heal myself or some feathers that I could use to blind the bird. This even extends to fighting humanoid targets as well. If I were fighting a warrior, I might get access to a rifle or a axe, while stealing from an elementalist could give me a staff or perhaps a scepter.

Wait, so a thief could take my weapon?

Not quite, it's more like I borrow the abilities from it. It's kind of an odd system. Since my notes all say that I only get access to these new abilities until I use them, my guess is that in the case of weapons, it's more likely that I take it and hit you quickly before you regain control of it.

That makes sense, I suppose. Sounds like that about wraps up weapons and stealing. What else makes the thief stand out?

Well, there's stealth which all of us rogues are familiar with. It does operate a little differently here though. Rogues are used to one flavor of stealth that's either on or off and we stay there until either we're detected or we stab something. Here though it's meant as more of a combat action. Stealth is a short-term state, so you can't just switch it on and make your way across the entire battlefield without being seen. For thieves it's meant as a way to either escape from a battle or to set up for another technique. There's even multiple ways to go into stealth. Hide in Shadows is probably the closest to what we're used to: you go into stealth and you come out after attacking. Shadow Refuge however allows the thief to go into stealth and heal himself, but it breaks if moves. Depending on the situation the thief finds himself heading into, he or she might wish to prepare a few different methods of going into stealth.

Another technique thieves have that we rogues do not is the ability to lay traps. Similar to the hunters back in Azeroth, these are simply something that is placed on the ground that can be triggered by one's enemies. Once triggered they can cause effects from poison and immobilization to allowing the thief to shadow step to the target.

Finally there's initiative. For most of the professions, if they use a weapon technique, there's an associated cooldown before they can use it again. For us though there's no such cooldown. If we want to use a weapon skill continuously, we're perfectly able to do so. The limiter here is initiative. Each of our weapon skills (with the exception of whatever the first technique for our main hand is) requires not only energy like all of the other professions do, but they also have an associated initiative cost. We start with ten initiative points and regenerate another one every second or so.

Using dual-wield pistols for an example, my first skill costs no energy, but Body Shot takes two, Unload is three, and Retreating Shot and Head Shot both take four. Even accounting for the fact that you can only use abilities so fast, there's still going to be a resource choke if you do nothing but use Head Shot over and over. This means that a smart thief needs to plan ahead. If you believe that you can burst fire your target down quickly if you stealth and get the drop on him, then you can do so. If it looks like a pretty lengthy fight though, you might want to sit on a few of those initiative points in case you need to use something like Retreating Shot to put some distance between you and your foe. Since your first skill always requires no initiative to use, it can be considered your filler skill while you wait for the right time to use another attack. Kind of like Mutilate or Sinister Strike, except they're not 50-60% of what you're doing during the fight.

So to wrap things up, a rogue looking to find work as a thief won't be disappointed, but there's going to be some retraining involved, particularly to get over the whole "why would I bother stealing?" idea. I imagine that's going to be a big hurdle for most of them.

Thanks for the report, Tak. That puts us up to five of the professions covered. Don't suppose you heard if anyone else is ready with another profession, did you?

I believe Lokaja's working on his ranger report, though he's still looking for info on pets. As for the elementalist, Malador and Daikaja are arguing over who's going to cover it.

Seems fairly obvious, I'd think. Elementalist is pretty much a mage, so that sounds like Mal's territory.

Yes, but Azeroth mages tend to be single element and Dai's arguing that since elemental shamans are more accustomed to working with multiple elements, he should get the job.

Sigh... fine. When you get back there, tell the two of them to just work on the report together. If they manage to write something halfway competent, I'll find work for both of them.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 6: A True Warrior FIghts With Whatever's Available

2011-07-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

Still have three more known professions to cover and eventually whatever the super-secret eighth one ends up being, but I figured I'd take a quick break to cover something else. Certainly not because anyone on the team's too lazy to have finished their notes, no... I'm certain that the ranger, elementalist, and thief articles are complete and they don't need me to cover for them at all. We'll just consider this a slight break to allow them to start, er finish going over their articles for any last minute changes.

A few weeks ago I started this whole Azeroth vs. Tyria series with a wall of text about how attack skills in Tyria were tied to your weapons. Using an axe gives you different abilities than a greatsword and so on. Plenty of variety here, but you can see the horizon for learning new skills. There's only so many weapons your profession lets you wield, right?

Let's say we've got two trained warriors sitting in a bar. The first guy says, "Okay, I've worked with all of my weapon styles now. I know how everything works and how to chain everything in the most efficient manner. I've got combat in the bag." In this case, he'd be correct... right up to the point where the other warrior clocks him over the head with a barstool because he figured out how to use environmental weapons.

The name environmental weapon makes it kinda obvious where you find these things, but it doesn't really tell you what they are. To most of us from Azeroth, the only time we interact with the environment is either when there's something glowy for us to mine/herb/search or when it's actively trying to kill us like in every dungeon we've ever stepped foot in. Weapons hanging on the wall, braziers full of coals dangling from chains, or even something as simple as a mug of beer on a bar - as far as all of us were concerned, these might as well have been either painted on or nailed and bolted down. We couldn't use any of these things if we wanted to, so for the most part you just learned to ignore all of it.

Tyria's a bit different though. If I'm walking along and I see a boulder lying on the side of the road, I can go pick it up. When I do that, whatever skills I would've had available from my weapon are now replaced with a different set for what I'm holding (the boulder). Now some items are going to be fairly simple in how you interact with them. Not much I can do with a rock other than bash someone with it or hurling it at a target. An elementalist on the other hand sees different possibilities. He could use his magic to hurl that boulder into the air, then bring it crashing down on his foe like it was a meteor. Depending on the item and who's using it, you may see vastly different uses.

Some are a little simpler than others though. Barstools are meant to be broken over someone's head. Jars of bees are meant to be thrown at someone; I can honestly say I never thought I'd see the day when bees became artillery. Powder keg is meant to be carried over to a target and then set off. There's even wooden planks you can take from fallen Oakhearts (picture a treant), so you can smack someone around with a stick for a different effect from hitting them with your sword.

There's some skills for the different professions that create these environmental weapons. Elementalists can make Bows of Frost, Fiery Swords, and Lava Axes which can all be picked up by their party members and used against the enemy. There's also some items you can use that, while they're not weapons per se, they do give you new skills to use. If you pick up a rabbit for example, you could use it to get a speed boost. Not entirely sure how shaking around a bunny makes you faster, but I've learned not to question some of these things. Most of them make a bit more sense though, like a bucket of water letting you put out fires or a bag of feed letting you feed animals. Rather than these things just showing up in your backpack when you start a quest, you'll have to go over and pick them up to use them.

I saved the best for last though: siege weaponry. Like in Wintergrasp or Baradin Hold, we'll have access to different weapons we find in the environment like mortars and cannons. Most of us are used to seeing these in PvP only, with the sorta exception of Flame Leviathan in Ulduar and Gunship in Icecrown Citadel. For the most part though, if you stuck to killing dragons and the like, you didn't work much with siege weaponry. In Tyria we'll be seeing a fair bit more though. You'll still being seeing siege weapons in the PvP areas of the world too (I'll get to those when I have more information), but the monster-hunting crowd will get to play with them as well. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy fighting with sword and axe just as much as any warrior. There's just something really satisfying about using artillery on an enemy. That and looking at the size of the dragon in this video, a little extra firepower probably isn't a bad idea.

Whole video's good, but skip to about 1:40 if you just want to hear about siege weapons

I'll try and wrap things up here. All these posts me and the team put up about the weapons each profession gets to use? Don't take those as your checklist of things to learn. If you want to be the best at what you do, be prepared to use the tools around you. That's not to say that you'll always want to drop what you're doing and use any weapons you find around you. Just like how you'll want to use the weapon that's best for each fight, you have to learn what those environmental weapons are capable of and when it's appropriate to use them.

Most importantly of all though, if you don't know how to use environmental weapons, you'll never make it in Keg Brawl. Honestly that should be motivation enough for all of you to figure out how to use these things, but if it's not, that just means more brew for me. Gotta love a group that plays games built around a keg of ale. It's almost enough to make me go with the Norn. Almost.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 5: All The Fun of Summoning The Dead, But Without The Plate

2011-07-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

I've talked about the warrior, Medeleth lectured everyone on the engineer, and Solagar managed to fit in some Guardian details in between all the complaining about becoming a Tauren. That still leaves four more Tyrian professions (well, five but we'll deal with that when there's more than hearsay) for us to cover. This time we've got Mordigg ready to talk to us about the new job he's looking into. Let's see what it is...

Little more intimidating than all those squishy casters in Naxxramas and Stratholme

Necromancer, huh? Gotta say I wasn't expecting to see you go with a cloth class.

Well, truth be told, it wasn't exactly planned. Like the rest of you, I was planning on finding something comparable to my current specialization to minimize downtime. However, such a thing does not exist in Tyria to my knowledge.

Yeah, the whole lack of a Lich King probably makes finding more death knights unlikely, huh?

Correct. As such I have found myself perusing the other offerings for a reasonable facsimile. My research currently shows the necromancer as being the best option available, though there will be numerous adjustments I will have to make to become accustomed to how they operate.

Bear in mind we're all going to have to make adjustments when we go to Tyria, so it won't be just you. I've probably got the easiest transition of the lot and I'll have my work cut out for me once we get there.

This may be true, but the core of their warrior still generally meshes with the class you're familiar with. For myself there are a few elements that are similar, but the bulk of it will require a change of thinking on my part.

Okay, let's start with the similarities then. Tell me what drew you to the necromancer.

The obvious answer here would be the beginning of the profession's name. A necromancer is someone who specializes in dealing with the dead. As a death knight that's one of my areas of expertise, though my own knowledge and abilities have primarily served to supplement my martial prowess. I can raise the dead, create spots of death and decay on the ground, and cause a variety of debilitating conditions in my foes, but I would never consider myself a specialist in these abilities. My ghouls are the best example of this: the one barely holds together more than a few minutes unless I feel like doing damage instead of tanking and my army of the dead serves as little more than cannon fodder.

I suppose the best way I can phrase this is to say that the necromancer is somewhat like a death knight who's forsaken his plate armor and warrior-style weaponry in order to further develop his other powers. Yes, I will have to make sacrifices to walk the path of the necromancer, but in exchange I will gain my own identity. No longer will I be considered a warrior that happens to use DoTs or summon a ghoul that barely qualifies as a pet. I will be a master of death, bending it to my will to defend my allies and drive my enemies from the land.

Makes sense to me. How about we discuss weapons now? We've already established that weapons dictate your available skills in Tyria, so what kinds of weapons does the necromancer have to work with? I assume you won't be swinging any two-handed swords or axes this time.

Correct, you will not see a cloth-wearing caster swinging a two-handed sword in our future. As one might expect from professions of the sorcerous type, the only two-handed weapon I might be wielding is a staff. Wielding a staff will provide me mostly with a variety of abilities, many being area-of-effects, that cause different debilitating effects on my foes. Reaper's Touch allows me to weaken a foe while at the same time providing one of my allies with a boost to their swiftness. Chilblains, unlike the old passive slowing talent I'm familiar with, is now an AoE ability that poisons and chills my enemies. Necrotic Grasp is just a basic attack, but the last two bear a little more mention. These two are Mark abilities.

A Mark is similar to a normal AoE ability like Death and Decay in that you choose where to cast it, but they have an important distinction. Marks are somewhat like timebombs: you place the Mark and then after enough time has elapsed, the Mark will trigger and cause its effect to those who were standing on it. Reaper's Mark causes vulnerability and bleeding on foes while Putrid Mark will actually take negative conditions you or your allies suffer from and transfer them to your enemies. There's also Mark of Blood which will not only harm your opponents, but also provide healing to your party members inside the Mark.

Sounds useful, but the timer could be problematic. What if your enemies start to split up before the mark's ready to go off?

This is not a problem. In addition to the normal timer, Marks can be manually triggered at any time the necromancer wishes. The timer is merely to allow for "set and forget" usage. For close quarters combat, a necromancer could drop his Mark on top of the group as it's fighting and immediately resume casting his other abilities. If there was more room to work, a necromancer could drop a Mark in front of him and then pull a group of monsters. He could continue casting until they all ran far enough to get within the Mark, then trigger it to hit them all with its effect before they reach him.

Nice, controllable AoE is always welcomed and it sounds like you'll have a little more variety this time besides "hit them with high-threat unholy damage". Back to weapons then?

Yes, there's still plenty to cover there. Some of the one-handed options for a caster are fairly similar to the ones available back in Azeroth: dagger and off-hand focus for all cloth wearers and the scepter is like the maces used by priests. The others are a little different though. Necromancers get access to warhorns and axes. I'm not entirely sure of the reasoning behind axes, but I suppose for someone who works with the dead, an axe that can cut through bone makes sense.

As for the abilities associated with these weapons, it's similar to what you and Solagar discussed. Your main-hand weapon determines your first three skills and your off-hand determines your last two. The scepter provides mostly long-range attacks (e.g. Curse and Feast of Corruption) while close range abilities are the purview of daggers (e.g. Necrotic Bite and Dark Pact) and axes (e.g. Rending Claws and Ghastly Claws). The distinction between those two being that axes are primarily powerful tearing attacks, while dagger attacks tend to drain your foe's life force and make it your own. Off-hands provide some additional customization: warhorns can daze your foes as well as summon locusts to attack them, daggers can weaken your foes and allow you to use Mark of Blood to heal your allies while damaging the enemy, and finally the focus lets you chill your foes to make them vulnerable right before blasting them with any life force you've accumulated.

Little more intimidating than when a boomkin does it, huh?

From the sounds of it, life force is a new resource for you like adrenaline is for me.

Yes, this is correct. Various skills provided by my weapons allow me to accumulate life force from my foes. In addition my life force pool increases whenever an opponent is felled within my vicinity.

So what exactly does life force do for you? Does it boost your regular spells like adrenaline does for me or is it something different?

Something different - it allows me to enter a Death Shroud. Being in this form provides me with new abilities and I can no longer be knocked down, but it drains life force the entire time. As such I must refill my life force by attacking my opponents if I wish to stay in my Death Shroud.

Okay, what about Death Shroud makes it so useful? Are the new abilities it provides worth the effort of stacking all that life force?

Not in all circumstances, but the abilities available in the shroud are quite potent. Deathly Swarm sounds similar to my Locust Swarm attack, but when it lands it not only deals damage, but it also clears three negative conditions I may have on me. Dark Path is similar to Blink in that it will teleport me to a new location, but it will also blind any foes that happen to be standing in the vicinity. Doom is a fairly basic Fear like what Medeleth used to use. Finally there's Life Transfer provides me with a way to directly drain the health of nearby enemies to fuel my life force.

Alright, that takes care of weapons and what I assume is the unique resource necromancers have available. Anything else that helps them stand out from the other casters?

Well, as I talked about earlier, one of the aspects of the necromancer that drew me to the profession was the association with the dead. Like death knights, necromancers also possess the ability to control the dead, though their abilities are far beyond what I may have been taught at Acherus. Ranged or melee, the necromancer has the ability to summon minions to fill either role. These new allies can be summoned merely to add extra damage to the fight or more bodies to take damage or they can be used tactically. Bone fiends can bombard the foe from range, but the necromancer can direct them to become stationary so they can immobilize their targets. Bone minions seem like fairly basic melee pets, but for a competent necromancer, they also serve as a way to blow up the enemy's front line for extra AoE damage.

Good thing those rat corpse things are meant to blow up, because they are creepy as hell.

Lastly there's Wells. Similar to Marks, they are meant to serve as a method of controlling the battlefield. However while Marks are targeted effects, Wells are localized - the area of effect is centered upon the caster. Currently there are three known Wells: Well of Blood which heals you and your allies, Well of Corruption which will take a foe's beneficial conditions (boons) and replace them with negative ones, and Well of Suffering which simply does damage to any opponents who would dare stand inside the Well. Only one of these may be in effect at any given time, but all have their uses. Well of Blood would be great for any dungeon crawling involving tight quarters, while Well of Corruption would be useful against any opponents that make use of a lot of buffing abilities.

Sounds good. Anything else of note?

Yes, but those fall under either abilities that have been covered previously (Signets) or various items that require further discussion like healing and downed abilities.

Yeah, let's leave those for later. Thanks for all the info, Mordigg. Looking forward to becoming a caster?

I will acknowledge that the idea is somewhat strange to me, but I suppose it's not unheard of for a Tauren to wear cloth. There are priests wandering around Thunder Bluff now, so I won't be the only one.

Well, except for the facts that we're not going to be anywhere near Thunder Bluff and you're not going to look like a Tauren.

Excuse me?

Oh, did I neglect to mention that before?

Yes, somehow you managed to leave out a somewhat important detail like "you're changing races".

Oops. Well, we'll add that to the stack of stuff I need to cover later. In the meantime, that's it for us this time. See you guys when we've got another post ready.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 4: So What's A Guardian?

2011-07-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I talked about warriors and this week Medeleth blathered on about engineers. Now it's time for someone else from the team to step up and talk about the profession they're looking at. Luckily I didn't have to resort to threats this time since we've got a volunteer. Solannis, I mean Solagar, is our resident paladin expert, so I imagine he's been off looking for a profession with a similar kind of feel. Let's see what he's found.

