Protection DPS is no longer a joke!

Yesterday, Ulushnar broke a few milestones. He now has 25.3k health unbuffed(over 1.8k Stamina) and over 900 Strength, he also has over 2.1k Attack Power, and his damage is getting silly as a result.

Before the launch of Wrath, Ulu was lucky to end up in the top half of the DPS meters. In an AoE instance, he might just nudge ahead of a underperforming single-target DPSer. In Wrath now, Ulu can routinely nuke his way to the top of the DPS meters in AoE instances. Even in single-target fights, Ulu's Shield of Righteousness is a hefty chunk of DPS every 6 seconds, and Hammer of the Righteous continues to be consistantly awesome.

Of course he still goes oom in about 30 secs if he isn't getting hit, but you can't have everything, right?

Titansteel: The Waiting Game

I've never really played an Alchemist. I mean, I tried to make Ulu one at one point when a friend convinced me that the Alchemist's Stone was "the shizzit" for tanks, but it never really stuck. I certainly never got all the cool transmutes people used to go on about. Which meant I never had to deal with the sucky cooldowns.

With my experiences over the last few days, I'm glad I never followed through on that profession. Ever since I started smelting Titansteel, it's been one torturous day after another waiting for the 20 hour cooldown on the next bar to be up. I'm swimming in materials, since I often trip over a couple of Titanium nodes whenever I go mining and my Mote Extractor has me swimming in Eternals.

However, knowing I still have 40 hours of cooldowns between Ulu and his Tempered Titansteel Treads makes me sad somehow. Ah well, guess tomorrow evening isn't too far away.

More Heroics.

Well last night it was back to the Heroic grindstone.

First up was Violet hold, the heroic daily. The first waves were pretty easy. We scarcely knew we were in a heroic until we hit the first boss, Zuramat the Obliterator. Took us two or three wipes to get the gimmick down, but after we did, the rest of the instance proved no challenge.

Also proving no challenge was Heroic Stratholme. There's a timer even there where if you clear to just before the last boss within 25 minutes, you get to fight an additional boss just before him. We cleared to him with no wipes and a few seconds to spare, but were unable to get to him in time. This heroic was not significantly harder than the normal.

And after this instance, I was able to buy the Libram of Obstruction, so go me!

After that we decided to try Heroic Halls of Lightning for the normal daily. It was, all things told, pretty damn brutal. The second and last bosses provoked some wipeage, but we got there in the end.

Into Heroics...

I've been meaning to post screenshots of Ulu's bad-ass new gear. The problem is as soon as I take one, he gets something new.

Case in point, I took this yesterday morning:



And I've already replaced my trusty lvl 74 quest reward axe with a Heroic Utgarde Keep drop!

Yes that's right, last night Ulu assembled a few level 80 guildies and went to test the heroic waters. And we found them both hot and full of sharks. Well metaphorical sharks at least. And metaphorical heat as well I guess.

The party was Ulu, Buachampoo (Holy Paladin), Frozt (Elemental Shaman), Eleinya (Demonology Warlock) and Vordar (Resto Shaman). That's right folks, two healers. Possibly not the best optimized group but since they were:

a) The only available level 80s in my guild and
b) Two couples who were unwilling to play separately, I took what I could get.

We tried Azjol'Nerub first, since that was the daily. We got owned hard and often on the mini-boss waves before the first boss. We just weren't able to clear one group before the second spawned. With more DPS it might have been more managable.

After a few wipes, we gave up and tried Heroic Utgarde Keep. It was more of a leisurely stroll than the zerg we normally do, but it was manageable. Didn't feel significantly harder than a normal lvl 80 instance, although saying that, I was restrained and only pulled one group at a time rather than my normal 2-3. Also as I mentioned, the first boss gave Ulu a shiney new sword, and I spent the night levelling ulu's sword skill from 373 to 400.

