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.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
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..."
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Hail to the Chef
Today was the day the vendors received their new recipes, so I ran straight over to get my stuff. Wolf Tartare was easy enough to pick up, but when I looked at Fish Feast, it took 450 cooking - I was still three points short. I thought, "Okay, I'll just go pick up the Kungaloosh recipe and take care of that first." Good idea, except for one tiny little detail: I kinda forgot that I never did any questing out in Sholazar Basin. Now normally this wouldn't have been that big of an issue. I would've just gone in, knocked out whatever quests the people out there wanted me to do, and picked up my recipe. However, there was apparently some strange activity going on in Wintergrasp today that seemed to have effects on everyone else in Northrend. Reports from myself and other members of the team include blackout periods with no memory of what happened, delayed reaction time for some spells, and in my case, learning how to swim through the sky:
Despite all that though, I finished getting the quest and got my recipe. That just left learning how to make a Fish Feast, so off I went to search the rivers of Northrend for the fish needed to finish my cooking training and learn my last recipe. There was a bit of a delay from the guild asking me to schedule Solannis to off-tank their 10-man Obsidian Sanctum run that night. Stupid "only one person can work at a time" contracting rules... Regardless, once that was taken care of and Solannis collected his fee, I went back to my fishing and got my last skill point. A quick trip back to Dalaran for my recipe, and my journey was at an end.
Ah, it feels so nice to finally have that taken care of. There may be dozens of other titles available, but there's just something about Chef that's awesome. Now if only I could find an epic chef hat or a frying pan shield to accompany my shield. Maybe one of those white smock things that the chefs in the fancy parts of Dalaran wear. I don't care if it's not all that great compared to my actual tanking gear - it could be vendor trash quality for all I care. I just think I'd look awesome in a chef hat.
Despite all that though, I finished getting the quest and got my recipe. That just left learning how to make a Fish Feast, so off I went to search the rivers of Northrend for the fish needed to finish my cooking training and learn my last recipe. There was a bit of a delay from the guild asking me to schedule Solannis to off-tank their 10-man Obsidian Sanctum run that night. Stupid "only one person can work at a time" contracting rules... Regardless, once that was taken care of and Solannis collected his fee, I went back to my fishing and got my last skill point. A quick trip back to Dalaran for my recipe, and my journey was at an end.
Ah, it feels so nice to finally have that taken care of. There may be dozens of other titles available, but there's just something about Chef that's awesome. Now if only I could find an epic chef hat or a frying pan shield to accompany my shield. Maybe one of those white smock things that the chefs in the fancy parts of Dalaran wear. I don't care if it's not all that great compared to my actual tanking gear - it could be vendor trash quality for all I care. I just think I'd look awesome in a chef hat.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
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!
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!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Solannis: Thaddius vs. the PuG
This weekend was a bit hectic. Ragar and I began contracting for a different guild (basically all of the people who we’d been working with before, just more raid focused) and soon after signing up, I was pulled into a 25-man Naxxramas group. The guild leader had a friend with an existing run that had two wings cleared and he thought this would be a good warm-up while they were trying to fill out the roster for guild-only runs. Good idea in theory, but there was a problem: between the raid leader’s friends, our guild, and some of our friends, we only had about 15 people.
Having to look for random people to fill out two-fifths of this run was already a bad sign. The fact that it took us about 25 minutes to get ten people from Trade didn’t help. After they filled out the raid, my feral druid friend and I looked at the roster: four tanks (me and him were the spare off-tanks), seven or eight healers, and the rest DPS. Someone asked, “Why do we need four tanks?” A valid question, we thought. The response from one of our healers: “In case two die.” There are certain things a tank doesn’t want to hear. This would be one of them. (Editor’s Note: This sounds suspiciously like my old guild’s strategy for Princess Huhuran, Operation “Let the First Tank Die”. Always hated that plan... - Rags)
Things started off fine in the Construct Quarter. Patchwerk was a breeze. Grobbulus actually gave me something to do (picked up slimes since “don’t stand in front of him” is apparently hard). Gluth took a couple tries since only one of the hunters was actually trying to kite the zombies, so the druid tank and I went to go do that instead so we could actually move on. That just left Thaddius... It was going fine at first: the two other constructs went down at the same time, all but one person made the jump, and the tank got aggro right away. Once the polarity shifts started happening though, things took a turn for the worse.
