All that work for three little cards

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).

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

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.

Solannis, Me, and Death Knight Makes Three

Yesterday our resident death knight, Mordigg, became the third person on the team to finish their training in Northrend. After he finished picking up his new abilities from the trainer, we sat down and put together a new tanking spec for him. It still needs field testing, but in theory it should work fine. Before we could do any sort of testing though, it was time to put together some starter tank gear for him.

Most of the gear we had was stuff I had smithed ahead of time: Tempered Titansteel Helm, Tempered Saronite Bracers, Daunting Handguards, Daunting Legplates, and most important of all, a Titansteel Destroyer. All he needed to do was slap a Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle on that and he was all set... well, except for one small detail. Apparently in all of his running around Outland and Northrend, Mordigg had neglected to go and actually train in the use of maces. He certainly couldn't go off and tank with a weapon skill of 1, but leveling that skill would take ages. A solution to this problem came from a priest friend of mine.

There's an island off the western coast of Icecrown that's crawling with Scarlet Onslaught soldiers. I'm sure most people are aware of how excitable and rather violent those folks are. This combined with the fact that they're quite easy to group up, not to mention seem to carry a fair amount of Frostweave and minor magical items, makes this a prime area to go with someone that has AoE attacks. Solannis went out here for AoE tanking practice with his 9-6-9 rotation, so it would work fine for Mordigg's training.

According to Mordigg, the basic rotation seemed simple enough (once his weapon skill got high enough that he could actually hit something other than air). Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Death and Decay, and Pestilence for the opening rotation with Frost Strike until runes came back up. Howling Blast with the first pair of runes to return, then repeating Death and Decay and Howling Blast whenever possible. When diseases started to fall, redo the opening rotation. Some additional practice will be needed since most of the monsters in dungeons are a bit tougher than your average Scarlet soldier, but this is a good starting point. By the time they wrapped up for the night, Mordigg's defense skill was capped at 400 and his two-handed mace skill was 399. That last point of maces will come soon enough, so now to look at his gear again.

We picked up a few more pieces off the auction house to fill in some holes in Mordigg's gear: Tattered Castle Drape (upgrade even with the worthless block value and only 30g), Crusader's Square Pauldrons (a steal at 40g), and Waistguard of the Risen Knight (very nice piece for 60g). After a couple of quick gem cuts from Sol and a belt buckle from me, he's sitting at 516 defense - 24 short of raid uncrittable.

Now there's still plenty of room for improvement here, even outside of stepping into a dungeon. Neither of Mordigg's rings is tank-oriented. Both of his trinkets are damage-focused and kind of old. His boots are still from his DPS days, though that one's easy enough to replace with a quick trip to Shadow Vault for some reputation gear; there's more useless block value, but for starter boots, they'll do until he gets some dungeon gear or I get enough Titansteel to make him a new pair.

With a few days worth of jewelcrafting dailies, or a chunk out of the team's funds, Mordigg could get a Titanium Earthguard Ring. It would be a significant upgrade that would last quite a while and Sol already has that recipe; it'll just take time or money, neither of which I'm fond of spending when I want him out there working to pay off his epic mount now. For trinkets, he'll pretty much be stuck with what he's got until something drops in an instance, barring picking up a new trade skill (more on that later). I could probably send him off to do a normal Halls of Lightning with what he's got now. Loken doesn't hit all that hard and his Seal of the Pantheon would put a nice dent into the Defense rating Mordigg needs for uncrittable.

That just leaves us with the matter of his trade skills, but I'll save that for the next post. The arguments we came up with for changing his profession(s) ended up being longer than the rest of this post, so for the sake of readability we'll leave it at "To be continued..."

The secrets of the Stormchop are finally mine!

It took many, many months of doing work for that stingy goblin, but after all the questing and all of the threats, I finally pried the secrets to the Stormchop out of his grimy little hands. All that was left after that was tracking down the supplies I needed for the recipe and I finally had my Outland Gourmet achievement.

That just left Northrend Gourmet and Dinner Impossible in my path to becoming Chef Ragar. Northrend Gourmet is as progressed as I can get for the moment; still waiting on the vendors to get another shipment of recipes. In the meantime I could chip away at Dinner Impossible. I'm not particularly fond of giving food to people in battlegrounds (they're just gonna run in and get knocked out anyways), but sometimes you have to swallow your pride to get the job done. I'll get this one done soon enough, but I'll do it my way. I call it "Operation: Drop and Run" - I don't do PvP.

Soon, very soon, I shall have my title and Scourge and blue dragons everywhere will tremble before the might of Chef Ragar!

Oh, there was one more thing I picked up today:


Apparently it was a good thing that I never dropped that quest, and that I'm such a horrible packrat that I still had the turn-in items from my old 40-man raiding days. And my friends told me I should clean out my bank more often. Hah!