Sometimes I surprise even myself...

... and if you don't get the reference then you fail, hardcore.

I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts while my ridiculously busy schedule of ridiculousness keeps me from writing anything meaningful.

After our bug-filled jaunt into ICC last week, we decided to start fresh this week even though we only got 5 bosses down last week... And due to illness/inability to form coherent sentences/real life causing low attendance/etc, we waited until Wednesday night to go in this week.

To make a much longer story very short: we smashed 7 bosses (Lower Spire + Fester, Rot, and Princes).  A typical first night for us.

I was surprised by a couple of things during the run, though, that I wanted to share.

First, remember a few posts back?  I said that the death of cat DPS was greatly exaggerated?  Boy was I right.

Now, I realize they thought it was underpowered and made a couple of changes to bump it up.  They may have done so even before I posted my previous thoughts.  They may have done a little before then, and a little after.  I'm here today to confirm that cat DPS is most definitely alive and well, even before the Cataclysm.

For the first time in my experience, I actually led the DPS chart on a couple of fights.  One of them by a good margin.

At the end of the Saurfang fight I was sporting over 13k DPS.  Once I get near my gaming machine again I can try to post up a screenshot - I got one that should show the Recount breakdown to show how much is attributed to melee, Rake, Rip, Shred, and Ferocious Bite.  Much like pre-4.0, the breakdown was fairly even - roughly 25% each going to melee, Rip, and Shred, with the remaining 25% divided up among Ravage, Rake, and FB. 

After a top half performance on Rotface, we moved to Festergut.  We had a mage leading the chart for most of the fight, but I was a close second until we hit 25%.  It is so incredibly liberating to actually have something to do differently when the Raid Leader announces "Kill shot range."  Anyway, mere seconds before Fester fell down I passed him, finishing with 12.5k DPS to his 12.3k.  The breakdown of damage was shifted slightly.  I don't have the screenshots to compare at hand (I will offer more details once I do), but while the same general breakdown showed, it was shifted.  (i.e. Rip had the highest percentage on Saurfang, IIRC, and Shred had the highest on Fester, again, unless my memory is failing me.)

I'm loving Nom Nom Nom, even if it did get the much less cool name Blood in the Water.  Once the boss is in range, your life becomes Shred/Rake to 5 CPs, FB, do this two or three times depending on the time left on Savage Roar, then Shred/Rake to 5 CPs and Savage Roar, wash, rinse, repeat and watch the boss die.  Since you don't really have to worry about refreshing Rip, the only timer you really have to watch at that point is Savage Roar.

Speaking of timers, I was moderately more impressed with my output because I haven't been using a debuff tracker addon.  Last time I tried to load BadKitty, it was broken, and I haven't checked in the past week or so to see if it was fixed.  I suppose it's technically harder to play this way, but given the proclamations of doom and gloom for Kitty DPS I wasn't worried about it until Cata actually dropped.  So I was doubly surprised to find myself on top of the chart.

Moving on... My DPS as a tank seemed relatively high as well.  There were even a couple of fights that I beat out a couple of our lower-geared folks that just must have had a bad fight that boss.  I dunno *shrug*.

Speaking of tanking, my single-target threat has been WAY up - to the point where I'm stealing threat from our other tanks if I don't watch it - while my AOE threat has been way down, so-so at best.  That 6-second cooldown on Swipe is a pain in my arse.  Tab-targeting helps, but having the Pulverize buff fully powered helps as well, and you need to consume 3 stacks of Lacerate to get there, which requires focusing on one target.  I still don't have a good handle on how to get and hold AOE threat, but I also realize that I might not have that until Cata comes and we get Thrash.

In completely unrelated matters, I finally completed the holiday uber-meta.  Picked a candy bucket in Telaar and got Achievement spammed...  Got my Violet Proto-Drake and danced in the... wait, I already spent 5k gold to get 310% flying.  blizz can I have my 5k back?  See, what I was reading over the past few weeks (sorry, I'm a bad blogger and don't have sources to link, it's been too long and I don't remember where I read them to begin with, but Wowwiki confirms it) said that if you already had a 310% speed mount, you got Master Flying for free, but this was not true if you gained the mount afterward.  So, I spent my 5k, and then heard afterward that enough people complained about the holiday meta that they changed it so that it granted the Master flying skill.  Thus I curse my impatience but please Blizzard give me my 5k back.

Anyway.... cheers!

Pre-Cata 4.0 Bear Thoughts

So my guild went in to ICC 25 this week a day late due to the patch, to try to relearn on the go how the game is played, so I got a good look at how to do things bear-wise until Dec. 7th.  I was actually pleasantly surprised with a few things, but I thought I'd roll that in to how to Bear in patch 4.0!

I'll cover all of the abilities in more complete detail in a later set of posts...

But first off, here is the spec I went with for my first go around...


Bear Build for 4.0!

Without the points to get to Perseverance (which I'll want at 85), I actually had one more point to use in the Feral tree than I will when I get that far.  We'll have 5 more points then, 2 of which will be in Natural Shapeshifter to get to Tier 2 resto, 3 in Perseverance, and I will find 1 point from somewhere (current odds are to take one out of Stampede) at that point for Master Shapeshifter... but we'll see.

For now... that looks like a solid build.  I have all the points in everything I want in the Feral tree, plus Heart of the Wild.  I personally don't think it would be bad, while using 4p t10 armor, to put 3 points in King of the Jungle to enhance Enrage even further for in-combat use, but excepting the tier bonus there's no reason to put points there at all.

On a side note, the tooltip for the four piece bonus to t10 armor still reads that "Enrage no longer reduces your armor and instead..."  I'm hoping they actually updated the mechanic so that it doesn't make you take extra damage, because Enrage no longer reduces armor anyway.  Even if they didn't, the bonus makes you take less damage, and more than overcomes the extra damage you take from Enrage anyway, so... I guess it all works out.  Anyway, back to the task at hand.

Tanking seemed... a little clunky to me.  Times were, the only rotationally used abilities Bears had on cooldowns were FFF and Mangle.  Now we've added Swipe and Maul to the mix, and given us an ability that wants us to build up Lacerate stacks, then remove them, AND an ability that wants us to have Lacerate ticking all the time.

So, in short, there's more buttons for us to press, and more limitations in how and when to press them.  To make matters worse, Maul and Swipe both now cost 30 rage (although Swipe's rage cost is supposed to be coming down, and word is they're reducing the threat generation to match, but keeping the cooldown.)  I can't say that I'm entirely pleased with that change - the 6 second cooldown on Swipe is a royal pain - but at least we'll be able to use Swipe at the beginning of a pull for initial aggro now.

I found myself doing things distinctively different for single-target and AOE pulls, which was... not entirely true previously.  For single-target, Mangle and FFF followed by Maul.  Maul and Mangle when off cooldown, fill in the space with Lacerates until 3 stacks, then Pulverize.  If you have the Pulverize buff up, 3 stacks of Lacerate, and Maul and Mangle are on cooldown... FFF again.  If that's also on cooldown... then Swipe, or consider Pulverizing to refresh the buff duration.  Doing this, I've been putting out comparatively massive threat - typically outpacing our DK and Warrior tanks.  Of course, maybe they just don't have their rotations down yet, or maybe I had rogue/hunter threat help, I don't know for sure.

For AOE pulls, I tended to start out with Lacerate, Pulverize immediately to have some buff up, then Swipe.  From there, I was tab-target Maul, Mangle, and Lacerate wherever I needed threat.  Swipe when off cooldown, and Pulverize whenever I could a) eat more stacks of Lacerate than the current buff had, or b) the buff was about to fall off.  I found myself sometimes having no issues with rage at all, and sometimes being rage-starved it seemed no matter what I did.  Either way, I was getting compliments from several folks on our run with doing awesome threat.  One player who has regularly had issues with generating just a little too much threat said he was going all-out and couldn't catch me.  Again, maybe I had help, but that certainly gave me some confidence.

All in all I didn't have many problems with threat generation, and when I did they seemed to be tied to rage starvation.

On the downside, the first night we got to Saurfang and had to stop because the door was bugged and wouldn't open after he died.  The second night, we killed Rotface before giving up because several of our players were having bug issues with the raid instances - getting dropped out of the instance, not being able to come back in, WoW crashing when they came in, WoW crashing when they were summoned - just generally annoying bugs.  I hope they get it all fixed soon.