I’ll admit that there are certain aspects of dungeon raiding I take for granted that maybe I shouldn’t. I read various blogs and look for ways to improve my performance (still have a long ways to go before I’d consider myself an expert). I look for strategies before attempting a fight. I discuss tanking and other theory with my fellow raiders looking for tweaks we can make to improve efficiency. Not everyone does that, and I can accept this fact. However, there is one thing I just assumed everyone would know that I was apparently mistaken about, and it brings to mind a question: did the schools everywhere but Silvermoon decide to stop teaching people the difference between left and right? I’m asking because apparently this was a problem for us.
To help explain that last bit, allow me to do a quick run-through of how Thaddius works. When he does a Polarity Shift, everyone in the raid will get either a positive charge or a negative one (think heroic Mechanar). Prior to beginning the fight, your raid leader will assign sides of the room for charges; ours yelled out before each attempt that, looking from the doorway, the right side of the room would be for the positive charges and the left side would be negative. Once he gives you a charge, you need to quickly get to the side of Thaddius that all of the people with the same charge as you are on. Two reasons for this: 1) everyone gets a damage buff based on how many people they’re near with the same charge, and 2) if you’re near someone with the opposite charge, you both take quite a bit of damage until you move away from each other. The Chain Lightnings and melee damage on the tank are enough for the healers without adding more, and the damage buff is necessary for taking Thaddius down quick enough that he doesn’t enrage and destroy the raid.
Here’s where that left/right comment comes in. For a 10-man fight against Thaddius, and 25-mans where you don’t have to grab random people, you’ll usually just run straight through Thaddius to cut down on as much DPS downtime as possible. However if you want to play it safe, you can tell people to run around Thaddius instead of through him. That way, anyone who’s a bit slow should be far enough away from the group to avoid damage and the only people near them should be making the same charge change. It was decided to go with the cautious plan, so the raid leader said, “If you have to switch sides, go around Thaddius on your right-hand side. Not his, yours.” Sounds simple, right? There were at least five people that had trouble with that and went to the left. And not just once, but every single time until we would wipe and have to regroup for yet another attempt! My favorite line from someone in the raid: “How about we say to go counter-clockwise in case that’s easier to understand?” I’m curious as to who out there would understand that, but find “go to your right” a foreign concept.
This obviously wasn’t going to work, so the raid leader decided to go with the other plan and have everyone run straight through for polarity shifts. I assume he thought that maybe they’d move fast enough through him to avoid damage if they didn’t have to hold up their hands every time to remember which side is their right. This worked better, but we still had people getting knocked out too early which would drop our damage and cause another wipe.
This went on for a while and some of us began to notice a pattern. One of the pick-up DPS, particularly the one who was the last to hit the ready check every single attempt, seemed to be the first one on the floor every attempt. This prompted my druid friend and a priest I know to pull out the damage meters. Neat little gadgets, those damage meters. Besides the obvious stuff like damage dealt and which attacks are how much of said damage, it also checks other things like healing dealt and, pertinent in this case, friendly fire. It’s just like it sounds: this is damage you have done to your teammates. This would include damage from abilities like Baron Geddon’s Living Bomb, Loken’s Arc Lightning, and for Thaddius, damage from being near people with opposite charges. They pulled up the friendly fire meter to look for any oddities. The main tank was 2nd on the list with something like 200,000 damage; higher than preferable, but the tank is the closest one to the other charge group each time and since he can’t really move during the fight, he just has to get into position and hope everyone else transitions in a timely fashion. Third was about 20,000 below that and it went down from there. First however would be our pick-up friend with 280,000 damage, 40% more damage than the person who everyone expects to be at the top and is at the mercy of the rest of the raid.