Our spirits bouyed by this success, we pressed on to try Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle. And for a while it seemed fine. The first two bosses and the trash surrounding them wasn't difficult. However, when we hit the gauntlet around Skadi the Ruthless and wiped. And wiped. And wiped some more. I think it took us an hour to finally bury that bastard, first it was surviving the Gauntlet long enough to get the 5-6 harpoons needed to dismount him, secondly it was getting him under control fast enough so he doesn't kill half the group when he lands.

In the end I used the following macro to get him under control:

/target Skadi
/cast Exorcism

And we killed him without any deaths. He even apologised for his rough treatment by giving Ulu a new belt. After that we cleared to King Ymiron, and after wiping a few times to his glowy ball o' death he too kissed floor in our honor. Sadly he didn't drop his sword, but I guess two weapon upgrades in one evening would have been silly.

So there y'go, some highs, some lows. The group wasn't perfectly optimised, but we had fun, and I ended up with seven badges towards Ulu's Libram. Only eight more to go! Heroic's seem to be the way forward for a group of 80s with decent gear and their heads screwed on. Also the rep gains are tremendous. Mobs give 2-3 times the rep they do in normal, and bosses give 5 times the amount.

Violet Hold's the daily Heroic today. I wonder what it's like...

On the "Difficulty Curve" (Or lack thereof)

I've already heard grumblings from the first couple of level 80s in my guild (a Prot Warrior and a Ret Paladin) about how "easy" the levelling process was. My response is "of course it is"!

The new level cap isn't just about giving players new abilities and more talents, it's about devaluing their current gear to the point where they can offer them reasonable upgrades. In that respect, it's a hill between the players and new content. People can charge up and over it if they have the time and energy, or they can leisurely walk over it and enjoy the view. I suspect most of us fall between those two camps.

I'm not going to comment on Heroics or Naxx10 until I've had a chance to do them, but if they're as straightforward as I've heard then it can only be a good thing. The one thing that The Burning Crusade lacked was a decent Molten core-type entry-level raid, womewhere where an entire guild can go in and gear up on, or that experienced/well-geared guilds can just sidestep completely and move onto the next content.

I know folks are going to disagree with me here, but I think Blizzard have got the balance right this time.

Ding & Stuff

Well a lot got done this weekend.

On saturday morning, Ulu did a couple of circuits of Lake Wintergrasp, the world PVP zone. He wasn't hunting Hordes however, he was looking for the abundant Saronite and Titanium nodes the zone contained. After an hour's mining, he returned to Dalaran and started working his Engineering to 440 so he could make the Armored Titanium Goggles. I had more than enough Titanium and Ulu had been lucky enough to find two Sky Sapphires whilst mining. I had to get the Frozen Orb and Heavy Borean Leather from the Auction House, but it wasn't much of an expense (well ok, the Orb was 1.1K, but hell, it's only Gold, right?). Still, getting the Goggles at level 79 was fairly decent.

After that, it was back to the grind. Saturday's pretty much a blur for the most part. I did some quests in Icecrown I think and I can remember stepping into CoT: Stratholme for the first time with some guildies (fun instance, I really liked it!) and I also did an Utgarte Pinnacle run with a PuG (which actually wasn't horrid, despite a few wipes on the gauntlet.) What I do remember clearly was that Ulu hit 80 in Drak'tharon Keep whilst doing a run for some lower-level guildies.

After they went to Bed, Ulu returned to Icecrown and ended up doing a lot of quests for both The Argent Crusade and The Knights of the Ebon Blade. He ended up Honored with both, which earned him some nice Legplates and Boots.

Yesterday, A guildy managed to get his Blacksmithing up to 440, and was able to make me a Titansteel Shield Wall (this time the Frozen Orb was a more "reasonable" 740G). He even loaned me a Titansteel Bar while my own smelt was on cooldown. I'd been 80 for about 12 hours and I already had two epics!

