The View From Down Here

The Sixth Picture of the Sixth Folder

Vads has tagged me, and I aim to please.

I was actually quite surprised at what it turned up – this:

Sadly, we’re all level 80 in this shot, and the DKs should give it away that this was a bit of fun on an off night. But, it’s Kil’Jaeden biting it, and completing my Outland Raider achievement.

Who do I pick to keep the chain going?

• Aurik
• Softi
• Tankette
• TGAPGeorge
• Billy Wallace
• And, last but not least, Veneretio. Tips on good UIs, maybe ?

Has Tanking Changed?

Kadomi thinks that tanking has undergone an evolution since WoW 1.0 came out. Me, I’m not so sure.

Yes, the abilities have changed. The buttons we press to engage the enemy are not the same buttons we pressed back when I started playing back in patch 1.9. It’s now possible for any number of classes to tank – Death Knights, Paladins and Druids have joined Warriors in being able to hold aggro and not die. But so what?

• You are not the buttons you press to keep aggro.
• You are not your class.
• You are not the gear you wear, nor the buffs you give out.
• You are not a beautiful and unique, heavily armoured snowflake, and your toon is the same collection of fleeting pixels as everybody else’s.

Apologies to Chuck Palahniuk.

The role of the tank is, and will continue to be, the one who can hold onto aggro. That’s all. Keep everybody alive by being less squishy than everyone else. Whether that’s in AoE situations, by hitting shield slam, or swipe, saving shield wall for the right situation, or just doing your damnedest to spam taunt, tanking hasn’t changed.

What has changed is our tools. We now have bigger and more varied tools at our disposal. The tools doth not make the player – a good tank is a good tank regardless of what abilities he has to hand. Tanking is all about spatial awareness, positioning and quick reactions (when it’s necessary to save someone). That hasn’t changed.

Better tools might mean that we have a more interesting time than we did before, but the buttons we press are so low down the list of things that make a good tank they may as well be near the bottom.

Playstyles have changed. But that doesn’t mean that tanking has.

Back in the Old Routine

It took long enough, but it finally happened.

I’m back in the pre-WotLK routine of raiding and not much else. It’s that simple. There’s not much to do other than farm and raid, and I don’t mind this one bit. I’ve seen every raid instance, and defeated it (though Sartharion plus 3 is still on the cards), I’ve done more daily quests than I could ever want. So it’s back to the meat of the game.

I’ve stopped pugging again, not because I have developed any dislike of pugs, but because I no longer see anything that’s a useful upgrade coming from anything I could pug. The “holes” in my gear are all now raid items, and they’re upgrades from Naxx-10 or heroic gear. I haven’t changed my mind about pugs being good for the soul, but there’s a limit – when I’m not going to get anything out of them, it’s time to move on.

More than anything, I’m looking forward to Ulduar.  If it doesn’t appear soon, then I might have to go back and actually level an alt. I think the world might end if that ever happened.

That’s right, I’m doing this deliberately.

Inspired by a tale of a healer friend of mine who got an earful every time someone died in a pug she was in, I think it’s time to set a few things straight.

The healer and the tank are, in some respects, the most important of the roles in any group, be it five-man or twenty-five. The healer in particular is essential for any content you don’t significantly outgear and level, for the simple reason that without him, nobody would survive five minutes. Similarly, the tank is necessary because only he has the gear which allows him to be repeatedly hit hard and not die.

Note that I am talking about the roles here. Your tank might be a moonkin. Your healer might be an elemental shaman. Neither of these things matters, so long as they can perform the job given to them – tanking, healing, whatever. Without someone performing these support roles, and it doesn’t have to be one of the “traditional” classes, nobody can survive for very long.

And, just as much, without the DPS, no healer or tank would get very far – there would be no mana left to keep the tank up long before there was any chance of the boss or trash pack dying.

The key here is synergy. The tank keeps the attention of the boss, and is healed by the healer, so that the rest of the group can safely lay in with their own attacks.

And occasionally that synergy breaks down. One of the DPS will pull aggro and the healer and the tank will both not be fast enough to land a heal, taunt or intervene. That’s fine. Take it as a lesson in aggro management. But…

Pull aggro several times in an instance all the while doing the same thing and there is most likely one of three things wrong:

• The tank isn’t very good
• The healer isn’t very good
• The DPS player sucks at aggro management

If nobody else is dying, it’s unlikely to be the first option, or the second.

