LOOK OVER THERE!!!!

Manabreak is closing it’s doors, and being moved to a new home:

http://awesomeflyingbear.wordpress.com

See ya there!

Chocolate Cake!

Right, now I’ve caught your attention with a yummy title, it is time, dear readers, for me to do something I’ve always tried to avoid doing as a blogger. Yes, I am going to apologise for not having posted anything in such a long time. It’s such a cliche and such a lazy way to jump back into blogging after having taken a break, but this time I really felt it needed saying. I suck, I have neglected this blog, neglected my love for writing crap about wow and neglected you, who much to my surprise seem to enjoy reading it.

So what have I been up to lately? Well, learning to tank. Properly. I hope.

See, my guild over here on the horde side seems to be populated exclusively with exceptional players. This wouldn’t be a problem if I myself were on their same level, but alas, comparatively I am a bumbling noob. I really think that as a tank, your fuck-ups are the most obviously apparent. The boss is obviously the focus of the majority of the raid, and you are his focus. You move him/her, you position him/her and if he/she loses interest in you, deciding to go nom the face of the nearest warlock instead, it’s painfully, instantly apparent. (Yes, Raelophos, that would be you! You wonderful aggro monkey, you!)

So, I’ve learnt:

How to pull properly, how not to pull, where to stand, where not to stand, what mobs do what, who to interrupt, when to pop cooldowns, how to stay alive……. etc.

I also learnt how to fly.

Seems if you tab target during a phase transition on the Lich King fight and don’t watch what you actually tab targetted to, you can sometimes find that instead of a Vile Spirit, you just charged into a Frozen Orb, and well and truly earned your wings. Oh yes, how everyone laughed at that one, and I earned myself a new guild note: “The Awesome Flying Bear”!

Oh and I learnt how to girly scream when the initial pull on BPC heroic went a bit squiffy. On the plus side, the panic in my voice seemed so hilarious to my guildies that they completely forgot about the fuckup and instead rolled about laughing. Woo!

So what’s next?

Well, I’ve been reading about Cataclysm tanking changes and I’m intrigued. Seems stacking EHP is going out, and stacking avoidance is coming back in. I would go into more detail but there’s a hundred million people out there who will do it far more eloquently than I.

But back in the here and now, we’re only two bosses and a small handful of achievements away from our ICC drakes! I’m massively excited, it’ll be my first ever 310% mount!

So until next time, have fun, stay safe, and…. sorry about being so quiet for so long.

Min 10k DPS for Loot!

I know this is something thats been discussed a thousand times already but I wanted to add my two cents.

It’s not unheard of, in fact it’s quite common, for the raid leaders of VoA pugs to set a minimum requirement for DPS if a player expects to be allowed to roll on any of the loot that drops. So when our benevolent guild leader put me in charge of the looting for the VoA25 she’d put together last night, I told people that they would not be allowed to roll if they did less DPS than me, the tank. Doing more DPS than the tank generally isn’t a tough thing to do unless you’re a healer, and is a reasonable demand to make, but it’s one that should motivate people to do their best.

Thing is, I didn’t mean it, and I knew that when I said it. Toravon’s not a tough boss, and never was, being tuned like all the other VoA bosses to be do-able in PvP gear. But the real crux of the matter is that, denying under-performers loot is counter productive.

Doing good DPS is a three pronged fork. Talents, Rotation and Gear (ok, maybe glyphs too.) Theoretically if you’ve motivated people to *not* slack, they’ll be doing the best they can with the gear they have. If their talents are bad, it’s not something you can fix in the context of a pug, or maybe they’re PvP specced which generally is acceptable/expected for at least a few people in VoA. So to complain about someone’s performance, but then deny them the opportunity to get gear that will improve it, is kinda stupid.

It’s also unfair when you, as a tank, break 5k DPS on Toravon. Hell, I doubt I could even do 5k on some of my level 80 pure DPS alts! So by those rules, they wouldn’t get loot in a raid where the tank did the same damage as me.

Assume you have 2 tanks, 5 healers and 18 dps. Toravon has 15,060,000 health. Lets say you have 3 minutes to kill him before Whiteout damage becomes unhealable (as an estimation). Thats (15,060,000 / 180) / 18 = 4648 dps. So if everyone in the raid had been doing 4.6k dps we’d have still killed him. But, in that scenario I’d have been at the top of the meters, and that’d be just wrong!

This brings up, then, the fact that people don’t like the feeling of carrying other players through content that is somewhat trivial to them. I’m somewhat familiar with this feeling myself, but when you get some perspective, it’s not so bad. We’re playing a multiplayer game and so surely one of the objectives, however abstract, is to play well with others. There’s no directly-tangible rewards in game for carrying fellow players or penalties for being an ass, so it’s easy to forget but it’s important to behave towards other people as you’d like others to behave towards you.