I haven't had a lot of chances to cat yet, but I have a few thoughts I'll share when I get the time to.  As for my last post about it, I realized later I did my dummy testing after they buffed us a little bit.  Anyway, happy hunting!

The Little Druid that Could

Awhile back I was running some regular commentary about my guild and the progress we'd been making in ICC and whatever other random game or real life thought crossed my mind.  Well... I figure since I took more than a month to write the first post of my Kitty primer I should ramble on awhile about what's been going on, starting, of course, with the most important person on the planet...

WARNING: POOPY DIAPERS AHEAD!

Kaethir's Cub

My little one was born, of course, back near the end of March.  She's grown from the measly 6lb 3oz she was at birth to a whopping 10lb 7oz as of a week or so ago...  Needs more meat on her bones, she's not gonna tank any bosses at that size!

She's doing great, no jaundice or major problems, and she's been sleeping through the night almost since the day my wife went back to work.  She's been "talking" for awhile now, smiling and giggling and generally making our lives wonderful.

Not to say she's perfect, but, well, she's perfect! She has of course the times that she decides to poop while you're changing her diaper... four times in a row... but I couldn't have asked for a better infant.  The few times she's cried there's always been a reasonable reason (gas, constipation, or the doctor sticking her with a giant needle) and so far she's just been a wondrous little miracle.

Sorry, I'm a new Dad, sometimes I just have to get mushy about her.

Movies

I don't recall mentioning much of anything about movies before, but I enjoy good Sci-Fi, Adventure, and Action flicks as much as the next person and I wanted to mention that Iron Man 2 and Avatar are both really good films that have come out in the last few months.  You should see them, or so I would have you believe.

Also, I saw an advertisement for The Expendables.  Anything with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Terry Crews is going to be either really, really good, or really, phenomenally bad.  I'm cautiously optimistic.


One final note on movies and then I'll quit.  In a moment of masochism I decided to DVR Transmorphers when I saw it on Encore.  I noticed this little gem pile of awful awhile back in Blockbuster.  Incidentally, it came out a little before Transformers, which was an infinitely better movie.  I watched about 20-30 minutes of it (that I can't get back) before deciding that there was no redeeming quality to it, at all.  IMHO, and in no particular order, it had bad acting, directing, casting, special effects, music, choreography, and writing, and the plot (which seemed like some inane mashup of the Matrix and Transformers) had to have been written by a dyslexic chimpanzee.  Save yourself.

Epic Adventurers and ICC

On with the show.

When last we left our impaled imperiled heroes, Epic Adventurers had finally downed Deathbringer Saurfang in 25-man mode.  We've had a few changes to our raiding schedule since then, but we've continued to press onward.

Our progression 10-man team (which I, unfortunately, am unable to participate in) has downed Festergut, Rotface, and the Blood Princes, while our 25-man team is regularly one-shotting the first 6 bosses (through Saurfang, plus Festergut and Rotface) in one night.

We run a fun/alt 10-man run on Sunday nights, which regularly clears through Saurfang.  The group I led in this past Sunday took a couple of shots at Rotface but couldn't pull it off.

I have been learning more and more about the intricacies of playing a Feral DPS, and I've had occasional opportunities to tank even on our 25-man runs, which has been a blast for me.  I've been topping 8k DPS against Saurfang, without optimizing my gems.  I share some gear between my sets, so it's impractical to completely optimize for either, and I think I've done well with the limitations I have.

The big team is currently stumbling over the Dreamwalker.  The strategy we've been employing is to have just 2 tanks to hold down the baddies, each one generally hanging out at the point of the wall in between the spawn points on each side of the green dragon, with the melee DPS roughly divided up between the sides and the ranged DPS and heals more or less roaming around the middle, assisting wherever it is needed.  Owing to the nature of the fight, we've been running a little healer heavy.

We seem to be having some difficulty keeping up.  I'm not entirely certain where the problem is.  This is complicated by the fact that due to my reduced raiding schedule, I'm not there every week. 

It has been suggested to me that we should use 3-4 tanks, split up the DPS more, and engage the Adds closer to their spawn points.  I'm a little leery of the idea, but I may propose it to our raid leader as something to try.  I'm sure we'll get it figured out soon.

Two posts in three days?  Is the ground getting cold for anybody else?

Now For Something Completely Different!

While I lay around and try to build a wall as a base for a shed in my backyard thereby avoiding getting pictures of my new little cub up, I'd like to drop an entry into the "Asshat of the Day" bin.

I hopped on to do a quick random, and finding no guildmates on I went ahead and hopped in as a tank.  The loading screen dropped me into an Utgarde Keep... one that had just barely started already, as they had cleared the group just at the top of the stairs inside the door.  There was a Shaman healing, a hunter, a warrior, and one other (sorry, I can't remember clearly) DPS, and me the big bear.

We said hello and started moving.  I pulled one guy because I could time it right, then pulled one of the two groups.  A little mishap in rage generation left me out at the end of that fight, and my enrage down... and the warrior pulled the next group.  Hoping he was just a little overeager, I waded in and we downed the group with no problems... but while still looting the bodies, he pulled the next two guys.

He then proceeded to pull the first group with a Forge Master before I was even close enough to FFF.

It was at this point that I said, and I quote, "Please stop pulling for me, k thx."  I got no response, but I hoped I had gotten the message across.

Up through the proto-drakes everything went mostly fine, although he continually pushed the edge of what I was doing.  The first group through the door on the far side, though, he just couldn't wait and charged in before I did... but barely, so I just went with it.

We came into the Prince's room, and I moved forward enough to FFF one of the four Vyr'kul in the room, and then I backed up to wait for them to come to me and ensure we didn't accidentally aggro the boss.  This, however, was apparently too slow of a tactic for the warrior, who charged in to the middle of them as I was still moving backward to pull them further.

It was at this point that I decided it was time to invoke the, "You pull it, you tank it" maxim.

After this champ keeled over dead (I apologize if the healer was actually trying to keep him up; the healer was (I think) the lowest-geared character on the run), I charged in and grabbed all of them.  I took my sweet time to make sure we had gotten all of our loot, and then I rezzed his sorry butt.

His response?  "Now you've pissed me off."

I actually think he tried to pull aggro from me for the rest of the run.  Not sure if he taunted or not, I just did my thing and never lost aggro on anything that mattered.  I outgeared him by a fairly significant margin, so I don't think he *could* have taken aggro from me without taunting.  He continually toed the line of charging in before me, apparently trying to time it so that I was already hitting the button when he charged, and on a couple of the less-threatening baddies he did even go in first, and I let him take the things he hit.  If I'd have had more time I'd have let him die another time or two just to make my point, but I was in a hurry and he never did anything incredibly out of line (like charge a boss...) so I went with it.

Let me be clear, folks, when I'm tanking heroics, I may not be the fastest tank out there, but I don't mess around.  I stop after kills only long enough to loot and double-check my healer's mana, and I move again.  If that's not fast enough for you, be ready for a repair bill, and don't get pissed off at me for it, because its your own damned fault.

Amoroso of Malfurion, you are the asshat of the day.

So close!

By chance I got picked up by a guild group going in to Gundrak over the weekend to try to get Less-rabi.  It only took us 2 tries, and since I have such a wonderful guild they also helped me pick up Share the Love, and that leaves me just 2 achievements away from Glory of the Hero.  It also gave me the opportunity to honor the Elder in Gun'drak, and I took a few minutes to pick up the last few Elders around Northrend, leaving me just 4 dungeon Elders from the meta.

A quick note on Less-rabi!...

Most of the strategies I read for it were designed before everybody overgeared the instances so completely.  It is now doable with just 3 interrupts (maybe less) if you have a suitably geared party.  We did it with one Bash, one interrupt from a DK, and one Kick from our rogue, and he was dead before he could try to cast again.  It's still a rough achievement, because that last interrupt needs to be ON THE BALL, the cast time is so short that if you are mid-GCD when it comes you will not successfully stop it.

Hopefully, within a couple of weeks, I will have the opportunity to go get Respect Your Elders and My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time, for my ugly new mount.  And once I pick up those four Elders, I will have completed 3 of the meta achievements needed for the uber-meta and the 310% speed mount.  Hopefully they won't do something silly and remove that.

Nothing really interesting to report otherwise, I'm still mulling over my options with respect to specs.

Blarg.  I am ded.