If you pull aggro off me, I’ll save you. Even if you do it a few times. But pull aggro off me consistently and I’ll stop trying to save you. Quite likely (if the healers I know are anything to go by) you’ll stop getting heals too. It’s our way of telling you “l2p” as so many (usually poor) players spout at the first available opportunity.

So, yes, I’m letting you die. Think of it like the birds that push their young out of the nest – you’ll either learn to fly, or die trying. You’ll end up a better player for it. And if you don’t, if you end up cursing the entire group but yourself, because you’re unwilling to change, then I’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll never have to group with you again.

Don’t thank me, or my healer friends, we’re just doing our jobs.

Just how good is Titanium Plating?

(Warning: this post contains Math.)

There’s a new shield enchant in town - Titanium Plating. And the question that has been going around my mind is – is it any good, or should I stick with the old favourites of 20 defense rating or even 18 Stamina?

To make the numbers easier, I’m going to make a few assumptions. The “typical” warrior who I’m going to use as my example will have:

• 25000 health
• 20% Dodge
• 20% Parry
• 20% Block
• 1000 Shield Block Value
• No raid buffs, such as Horn of Winter, or Blessing of Kings.
• Talents: 3 / 3 Vitality and Improved Shield Block (Protection warrior, right?)

Let’s look at the easy one first. The 18 Stamina enchant adds 191 health (180+6% from Vitality), leaving a total of 25191 health, an increase of 0.7%. Not that impressive, right? And as we add more health from food buffs, Power Word: Fortitude and Commanding Shout, its comparative value decreases. But for the minute, we’ll call it a 0.7% increase in health.

Now, 20 defense rating. Again, it’s not too hard to work out the benefit of this enchant:

20 defense rating = 4 defense skill (ignoring the remainder). That’s the same as 0.16% dodge, 0.16% parry, 0.16% to miss from the boss and 0.16% block. That’s an additional 0.48% avoidance, plus 0.16% block. That’s almost a half a percent avoidance, plus a 1000 HP reduction in one hit in every 625 – or an average reduction of 1.6HP per hit (ie, 0.16% increase in effective mitigation). While defense rating is subject to diminishing returns too, it scales somewhat more slowly, so as we get to 27000 health or more it’s probably going to be better to take the defense rating – 0.48% avoidance plus 0.16% mitigation sounds good to me.

And, finally, Titanium Plating. This is where it gets tricky:

20% block rating means that, on average, 1 out of 5 attacks will be blocked. So our average increase in health saved will be 40 over 5 attacks, or 8 health per attack.  so that’s a 0.8% increase in average block value. Doesn’t sound so impressive, does it? We’re forgetting one thing, though – shield block. If we assume we keep shield block up as much as possible then for 30s we will see a 0.8% increase in block value, followed by a 10 second period where everything is blocked, for twice the usual shield block value. But because the usual block value doubles as well as the enchant, we can disregard this in terms of percentages. So our new average increase is as follows:

(30s  0.8% increase) + (10s  4%) = average increase of damage reduction - 1.6%

Sounds good? Of course, 1.6% more damage mitigated does, but shield block isn’t necessarily going to be used that way. It might be used to generate extra threat, or as an extra crutch if healing starts to slide slightly. So we can’t assume that it will be up for 10 seconds in every 40. That is merely the absolute best case. And this additional reduction is going to be a much lower percentage of the incoming damage from a boss, who hits hard every 2.5s than it will be from an AoE trash pack which will be constantly beating on you.

Of course, Shield Block Value is also useful for threat, from Damage Shield and Shield Slam. Because our average block value (in the best possible conditions) has increased by 1.6%, so too will our threat from these damaging abilities. A 1.6% increase doesn’t sound much, and at the moment it probably isn’t, but in the future it may well turn out to be useful at higher gear levels, even though by then the percentage will be diminished. It’s also a benefit neither of the other two enchants will grant.

So, which is the better enchant? 18 stamina might have cut the mustard when 15k health unbuffed was the norm for tanks, but it’s starting to show its age. No, both the new enchants are, somewhat unsurprisingly, better. On reflection, I’d rather have the 20 defense on a slow-hitting boss. For AoE trash packs, where keeping up shield block is an excellent passive threat move, the extra threat from the plating wins out. Again, though, as shield block value increases the additional percentage mitigated by the plating is reduced. The higher the gear level, the more valuable the avoidance will be, as it diminishes at a lower rate, being spread across three stats (dodge, parry and miss).