Larisa wrote a great post about this recently, in which she said that as a proud Swede she’d rather be the one carrying a group through a heroic than be the one being carried. I think thats a great perspective. If you figure you’re going to be the impressive one, that they may well look up to you, and maybe even learn from you, playing in pugs with lesser geared or experienced players can be quite an ego boost rather than a drag.

The flip side is that people are sometimes both under performers and assholes all at the same time. In this case, I won’t really feel like doing them any favours. But sometimes you get lucky, and people endear themselves to you. Like the DK in Nexus last night which I was tanking on my recently rediscovered warrior. He’d never been there before and everything was amazing to him. He didn’t hit very hard for someone of his level and was obviously a new player in need of some tips, but he was having so much fun and it was great to see. He may have held the group back in terms of performance but he propped us up in spirits, and thats far far more valuable.

(Footnote: Toravon dropped Sanctified rogue legs and the winning roll was from Anderath, who was underneath me in the meters. I gave them to him and whispered him a “gz!”. Maybe next time I see him in a pug he’ll beat my DPS! Also, I did check his armory this morning, he’s wearing them and he’s got them properly gemmed and enchanted. Good man!)

The Chuck Norris of Levelling

I seriously think that ret paladins play a completely different game to the rest of us.

See, since I got around to levelling one in my (very long) To-Do List, my jaw has been on the floor. Ok so, levels 1 to 60 were a drag, because you don’t have enough skills to fill a rotation. You basically judge, exorcism, then leave auto attack to do it’s thing while you AFK to make a coffee. If you’re lucky, the mob is dead by the time you get back. So I skipped some of them using gifted levels from recruit a friend, for the sake of my sanity. But level 60 onwards, jesus! Hellfire Peninsula is a freaking joke for a retadin. Zangarmarsh takes about five minutes, and then you only need a few quick quests in Terrokar before you’re off to Northrend.

Lets break it down.

I heal myself almost constantly, without thinking about it.

I have like, four “OH SHIT” buttons, before I’m even 80. I’m almost unkillable in a solo-PvE situation.

I have a tiny tiny mana pool that never runs out. Ever. I never have to drink. At all.

I wear plate. *flex*

My mounts run faster than yours, so I can skip from quest to quest faster.

My hair is blonder than yours. (This is not relevant to being a Paladin, just needed to be pointed out.)

All in all, I think this is easily the fastest and easiest levelling experience ever. I’ve got a hunter as far as 75, and even the character creation screen says they’re good at soloing and levelling, but thats not nearly as fast as this.

Paladins don’t have to worry about running out of ammo, or ressing their slacky pets who can’t keep aggro off them anyway.

Paladins don’t have to keep dropping new totems or switch out of cat form to heal themselves.

Paladins don’t have to stealth everywhere cause they’re too damn squishy to take a hit.

Paladins don’t have to stop to eat or drink. If you die (which you don’t), you Lay on Hands and run straight back into the fight.

Paladins have no use for their enemies souls. They’d rather just smash their face in, then steal their stuff.

Paladins have wings. Suck it, RedBull.

Paladins are literally the Chuck Norris of levelling.

Earth, Wind and Ffffffffffffffffu…

Yesterday we, the clearly insane members of Touched by a troll went into VoA 10 and killed Toravon.

Then, we went for Koralon, Archavon and Emalon, all at the same time.

Clearly insane.

But I can’t help but feel that this is the way this instance was supposed to be done. It’s as though all along we’ve been bitching that VoA bosses are too easy, when they were never really designed to be seen alone.

And really, as brothers, fellow watchers, you can’t imagine that on hearing the rampaging army of little people rush through their corridors, they wouldn’t want to jump to their comrades defence.

Anyway we didn’t get the fight done. Our problem was really just in the tanking, and the timing. We have Koralon and Archavon on low health, being worked down by us tanks while the rest of the group barring a healer or two who stay to keep us up are off at Emalon. At some point, we always get unlucky with a tank being grabbed by Archavon while Koralon is casting Meteor Fists, which by that point is hitting very very hard, and the tank dies. Hard. In the face. Either that or Archavon hits his enrage timer before expected (thanks to some inaccurate boss mods timers) and I get flattened.

Our strategy for next time: both tanks in the Koralon/Archavon room should have 390+ fire resistance. We did some little tests afterwards, when all were in bed except Cherana and I, on the trash before Koralon. They do a miniature Meteor Fists. I took the hits alone, and with 410 fire resistance, I got hit for roughly 11k, resisting up to 17k each hit. Scale that up to Koralon’s Mighty Meteor Fists and you should be reducing them initially to (on a single tank) 12k hits, growing to 25k hits when Molten Fury is fully stacked. Totally healable. (I have lots of faith in our healers, dey be good mon!)