You are never going to get tired of mocking the name change, are you?

No, probably not. Considering that you were the one stupid enough to let the engineers try that gun on you, it's your own damn fault you're a Tauren now and the name change was your own choice.

First off they told me it would be safe.

And you took four Goblin Engineers at their word, did you?

At no point did I lie. It is safe - you've still got all your limbs, don't you?

No, I've got cow limbs now.

Bah! Now you're just nitpicking. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made in the name of progress.

Sacrifices? I'm a cow now! I had to change my name so it wouldn't be so obvious that I used to be a blood elf! Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was to walk into Silvermoon and have to pretend I hadn't grown up there?!

Okay, both of you shut up so we can get back on task. You can kill each other later when we don't have work to do. Now would you care to enlighten everyone on the profession you've been researching, Sol?

Very well, I can return to this argument at a later date. As for my Tyrian inquiries, I've been looking into the guardian profession.

So I take it that's the Tyria equivalent of a paladin then?

Well, yes and no. It's not as clear-cut as that. For you, skill and weapon style differences aside, the warrior has a very similar feel to it. You're still all about hitting someone with a sharp/blunt object and wearing heavy armor. Paladins however are a little more varied than that. Some of us are tanks, some DPS, and some are healers - we've always been one of the more versatile classes in Azeroth. Strangely it seems that for Tyrians, those three roles are somewhat amalgamated.

Ah yes, the lack of dedicated tanks and healers. Gonna have to write up something about that later. For now just focus on the guardian, since the healer/tank discussion is going to take up more than its fair share of text.

True enough. Aside from the tank/heal/DPS options, paladins were known for our more iconic abilities: enhancing others through Blessing spells, auras to provide passive bonuses for everyone in range of us, healing, and our holy-powered weapon attacks. Yes, many of us identified with our chosen weapon styles, but our power came from enhancing those weapons with the power of the Light.

So how does the guardian compare? Are you looking at the same tools, modified for the way Tyria works?

There's some similarity, but a lot is fairly different. I'll start with familiar ground. Like the warrior and engineers you and Medeleth discussed earlier, guardians have their own sets of weapons available and skills associated with said weapons. Many of these weapon skills keep with the "infused with holy power" theme that paladins are accustomed to: Shield of Judgment, Leap of Faith, Smite, and Cleansing Flame are but a few examples. There are some differences in the variety of weapons available through which to channel our might.

As a paladin my options included all manner of swords, maces, and axes in addition to the use of shields and caster off-hands. Daggers and staves were apparently considered unsporting and were as such unavailable. In Tyria however, my options are expanded. I still have the bulk of my old selections, though now they break the off-hands up into torches and focuses and now scepters are considered separate from maces. I do lose the ability to wield axes for some reason (considered uncivilized, perhaps?), but in exchange I gain the ability to wield staves.

So after all these years, you finally figured out how to wield a stick, huh? I always wondered what would've happened to a ret paladin if the end of his mace broke. Would he forget how to swing it?

I didn't make up the rules, I just followed them. For all I know, we weren't allowed to use staves or daggers simply to give casters something we weren't allowed to use. I remember a good stretch of time where healing paladins would dress in cloth instead of plate mail simply because healing plate just couldn't compete with the magical bonuses of the cloth. It made a mockery of our class, but sometimes you have to swallow your pride if you're going to perform your assigned tasks.

Let's get back to the weapons, shall we? Similar to how your warrior weapons have different strengths, ours also provide us with varying skill sets. A two-handed hammer is great for close range AoE attacks, while the one-handed mace allows for attack chains and some support abilities. The scepter seems like it should be similar to the mace, yet it provides the guardian with more of a offensive spellcaster skill set. A greatsword in the hands of a warrior is a potent AoE tool, but with a guardian it allows for more control techniques in addition to enhancing one's allies with a speed boost through symbols.

A symbol? Is that like the guardian version of a blessing?

Not quite. A blessing is a simple single-cast spell that provides a benefit to the target for a long duration. The idea behind blessings is that you cast one on everybody before the fight begins along with all of the other buffs being cast, then everyone tops off on mana before beginning the fight. Symbols aren't really targeted on allies. A symbol is placed on the ground and activated by someone stepping on it. Some can be beneficial like Symbol of Swiftness which is the greatsword speed enhancing skill I mentioned earlier. Some can do damage to your enemies, like the mace skill, Symbol of Wrath. Some even do both, like the staff skill Symbol of Protection; this symbol will damage one's foes while providing a Protection buff to your allies.

Okay, so symbols are more of a combat buff. What about pre-pull buffing?

There lies the interesting bit. I don't think they actually have that in Tyria. It's possible that there's consumables of some kind; I haven't done much research into that particular area. As for the kinds of buffs we're used to where I'll hit everyone with Blessing of Might and a priest would cast Power Word: Fortitude, I don't think those actually exist here. Other than the more short-term benefits like my symbols and your shouts, I don't believe they do long term buffing here.

Strange, but honestly that's fine by me. Before they did the consolidation in Azeroth, it was always annoying to make sure that your raid had every buff covered. I remember in those few situations where we didn't have more paladins than auras, we had to organize things so the correct groups got Devotion Aura or Concentration Aura.

Thanks for bringing up auras. That actually leads into my next point. Guardians don't have auras. Instead they have three virtues: Justice, Courage, and Resolve.

Well, at least Righteousness isn't one of the words.

You have no idea how right you are. I swear half of my spellbook had that word in it. Regardless, these virtues provide the guardian with some rather potent benefits. Courage periodically blocks attacks against the guardian. Justice makes every fifth attack cause the target to burn. As for Resolve, it gives the guardian some level of health regeneration. There's no duration on these buffs, but they're self-only. Kind of like having an aura that can only affect you.

So no party buffs other than the signets then?

Not quite. The guardian has the ability to activate these virtues. When doing so, he can then share these benefits with his allies. Courage lets everyone block their next incoming attack, Justice makes their next attacks cause burning, and Resolve will clear any conditions your allies may have in addition to providing them with regeneration. These party benefits are only temporary though and they come at a cost: activating a virtue will disable it for yourself and it will remain disabled for a duration of time, depending on which one you activated.

Interesting, that should lead to some tactical decisions while out in the field.

Indeed, rather than simply having an aura that you only consider if there's another paladin in the group, now you have to think about when you should buff your party versus when you should keep all of the power to yourself. One example of a situation where activating an aura would be in conjunction with another ability, Wall of Deflection. This ability creates a wall which will deflect projectiles. In the case where you find yourself besieged by ranged opponents, you could place this wall and have your team run behind it, then activate Resolve so everyone can regenerate out of combat. Another might be if you need to use your self-healing abilities. You could activate Justice and let everyone else add some fire damage while you patch your wounds, then jump back into the fight and regain your virtue whenever it's off cooldown.

All those years of not being able to catch a hunter in a BG make this kinda satisfying

Yeah, I can see a few good opportunities to mix in those virtues during a dungeon run. How about the rest of your abilities? Anything else interesting to add to your pally bag of tricks?

A few other odds and ends here and there. Wards are similar to symbols in that we place them on the ground, but rather than causing damage or helping our allies, they serve as a method of control. They can create impassible barriers for our foes, such as the staff skill Line of Warding, preventing them from physically crossing the threshold. They can still attack through the ward if they have a ranged attack, but this still provides a manner of control in case you want to block off enemy melee from cloth wearers or you're escorting someone that has a tendency to put themselves in harm's way.

Spirit weapons are fairly self-explanatory. Guardians can summon ghostly weapons to temporarily assist them. The only one I'm aware of at the moment is Hammer of Wisdom, but I'm told there are others. The hammer has a useful ability to knock down a foe, but using this ability will dispel the hammer regardless of when you used the skill.

Nice seeing that spirit hammer do more than give me an interrupt once a minute

Finally we share two skill types with warriors: shouts and signets. Same basic functionality for these. Shouts either buff allies or debuff foes. Signets provide a passive bonus with an additional effect when used, but this will disable the passive bonus for a time similar to activating a virtue. The actual selection available varies from the warrior list however. Some examples include Hold The Line, a shout that gives Protection and Regeneration to allies, and Signet of Wrath which causes nearby foes to burn passively and will burn and blind a target when activated.

Oh yeah, forgot about signets in the warrior post. Didn't get the info on them until I saw that stack of notes Med turned in with his engineer research. So to sum everything up, while the guardian has some additional abilities you're not used to working with, in general it's still fairly similar to the paladin?

It's hard to give a definitive answer without any first-hand experience, but based on what I've found so far, that would be the case. Any paladin looking to move to a similar profession would not be completely overwhelmed by the guardian. While there's still quite a bit of new information to process, it's likely the shortest learning curve available out of all of the professions I've seen and my personal choice for profession out of the seven we've seen so far.

Thanks for the info, Sol. That puts us at three professions down, four (well, five eventually) to go.

Don't forget you need to write something up about healing/tanking/etc.

Oh yeah, there's that too. Guess I should get started on that one while I wait for someone else to finish their profession research. Hopefully that post won't be as much of a novel as these last four.

If any of us write it, that's not particularly likely.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 3: Engineering For Fun and Profit

2011-07-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

Last week I talked about warriors and the changes we'll have to prepare for heading from Azeroth to Tyria. Thinking about the basic concept of warriors, it seemed like it should have been a fairly short and simple post, right? The wall of text I wrote up for that post would say otherwise. The core of the class/profession is still there. We're still practicing the fine art of putting sharp things into bad people. It's just all of those little details that have changed like skills, movement, ranged combat, stances, etc. So you know, except for that list and pretty much everything else I was able to think of, it's all the same.

So now that we've covered what should have been the simplest comparison between the two realms, let's move on to something a little more complex. Yes, I know there's still at least one "this should be really simple" comparison left with rogues versus thieves, and arguably guardians and paladins could fall into this category as well. However I have to line someone up to do those posts, so they'll be ready when their corresponding "expert" gets off their butt and writes it. Solannis/Solagar is taking his time researching guardians (I think he's just pouting about the whole name/race change, but don't tell him I said anything). As for rogues, Takkal's not a very experienced writer, so I'll have to work with him on that one. In the meantime though, I do have someone that's done their homework.

Like I mentioned in our "we're not dead!" post, Medeleth has actually been the main person pushing for our move to Tyria. He's been putting in the bulk of his time these days into researching the world and hooking up everyone on the team with all of the pertinent information for their preferred professions. Now I could say that he's just a fan of the world or that he's finally taking an active interest in team business, but I'm not an idiot. I read his initial notes and I discovered his ulterior motives. Well, ulterior is probably giving it too much credit since half of that first memo he gave me could be paraphrased as "I can be an engineer instead of a warlock! Screw this magical nonsense, I wanna live here!" So without further ado, here's Med to tell all of you about engineers in Tyria:

First off, I was not that overly exuberant in my initial reports. It was simply a pleasant surprise to find a world that treats engineering as more than a mere hobby one does on the side to acquire a flying machine or a pair of goggles.

Care to clarify for everyone what you mean by "mere hobby"?

Certainly. As you're well aware, I think of myself first and foremost as an engineer. Given the choice, I would prefer to solve problems through the proper application of science. Well, and explosives. Regardless, my options for this method of problem solving have always been limited. The bombs I made had the potential to take out a foe, but for whatever reason, the laws that govern Azeroth dictate that I can only use one bomb every minute. I had other options for dealing damage with engineering, but those had similar cooldowns (if not longer). If I wanted to defeat an enemy of similar power through engineering alone, assuming that they never healed, such a battle would take about a half hour, if not longer. In addition, all of these tools required a significant investment of capital and resources to develop. As such, not only were my tools woefully inadequate for the tasks I was attempting, I was paying a premium for the privilege of failing at said tasks. This would be the primary reason I've spent the bulk of the last few years practicing as a warlock during tasks I've performed for our company. My warlock abilities got the job done, but I've never felt the sense of satisfaction from casting an Immolate like I have from making a mechanohog.

Okay, so what makes Tyria different? What makes you think that you'll be taken seriously as a professional engineer there when you've been less than successful back in Azeroth?

Numerous reasons, but I'll start from the beginning. For Tyrians engineering is not treated as a sidejob one does when they've got some downtime between running dungeons. In Tyria engineering is on par with professions like warrior and elementalist and one is expected to put in the same degree of dedication, if not more, to our craft as they would into learning your warrior abilities or a elementalist's spells. As a full-fledged profession, engineering has the same defining characteristics as any other profession: weapon selections, armor options, and combat skills.

Weapon selection are fairly basic and fit the profession: rifle, pistol and a shield, or dual-wielding pistols. This part actually covers one of the other issues I've always had with Azerothian engineering. Over the years I've made numerous rifles to advance my skills as an engineer. Some of these we've found a use for with different members of the team. However, the bulk of those weapons have either found their way to Matheion for disenchanting or to a vendor so they could be sold for a mere pittance. I'm not sure what was more insulting: the fact that I couldn't use the weapons that I designed, or the fact that there were so many of my fellow engineers working on their own skills that the effective assembly line they'd formed had devalued our inventions to the point where the finished product was worth less than its components.

You're preaching to the choir, Med. I'm a blacksmith - I'm used to basically throwing away gold for the sake of perfecting my techniques.

Yes, I know that you can sympathize with that particular problem, but you don't identify yourself first and foremost as a blacksmith. It's a point of pride for you, just like your Chef title, but you don't introduce yourself to others as Ragar, the blacksmith.

Point taken. So your weapons include firearms and a shield. We already talked earlier about how weapons dictate most of our skills in Tyria. Any details on your available skills?

Indeed, we'll start with the rifle. First you have Hip Shot, a fairly basic attack but one you can perform while on the move. There's Net Shot which is fairly self-explanatory: you shoot a net at your target. Blunderbuss is a bit more interesting; it's a shot meant to cause your target to bleed (well, more so than any wound typically does), but it's more effective at close range. This seems like it's somewhat counter-intuitive given that rifles are normally considered a long range weapon. However your other two skills include Overcharged Shot (an attack that knocks back both you and your opponent) and Jump Shot (you launch yourself to a target location and actually deal damage to enemies near your landing zone). When you look at these five skills as a whole, you start to see potential synergy. An approaching enemy could be immobilized with a Net Shot with Hip Shots until he gets too close. At that point you could use Blunderbuss for the maximized bleeding effect, Overcharged Shot to knock both of you back, then Net Shot him to start the cycle over again. Should your opponent then decide that he'd rather not stick around, you could combine Jump Shot and Net Shot to prevent his escape.

It's like Heroic Leap, but useful

Dual-wielding pistols is another option. While it's lacking a lot of the distance control options of using a rifle, it does still have Glue Shot for that basic immobilize effect. What it lacks in control however, it makes up for in damaging effects. Explosive Shot is a basic attack that explodes on impact with a target. Dart Volley fires a poisonous dart at the target. Static Shot is a lightning attack which includes a blinding effect. Finally there's Flamethrower, which operates similar to Blunderbuss in the "more damage the closer the target is" effect, but it's fire instead of bleeding.

The pistol/shield option is fairly similar to dual-wielding pistols, but you're trading Glue Shot and Flamethrower for Absorb (you can absorb a projectile from an enemy for use against them later) or Deploy Ballistic Barrier (place a static barrier to intercept enemy projectiles). If you're in a situation where projectiles are a major concern, then the shield option's there. Personally I have a hard time choosing that over the mobility options of the rifle or dual-pistol's Flamethrower skill, but it's there if you need it. Well, assuming you don't want to use the actual Flamethrower at your disposal.

Wait, *actual* Flamethrower? As in more than one?

Indeed, and now we're getting to the good part. You know the various non-weapon skills you covered in your warrior post?

Yes, utility, healing, and elite skills. For warriors we can choose from options like shouts, banners, and stances to support our weapon skills.

That is correct: your utility skills *support* your weapon skills. As an engineer, my utility skills *become* my weapon skills. Let's start with the categories our utility skills far into: weapon kits, backpack kits, and turrets.

Weapon kits are essentially additional weapon sets we can switch to during battle in addition to the normal two sets everyone can swap between. There are a few different options here, but my personal favorite is the Flamethrower Kit. When activated, my weapon skills are replaced with five new skills. Flame Jet allows you to spray multiple enemies with fire while on the move. Flame Blast fires a ball of plasma towards your enemies that will explode upon impact. Air Blast not only interrupts enemy casts, but also knocks them back and deflects projectiles. Napalm creates a flame wall that will burn and blind your foes. Finally, Backdraft will pull your opponents towards you, setting them up for your other attacks.

Backpack kits for the most part operate like weapon kits and replace your weapon skills with new backpack-related abilities. A Grenade Kit, for example, gives you a regular grenade attack in addition to a variety of grenades that cause status effects. However, some backpack kits don't replace your weapon skills. The Med Kit gives you the option of dropping medical packs that can heal your allies if they should run over them. In this case, you could have a rifle out and in between shots, you could use your Med Kit to drop a medical pack for someone, then immediately go back to shooting.

Turrets are closer to the Med Kit in operation in that they won't replace your weapon skills. Instead you simply drop your turret on the ground and go back to doing whatever you were up to before. However while the medical packs are single-use (your ally picks them up and now it's gone), the turret has a little more presence on the battlefield. Once used, it stays on the battlefield for a while and does its specific task. A Rifle Turret is pretty self-explanatory: it shoots whatever is in range. Other options include the Flame Turret, Thumper Turret, and the Healing Turret.

