Very little, I’m afraid.

Instead I’ve been finding out about the origin of the Gnomish race, by following the questlines around the Fizzcrank Airstrip. It feels like Gnomeregan as it ought to have been, very much more polished than any of the old-world stuff, and I highly enjoyed it.

Similarly the Coldarra quests. They all felt very well put together, feeding into The Nexus, which I’ve now run 3 times (and only on the third did I have any quests). Once you know the storyline behind the place it feels a lot more rich, so I’m going to put some effort into getting as many instance quests as I can before venturing into the remaining dungeons.

Oh, and Dalaran is awesome. It feels a lot more like a city than Shattrath ever did. Now all I need is my flying mount back and I’ll be set…

… you don’t talk about Lich King Club.

The second rule of Lich King Club is, no whining.

A day into Lich King, and it’s very pretty. A lot of work has been put into the art, I’ll grant that. Utgarde Keep was an instance I thoroughly enjoyed - a different feel, a different look. Unfortunately I then went to The Nexus. It feels a lot like Botanica part 2. So much so that nothing there felt really fresh.

Unfortunately I’m very busy this weekend so I won’t necessarily get a lot of time to play, but I’m looking forward to the new quest areas and level 80 raiding a lot more than more 5-man runs. I guess I’ve remembered the gear grind to get to uncrittable from 70, and I’m in no real hurry to repeat it.

I’ll enjoy levelling to 80 - some of the quests are fantastic already - but the gear grind isn’t something I’m in a hurry to repeat.

I would assume that any raiding guild worth their salt is giving their MTs first crack at tanking plate gear drops

Why would we want to do that? I’m not a big fan of the “Tank priority” scheme. It’s all about the team as a whole, not any individual. Why should they lose out on a reward because the tank thinks it might be better for them? This particularly applies to Tier tokens, though if something is a serious upgrade for someone else, they should have it. The paladin offtanking today might well be main tanking tomorrow because the usual Main Tank is unavailable.

Tank priority makes a mockery of any sort of effort-based loot system, be it eqDKP, EPGP, or anything else. It’s stating that the tank is the most important person in the raid. This isn’t true. There are ten (or twenty-five) most important people in the raid, and all of them have a job to do.

A case in point - I’ve seen the warrior Tier 6 helm drop multiple times. I’ve never got hold of one, though, because my PR has been too low. Does it really matter? Not really. My [Tankatronic Goggles], pretty much the very first epic I got, are still serving me well, and have done in every single raid encounter I’ve seen. (On the other hand, I did walk away with T6 legs and shoulders and a [Bulwark of Azzinoth] in one night, so it’s not like I’m not seeing serious gear improvement).

What happens when your tank who’s got all the best gear suddenly gets run over by a bus, or (shock, horror!) quits the game? Suddenly all the investment made in him is wasted. If a tank is really good, then he’ll be picked for most raids and be near the top of the list for loot anyway. There’s no need to push the balance in his favour that little bit more, or when you reach the next Brutallus, you’ll find your tank surviving happily while your dps are completely unable to beat the beserk timer.

In my last raids, I have been number 3 in ZA several times, and was number 2 for our last Kara run

Now, far be it from me to complain about a protection warrior doing decent dps, but there’s something wrong there from my point of view. If the tank, who by definition, is wearing a set of gear which maximises survivability, is topping, or coming close to topping, the dps meters then there’s something seriously wrong somewhere.

I am of course assuming that Kadomi is geared similarly to the rest of her group, and that Daughters of the Horde are very much at the casual end of the spectrum, however to me if the DPS are struggling to out-damage the tank, there’s something not quite right somewhere, whether it’s in their rotations, their choice of spells or even how they have gemmed and enchanted their gear (if they even have).

So, my point, long winded as it is, is that yes, tanks can do reasonable dps these days, but if the players who are supposed to be doing the most damage aren’t, then everyone should work together until they are back in the right place again.

If tanks could do an equal amount of damage to the dps players, what would the point of taking the squishier people with you be?

On, then, to Felmyst, an undead dragon created by some bizarre accident involvng a Pit Lord’s blood and the proximity of the sunwell. She has a groud phase, where people have to move out of an AoE effect, and an air phase where she breathes down on the raid and causes a load of skeletons to appear, at which point they’re AoEd down. Yes, it’s Nightbane with a twist, which is that of her breath, both on the ground and in the air.

Had a few odd wipes where the wrong location for the breaths was called out, and one particularly frustrating one where she entered the air phase with one health and we wiped to the breaths but she went down too.