And thanks, Zorzil, for coming on your warrior to tank this with us. We’ll get it for your warlock as soon as we can find another tank insane enough to do it!

The ICC Buff and You

I got to thinking last night, about how the Icecrown buff is affecting us now it’s progressed into 20%.

In our guild, I’d say we’re at the end of normal mode progression, and ready to get started on hard modes. We went in last night and absolutely roflstomped Putricide and Sindragosa, two bosses I’d previously thought of as pretty tough.

But are we really ready for hard modes, or is it just the 20% extra everything that is giving us that confidence? I know the buff exists for hard modes as well, we’ll be putting out the same numbers in both, but it seems so artificial.

I think that Blizzard knew they would be nerfing Icecrown towards the end of the expansion, just in the same way as they did with Sunwell at the end of BC. Sunwell (as I understand it, I wasn’t there) got nerfed by roughly 30%, which is where the buff in Icecrown will be ending up. What Blizz have chosen to do this time around, however, is to build their nerf into an element of the story, and to euphamise it, buffing us rather than nerfing the content. It’s more fun for players to see themselves putting out bigger numbers against the same bosses, as opposed to putting out the same numbers against weaker opponents. It’s more exciting this way.

I think it’s clever, to do it this way around, but I’d love to see how we fared against the same content without the buff. I think that now we know the fights, and are pretty well geared from them, we wouldn’t have a problem doing them unbuffed.

At the moment it feels a bit like having the sides up at the bowling alley. You can still make mistakes, but it’s next to impossible to throw a total-gutterball. When you take away the chance of failure, is it really as exciting?

As a footnote, I will add that it’s still impossible to overpower the Lich King fight. I foresee full groups of level 85′s, geared out their ass from whatever new raids we’re doing in Cataclysm, going back in to ICC and still wiping repeatedly on him. Numbers don’t matter there, it’s the movement involved that will wipe you. Can you stun and slow the Val’kyrs in time? No? Did you move out for Defile quickly enough? No? Then you’re screwed!

AoE Tanking and Why I Suck At It

Don’t get me wrong, I love being a bear tank.

So long as I don’t have more than, say, two targets to tank, I’m all good.

Blood Princes is about my favourite fight in the world, because I have two bosses to tank, our paladin takes care of the Orbs and the other dude, while I generate a massive threat lead on the rest of the raid, so much so that half way through the fight I could probably go grab a coffee and I’d still not have dropped threat before they were dead. It’s not boring because it’s easy, it’s just one fight during which I never feel like I have to struggle to say on top of the DPS, which frees me up to worry about other things like effectively mitigating damage where possible, and trying not being sent flying across the room. (although that is kinda fun, makes me sad I never got to tank Stalagg and Feugen in Naxx)

But thats two targets, lets dive in a little earlier on in Icecrown and look at….. say…. lower spire trash. Big packs of four, five or six mobs at a time. As I said earlier, I run with a Protadin as a fellow tank. We agree before a trash pull, most of which are arranged in a lovely symmetrical formation, “You go left, I’ll go right”. So we charge in, and he does all his fancy yellow spells and I swipe spam, and he gets four mobs and I get two. Now, I’m not usually one to complain about *not* getting smacked in the face, but it highlights a little disparity in the effectiveness of a druid’s toolbox for aoe tanking, and the paladin’s.

I wouldn’t mind this if I thought it were a fair trade. If I were significantly ahead of him on single targets, that’d be fine, but most times when we fight for threat we’re about even. Neck and neck on the threat meters, which is kinda cool actually and might be a good thing when we come to Heroic Deathwhisper.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Cataclysm, provided Blizzard keep to their promise of making CC a requirement in 5 mans again, and having DPS focus down single targets rather than just gather up a big pack and AoE it down. Because as a bear, I can’t compete with simultaneous flamestrike, blizzard, seed of corruption spam AND rain of fire, which is why I hate tanking five mans.

Also, we get some new AoE threat ability.

I’m a little hesitant to complain too much, because I’m not necessarily trying to encourage homogenisation. I don’t really think a bear SHOULD be as powerful an AoE threat tank as say a paladin or a DK, I’d just appreciate it if people saw me and thought “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t AoE spam here.”

But, you know, that would require people in random pugs to actually think. Which could happen, maybe, one day. But I’d guess we’ll see rocket packs for pigs first.

Pew Pew

You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words?

This one’s worth 27,500!

So I officially no longer hate Malygos. I love him. Him and his yummy yummy power sparks!