The druid and priest brought this to the attention of the raid, hoping to get said DPS to understand that whatever he was doing was killing people in the raid and making the healers’ jobs more difficult. Instead, they got one of the other pick-ups to chime in with, “I’ve run with him before and he wouldn’t do that. Both your meters must be busted.”
There are certain things in life that can be disputed. One can argue for or against talent specs based on damage output, survivability, etc. One can argue strategy based on group make-up and possible achievements. Math, however, is not one of those disputable concepts. Numbers are not malicious and trying to single someone out for fun. They’re a reflection of the actions of the raid and entirely dependent on the raiders themselves. The fact that both of their meters agreed within a percentage point or two certainly didn’t help his “The maths are out to get us!” philosophy either.
Somehow we managed to take down Thaddius (after an enrage) and move on to the Death Knight Quarter. Nothing really notable here, other than one wipe on the Four Horsemen; they assigned ranged to the back two horsemen who proceeded to get smashed by melee attacks, so the druid and I took over and got something else to do). The raid was called at this point, so we all packed up and headed off to repair our equipment. I did end up getting my tier leggings from the run and my priest friend picked up a couple of pieces, so it wasn’t a total loss.
I do look forward to being able to go back to Naxxramas, but without hitting Trade for filler. While it was good experience seeing the differences between the 10- and 25-man versions, I’m willing to wait for more experienced people... or at least someone who can tell their right from their left.
Having to look for random people to fill out two-fifths of this run was already a bad sign. The fact that it took us about 25 minutes to get ten people from Trade didn’t help. After they filled out the raid, my feral druid friend and I looked at the roster: four tanks (me and him were the spare off-tanks), seven or eight healers, and the rest DPS. Someone asked, “Why do we need four tanks?” A valid question, we thought. The response from one of our healers: “In case two die.” There are certain things a tank doesn’t want to hear. This would be one of them. (Editor’s Note: This sounds suspiciously like my old guild’s strategy for Princess Huhuran, Operation “Let the First Tank Die”. Always hated that plan... - Rags)
Things started off fine in the Construct Quarter. Patchwerk was a breeze. Grobbulus actually gave me something to do (picked up slimes since “don’t stand in front of him” is apparently hard). Gluth took a couple tries since only one of the hunters was actually trying to kite the zombies, so the druid tank and I went to go do that instead so we could actually move on. That just left Thaddius... It was going fine at first: the two other constructs went down at the same time, all but one person made the jump, and the tank got aggro right away. Once the polarity shifts started happening though, things took a turn for the worse.
I’ll admit that there are certain aspects of dungeon raiding I take for granted that maybe I shouldn’t. I read various blogs and look for ways to improve my performance (still have a long ways to go before I’d consider myself an expert). I look for strategies before attempting a fight. I discuss tanking and other theory with my fellow raiders looking for tweaks we can make to improve efficiency. Not everyone does that, and I can accept this fact. However, there is one thing I just assumed everyone would know that I was apparently mistaken about, and it brings to mind a question: did the schools everywhere but Silvermoon decide to stop teaching people the difference between left and right? I’m asking because apparently this was a problem for us.
To help explain that last bit, allow me to do a quick run-through of how Thaddius works. When he does a Polarity Shift, everyone in the raid will get either a positive charge or a negative one (think heroic Mechanar). Prior to beginning the fight, your raid leader will assign sides of the room for charges; ours yelled out before each attempt that, looking from the doorway, the right side of the room would be for the positive charges and the left side would be negative. Once he gives you a charge, you need to quickly get to the side of Thaddius that all of the people with the same charge as you are on. Two reasons for this: 1) everyone gets a damage buff based on how many people they’re near with the same charge, and 2) if you’re near someone with the opposite charge, you both take quite a bit of damage until you move away from each other. The Chain Lightnings and melee damage on the tank are enough for the healers without adding more, and the damage buff is necessary for taking Thaddius down quick enough that he doesn’t enrage and destroy the raid.