Hello, my name is Namthe and I’m an Addonoholic.

Right, I’m glad I’ve got that out of the way.

I remember my first addon, way back in the mists of time when I was but a newbie. MobHealth did just what it said on the tin – it allowed me to see exactly how many hit points something I was fighting had left (players these days don’t know they’re born). I was happy with that (and a few others) for the longest of times, and after a while I started becoming more adventurous. Bongos Action Bars? Excellent. they saved a fir bit of screen space. X-Perl unit frames? They were nice too, giving a new look to how my UI presented itself. Eventually I went overboard and before I knew it there was far too much information on the screen. I didn’t need most of it, but it stuck there for a while because I’d got used to it.

Then, one day, I discovered the now-defunct MazzleUI. It changed my world. Once I’d got used to the keybindings, it solved a lot of my problems, and displayed just the right amount of data (ironically, still too much). More than that, it looked pretty in a way that my previous UI just plain hadn’t. For a while, I stuck with it, until the constant fixing-up after patches got too much. Since then I’ve tinkered with all sorts of action bar and raid frame mods, but always ended up with a few constants – the minimap in the centre of the bottom of the screen, some sort of health indicator either in the middle, or slightly above, anda graphical depiction of the raidmembers to the right and left. It works.

Recently, though, I tried an experiment. I threw everything  away and decided to start again, trying to replicate my existing UI’s layout and behaviour using as few addons as possible. It worked, mostly. Everything was trimmed down, the memory footprint was right down too.

Then I tried to repair, or at least thought I did. I had been using a tiny addon to auto-repair every time I spoke to a repairing vendor. And because of this, I’d got into the habit of just clicking on a vendor to repair. Embarrasing to say the least if you try that in a raid. As time went on, I noticed there were more and more of these tiny little things that I was missing, like plotting where ore nodes and gas clouds were on a map, or a decent crafting window, or turning on the combat log on entering an instance.

Before I know it, I’m back where I was before. Sure, I’ve saved a bit of memory, but nowhere near as much as I’d hoped. I know for sure I could tank without addons (though Omen on threat sensitive fights such as Malygos is still helpful), but could I cope the rest of the time? The jury’s still out on that one.

It’s a dependency  wonder if I’ll ever break.

Paradigm Shift

Looking back on my original character, I was never very good at playing a rogue. True, I did OK, but I was never great at the whole thing. If I came top of the DPS charts, it was because everone else was worse than me rather than because I was doing anything spectacular. When I rerolled to my current warrior, everything seemed so much more straightforward. I could understand the rage mechanic far better than I ever got to grips with the combo points mechanic, and my brain was always oriented toward tanking. I lost count of the number of times I rounded up random mobs at level 60 to stop them chomping the healer and bring them back to the (particularly poor) tank.

The amount of time I have spent playing my rogue since Namthe reached level 70 is probably in the order of two hours or so. The mechanics seem alien to me (far more alien, even than the mana-using classes that I’ve tried since). It’s seemingly true that you can never go back.

So, on to Malygos then. For the uninitiated, the first two portions of the encounter are reasonably within the norm. First you fight the dragon himself, and following that there are a number of his underlings to dispatch.

And then everything changes. Once the minions are defeated, the entire encounter changes massively. Suddenly, the floor vanishes and you start to plunge to your doom, only to be caught by members of the Red Dragonflight. Yes, it’s a boss based on vehicle-based combat, with the hateful combo points and energy mechanic. In three dimensions.

You can practice this by doing the Aces High daily, and I have done – but the daily is very much different in so far as the dragons you have to kill don’t have all that much longevity – they drop dead very quickly. I would get stuck at around 10 stacks of the dubuff on occasion as the errors introduced in my poor energy management combined with the occasional need for shielding finally caught up with me.  It didn’t help that the mod I was using (MalygosCP) to track debuffs and combo points, was lying to me about how many I had applied.

So, this is one area where I’m going to work harder to improve. It’s just annoying that it requires a raid to practice it well.

Unexpected Benefits

3.0.8, the patch that was supposed to be the saviour of us all, has arrived. And as many people will tell you, it hasn’t lived up to what was promised.