I’m back bitches! (kinda)

Ok so I took a short break from the game. Very short, actually. I was tired of healing, 25 mans, pugs, etc. but I very quickly realised that I missed something about it and that what was needed wasn’t a break from the game altogether, moreso a change of scenery.

My scenery at the time:
Alliance, druid healer, 25man guild.

Well, I’ve always played Alliance. Since day one. I’ve even written blog posts about being Alliance. So fuck it, time to faction change. MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Thats right, I’m a cow, and I’m awesome! My dance is no longer slutty, it’s soulful. I can’t shadowmeld but I CAN (and will) war-stomp you in the face. Oh and I have more HP, which brings me on to my next point. Pretty much all I’ve done this entire expansion was healing. So, bye bye healing spec! My resto gear set has been augmented with a little hit rating here, a little crit rating there, and BAM I’m a boomkin. Except, thats my offspec, as my main spec is a big fat bear. No more am I squishy healer, instead I am squishy tank. Well, perhaps not so squishy, but I can’t help but feel that way, charging into a fight completely naked but for the fur on my back! Bring it on Arthas, I killed you once as a healer and now I’m gonna rip your face off as a bear!

Thirdly and probably most importantly, I found a new guild. Completely by accident. I knew I was looking for a ten man raiding guild but I wasn’t having any luck finding one on Stormrage. But one night, after offering some addon-fixing advice to a mage who QQ’d in trade chat (surprise surprise, a mage who QQ’s) I made a friend. Someone who had just transferred to the server….. with a few friends….. to start a 10 man raiding guild! Ding! Problem solved! I applied immediately, by answering their one single, and rather unorthadox application question. If you want to know what it was, you’ll have to apply for yourself!

What I found in this guild was not just a raiding team, but very funny, very decent, very skilled and very enjoyable people to spend time with. I *love* raiding with this guild, in a way that I haven’t in a long long time.

So yes, I’m furry and horny and I bite.

And I’m loving it.

This is not a “druid-changes-in-cataclysm” post!

… though I will go as far as to say that I’m kinda excited about not being in tree form 100% of the time anymore. Perhaps not the popular opinion amongst druids, but just my two cents!

My Very Own Deathtard
Aaaaanyway, following on in the tradition of pretty much everyone else everywhere, I now have a level 80 DeathTard! Poor little Chuggit had been sat at level 75 for months on end, as is the case with a lot of my alts actually, but I finally decided it was time to get the hell on with it and get her a life-time membership to the heroic spamming club! I’m playing her as frost dual wield DPS, since tanking is too much like hard work and…. well….. she’s a gnome. Seems that melee gnomes hacking away with two one-handers is HILARIOUS to watch!

I haz a posse!

Our New Lich King 25 Tactic
We’re a diplomatic guild, who’s leadership are open to suggestions from our members on how to best deal with an encounter we’re working on.

This is what we came up with:

We’ll melt that bastard place down! Honestly who ever thought to build that place from ice!?! Duh!

Doesn’t work though. I still end up getting Val’kyr’d a lot.

*grmbl*

I have to admit that the Val’kyrs are one of my favourite elements of the Lich King fight. You eventually resign yourself to the fact that killing Arthas requires going through a lot of wipes beforehand, while everyone learns where they need to be and when, and “Lady RNG” has had her chance to mess with you enough that she’s satisfied. Like, for example, Val’kyr-ing three of your five healers, then dropping a defile on the melee trying to free them. NOT cool, REALLY NOT COOL! But yeah, thats why I love the Valks. They add that element of terrifying surprise to the fight. You can all bunch up in the same place and force them all in the same direction if you want to, but ultimately who they pick off can have a massive effect on the outcome. Say you’re relying on paladin stun rotations to keep one of them flying away, and your three retadins get picked up. You’re fucked, wipe it and go again. These no-fault wipes are my favourite, honestly, because you just sigh, pick yourselves up, and go again. You were doing fine, it was just Lady RNG messing with you. God bless Lady RNG!

Anyway, it’s all fun and games, as they say, and after doing him on 10 man once already, I’m looking forward to more 25 man attempts.

Fishing

I don’t think a huge number of people know this, but I love fishing. It’s incredibly relaxing, and perfectly illustrates the “dynamic range” warcraft offers. You can sit with a friend by a lake just patiently waiting for that Dark Herring catch, chatting away the hours, or you can be embroiled in a raid with 24 others, working fast and furiously to take down the tyrannical behemoth in front of you. So my next item on the “to-do” list is the Salty title. Which will probably take a lot of patience, or would if I was actively going for it. Fact is, it’ll probably just happen organically as I find myself with time to spend fishing on days where I’m not raiding and my alt-levelling partner is doing something more interesting!