[General]Site update, general thoughts

I've simply stopped posting much any more. Really, I've simply stopped writing much altogether about WoW.

This is mostly to do with me not raiding any more. Cataclysm hearkens back to the days where heroics were decently hard and raiding was challenging, and while that's awesome and everything I wanted improved, it's not nearly as easy to balance farming, rep grinding, valor point capping, and doing all the other things I like doing while also keeping a schedule of 4 hours where you do nothing else but play.

So raiding is done, at least as a srs bsns raider.

The theorycraft and news side of me has been...well, pretty down too. Part of it is that honestly, Alaron and Yawning were doing such a kickass job that anything I'd add would be largely irrelevant. With them taking up most of what was needed there just haven't been that many topics to discuss.

With them likely to be (or already) taking a hiatus, though, don't expect a lot more from me. The thing is that - and Yawning alluded to it - that feral has left me somewhat cold this expansion. Bears haven't grabbed me like I had hoped the dynamic rotation would have, and while it's not quite as boring as it used to be it's still not feeling like my abilities really...well, do much. And cats...well, I spent a lot of time on Alaron's blog talking about why I'm not really thrilled with ferals, but allow me to quote myself as I think this is the clearest indicator:

If you switched cata and wotlk in order, here are the buffs ferals would get:

-bleeds would be reduced in duration to increase the value of being on the target as well as making the rotation more potent.

Mastery changed to a scaling reduction of the opponents armor.

FB changed to use all available energy and do significantly more damage, buffed by bleeds and bleed modifiers.

Blood in the watermremoved to increase difficulty of rotation.

Swipe buffed by approx. 300%

Savage roar increases all damage instead of just autoattack, increasing it’s performance in the rotation and making the time on target more important

Berserk removes fear.

Shifting forms removes slows and snares

Fury swipes removed; it was not useful to have so much of the rotations damage on a noninteractive autoattack. This has been readers as damage to other abilities.

Instead of some attacks scaling with weapon damage all weapons have a ‘feral ap’ stat, allowing all feral attacks to scale with weapon damage naturally.

And that’s just off the top of my head. Yes, it’s nice to not be bound so much by arpen. Yes, skull bash is nice. The rest has been nerf after nerf, affecting either overall dps or simply the fun involved.

Add to this that ferals are underperforming both overall on DPS and in the melee group aside from one fight (Chimaeron) and you don't have the most compelling experience. At least I haven't. Things are easier, there's less to actually do, and it's not as fun for me. Other ferals differ, and that's awesome. But it's a good reason why I've been so malaise-y.

Then there's the 'we can't have nice things' function of PvP. It's amazing how much I miss removing snares by shifting. This was a really class-defining ability that really, really makes me sad to lose it. I don't pvp, and i don't care that much about pvp balance, so it's doubly sad for me; it's like I can't have nice things because out there, some other cat is thumbing his nose at people. Same thing with zerk removing fear; it's shocking how often I ended up using this in PvE. It's not something that's required, or something that's really awesome. It's just something that is nice, and you miss it when it's gone, and makes the class that much less fun to play.

But anyway, to answer some long-held questions that I seem to get all the time:

On weapon DPS: the weapon DPS is the best stat to 'stack' if you can for ferals; nothing comes close. But weapon speed or weapon damage don't matter in the slightest. All 200 DPS weapons are exactly the same as far as a feral is concerned. This is also why Unheeded Warning became so amazing for ferals.

On warstomp: sadly, it does have a cast time - and that means it can be pushed back on and (more importantly) you can't dodge while doing it. It's still very good for some things, but it's certainly not as great as you'd hope as a bear. It's actually a bit better as a cat, assuming you don't piss off the tank by doing so.

On stam vs. agility as a bear: stamina isn't nearly as awesomesauce as it was. Bears get roughly the same multiplier that other tanks do, so getting more doesn't help. Bears don't get a whole lot of gain from vengeance with that high stamina either; you get far more AP from agility. Most importantly, stamina marks in heroics are fairly small in terms of what you need to survive big hits. Longtime readers will remember that this was also the case for the Naxxramas era, and that didn't survive very long. I don't know whether or not stacking agility will be better in the long run, but if I had to bet on it I'd always bet on harder encounters having bigger hits to stress out everyone.

On capping hit/expertise as a bear: the only reason to do this now is for threat and to a lesser extent, skull bash (which is going away as a reason in 4.1). That being said, threat is kinda sketchy for bears and no other stats are remotely nice.

On capping hit/expertise for a cat: theoretically it is the least important thing to do. Realistically a lot of people have a much easier time with a rotation with high hit and expertise. Ultimately the difference between a hit and exp-capped feral vs a mastery/haste/crit feral is fairly small, so as long as you're stacking agility over everything else you'll be fine.

On the state of dps and ferals - yes, ferals are low. Yes, the simulators and the actual results agree. No, you probably won't see this as an issue if you're not in highly competitive raiding guilds. But statistically and mathematically this is entirely true: ferals are both doing poorly relative to overall DPS and to melee DPS (which is completely getting hosed so far this expansion). Any argument otherwise is essentially baking the numbers in a really quirky way. For instance, looking at the top 10 ferals and seeing that they are performing close to the top 250 overall (on a fight that favors ferals, no less) and thus declaring ferals are doing fine. Err...no. That being said, it's not hard to fix ferals to be more competitive: give them much better AoE and give them more base damage from either white damage shreds, or make their startup cost a bit cheaper. It's really not that hard to fix and ferals aren't so broken that they require a complete change.

On blue posts and ferals: no, ferals aren't getting a lot of attention. I don't know why either. I do know that it's much, much faster to bring up an actual broken problem to a person who knows a dev than it is to bring it up on the forums. One has a chance of being fixed. Another...almost never does.

I'll still very rarely post, and if you do have something you'd like me to talk about I'll be happy to. Otherwise I wish you the best of luck in Cataclysm. :)

[General]The dirty secret about armor

This is somewhat based on a post I made on tankspot a while back and references common tanking terms like Effective Health and Time to Live. If you don't know what these mean - read Aggathon's excellent treatise on these things over at Tankspot: Why we do what we do. There's nothing new there for many tanks familiar with these concepts, but it's a well-done document.

But, there's something it doesn't cover - and that's the advantages armor has over stamina. Or at least it doesn't cover it hugely. Similarly, it doesn't cover the advantages that resistance has over stamina in some circumstances.

Effective health is simply how much total incoming damage you could take at once. It is normally referring to physical damage (noted as PEH, or physical effective health) and is simply the following:

health / (1-armor reduction)

So if you have a 50% armor reduction and 50,000 health, you have a PEH of 100,000 - meaning you can take 100,000 physical damage (before armor reduction) before you die. Now, other things like general resistance to all damage (such as protector of the pack) fall in here too, but ultimately it doesn't matter; the important thing to consider is effective health combines the reduction in damage with the amount of health you have.

Similarly, you can look at magical effective health (MEH) as:

health / (1-reduction)

which factors in general resistances and specific ones. Note that for the purposes of effective health, you can't take into account chance; if something could happen that's beneficial (like a block or dodge or SD proc), effective health assumes that it won't happen. Thus for resistance purposes you can take only the minimum resisted value.

So that tells you how effective health works. And you can combine the two values depending on the % of magical damage and physical damage you're expected to take at a given time, and optimize based on that. Now most folks will tell you - often rightly - that the best way to optimize for this is to always go for stamina, even over more armor - because health is in both physical and magical EH and benefits both. And that's true - but only for the calculation of how much damage you could ever take.

Where it gets interesting is in the notion of partial health. And this is where the dirty secret of armor comes in. While effective health is awesome, stamina only helps how much damage you can take at a given time; armor magnifies both how much damage you can take AND how valuable healing can be.