After that I decided to put the Championing system to the test and work Ulu up to Revered with the Argent Crusade. Championing gives you Reputation with a faction if you wear their tabard in a level 80 Dungeon or Heroic. Ulu needed about 7k rep to get there, so it wasn't easy. He ended up running The Oculus (three times!), Utgarde Pinnacle (twice), CoT: Stratholme, and the Halls of Lightning. After running those seven instances, Ulu was still about 1k short of his rep goal, so I had to finish things off with a daily quest in Zul'Drak and a quick wowhead-assisted scour of Icecrown for any quests I'd missed. I managed it in the end and crowned Ulu's goggles with a shiney new head enchant.

The moral of the story is this: Short, trash-light Dungeons may make for fast clears, but they're murder to grind rep in.

As of last night, we have seven level 80s in the guild, with another few on their way. With a slightly larger population, it might be possible to start Heroics!

The Rep's the thing.

Ulu's not even level 78 yet (about 2/3rds of the way there) and I'm thinking about rep grinding.

Looking at the (very healthy) list of Tanking rep items, two factions stand head-and-shoulders above the rest as ones to get Revered with ASAP.

The Wyrmrest Accord have one of the best pre-raid tanking cloaks at Honored and a really nice tanking chest at Revered. Luckily having done almost all the Dragonblight quests at this point, I'm just past Honored with them.

The other faction, the Argent Crusade will be a bit more work. I'm not even Friendly with them yet, although there are quest chains in Zul'Drak and Icecrown I haven't yet touched. Still they have really nice legs at Honored and the Tanking head enchant at Revered.

Luckily both factions are championable, so once Ulu starts the level 80 Dungeons he'll be able to get rep with them faster. I think I'll make Wyrmrest my first goal before settling into getting the Crusade to Revered.

Still weekend's coming. I wanna get Ulu to 80 and do some instances with friends. I'm also tempted to brind Wulfsblood out of mothballs and bring him to Howling Fyjord for a cooking/skinning/leatherworking zerg. I have almost all the mats now for Ulushnar's engineering goggles, but I need Leather badly.

Oh For The Wings...

Ulu hit level 77 last night. I was getting bored with finishing off Dragonblight and a brief foray into Grizzly Hills didn't exactly excite me. I did a Violet Hold run with guildies, and then as I was thinking about what to do next, a friendly NPC in Dalaran advised me to seek out Hemet Nessingwary in the Sholazar Basin.

To the veterans amongst you, Hemet Nesingwary is synonymous with mass animal slaughter in the wilds of Stranglethorn Vale and Nagrand. Some directed grinding sounded like exactly what the doctor ordered.

It worked. I've pursued most of the quests there towards their completion and Ulu hit 77 last night, which enabled him to spend 1k Gold and learn Cold Weather Flying.

Now Ulu's wings (or rather chopper blades) are back in play. This is going to make the last three levels so much easier!

Instances Thusfar

Ok, to date, Ulushnar has tanked the following instances:

Utgarte Keep: (lvl 70-72) Fun intro instance, three bosses and a lot of melee mobs. Clearable within half-an-hour by most groups, could become Shattered Halls 2.0 on Heroic.

The Nexus: (lvl 71-73) Fairly pretty instance marred for me by the sheer amount of Silencing/Manaburning mobs. Reminds me a lot of Botanica for some reason, although the architecture is quite different. Four bosses and about a 45min clear.

Azjol-Nerub: (lvl 72-74) Incredibly short instance with three bosses and maybe 6 real trash packs (9 if you count the three mini-boss packs before the first boss). Shouldn't take an experienced group more than 20 mins to clear, but remember to cleanse poisons on the second boss. This entire instance is an arachnophobe's nightmare!

Ahn'Kahet: The Old Kingdom: (lvl 73-75) Largest instance thusfar. Four bosses and a massive epic feel, although you might spend nearly an hour down here until you get the route down. The last boss has my favourite gimmick thusfar, which I won't share for fear of spoilers.

The Violet Hold: (lvl 75-77) This is basically Black Morass, with the additional gimmick that the first two bosses are randomly chosen from six. Not going to be an easy place to go loot farming.