Would've traded that worthless imp for one of these turrets in a heartbeat

So the Healing Turret would give you a healing utility skill in addition to your self-healing skill?

Not quite. The Healing Turret would actually take the place of your self-healing skill. Your choice there would be between the turret, the Med Kit, and Elixir H.

Okay, so if the turret can heal you, I suppose that implies that you could heal yourself by running over your own medical packs from the Med Kit.

I cannot confirm that, but my instincts say no simply because of the Tool Belt.

What does a belt have to do with healing?

The Tool Belt is an engineer specific trait, kind of like adrenaline is for you warriors. The Tool Belt gives us the option of overcharging our kits.

So you won't miss out on all of that exploding from your Goblin Engineering days?

Very funny, but no. Basically it gives engineers a cooldown option to get an extra feature out of our kits. In the case of the Med Kit, you get a self-healing option. Grenade Kits can be overcharged for a grenade barrage. If I were using a Mine Kit and had a bunch of mines set up, I could use the overcharge to set them all off. Finally, I could overcharge a turret to get a more powerful attack (e.g. Rifle Turret would fire off a burst attack while the Thumper Turret would knock down nearby foes in addition to doing damage to them).

So to summarize, your profession's going from "a neat little hobby" to making you a full fledged Gnomish Army Knife in combat. That about cover it?

You're cutting out a lot of the nuance and emphasis, but yes, that describes the situation in layman's terms. However that doesn't quite cover the potential the new improved engineer has. A novice engineer could just grab a rifle and happily fire away at his foes. A true master however will be making use of all tools at his disposal.

Let's say that I'm using a rifle, Med Kit, Mine Kit, Flamethrower Kit, and a Thumper Turret; there's also the elite skill, but I'm missing information for those other than the Elixir Kit and that's not part of this example. Now with this loadout, we'll say that I'm getting ready to fight a group of enemies. Rather than just using my rifle right away, I could set up for the fight by placing mines and a Thumper Turret in between myself and my foes. Next I could start the pull either with a Hip Shot or, in the case of one target being a bigger threat than the others, a Net Shot to stagger him behind the rest of the group. Now that the group's heading my way, I can continue firing away while they run through the mines and the AoE from the turret. Once they start to get close though, I can switch to the flamethrower for AoE damage. Between the mines, turret, and flamethrower, this should be enough to handle the weaker parts of the pull. That just leaves the foe I immobilized and any potential survivors of the AoE assault. If I need to finish off the survivors, I could use Net Shot again and go back to AoE work. Once that's finished, I can switch over to the Rifle and use the rotation I mentioned earlier to take them down.

This is only one example of the potential of the engineer profession. I could go on about potential battle scenarios for pages, but this should set the tone for what's possible. Hopefully I've managed to properly convey the exact reasons for my excitement about moving to Tyria in this post.

I think you covered the matter fairly well. Thanks for your time, Med. If you come up with anything else that needs a post, let me know.

That should just about cover the engineer profession. That's two down, six to go. Time to start persuading the rest of the team to get to writing. See you next time.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 2: The Way of the Warrior

2011-07-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

Now that we've laid the groundwork for how weapons work in Tyria compared to Azeroth, we can move on to something I'm sure most people are curious about: the classes, or professions as they like to call them. As of right now there are seven known professions available to anyone looking to do some adventuring in Tyria. Supposedly there's an eighth one out there somewhere, but if there's anyone who actually knows what that profession is, they're apparently keeping their mouth shut. Regardless that still leaves us seven other professions to talk about, and at the rate I write, number eight might be unveiled before this series is finished anyways.

For those interested in some adventuring work, the choices so far are elementalist, engineer, guardian, necromancer, ranger, thief, and warrior. At first glance it looks like there's some familiar names amongst that group for us Azerothians. We're used to warriors, hunters have been called rangers in some parts of the world, and thief is just another synonym for rogue to us. Elementalist is a little more vague since we know both mages and shamans that are big into the whole "summoning the elements" thing. Guardian and necromancer are new to us though and engineering to us is just a tradeskill, not an identifying name. Well, unless you're Medeleth.

Names aside, most of us probably look at a list like that and think, "Ah, I'll just find the closest analog to what I am now and go with that. I'll have a real short learning curve compared to everyone else, then I'll show those rookies how a real adventurer gets things done!" Yeah... that's not gonna work. Just like the skills I mentioned last time, the professions operate a bit different than what we're used to. For today let's start with the warrior profession.

You'd think that comparing an Azeroth warrior to a Tyrian one would be a pretty simple job. We both hit people with assorted weapons, we both yell at friend and foe alike, and we both wear heavy plate for armor. True though those may be, there are some differences buried in the details. In addition, there are some tricks the Tyrians have that we don't.

Let's start off with weapons since those are pretty iconic for warriors. Now like I mentioned last time, to most of us from Azeroth, one weapon is as good as another. My Devastate, an Arms warrior's Mortal Strike, and a Fury warrior's Bloodthirst all hit the enemy the same regardless of whether it's a mace or a sword. In Tyria however weapon styles have their own specific skills and their own strengths/weaknesses, so this isn't the case. If I were using a sword, then I'd be more mobile and be using a lot of bleeding techniques, but switching to an axe would give me access to more burst damage. If I needed some AoE, then I could break out a greatsword or a bow. Yes, you read that last part right - a bow.

For all of us Azerothian warriors (and honestly the casters too but this is about us warriors), our ranged weapons served one purpose: stats on a stick. We didn't pull with these unless every single other ranged trick we had was on cooldown and the only time we used them in combat was if a dragon was flying and we felt like doing something other than twiddling our thumbs till it came back down. Gun, bow, thrown weapon - didn't matter to us. All we wanted was more strength for DPS and more stamina for tanks.

In Tyria though both bows and guns serve completely different purposes. If I want to pick off a single target at range, then I can break out a gun and start pounding away at it until it gets close enough that I need to switch to melee. If there's a group of monsters that need taken out, then I can switch to a bow and start raining fiery death from the sky.

Not sure why I get fiery sky death, but I won't say no to it

So weapons determine our attack skills and being a ranged warrior is no longer considered a sign of mental instability. Next on the list of similar yet different? Stances. Azerothian warriors used to think about their stances, but honestly that's a thing of the past with additions like Warbringer and Juggernaut. I can't actually remember the last time I had to switch out of Defensive Stance; there just isn't really any need to anymore. You find the one that suits you and the skills you have to use and it's just this passive buff that always exists.

For Tyrians stances are similar in that they have no buff duration or cast time (they're either just on or they're off), but they're not meant to be permanent. Let's use Berserker Stance as an example since both worlds have one. In Azeroth Berserker Stance is just a flat 10% damage increase and fury warriors use it because their skills require it. In Tyria Berserker Stance doesn't add a passive damage bonus. Instead the entire time you're in the stance, you build additional adrenaline, which I'll get to in a second. Suffice it to say that adrenaline is always good to have. However the entire time you're in this "yay adrenaline!" stance, you're losing energy - the resource required to actually use any of your skills. This makes the stance a tactical choice rather than a passive bonus: do I use the stance now to build my adrenaline for short-term gain or do I forgo the bonus for the purpose of having resources for a longer fight?

Since I just mentioned adrenaline, let's go ahead and compare that to its closest analog for Azerothians, rage. To an Azeroth warrior, rage is everything: it's what fuels our abilities, and with enough rage, we can destroy anything in our path (assuming we live through whatever was pounding on us to supply said rage). However rage is merely a resource for us and cannot do anything when it's not being used.

Adrenaline, while similar to rage, does have some distinct qualities. For one it only comes with attacks from the warrior, not received by him like protection warriors are accustomed to. Next it's only a secondary resource. Energy is used for the bulk of warrior skills with only a handful benefiting from releasing adrenaline. However unlike rage, adrenaline can help even when not in use. As adrenaline is acquired, it builds up like rage and once it passes certain levels, every attack from the warrior will hit harder. This will continue as long as there is adrenaline built up, so until either the battle ends and the adrenaline fades or until the warrior releases it all through a burst skill. These skills can do anything from applying conditions to just dealing a bunch more damage to your target. This means you'll have to choose whether you want to spike the enemy down as soon as you build up enough adrenaline, save up for a maxed out burst skill, or just sit on the adrenaline and chain a bunch of powered-up regular attacks until a better opportunity presents itself.

Speaking of chains, that leads me to my next point. Anyone from Azeroth is pretty familiar with the idea of an attack chain or rotation. We've all done our research to find out what our optimal attack order is and when we should use which attack. Well, chains are sorta similar, but they're more self-contained. Remember those five skills I said were associated with each weapon style? For this example let's say you're using a sword. One of your skills will be called Sever Artery. Now in the middle of a fight, you'll be doing your thing and at some point you'll use that skill. If you take a look at your HUD afterwards, you'll notice that there's something new in the spot where Sever Artery used to be. Now it's called Gash. That's because those two are part of an attack chain: Sever Artery, Gash, and Final Thrust. Chain skills add two more moves you can pull off against your enemies, but they need to be in order, or "chained". If you use Sever Artery and Gash against an enemy, but then you switch to a different skill, you'll have to start the chain again if you want to land a Final Thrust. This means you'll have to think about whether or not you'll have enough time to finish a chain against your enemy or if you'd be better off using a different skill like your self-heal or a charge skill.

A true warrior adds some variety instead of just mashing Bloodthirst or Mortal Strike

Charge skills are going to be a bit odd for most Azeroth warriors. Other than using a mount or crafting, we're all pretty much used to instant reaction. Unless you're a DPS warrior trying to use Slam without Bloodsurge, the only time we see cast times are for crafting or summoning mounts. Well, charge skills are kind of like cast time skills, but the time's variable. The longer you want to wind up your swing/stab/etc., the harder it'll hit. Note that there is a limit to how long you can charge up though. No matter how much you may want to, you can't just sit outside of town for five hours waiting for the first thing that comes in range so you can hit it to the moon. It'll take more than shouts and banners to make your swing that powerful.

Shouts we're all pretty familiar with: I yell out something that either makes all of my friends stronger/tougher/etc. or I say something mean about my enemy's mother and lower their attack/defense/etc. Fairly standard warrior tool that even the Tyrians didn't see any real need to fix. They did however decide to add another buff to their arsenal though: banners.

Banners to me were always just something the guild summoned either to show off or to signify "stand here, you easily distracted morons". Other than a slight bonus to experience (which meant absolutely nothing to us raiders), they served no real purpose beyond that. In Tyria though, these serve as sort of a warrior totem. The example I could find was the Banner of Courage, which makes friendly melee attacks around the banner hit harder. The warrior would place this banner and then continue to fight. However, this doesn't have to be the case. For a more mobile situation, say a large group chasing after a giant monster, a stationary buff doesn't help all that much. In this case the warrior can pick up the banner and run around with it. It means he won't be able to attack along the way since his hands will be full, but all of his allies in the surrounding area will benefit from the buff while he follows the group. Once they finally stop somewhere for some stationary fighting, the warrior can plant the banner and get back into the thick of things.

That just about covers the major differences between the two types of warriors. There are a few other details like warhorns, but I covered the important parts. There's also traits, but that's another one of those "needs its own post" topics. For the most part, anyone from Azeroth who enjoys being a warrior and getting into the thick of things should be happy with what Tyria has to offer. In addition any warriors who fancied themselves as a pretty good marksman can still be proud warriors and not feel required to join the ranks of the rangers. It won't be quite the same for all of us and honestly it's probably going to require quite a bit more paying attention that some of us have been used to from the days of Wrath (and honestly quite a bit of early Cataclysm raiding), but I think we can handle it. Hell, for those of us that are old Onyxia and Blackwing Lair veterans, it'll feel like the old days of stance dancing. I've kind of missed that. The stance dancing part, mind you, not the 40 man part; you couldn't pay me enough to do that nonsense again.

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 1: One Weapon's As Good As The Next, Right?

2011-07-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Last time I mentioned that the team was looking to leave Azeroth in search of greener pastures and grander treasures. I even mentioned that we had somewhere in particular picked out. Now that those basic details are out of the way, I figured it might be a good idea to start looking at some of the similarities and differences between our old home and our potential new one, in case any other Azerothians are looking for a change of scenery.

Given that I'm comparing two entire worlds, this isn't going to fit into one post. Well, technically it could, but that's less of a post and more of a dissertation and I know no one is going to sit through that mountain of text unless I break it up. Best to start simple, I think. Adventurers of all classes have to have their tools of the trade: swords, axes, guns, etc. You'd think that there shouldn't be a whole lot to talk about here, right?

To those of us from Azeroth, a weapon's a weapon and all that matters is if you know how to wield it and if it gives you more strength/agility/maximum damage/whatever random number your class and build was concerned with. Axe or sword, it didn't matter because the attack's the exact same for both. I always thought that was a bit odd that a sword swung the same as a mace or an axe, but that's just how it always worked. The closest we ever came to caring about weapon types was back when Arms warriors and Combat rogues had to spec for specific weapon styles. Even then it wasn't really all that involved, since all we were really doing was choosing between passive bonuses: a better chance to critically hit with axes or perhaps get the occasional free swing with a sword.

It was even simpler when it came to casters. As far as Medeleth and the other spellslingers were concerned, their weapons were annoying things they had to carry to bump up their spell power. A warlock with a staff cast his spells the same as one with a sword and book and, assuming they had the same bonuses, hit for exactly the same amount. Weapons were just eye candy to all of us and as long as we had something in that hand to do our jobs, it didn't matter what it was. That was Azeroth though; for Tyria, that attitude isn't going to cut it anymore.

Now the system as a whole is a lot more complicated than I'm going to lay out right here, but just to keep things simple, I'll focus on the basics; we'll go over the specifics later. For the moment, let's start with how we dealt with combat back in Azeroth. You'd have your long list of abilities available in your spellbook. Depending on your spec, you'd pick out the abilities that made sense for you to use, then you'd put them somewhere where it was easy to use them. Assuming that you were using whatever was agreed to be the most efficient build/rotation for your class, this meant that you pretty much picked the same abilities as every other person of your class doing that job. You'd have your single target skills, your AoE moves, your "oh crap!" buttons, etc. Pretty much everything you could possibly need during the fight needed to be available at a moment's notice. The standard-issue adventurer's HUD makes it easier to keep track of all of this stuff, but after a while it can get pretty cluttered, especially when you start to consider add-ons. I managed to keep mine fairly clean, but that took hours of work and a lot of extras to minimize wasted space and duplicate information. I couldn't do anything for all of those hotbars showing my abilities other than shrink their size a bit and hope I could still make out which button was which. When we move to Tyria however, that kind of heavy-duty HUD management should be a thing of the past.

This is the kind of mess I'd rather avoid

I can't comment on whether the add-on management will exist or not because, well, I don't know if they're allowed to modify their HUDs or not. What I do know is how many bars of buttons there will be on the screen:

One bar. 10 buttons.

That's it. At last count I think I have something like 48 buttons on my Azeroth HUD; Med's even worse at 60 just because of all of that engineering crap and warlock summoning stuff he keeps on his.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're looking at that and going, "So instead of having everything at my fingertips, I'm gonna have to dig into my spellbook whenever I need to switch from single target to AoE or whatever else I need to do. How is this helpful?". Remember when I was making a big deal earlier about how weapon types were going to matter in Tyria? Therein lies the secret.

Let's take that 10-button bar and break it into two sets of five. Looking at buttons 6-10, we've got a healing skill, an elite skill, and three utility skills. I'll talk about this three things at another time, but for now let's look at what we've got left: buttons 1 through 5, or as they're better known, your weapon skills.

To illustrate, let's say that you're a warrior and you've got a one-handed sword equipped. If you took a look at the abilities on your bar, you'd see some high mobility move and an emphasis on bleeds. This would be great when you need to bounce around the battlefield and the bleeds would be great since you could have one ticking away on multiple targets. This isn't perfect for all situations though. What if you ran into a big rock elemental by himself? Assuming rock can even bleed (don't look at me like I'm crazy - Kologarn can take damage from Deep Wounds and he was rock with a moustache), the mobility from the sword is kinda wasted if your target's slow and the bleed's less impressive if there's only one target taking damage from it. How can you improve your odds in this situation? Switching weapons, that's how!

If we switch over to an axe, now we've got access to some high spike damage in case the rock elemental has high armor. If we go with a mace, now we've got stuns in our arsenal. Assuming we can get the drop on the elemental, our warrior could even go with a rifle and decimate him from range. Yes, I know the idea of a ranged warrior sounds like heresy, but it's true. Things get even weirder though when we get to the casters.

We'll use an elementalist for the caster example (they're like mages, but they don't pick one element and pretend the others don't exist). Let's say this elementalist has two weapon sets: one with a dagger with a focus in his off-hand, and the other with just a staff. Were this Azeroth, these two would cast the exact same spells with the only differences being how hard the spells hit, how fast you cast them, etc. In Tyria however, your combat spells are in those first five buttons and because those are weapon-specific, your two weapon sets now serve different purposes. With the staff equipped, the elementalist will now have access to a set of long-range attacks, but he'll have to deal with longer cast times. If he switches to the dagger and focus, his dagger will give him a set of fast casting, medium range spells while the focus will fill in the remaining slots with powerful close range spells. For a little extra customization, the elementalist could even swap out his main hand dagger if he's planning on being stuck in close quarter combat or he could go dual daggers and be built for medium range destruction.