Let's take a very simple example that should be at least somewhat realistic - two tanks with precisely the same physical effective health. One tank has 50k health and 50% armor reduction and no other sources of reduction (or for our purposes they're the same as each other, so they go away) - so using the formula above they have 100,000 EH. The second tank has 40k health and 60% armor reduction, giving them also 100,000 EH (40000/ (1-.6)).

Now, we'll hit both of them with a hit that takes half their EH - a 50k hit. The first tank's health is now at 25k. The second tank's health is at 20k (50k *.4 = 20k). Still the same EH, right?

Now, let's heal them. We'll heal both of them identically for 10k health. This is where it gets interesting.

The first tank goes from 25k to 35k - and their EH is 70k.

The second tank goes from 20k to 30k. Their EH is now 75k. That's a 7% lead in EH over the first tank.

Let's give them another 10k heal:

The first tank goes from 35k to 45k. Their EH is 90k.

The second tank goes from 30k to 40k. Their EH is 100k - up to full. At this point the second tank has a 10% lead in EH over the first!

And that's the dirty secret of armor - and why armor is good. Because it improves the value of healing, partial healing on a tank, it increases the EH of the tank after they've taken damage but before they've been healed to full. That it also makes it more likely they can be healed to full is a nice side effect too. This seems somewhat obvious - since armor reduces damage taken, of course it reduces the amount of health needed to go to full - but the EH model doesn't often talk about partial healing or what happens when your tank is somewhat healed but not entirely. And the bigger the deficit and the larger the amount of heals it takes to get there, the more this becomes obvious.

Yet we don't often have the case where a tank takes damage and then sits there with no heals until they get all the heals at once. Many tank deaths happen because of a combination of lack of enough healing with a set of hits; this was what killed people on Algalon, as an example.

Now the side part of this is that since armor doesn't help with magical damage, this is obviously not as great for things with massive magical burst; in the above example the 40k tank has 40k MEH, and the 50k tank has 50k MEH, which is a big disadvantage. The neat thing though is that resistance math works exactly the same here as armor does - with similar advantages in partial damage and healability. And that means that resistance at certain steps becomes far more valuable than health due to how much damage you can reduce. We've seen this before with Sarth3D and with heroic 25-man Anub'arak, and it's been used nicely sometimes for Sindragosa as well. And resistance also gets a boost from simply being way better at increasing EH than health does; while you can get 110 stamina from a wrist enchant, you can also get about 5% resistance (or 50% of the way to 10% resistance), which is a much bigger boost to MEH than that 1300 health would be normally.

Anyway, hopefully this will give you some intuition as to why things like Unidentifiable Organ is good regardless of whether the stack wears off, or why Petrified Twilight Scale is awesome even with the proc being somewhat meh. It should also give you an idea of why bears were so ridiculous before this as far as being healable, especially back in the day of TBC.

[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.

[General] Pimpage and shoutouts

I never do a good job of saying goodbye :)

First off - many folks asked for good resources out there on various things, so I figured I'd give my recommendations and try and encourage some bloggers to write more.

On cat stuff: Coldbear has done quite possibly the most exhaustive writeup of feral dps that exists or that could exist. The video is awesome (especially if you happen to be taking ritalin) but the thing I most commend him for is the literally amazing wowwiki feral dps entry. The sheer amount of work on this is insane. Some great tips I learned from him are some of the UI fun bits, using GotW right before the pull to get an OoC proc and using nature's gift to maybe get one while pooling energy. But really - he's got it all.

I linked him before when he did some work on Arpen mechanics and the tricky question of when to switch - but you should still go visit Vallen at Feral Aggression and bug him to post more. He writes with a great style in a very approachable way, and he has a lot of things to say. Go say hi, show him you're interested and ask him to explain more stuff.

On bear stuff: there's sadly just not that much out there. The one I can wholeheartedly recommend is Darksend's great I'm not Feral, I'm a bear. He does a good job posting over at Tankspot and putting up movies, but you should bug him to post more otherwise.

For a newer set of all-around info, Alaron and the Fluid Druid is great and I hope that he continues to post a lot. The basic starting point on bear tanking and cat DPS should be required reading for any bear wanting to do any raiding. He's a bit busy right this moment, but hopefully he'll get back into the swing of things.

I really encourage you guys to comment on their blogs, ask them questions and in general go say hi. There's nothing more encouraging or inspiring to a writer than readers, and I've written some of my best work simply because someone left a good comment. If you want more things written - ask :)

Other than that, the EJ forums, tankspot, and the dreaded wow forums are all good resources. And Rawr. Always Rawr.

Onto some shoutouts for peeps out there. I'm sure I will miss a ton of people, and that's my personal failing.

-Andrew/Karthis - you were my biggest inspiration for starting writing at a good clip, to the point where my blog looks and is formatted a lot like yours was. (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?) Your taking a break made me write more, and you leaving made me write even more, but no matter what I provided I could never fill that void. You were a great read and a good person to talk to. Thank you for giving so much back and doing it so well.

Flyv - it was awesome when you and Karthis and I were all bouncing ideas off of each other and getting more and more information. It really felt like a community and it was really synergistic. Sorry to see ya go.

Runycat - theory comes and goes, but your writing went way beyond that. You were seriously awesome and amazingly helpful, and damnit you were fun. The world needs more people like you. Some day it'd be great to bring the significant others and have a beer.

Copey - one of the best contributors to comments on this site. I'm really glad you spent the time to write.

John Patricelli - you gave me my first big break, and my success is almost entirely because of that. I'm sorry we didn't get along; that was entirely my failing.

Fasc - my partner in crime over at the wow forums. I didn't always agree with you, but I always respected what you were saying and why, and it was nice to have some sanity in the wilderness.

Astrylian - I don't think anyone has written something as profound as you have for this community. Thank you for doing such an amazing piece of work and for writing so well about it.

Communism - thank you for providing such clarity and quantitative analysis on the wow forums. It kept me from killing people with my bare hands. :)

Phae - congratulations again on the sprout. He's beautiful. :) You were the best of us, and you made me want to join the druid community.

Toskk - you were doing it before it was cool. Just astounding work that every feral owes a huge debt to.

Jacemora - write more, damnit!

Tigerfeet - sorry that you got burnt out. More sorry you're not writing more. You have a ton of style and wit, and I envy what you can do with graphics like no one else.

All my commenters: Thank you for the support and well-wishes and saying hi. I'll miss talking with you and helping out more than you'll know.

So long, guys. Kick some icecrown butt and may Blood Queen always drop Bloodfall. :)

[General] ThinkTank 2009 retrospective

Happy New Year!

First, some tooting of my own horn. This year ThinkTank had, according to analytics, 594,000 visits over the year with 850,000 pageviews over that time.

Wow.

Average views per day were about 1500, with a peak of 2500 on April 24th - which was likely based on a post that got linked on wowinsider.

The most popular posts are things like the Icewell Radiance post, gear analysis for cats, and other loot lists. Not a big surprise, that; the first one is linked in my wow forums sig just so I don't have to explain over and over how druids aren't screwed by losing 20% dodge. :)

Pretty amazing to me that there are that many people reading this stuff. Thanks, guys - you really make this special, and you really make writing this worthwhile.

This year I changed guilds, changed my primary focus to DPS, changed jobs multiple times (stupid economy) and played on 4 different computers. I downed the hardest bosses in T7, T8 and T9 and earned two server first titles (though to be fair, our server is a bit ass). It was quite the tumultuous time. Thanks for reading through all that. :)

I wanted to quickly look back at some of the articles I wrote this year and revisit some, or at least point out some nice ones that I was particularly proud of.