The big thing, as far as I was concerned, would be that the lag in Naxxramas (and other raids) was going to be fixed. Unfortunately last night’s raid proved that to if anything the lag was worse – before we even set foot inside, members of one guild were complaining that they’d given up for the night because they’d been wiping on trash in Obsidian Sanctum, the lag had been so bad for them.

And, on starting pulls in the Spider wing, it was revealed that the lag was there. Bearable, but there. And so it continued for a few minutes, right up until the moment that I pulled Anub’Rekhan. Things were just about bearable until it came to the point of moving him around the room during the Locust Swarm. I moved through the usual semi-circular kiting path, waiting for him to follow. He didn’t. The server was struggling so much that it averaged my movement over about twenty seconds, and he ploughed through the middle of the room, killing half the raid. Not that it mattered too much, the lag had hit a point where nothing was happening anyway. I stood there for fully sixty seconds before he killed me, with no healing on me at all. Hurray for the lag.

Somehow, and I’m not at all sure how, we gave it one more go. Things were more bearable this time, and he was downed in short order. The only explanation I can think of is that almost every other guild had given up by that time so we had the instance server to ourselves.

So, unexpected benefit #1: Terrible lag makes everyone else give up and go away, leaving us lag-free for a night.

As for unexpected benefit #2: The change to Glyph of Bloodrage means that warriors no longer take a health penalty for generating rage using Bloodrage. This means that if healers put a load of heal over time spells on you, they don’t immediately take aggro in the first second of the pull (overhealing generates no threat). It’s not a big change, it’s a subtle one, and it wasn’t a big problem to begin with, but it was a pleasant surprise.

And that’s it. Expect more posts complaining about the lag in the near future, as I don’t expect it to be fixed uickly and it’s rapidly turning from a slight hump in the road to an enormous bloody menace.

Lagtasia

There comes a point in every challenging  raid where it’s far too tempting to give up and go on to something else instead. Sometimes it’s the right call, Sometimes it’s just frustration at the way certain people are playing, sometimes there’s a real problem.

One of the biggest real issues to be experienced at the minute is that of significant, and problematic, server lag. As an example, in Naxxramas at the moment we can have up to two seconds of server lag. It’s bad enough that that’s greater than the global cooldown by a large factor. Two seconds is a huge amount, and while many bosses are just made harder by such a change, there’s a couple that are made impossible.

Of those three in particular stick in my mind – two in the Plague Quarter. Heigan the Unclean requires that you be standing in the right place in his room at all times, as different areas of the floor become no-go zones. With a two-second lag, it’s not always straightforward to work out whee you should be standing bearing in mind where the server thinks you will be standing; it’s bearable, though, once you get into the swing of it.

Loatheb, however, is a different matter. The three second healing window is, at worst case, reduced to a 1s window. Ouch.

As for Thaddius? It’s really not very conducive to success  zap everyone on your side of the boss because the server hasn’t told you what your charge is by the time it goes off.

I sincerely hope the lag is sorted soon; it just isn’t pleasant to try to do anything when the server takes longer to acknowledge your actions than you do to perform them.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry

I’m told that I’m particularly good at keeping a cool head when the actions of those around me drive me up the wall. I’d also disagree with that, but on the other hand I’m very good at disguising exactly when I’m annoyed at least up to a point.

This afternoon, I ran Naxxramas 10-man, and it would be fair to call it an unmitigated disaster. It was an all-guild run, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. Everyone on the run held at least the Raider rank in-guild, so it should be reasonable to expect everyone to know what they are doing, right?

Wrong.

I won’t embarrass those people who let the side down by naming them, but let’s take a look at the catalogue of fail for the afternoon:

• An offtank who swore he knew what to do on the Four Horsemen fight and then proceeded to wipe the raid twice by doing the wrong thing
• A healer who healed throughout Loatheb’s necrotic aura, pausing only to regen whenever the aura dropped
• Players who claimed to be unable to see the green stuff bubbling up through the floor of Heigan’s room
• Players who ignored the call of “Stay back, there’s a patrol coming” several times
• And to top it off, players who didn’t bother to get any frost resistance gear and thought that 10k health would be ample for Sapphiron.

Let’s look at that last one. Yes, frost resist gear is optional, but with 10k health? Please. This isn’t the Burning Crusade any more.

I’m going to have to think twice before offering to help gear up people in future. The effect it can have on my sanity just isn’t worth it.