The idea of mixing main and offhand weapon types isn't just for casters. When I was talking about sword and axe techniques for the warrior only, those were one-handed weapons. The warrior could mix the two for bleeds and spike damage, he could go all-out if the situation calls for it, or he could toss a shield in his offhand for some defensive skills. There's also mixed weapon techniques for that middle button of the five, but those are for thieves only (damn greedy thieves).

Now I could go on about the ramifications of this for days, but I'll try and sum this up. Switching to a system where your weapon style matters does make it where you'll have to carry around multiple weapons, but honestly we've been doing that for ages already. I've had to dedicate two bags to spare gear for as long as I can remember. Plus with some of the other stuff I've seen, I might be getting some of that bag space back, so I can afford to hold onto a few spare weapons. We'll talk about that "other stuff" another day though, along with the other twenty things I couldn't fit into this mountain of text.

LF Adventurer Work Not In Azeroth

2011-07-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

*cough* Damn dust! *cough* Guess I should've hired someone to clean while we were gone.

Hello, anybody who forgot to take us off their feed readers! Been a while, huh? I suppose I should talk about why we haven't posted in a while and maybe play a bit of catch-up for what's happened in the last couple years.

The former's kinda easy to cover honestly: nothing worth writing about happened for a long time. Looking at the last couple posts we did, it was the guys running heroic dungeons over and over again and I was just doing weekly wrap-up style posts. After a few of those, we decided to take a break until something worth writing about came along. I didn't enjoy writing those "Dear diary, we ran heroics today..." posts and I doubt anyone really enjoyed reading them. There's something to be said for making yourself write just to stay in practice or to get into the habit, but we can recognize when we're trying to hard just for the sake of having a post up with today's date.

As for what's happened in the last couple years, I'm gonna save a good chunk of that for other posts. Part of that is because there's enough there for separate posts, but most of it is just for brevity (my rough draft of this post with all the details hit four pages and I was barely finishing the wrap-up). I'll summarize it all though: we ran heroics, we went to raids, Azeroth blew up, we did a lot of leveling, and we were starting to get a bit burned out towards the end. Being tanks though, you keep going for the sake of the group and because there was still some enjoyment to be found in the work. Earlier this year though, the guild Solannis (who became Solagar - long story for another day), Mordigg, and myself were all contracting for kinda, sorta exploded. They were still there in name and general spirit, but the ones we all enjoyed working alongside the most all left for various reasons. Some to find work with another guild, some to go join the PvP circuit, but most of them just needed a break from the war and the Horde and went their separate ways.

This left us with a decision: do we stick around with the guild despite it no longer having the people we enjoyed working with, or do we follow suit and blaze our own trail? After some discussion with the entire team (even the Alliance branch came down to weigh in), we came to a conclusion: time to move on. I got the feeling from the team that we all just needed a change of pace and scenery. Some new business contacts also wouldn't go amiss, since the Alliance branch wasn't particularly thrilled with King Varian and I really hate Garrosh. Between the two of them, a lot of good soldiers are going to die for stupid reasons and I'll be happy to be gone while they fight it out.

Of course, deciding to look for work other than Alliance or Horde does leave us with a predicament, but we've got enough engineers on the team that we can find a way around that. I mean, if we can send men off to alternate Azeroths to open new branch offices for us, I think we can find a new home. Med's been hard at work investigating new worlds for us where we can set up shop and members of the team have already investigated a few of them. Some have held promise, but just didn't pan out. Some visits have ended nearly as quickly as they began.

There is one place that has our attention though. It's got plenty of work for adventurers like us, there's far less faction vs. faction nonsense than we're dealing with on Azeroth, and it's technologically advanced enough that Med and the other engineers are all fighting over who gets to do the first scouting mission:

Usually a good sign when the team's actually competing to see who gets to go in first instead of needing coerced or threatened. Guess I should start digging through the recon Med's found, so I can start posting about that.

From "Summer Slowdown" to "We've Run Out of Heroics For The Day"

2009-08-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

When I said the team needed more exciting things going on so I could blog about them, at no point did I consider the possibility that one could swing too far in the other direction. Namely, we've had plenty of work lately, but none of us have had any time to write any of it up. Ever since the Argent Coliseum opened up, we've pretty much had work lined up from when we punch in to well after we should've punched out for the day. We're all tired, but it's a good tired as opposed to the normal falling asleep in Dalaran while waiting for a group to show up.

About the time the Coliseum opened, I also found a new guild for Grunzford and Mordigg. So far they both seem to have nothing but good things to say about the new guild, and they certainly aren't wanting for people to do things. To put things in perspective as to how many heroics and raids Grunz has run in the last week, he's managed to pick up every piece of Emblem of Conquest gear except for the pants (he had tier 7.5 already) and still have enough left over to turn into Emblems of Valor for his shoulders. Mordigg made out about as many emblems as Grunz, but unfortunately he did them all before the switch to Conquest. That'll buy a lot of epic gems though, so it's not a total loss.

Speaking of the death knight, he's been a bit annoyed at the hits his survivability seems to have taken lately. Nothing too bad for what he's been doing, but the health and armor loss has been noticeable. In addition, he also mentioned a spec swap for his multi-target tanking build. Blood's still fine for single-target tanking, but the change to Unholy Blight eliminated the main reason to have that for a trash tanking build. I believe he found some Frost build last night, but it still needs a field test or two.

Grunz seemed to make out fairly well with the changes, and in the last few days, he's seen fights that even Solannis hadn't tanked:

While Grunz has seen most of our field time, Sol and I haven't been entirely left out of the fun. For the most part, we've been doing the new 5-man dungeon - Sol for the trinket, me for damn near all of the tanking stuff since I've got Naxx-10 and heroic gear. The new instance is fun, though I do have one question. The warrior champion they've got in there, Marshal Jacob Alerius, is already a bit weird since he's an Arms warrior using a shield, but I'll ignore that as normal PvP weirdness. What I want to know is: what day of warrior school did I sleep through when they taught that backflip throw garbage he does? It's certainly not in any of my talent trees, so what do I need to do to learn this trick? He won't talk regardless of how many times I Shield Slam his face, so I'm open to suggestions.

Summer Slowdown, BlizzCon, and Podcast Question

2009-07-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

Gotta love the summer slump - makes it a pain for me to line up work for the guys, which in turn makes for slow blogging. Most of what I've been able to find has all been one-shot jobs a friend of mine has found. Some of those go quite smoothly and everyone gets what they want out of the run. Others end like... well, like Medeleth's last run. I think he still holds a grudge over that one. Unfortunately from the looks of the guild roster most evenings and the way some of them talk about being bored or disillusioned with the whole war against the Scourge, I don't see an end to our PuG adventures in the near future.

The obvious solution to this would be to look for a new guild to contract one or more of the guys out to (or me even - I could use a break from doing paperwork for the rest of the guys). It would give us a new source of work for at least one member of the team and we'd have an inside line for any jobs that come up that require the services of someone else on the team. The downside though would be that whoever got transferred have to leave behind the guild members that still show up and we're friends with; there's nothing physically preventing them from staying in touch, but anyone who's ever changed guilds knows that it's never quite the same as having that green text going back and forth.

If push comes to shove and I end up having to find new homes for some of the team, I do have a couple of leads. In the meantime though, doing the occasional PuG should keep the team in fighting shape, barring any more spectacular failures like Med's last adventure. Well, that and it should keep them from complaining to me about being bored (can't be bored when something is trying to kill you).

In other news, we received our confirmations for BlizzCon today, so everything is ready for the trip now. I'll be bringing a camera and a camcorder with me, so hopefully between the two of those, there'll be something worth posting. I'll also try posting some on Twitter while the show's going on, but any pictures I put up there will be restricted to the iPhone's camera and that really only works on things within Charge range.

Lastly I've got an idea for something for the blog, but right now it's just an idea. I was reading Rilgon's blog today and he posted a proof of concept podcast where he covered hunters and the various things affecting them at the moment. Awesome show by the way, so I recommend any hunters or those interested in hunters take a listen (it's about a half-hour, so it'll give you something to listen to while doing your dailies). Regardless, while listening to his podcast, I started thinking about how it sounded like a lot of fun and maybe I should try my hand at it. Med could round up whatever program I need to record this, we've got a fairly decent microphone that I picked up to discuss raiding strategy (read: yell at people in void zones, make fun of people not in Ventrilo), so all that leaves is the actual content.

There lies the question: what to talk about? Certainly can't talk about hunters like Rilgon. For one he's got that covered, but more importantly our hunter can't even come up with decent pet names, let alone figure out what raiding hunters should be doing. That leaves talking about tanking or posting audio versions of the arguments/discussions we've used in the other posts. Tanking would probably be best, but I'm open to suggestions. While we figure out what to talk about, I'll work with Med to try and figure out how to actually record something. Once we've managed to make something presentable, I'll post it here... well, once I figure out how in the Nether I'm supposed to post audio here.

Medeleth vs. Naxx: Not All Guild PuGs Are Equal

2009-07-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

Ragar: Not much to report from the last few weeks. Guild's still on a bit of a hiatus for the summer, so most of us have been enjoying the time off. We have had a few jobs here and there through a buddy of mine - mostly Naxxramas runs, but with the occasional Vault of Archavon or Obsidian Sanctum trip. Admittedly not the most exciting work in the world, but it's still practice for those guys and they got some upgrades.

Medeleth: Not all of us got upgrades...

Ragar: Look, I said I was sorry.

Medeleth: You sent me off to die!

Ragar: Hey now, I didn't line up that job. My shaman friend found that group and asked for a DPS. If I recall, you said something like "I suppose I could take a break from my research to support the masses. They shall stand in awe and wonder at the sight of fel magic and engineering prowess when wielded by a true genius." What happened to all that bravado, Mr. "Creation and destruction are my playthings"?

Medeleth: That "bravado" as you call it was trampled under the boot of Instructor Razuvious as the group proceeded to fail and call retreat three times before calling the raid.

Ragar: Wait, you couldn't kill Razuvious? How in the Nether is that even possible?

Medeleth: Combination of bad Mind Control timing, failure to swap threat between understudies so Bone Barrier was always up, and lack of healing on the understudies. Basically the one tanking Razuvious would either die or the Mind Control would break, then he would immediately run over to myself and one of the mages and express his dissatisfaction at our setting him ablaze.

Ragar: Well you didn't get locked into the run, so that's a plus. Besides, it couldn't have taken that long if you couldn't kill one boss.

Medeleth: We were in there for over an hour. It just took them that long to get ready between pulls. To properly illustrate just how slow these people were, your shaman friend had enough time after a wipe to fly over, use his Ebonweave and Spellweave cooldowns, fly back, then get a drink before they finally remembered they were in a damn dungeon.

Ragar: Well, I think you've beat most of my bad pickup group stories with that one.

Medeleth: Ah, but I'm not finished yet. This was not a true pickup group in the strictest sense of the word. This was a guild run with something like 60-70% of this 25-man group from that guild. These were people who had worked with each other on a regular basis and had apparently set foot into Ulduar. The raid leader even tried using that as encouragement. He said at one point, "C'mon guys, we've taken down Ignis with five people up before. We can do this!" Maybe it's just me, but instead of being motivated by that, all I hear is that either half of his 10-man group or 80% of his 25-man group got themselves killed.

Ragar: Realism does tend to cut into the motivational power of a battle speech. So I take it you don't want any more jobs from them?

Medeleth: If I end up in a group with those people again, I can and will find a way to make you suffer. It may be the next day, it may be a year down the road, but I will have my revenge.

Grunzford vs. Ulduar: The First Few Bosses

2009-07-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

Ragar: Sorry for the delay between posts. Bit of a hectic schedule, compounded by an exploding hard drive on one of our Macs.

Medeleth: Which wouldn't have been as big of an issue if you'd been backing up like I'd told you to do.

Ragar: Yeah, yeah, I know. No big deal though - all of the important stuff is backed up, so all it really did was do the spring cleaning I never got around to doing. Anyway, let's get the quick summary out of the way. Solannis, Mordigg, and I are pretty much doing dailies for the moment. The mage and the hunter are both slowly making their way through Northrend. The priest shows up just long enough to disenchant things, then disappears again. Right now most of our field time has been going to Grunzford.

In the past few weeks, he got to tank a 25-man Naxxramas instead of pretending to be kitty DPS and he's had the opportunity to off-tank a couple of 10-man Ulduar runs for our guild. How was your first experience as a raid tank, Grunz?

Grunzford: Far preferable to being DPS. I've got nothing against being a cat, but for doing damage, it just never clicked as well with me as being a boomkin did. Funny thing was I got to off-tank one of those Ulduar-10 runs before Naxx though.

Ragar: Oh? How did that go?

Grunzford: Pretty smoothly, though I did have a bit of hassle from one of the random people the guild had in the run. They were pushing for me to convince you, Sol, or Mordigg to come in instead of me.

Ragar: Was he concerned about your gear or something? You were an off-tank. The stuff the off-tank fights doesn't hit that hard and anything that does would take us down just as fast.

Grunzford: If it were just a concern about my equipment, I might've understood. However, I begin to question their motivations when their gear concern comes moments after saying, "Aw man, we've got two druids. There's competition now." If you're trying to make sure you don't have to roll against people for loot, at least try to hide it. That's just insulting.

Regardless, all of the fights we did went just fine. Razorscale and Ignis went down quickly. They'd already done Deconstructor that run, but I did get to tank Iron Council before we called it. This was the only fight I went down on the whole night.

Ragar: Fusion Punch?

Grunzford: Yeah, the first attempt I ate two ticks of the DoT after one of them. The next attempt had faster dispels, so we got them down that time. I didn't feel too bad about falling to the DoT though, since I'm pretty sure that would have taken any of you three down as well.

After that run wrapped up, I also had that Naxx-25 run with a couple of tanking upgrades and we've also got a 10-man group planning on working on the harder versions of the Ulduar fights in the next week or two.

Ragar: Looks like other than your helm, the rest of your gear's up to the task of doing hard modes, so that should be fine. There is the question of your second spec though, since some of those fights only require one tank.

Grunzford: Yeah, there lies a problem. Right now my second spec is resto, but I don't think we want me healing.

Ragar: Ah, feel inexperienced at healing?

Grunzford: Well, that and the 1100 spellpower. Pretty sure the combination of those two is not a recipe for success.

Ragar: Yeah, that's not so much gonna work. Guess it's time to start grabbing offspec gear.

Grunzford: You mean like all of that DPS gear and healing gear you and Sol keep passing on?

Ragar: Bite me, smartass.

10-Man Raids, Adventures in Powerleveling, and the Druid's First Trip to Naxx

2009-06-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

This past week, the guild Solannis and I are in decided to put the 25-man runs on hiatus. Basically the recruits coming in weren't outpacing the people getting burned out from Ulduar, so we weren't making much headway. Well, that and they were apparently tired of repeatedly wiping to the adds on Freya because "don't kill the damn water spirit" is apparently a difficult concept. I think some of it's also just the time of year honestly, but regardless that does put us in the situation of being back to 10-man raiding only and that's just fine with me and Sol.

Now don't get me wrong: Sol, Grunzford, Med, myself, and the rest of the team do enjoy raiding in both 10- and 25-man forms. Tanking or DPSing (maybe one day healing) dragons, giants, and other assorted beings with treasure we want for ourselves is what we do best. I even enjoyed 40-man raiding, despite the general headaches I got from some of those runs, which brings me to my point. Finding nine other people you like can be somewhat difficult, but it's doable. Finding 24 other people you like is another matter altogether.

There's also the matter of raid coordination. In a 10-man run, Sol or I can reasonably know each person in the group and what to expect from them and, in the case of a second tank, we can usually do things like tank switches and cooldown usage with a quick call or sometimes without saying anything. In a 25-man run though, half the time we don't really know much about our fellow raiders other than "he's usually around 4k DPS" or "he'll die to the first void zone". It's also just quieter in 10-man runs, so the tanks don't have to shout over someone for tank switches and other pertinent "I will die if the healers don't hear this" situations. Sol says that last one's particularly annoying for Kologarn.

Alright, so with the 25-man raiding out of the way for the week, that left us with time for some low-level work. Our resident mage Malador made it to 65 today, so he's made a fair bit of progress since my post. He has been complaining though about feeling restricted in leveling to Frost. Something about Ice Barrier and the other trees not being time efficient. We've also taken to subcontracting our services to others to help their leveling progress. Well, not so much subcontracting as it is dragging a buddy of mine through dungeons to help him catch up. If nothing else, it's given Grunzford something to do and apparently it's quite efficient as a druid. To hear him describe it, all he does is bounce around and Swipe at things so they chase him, then Swipe everything down in a giant group and Improved Leader of the Pack keeps him topped off. It's so efficient really that Sol, Mordigg, and I never need to do it again, so we'll just add that to his list of duties. Purely out of business sense though - I would never do something like that out of spite, perish the thought...