10. How to: Sarth3D. While a lot of druids had done Sarth3D with big stam and external cooldowns, only a handful up to this point did it with resist gear - mostly because the resistance math was so unknown. Thanks to Shamgarr's really excellent work we were able to figure out the sweet spots and how to get there. I really like this one mostly because I know of at least 3 guilds who had trouble with this who switched to this strategy and knocked it out of the park. :) I expect this to be relevant for at least Sindragosa.

9. The antitank series. While this is almost entirely defunct (other than using it for heroic farming) between the awesome picture of Russian antitank dogs and the concept of just doing massive DPS while tanking, it was good times.

8. Toggling Maul. I really like this one just because it's so simple; how to toggle maul so that you can choose to use it all the time - or not. Hopefully this becomes not an issue in Cataclysm.

7. Sample values of stats for threat. This was simple, fairly easy to understand and got right to the point - and illustrated very quickly what was best for threat and also how badly bears scale with threat stats. I liked it because it was definitely a guiding point for a lot of people who weren't quite sure how best to go about getting threat.

6. The Future of Block. I like posts like this in general, and this one made me think the most of all the posts this year. It'll be interesting come Cataclysm to see how close I got.

5. Glyphs are the new Flask. I still think people don't do this enough, which is a shame. Glyphs are cheap enough to make (though usually not cheap to buy directly) that getting a guildie to make you a stack or two of glyphs and swap accordingly is almost always the right choice. I typically toggle maul glyphs or growl glyphs (ohai, Saurfang).

4. Savage Defense analysis. There still aren't a lot of math models around SD, and this was one of the first - and it turned out to be largely correct. Another one that dismissed a lot of bad math and conceptions that people had on forums. It's still not perfectly accurate but it's on a reasonable order, and showcases both how good armor is and how decent SD is.

3. Icewell Radiance. Another hugely popular post, I'm happy with this because it seems to basically end arguments about it. People reference it regularly to defuse bad thoughts about bears. It's useful, informative, and the math isn't so complex that it throws people.

2. Nerfing Stamina the right way. This was another post that started from the wow forums and continued here, and I liked both the reasonable math associated with it, the other commenters providing information, and the actual conclusion I got (which was oddly one of the most popular posts I ever wrote)

And my favortest post of all:

1. Phat Lewts. Nothing could remotely top this, and I thank all of you for the well wishes and feelings. He's just over 9 months old now, is very healthy, happy, and I love him. He's the best thing I've ever helped make.

[General, Druid] Icewell radiance part 2 -the 4 fallacious myths

I've been very busy in the last couple days, so I've got some comments to answer - but of the answerable comments, enough were odd that I wanted to address them specifically.

There were 4 statements made in the blog and elsewhere that I kept seeing, and they were specifically incorrect as far as Icewell radiance goes. I'll go with them all Matticus style and talk about them separately.

Myth #1: other tanks can stack parry to make up for the lack of dodge.

This looks reasonable, right? I mean, sure - other tanks lose dodge, but they can just go with parry. All is good. The problem here is that very few tanks were going for any kind of avoidance anyway; they'd get what's on their gear and just stick with that for the most part, with the occasional defense/stam or dodge/stam gem thrown in for metas and socket bonuses.

Here's the important thing to understand about this change: it doesn't make dodge less valuable, it makes all avoidance less valuable. As I pointed out, all avoidance now reduces less damage overall than it used to due to having less of it. But that doesn't say dodge - it's all avoidance. You have less avoidance period - it doesn't matter how you got at that avoidance.

Furthermore, parry is as valuable before from a diminishing returns standpoint as it is now. In other words most tanks would rather stack dodge than parry because they'll get more avoidance out of it. So they can't just switch out dodge gems for parry gems (even if they had them); they'll likely lose avoidance doing that. And if they didn't lose avoidance doing that, they probably should have been doing it in the first place.

Another way to say it is this: if it takes 70 dodge rating to get 1% avoidance now, it'll take 70 dodge rating to get 1% avoidance then. If it takes 75 parry rating to get 1% avoidance now, it'll take 75 parry rating to get 1% avoidance then. Those values aren't going to change.

Myth #2: block is going to make up for it
Block is definitely more scalable with respect to the number of incoming attacks. Savage defense does lose out here. At the same time, every block tank just lost 20% avoidance. Chances are they weren't unhittable (most paladins and warriors aren't in their normal gear, even with HS up), which means that they'll be blocking the same amount of hits as before; dodge didn't push their block off the table. So they'd have to be stacking block to compensate now, if they wanted to - except they've got 20% block to stack.

That's a lot. Now, it's not subject to diminishing returns at least, but at the same time the block gear that exists out there...kinda sucks. Most Anub hardmode tanks know this pain; they're wearing a blue trinket, a bunch of random pieces from Naxx and Ulduar...do you think that gear set is going to cut it in Icecrown?

And they can't gem for block rating either. So where are they going to get all this block?

Myth #3: Bears are going to be dying more due to more hits in a row.

The idea goes like this: let's say that a tank will die in x hits in a row. Tank A, with 40% avoidance, has a (1-.4)^x chance of dying then. The druid, with 31% avoidance, has only a (1-.31)^x chance of dying - which is much greater. For 4 hits, for example, tank A would die 12.96% of the time; the bear would die 22.67% of the time. Therefore, aren't bears going to be at a big disadvantage?

Well...no. Here's the thing - this was true before, right? I mean, tank A had an advantage over druids before. But how much? The avoidance values before were 60%, so assuming you'd die in 4 hits, tank A had a 2.56% chance - and the druid had a 5.71% chance.

So yeah, the chances that a druid takes 4 hits has increased significantly (15% vs 10%). At the same time, the relative chances that this occurs has decreased significantly.

But the most important thing here is that healers cannot assume either tank is going to dodge that many hits in a row any more. Healers have to heal both tanks the same way. As I showed in the previous article, bears are actually going to take less relative damage to other tanks than they do now. What this also means is that unlike in the 2% case, healers can't assume that tank A will avoid an attack every 4 attacks. They'd be wrong 12% of the time, which means 1 out of 8 times they'd be dead.

So they have to heal tank A as if they weren't avoiding. Which means healing the druid is functionally the same.

Myth #4: Because GC said so

Ghostcrawler's said basically that if you think avoidance was good before, it'll still be good. If you think it's bad, that won't change. He's also said that EH is important but not the be-all, end all of tanking. Here's one commenter on this:

Interesting view, but I'll go with what GC has posted about Chill of the Throne. Stamina is arguably less important, avoidance is still valuable, cooldowns matter and are not easily compared, and effective health does NOT = best tank. I love that you write a lot on bears Kalon, and I'm sure you're a great bear tank. But, you seem rather set on the idea that bears are the best tanks. They aren't. They're not dominating leading progression guilds, general opinion of them is certainly not "#1 tank" and the developers don't think so either. So, can you make this your last "nerf bears because they're so awesome" post for awhile?

So why am I so high on druids?

It's not because of EH, at least not solely. It's not because of avoidance being nerfed or that I think avoidance sucks. It's that I think that relative to other tanks, druids improved significantly. Whatever you think of EH, after this change EH is better than what it was. Whatever you think of avoidance, after this change avoidance is worse than what it was. Both of these things favor druids.

Now, it's possible that icecrown has a ton of tank-stressing fights that so happen to stress high avoidance and high block values. That's a possibility, and I don't deny it; I've often said that the best tank is not determined by the tank's values, but by the encounters.

At the same time, GC's come out and said that tanks are going to be dying in Icecrown due to taking huge amounts of damage. And really - what tank is better at taking huge amounts of damage than a bear?