Here’s where that left/right comment comes in. For a 10-man fight against Thaddius, and 25-mans where you don’t have to grab random people, you’ll usually just run straight through Thaddius to cut down on as much DPS downtime as possible. However if you want to play it safe, you can tell people to run around Thaddius instead of through him. That way, anyone who’s a bit slow should be far enough away from the group to avoid damage and the only people near them should be making the same charge change. It was decided to go with the cautious plan, so the raid leader said, “If you have to switch sides, go around Thaddius on your right-hand side. Not his, yours.” Sounds simple, right? There were at least five people that had trouble with that and went to the left. And not just once, but every single time until we would wipe and have to regroup for yet another attempt! My favorite line from someone in the raid: “How about we say to go counter-clockwise in case that’s easier to understand?” I’m curious as to who out there would understand that, but find “go to your right” a foreign concept.
This obviously wasn’t going to work, so the raid leader decided to go with the other plan and have everyone run straight through for polarity shifts. I assume he thought that maybe they’d move fast enough through him to avoid damage if they didn’t have to hold up their hands every time to remember which side is their right. This worked better, but we still had people getting knocked out too early which would drop our damage and cause another wipe.
This went on for a while and some of us began to notice a pattern. One of the pick-up DPS, particularly the one who was the last to hit the ready check every single attempt, seemed to be the first one on the floor every attempt. This prompted my druid friend and a priest I know to pull out the damage meters. Neat little gadgets, those damage meters. Besides the obvious stuff like damage dealt and which attacks are how much of said damage, it also checks other things like healing dealt and, pertinent in this case, friendly fire. It’s just like it sounds: this is damage you have done to your teammates. This would include damage from abilities like Baron Geddon’s Living Bomb, Loken’s Arc Lightning, and for Thaddius, damage from being near people with opposite charges. They pulled up the friendly fire meter to look for any oddities. The main tank was 2nd on the list with something like 200,000 damage; higher than preferable, but the tank is the closest one to the other charge group each time and since he can’t really move during the fight, he just has to get into position and hope everyone else transitions in a timely fashion. Third was about 20,000 below that and it went down from there. First however would be our pick-up friend with 280,000 damage, 40% more damage than the person who everyone expects to be at the top and is at the mercy of the rest of the raid.
The druid and priest brought this to the attention of the raid, hoping to get said DPS to understand that whatever he was doing was killing people in the raid and making the healers’ jobs more difficult. Instead, they got one of the other pick-ups to chime in with, “I’ve run with him before and he wouldn’t do that. Both your meters must be busted.”
There are certain things in life that can be disputed. One can argue for or against talent specs based on damage output, survivability, etc. One can argue strategy based on group make-up and possible achievements. Math, however, is not one of those disputable concepts. Numbers are not malicious and trying to single someone out for fun. They’re a reflection of the actions of the raid and entirely dependent on the raiders themselves. The fact that both of their meters agreed within a percentage point or two certainly didn’t help his “The maths are out to get us!” philosophy either.
Somehow we managed to take down Thaddius (after an enrage) and move on to the Death Knight Quarter. Nothing really notable here, other than one wipe on the Four Horsemen; they assigned ranged to the back two horsemen who proceeded to get smashed by melee attacks, so the druid and I took over and got something else to do). The raid was called at this point, so we all packed up and headed off to repair our equipment. I did end up getting my tier leggings from the run and my priest friend picked up a couple of pieces, so it wasn’t a total loss.