Ramblings

Rambling the First, on Hybrids

My apologies to the author whose post inspired me, I cannot recall which blogger it was to give credit.  I can, however, use a post from my own blog's history as a starting point.

In examining the fact that Druids simply don't follow the rules, I mentioned the fact that we can, to a certain extent, shift roles mid-fight by shifting forms.  While this remains true and does showcase our hybrid capabilities, we aren't and can't be good enough at a backup role to be truly hybrid, with half an exception for bears and cats.

Blizzard has made a point of making characters with multiple roles specialize and remove their hybrid capabilities in order to be competitive with other classes.  While this is a good thing in general - hybrids shouldn't be able to be the best simultaneously at 2 things - it has the (I hope) unintended consequence of removing some of what I consider the key benefits of playing a hybrid class.  While being able to switch between tank, healer, and 2 different forms of DPS is nice, we can't effectively switch in the middle of a fight, which would seem to me to be one of the key benefits of being a shapeshifter.

The shifting of stats for bears means that bears and cats can fake it - the gear they want shares stats, with the exception of cloaks, amulets, rings, and trinkets - but you're not going to have "enough" survivability as a bear or be solid enough at DPS as a cat to make this worthwhile, and if you've taken the talents to be really great at one you're going to be missing key talents for the other, not to mention the glyph clashing.  The other two forms that share key stats - boomkin and tree - cannot really share because the forms that make each great are not attainable at the same time, and even if they were, you need spirit as a tree and hit as a crit chicken, and each is not needed by the other.  This means that unlike cats and bears, where the gear (if not the gems and enchants) can be shared, trees and boomkin are unable to really move between each other.

They are doing away with a number of secondary stats in Cataclysm.  Perhaps some of the Druid's hybrid-ness will return, but I doubt it.

In this blogger's humble opinion, the era of the true hybrid is over, and has been for quite some time.  Being one of the things that drew me to this class, I hope it can come back, but I mourn its loss and expect that it is gone for good.

Rambling the Second, on Dual-spec

On a side note, Blizzard can we please have 7 specs?  I would so have one of each Druid spec and a PvP spec or three.  I would even pay 1000g apiece, at least for 2 more than I have now, so I could have a cat and boomkin spec.  What's that you said?  No other class in the game could use more than 3, and most couldn't even really do that?  So what, *I* could use it! ;)


Rambling the Third, on My Specs, My Guild, and Raids

Speaking of specs, I'm toying with a couple of ideas.  While I enjoy making like a tree and leaving (ooooh, bad pun!), I have an issue that I've been pigeonholed into that role in my guild's raids (long story, if you've read my earlier posts you should have a taste) and it causes me to have an issue with gear.  Specifically, I don't get the opportunity to roll on gear for my main spec.

I've attempted to discuss the issue with my guild and raid leader, and while a resolution may still be forthcoming, I'm not hopeful.

This leads me to some decision making regarding my options.  The last resort, always, is to leave and try to find another guild.  I'd like to avoid that if I can, because frankly I love my guild, I'm friends in real life with a number of the members, and I don't really relish the thought of trying to find a new one that I would fit in to.  Since I don't want to do that, I'm left with trying to find options that simultaneously allow me to stay in the guild, continue running raids, and actually have a chance to roll on gear for my main spec sometime.

The second-most extreme (beyond /gquit) option I have thought of is removing the ability to do anything but tank by respeccing by secondary spec into another bear spec.  I think I've just about ruled that out though, because I believe that would lead to no guild raids for me.

I could also forsake the 25-man raids to run my own 10-mans.  However, with Wednesday and Thursday claimed for 25-man runs and Tuesday a hit-or-miss night to have the folks in my guild on to play, that seems like an iffy proposition at best.  I tried running Mondays in the past, and by then most of our players have their mains locked.  My Friday and weekend availability is not steady enough to run then.  Plus, given that I have committed to my significant other that I will only raid on a regular basis on one night a week, that would preclude me from running in the guild 25-mans, which I also would like to continue doing.

The option that seems to present me with the best situation is to change my offspec from tree to kitty DPS.  This would allow me to roll on leather gear and weapons that I would actually use for my main spec even if I'm in my offspec, because the two forms share stats now.  The major downside to this plan is that I lose the flexibility of having a healing spec.  If I'm not tanking I become just the meat in the room.  (For all you DPS out there, I'm kidding.  I love you guys.)  Also, I still couldn't roll on tanking accessories for things such as the cloaks, rings, amulets, and trinkets, but I can get by with Emblem items for most of those.

Of course, this plan also requires me to do the research and take the time to learn how to be good with the class with the hardest DPS rotation in the game... or so I've been told it is.  Stay tuned, my blog name may become somewhat of a misnomer.

Rambling the Fourth, on Blog Changes

Check out some changes on the site, I added some perma-links to the bear and tree primers on the right, and a real blogroll and limited the blogroll updates to the latest 5.  Also, I actually touched my profile.  No pics yet, but I'm working on it!

Rambling the Fifth.... ok I'm done.

As always, thanks for reading, and have a wonderful week!

We might get TWO buttons?

I'd like to point out a blue post by Ghostcrawler that I came across...

Yes, a lot of the focus of the post is warrior tanking, but there's some other aspects thrown in.

The part I'd like to point out is this:

3) There are differences in how tanks generate AE threat, and therefore damage. Warriors are jealous of the DK and especially paladin persistent area-based damage, and the others are jealous of the warrior's burst AE threat on incoming adds. Druids are jealous of anyone with more than one button.

For the love of Elune, yes, please, give us something else we can use instead of just spamming swipe and hoping our gear is strong enough to out-threat everybody else with it.

The Guns of Icecrown Citadel

Illorien, Renakashin, and I finally managed to get another scheduled guild run into ICC 10-man Wednesday night.

This is just our second outing as a group.  One of our guild officers was running a second 10-man group in parallel that night as well.  Epic Adventurers had not, as of the beginning of these groups, downed any boss in ICC except for Marrowgar, and the group the three of us were leading had not even done that.

Wednesday was a day for progressing!

We had a bit of a time sorting out players for each group and a lot of turnover at the last two DPS spots in our run, but we ended up with this group dynamic:

Tanks:
Illorien and Myself

Heals:
Renakashin, another Holy Paladin, and a Resto Druid

DPS:
Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Ret Pally

So a bit late we started in.  My last post on ICC10 detailed our troubles with regards to the trash leading up to Marrowgar.  Tonight there was no such trouble.  We managed to lose a player or two to lacking of target marking and not being quick enough on taunts of the trap-spawned saber-lashing Deathbound Wards, but no wipes and we were shortly facing down the monstrosity that is Lord Marrowgar.

Lord Marrowgar!

We originally stayed with the strategy we had tried (and been getting better with) on our last run - tanking Marrowgar in the middle, spreading out the DPS and trying to contain the insanity.  Our first attempt was going fairly well until I crashed and had to reboot.  I didn't see what happened while my computer was starting up again, but I can't imagine it was pretty.

When I got back in it was suggested that we tank him off to the side of the room instead of the middle.  Something about him only being able to use his fire in the same general direction or something - being a tank, I'm in front of him and I can't tell you what it looks like from the other side, but somebody felt this would help with being able to avoid the fire (or possibly bring everybody closer together for killing bone prisons.)  It was also noted that he seemed to like to be in one corner or the other at the end of his whirlwind, which would mean less moving him and the raid having to avoid it.

It was an excellent suggestion, and our second attempt was flawless.  Illorien and I occasionally had to switch sides of the room - he really did end his whirlwind in one end of the room or the other basically every time - but with Feral Charge I was able to close the distance quickly, and Illorien was quick enough to stay more or less with me.  Our DPS worked well at breaking prisons and getting back on the boss, and he went down without a single player death.  Progress for our crew and Frost Emblems for the win!

The trash before Lady Deathwhisper didn't provide anywhere near the challenge that the trash before Marrowgar did our first time in.  Then again, if we'd known anything about the Deathbound Wards the first time in, we wouldn't have had nearly the issues we did.  In any case, it was a simple matter to pull a small group at a time and down them healers, casters and melee.  The two big spider-looking guys are a minor pain, but they went down without causing us any issues.

Lady Deathwhisper!