I'm not saying bears are the best tank. I don't know enough about Icecrown's fights to say that reasonably. But I am saying simply that these changes improve the things bears are good at and reduce the things bears are bad at. That's it. That's a far cry from most of the druid population that I read, who continually were worried that bear tanking was dead because they were losing all their dodge.

Though let's go back to that 'best tank' thing. It's true that they're not dominating progression, though I'd say that a druid MTing Anub'arak for most of the top guilds in the world indicates strongly that this isn't entirely true. General opinion is that paladins are the #1 tank...but they just lost 20% avoidance. And developers have stated things like 'we think block tanks are going to be the best tank in Ulduar because of large physical hits', and they've also stated that they're worried about druid levels of power but aren't going to nerf them significantly because there aren't enough to care.

I'd take that general opinion with a big grain of salt. I'd take what developers say with more. Basically, a high sodium diet should be in your future. :)

[General, Druid] Icewell radiance, bears, and you

Ice sure is purty. I figure we're just staring at the pretty ice caves and forgetting to tank.

Or: people are really, really dumb.

This is a post designed entirely to defuse all the bad forum posters elsewhere. It's going to show every single way they're wrong and why they're wrong, and then I'll just put the link in my sig so that I never ever have to respond to them again.

If you don't like that attitude, that's understandable. I'm in a bitter mood right now after reading so much ignorance from other tanks, particularly druid tanks.

Here's the summary, in case you just want to skip ahead: Chill of the Throne is the least harmful to druids. It is a relative decrease to damage taken compared to other tanks. It also will likely make effective health more valuable, which only favors druids even more. In short, druids will be in a better position relative to other tanks than they were before this, and are in all likelihood the best overall tank in generic terms for any given encounter.

What is Icewell Radiance?

Icewell Radiance is the name a forum poster called "Chill of the Throne" - which is the real name. What's that? That's this:

For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Why are we doing this?

The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.

We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.

We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.

So what does this mean? It's an effect on each mob, which means the -20% happens after all diminishing returns have been calculated. It affects everyone equally; every player loses 20% dodge, just like if you were facing someone with expertise that only worked against dodge.

if you're wondering, my chronic pain is forumgoers

Druid win #1: relative damage taken

Let's take a paladin and a druid for comparison's sake. These numbers are basically made up, but that won't matter (as you'll see) because they illustrate a trend. And they're fairly close to accurate anyway.

The paladin has a total of 60% avoidance. They have 10% damage reduction in general, and 62% reduction from armor.
The druid has only 51% avoidance. They have 12% damage reduction total, and 66% reduction from armor.

In terms of total damage taken over time, the paladin in this example is winning. What's their total damage taken over time? It's damage in*armor reduction*talent reduction*avoidance.
So damage = 1*(1-.62)*(1-.10)*(1-.60) = .1368. In other words, for every point of avoidable damage that comes in, they take .1368 damage out.
The druid has 1*(1-.66)*(1-.12)*(1-.51) = .1466. For every point of damage in that's avoidable, they take on average .1466 out.

That's what's the case now - a paladin has an advantage in overall damage over time. Probably more than that, honestly. But again - doesn't matter. In that case, the paladin takes 93.3% of the damage a druid does in this example.

Let's now reduce the avoidance by 20% and see what happens to the numbers:
Paladin: 1*(1-.62)*(1-.10)*(1-.40) = .2054.
Druid: 1*(1-.66)*(1-.12)*(1-.31) = .2064

They're almost identical. Not quite, but significantly closer. The paladin now takes 99.4% of the damage that a druid does.

So relatively, a druid is taking less damage than they were before compared to other tanks. This is going to hold true for all other tanks unless you were a very rare kind of druid that stacked avoidance. In some cases it'll be more pronounced than others (particularly against DKs who had high avoidance values, druids will be even more ahead) but the general trend is true: if you have less avoidance than the other tanks and everyone gets reduced the same flat amount, the tank with less avoidance will be more improved.

but if you make this building only half as tall, you might live if you fell out

Druid win #2: less damage per swing

The main reason that they've done this big change is so that they can do less damage per swing while maintaining the same incoming damage per second to the tanks. So let's go through this math too.

Let's say that they wanted to have each tank take X damage per second after mitigation and debuffs and whatnot. In order to do this with avoidance being 60%, this means the incoming hits had to be X/(1-.6) , or 2.5X. If you were supposed to be taking 10k damage a second from avoidable attacks, the attacks needed to be 25000 damage/second big - which meant that you had to basically have 50k health to survive two hits in a row. That's pretty close to what things do in ToC now and what the thresholds are.

But now? The same X damage with 40% avoidance means the damage per second only needs to be 1.67x. Now, you can take 3 hits in a row with that 50k health, but it's more likely you'll be hit.

So everything's the same, right? Well...not exactly. The thing is that if things hit for 25k each, no tank can take 3 hits in a row. That's 75k. That's nuts. But reduce how much damage each hit is, and suddenly druids start having advantages due to their higher health potential. As I showed earlier, druids already have huge health leads over other tanks. 10k health. But 10k health doesn't matter when everyone dies in 3 hits.

10k matters a lot more when that means a druid can die in 4 while other tanks die in 3. Again, using those numbers from above - the best geared warrior has 59k health abouts. The best geared druid has 69k. That would directly mean a druid would be able to take one more hit that wasn't avoided without a single heal.

That's a big deal.

Especially when they have less of a reason to even care about avoidance and want to go for armor and stamina above all else. Which brings me to #3.

Druid win #3: not caring as much about avoidance
The idea behind diminishing returns on avoidance is the same as the one behind armor - while the absolute value per point of avoidance goes down as you get more of it, the relative value stays the same.

So for example: if I avoid 50% of attacks, getting another 1% avoidance reduces my relative damage by 2% - instead of taking 50 attacks every 100, I take 49, and (50-49)/50 = 2%.

But let's take 20% dodge off there. Now, that same 1% avoidance - which remember, costs the same as it did before - now makes me go from 30 to 31%. Which means that instead of taking 70 hits, I take 69. That's only a 1.4% improvement in incoming damage taken - or about a loss of 40% effectiveness.

So this makes avoidance about 30-40% less valuable than it was before. Think about that in terms of the gearing too.

60% of the time, it works every time

Druid win #4: druids still rock with stamina
Note that all the above applies to every tank. They're all not liking avoidance as much as they did before. They're all thinking they can get more hits without dying. They're all thinking that avoidance isn't the way to go. They're all going for even more stamina than they were before - if possible.

But druids win here, again. Druids get 16 points of health per every 1 point of stamina. No other tank gets close to this - only blood tanks vaguely get close to druid levels of health, and only paladins get close to this level of scaling (and they're about 14 per stamina point). Druids have continually gained more health per tier than any other tank. This trend isn't going to cease. So in the world where avoidance is blind, the stamina/armor tank is king.

So to speak.

Druid win #5: magic damage too!
So avoidance is worse, druids are better relative to other tanks, and they want more stamina. Traditionally one way to balance high avoidance values was via magical or unavoidable damage. But guess what - stamina aids that too.

And if that weren't enough, druids can fairly easily keep high levels of health while using resistance gear, as has been shown with some success a couple times in the past. So that means that even if they decide to throw stupid amounts of magic damage around, the best tank to deal with magic damage most of the time is...a druid.

So this is all awesome, right? What could go wrong?
Well, druids do lose some effectiveness of savage defense; it won't be up nearly as often with less avoidance. However, other tanks lose a similar amount of damage reduction this way (save DKs) so that's kinda a wash.

If there are fights like Anub'arak that favor shield tanks due to incredible amounts of quick attacks, they'll still favor block tanks. Similarly, fights that favored avoidance before will favor avoidance now, though not to the degree they did.

And as has been shown repeatedly in WotLK, one of the biggest things is cooldown use - and druids still have less oomph with their cooldowns than other tanks.