Chain-running younger adventurers through dungeons isn't all Grunzford's been up to though. Yesterday he got to go on his first trip to Naxxramas. Unfortunately for him though, it was as a cat, so he didn't get any raid tanking experience. Still better than nothing though and he got a few upgrades to show for it. He says he wasn't real happy with his performance compared to some of the other people - it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great (I think he said 9th or 10th overall for damage). Looking at his talents though, I think part of it comes from being built to be a bear instead of a cat and missing a couple of key talents, but most of it is probably lack of practice being a cat outside of doing dailies. I know that if I were asked to do damage instead of tank, I'd probably do just as badly if not worse and I'm pretty sure Sol keeps his two-handed maces skill around 370 just to get out of having to play retadin for some fights.

Team Update: 6/4

2009-06-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

It's been a fairly slow week for us, so nothing major to report. I think Sol's 25-man team only made it as far as Thorim attempts last week, so no progress there. This week's already behind since Tuesday's raid got canceled - bad combination of people with other commitments and some raider turnover. It's unfortunate, but you get periods like this in raiding guilds.

For me, it's been mostly tournament dailies. I did try to get into the Ulduar run this week before they called it, but apparently when they say to the contractors like us to send our mains for the job, there's fine print that says "everyone but Ragar". Bah, like I need their repair bills anyway.

Our new bear tank Grunzford has had a fair bit of action this last week. No raids, but a fair number of heroic runs. Only one piece dropped from any of the runs that he cared for, but it's still Emblems of Heroism towards other gear. It also gave him a bit more practice at tanking, so he'll be a bit better prepared for when I line him up with a Naxxramas job at some point.

Speaking of Naxxramas, our resident shadow priest, Matheion, paid that place a visit this past weekend. Some friends of mine from the guild were going with a pick-up group and said they needed a shadow priest, so I sent him along for the practice. To hear him describe it, it wasn't the worst PuG in the world, but they certainly tried for the title. Sounded like your typical PuG screw-ups to me: assigning people to kite on Gluth who aren't built for it and not giving them enough healing, half the raid dying to the dance on Heigan, only one person cleansing curses on Noth, etc. They ended up not finishing the run, but if nothing else he got some Emblems of Valor and a new pair of pants out of the run.

Most of the last week though has been dedicated to our team's mage. Right now he's 43 and slowly making his way towards Outland. Our team's hunter, Lokaja, asked if he could be next, but after buying epic flight training for the priest and the druid within a few weeks of each other, the team bank needs a breather and that means it's the lowbie's time to shine. Besides, I saw him trying to quest a little the other day and I think he and that wolf of his need a bit more training dummy time before they start questing again. I don't know hunter rotations all that well, but I'm pretty sure he's doing it wrong.

We've got a full house (of tanks)

2009-05-27T16:57:00.001-07:00

A couple days ago our resident druid Grunzford finally hit 80. The last couple of days have been us trying to set him up with whatever crafted and AH gear we could acquire for him. Not the easiest task since apparently the only leather anyone sells these days has spell power on it, but we managed to pick him up enough gear for a starter tanking set.

He did get the opportunity to tank his first heroic yesterday though. A buddy of mine was looking for a quick heroic run and I volunteered the druid. In retrospect, it may have been a bit much to have his first real tanking experience be in Utgarde Pinnacle, but hey - no wipe, no foul. Besides that's how I learned how to tank in 40-mans ("You guys gonna take it easy on me?" "Hell no, get to work.")

It's a little too early to go making any concrete judgments from that small of a sample of experience, but from what he was telling me, it sounded pretty similar to warrior tanking in that it was a priority list. Mangle's sorta their version of our Shield Slam with Maul being the bear Heroic Strike, so it's "hit Mangle when it's up and use Maul when rage allows". After that it's keeping a stack of five Lacerates up (used only as often as necessary to keep the stack up), Feral Faerie Fire when it's up, and Swipe as their filler strike like Devastate is for us.

There are some slight differences, like how our filler strike is what keeps our five-stack up for us instead being a "use every 13.5 seconds" ability, but the main difference is that they don't have proc-related conditions for their priority list. For warriors, we're always watching out for a Sword and Board proc or for Revenge to come up, but bears appear to stick with their basic priority list. They technically have a proc in the form of Omen of Clarity, but that's just a free hit of any kind rather than a specific ability. Since they've got something to press every cooldown and they all take about the same amount of rage, it essentially just becomes a free Maul in the end.

I'm hoping that in the near future, I'll be able to line him up with some more heroic work or perhaps a raid or two to get some better info on how their abilities work. Most of the raid work that comes our way tends to have "send Solannis" in the notes, but we'll see. If I can find work for the lock, then I can find work for a tank.

Crusader Solannis, the team's newest 80, and some news

2009-05-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

Some quick updates since the last couple of days were eventful and we actually remembered to take pictures for once.

First off, Solannis finally finished championing the last of the cities for the Argent Tournament and has earned his Crusader title.

Of course he couldn't resist being a smartass and timing everything out. Not that I'd be any better, but it's still a little silly. It'll be a while before I get those titles though - back when I was questing, they were a little stingier with the reputation.

Next up is our resident priest, Matheion. He finally hit 80 last night, so we celebrated by going to crafting him some gear, spending some Emblems of Valor on bracers, and hitting the auction house for bargains. He still has no idea how to heal though, so for the moment he's focusing on Shadow.

Math did say to pass along a message to anyone currently leveling: if you're 77 or higher and you're not doing the Argent Tournament dailies, drop whatever you're doing and go. Aside from the whole "collecting Champion's Seals" thing, each quest is apparently worth about 24,000 experience each, so it's as close to free experience as you're going to get.

On the raiding front, Sol says they downed Kologarn, Assembly of Iron, Auriaya, and Freya for the first time this week in the 25-man run. Not a bad week's work.

There was one other bit of news. Now what was it?... Oh yeah!
I managed to get some tickets for me and two friends to go to BlizzCon this year. I've been once before, but not as a blogger, so this time I'll have some gadgets to post anything interesting we may find. Of course, this means I'm gonna have to find another human costume for the show since it's apparently in Alliance territory. For some reason, they get all worked up when a Tauren shows up on their doorstep.

Mordigg's first Ulduar

2009-05-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Ragar: Last night the guild did another one of its 10-man Ulduar excursions. This time they requested Mordigg instead of Solannis. Well, technically it was "send whoever you want", but when I mentioned that I'd like to come, it's "anyone other than you". You can almost feel the love.

Mordigg: Yes, nothing to do with the fact that every other tank your guild has is a warrior. It's all out of spite.

Ragar: Yeah, yeah, you and your logic. I'm well aware that from a tactical perspective, it makes sense to mix up the tanking classes. I'd just like a break from doing paperwork. That's enough about me though. How was your first trip into Ulduar?

Mordigg: It went fairly well - cleared the first floor and Kologarn in under two hours. We wiped a few times on Assembly of Iron for some reason. The raid leader called it after that and we'll reconvene during the weekend to finish up. There was one other issue where I wanted to strangle -

Ragar: That's normal.

Mordigg: But I didn't even say who.

Ragar: You don't have to. There are people Sol, Med, and I tune out, but there's only one person for whom "strangle" comes to mind.

Mordigg: Okay, just making sure it's not just me. It's always a little bit of a concern when thoughts like that come up as a death knight.

Ragar: So out of curiosity, what'd the loudmouth do this time?

Mordigg: Well, first off he questioned whether I was crittable after the first Kologarn atttempt. That's just flat out insulting, especially from someone who thinks they know tanking because they know a guy that tanks Naxxramas once in a blue moon. Kologarn is a giant whose hands are taller than I am and who puts a stacking -25% armor debuff on the tank. I'm going to get hit really hard, especially if the other tank's busy with the Rubble and can't taunt off of me when I get a second stack.

Ragar: Yeah, -25% armor hurts, especially since high armor is kinda your thing along with druids.

Mordigg: The other major thing was during Assembly of Iron. When you're fighting Steelbreaker, the other tank has the two other guys off in a corner. Every now and then, the middle one, Runemaster Molgeim, will put a Rune of Power on the ground that bumps up the damage done by anyone standing on it by 50%. Great for us, bad when they're standing in it. Occasionally he'll put one underneath Steelbreaker so I'll have to move him. No big deal, right? First one shows up and loudmouth starts yelling, "MOVE HIM! MOVE HIM! MOVE HIM!" I'll admit I could've handled it a little more tactfully than yelling back, "I can $&*#ing see!"

Ragar: Alright, you've had your first taste of Ulduar and now Sol and I know you're still sorta normal based on the fact that you can still be angry. Any other notes?

Mordigg: Well, there was one point during an Assembly attempt where a feral druid pulled aggro off of me near the beginning. After talking to the other tank, he said, "Yeah, he's kind of a beast. I usually put Vigilance on him, but I forgot." How does Sol deal with that?

Ragar: Don't ask Sol about building threat. His survivability build is the same as his threat build. Infinite Divine Plea made his threat generation kinda ridiculous.

Mordigg: Yeah, well that's not the case for me. My Frost tanking build has decent enough survivability, but threat's always been the thing that it's been weak about. For trash pulls, it's fine - Howling Blast is awesome for stuff like that. For bosses, it's always been a little too dependant upon Rune Strike, which keeps me from using Frost Strike as much as I should. There's always the concern that I'll accidentally use the runic power before Rune Strike goes off and I'll lose a good chunk of threat from that. Not to mention the fact that the changes to Blade Barrier makes Rune Strike come up less already.

Ragar: Yeah, I can see that being an issue, what with your heavy threat attack being the weird love child of Heroic Strike and Revenge.

Mordigg: Regardless it should be less of an issue with the new spec, though I still need to field test it.

Ragar: Okay, walk me through the spec. What's the theory behind it?

Mordigg: Well, it's less runic power dependant than my Frost build, so there's less likelihood of clipping my Rune Strikes. As Unholy I'll be using Scourge Strike instead of Obliterate or Howling Blast for my double-rune attack. Since it's shadow damage, it'll ignore armor and in theory deal more damage than using Obliterate on bosses like I've been doing. The glyph also gives me the potential to refresh diseases on the target, which would let me get a few more Scourge Strikes in before having to refresh diseases.

I still need to see if it's got better or worse AoE threat than my Frost build. Frost has Howling Blast with the occasional one being free, whereas this build has Unholy Blight, Wandering Plague, and Corpse Explosion. Both have the Death & Decay glyph and reduced cooldown, so that's not a consideration.

Ragar: Corpse Explosion?

Mordigg: I had a spare point I needed to spend to go further into Unholy and the other choices weren't that appealing. Besides, I'd heard that it was a little better these days. We'll see when I get the chance to test it.

Ragar: How about survivability? I know this is mainly a threat build, but does it have any extra tricks?

Mordigg: Actually it does. It's got Bone Shield and Anti-Magic Zone along with a better Anti-Magic Shell, so it's really more of an anti-caster survivability build than the other. I'll admit I'm not fond of losing the extra 3% miss from Frigid Dreadplate, but hopefully the mitigation from the glyphed Bone Shield should balance out in the end. We'll find out when the group starts back up this weekend.

Ragar: Well, you have fun with that and try not to kill the loudmouth. I'm not sure our contract covers that.

Mordigg: I make no promises.

Team Update: 5/5

2009-05-05T13:41:00.000-07:00

Not much on the raiding front this week - the guild Solannis and I run with took a break from 25-man raiding this week while they recruited some extra members. That left us with 10-man Ulduar and whatever else people came up with to fill the time. Still plenty to do for us though, so we made due.

First up was the Children's Week festivities. I'm still not entirely sure why the matrons think it's a good idea to send children off with strangers who fight dragons, undead, and various other unpleasant things for a living. I can think of some cynical reasons, but I'd hope they're not quite that desperate for the extra space in the orphanage. Regardless, me, Sol, and Medeleth participated and ran around orphans to various parts of Azeroth and Outland. Med complained a bit about it being a "waste of his genius" or something like that, but he's really a big softy. One that toys with demonic forces, but a softy nonetheless. None of us have finished all of the achievements for the title, but I don't see that happening any time soon. The Utgarde Pinnacle run is no problem, but I've got no desire to step foot into a battleground as is, let alone with a kid trailing behind me. Oh well, no big deal. I'm perfectly happy with Chef Ragar and I think Sol's got another title in mind. Med doesn't seem to care all that much, so he'll probably stick with his Silvermoon title.

Speaking of the lock, he actually got a little raid time in this week. The first time was an Ulduar-10 swap: we were going after Hodir and Mimiron, so there was no need for a second tank. After last week's "ta-daa!" incident, Sol and I talked to the raid leader and explained that we have better options available when DPS is required. Admittedly though, Sol could've been a bit more diplomatic than saying, "My Ret gear is garbage. I have no intention of making it anything other than garbage. Grab the lock." Regardless, it worked and Med got another shot at raiding. I don't think we saved the meters from the run, but from what I recall, it seemed like a acceptable showing for someone with 90% crafted or AH gear and below hit cap.

Later in the week he had another shot in a 10-man Naxxramas group; some new people in the guild needed gear, so I talked them into taking Med along for the ride. A couple hours later, Med came out with two new pieces of gear (one that he can't put on till he gets more hit rating though) and enough Emblems of Heroism for a third. All in all, a fairly productive week for the lock.

Not a whole lot of news for the rest of the team (shammy's gone Elemental for the moment, Mordigg's mostly been herb farming), but our priest has been making pretty good progress as of late. He's still got eight more levels to go till he's caught up with the rest of us, but that shouldn't take too much longer. He said something about using a Discipline spec to level in Northrend. Personally I don't understand using that over Shadow, but considering me and Sol leveled as Protection, we're not really in a position to judge anyone. He's still got no idea how to heal though, so that'll be a fun learning curve once he starts instancing.

Sol should probably fix that at some point

2009-04-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

Story from Solannis' 10-man Ulduar run last night:

Solannis: Hmm... according to what I'm reading, the only reason we would need an off-tank on General Vezax is if we don't kill the Saronite Crystals to make vapors. Are we going for that achievement?

Main Tank: No, just normal the first time.

Solannis: I should probably flip to my Ret spec then.

Main Tank: Yeah. Next time we come I'll bring my Fury gear so I can dps instead. I don't know how good your Ret gear is though.

Solannis: Okay, you see the gear I have on now?

Main Tank: Yeah, your tanking stuff. What about it?

Solannis: *switches to Jawbone* Ta-daa!

Rest of raid: *facepalm*

Believe it or not, that wasn't a recipe for spectacular DPS. Admittedly though, a good chunk of that was from the fact that Sol's: a) not hit-capped, and b) his weapon skill was apparently something like 365. I guess I'll have to have him start spending Emblems of Valor on Ret gear and the rest of us can start looking for crafted items and pieces on the AH for him.

It does seem a bit odd to go to all that trouble for a set of gear that he won't use that often and doesn't even want to use (his attitude towards Ret is about the same as mine towards Arms and Fury), but until I can start convincing the raid leader that we have a perfectly good warlock ready to swap in off the bench, it's our obligation as contractors to provide what is requested. Sigh, and I was just starting to make back that money from the lock's epic flyer too.

Close but no cigar

2009-04-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Ragar: During the weekend, Solannis and some of the guys from the guild decided to try out 10-man Ulduar. They made it pretty far, but unfortunately couldn't down Mimiron before calling it last night. Regardless no one was expecting to make it that far in the first week, so it was still a victory. No loot for Sol, but for the most part Ulduar-10 gear is a sidegrade unless you're taking down bosses in Hard Mode, so no one was really there for loot. Any notes or comments going into this new week of raiding, Sol?

Solannis: Well, for Mimiron in particular, I believe we've got the mechanics down. It's just a matter of execution and everyone surviving. You can't afford to have anyone fall during the first three phases of the fight, but I believe we've got that down for the most part. The fourth phase is everything combined, so that's just going to require some additional practice since we only tried it three times before calling it a night.

Ragar: How's the new spec holding out?

Solannis: So far so good. I did have the opportunity to actually try out my new Divine Sacrifice spell on Mimiron; the MT was trying to plan out cooldowns for phase 1's Plasma Blasts and someone mentioned Hand of Sacrifice, which made me remember that I had that and the upgraded talent version. Nothing in Naxxramas hit particularly hard, so I'd honestly forgotten that I had those abilities. I have noticed something in particular about my current spec/glyphs and our buffs to Divine Plea.

Ragar: Such as?

Solannis: When I'm off-tanking, I have to be really careful to not pull aggro off the main tank. I found that out the other day on the trash leading up to the new Vault boss. The MT asked why I taunted off of him and I said I didn't, which brought about a bit of a tirade. Something about perfect rotations and using every cooldown. Regardless, it means that I have to be a little more cautious. For example: during phase 1 of Mimiron, I can't have Righteous Fury on or I will pull off the MT. For the rest of the fight though, it's fine.

Ragar: Remember to get any pictures this time?

Solannis: As a matter of fact I did, though just two. I forgot to take pictures during the bosses since I was more concerned with living, but I did get a couple good shots on the way to Mimiron.

Tonight's more 25-man work, so hopefully we'll make some progress there. It'll feel a little off though going from Mimiron practice to XT-002 Deconstructor, but hopefully our smaller scale operations will make the 25-man work go that much smoother.