For anybody that hasn't done this fight (and if you've found your way here, you probably have!), it's not an exceptionally difficult fight, if you have reasonable DPS and good coordination.  Simply put, you have to maintain enough DPS on Deathwhisper's shield to kill her before she enrages while still having enough of the right kinds of DPS to take out the adds in each wave before a new wave spawns.

We tried a couple of different plans, but the one that worked for us was this:  We put the ret Pally on Deathwhisper full time.  The Warrior and Hunter were targeting the Adherents, while the Warlock and Mage targeted the Fanatics.  Once all of any group were down, the ranged DPS switched to Deathwhisper until the new group of adds spawned.  We had the Pally and the Warrior switched at first, it took folks awhile to figure out exactly what was needed on the adds, and Ill and I found out we needed to mark targets for DPS to focus on when there were multiple targets for physical/magical DPS.

While Ill and I had to tank the Fanatics, our damage was focused on the Adherents, since that's where we were limited less.  I did discover fairly soon, though, that I had one single ability that could do more than 100 damage to the Fanatics:  GO GO FERAL FAERIE FIRE.  Yeah, I know, 1000 damage every 6 seconds or so isn't much, but it helps, dangit!  One of our attempts ended up doomed when we lost both our Mage and our Warlock with multiple Fanatics up.  Let me tell you how much you're not going to be able to kill them without magical damage.

I think Illorien and I failed a little in our explanation of the fight - our successful run had more than once in which the adds went down with 15+ seconds to spare before the next group spawned.  I can only surmise that we had DPS switching to the wrong adds because we were calling out to focus fire on an Empowered Adherent or Deformed Fanatic, and we hadn't clearly laid out that you need to stay on the correct type of add because you can't really help with the others.

On what was to be our last attempt of the night because of time, we broke through her shield with all adds down and just under 3 minutes left on her enrage timer.  The nice thing about this point in the fight is that it takes a ton less time to take her down than it does to take her shield down.  It took us less than 2 minutes to bring her down after her shield fell.  On a high from a successful fight, we decided to press on and try the Gunship Battle.

The trash in between is PVP-ish except for the frost drake.  None of it caused us much issue, though.  Unlike the Faction Champions fight in ToC, these aren't true PVP-like mobs, and they go down a LOT easier.  The drake's a chump, too, and easy to kill.

The Gunship Battle!

It took awhile to explain this fight because most of our raid hadn't been here before.  There's a lot of random stuff to talk about, but here's the gist of what we did.

Our raiding party to the other boat consisted of Illorien, Renakashin, the Warlock, and the Warrior.  Our guns were manned by the Hunter and the ret Pally.  Everything was going well up until the end of our first raiding party trip across to the other side.  Rena had issues getting back across and died.  Fortunately, she was close enough to the edge that our tree was able to Rebirth from our boat, and before long we were up and going again.  Our Warlock went down, then our Mage.  I tried to Rebirth the Mage but a portal opened up and he got one-shotted by the mob that appeared on top of him.

We added our hunter to the raiding party going across.  Somehow, through all this craziness, we managed to stay ahead of the Horde.  When we lost our ret Pally shortly before the end of a raid to the other boat, some folks were ready to wipe - but we were close enough to the end that Illorien hopped in the cannon in his place, and before another battle mage came out, Orgrim's Hammer fell from the skies.

With no more trash and still on the high of success, we put off sleep for just a little longer to give a shot at Deathbringer Saurfang.

Deathbringer Saurfang!

I probably didn't do a good job of explaining this fight - I know I failed to mention why I was spreading everybody out as much as I was.  We failed, but with it already being late and in a one-more-shot mode for the last 2 encounters we decided to call it for the night.  The deathblow was 2 of our healers going down.  I think we gave up a little too much blood power before that happened anyway - I was off on my taunt from Ill, among other things - although we did burn down the blood beasts relatively quickly.  I'm positive our next run will be even more successful.

EA's other group had also reached Saurfang by the time we ended.  As of the time of writing of this post I do not know if they were successful or not.  In either case, our guild made a huge step in progression through the Citadel.

Thanks for joining me on this little detour!  I know we may be a little behind the curve, as new content dropped this week and we haven't quite cleared the old content yet, but this was a big success for us and we look forward to more consistent success in the future.

How to Make Friends.... or Something Like That

Sorry, the tree post is still coming, but it'll have to wait.  I'm busy, and want to put a positive note out today.

I had one of my best cross-server pugs the other day, and I felt it deserved mention.

We pulled Nexus, and I casually glanced at folk's gear scores before we started.  3 of the 5 were 5k+, and the other two didn't miss it by much.  I figured this would be a clean, easy run.  We feasted and buffed and off we went!

Little did I know how clean and easy.  17 minutes later, a scant 2 minutes after the LFG buff wore off, Keristraza collapsed.

I picked up Split Personality on Grand Magus.  She was down nearly 60% before her first and only split.

For the first time in my WoW experience, I really did chain-pull most of the instance, pulling each group before we were finished with the last.  Nobody really had any issue with it.  My pally healer did almost as much damage as she did heals outside of boss fights.

I was impressed.  It's times like this that I wish Blizzard had implemented an addendum to their cross-server ignore feature, that would give you a preference for people in cross-server groups.  I think that would be fun, and allow more interaction and relationship-building than the current system, perhaps even sister guilds on other servers.

Also, I keep growing gradually closer to my Glory of the Hero proto-drake.  I think I'm going to make a serious push to get it in the next month or so.

Hope folks had a happy holiday season!  Back to the grindstone.

Frost Emblem Accessories

*EDIT*

I've changed my mind a bit about the importance of the Corroded Skeleton Key.  Please see this post for details.

*END EDIT*

As a followup to Tier 10 and the Bear, I'd like to take a quick look at what is available from an Accessories standpoint for bears.  There's not a lot so this should go quick!

Trinket

Corroded Skeleton Key
Stats: +228 Sta, Use: Absorbs 3200 damage, lasts 20 sec.
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Great trinket, gives a purchasable upgrade from the Coren Direbrew stamina trinkets.  Meh-inducing use ability, but better again that the Direbrew ones.  Will purchase sometime in the middle of my planned leather item upgrades.  The issue at hand is that the only significant increase is in stamina, which will only help in that it will let me back off some of my two-color gems to single color because I won't need the stamina bump as much.

None of the other trinkets are worth talking about.

Idol/Relic

Idol of the Crying Moon
Stats:  Periodic damage from Rake or Lacerate causes you to gain 44 Agi for 15 seconds.  Stacks 5 times.
Cost: 30 Emblem of Frost

I like this item a LOT.  I'll take 220 Agi over the 135 from Idol of the Corruptor or 200 dodge rating from the Idol of Mutilation any day.  I'm probably going to insert the combination of this and the trinket (90 badges) at the top of my list, ahead of my leather items, as the next leather item on my list is 95 badges.

Cloak

There are a few options here which seem promising, but probably only one we want.  Each of them costs 50 Emblem of Frost.  Here they are:

Might of the Ocean Serpent
Stats: 177 a, 95 Str, 103 Sta, Y socket, 45 exp, 65 ArP

Recovered Scarlet Onslaught Cape
Stats: 177 a, 90 Agi, 90 Sta, B socket, 60 crit, 105 AP, 52 ArP

Sentinel's Winter Cloak
Stats: 737 a, 90 Str, 124 Sta, Y socket, 48 def, 48 dodge

At first, I thought this was a slam dunk, but on second thought I'm not quite as certain.  I like the Might's expertise, but it is otherwise inferior to the Cloak.  We'll rule that out.  The Cloak nets you 139 Sta (assuming 15 from a 2-color gem), while the Cape nets you only 120 (assuming 30 from the socket).  I like the dodge rating, but 90 Agi will net you more dodge than that 48 dodge rating.  560 more armor is nice, but it's not affected by our multiplier.  I don't think either one is a bad choice, but I think I may be going for the Cape rather than the Cloak.

There are no rings or neck items available via Frost Emblems.  Given my current items, the cloak will probably come after I've manage to upgrade most of my leather items.

The tree post is coming soon!

Abbreviations Glossary:

a: armor
AP: Attack Power
ArP: Armor Penetration
exp: expertise

Stat Abbreviations:
Agi: Agility
Sta: Stamina
Str: Strength

Socket Abbreviations:
B: Blue
M: Meta
R: Red
Y: Yellow

Tier 10 and the Bear

I'd like to take an in-depth look at the stat bonuses on Tier 10 gear and the other items available with Emblems of Frost for bear tanks.  If you've read this blog at all, you probably know already that fairly soon I'll follow up with a look at the gear with respect to trees.