Note that I don't think that this will mean druids will be able to be so awesome that they'll allow taking fewer healers or taking fewer tanks because of their awesomeness. Maybe. If there's a fight like I described where a druid can take one more hit before dying than other tanks, this may be feasible; healers who can cast efficient, big heals are going to love druids. But it certainly means that if there are EH benchmarks that tanks must hit before moving on, druids are almost certainly going to be the first ones there.

Honestly? I suspect that we'll see a nerf to druids early on in Icecrown. Maybe even sooner.

But until that nerf happens? Druids rock, baby, and this nerf is secretly a druid plot to rule Icecrown.

[General]Nature Resist for Anub'arak ToGC25

A couple people have asked about what nature resist I use for Anub'arak here and there. It's pretty easy, actually.

Nature Resist Totem (130)
Arcanum of Toxic Warding (25) - from Knights of the Ebon Blade Honored
Enchant Cloak - Superior Nature Resist (20) - farmed from Icecrown mobs. And the drop rate really isn't that bad.
Lesser Flask of Resistance (50) - pretty much any alchemist will have this, though it costs fireleaf, which isn't that common.
Fur Lining - Nature Resist (70) - farmed from the same icecrown mobs as above. This is a leatherworking-only perk.
Runed Ring of Binding (25) - Onyxia 10.
And while I don't have it, Signified Ring of Binding (30) is also awesome, and drops from Ony 25.

That's all it is. With the above enchants and flasks and totem, I get to 320 NR. Which is good for an average resistance of about 38%.

What does that mean for Anub'arak though? On our 2% wipe last week (side note: sob) this was my values for Leeching Swarm:

Actor	Totals		Hits			Absorbed		Resisted		Misses
										Ab	Total
Fellhoof	1544848	16.2 %	214	7218.9	1544848	73	230926	214	1137968	2	2

So I took 1.5 million damage from leeching swarm, and resisted 1.1 million damage.

Leeching swarm was active in this fight for 217 seconds. This is the formula for how much damage Anub'arak heals from leeching swarm:

healing = (damage done + absorbed damage)*(2.3)*(MS effect)*(player modifier to healing)

The MS effect corresponds to whether MS or wound poison is up - if it is, this all gets reduced by 50%. The 'player modifier to healing' is another example of awesome blizzard mechanics, where the player's talents that multiply healing done also multiply healing done to Anub'arak. So things like Purification or Master Shapeshifter (tree) boost healing done to Anub'arak.

The important thing to note here: resisted damage doesn't ever heal Anub'arak.

For me, that meant I was personally responsible for 1.983 million damage healed to Anub'arak - in 217 seconds, that's 9173 HPS. Yikes.

But how good was the resistance? The damage I didn't take was equal to 1.137 million/217 seconds or 5244 DPS I wasn't taking during this time. The healing done would be equivalent to 1.15 this value (MS effects were up), which meant that resisted damage was equivalent to 6030 HPS not done.

In other words, the resistance was the equivalent of 6k DPS done to the boss.

Note that this isn't all due to the enchanting this way; 130 NR provides about 18% resistance by itself, or about 3k DPS done by itself. That means the gear by itself contributed about 3k DPS, or 2.6k reduced damage.

That's very substantial, and it certainly makes it easier to heal the tank on the hardest part of healing.

Is this adviseable for other players? Probably not. Certainly not other DPS classes, who will already be fairly low on health and want to do maximal DPS prior to phase 3. Maybe healers, who may be able to take the hit on their healing power/regen power.

But almost certainly tanks. Our two tanks by themselves were responsible for about a third of all healing done to Anub'arak - and that was with me using NR gear. If I hadn't, we'd be closer to 40%.

So if you have enough health to survive the scary part of phase 3 - which is freezing slash + a melee hit + a leeching swarm tick - consider dropping it for at least a lesser flask of nature resistance.

[General, Paladin]Argent Defender is OP!

As a feral tank - and really, as any tank would tell you if they were honest, Argent Defender is ridiculous. It's not just overpowered, it's superpowered. It's a relic from an older age when power just flowed like candy, and really shouldn't exist in this world of more realistic, 5% bonuses and gritty power benefits.


I mean, the guy can fly through space on a surf board. He is the herald of Galactus, who can eat whole worlds and has a weapon that erases you from existence. He uses the power cosmic - and that's like using cheat codes, basically. He's taken on the entire Fantastic Four and whooped them; the only reason they won is that he felt some pity and remorse for his planet.

So totally nerf Argent Defender. He's stupid.

However, if you're talking about the paladin talent Ardent Defender, it's just about right and puts paladins on a similar but not as good level of EH as a druid. The proc is reasonable and is on the same level of power as many other ohshit buttons, with the proviso that it's much better in some cases (ohai, Algalon) and not nearly as good in others.



Sorry for that. Was feeling a bit silly this morning and was annoyed at yet another stupid thread about Argent Defender, and that silly misspelling. Argent means 'silver'. Argent Crusade - Silver Crusade, kinda like that Silver Hand thing. That big burst on the tabard? It's in silver, ya know. Ardent means impassioned or hot, like...zealousness. Ya know, like what paladins are?

Sigh.

[General] Trinkets, tanking and you part 2 - the answers

As promised (though a bit late) here's the followup to the previous post about trinkets.

First off, this is the list of responses overall:

	KT	Hodir	NRB	Anub	Mimiron
Juggernaut	5	9	9		9
Glyph	5	2	1	10
Bheart	5		3	5	8
DM:G	5	3	5	5	2
Balebrew		6	2		1

It's an interesting spread. No one would ever use the balebrew trinket on KT, no one would use the heart on Hodir, no one would use Juggs + Balebrew on Anub, and no one would use glyph on mimiron. Interesting.

Here's what I either have chosen or would have chosen:

Boss 1: Kel'Thuzad (25-man) tanking the adds (at T7 levels of gear): I'd go with glyph and Black Heart. Huge health is nice on this, but not essential, and while you hit SI at the end this can actually hurt you if KT picks that moment to freeze you in a giant chunk of ice, as it does a percentage of your damage. Armor is awesome here, as it works against multiple mobs well and it deals with being stunned/frozen. I would also want an extra CD just in case, and glyph is great.

Boss 2: Hodir (25-man) tanking the boss at just starting T8 levels of gear. For this, you want a fairly large chunk of stam. I didn't mention, but I assumed you'd be one-tanking it. If that's the case I'd go with Juggernaut and Black Heart. For a bear, two stam trinkets (even at barely T8 levels of gear) is going to put you well over the frozen blow limit for stamina, so you don't need raw stam only. Black Heart gives stam for the frozen blows and gives armor for when he's not.
(bonus: does this change if you're trying for the hard mode?) Yeah, and as many alluded to chances are you don't need the stamina trinkets and are going for minimum healers, so DM:G gets the nod here - as does some other threat trinket, most likely. Or an avoidance one. Given the choices the best 'threat' trinket is likely the balebrew charm. :)

Boss 3: Heroic Northrend Beasts (25-man) tanking Gormok with one other tank, then tanking the stationary worm, then DPSing on Icehowl (at barely T9-levels of gear). This one was surprising to me, as while almost everyone picked Juggernaut, very few went double stamina. That's what I do, by the way - I go Juggernaut + either Heart of Iron (what I did to start) or Black Heart (what I do now). The extra CD from Heart of Iron was too good to pass up. On my first kill tanking it I went Defender's Code + Heart of Iron to get the extra CD, but it wasn't reliable enough and would lead to my death anyway.

Anyway, my experience here is that more than anything else, raw stam is great.