I do look forward to being able to go back to Naxxramas, but without hitting Trade for filler. While it was good experience seeing the differences between the 10- and 25-man versions, I’m willing to wait for more experienced people... or at least someone who can tell their right from their left.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Solannis: First Non-Holy Raid
I raided a fair amount back in our Outland days, but it was always as a healer. As such, all of my experience in groups of that size has been from the back of the group. Ever since I switched over to tanking, I've been looking forward to trying my hand at raid tanking. I've listened to Ragar describe the job and noted what seemed pertinent, but it's one of those jobs that you can't just read about. The gap between theory and application may seem small, but it's littered with the bodies of dead raiders. Originally the plan was that I would swap in for Ragar on his next trip to Obsidian Sanctum. He said something to the effect of, "Think of it as your Onyxia." This seemed like a reasonable enough idea - starting off with just one boss to get my feet wet in terms of threat generation and proper movement/positioning. Of course, this was all thrown out the window when I was volunteered to go to Naxxramas.
Apparently the group that Ragar went there with a while ago was taking another trip, but one of their tanks was incapacitated. They had asked Ragar to come, but instead he volunteered to send me in his place, citing that I could use the gear/experience more than him. I think he just wanted to stay home with his keg, but that's beside the point. What matters is that I'd been drafted into my first raid tanking role. It was an off-tanking position, but a tank nonetheless.
I asked Ragar going in what the off-tank was supposed to do. He didn't have a whole lot to add since he's always been the main tank, but he did have a few pointers to begin with: "Just grab anything loose, help the MT on hard-hitting pulls by grabbing a few off of him, and listen to him on boss fights." Not the most useful advice, but I'll take what I can get. I was summoned by the group to Naxxramas soon after. We buffed up and started in on the spider wing.
Before we even made it to the first boss, I received an upgrade: Minion Bracers. Fairly large step up from my old Tempered Saronite Bracers, I'd say. We then went into Anub'Rekhan's lair. Ragar said he hadn't seen this place since before the Dark Portal opened, so I listened to the main tank and just kept an eye out for any extra bugs. After Anub'Rekhan went down, the rest of the spider wing went fairly quickly (even got the Arachnophobia achievement). I'll have to give Ragar my notes later for whenever he comes back in here.
Next up was the plague quarter. Ragar had some comments for me on most of this quarter, except for the first boss, Noth the Plaguebringer. It was pretty simple though (honestly Consecration caught most of the skeletons for me), so that wasn't a problem. With Heigan the Unclean, I had Ragar's notes, but the group had another idea: rather than doing the lava dancing, they positioned the ranged on the wall in one specific spot while the melee beat on Heigan on his platform. For phase 2, we'd run over to the ranged and wait until he finished, then head back to the platform. This method seemed a bit off compared to what I'd read, but it was efficient and efficiency trumps all. We continued on to Loatheb who went down without much of a fight, then it was off to the death knight wing.
Mind-controlling the student for Instructor Razuvious went off without a hitch, since it's just going off timers: Bone Barrier then Taunt, call the other tank after 15 seconds, wait for him to call then Bone Barrier/Taunt, release control and renew it after the other tank's taunted off you twice. Other than that, all I did was use Blood Strike to add damage and threat while I waited for taunts. Next up was Gothik the Harvester, with me tanking on the living side. It's a good thing the undead side was keeping up with us, because all of the waves that popped up on our side tended to fall rather quickly. Gothik himself went down shortly after, so it was off to the Four Horsemen. No real difference here from Ragar's notes: just switching off melee horsemen and corners of the room whenever we got three stacks of a mark, then dealing with the ranged horsemen once the melee were down. After the fight was over, I was given the Chestguard of the Lost Conquerer which would allow me to pick up my Heroes' Redemption Breastplate - a sizeable upgrade from my Breastplate of the Solemn Council, not to mention saving me 80 Emblems of Heroism that could go towards other tanking pieces. Picking up any new pieces would have to wait though, since we still had the construct wing left.