First Impressions of Ulduar and other new stuff

2009-04-15T16:05:00.001-07:00

Ragar: Yesterday the doors to Ulduar finally opened up for treasure-hunting adventurers like ourselves. Per the request of the guild Sol and I contract for, he was our representative in their first foray into Ulduar. It was a short trip since everyone got a late start that day, so they only made a little bit of progress. Sol, how was the trip?

Solannis: It took us three or four tries to get Flame Leviathan down, so it wasn't too bad. Nice change from Naxxramas though since it didn't feel like there was a lot of room for errors on our part. I'm not sure that first attempt really counts though since we sorta made a mistake.

Ragar: Oh? What was the mistake?

Solannis: Apparently there are these towers up in the courtyard of Ulduar that do things like send fiery/icy/nature-y/physical doom at you from the sky. We sorta neglected to destroy those towers. That was apparently a mistake. We rectified the problem and after a couple of attempts, the giant doom tank was destroyed and we moved along to Ignis the Furnace Master where we encountered another couple of problems.

First problem, the Flame Ragers in front of Ignis. We received reports today that those are apparently supposed to be attacked primarily from ranged DPS, with melee waiting for the tornados to go away before moving in to attack, then ducking out before the next tornado. Our group? Heavy melee. Let's just say it wasn't pretty.

Next was Ignis himself, and apparently there's some issue with the buff he was getting not going away when the Iron Constructs he summoned were heated, cooled, and shattered. It sounds like the issues been dealt with, but we'll have to wait and see on Thursday since we're not scheduled to go back until then.

Ragar: How was the Argent Tournament? I know you did everything available today and Medeleth's working on it, but I haven't had the chance to check it out yet.

Solannis: The mounted combat is a little strange, but after a bit you get the hang of it. Haven't dueled anyone yet though, so I can't vouch for that. As for the rest of the quests, they're fairly simple, but they require a bit of flying around, especially between Crystalsong and the tournament grounds. I'd imagine Medeleth isn't too happy about doing all of that on his flying machine.

Ragar: Hey, if he wants an epic flyer, then he can finish getting that last thousand gold himself. Most of the team's funds have gone into getting dual spec training and even that's not really enough. You, me, and Mordigg have enough, but the shaman's gonna have to wait or start doing dailies like the rest of us.

Solannis: Yeah, he could use the exercise anyway since he doesn't get a lot of instance work. Oh, and I did pick up that other thing we were waiting for. I couldn't get it until I finished today's daily and I'm still working on the rest of the achievements, but I at least have this.

Ragar: Excellent! We'll have to work on the achievements later, but that'll do. Folks, I'm sure we'll have more later this week like on what our specs are or more Ulduar impressions, but until then we'd like to close on this note:

Pretty sure the dragon was supposed to come after the heroics, not before

2009-04-08T11:34:00.001-07:00

I finally managed to line Medeleth up with some Emblem of Heroism level work. The catch? It was Malygos, the guy you're supposed to work your way up to through heroic 5-man dungeons and 10-man Obsidian Sanctum and Naxxramas. Med, however, hasn't seen a heroic since Outland. All of the gear he's got is either stuff the team crafted, stuff we bought off the AH or with spare tokens, and a couple of quest drops. His rotation was based off of notes we pulled from a research site and mostly untested (hard to get into a rotation while doing dailies when everything dies in 3-5 hits). I'll admit it - I thought it was going to be a pretty ugly showing on Med's part, but my guildies wanted a ranged DPS and it was either him or I play hunter with my tanking gun.

I suppose I should've given the lock a bit more credit than I did. For someone with no heroic experience, third place isn't too shabby. Admittedly though, that number is inflated a bit by the fact that warlocks can cheat a bit at the fight by teleporting out of the vortexes, but considering that Med didn't have enough health to consistently survive those, I'll let that one slide. Shame there wasn't another warlock in that run though. It would've been helpful to have someone with an Affliction spec to compare Destruction against.

No lock loot from the run, though a resto shaman friend of ours finally got her healing mace, so that's a plus. Med did get his two achievements though and his first two Emblems of Heroism after being 80 for about a month. At this rate he should get his first piece of Emblem gear sometime this fall.

All that work for three little cards

2009-04-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

For the last few months, Mordigg's been flying circles around Sholazar Basin to pick weeds. Months of milling herbs to make ink, swearing at the small amount of Icy Pigment that came out of those herbs, and swearing even more at all of the Chaos cards and Eight of Prisms that were made (they say it's random, but Mord's doubtful). Finally though, they're all finished and turned in.

For Medeleth and the shammy, there's Darkmoon Card: Illusion. Far from a best-in-slot for either of them, but considering that Daikaja's only been to two heroics and the lock's hasn't seen a heroic since Outland, it's better than quest rewards.

Mordigg though got the best of the lot - Darkmoon Card: Greatness. While primarily a DPS trinket, it's also a very nice threat-generation trinket for tanks. It's 180 attack power (more if he was Unholy but he's not), 0.46% parry from Forceful Deflection, and the proc will give another 300 Strength for 600 AP and 75 parry rating for 15 seconds. That parry rating will take a bit of a hit from diminishing returns, but this is primarily a threat trinket; the extra avoidance is a happy side-effect.

I'd still like to set Mord up with a heroic Azjol-Nerub run one of these days to get his Essence of Gossamer for an effective health trinket, but this trinket does a better job of filling in a gap he's reported from the field. While improvements in Strength, hit rating, and expertise in his other equipment have improved his threat output overall, Mord says that his primary weakness right now is opening threat. Due to the disease-reliant nature of his abilities, particularly Howling Blast's current dependence on targets having Frost Fever for maximum damage, it can take a full rotation to really grab onto AoE pulls. This problem is further compounded by missing with abilities, but that's another matter. The main issue is that there's no real burst threat from the beginning for Mordigg, so if someone gets trigger-happy before Death and Decay have had a chance to tick once or twice or before he's finished with Icy Touch/Pestilence/Howling Blast, targets can get pulled away in an AoE pull. There's also Rune Strike, but while it's a good chunk of burst threat, it's "on next swing" and doesn't go off if you switch targets so it's unreliable as an opening burst.

We've heard word that Howling Blast is going to start hitting harder regardless of the presence of Frost Fever (apparently it takes longer to recharge though), so that'll definitely help. In the meantime though, adding a bit more oomph to Mord's attacks with the card will have some effect on his threat generation. It doesn't quite deal with the "overzealous DPS that blows cooldowns on one or two targets" problem, but that's what taunts are for (that and letting them die if they keep it up).

Just tell me who I need to beat up

2009-03-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

Another day, another list of notes about different things we'll see when the gates of Ulduar open up. Normally we'd just look at these notes and see if we need to change anyone's spec/rotation/etc., but today we've got something awesome:

Cooking
Cooking with Style - Obtain a Chef's Hat.

I will have that hat. I don't care what I need to do or who I need to kill - that hat will be mine!

There's probably some other stuff in there I should pay attention to, but I don't think any of it is more important than a new hat. Well, unless they give me a frying pan shield or something like that. I certainly wouldn't say no to some actual cooking utensils. You'd be amazed how difficult it is to make a proper feast with nothing but a fire and a pouch of spices.

Team Update: 3/23

2009-03-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts; it's been somewhat of a slow week on the adventuring front, combined with me being busy with paperwork. Not everything about the "dungeoneer for hire" business is glamorous.

Mordigg went on the guild Naxxramas run again and picked up a couple of pieces along with some Emblems of Valor to go towards some additional equipment.

Solannis and I mostly did our dailies during the week to chip away towards the extra gold we need to buy Medeleth's epic flight training. We could pool our money together and buy it now, but I'm not fond of breaking the bank for that when he's done leveling. Besides, since he doesn't have any gathering skills, it's kind of a low priority despite how much he complains about the speed.

Speaking of the lock, we managed to snag a couple more pieces from crafters and the auction house for Med since I haven't been able to line up any heroic work for him yet. In the meantime I've had him out doing jobs for the Sons of Hodir since he doesn't have that nifty "I'm a scribe and don't have to grind that rep" shoulder enchant. Right now he says he's at 1780 spell power and 156 hit rating self-buffed. I have no idea how that compares to other casters since I'm a melee-type guy, but it's better than where we started.

I did work with our resident boomkin some during the slow periods. Another few slow nights and he'll be ready to do something in Borean Tundra other than sit by the mailbox and wait for alchemy supplies.

I think until we hear more from the scouts up in Storm Peaks about Ulduar and how to get inside, it'll be fairly quiet on the raiding front for the next few weeks. I'll comment when something comes to mind, but if anyone's got any requests, we'd be glad to hear them. All of the replies I've seen so far have been to stories where I tried to be funny or some of the posts where me and the guys argued amongst ourselves, but if there's anything in particular tank-wise that people are dying to hear about, I'm open to suggestions. If all people want is us talking and/or arguing, then I can work on that too (I've got a post idea about what we 80s do when we're not the ones out in the field, but I'm trying to figure out if it'd only be funny to me).

Oh, and I do have one request if anyone reading this can help me out. I've been looking for a destruction warlock blog for Med to read through. I've got a few Affliction blogs bookmarked that he read through when he was using those builds back in Outland, but I haven't been able to find anything like that for destruction. We've looked at the normal research sites out there to tweak his rotations and all, but it's quite different to read mathematical proofs versus the commentary and opinions of someone who uses the build on a daily basis. So if someone out there can make a suggestion, I'd appreciate it and I'm sure Med would to, even if he'd die before admitting that he needed assistance.

We could field half of a 10-man

2009-03-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

Ragar: That is, if we weren't limited by contract to only have one agent out in the field at any given time. Anyways, we've got a new member of the team that just finished their training and are getting prepared to go out and do some real work for the team. Per his request, I've agreed to allow him to introduce himself, so I'll let him take over (I'm gonna regret this...)

Medeleth: Greetings and salutations. I am Medeleth, your friendly neighborhood genius. In addition to the field exercises that he keeps pressing upon me when I'm trying to do real work, I’ve been asked by Ragar to help contribute to this blog project of his and to provide some of my own writings to share with the world. I had to agree of course - as a genius, it is my civic duty to help enlighten my fellow man. It also provides me with a new venue to show off the more recent developments from my research.

“Research?” you ask. Yes, I am a researcher. The majority of my time is spent delving into the secrets of the universe. Through pain-staking work and experimentation, I have unlocked the keys to the myriad mysteries of our modern world. The man you see before you is a student of the one true path to knowledge, the powers of creation and destruction themselves!

What? No, not fel magic! Engineering! Why you people focus on such things as “classes”, I will never understand... While it is true that I am a practitioner of the fel arts, that’s merely a side job of sorts to support my real work. Yes, there’s some research involved in that field as well, but it is mere child’s play to a genius like myself. I’ve already mastered all of the spells the trainers have come up with and I’ve tamed their most “fearsome” demon, so there’s no challenge left to thrill me in that field. However, I will admit that the warlock training does have its uses.

While I would prefer to spend the majority of my time in my lab discovering the answers to all of life’s mysteries, there are obstacles to this goal. Particularly irksome is acquiring resources for my work. Nothing in this modern world of ours is free, especially not the exotic items I require for my ground-breaking discoveries. It would be ideal if I could simply craft something to satisfy the shopkeeper’s need for shiny baubles, but alas their primitive minds cannot fathom the brilliance of my work and, as such, they will only offer me a pittance in exchange. As one cannot make any headway economically by selling their creations for less than the component costs, I am left to fall back on my warlock abilities to generate the income required to support my research.

Now that I’ve made a suitable introduction, I believe I can provide you, the readers, with an idea of what you will see in my future columns. The focus of my writing here shall be on engineering: my current research, recent findings, etc. It is my fondest wish that by showing you the mechanical wonders my craft is capable of, some of you may be inspired to conduct your own research. Perhaps one day we could discuss our research as peers and together we can pave the way to a brighter tomorrow for Azeroth. Additionally (and primarily because Ragar doesn’t know anyone else willing to write about this) I will give my thoughts on my secondary profession, though I will admit right now that any warlock writings are going to be from the perspective of “how does this affect me as an engineer?” I may capture souls and have the powers of flame and shadow at my beck and call, but I am first and foremost a scientist. Until next time, I bid you all farewell. Back to you, sir.

Ragar: I'm shocked. You managed to keep it just short of a novel.

Medeleth: Brevity has its place, but to provide a truly accurate representation of myself in this introduction, now was not such an occasion. Besides, it's not like you're going to run out of space any time soon. Remember which one of us is your technical support for this writing venture.

Ragar: Yeah, yeah, I remember. Back to the matter at hand though. Now that you're 80, we will have to set you up with some decent starting gear before you can start dungeon diving. Sol gave you those bracers from the Emblem of Valor guy and our priest buddy gave you those gloves, so that's at least a couple of decent pieces to go with your goggles. Are you planning on changing specs any time soon? Just so I know what I need to start shopping around for.

Medeleth: No, I believe my current talent allocation will suffice for any further excursions into the field you may demand of me. I will admit that I do miss the rotation style of Affliction to some degree, but Destruction has its own charms now that it's no longer casting Shadow Bolt from here to eternity. There's also somewhat of a parallel between it and the goblin engineers with whom I have associated. It's not quite as structured as true engineering, but there is a similarity. Now if I could somehow combine the two, then it would be another matter altogether. I'm making some headway into that field, but "someone" keeps interrupting me with requests to play adventurer or assassin or whatever someone's paying for that particular day.

Ragar: You know the rules - you're on the team, you're gonna contribute. Besides, we're supplying all of your materials anyways, seeing as how you dropped mining a while back.

Medeleth: I'm aware, I'm simply voicing my opinion. I feel my efforts would be better suited in my laboratory or poring over my notes, but I suppose if someone has to represent the team as artillery, I can't really fault you for sending me out. So when are you planning on pushing me out into some zombie-infested sepulcher or something to that effect?

Ragar: We'll see. I'm guessing that the guild won't be looking for a DPS from us for a while, so it'll probably just be heroics for the near future. Not a bad idea anyways since your gear could still use some improvement. I'll admit I don't know casters all that well, but I know you're not at hit cap and I'm guessing that 1612 spell power isn't gonna cut it for long. I'll give you a heads up once I've got something lined up for you.

Medeleth: I'll be waiting with bated breath...

Mordigg vs. Naxxramas, Round 2

2009-03-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

Ragar: Tuesday's the day when me and Solannis' guild has their 25-man Naxxramas run scheduled every week. Per their request, Sol has been our team representative on these dungeon runs. Today though was different - the raid leader asked if Sol had any upgrades he was still looking for out of Naxx. Since Sol's pretty much down to one or two specific pieces and some sidegrades out of there, we were given the option of subbing someone in from the bench. I was tempted to take the spot myself, but since I've already had the chance to do a couple 25-man runs of my own, I gave them Mordigg. So Mord, how was your first 25-man?

Mordigg: Similar for the most part to the trips I've made into the 10-man version of the necropolis, though with a few exceptions. Mostly it was just dealing with larger pulls and having to work around multiple tanks.

Ragar: Pick up anything shiny?

Mordigg: I won a handful of upgrades. Some new shoulders, a breastplate, and a cloak. All three of which replaced some blue-quality pieces from quests or heroics. I lost a few points of my defense buffer, but overall my avoidance went up. I think I calculated something like 50.8% unbuffed, 60.8% with Blade Barrier up.

Ragar: Any thoughts about the experience? Some things you want to watch out for the next time you go?

Mordigg: For the most part I'm satisfied with my performance, though I'm far from perfect. When it was me and the off-tank pulling while the main tank distributed loot, I noticed that some of the DPS could pull off of me if they front-loaded a lot of damage onto a single target. I might be able to clean this up a bit rotation-wise, but I think part of it is just something I need to learn to deal with as a death knight. The majority of my threat generation for groups is built upon damage over time effects (i.e. Death and Decay, disease-based abilities like Howling Blast and Obliterate), whereas my burst threat is from Rune Strike and large Obliterate/Howling Blast hits. Rune Strike is most of my burst, but unfortunately it has two limiting factors - single target only and it goes off on my next melee swing. As someone who wields two-handed weapons, this makes my task somewhat difficult since that "on next swing" means that once I use Rune Strike, it's going to be at least three seconds before I make contact and three seconds in Naxxramas feels like an eternity. I can use some other abilities in the meantime, but having that strike hit faster would certainly make things so much easier.

Ragar: Let's see if we can fix anything on your end. How do you begin the pull?

Mordigg: Depending on whether I run into the pack or pull them to me, it'll be Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Pestilence to spread the diseases, and Death and Decay either before that set (drop it on or in front of a group I'm running towards) or after (Death Grip pull and the group's heading towards me). After that it's usually Howling Blast and a Blood Boil or a Pestilence on a different target to buy another few seconds on diseases and getting Death and Decay up as soon as I can.

Ragar: So not a lot of single-target threat then.

Mordigg: Usually I'll try and focus on that after the initial set of runes. Since there's a 10-second cooldown on each rune, I have to lock in threat on the pack quickly. Part of the problem is that Naxxramas is so AoE-heavy: grab the group, AoE everything down while the tanks hold it all. If someone's going all out on a single target when I'm trying to hold onto everything against warlocks chain-casting Seed of Corruption and hunters using Volley on everything in sight, there's not a whole lot I can do other than use Dark Command when it's available.