Boss 4: Heroic Anub'arak (10-man) tanking Anub'arak (at T8-levels of gear) This is another interesting one. Everyone picked glyph, and it was the only unanimous pick of the whole test. But then choices were between Black Heart and DM:G. On 10-man, I went with Defender's Code and DM:G to start, but with the nature resist strat I actually went and equipped more stam, going for defender's code and heart of iron instead. Now that I'm doing it in 25s, I'm using glyph and juggernaut. The reason this works is that I'm getting rid of stamina in other ways. And the cooldown from juggernaut is useful, even though it heals; damage can be very rough.

The way I justify this is that I'm losing about 8k total health in using the other non-stamina trinket, the flask, and the various enchants. So I gain a bit back. So far, it's worked out ok.

I'm not a fan of DM:G on this because the worst case doesn't allow you to block and DM:G doesn't have an on-use. Dodging is good, don't get me wrong, but the thing that kills tanks is unlucky melee+slash+ leeching swarm more than anything. And since you're stunned, the main way to deal with that is by armor and stamina (and resistance).


Boss 5: Mimiron (10-man) tanking phase 1, then tanking adds in phase 3, then tanking all parts in phase 4. Again, most people picked Juggernaut as the first trinket choice. Many picked Black Heart, but that was puzzling; what actually hits physically hard on this fight? The assault bots don't, the boss doesn't; the dangers are almost entirely magical. I was expecting more Balebrew charms. For the record on normal mode I just did this with HoI and DM:G.

(bonus: does this change in hard mode at all?) Yes, it did - I went pure stamina and would do so again, so that I could hopefully survive the plasma blasts. It's tough.

Onto the comments:

Anon - the hydross trinket didn't have an internal CD, but it didn't proc all that often. I had an uptime of about 50%, give or take. Which makes it a bit less valuable than Glyph on the normal case, but it's not predictive and not on demand. It's kinda meh, but if you want to maximize armor no matter what? Probably a decent idea.

Frederic, Edward Nigma's wife is totally awesome as an answer.

dtc (and others) - I didn't put Heart of Iron on there because I wanted y'all to think a bit. Namely, is 170 stamina without an on-use good enough? Otherwise the answer is almost always "Juggernaut + HoI" over and over again, and that's boring.

Liz - RNG is a bastard on beasts, but RNG is really an illusion. The only really dangerous times are on impales, and you know exactly when an impale is going to hit, without question. Time your CDs (and use external ones) for these, and you will be golden.

As to Beasts and dtc's question, we do use only two tanks on beasts and so far it's been fine once we worked out a few kinks. Our rotation looks like this, kinda (from memory, so forgive me if it's wrong)

I start. Note that 'impale x' means 'have CD used for impale x', so if it says barkskin on impale 1, that means that barkskin is up in time to eat impale 1.
impale 1: barkskin
impale 2: trinket CD
impale 4: warrior taunts
impale 6: trinket
impale 8: I taunt, barskin
impale 9: GS
impale 10: SI
impale 11: warrior taunts, LS, I get BoPPed
impale 12 (if it happens): Shield wall
impale 13: PS

then warrior gets bopped.

Nowadays we don't get to impale 12 unless we got very unlucky on snobolds.

It is a shitton of damage, but it allows for faster DPS on all three phases and is fairly easy. With this rotation down we're no longer getting gibbed randomly due to tank death; the only issue is if snobolds decide to go kill nothing but healers. That's basically the only RNG part.

[General] 10-mans observations

I've been doing a lot more 10-mans as my schedule's been a bit more free this summer. Up until last week I'd never done all of Ulduar on Felhoof. I had two experiences that were about as wildly varied as could be.

The first was me getting in a bit late, in a group that needed a second tank. I thought it would be okay, and it looked like a solid group - but a number of the people in it decided to leave early, go AFK, or otherwise only stick around for gear on the boss they wanted and then leave. They've since been kicked from the guild, and good riddance. But these all conflated to a very difficult time of it - and it didn't help that the other group that was going at the same time was knocking out hard mode achievements left and right. We finished up without doing Yogg in two whole days, and only managed one hardmode achievement (XT).

It was honestly one of the most demoralizing experiences I had ever had playing. Not just wiping over and over to things we've done before simply because people were leaving and we were scrambling to find people, or people simply couldn't perform at the level we recruited them at - but knowing that it was doable by other people that I raid with...sigh.

The next week I got to go in on the 'hard mode' group's run because they needed a second well-geared tank for Algalon tries as well as finishing up their Glory of the Raider achievement; they had Vezax and Yogg hard mode to go. And sure enough, it was a breeze. One-shot virtually every hard mode in there that we tried (we didn't do Firefighter). We one-shot Freya+3 and did it so fast we got Conspeedatory. The only trouble we had was doing a side achievement on Thorim, and once we stopped trying for that we breezed through things too. We got to Vezax and two-shot him on hard, then got to Yogg and one-shot him on everyone's first try at that hard mode. We went back and did Ignis and Razorscale's achievements, and at the end of the night 7 people had their Rusted Protodrake.

Not me - I started the night only having Hodir and Kologarn done, and finished with only Mimiron to go. Pretty sweet.

I've talked about what makes runs so much better or worse, and in this I think it really came down to leadership and experience. I did the running of the group the first time, and I didn't and don't have a lot of experience on Ulduar. It was frustrating, and I didn't know the strats as well as I should have - and that was compounded by people flailing about and leaving left and right, babies crying, etc. The second group had done most of this many times before and had had practice at it, and the raid leader has been leading these sorts of things for months - and strats were ready, questions were answered quickly, and things went well. I've talked about the importance of leadership before, and it's definitely true now.

At least right now, I shouldn't be doing leading. Too many distractions, not enough knowledge of the fights from top to bottom. Ah well.

Anyway, onto the actual analysis. 10-man is very, very well done. FL+4 and XT are both easy enough hard modes that they're not really gating bosses. The actual fights of the hard modes are pretty nice with the exception of Hodir. Hodir is still a boring hard mode, largely. Thorim adds interesting tension, Freya is quite a different fight.

But Vezax and Yogg are masterful.

Vezax has a tension that isn't in almost any fight I've ever done. Maximizing performance when you can't really do anything is a bizarre mechanic, but one that works. Every move made requires a weighing - if I do this, will the raid wipe? Then you have the Animus spawn, and it goes insane - damage is everywhere, you only have a certain amount of time, and you've still got to watch out for most of the mechanics from before.

Yogg with fewer keepers is astoundingly different. I'm shocked at how important the sanity mechanic is when you can't refresh it. Hodir and Mimiron aren't really missed, but having no sanity is like night and day. It changes how you can DPS, it changes what you're going to do (sending in 4 DPS in portals so that you get fewer brain phases means no healer), and it drastically changes the tension in phase 3 for a DPSer. Instead of worrying that you won't make the enrage, you're worrying constantly whether you're going to take that last bit of damage that'll send you over the edge.

As a cat, what I ended up doing was being absurdly cautious and maximizing bleeds. I'd try and rake, shred shred rip and then rake - and then turn around immediately and await the next lunatic gaze. I didn't start this way, but my sanity was dropping precipitously (to a mighty 4!) and I couldn't afford anything else. It worked, too; I topped the meters with bleeds on yogg.

But the tension was palpable. It was a crazy fight because of that. Just brilliant. Kudos to Blizzard for adding such an interesting mechanic to an otherwise boring fight.

Which brings me to...Algalon. Algalon isn't at all hard. In our first hour of attempts we got him to mid-40s, and that was mostly just learning what to call out and how to move, and what the behaviors are. The only thing that's stopping us right now, and we're having a hard time with, is when to kite constellations into holes and which ones to leave up - but that's mostly because we didn't consider that so important. Once we iron that out a bit more, (likely making sure that no one is near the hole we'll take and kiting constellations into specific ones outside of that) I think it'll be a clean kill. It's disappointing; the actual zone is epic, beautiful, and the lore is great. The fight itself compared to Yogg-1 or Vezax or Freya or Mimiron is much less special.