The first boss in this wing was Patchwerk, a rather large abomination, and it was decided that I would be tanking him since our MT had more health for the Hateful Strikes. Fights like this make me realize why Ragar says that he rarely looks at his health while tanking if he can help it - that number spends an awful lot of time being low and the healer in me was going, "Gah! Heal! Where's my Holy Light?!" On the plus side though, I was never low on mana. After the large unpleasant undead was dealth with and I was patched up, we moved on to the rest of the construct wing.
Grobbulus was rather uneventful, except that I kept getting hit with that Mutating Injection attack of his. That wasn't a problem per se, but it did delay me a bit on picking up the slimes that popped up. He went down easily enough though, so it was off to Gluth. Simple fight from the tanks' perspectives - I taunted off the MT when he got three stacks of that debuff, then he'd pick it back up once they fell off. The raid finished taking Gluth down quickly enough, so it was time for Thaddius and the two constructs before him. No difficulty here, and unlike Ragar, I did not feel compelled to say something asinine every time we were thrown into the air. (Editor's note: It's not my fault you have no sense of humor and don't see why "Fancy meeting you here" and high-fiving the other tank as we passed isn't funny. - Rags) After they went down, the main tank grabbed Thaddius and we proceeded to burn him down. At this point, some of the members of the group moved to call it for the night and reconvene on Sapphiron's Lair after a brief respite.
The Emblems from that run, and the two dungeons I was pulled into after we finished, gave me enough to get the gauntlets to accompany my new chest as well as the Waistguard of Living Iron to replace the Tempered Saronite Belt I'd been using. I still have quite a few pieces left to replace, but tonight definitely helped in that regard.
I still need to do quite a bit more raiding to get a better feel for the nuances of paladin tanking, but I do have some observations. From what I've seen, I'm more than equipped enough to tank these instances, but there are some non-gear aspects of my tanking that could use some work:
Apparently the group that Ragar went there with a while ago was taking another trip, but one of their tanks was incapacitated. They had asked Ragar to come, but instead he volunteered to send me in his place, citing that I could use the gear/experience more than him. I think he just wanted to stay home with his keg, but that's beside the point. What matters is that I'd been drafted into my first raid tanking role. It was an off-tanking position, but a tank nonetheless.
I asked Ragar going in what the off-tank was supposed to do. He didn't have a whole lot to add since he's always been the main tank, but he did have a few pointers to begin with: "Just grab anything loose, help the MT on hard-hitting pulls by grabbing a few off of him, and listen to him on boss fights." Not the most useful advice, but I'll take what I can get. I was summoned by the group to Naxxramas soon after. We buffed up and started in on the spider wing.
Before we even made it to the first boss, I received an upgrade: Minion Bracers. Fairly large step up from my old Tempered Saronite Bracers, I'd say. We then went into Anub'Rekhan's lair. Ragar said he hadn't seen this place since before the Dark Portal opened, so I listened to the main tank and just kept an eye out for any extra bugs. After Anub'Rekhan went down, the rest of the spider wing went fairly quickly (even got the Arachnophobia achievement). I'll have to give Ragar my notes later for whenever he comes back in here.
Next up was the plague quarter. Ragar had some comments for me on most of this quarter, except for the first boss, Noth the Plaguebringer. It was pretty simple though (honestly Consecration caught most of the skeletons for me), so that wasn't a problem. With Heigan the Unclean, I had Ragar's notes, but the group had another idea: rather than doing the lava dancing, they positioned the ranged on the wall in one specific spot while the melee beat on Heigan on his platform. For phase 2, we'd run over to the ranged and wait until he finished, then head back to the platform. This method seemed a bit off compared to what I'd read, but it was efficient and efficiency trumps all. We continued on to Loatheb who went down without much of a fight, then it was off to the death knight wing.