Twins next! Just so long as they’re not just a rehash of the Twin Emperors, we’ll be fine…

Anyone porting to Stormwind by way of Shattrath City gets instantly zombified, thanks to the choke point in the Mage Tower. I can only hope it ends soon - though I’ve only been minorly inconvenienced by it, a whole bunch of people who are levelling characters are having a hellish time.

And then there’s the Scourge Invasion, which seems to be a repeat of the one that occurred when Naxxramas was originally launched. I managed to get 18 [Necrotic Rune] for the quests and the tabard, and now I’ve given up trying to farm more. It’s nigh-on impossible to tag a spawning scourge before someone else does, at least for a warrior. Anyone with a ranged, instant attack has a much better time of it. Grouping’s out of the question, because so many people are selfish and don’t want to share their runes.

Thus far, then, the Scourge Invasion is made of a huge amount of fail. I sincerely hope it’ll pick up soon because at the moment it isn’t a great deal of fun.

Ready the shotgun. I’m curious to find out how this event progresses. It’s almost like they’ve deliberately re-introduced the Corrupted Blood plague. I logged in briefly this morning to see what it was about and witnessed Khadgar consumed by the disease, at which point his retinue of bodyguards turned on him and swiftly despatched him. Brutal.

In other news, the more observant of you might have noticed from my updated portrait that we downed Illidan earlier in the week. Perhaps I was slightly wrong before - there’s still an element of strategy involved in the fight, and it took us a few goes to get it right (though I expect that to improve tonight). Anyway, I walked away with the [Bulwark of Azzinoth] and ever since I’ve been getting whispers from random people either congratulating me or asking where I got my kick-ass shield from, which is nice.

I’m looking forward to Sunwell, which will be either tonight or Sunday depending on how things go. Kalecgos reads like it might be a challenge even now.

A friend of mine, who isn’t so lucky as I am, asked me the above after I complained that raids were now too easy. It’s a sentiment I think is well worth exploring. We’ve all seen now how much easier almost every boss is in the current state of affairs.

Last night The Hidden Circle zerged through Black Temple, downing everything from Supremus to the Illidari Council in under three hours. It was rather ridiculous, really. The difficulty is gone, and with it some of the enjoyment. We still have some new content to poke at, Sunwell, which I expect we’ll see soon, and I expect some challenge there, but to have Illidan in his previous form stolen from us is somewhat disappointing.

On the other hand, I understand that it’s nice for the more casual players to experience the content before it becomes completely obsolete. I don’t want to take the opportunity to experience the content away. I also appreciate that I’m lucky to have seen as much as I have - in terms of Vanilla WoW, I never saw Blackwing Lair, Naxxramas or much of Molten Core. That doesn’t mean I’m being elitist when I’m disappointed that things I was working toward are now nerfed to ridicule (as an example, Reliquary of Souls phase 1 last night didn’t reach the enrage).

It’s a shame that the old style bosses (minus, maybe, shear) couldn’t be activated by maybe adding a Heroic mode for raid instances, and with normal mode dropping gear from the previous tier (say SSC gear from BT). That way casual players could see the content, and the higher-end (I won’t use the word “hardcore”, because I know true hardcore players and I couldn’t cope with it) raiders could carry on almost like they were before.

Last night’s Black Temple raid was called off because lots of people were having trouble getting online and staying online, not to mention the addon hell that many people were going through (Having tested everything on the PTR helped me immensely on that front).

In order to play with our new talents, then a group of us went to Kara to find out how we’d fare against a familiar environment. And the answer is, as far as I’m concerned, a little too well. The entire instance was clear in under 90 minutes, and that includes a lot of waiting around for people who’d been disconnected, replacing them if they got stuck offline, and general fiddling with addons (at one point my action bars decided they were going to page out mid-fight. Eek.)

Anyway, the answer to the question “How well can a Protection Warrior AoE tank?” is “Very well indeed”. Depending on how on the ball I was with my abilities, I was able to hold my own against my co-tank, a protection paladin.

Warrior threat sucks when you’re not being hit by bosses, as you might expect, but it’s still better than it was before.

After we destroyed Kara, we moved on to Zul’Aman. To be honest the nerf bat hitting the instance really hit home here. With the same group, we managed the timed run with several minutes to spare, even though we’d done the bosses in a completely non-optimal order. That too was clear in about an hour, accounting for people swapping characters after the timed run. Zul’Jin was laughably easy compared to how he’d been before, too.

I’m expecting similar for Black Temple this evening. This is a huge disappointment, as having faced Illidan once before the patch, it annoys me that we won’t be able to kill him in his original state. Ah well, roll on level 80, where I’m hoping new bosses will be back to being a reasonable difficulty.