[General]Some quickie updates

Long time, no post.

I'm no longer a part of casually serious. I'm now a part of Skunkworks. Which...is Casually Serious, but renamed. And 100% more awesome. With it comes a web page redesign, some personal rules about behavior outside the game, and really snazzy graphics. We are recruiting a resto druid, and will always consider fantastic applicants no matter what their class and spec. If you're totally amazing and also would rather do more progression with fewer hours, send us a note.

I am back to raiding, at least on a trial basis. My work schedule changed enough that it seemed feasible. We're currently trying to kill HLK 25 man, and we've gotten as close as 17% enrage. I think he'll die in the 25% buff.

I'm planning on writing a retrospective of how ferals did from TBC to WotLK. It'll be a bit fluffy, so you mathy folks won't be satisfied all that much.

I'll also update the loot lists for Halion's loot table. Other than the Sharpened Twilight Scale, there's not a ton of super sexy stuff from there for cats. If you're hurting for rings the Signet of Twilight is neat, but otherwise...meh. For bears, the Umbrage Armbands are not too shabby, but not exactly exciting, and the Petrified Twilight Scale is a nice armor trinket but the proc is sad and doesn't compare well to Unidentified Organ.

I'm likely not going to comment much on the posted Cataclysm talent trees. Most of what I would have said has been said elsewhere and more eloquently than I could have. I will say that so far, they've not met the goals they set out to do in their design statement, and there's a lot of work left.

So I ask readers - what kinds of things are you looking for? Tips on HLK? Gearing strategies? Reviews of talents? Philosophical rants on the pointlessness of an infinite universe? Hello Kitty Island Adventures?

[General]CS downs HSin, Vengeance

Last night I raided for the first time in 3 months. In essentially the same gear I left save one more piece of T10, which was important; that was the 4pT10 bonus. I was doing this mostly because due to some burnout and churn, we had lost a few raiders recently and we were short.

We were doing Sin on HM - a progression kill for us. It had been a hard, annoying fight for some time. Aside from the mechanics which are very punishing for individual mistakes, the annoying voice just grates beyond belief. Ugh.

Anyway, we downed her with me in the raid, filling in for our resident feral whose hard drive decided to melt down the day before. (Sorry, Bone) I didn't even do that horribly despite only doing the fight once on 10 man normal; I didn't kill people with blocks, I didn't break out blocks too early, I didn't blow up (until the fight was done) and was (mostly) okay. Didn't even do horribly on DPS, though certainly not what I was doing when I left; losing two tiers of gear progression will do that :p Congrats to Casually Serious on getting 10/12 HM down, and getting US 182nd kill of her.

I gotta say, it felt great. It felt great to be a part of progression kills, especially ones that were frustrating. It was great to be able to hang out with friends in that kind of environment again. It was fun to see the old folks and meet the new. It was great knowing I did contribute some and I wasn't a detriment to the fight. It was great to finish up the instance too and work on PP hard mode and get a kill of Lich King - my first on both. Even ended up with Astrylian's Sutured Cinch and a 264 tier piece. I desperately wanted the former to just have; it would have bugged not getting the tribute gear for the guy who did so much for the community.

Mostly, it was just fun to play.

I'm very grateful to CS for giving me that chance again. And for giving me an excuse to write some things again. It's still not going to bring me back to raiding; I didn't give up raiding because I didn't enjoy it, and it's still too conflicting with personal time, family time and missing time with my children to do so on a regular, scheduled basis. That's the real difficulty; if I could simply log on whenever I wanted and raid, that would be great. More importantly, if I could just stop raiding mid-raid and help out or eat dinner or play with the kids, that would be ideal. But that's not raiding.

Still, I hope that I'll get to do more things like this in the future. And while I hope CS fixes their attendance and roster soon, I'll be happy to help out when I can. :)

Speaking of: CS is still recruiting. If you are an outstanding player and want to work on hardmode progression without spending 5 nights a week killing yourself because raiders can't move out of fires and don't understand things like 'move left', this may be the guild for you. CS's needs change constantly, so check csguild.org for our specific needs at any time.

Onto the announced preview changes. The one I want to talk about today is Vengeance. Vengeance is an interesting idea: here's what the blue preview had to say about it:

Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.

You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won't see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking

So what does that mean for you? Here are my concerns (posted at Tankspot as well):

My concern is that health is not going to grow at the same rate that DPS grows, which means that this buff is not going to be enough. My secondary concern is that while it does add more damage, it is still not a huge amount, and it is only off of one stat; even given two stats (strength and stamina) this simply is not going to compete against DPSers gaining benefit from 4-5 stats on an itemization value unless the scaling is totally weird.

On the first point, let me illustrate. In tier7 most tanks were approaching or exceeding 40k health buffed, and maybe 30k unbuffed. Most DPS (buffed) were able to do 4-5k DPS. By tier 10, however, the unbuffed health had risen to 50k or so (not druids, mind you). This is an increase of only 66%. By comparison, DPS are able to routinely hit 12-13k DPS - an increase of 140-160%. That's bad. When you have a stat you want to scale not scale at the same rate as another stat, you're going to have problems.