Mind-controlling the student for Instructor Razuvious went off without a hitch, since it's just going off timers: Bone Barrier then Taunt, call the other tank after 15 seconds, wait for him to call then Bone Barrier/Taunt, release control and renew it after the other tank's taunted off you twice. Other than that, all I did was use Blood Strike to add damage and threat while I waited for taunts. Next up was Gothik the Harvester, with me tanking on the living side. It's a good thing the undead side was keeping up with us, because all of the waves that popped up on our side tended to fall rather quickly. Gothik himself went down shortly after, so it was off to the Four Horsemen. No real difference here from Ragar's notes: just switching off melee horsemen and corners of the room whenever we got three stacks of a mark, then dealing with the ranged horsemen once the melee were down. After the fight was over, I was given the Chestguard of the Lost Conquerer which would allow me to pick up my Heroes' Redemption Breastplate - a sizeable upgrade from my Breastplate of the Solemn Council, not to mention saving me 80 Emblems of Heroism that could go towards other tanking pieces. Picking up any new pieces would have to wait though, since we still had the construct wing left.
The first boss in this wing was Patchwerk, a rather large abomination, and it was decided that I would be tanking him since our MT had more health for the Hateful Strikes. Fights like this make me realize why Ragar says that he rarely looks at his health while tanking if he can help it - that number spends an awful lot of time being low and the healer in me was going, "Gah! Heal! Where's my Holy Light?!" On the plus side though, I was never low on mana. After the large unpleasant undead was dealth with and I was patched up, we moved on to the rest of the construct wing.
Grobbulus was rather uneventful, except that I kept getting hit with that Mutating Injection attack of his. That wasn't a problem per se, but it did delay me a bit on picking up the slimes that popped up. He went down easily enough though, so it was off to Gluth. Simple fight from the tanks' perspectives - I taunted off the MT when he got three stacks of that debuff, then he'd pick it back up once they fell off. The raid finished taking Gluth down quickly enough, so it was time for Thaddius and the two constructs before him. No difficulty here, and unlike Ragar, I did not feel compelled to say something asinine every time we were thrown into the air. (Editor's note: It's not my fault you have no sense of humor and don't see why "Fancy meeting you here" and high-fiving the other tank as we passed isn't funny. - Rags) After they went down, the main tank grabbed Thaddius and we proceeded to burn him down. At this point, some of the members of the group moved to call it for the night and reconvene on Sapphiron's Lair after a brief respite.
The Emblems from that run, and the two dungeons I was pulled into after we finished, gave me enough to get the gauntlets to accompany my new chest as well as the Waistguard of Living Iron to replace the Tempered Saronite Belt I'd been using. I still have quite a few pieces left to replace, but tonight definitely helped in that regard.
I still need to do quite a bit more raiding to get a better feel for the nuances of paladin tanking, but I do have some observations. From what I've seen, I'm more than equipped enough to tank these instances, but there are some non-gear aspects of my tanking that could use some work:
- A more precise taunt would be useful so I don't accidentally grab the wrong attackers when peeling something off the main tank. I believe this one is coming, so I'm not real concerned about it.
- Be quicker about switching to Seal of Wisdom for easy trash. For light-hitting trash, the MT would grab everything. This is fine, but it does kill my mana regeneration. As such, I should switch to Wisdom when I see stuff like that to cut down on my need to drink, especially since we were chain-pulling the entire time.
- Remember to use Avenging Wrath. I'm so used to ignoring this from my Outland healing days, not to mention the fact that it puts up Forbearance so I'm paranoid about being unable to use Divine Protection. The Forbearance issue is apparently being dealt with by the paladin trainers, so it'll just be a matter of training myself to use it.
- Stop sending all of my cooking materials to Ragar. He's not the only chef on staff and since I'm spending nearly as much time on the front lines as he is, I have an equal right to the food. (Ed.: That's fine, but you can get your own fish. I spend enough time out on the ice as is.)