It's a bummer. It really should be a super hard fight, but the only thing that stopped us was double zones, zones closing early, and melee being stupid about not moving out of Cosmic Smash.

If y'all have any tips, I'd love to hear 'em.

Anyway, will have the cat epic gem comparison later this week.

[General]Well, that was fast

Another PTR, and bam! T9 changes for all tanks.

Paladin 2p is going for Hand of Reckoning instead of Righteous Defense, which is good; RD is almost never used by comparison any more.
Paladin 4p explicitly reduces the forbearance penalty.

Druid 4P is now reducing the cooldown of Barkskin by 12 seconds (was 10% more barkskinny goodness)
Warrior 4P is now reducing the cooldown of shield block by 10 seconds (was 20).

While I miss the thought of being ridiculously OP, it was pretty clear with some basic math that 30% barkskin wasn't going to see the light of day. Though I'll be surprised if 90-second divine protection for paladins lasts.

[General] Tier9 bonuses for all tanks

MMO champion has the procs for the various T9 abilities for all the gear. And...well, let's just say that apparently the even-numbered sets will be 4 fite, the odd will be 4 bear.

To be really, really clear: These are almost certainly not the final versions. They might not even be correct. Some of the bonuses make zero sense, like adding .01 seconds to the damage of immolate. So take these with a grain of salt and don't get too attached to them.

But let's take a look at all of them, starting with the druid:

• Druid T9 Feral 2P Bonus (Class: Druid) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Growl ability by 2 sec and increases the duration of your Rake ability by 3 sec.
• Druid T9 Feral 4P Bonus (Class: Druid) -- Increases the damage reduction granted by Barkskin by 10% and increases the critical strike chance of Rip and Ferocious Bite by 5%.

This is an interesting change for bears. The 2p bonus is decidedly lame unless we're facing huge amounts of random dorks or something (more on that in a bit).

The 4 piece, to me, reads "We're very sorry about your bad cooldowns. We're very sorry about your bad cooldowns". A 30% barkskin every minute is approaching IBF-levels of awesome. If they wanted Druids to be the next DKs, this is a good way to do it. Between a druid's innate damage soaking ability and this set bonus, they'll be in pretty good shape. A really excellent ability.

Blizzard got a bit lazy with the set bonuses in general though. For instance, here's the DK version:

• Death Knight T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Class: Death Knight) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Dark Command ability by 2 sec.
• Death Knight T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Class: Death Knight) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Unbreakable Armor, Vampiric Blood, and Boneshield abilities by 20 sec.

Dark Command, shockingly, is the DK taunt. Hmm. The 4P bonus improves each tree's 2-minute cooldown to 1 min 40, which doesn't sound awe-inspiring. Helpful, sure - it's basically a 16% improvement in the cooldown if you're using it every time - but that's over a long duration. On a lot of fights that'll mean you might get to use it once more than you would have.

The Paladin one is awfully familiar...

• Paladin T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Class: Paladin) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Righteous Defense ability by 2 sec.
• Paladin T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Class: Paladin) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Divine Protection ability by 30 sec.

Wow...another 2 seconds off of taunt. Thrilling. The 4p bonus is similar to the DK one; cutting it from 2 minutes to 1.5 is good, but does it actually do much? It's not nearly as game-defining as the barkskin one. I also bet they forgot about forbearance stopping this from working at all, but I bet that's at least their intent.

Finally, warriors! And I bet you can guess what the 2p bonus is:

• Warrior T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Intervene) (Class: Warrior) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Intervene ability by 5 sec.
• Warrior T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Shield Block) (Class: Warrior) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Shield Block ability by 20 sec.

Oh, those tricksy Blizzard people. Intervene with a shorter cooldown - that might be actually more useless than growl having a shorter cooldown. Though at least it doesn't run into the stupid diminishing returns that the taunts do.

The 4-piece for shield block, however, is really intriguing. This would cut shield block down to 20 seconds, which basically means shield block is active fully half of the time. While this isn't as game-changing as the 4pT8 bonus in the sense that you can't plan on stopping special attacks with it, the amount of threat and damage mitigation this should stop should be decent. This effectively allows for a much higher block rate overall (half of all attacks will be blocked for sure, and they'll be blocked at the 200% block value) as well as a much higher amount of damage blocked. Depending on gear, this'll be close to a 2% mitigation boost by itself.

I'll have to figure out more on what the cat bonus is, by the way, but for now it doesn't look that impressive to me. Rake's duration increased is nice and should add another shred in the cycle, but 5% more rip crit and FB crit just seems not all that hot.

Oh yeah, one last tidbit: the tanking T9 idol:

• Druid T9 Feral Relic (Lacerate, Swipe, Mangle, and Shred) (Class: Druid) -- While in Bear Form, your Lacerate and Swipe abilities have a chance to grant 200 dodge rating for 9 sec, and your Mangle and Shred abilities have a chance to grant 200 agility for 16 sec.

Before you go gaga, I'm assuming that the mangle only applies to cat, not bear. If it didn't, it would be one amazing idol. As it stands it's going to be a nice way to combine the best of two idols without having to go crazy to get both. 200 dodge rating is a bit higher on avoidance than Corruptor, and 200 agility is a much better boost than Ravenous Beast or Worship.

[General] The future of block part 4 - healing

The last post on the whole block wackiness got some really good comments, and I had been planning on talking about the healing aspect more anyway. But before I get to the comments, let's talk about a world for healers where the avoidance a tank has is drastically reduced, their worst-case mitigation is very similar between tanks, and block does a lot more but the average damage is still around the same as the dodgy tanks.

Clearly in a world where tanks get hit more often, they would either need to be hit for less or get a lot more health. Traditionally tanks have had about twice as much health as their DPS counterparts after buffing. Sometimes it goes a bit higher, but usually not much. This is by design; this way heals for a tank can also heal non-tanks when they take raid damage without having some huge gulfs, and the heals are going to be (mostly) similarly effective. In other words, it's okay to do about 1/5th of the health in damage to a tank and also do 1/3rd of the possible health in damage to a DPS, since these are both around the same amount of damage.

So there are ramifications for tanks having significantly more health than they do now. But if you don't give the tanks more health, what do you do?

One option is to tone down the damage dealt to the tanks, as I mentioned previously. The problem with this is that the heals are still for the same amount. When a healer can heal for about 1/5th of the total health a tank has in basically one GCD, it's not particularly scary if that tank gets hit for 1/5th of their total health every GCD. That means one healer can basically keep up with the damage on a tank, and that's pretty boring from a healing perspective.

So if toning down the damage doesn't work, we'd have to up the stamina, right? Nope. The other option is to tone down the damage and tone down the healing done. If all heals did, say, half the healing they do now, tanks could still take less damage but would still require quite a bit of healing.

So let's go with that. We'll have healers healing for half as much (the Sunwell radiance aura part 2: mortal strike aura), tanks being hit for half as much, and tanks avoiding half as often as they did before. Now, it takes on average 8 hits to kill a tank. It also takes on average 10 GCDs worth of heals to heal a tank fully.

Is that fun? Maybe.
Is that scary? Does the tank run the risk of dying? I think so, yes. Why? Because healers aren't going to be able to catch up instantaneously in this system. They don't have to keep their tank topped off at all times, but they will need to keep heals going on them quite often. And while a GCD costs less than it did before, it still is pretty expensive. At the same time, you have the very real ability for some tank healers to actually heal big, efficient heals and spend some time doing it. It's no longer their most efficient heal that's quick.