Ragar: True enough. Looking at your equipment, I think there are a few spots we can clean up that might help some though. Your bracers can be replaced with the ones sold for Emblems of Valor (I think Sol's almost got enough for another pair) and that green trinket desperately needs replaced with the Essence of Gossamer, so I'll try and set you up with some Azjol-Nerub runs. Of course, if I can get you signed up for a 10-man Naxxramas run in the meantime or get you into next week's 25-man run, you might get something better.

Mordigg: There's also Darkmoon Card: Greatness. That would be a sizeable tanking upgrade as well.

Ragar: Yes, but knowing our luck, we'll end up finishing two Chaos decks by the time we get those last two Nobles cards and I can't afford to pay for what we're missing since the lock's a level from being able to fly in Northrend. 60% speed flight is far from efficient, so you, me, and Sol are gonna have to start making some gold to fix that soon.

Mordigg: Oh joy, more daily quests...

Ragar: It's that or I have to listen to the lock complain about spending all that time flying around and not doing engineering research. It's worth the money to preserve my sanity.

Team Update: 3/7

2009-03-07T09:14:00.000-08:00

Not a whole lot to report for myself the last few weeks: cooking dailies, farming ore, the usual. Mordigg spent most of the last few weeks gathering herbs to mill as he tries to make his Darkmoon Card: Greatness trinket; right now we've got the Prisms Deck made so Daikaja can get the Darkmoon Card: Illusion as a healing trinket, but the other decks are all sitting at five or six out of eight cards. He's also run a few more heroics for emblems towards his tier pieces, but really I just need to get him assigned to a 10-man Naxx run again.

Solannis finally got to take down Malygos (well, the 10-man version at least), so now he's got that new tanking neck he'd been looking for. Guild's still working on the bigger version of the fight, but it's something. Funny thing was, he got the achievement, but didn't get the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. I took a look at his achievements and found the problem. Apparently he's never gone to Oculus; I suppose I'll have to fix that at some point and schedule him for a run one of these days. Since Sol's become our main field agent for raiding these days, he needs a title and until he gets to work and gets Chef, he'll have to settle for Champion of the Frozen Wastes. That or I could make him get Challenger again, but I'm guessing that suggestion won't go over well.

Most of the team's effort the last few weeks though has gone into two of our cloth-wearing members. Our senior engineer, Medeleth, has been making fairly good progress into Northrend. Granted, getting him to step out of the lab was a pain, but once I got it into his head that he wouldn't be able to upgrade his goggles or learn the secrets of the motorcycle without some legwork, he started burning through those quests in Borean Tundra. Earlier today he hit 74, so it shouldn't be too much longer before he catches up to the rest of us and we can start working on some gear for him.

The other clothie who's made some great progress would be our resident priest, Matheion. Up till now, we've never had a priest pass the 20 mark. They'd always end up running for the hills or vanishing from the face of Azeroth or something like that. Regardless, we've finally got a priest that's made it past the Barrens and through the proper application of heirloom items, craftable pieces from other members of the team, and the occasional threat, he'll make it to Northrend or die trying.

7 Questions for me and Sol

2009-03-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

Aureilie tagged me in this question thing that's been going around, so I'll play along. I even talked Sol into doing it as well. Let's go ahead and get started.

1. What is your name, and where did it come from?

Ragar: Name's Ragar and, well, my name came from my parents. I think it was the name of some warrior they knew way back when, but I'm not sure.

Solannis: Solannis is an old family name, dating back generations to a magus of some considerable power. Admittedly naming a paladin after a master of the arcane may seem like a bit of a stretch, but the path of the paladin is a relatively new option for my people. I remember having to read some introductory magic textbooks as a child, so I imagine that's where my parents were trying to push me towards before this came along.

2. How old are you, and what is your birthday?

Ragar: 55. Birthday's the 3rd of November. If you need a gift idea, I'm partial to rum.

Solannis: I'm 84 and my birthday would be in September. Ragar and I might seem a bit old, but in perspective, it's about the same as your typical human/dwarf/etc. adventurer. Right after we were considered adults and finished our training, we started out in the field. Adult to tauren and blood elves just happens to be a bit older. Honestly when I hear how old most humans are, it still seems strange to me that their 20s are considered an adult age.

3. Are you in love, and with whom?

Solannis: No, too busy working.

Ragar: Nope, have you seen who I'm surrounded by on a daily basis? All of my time is spent working or trying to keep them from blowing themselves or someone else up (well, unless we're getting paid for it).

4. What is your favorite mount and why?

Ragar: Midnight, my faithful steed from Attumen in Karazhan. He just looks awesome.

Solannis: And he's the first horse that could ever hold a Tauren without snapping like a twig?

Ragar: That too.

Solannis: I'd say my Bronze Drake would be my favorite mount. It was the first time I'd ever tried tanking heroic Stratholme and I won the roll. I know quite a few people have it now, but it still looks classy and it's a good memento of a milestone in my tanking career.

5. Do you prefer a certain type of Azerothonian meal, and where do you get it from?

Ragar: Dragonfin Filet with a couple mugs from my trusty Brewfest Pony Keg. It doesn't get any better than that. As for where it's from, I catch the fish myself and the pony keg's from hours of running back and forth on rams and barking for various breweries until my voice gave out.

Solannis: Dragonfin is indeed quite good, but I prefer the variety of flavors offered by a Fish Feast. For the beverage, I find Kungaloosh goes quite well with most seafood. These are usually prepared by Ragar (I'm still working on the Fish Feast recipe), though there are a few chefs in the raid typically who come prepared for hungry adventurers.

6. You know those giant mushrooms in Zangarmarsh? What is your theory on how they came to be, and why are they so huge?

Ragar: Plants and fungi aren't really my thing, but I'd guess it's probably got something to do with either those Sporeggar guys. That or just the fact that it's a giant alien swamp, so they'll probably have some giant alien plants and mushrooms.

Solannis: I've seen various items on top of the mushrooms as I've flown past, so I suppose it's possible that they might have been grown on purpose by ancient orcs or something like that to serve as elevated housing for protection against predators. It's not really my area of expertise though, so I can't say with any certainty.

7. If you saw the Lich King walking towards you, what would you do?

Ragar: Take a nap while he gives another long speech just to portal away. Man, that guy loves the sound of his own voice... Now if this was in Icecrown Citadel, that's another matter. I'd be getting ready to charge in and fight. We may be contractors, but we're big supporters of the Argent Crusade and if a mission comes up to go into the Lich King's house, you bet we'll be signing up for the job.

Solannis: Ragar pretty much summed up my feelings on the matter, though I admit I'm probably a bit more eager to take down Arthas, what with him decimating most of Quel'Thalas to resurrect Kel'Thuzad, destroying the Sunwell that fed our need for arcane magic, turning one of our champions into a banshee, and a few other minor issues my people might have with him. There's also the matter of atonement on our behalf, since we're not exactly innocent ourselves. I don't regret the actions my people took in mastering the Light in defense against our enemies, but considering the events that have taken place since the Dark Portal reopened, we do have some obligation to make amends, if only for pride's sake.

8. (Dav added this one) Be honest, how many times have you used the Grizzly Hills outhouse without any real reason?

Ragar: There's an outhouse out there? Huh, didn't know about that.

Solannis: Was unaware of that as well, though admittedly I didn't really make it my quest to find new and unexplored restroom facilities in the wilderness while I was running around doing quests.

Where in my tanking spec did you see "I'm DPS"?

2009-02-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

Ragar: So Mordigg, how're the heroic runs coming along?

Mordigg: So far so good, I suppose. At this point I've acquired the belt, sigil, and neck pieces from the emblem vendor. I'm still working on the two tier pieces, though I'd prefer to save myself the trouble and just get back into another Naxx run with your guild.

Ragar: Ah yes, the first 8-man Naxxramas run. I think Sol went back with them later and they managed to pull it off; I'll have to bug him to talk about it later. How have the groups been so far?

Mordigg: The groups you and Solannis recommended have done admirably so far; we've yet to come across a challenge that we were unable to overcome. There was one strange run though, but that was an anomaly.

Ragar: Strange? What about it was strange?

Mordigg: Well, it started off with me being brought in to tank the run like usual. While they were filling out the group though, the leader said that the main tank for your raids wanted to come in and he asked if I could DPS instead.

Ragar: Ah yeah, those are always awkward times.

Mordigg: I mean, I did my job and according to the numbers they presented at the end, I believe I did an acceptable job with the equipment I had on hand. It's just that I was unprepared for the scenario. I've put in all of my time and effort to accumulate equipment to tank. All of the money the team has spent, all of my emblems, my enchants - everything has been focused on the task of staying alive and holding the attention of the team's target. When they asked me to DPS instead, I threw on my gear, but it just irked me because the state of my equipment made it appear as if I hadn't been trying to improve myself. Various blue-quality items from quest rewards, a green here and there, and some tanking pieces simply because I haven't found a better DPS piece anywhere. Yes, the majority of it had strength/hit/expertise on it simply because that's necessary for tanking, but compared to what some of the other members of the party were using, I looked like one of the fools they manage to drag out of the woodwork for Archavon pick-up groups. They made a joke at the end and I know they didn't mean anything by it, but it's still irksome. I do have my pride after all.

Ragar: Yeah, it's never fun to get asked to DPS instead as a tank. You spend so long perfecting your threat rotations that going to something else just feels weird. You do have an advantage over Sol and I though - all of your abilities work just as well in your DPS presences and gear as they do in your tanking gear. For me and Sol, we're built around using shields. Throwing on a two-handed weapon, or some one-handers in my case, kills most of our abilities, so most of the time it's just us standing with the other melee whacking the boss with a shield and trying to at least out-DPS the priests' Shadow Word: Pains.

Mordigg: Should I expect more of this in the future?

Ragar: Outside of raiding, not really. In raids it can't really be helped since some of the fights really only require one tank. Even with the multi-tank fights, there are a couple that are mostly one-man shows until you get to a certain point. Take Kel'Thuzad for example: until he summons those guards of his, me and the other off-tank might as well be taking a nap. In the meantime though, it wouldn't hurt for you to pick up some off-spec gear. I know you don't want to DPS, but at least you can DPS to some degree with your tanking spec so it's still a good idea. There's also some rumors flying around about us being able to change specs in the field, so bear that in mind.

Mordigg: Dual specializations, huh? Will you and Solannis be doing the same?

Ragar: Sol will either go Holy or Ret for his second, probably Ret given some of our conversations. I think he's still a little burned out from his days in the arena as a healadin.

Mordigg: And yourself?

Ragar: Double Prot. Probably a survivability build and a high threat one. I may have off-spec gear, but I wouldn't feel right without a shield on my arm. It's possible I might change my mind, but unlikely. You?

Mordigg: I'll have to do some research. Those notes you showed me suggest some rather radical changes to my abilities, so it's hard to make any concrete decisions now. Like you said, I can DPS to some degree with my tanking builds, so I may try something along the lines of what you're suggesting. Perhaps a single-target build and one for larger groups. Since everything is in a state of upheaval though, such a decision will have to wait for another day.

Sixth folder? That implies my pictures are organized

2009-02-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Apparently I've been tagged by TGAPGeorge for this "sixth picture in your sixth folder" thing that's been going around. Like the title says though, my pictures aren't exactly organized into folders - it all just gets dumped into one and the stuff I'm gonna post gets copied over to this computer, so it's just a subset of folder one. With that said, let's see what we can find.

Sixth picture... hmm, the sixth picture's not particularly interesting. That and pictures two through five are just profile shots of Sol I was using for a sketch that was never finished. I could post that, but that seems like a bit of a copout. Let's see what we've got with those cut out.

Now we're getting into pictures I've already posted. Reruns are no fun, so I'll cut those out too. Third try's the charm, so let's see what I find.

Ah, here's a good one I'd forgotten about. It's me and Sol next to each other on top of the Scryer's bank. It's the only time we've ever been able to get this camera's timer thingy to work right; normally it'll go off too soon, so it'll be just me or Sol in the shot. Unfortunately Sol forgot to turn off the extra display stuff on the camera, so it's a bit cluttered.

A Voice From The Past

2009-02-20T14:35:00.001-08:00

Nothing real eventful from Sol's raid yesterday, so I'm still coming up with something a little more substantial to write about. In the meantime though I do have something everyone might enjoy. Before I came along and got put in charge of this operation, this was actually an Alliance-only adventuring company. The guilds the team had contracts with fell apart, so a Horde office was opened up and I was put in charge. Communications between the two groups has fallen to the wayside over the years due to all of the work moving over here, but we did manage to get in contact with one of our people over there. I'm still looking for wherever that dwarf we had ran off to, but here's the second member of the team and my warrior predecessor, Tuknir:

What the... By the Light! People! You've gotta help me! I've been stranded here alone for years now. The dwarf was with me for a while, but then he vanished and I think the gnome's gone feral or something cause he's long since disappeared. I yell out at the other people in Ironforge to get there attention, but it's like I'm a ghost or something. I've had nothing to eat but Silverleaf and Peacebloom for ages now. I'm pretty sure that stuff isn't healthy after this long. Please, for the love of Lordaeron, help m-

Oops, looks like we lost the connection. Oh well, wouldn't want to take up too much of Tuknir's valuable time so we'll let him get back to whatever it was that he was doing. See you folks next time.

(Alright, Sol, Mordigg, which one of you smartasses thought it would be funny to not tell me the human lost his mind? And what was he wearing? Valor?! Man, it really is like he's lost in time or something.)

A Tale of Two Naxxramas

2009-02-16T15:01:00.000-08:00

Ragar: Most of this past week was spent farming or working with the team's rookies (I'll get to them later on once I'm convinced they won't get eaten by something in the Barrens), but there were a couple of raids we can discuss. Solannis had his typical Thursday excursion into Naxxramas with 24 of our guildmates and Mordigg made his first trip into the necropolis as well. So Sol, how'd your run go?

Solannis: It was a pretty standard trip for us, though not one of our better nights. We had more deaths on the trash pulls than usual and a couple of the boss fights could have been smoother.

Ragar: Anything stand out that might have explained the extra deaths?

Solannis: I don't think the pull frequency caused it - I was pulling fast, but the main tank and I usually go at a pretty fast rate. We had a new off-tank, but he seemed to be doing a fine job keeping up. Mostly I think it was due to positioning (i.e. melee dying on whirlwinds) and getting adds after a pull due to people being too close or too far away. I think it was mainly just an off night and it'll be back to normal this week.

Ragar: Adds, huh? You mean like getting one of those shades after a pull, or maybe a patrol?

Solannis: More like we managed to get four of the 4-6 packs of death knights between Gothik and the Four Horsemen. It wasn't pretty, but we got through it.

Ragar: How about you, Mordigg? Was your first Naxx run quite as exciting as Sol's?

Mordigg: Yes, but for different reasons. The group was made up mostly of members from your guild and I was brought in as their off-tank. Most of the members of the group were well-equipped with the various pieces they'd found on the larger scale Naxxramas excursions with Solannis, so the main tank/raid leader decided to make things more "interesting".

Ragar: Interesting, huh? Knowing him, that's another word for expensive, but go on.

Mordigg: At the time there weren't enough guild members on for a full 10-man group, so rather than waiting for others to check in or delving into the horrors of Trade chat for filler, our leader decided to try 8-manning the dungeon for the achievement.

Ragar: I haven't tried to 8-man that place yet. How'd that work out for you?

Mordigg: It actually worked fairly well, considering we had a less than ideal group composition and didn't really come up with a plan beforehand on how to underman some of the fights. We cleared the Arachnid Quarter, the Plague Quarter, and almost cleared the Military Quarter. In the end we just couldn't get past the Four Horsemen. We had a very melee heavy group and I don't believe we had a ranged DPS that could heal themselves for the back, so our two healers were spread very thin. We did try a few different ways of doing the fight, but they ended up calling the run and said we'd try again later. Haven't gone back yet though since everyone got distracted by candy and love fools, so we may just have to start from the beginning this week.

Ragar: Pick up any new equipment?

Mordigg: A few pieces - some boots from Noth, a pair of gloves from Grand Widow Faerlina, and I'm five emblems away from a new belt now. Unfortunately the boots and gloves are sidegrades from my old gloves from Gun'Drak and the boots you crafted. The bonuses are a bit better distributed than my old pieces so they're still worth using, but not quite as big of a jump as it would have been if I'd replaced one of my non-epic pieces.

Ragar: So any impressions from the 8-man run? I know you've never seen the place in a full raid, but let's hear your thoughts.

Mordigg: Well it's hard to compare it to something I've never done before, but I did think the difficulty was rather enjoyable even with the associated repair costs and extra retreats/deaths. I'm not saying that I'd want to do something that hectic every time and I'm certainly not advocating that we leave someone out of the run that could use equipment from there just so we could go for the achievement, but if it comes up again that there's only eight of us available and nothing is happening, I'm all for trying it again.

Our hunter sucks at naming his pets

2009-02-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

Ragar: Since Mordigg and Daikaja are waiting to do heroics and build up their gear (or in the shaman's case, remember what a healing spell is), I figured it was time to send one of the DPSers off into the field. However unlikely it is that one of the groups we run with will be short on DPS instead of tanks or healers, we have to be prepared if that's what someone asks for. There's plenty of options available, but I settled on one of them. He's half of our engineering team, our original herbalist, and quite possibly the worst person at naming pets I have ever met: Lokaja the hunter.