Bear with me, these are going to be long.  Perhaps not quite Bearwalls, but long.

I'll be comparing this gear to the Tier 9 level gear as well as trying to decide what's the best value - the most bang for your Emblem buck, if you will.  Of course, this will depend on the gear you're currently wearing.  If I say a particular piece is the best upgrade, but you're wearing an item from ToGC in that slot and still using blues elsewhere, replace the blues first.

The Tier 9 level I'll be using is the base level - for those of us that did some 25-man ToC (or heroic ToC at all) and may have picked up trophies or heroic versions of gear, remember that your mileage will vary, because your Tier 9 gear is a little better than what I'm putting forth here.  Also note that I'm not examining accessories (back, neck, rings, and trinkets) yet.  If I can work up the courage I might tackle that later.

If you are confused as to any abbreviations, please see the end for a glossary.

Without further ado, let me begin.

Head

Tier 9: Malfurion's Headguard of Conquest
Stats: 485 a, 104 Agi, 120 Sta, M/Y sockets, 80 crit, 64 exp., 129 AP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: Hood of Lethal Intent
Stats: 506 a, 120 Agi, 136 Sta, M/Y sockets, 82 hit, 165 AP, 64 ArP
Cost: 75 Emblem of Triumph

Tier 10: Lasherweave Headguard
Stats: 517 a, 144 Agi, 144 Sta, M/R sockets, 88 crit, 143 AP, 80 ArP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

I'm going to go ahead and mention something here at the top that I've noticed across the board.  Take a look at the Tier 9 vs. Hood of Lethal Intent.  I didn't put the iLevel of the items in my summary.  Hood is an iLevel 245, while the Tier 9 is a 232.  Something they did with the purchasable gear is that the individual items are generally better than the tier pieces in-slot if you don't raid enough to get the Trophies (or Marks of Sanctification for Tier 10).  The 2nd level non-heroic tier gear is approximately on par with the pieces you can buy without having to raid.  I'm not sure how I feel about it, but that's what you see here.  The only reason to stay with the T9 gear is if you desperately need the expertise...

It is also good to note that the Hood is a bit more DPS-centric, with hit vs. crit and ArP vs. expertise.  The major stats win out though, and you should take the Hood unless you feel that the Tier bonus is worth the stat drop and you can't afford to lose another piece.

You lose expertise for ArP in the step up to Tier 10 from Tier 9, or hit for crit coming from the Hood.  I'm not excited by the loss either way, but the nice step up in base stats - +40 or 24 Agi, +24 or 8 Sta - far outweighs the loss.  If this pulls you off your hit or expertise caps, try to shift your gems or enchants to compensate.  The downside is that it costs you 95 Frost Emblems to do this step - that's a fairly huge cost.  Let's see how that pans out as we go forward.

Shoulder

Tier 9: Malfurion's Shoulderpads of Conquest
Stats: 447 a, 81 Agi, 89 Sta, Y socket, 60 haste, 119 AP, 52 ArP
Cost: 30 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: Duskstalker Shoulderpads
Stats: 467 a, 93 Agi, 101 Sta, Y socket, 67 crit, 135 AP, 59 ArP
Cost: 45 Emblem of Triumph

Tier 10: Lasherweave Shoulderpads
Stats: 477 a, 107 Agi, 107 Sta, R socket, 71 crit, 126 AP, 63 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

Here we see again the disparity in items available with Triumph Emblems...  And again, unless you want the set bonus, take the Duskstalker piece instead of the Tier-9.

The step up to Tier 10 nets you +26 or +14 Agi, and +18 or +6 Sta.  It has the same secondary stat set as the Duskstalker piece, which loses haste for crit, an acceptable change as a bear.  It also has a red socket instead of yellow, which I consider a plus for a bear - yellow gives us crit or hit, red gives us Agi or dodge.

To compare spending 95 Frost for the head vs. 60 Frost for the shoulders...  Comparatively, 35 badges gets you 10 to 14 Agi and 2 to 6 Sta (depending on which piece you're coming from for each choice.)  That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more stats per Emblem used to spend the 95 Frost, provided you're making the same jump (T9 to T10 or Emblem piece to T10).  Not by much, and I'd probably go ahead and spend the badges early anyway to get the boost while I rebuild to the bigger number.

Chest

Tier 9: Malfurion's Raiments of Conquest
Stats: 596 a, 104 Agi, 120 Sta, R/Y sockets, 74 crit, 70 haste, 161 AP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available.

Tier 10: Lasherweave Raiment
Stats: 636 a, 144 Agi, 144 Sta, R/Y sockets, 96 crit, 159 AP, 80 ArP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: Shadow Seeker's Tunic
Stats: 665 a, 162 Agi, 162 Sta, R/Y/B sockets, 108 crit, 92 exp, 184 AP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

There's a solid upgrade here no matter which way you go, but the Shadow Seeker's Tunic is clearly a MUCH better upgrade than the T10 piece.  +40 or +58 Agi, +24 or +42 Sta, AND an additional blue socket (which equals +30 Sta).

Continuing to examine against the previous most-efficient use of Emblems... I'm taking this over the head item or the shoulders.  It's definitely more efficient than the head, and enough of a boost over the shoulders that it is worth it to me to wait for 95 badges.

I'd also like to point out that I think the secondary stats are better for bears on the Tunic rather than the T10 Raiment.  I want the 4-piece T10 set bonus.  This very well might be the only piece I don't pick up.

Wrist

None.  Oddly enough, the highest wrist purchasable with Emblems require only Emblems of Valor.  I'm moving on...

Hands

Tier 9: Malfurion's Handgrips of Conquest
Stats:  373 a, 81 Agi, 89 Sta, Y socket, 52 hit, 60 crit, 119 AP
Cost:  30 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems:  None Available

Tier 10: Lasherweave Handgrips
Stats: 398 a, 107 Agi, 107 Sta, R socket, 63 haste, 126 AP, 71 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: Cat Burglar's Grips
Stats: 416 a, 120 Agi, 120 Sta, Y/Y sockets, 80 crit, 129 AP, 64 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

I see an interesting dilemma here.  Multiple sockets and 13 better each Agi and Sta, as well as crit vs. haste in secondary stats.  I like the red socket better - I'll use it for an Agi or Agi + Sta gem - but multiple sockets may outweigh it.  It won't outweigh the set bonus in my mind, though, and this isn't enough of an upgrade to make me choose the Cat Burglar's Grips over the T10 piece.

It's also not enough of a bonus to make me spend my hard-won, precious Emblems of Frost here before spending them on the Tunic either, though.  Still going for the chest.

Waist

There are no Tier pieces here, and nothing is available from Triumph Emblems either.  There is a Frost Emblem item, and for comparisons of Emblem spending here it is...

Frost Emblems: Vengeful Noose
Stats: 374 a, 120 Agi, 120 Sta, R/Y sockets, 64 haste, 129 AP, 80 ArP
Cost: 60 Emblem of Frost

For me, and the item I'm coming from, this provides a boost of nearly 50 Agi and 25 Sta, as well as another socket.  That's about the same boost as I'd get out of my chest item with 35 less badges.  We have a new front-runner.

Legs

Tier 9: Malfurion's Legguards of Conquest
Stats: 522 a, 102 Agi, 120 Sta, R/B sockets, 64 hit, 80 crit, 129 AP
Cost: 50 Emblem of Triumph

Triumph Emblems: None available.

Tier 10: Lasherweave Legguards
Stats: 577 a, 144 Agi, 144 Sta, R/Y sockets, 80 exp, 159 AP, 96 ArP
Cost: 95 Emblem of Frost

Frost Emblems: None available.

Here we get it easy, a straight Tier 9 to Tier 10 comparison.  Solid statistical upgrade in Agi and Sta.  I like the expertise on the T10 item, but I like the blue socket on the T9.  38 Agi and 24 Sta for 95 Emblems is not as strong as either the Tunic or the Vengeful Noose.  This might be the 3rd or 4th upgrade I target from among this group of items.

Feet

There are no Tier items for feet, and nothing is available for Emblems of Triumph or Frost.