But there's still a lack of risk, and there's no real reward for doing the 'right' heal. Which means we need one more variable: nerfing mana regen for healers. This really should be done; there needs to be a very concrete penalty between the healers that can manage their resources for a fight and the ones that can't. This is a dividing line, just like tanks and threat/mitigation is, and just like DPS and mobility is. It's not any more, but it should be. The benchmark for hard fights is that healers should basically be OOM at the very end of any fight, and if they messed up they'll be OOM earlier. This makes one GCD less important, but the overall performance of a fight moreso.

My wife brought up an interesting point as part of this - what the current healing model solves. Currently for tank healing the model is really simple: you assign 2 or more healers to heal the tank, and they all just spam heals on that tank in the most efficient, reasonable way they can. There's rarely coordination. There's little to no actual communication. It's just heal, heal, heal. In addition, the raid healers tend to throw heals on the tank too whenever they can - a hot, a pom, whatever. In addition to that, the tank healers do the same thing on the raid when they can.

Which means two things: coordination of healers is at a fairly big low, and (this is the important thing) healing can be made puggable. I hadn't realized this, but it's fairly true. In an environment where people are encouraged to spam heal the hell out of something, it doesn't matter if you have good communication and teamwork and rhythm. You just spam away. And because (for worse) healing is measured often by effective healing and meters, a lot of the time you're rewarded for this behavior.

So if the above things go in (and a bit more), you won't be able to spam heal; it's just not efficient enough. You won't be able to snipe other heals as well; you'll need to stick to your assignment, they'll need to stick to theirs, and you'll need to coordinate. But...that means that pug healers will be pretty disadvantaged. And that's true, but I think that's okay. That also likely makes me an elitist jerk, but so be it.

Let's first go to Shamad's comments:

You're getting into a world of chain reactions if you want to touch the current chances of tanks being 2shotted...lowering avoidance doesn't effect healing, other than to reduce overhealing(currently for paladins in the range of 70%). Now if you want to soften the blows from this, you've eliminated tank deaths completely and trivialized the content....Now you might reduce the amount tankhealers heal for. Except then they become redundant and you'd just have raidhealers heal everything. Unless you change how much raidhealers heal for. And now we're back to damage not being able to kill. And the content is trivialized.

These are all good points (and he raised others that are good), but I think that this model can work. Why? At the very least, because this was essentially the model used in TBC. We had less avoidance at the start, and we had less damage intake coming in, and the heals that healers had were less as a percentage of the tank's health. Tank death was very real and very scary (especially with parry haste being a bigger deal, and especially with crushes existing). Very rarely did two damaging hits kill someone; at worst, it was something like Bloodboil, where multiple bloodboils damaging people killed people eventually as healers scrambled to heal too many people at once. Or a tank simply taking too much damage and the big heals not landing quite in time. Death was quite real - but a lot of times death was caused because a healer ran OOM or didn't get off a heal in time. That's a very different feel than 'people died because I didn't spam enough' . Basically, I think that right now the model is 'heal quickly or die'. I think the model can move to 'heal now and later or accumulated damage will put you too much in the hole and you'll die'.

Seleria commented as well, and I appreciate it:

That being said... Patchwerk remains one of my most exciting bosses to heal. Maybe I'm crazy, but I spend Patchwerk spamming my heart out on my healing assignment (an OT most of the time). There's no moving around in the fight, there's no guesswork as to who in the raid is going to take damage. It's a pretty boring healing assignment, but it's one of my favorite fights to heal.

What Blizz, however, has taken from "healing is boring"... is "let's send damage everywhere! Woohoo!" There's more raid healing than ever. Let's say you have 7 healers (that's what we run in Ulduar) 4-5 of ours are generally on raid and 2-3 on tanks depending on the fight obviously.

So with your suggestions I guess the end result as far as I can tell is "have tanks take more consistent but weaker hits." Which as you said... means there's less healing that HAS to be done. So you propose that healing gets weaker/regen gets weaker to correspond with these weaker hits... but the raid damage hasn't changed in your scenario. Sure, the tanks can avoid magic damage, but that doesn't do anything for the 22 other people in the raid....
On the other hand--what if you kept the damage the bosses are doing now the same, kept healers the same, but increased the health of the tanks. Keeping your block solution idea, you'd still not be running into "2 hits and you're done," but healing doesn't have to be completely screwed around with that way. Then you run into the pvp issue. No mage wants a prot warrior to wander into a BG and have 3-4 times the amount of health they do.

Yeah, that's one of the big problems with the idea - that if you up stamina on tanks, does every tank class automatically become insane? Do Death Knights now become ridiculous beasts with a tank/pvp merge? Do ferals? Do warriors? I think that's a serious concern. I also think that the big problem is that you need all healers to be able to heal both raid and tanks as needed, and if you have the tools too different from each other, it won't really work out. If flash heal can't do both raid healing and tank healing, it makes it harder for a holy priest to tank heal if they're the ones assigned. If HoTs are best on tank healing, doesn't that make them insanely good on raid healing? Like I said above - tank health and raid health have to be within a reasonable percentage of each other, or the healing just gets too odd and bifurcated.

So basically, I'd argue that all damage would need to be nerfed, all healing would be nerfed, and all regen would be nerfed. That's how big a change this would be.

I wanted to bring this one up specifically:

So I guess the dilemma I see is keeping average health values around the same as they are now (let's say tanks with 40k health) and they're taking less damage overall, that starts to make tank damage on the same order as raid damage so healing classes that are better suited to raid heal are suddenly the only class you want to have around--and homogenizing the healing classes even further probably wouldn't be a really good idea.

That's a reasonable argument even if you do nerf all healing. However, I think that the tank healers would still have some quality in there. For starters, the big, slow heals can be used - and they're a lot more efficient than the raidwide heals tend to be. They're not good for speed or throughput, but for mana efficiency they're awesome. And in a world where healers can go OoM easily, that's where the tank healing niche will shine, I think - in being the efficient healer. Sure, the raid healer can heal the tank, but they'll go OoM a lot faster.

I guess in my world the raid healer would spend a decent amount of time Oo5R, and the tank healer wouldn't. And that's how you'd separate out the two.

Finally, Yi brought up the elephant in the room (and this goes for healing as well):

Tanking diversity is fun because it makes you shine in certain situations. I would argue that the classes are balanced enough as it is; any class can tank any fight in Ulduar if they choose(how painful it is on the healers is another matter altogether--but then again, weren't they complaining about being bored). But certain classes will stand out, like warriors on the screaming mimi or bears on Ignis. Further homogenization, I fear, would come at the expense of non-standard tank class popularity and the "gasp" factor when you do some amazing, class-specific thing.

I really, truly agree. I think that class/spec homogenization really is starting to hurt things, and having more things like this will only be worse. I like the idea of block tanks trading block for avoidance, I like the idea that tank damage is less per hit than it is now, but I also long for the days that you wanted specifically a druid to tank a certain boss, or a paladin for another - because of their specific, unique mechanics. I kind of miss paladins rolling on specific odd pieces of gear and not wanting that tanking weapon because it had no spellpower. I miss druids and their big armor and that being an advantage. If "flavor" of a class really just means how it looks when it does things but all capabilities are the same, why really have that flavor?

I've suggested several times ways that Blizzard can retain tank balance while giving tank niches, but I don't think they'll do this until a large chunk of their populace express dissatisfaction in it. I've thought that healers should have a similar set of niches, and they're closer to it - but even then, they're becoming more and more homogenized. Really, above all I want them to force tanking niches as part of raiding; that you must cover certain tanking niches in 25-man or you will have a detrimental raid. This is fine for DPS and healing; why not tanking? But time will tell, I suppose.