Then you have the issue of the actual talents scaling with AP. Right now, many tanks have horrible scaling with AP. Druids at least have a ton of 'this does additional threat' which screws over AP scaling - and lacerate even divides the AP by 2!

Then you have the issue of stats. This is what druids have had to deal with for eons: that because they only scale with 2 or 3 important stats relative to other tanking classes, those scaling factors have to be pretty insane for them to be competitve. And naturally, that means imbalance for certain outliers, like polar gear. Same thing here; either things are going to scale too well or not well enough.

I think it's a decent idea - it gives tanks a boost to DPS based on health but only when being hit - but it's not sufficient by itself.

Now, Jere pointed out (Rightly) that while the scaling is bad the base threat may compensate for this; tanks started out significantly ahead on threat at the start of WotLK, and if they do so in Cat that might work out okay. But it's certainly something to think about and consider.

Anyway, that's it for now; I'll talk about the actual druid changes in a bit.

[Offtopic]CS is recruiting

Last one for a while, I promise.

Casually Serious is recruiting right now - and I really recommend coming by and seeing if you have what it takes. CS is looking for a feral (DPS with occasional OT duties, aka, my old role), a rogue, a hunter and a healing (disc/holy) priest ,but as always outstanding apps are always interesting.

The official recruitment thread is over here:

I really can't speak enough about CS. If you're in a situation where you would like to raid but have limited time and you know your stuff, this is an amazing guild. We don't waste time, we don't mess around, we don't care about loot whoring or drama and don't tolerate it. We simply want to kill as much content as we possibly can. There's no recruiting for the bench, no giant raids, no one's on a special status or anything of the sort.

It's just be at raids and win.

Two nights a week, 4 hours for those nights, 7-11 PST. That's it. And for that 8 hour raiding schedule, CS has downed:

Naxx, Maly & Sarth3D (and gained the protodrakes)

Every hard mode in Ulduar + Yogg0 and gained Death's Demise & Celestial Defender

Every hard mode in ToC and gained Grand Crusader

Everything in ICC save BQL (which we haven't tried yet).

Realm firsts aren't that special on Balnazzar, I'll grant you - but being US 150/world 400 is, and wanting to do Yogg0 long after gear was irrelevant also was.

Anyway - if you're a good feral who does their homework and doesn't like to mess around, I can't recommend CS enough. Especially if you're like me and like tanking and DPSing both. And if you're a good player regardless, come see if it's what you're looking for.

[Offtopic] What a night

The new guild seems to be working out pretty well, in case you were at all curious. On Tuesday we continued our attempts on 25-Firefighter and managed to get it down after only an hour, which left us time to start work on hardmode Yogg.

It also meant that Algalon-25 was unlocked.

Last night we intended to work on Algalon, then go to ToC and work on hard modes there. We specifically moved our Algalon-10 attempts up to give people some experience at the encounter beforehand who hadn't seen it.

And in our first hour of attempts, Algalon died! Last pull, with only two people alive at the end (gogo Ardent Defender and Guardian Spirit), DoTs finished him off through the last big bang; we weren't sure that we got him until he just kinda stood there and looked emo. I'm amazed at this; having one hour to work on him and getting him down in that time is really outstanding, even if having all that gear from ToC helped and it wasn't what you'd call the most impressive kill shot. That was realm first, so now Fellhoof is sporting the groovy title "Celestial Defender". That's probably my favorite one since Hand of A'dal.

ETA: Here's a great log of how much damage was done after basically everyone in the universe died a horrible death. All I can say is that rip is AWESOME. And I should've just refreshed rakes.

I was expecting people to not be on their game after that awesomeness, but we then proceeded to go to ToC and one-shot beasts, kill Jaraxxus after a few attempts and one-shot Faction Champs on heroic - the last two were also progression for us. We got a few attempts in at heroic Twins before we were overcome with pain and huge amounts of ball jokes.

Pretty incredible work for a guild that does 8 hours of raiding a week.

Finally, to end the night, I was promoted from a trial membership to full-time.

I've talked about it before, when people felt like things were on, everyone was in a good mood, etc - and this was one of those nights. I felt like this when Fire and Blood downed Kael'Thas for the first time, too. It's a rare joy, and it doesn't happen often, but when it does it makes you understand how great raiding can be.

Next week we're going back to Ulduar to finish off some of the hardmodes that people have missed and then work on Yogg+1, the last major hardmode that has yet to be completed there. If this week is any indicator, that means we'll have time to work on Twins again. Twins is a really interesting fight; much like vehicles a lot of your success has nothing to do with how you play your toon and everything to do with managing the balls. Unlike vehicles, this somehow is way less frustrating to deal with and is downright fun. I also like it because it's not the kind of fight you'll ever really be able to brute force; it will require strategy, and the strategy is definitely going to make a huge difference in quality. I'm anxiously awaiting Bellwether's report on how she dealt with the fight.