So, among these items, I'll be targeting the Vengeful Noose first, followed by the Shadow Seeker's Tunic next.  I'll have to examine my secondary stat layout at the time to determine the next upgrade from among the hands, legs, head, and shoulder items.  At that point, I will likely buy them from the cheapest to the most expensive, because there isn't particularly a huge difference in cost to benefit ratio.

Look back soon for the Tree version... or perhaps the Accessories!  Thanks for reading!

Abbreviations Glossary:

a: armor
AP: Attack Power
ArP: Armor Penetration
exp: expertise

Stat Abbreviations:
Agi: Agility
Sta: Stamina
Str: Strength

Socket Abbreviations:
B: Blue
M: Meta
R: Red
Y: Yellow

Yet another Primer Followup

BBB posted an excellent intro to being a bear the other day... you should go read it if you haven't already.

Hope everybody had a great holiday!

The Trash of Icecrown Citadel

I had originally planned on titling this post the Guns of Icecrown Citadel.  Turns out I was a little ambitious in thinking we would make it to the gunship battle on our first trip in.

I had heard that the trash in ICC was rough for any ill-prepared groups.  In ways it was better and in ways it was worse than I had expected... but I'll get to that.

We decided to try to get as good a group together as we could, focusing on getting our best DPS.  We struggled to find healers in our guild willing to come, one of them flat out stating that she was afraid of the place.  We pugged in an excellent but very slightly under-geared priest for the final healing spot...  Here's the breakdown:

Tanks (2):
Me (Bear) and Illorien (DK)

Heals (3):
Holy Paladin (Renakashin, co-leader), Tree Druid and Holy Priest

DPS (5):
Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, 2 Mages

The TRASH!

The first thing you encounter on the way in the door is a pair of undead that are pure melee but explode when killed, doing a fairly decent chunk of damage.  Plus, every so often, another one paths in from the next room.  A little mismanagement of this led to us losing a couple of folks while we cleared them out - once you've taken the top of that set of stairs, they stop coming in from the next room.  There's another group of these that run around the room - we pulled them out and downed them fairly easily.  Illorien held them in place, I pulled them out one at a time for the DPS to go nuts on.

We were at last able to begin moving into the room.  It has essentially 5 sets of mobs, one group in each corner and one dead ahead in the back half of the room.  It also has a special secret surprise, that I'll get to in a moment.  The right and left corners closest to the door each have a humanoid Undead caster and three of the Damned - the exploding undead I mentioned previously.  The corners further from the way in each had a spiderlike Undead caster as well as the groups of the Damned.  The spiders throw random web wraps around that players must be broken out of, and don't appear to have a threat table, or at least cast randomly enough that the threat table doesn't seem to matter.  The group in the middle is made up of 2 of the spiders, 1 of the humanoid Undead casters, and 2 non-explosive melee Undead.  Our general plan of attack for the four corners was for the DK to hold down the melee while the DPS and myself burned down the caster, then for me to pull out the Damned one by one for the DPS to burn.

The corners went smoothly.  The casters really don't like to move, and it's impossible to move the spiders via LOS if any member of the raid is in its LOS.  We discovered with the last group that the DK's death grip can yank the spider out and (at least sometimes) not disturb the group of melee.  It worked, though, and we decided to use a similar plan of attack on the group in the middle, singling out a caster at a time for death, followed by the melee.

Illorien dropped a Death and Decay, and I charged a spider.  It was well on it's way to dying when I hear over Vent, "There's a giant coming...  Giant coming!"  I turned around and saw two gigantic undead slaughtering the ranged DPS and healers.  It was the first of our wipes trying to deal with those two giants.  The one spider went down, but that was it.

Those two giants were epic trash for us.  We tried several strategies for fighting them, all of which failed for various reasons.  You can't pull them out of the room - they run back in and reset.  We tried several different methods to split them up so that the DPS could burn one down without worrying about the other one.  We tried pulling them into the corner of the room...  None of our methods worked... they were too close to the other group so we pulled them, or they managed to take out DPS somehow... Illorien noticed that they were using Saber Lash - an ability Lord Marrowgar also uses - that does melee damage to the target (tank) and his nearest ally... which meant that we absolutely had to have the tanks on top of each other to take the Saber Lashes.

When we realized that, we decided to stop trying to separate them.  Illorien and I grabbed them and brought them to the front edge of the room, just inside where they would step out and reset and far enough away not to aggro the other mobs.  Then we turned them away from the raid and let the DPS burn down one target, while the two of us prayed for healing fast enough that double Saber Lash wouldn't do us in.  It worked like a charm.

The last group of mobs, already down one member from our first run-in with the giants, went down with ease.

The next room, smaller than the last, has just one group of adds in the center, but has two of the giants sleeping on opposite sides of the room, and there's not much room to maneuver without almost certainly waking them up.

Illorien was trying to scoot in a little bit and pull some of the smaller trash and one of the giants woke up.  Since nothing else aggro'd, we counted our blessings and downed it.  We were then able to move in to the now-vacated side and aggro the smaller trash while keeping some distance from the other giant.

It woke up after we had started in on the smaller trash.  I picked it up and burned a couple of cooldowns to stay alive while the DPS dealt with the smaller casters, then Illorien pulled everything else with him to stand in front of the giant.  With both us there, the giant wasn't going to kill us by itself, so the DPS burned down the smaller melee mobs and then we brought down the giant.

After a grueling hour plus we had made it to Lord Marrowgar.

 We wiped several times on him before we ran out of time, as our pug healer had to go guild raid on his main, and several of our guild folks were itching to end early due to early mornings.  We learned a bit, and tried a couple strategies, but I think our group as a whole might not have quite been there, gear-wise.  We tended to do alright in Phase 1 - our folks moved out of the fire and broke down the bone prisons fairly efficiently, our healers were generally able to keep up, and things went smoothly.  Then Phase 2 - the whirlwind - came along, and as long as it wasn't badly timed with respect to a bone prison, we usually handled that fairly well.  Usually the issue came at the end of the whirlwind, when we had a little trouble with folks struggling to keep away from the boss while the tanks dragged him back into position while still staying out of the mass of cold fire on the ground.  Several times we lost people as the second Phase 1 started because of how crazily spread out folks were and the healer's need to focus on the tanks.  I think a combination of being a little short in a couple of places lead to everybody needing to be danged near perfect.

We got him down to almost 50% on one run.

For being our first ever time going in to the instance, I think we did fairly well, especially considering basically none of us have any Heroic ToC gear.

I'm not sure if we'll try again next week, or perhaps give a go at Heroic ToC10.  That was pretty rough on us.

Good luck and hope you get a chance to clear it!

Impromptu Weekend ToC10

I don't often get time to play much on the weekends - family commitments, time with the spouse, and my other two geek-related time consuming hobbies (Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons) combine to form just about the ultimate WoW blockage on the weekends.

Last weekend rolled around with no major plans for Saturday afternoon, I figured I had a good chance to get something done.  I haven't had a chance yet to go in to the Icecrown Citadel raids, illness and houseguests had prevented me from having a chance to do ToC last week, and the weekly raid quest was for Lord Jaraxxus's head, so I decided to try to put together an impromptu run for ToC10.  Encouraged by the fact that we had cleared it last week, I was hopeful to get a run in before dinner plans with the wife, and started putting a group together about 2:00.

Luckily for me, the two friends that have been my co-leaders for the raids weren't able to get into a ToC10 earlier in the week, so their mains weren't saved, and another guildie who has been bringing her healer almost every time was able to come, so we had most of the core tanks and heals we brought previously.  We filled in with one pugged healer and 3 pugged DPS and set off.  It took us until after 2:30 to get it all together, but it worked!  The breakdown:

Tanks (2):
Bear (me!) and DK

Heals (3):
2 Holy Paladins and 1 Disc/Holy Priest

DPS (5):
2 Hunters, 1 Warrior, 1 Rogue, 1 Enh. Shaman

I was hoping for 3 ranged DPS.  Lord Jaraxxus is a little easier with more ranged DPS - there's less need for melee DPS to switch to Mistresses, and those pesky Infernals die that much faster - and gives you more chances to survive issues with Anub.  I was confident that this would work, however, so we ran with it.

The Northrend Beasts!

Everyone was familiar with this fight (even though one of the pugs had only seen it on 25-man), so it went fairly smoothly.  Gormok went down like the chump he is - I started with him, the other tank taunted off of me, I taunted back... I think that was the last time I taunted until he had barely 30k health left.  We lost one of the hunters during the jormungar portion...  so when the first worm fell, the other tank picked up the remaining one, and I shifted out and battle-rezzed him.  Druids cheat so hardcore.  Nobody got hit by Icehowl's charge, so he was easy.  One down, 4 to go.