Lokaja: Thanks, I... HEY! What's wrong with my pet names?

Ragar: I'm just calling it like I see it. You have horrible taste in pet names.

Lokaja: Gimme one name that isn't great.

Ragar: Okay, let's start from the beginning. Your main pet is a battle wolf, decked out in spiked barding. One might expect that such a beast would have an intimidating name so that he could strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. You however decided that he should be named Kibbles.

Lokaja: First off, don't talk bad about my wolf. There are fewer surefire ways to piss off an orc than to say something bad about our wolves. Secondly, Kibbles fits him. Sure he looks mean and all, but he's really just an overgrown puppy. One with spiky armor and very pointy teeth, yeah, but still a pup at heart.

Ragar: Speaking of teeth, that brings us to your next pet. You tamed a ravager, one of the most exotic-looking beasts in Outland. Your choice for his name? Bitey.

Lokaja: I'll admit it may not be fancy, but it's descriptive. He loves to bite things. Little guy damn near bit off my hand when I tamed him.

Ragar: And last, but certainly not least, is Cat.

Lokaja: What's wrong with Cat? Plenty of hunters out there have a pet named Cat.

Ragar: Yes, but theirs are actually cats. Let's take a look.

Lokaja: ...

Ragar: Does that look like a cat to you?

Lokaja: Well, in the right light, if you squint a bit -

Ragar: I'll ask again, does that look like a cat?

Lokaja: ... no...

Ragar: What does it look like?

Lokaja: A devilsaur...

Ragar: And that's why we're gonna take votes for any other pets you find that need names.

Team Update: 2/8

2009-02-08T08:41:00.000-08:00

Not a whole lot to update with myself or Solannis. He's still doing the 25-man runs with the guild we're working for (I think the main tank's got a crush for Blessing of Sanctuary or something) and apparently Sol's out of Emblem of Valor pieces to buy for tanking. The boots and bracers are sidegrades to stuff he's found in Naxxramas, so right now it's either sit on them or pick up holy/ret gear. As for me I've done the occasional 10-man run and heroic in addition to cooking and fishing, but I'm kinda in the same boat as Sol, though at the Emblem of Heroism level. I've grabbed everything other than the Valor Medal of the First War, but I'm really not all that impressed by it. If avoidance gearing was the better option right now, then I'd be all for it, but everything me and Solannis have fought seems to fit effective health gearing over avoidance. Since that's the case, I can't really justify dropping my Seal of the Pantheon (lets me socket for Stam) or my Essence of Gossamer for the Medal.

Mordigg's made some strides in getting his tanking gear. He grabbed his Sigil of the Unfaultering Knight the other day and a few random pieces out of heroics. He even managed to tank the Culling of Stratholme under the 25-minute timer first try (won the drake to boot), so I suppose his gear isn't too terrible. There's still plenty of room for improvement though, so hopefully I can get him signed up for one of the 10-man Naxx excursions at some point here.

The main focus of the last few weeks though has been our resident shaman/leatherworker, Daikaja. Lately the group we've been working with has been running into the problem where there weren't enough healers to go around. Daikaja and Solannis were our official healers back in our Outland days, but since Sol's taken up tanking, that leaves it to the shaman. Dai was a resto shaman back in the day, but since he'd be running around on his own to train, we figured that a new spec was in order. He tried elemental, but it just wasn't clicking. Now enhancement on the other hand, that was working just fine. He'd leveled as enhancement back before Outland, so he was already used to that, and the new abilities the trainer showed him seemed to make fighting a bit more fluid. When I last checked, he was 78 and running around in the Storm Peaks doing errands for goblins and Brann Bronzebeard - nice enough dwarf, though I think he's a bit crazy which might explain why I like him.

Once Dai's finished off his training, he, myself, and the rest of the team should be able to cobble together some sort of starter healing equipment for him. Dai's got a couple of leatherworking pieces he can work on, Sol can knock out a few glyphs for him and maybe a couple gems, and I can work on a decent mace to get him started. Admittedly we can't do quite as much for him as we can for a tank since that's our specialty, but it'll be enough to get him into a dungeon and back to practicing his healing techniques. Hopefully he'll be ready soon so I can start posting some of his exploits. Well, that or poke fun at him for being rusty - one of the two.

Tools of the Tank: "Which piece of gear is better?"

2009-02-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

Got the idea for this post from a conversation I had with a death knight friend of mine who's trying to build a tanking set. After discussing what bonuses he should be focusing on, I asked him what his combined mitigation/avoidance was just to get a feel for what it looked like compared to mine or Solannis'. He didn't know how to check that quickly, so I gave him a macro I found about a year ago in this article on Veneretio's blog. He seemed pretty happy about it, so I thought I'd share it again in case anybody missed Vene's post or the Tankspot article that he got the macro from (I'd link it, but the link he had doesn't appear to work for some reason).

To start with, here's the macro I'll be talking about:

/run local a,b=UnitDefense("player") a = (a+b-400)/25 ChatFrame1:AddMessage(format("Need 102.4%% combined (miss+dodge+parry+block). Currently at %.2f%%", 5+a+GetDodgeChance()+GetBlockChance()+GetParryChance()))

For those out there who aren't into macros, I'll summarize what this does. When you create this macro and hit it, it'll give you a little message that says "Need 102.4% combined (miss+dodge+parry+block). Currently at [your combined mitigation/avoidance]%." Originally this macro was used by tanks to find out whether or not we were uncrushable/unhittable. Essentially once you got enough gear that the sum of your miss/dodge/parry/block percentages was 102.4% or higher, no regular hits or crushing blows would be able to hit you - everything would either be avoided or blocked. For warriors, it wasn't as big of an issue because we would just use Shield Block whenever it was up; you only needed a minimal amount of combined avoidance/mitigation to go with that to be past the magic uncrushable/unhittable number whenever Shield Block was up. Paladins got more use out of it because they could actually maintain uncrushable/unhittable with Holy Shield. They would focus on getting their gear to 72.4% mitigation/avoidance, then as long as they were good about using Holy Shield, they were golden. Bears... well, they had miss and dodge, so this macro wasn't as useful for them.

Nowadays though we don't have to worry about crushing blows, but 102.4% is still the unhittable mark. For warriors, this is kind of an unrealistic goal with how our Shield Block techniques have changed. Paladins can still do it pretty easily with Holy Shield, so they still look for getting to 72.4%. Death knights and bears aren't getting to unhittable without some ridiculous gear and gems, but this macro does still serve a purpose regardless of your choice of class.

While most of us aren't concerned about being unhittable now, a high mitigation/avoidance is still useful. When you're swapping around gear, you'd prefer that your survivability go up. This isn't always easy though given that a lot of gearing up involves getting sidegrades that drop as many of those percentages as they increase. Some sidegrades are pretty obvious in nature because they'll make up for a shortcoming we've got (i.e. Hit Rating or specific Dodge/Block Rating in early tanking gear) and only take away from something we've got a surplus of (i.e. Defense Rating in early tanking gear). With others though, it's helpful to have a tool to help look at all of this info.

I'll use me for an example and swap around one piece of gear (rest of my equipment is in that armory link, so I won't show it here just to cut down on clutter). Let's start with the Titansteel Shield Wall, my first 80 shield with an 18 Stamina enchant on it. With that shield equipped, I'm at 543 Defense skill, 28047 HP unbuffed, and according to that macro I've got a combined 69.64% mitigation/avoidance. Now let's swap that out for my Skull of Ruin with a 20 Defense Rating enchant on it. Looking at the numbers now, I'm at 27927 HP unbuffed (down 120 health mostly from that enchant), 540 Defense skill (still uncrittable), and 70.75% combined mitigation/avoidance. So in this particular case, I'm down 12 Stamina and I know I lost some spread-out avoidance from the Defense Rating, but my combined mitigation/avoidance is higher. Here's where you would go into the individual numbers to see where you're increasing and decreasing; in this case I'm losing 0.09% Dodge and Parry with the Skull, but I'm gaining 1.41% Block and 60 Block Value. I can then apply that information to what I already know about my equipment to decide which shield I would rather use. For me it's the Skull due to how AoE heavy everything is now and the fact that my Block Value took a hit from some recent upgrades; depending on the state of your gear, you might have opted to stick with the Shield Wall.

All this macro talk does leave out one important detail: how do you know if something is an upgrade when it's still on the boss' corpse? The macro does you no good in this scenario since it only works with items that you're wearing. For this we need to turn to an outside source. You could try sites like Tankspot or TankingTips and look at their equipment lists. You could do your own research. These are definitely useful and I'd recommend them, but their information is sort of in a vacuum - whatever lists they have won't take the stuff you're wearing into consideration. For that we'll need another tool: RatingBuster. I found out about this from reading BigRedKitty's blog and it provides a lot of context to the numbers you get from the macro; the macro honestly becomes kind of secondary to RB's info, but it's still helpful to have a one-button "how squishy am I?" macro for quick reference. Once you open it up, it should be preconfigured with most of what you need, but you might make a few tweaks just to get the details you want. For that, just enter this and you'll get the configuration window:

/ratingbuster win

Once you're in here, you can make whatever changes you want. Rating will let you pick whether to break down ratings into their specific percentages. Stat Breakdown lets you choose what derivative values to show (i.e. Strength = Attack Power and Block Value for warriors). Finally, Stat Summary lets you change what sums you'll show (check off whatever individual values you want to see). Once all that's set up, every time you look at a piece of gear, it'll tell you what you're gaining or losing compared to your current equipment.

Hopefully these two tools will be of use to people out there. It's all stuff that involves quick math we could all do with the time, but when you've got quest rewards to choose from and a cranky raid leader that's yelling at you to roll or pass on the loot, it's nice to automate some of it.

Picking a Trade Skill: Mordigg

2009-01-28T19:04:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I told everyone about Mordigg getting to 80 and our attempts at putting together some decent tanking gear for him. Operation "Make Mordigg Less Squishy" is still an ongoing process, but we've made progress. Part of the process was picking a new trade skill for him. He's already made the decision and powered his way through to get what he needed, but for the sake of discussion, I'll walk through the decision-making process we used.

There's multiple different routes one could go as a tank to get benefits from trade skills. For example, I am a miner/blacksmith, which provides me with extra Stamina and two extra prismatic sockets for gems. Solannis is a scribe/jewelcrafter, giving him a better shoulder enchant than the one provided by the Sons of Hodir, a high-Stamina trinket, and the ability to use Dragon's Eyes for better quality gems (i.e. the 41-Stamina Solid Dragon's Eye vs. the 24-Stamina Solid Sky Sapphire). Mordigg, on the other hand, was a skinner/herbalist, which provided him with... some small bonus to his critical strike chance and a small heal over time with a three-minute cooldown. Neither of these is really a tanking benefit - they're nice, but we can do better. We'd been using Mordigg to gather supplies for the others on the team while he trained in Northrend. Our resident leatherworker powered his way to 430-something based mostly off Mordigg's leather, while Sol's inscription and Mr. Boomkin's alchemy have benefited from the herb supply. After looking at everyone's trade skills, we decided to have Mordigg drop skinning. Our leatherworker already has capped skinning despite being only 70, plus he already has our leg armor kit recipes, so most of the important stuff is out of the way anyways. Given that it will be a while before any of our leather/mail wearers get to 80 anyways, we have time to prepare for getting their equipment. Now that we'd freed a trade skill slot, it was time to pick Mordigg's new profession.

Let's start by listing our options out: alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, inscription, jewelcrafting, leatherworking, and tailoring. The last two on the list can be cut right now: there is nothing from either of these other than their bracer/cloak linings that we can't get from the others on the team. That's true for most of these trade skills, so it comes down to the self-only benefits and the cost involved. Leatherworking's bracer enchant is 50 Stamina more than the best bracer enchant out there. This actually makes leatherworking have one of the best payoffs for a tanking trade skill out there, but it's a minor increase over the other trade skills and the downside is how time-consuming and costly it is to level. If there wasn't already a leatherworker on the team, I'd consider it, but given that we have one and Mordigg just dropped skinning, I can't justify the time/expense to level it. As for tailoring, it has a cloak enchant that gives 300 attack power for 15 seconds. Given how often it procs, it's assumed to be the equivalent of a constant 75 attack power. Attack power is nice as a tank, but we'd rather have survivability (Stamina, armor, defense rating, etc.) or a more useful threat stat (hit, expertise, or Strength which is affected by talents and Blessing of Kings). Tailoring is also quite expensive and time-consuming to level, given the cloth prices in the auction house and that we've been sending all of our cloth up till now to a tailor/enchanter friend of ours. Enchanting is out as well: the 24 Stamina ring enchants are quite nice, but considering that it requires materials that would be quite time-consuming to acquire and it would redirect resources away from our enchanter friends who already have most of the recipes we need, it would be the least cost-effective upgrade. This leaves us with alchemy, blacksmithing, engineering, inscription, and jewelcrafting to choose from.

Blacksmithing is a time and resource intensive journey that would require me to go and scour Azeroth and Outland for Mordigg's materials. Learning jewelcrafting, as Solannis puts it, is "a world of frustration and pain" that would also require me to go gather his materials. Engineering isn't quite as bad to learn according to our local engineers and the trinket is quite nice, but the recent improvements that have been made to the Tempered Titansteel Helm eliminates the need for the goggles, so half of the benefit is gone. Given that blacksmithing's extra sockets and jewelcrafting's higher-quality gems are essentially sidegrades (though customizable ones) to the benefits of other trade skills, and the fact that I didn't feel like farming materials for him or paying the ridiculous auction house prices, that left us with two trades that Mordigg could learn that he could gather his own materials for: alchemy and inscription.

Alchemy has a very nice tanking trinket and increased benefits from potions, elixirs, and flasks. It would also provide a second source of alchemy research to support Mr. Boomkin's work. Inscription would give Mordigg a superior shoulder enchant to that provided by the Sons of Hodir with no reputation grinding required (definitely a plus in my eyes) and he would be able to supplement Sol's glyph research. There are drawbacks however: alchemy draws a lot of benefit from consumables that Mordigg would need to keep in supply and even these are gated by the limits on potion and elixir/flask usage, while Inscription would going to have a lot of overlap in glyph recipes since Sol's been at this a while.

To eliminate some of the variables here, we made some assumptions based on what resources the team had available. Our druid buddy has been performing alchemy research since the first week we were in Northrend, and two of our healer contacts aren't that far behind him. Odds are that if anyone on the team needs something brewed, they'll help us out. Same thing goes for inscription research: Sol has most of the glyph recipes, but if we really need something that he doesn't have, hitting the auction house won't kill us considering no one on the team respecs all that often. That left us with alchemy providing better consumables and a trinket and inscription giving us a much stronger shoulder enchant with no reputation grind.

Looking ahead to where Mordigg regularly starts tanking heroic dungeons, the alchemy trinket would fall to the wayside to make room for Essence of Gossamer. It's definitely a good starter trinket, but between that and the Seal of the Pantheon, the alchemy trinket would be the one to replace. So now it's alchemy's better consumables versus inscription's shoulder enchant.

The improvement to consumables is certainly nothing to scoff at, being anywhere from 35-50+% better than the regular potions. Given an elixir pair of Mighty Defense and Mighty Strength, that's a difference of 11 defense rating and 12 Strength over the unmodified elixirs according to a post on Tankspot. The downside to this benefit is that it only applies to elixirs/flasks that the alchemist can create. This means that if Mordigg gets unlucky with his research (which has a 3-day cooldown), this benefit is greatly restricted. There's also the matter of the consumables themselves. Consumables are meant to enhance your abilities to make life easier, not boost you so you're just at the required level. You'll use them for learning new fights, but after that you might not use them all that often, so the benefit from alchemy is diminished.

Inscription however is a static bonus. Compared to Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle, the scribe-only Master's Inscription of the Pinnacle has an additional 32 dodge rating. That's the equivalent of two Subtle Scarlet Rubies. It's not as flexible as the blacksmithing sockets or jewelcrafter gems, but it's a lot of extra avoidance that frees up two other sockets for Stamina or threat. Having Mordigg pick up inscription would also free up a lot of time/resources that would have been necessary to get him to exalted with Sons of Hodir, allowing those Relics of Ulduar to go towards Sol, who still needs the Smooth Autumn's Glow recipe at Exalted, or other members of the team that make their way to Northrend.

The decisions made here may not fit every tank out there. Not everyone has a blacksmith on their team or has a smithing friend. If this is the case, I heartily endorse picking up the trade; it's a lot of work, but the resources available to you as a smith (and especially if you have mining to go with it) are quite useful. Same goes for jewelcrafting: it's a royal pain to learn, but it's handy to never need to hit the auction house for a gem. The decision to have Mordigg learn inscription really came down to, "What has the best benefit/time-and-money ratio?" After Mordigg went to the trainer, it took about 800-900 gold to get him up to 400 inscription for his shoulder enchant. Solannis did have some old ink stockpiled though, and we bummed some off of a buddy as well; given herb prices, that probably would've put the entire run up to 1000-1200 total for the whole thing had we started with nothing. I know for a fact there's no way we ever would have made that much progress in smithing or jewelcrafting for that kind of gold.