- Quit defaulting to Judgement as an opener if Avenger's Shield is down. If I was using another Seal, this would be fine, but since Seal of Corruption is stack-dependant for Judgement damage, this is inefficient as an opening move.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
An Open Letter to The Rokk
Dear Rokk,
Let's get this out of the way: I don't like you, you don't like me. However, you have my Stormchops recipe, so you're stuck with me doing your dirty work and swearing at you every day. It doesn't have to be that way though - you have the power to put an end to all of this. Just give me what I want and I'll be out of your hair. Earthmother knows I've more than put in enough time for it. I've made enough Spiritual Soup and Demon Broiled Surprise to feed an army and I've brought you enough Mana Berries to fill the Nagrand Arena. I've even made enough Kaliri Stew that those damnable birds start flying away in a panic when they see me coming!
I'm so close to getting my Chef title. I have Great Feasts prepared for Dinner Impossible (when I can bring myself to give useful food to people that are about to die in mere moments anyways...) and I'll have the last recipes I need for Northrend Gourmet when the vendor gets their new shipment in a week or so. All that remains after that is becoming an Outland Gourmet, which brings it back to you.
In closing, please give me my Stormchops recipe and I promise I won't do anything uncouth like use you as a training dummy or drop you from the Scryer's Tier.
Have a nice day,
Rags
Let's get this out of the way: I don't like you, you don't like me. However, you have my Stormchops recipe, so you're stuck with me doing your dirty work and swearing at you every day. It doesn't have to be that way though - you have the power to put an end to all of this. Just give me what I want and I'll be out of your hair. Earthmother knows I've more than put in enough time for it. I've made enough Spiritual Soup and Demon Broiled Surprise to feed an army and I've brought you enough Mana Berries to fill the Nagrand Arena. I've even made enough Kaliri Stew that those damnable birds start flying away in a panic when they see me coming!
I'm so close to getting my Chef title. I have Great Feasts prepared for Dinner Impossible (when I can bring myself to give useful food to people that are about to die in mere moments anyways...) and I'll have the last recipes I need for Northrend Gourmet when the vendor gets their new shipment in a week or so. All that remains after that is becoming an Outland Gourmet, which brings it back to you.
In closing, please give me my Stormchops recipe and I promise I won't do anything uncouth like use you as a training dummy or drop you from the Scryer's Tier.
Have a nice day,
Rags
Monday, January 5, 2009
Slight Differences in Tanking: Pre-Pull Procedure
Solannis: Hey Rags, what's your pre-pull checklist look like?
Ragar: Checklist?
Solannis: Yeah, you know, all the stuff you have to do before you can start the fight. Mine's kinda long. First I make sure everyone's got their blessings, then I check to see if Righteous Fury is up. If those are all up, then I see if I need to drink and top off my mana before the fight starts. Once all that's taken care of, then I put up a seal and find a spot to tank. I throw an Avenger's Shield at one of them, then drop a Consecration and wait for them to show up, assuming I don't have to line-of-sight pull them. How about you?
Ragar: Shoot.
Solannis: That's it? That's your entire procedure?
Ragar: Sometimes I mix it up and use Heroic Throw. Usually though I'm lazy/impatient and Charge in to get things started faster. Oh, and sometimes I use a shout, but there's usually another warrior or two in my groups, so I don't always have to do that.
Solannis: I hate you so very much.
Ragar: Duly noted.
Ragar: Checklist?
Solannis: Yeah, you know, all the stuff you have to do before you can start the fight. Mine's kinda long. First I make sure everyone's got their blessings, then I check to see if Righteous Fury is up. If those are all up, then I see if I need to drink and top off my mana before the fight starts. Once all that's taken care of, then I put up a seal and find a spot to tank. I throw an Avenger's Shield at one of them, then drop a Consecration and wait for them to show up, assuming I don't have to line-of-sight pull them. How about you?
Ragar: Shoot.
Solannis: That's it? That's your entire procedure?
Ragar: Sometimes I mix it up and use Heroic Throw. Usually though I'm lazy/impatient and Charge in to get things started faster. Oh, and sometimes I use a shout, but there's usually another warrior or two in my groups, so I don't always have to do that.
Solannis: I hate you so very much.
Ragar: Duly noted.
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