It's difficult, on our server, to pug into good groups for ToC.  One of our pugs commented at this point, "finally got a good group!"  When everybody knows what they are doing and most of them are geared well for the instance, things tend to go well! :)

We moved on...

Lord Jaraxxus!

A little stategery and we're ready to go for the next boss.  Jaraxxus started out normally, although it took a little long to drop the first Mistress - I don't think the melee DPS switched to her right away, but once they did she fell quickly.  The infernals came next, and this is where we started to get into a little trouble.  It was my fault mostly, I think, for not marking which infernal to focus on.  They're already difficult to really hold aggro on (at least for me... maybe I'm doing something wrong...) and without either excess ranged DPS or me marking a clear target it took too long to down them and they ran too wild near the melee, did too much damage, overstressing the healing.  There were still one or two of them up when the second Mistress came.

Things got a little crazy after the second set of infernals came.  We were already behind due to the craziness of the first round of adds, and at some point, I forget exactly when, the DK, the other tank, went down.  I immediately had to stop what I was doing, of course, and pick up Jaraxxus, trying my best to keep the adds aggro'd on me.  We lost a couple other folks - three or four in total - but beyond me trying to keep ahold of them we ignored the adds the rest of the way and we'd done enough damage before starting to lose people that he went down just before things were really about to get out of hand.  It was a little close, but two bosses down, and no wipes yet!

The Faction Champions!

Our kill order: Priest (not Shadow, I don't remember if he's Disc or Holy), healing Shaman, Warlock, Rogue, Boomkin, Paladin.  We wiped once or twice - our first run went pretty well and we downed three of them, especially good considering our hunters forgot to use frost traps and I called out the wrong target after the priest went down.  (I was sloppy that day, I don't know why.)  The DK pestered the paladin, keeping him (or is it a her?) essentially out of the fight.  The rogue went down early the first try due to burst damage, and losing his kick interrupt really hurt.

The champions continue to give us more trouble on our runs than any of the other bosses, and I'm not entirely sure why.  We're getting better with them, though, and I consider that a good sign.

The Twin Val'kyr!

We one-shotted them.  There was a little confusion as to which people were supposed to be on which side of the room, but the fact that we pull the two of them fairly close together in the center of the room made that a little less important - we had a fairly even distribution of light and dark and that's all that really mattered.  None of their special abilities did much of anything, and we didn't have issues with too many of the wrong-colored orbs hitting our guys.

I felt a little bad when I won the Loop of the Twin Val'kyr, as that is just about the only upgrade left in ToC10 for Illorien (our DK and co-leader).

You might think, from what I've said, that we were moving fast!  No, one of our pugs complained because it was taking us awhile in between bosses.  Admittedly, we had a few folks go afk for a couple minutes for issues that probably could have waited, but we don't fly like that.  It's one of the endearing features of our guild, I think, that we understand that people are human and things happen, and we're willing to work with the time people give us.  One of our breaks was because all of us leading the raid were a little under the weather and one of us went to make tea because her throat felt like it was wrapped in ropes of fire, and another break happened because one of the healers had a puppy get into a roll of toilet paper.  I can understand the desire to get through things fast, but please... people are human, cut them a little slack if they can't stay 100% dedicated to a game for nearly 2 hours at a time.

Anub'arak!

Before we started up the event that drops you into Anub'arak's cavern, our pug shammy opened up a trade and gave me 8 gold.  Luckily I figured out what was going on before I hit the water, and clicked off the water-walking buff he had put on me.  Our DK escaped a similar fate, but I'm not sure if he saw it and clicked it off or had another method.  I gave him his gold back, 'cuz I'm just a nice guy like that, but it was funny anyway.

One of the folks on the raid had never been to Anub before, so we had to explain the entire fight.  Much like our last clear, we had a slightly sub-par healer setup - 2 paladins and 1 priest.  Determined, however, we set out to vanquish our foe!

Our first attempt was doomed fairly early on.  We lost both our hunters to some craziness in Anub's first underground phase.  Our shaman made a valiant effort to use his small ranged arsenal to pick up the slack in dropping permafrost, but we lost a healer as well and had an add still up heading into phase 3.  We wiped shortly thereafter.

Despite our relative success during our demise, we decided to switch one of our paladin healers to tanking the adds, move the DK to Anub himself and I pulled out my tree gear and filled in the healing slot.  In addition to providing a steadier flow of smaller heals for phase 3 goodness, that helped the other 2 healers a bit by providing the Tree of Life aura.

The second attempt was nearly flawless, as we didn't lose anybody until Anub was well into phase 3 and our victory was nearly assured.

It took us about 2 hours in total, and while I was ready (and actually started trying to refill the spots of folks who left) to give ICC a shot, I was out of time.

Tuesday, I expect my little crew will be giving our first shot (or at least, the first shot with me there!) at ICC's 10-man raid.  I haven't even had a chance to do the 5-man in heroic mode yet.  We'll see what happens though, and I'm hopeful we can get through it!

Cue the Final Fantasy "Win!" Music

I had a great night last night, and I'm gonna tell you about it.  If you don't want to know, be a grinch and go away.

It all started off with a super powered run through Halls of Lightning for the Heroic Daily.  Three pallys and two druids, all overgeared.  We churned through it in under 30 minutes.  Piece of cake.

Then I moved on to my guild 10-man raid.  Let me back up a little before I get into it.

So I made a raid report a couple of weeks ago with the intention of making it a kind of ongoing thing, something I could write about on (at least) a semi-regular basis, probably because failure is not something people like to write about.  The trips that followed my last post about it were rife with issues and mired in mediocrity.  One night we downed only the Northrend Beasts after wipes on both Onyxia and the Beasts.  Another we got through Ony and Lord Jaraxxus, but could only throw ourselves at the faction champions a couple of times before we ran out of time.

So after the last run, I asked if a schedule change would help, and with some responses in the affirmative, we decided to move the next one to a Tuesday night, after the raid reset instead of before.  Little did I know how much this would work to our advantage.

Several folks who had been mostly bringing alts were able to bring their mains, and some who weren't able to go on Mondays showed up.  We had a whole Epic Adventurers raid for pretty much the first time since three of us decided to start running our own guild raids.  Ok, we started out with one former EA member in the raid, but he was replaced after Jaraxxus due to power failure, and he counts anyway.

We also changed the raid order - more than a couple of us need upgrades primarily from the second half of ToC, anymore, so we went with that first instead of Onyxia, with the plan to go get her if and when we churned through Anub.

The raid composition broke down like this (both before and after the character switch; we replaced a feral druid dps with another feral druid dps!):

Tanks (2)
Bear Druid (ME!) and a DK

Heals (3)
2 Holy Paladins and a Priest (Disc I believe, but may be Holy)

DPS (5)
2 Hunters, 1 each Mage, Warrior, and Cat Druid

We one-shotted both the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus - our crew had been through all of these enough times that all we needed was a little communication amongst the tanks and healers and everybody else filled in perfectly.  We had a good showing the first time out against the Faction Champs but couldn't do it, decided to change our strategy a little bit and failed miserably, went back to the first method and powered through.

Against those champions, we were facing the tree druid, the disc priest, the enhancement shaman, the mage, the warlock and the rogue.  I stayed in bear form; I am not convinced that I shouldn't have gone cat, or traded out to resto and let one of the healers DPS, but it worked.  The DK pestered the shaman the whole fight, our hunters put their interrupting pets on the priest to start, our mage did his best to keep the lock and/or mage polymorphed.  Our kill order was druid, priest, rogue, warlock, mage, shaman.

Not sure if that's the best order but it worked for us.  The reason we had an issue the first time around was that our priest got rogued 3 times (2 battle resurrections).

We moved on to the Twins.  I was a little nervous - the only time I had ever even seen the Twins I was on sub-par hardware that was video lagging to the point that I couldn't do anything about the orbs, and ended up disconnected most of the fight, on top of having a bad connection because I was in a hotel.  So I let my co-leader, who has cleared ToC10 several times on non-guild runs, describe the fight.

We wiped once, because I'm a Fail Druid and started before everyone was ready.  Really, my OT said "start it up" and I brought them out and ran in, and pallys were still trying to get buffs up, healers were on the wrong side... it was just plain bad.  The second try was flawless.

I was extremely excited at this point.  We had started late and had barely been going for even an hour and a half and had cleared more than I'd ever really seen in ToC10.

I actually did a reasonable job explaining the Anub fight myself, although my DK reminded me that I'd left out one of the most important things - RUN AWAY from the little adds.

Our first attempt met with failure after a healer went down at the beginning of one of Anub's above-ground phases... the other druid battle rezzed but I mistimed my OS button and went down.  It didn't help that I hadn't done a good job of running away and had more than a couple stacks of the debuff from the little adds.

Our second attempt saw my first ever clear of ToC10...  The phase 3 damage/survival race was a little rough - we lost 6 of our 10 people and ended with a healer, both tanks, and one dps standing.  Pally healers aren't the best bet for that phase, but it worked out in the end.  I properly timed my emergency button that run, and we pulled it off.  Only a little over two hours on the entire run, and time for Onyxia.

Then we went and beat her down, and even had time at that point to go whack the VoA10 loot pinata.  Two hours and 45 minutes, 20 Emblems of Triumph and a few Conquest, a whole pile of loot, and a very satisfying night for all involved.

As always, thanks for reading.  I know this isn't the most useful of posts but success is fun to write about....

See you all on the flip side!

Of Loot and RNGs

Welcome back!  I hope everyone had a fun holiday weekend!

The world is funny, sometimes in what it gives you.  No matter what the odds of something happening are, that slim chance sometimes wins out.  You love it or hate it (or sometimes just have to laugh!) depending on which way the long odds went... and I had an example of this last week that I thought was so ironic I could do nothing but laugh.

If you read about our loot rules last week and thought about it a bit, you may have realized that it's rather difficult in *most* of our 25-man raids to get gear that you have to roll for as an off-spec roll, because there will usually be at least one main spec in the raid that can use it and thus will get to roll first.  This makes it a little rough on those of us that raid in our non-main spec, but it's really probably for the best this way.

That's neither really here nor there.  Since I don't normally get a chance to bear up in our 25-man guild raids (because we have 3-4 designated progression tanks ahead of me), I usually end up rolling on healing gear, which has been mysteriously slim of late, and I don't usually get to roll on tanking loot.

Last week, due to illness, I had a chance to tank on our Ony/Vault/ToC run.  I was ecstatic at the chance to run my main spec in our guild raids as well as having the opportunity to roll on tanking gear as my main spec.

I was disappointed, then, when the only real tanking upgrade that dropped was a sideways one for me - a chest item with identical main stats and gem slots, and a few shifted secondary stats as the one I'm already wearing.  (I passed on rolling for that, since we had folks that could get much more use out of it.)  I had to laugh, though, because two pieces of leather casting gear (that I would have really expected to be snapped up by one of the casting druids on the raid) fell to off-spec rolls, and for a change of pace my rolls were decent enough to win.

Why is it that the RNG decides to ship me healing gear on the one night I'd really like to see tanking gear drop?

Black Ice Friday

Being Black Friday today, I'm not going to be anywhere near a computer long enough to write a proper post, so I'll just point you over to Icedragon at Druid main and her great post about some techniques useful to bears.

My only comment to her:  SWIPE! :)

I know, I know, bad pun in the title, but I can't help myself.

Kaethir has issues (aka More Bear Followup)

I realized when finishing up the tree primer last week, that when I covered my bear enchants I managed to completely forget the weapon slot!

So, here, short and sweet, is the last piece of that discussion.

I have yet to see a good dagger or fist weapon and offhand setup for feral druids.  It may exist, however, and keep that in mind when selecting enchants, but my analysis is based on using two handed weapons (staves and polearms).

I have seen folks go different routes, with Blood Draining or Berserking, but really, in my mind there are only two options, and those are Mongoose and Major Agility.

I've seen somebody with way too much time on their hands do the math, and declare that given average time between procs of Mongoose, the overall benefit over the length of a fight will be better with Mongoose as opposed to Major Agility.  I've used both, I haven't seen a major difference in my survivability.  I'm currently running Mongoose, but if you don't trust it and would rather have a consistent bonus, go for the +35 agility.

Told you it was short and sweet.

Followup on the Bear Primer

It is unfortunate that we must sometimes admit we have made a mistake, but we do, and it is best that we then go back and try to correct these mistakes.

I stated unequivocably that, as a bear, you want to use the two-color gems to tack stamina on any non-blue gem.  While I still think that's not a bad plan, I intend to investigate a new (to me) idea, that I thought of after seeing another bear on my server take a different track.

He had used his 3 Jewelcrafter's gems for Solid Dragon's Eye, to get the maximum stamina from that profession.  His other gems, however, were almost completely stacked with the +20 agility Delicate Cardinal Ruby.  Keeping in mind that this was on a loot pinata raid (aka Vault of Archavon), still the healers had no trouble keeping him alive.  His character sheet dodge is over 30%.  While I don't advocate his plan (at least not yet,) I'm going to experiment with dropping my Shifting Dreadstones for Delicate Cardinal Ruby, at least at some point.  We'll see how it goes, and I suspect that come Icecrown and it's Chill of the Throne reduction to dodge, I may need to go back to Dreadstones, but for now I want to see what this kind of change does for me.

I would think that the best way to go about using something like this would be to aim for my HP to be roughly the same as non-bear high end tanks - ~45-48k buffed - and then stack as much agility as we can find.  It may even allow me to take one or two of my Solid Dragon's Eye +51 stamina gems down to Solid Majestic Zircon and use the jewelcrafter gems for +34 agility...

If I get a chance to really examine it, I'll let you know how my experiment goes.

I'm out of town this week and may have my regular update schedule broken up, but we'll see what happens.

As always, thanks for reading!

A Look at Tier 10 Set Bonuses for Bears

Fairly short post today...

Thanks to the kind folks over at the Daily Druid for the current T10 set bonuses from the PTR...  For reference here are all of them:

Druid T10 Restoration

• 2P Bonus – The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
• 4P Bonus (Rejuvenation) – Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.

Druid T10 Balance

• 2P Bonus – When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 10% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 sec.
• 4P Bonus – Reduces the cooldown on your Eclipse talent by 6 seconds.

Druid T10 Feral

• 2P Bonus – Your Swipe (Bear) and Lacerate abilities deal 20% additional damage and the cost of your Rip ability is reduced by 10 energy.
• 4P Bonus – Your Enrage ability no longer decreases your armor and instead decreases all damage taken by 12%, and the periodic damage done by your Rake ability can now be a critical strike.

For now I'll just take a gander at the feral bonuses from a bear perspective.  Later I'll throw some thoughts out there on the Restoration set.

The 2-piece bonus seems pretty solid.  The damage bonus to Swipe should enable us to have an easier time maintaining AOE aggro.  Adding damage to Lacerate helps a little bit on single-target aggro.  We shouldn't have had problems already, but this will help ease any tensions if we have to stop our threat rotation (i.e. if someone pulls a secondary mob off us....)  All in all, I think it's a nice little 2-piece bonus, but nothing to write home about.

When I first saw the 4-piece bonus, my eyes nearly popped out of my head.  After some further thought, I'm not quite as stoked about it as I was, but I'm still excited.  The first half is rather innocuous - removing the armor penalty from Enrage just means we can use it without fear of overwhelming our healers.  But since we shouldn't be having rage issues anyway (unless our silly healers are shielding us too often), that's not really all that big a deal, in my eyes.  The second part, however, means that we'll use enrage pretty much as often as we can.  Free rage plus damage reduction... where can I sign up?

It makes Enrage useful in a number of ways that it couldn't dream about before.  If I get to the point that I have this bonus, Enrage will get added to the list of abilities macro'd into my emergency button.  Rather than being a rage generator with a drawback, it's an actively good ability with rage generation tacked on for free.  I already use Barkskin at semi-regular intervals during most fights.  While not quite as effective as Barkskin, the new and improved Enrage will give you a similar effect.  I will probably be using Enrage as often as possible during fights, and instead of stacking Barkskin on top of it, I will use Barkskin once the Enrage bonus has ended and it's on cooldown.

I like it, and I think it's a solid bonus to look at as an upgrade from the T9 sets.

Tune in soon for some thoughts on fandom by the WoW developers, and my primer for the OTHER role I play as a druid - tree!