And that's as far as I've tanked to date. I've been mostly running for guildies who haven't levelled as far yet. I really like the design of the encounters in the instances. The bosses have interesting gimmicks to learn, but nothing that will insta-wipe an inexperienced group. I'm really looking forward to checking out the other instances.

Get a Venture Co. Libram of Protection!

Ok, so you've hit level 75, you've got your shiney new Shield of Righteousness and you're wondering how to give it more oomph.

Well if you're like me and were never lucky enough to get the Libram from Mother Shazzrah in Black Temple, fear not, there's a nice option that will only take about half an hour to get.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Venture Co. Libram of Protection!

If you want to buy it, you have to accumulate 30 Venture Coins, which are obtained by doing PVP-type quests in Grizzly Hills. These are easily obtained by doing three quests in the Venture Bay subzone:

Smoke 'Em Out - This is easy, just throw smoke bombs into groups of the Venture Co. Stragglers. If you get too close and aggro some, just throw them at your feet and they'll go running. (Horde Equivalent)

Keep 'Em At Bay - Kill ten Horde units or players. I opted to kill units because I am a carebear at heart, but even if you opt to kill players, this is easy as pie. (Horde Equivalent)

Down with Captain Zorna - Kill an elite standing on the docks by the Horde ship on the bay. She wasn't hard, I managed to duo her with a Prot Warrior no problem and she can probably be solo'd. (Horde Equivalent)

Each of these quests gives you 10 coins, for a total of 30 coins which will let you get your Libram. The only wrinkle to these quests is you have to be PVP flagged whilst you have them in your logs. On my server the folks there were more concerned with doing the quests but your server may be different. If you're doing this as Prot, it may be worth roping a few mates in to help.

I'd rather be levelling

So Ulu hit level 76 last night, not long after completing an epic quest chain in Dragonblight (no spoilers, but go there and do every quest you can, you won't be dissapointed!). After that was done, I kinda lost the desire to do much more levelling that evening, and ended up tanking a few instances instead and did some mining. The Sholazar Basin's still largely deserted on my server so it's easy enough to run around there a couple of times a day and pick up a load of Saronite Ore, and if I'm really lucky, some Titanium. I've been slowly getting Ulu's Engineering up as well, but I've diverted a lot of my ore to a friend who's levelling Blacksmith and making him some spiffy armor.

Back at work today and working through the deluge of stuff. Tonight's going to be more quests and some instances. I'm aiming for 77 by tomorrow night.

A brief update

Well the WoW Blogsphere's been quiet for the last few days because everyone's been too busy playing the expansion. Normally I'd use my lunchbreaks at work to offer my own insights, but I've been off for a few days of annual leave.

I'm not going into much detail. Ulushnar has been my number one concern and he's currently at about halfway through level 75. I haven't exactly been going flat-out, but nor have I been taking my time. He's completed almost all the quests in the Borean Tundra and Howling Fyjord starter areas, and he's making a good crack at the Dragonblight ones. He's also led a load of runs into The Nexus, Utgarde Keep and Azjol'Nerub.

Initial thoughts are I'm having a fecking ball! Blizzard have made a few nice changes like spreading out the quests among smaller hubs rather than have you running back to the same 2-3 hubs in every zone.

I love the asthetic of the place as well. After the vaguely sci-fi overtones of Outland (which I didn't mind), it was nice to get down to some good, honest fantasy. And with that comes good, honest fantasy-looking armor.

I've been merrily replacing Ulu's mix of T5, T6 and Badge gear with a hodge-podge of crafted items and a few instance quest rewards. They've done a much better job this time of making all the levelling armor drops having a similar look and feel, so the end result is Ulu looks more like a scary, bad-ass viking and less like he fell asleep and someone drew graffiti all over his armor. The biggest problem I've seen is Ulu's avoidance is in the toilet. By the time I hit level 75, most of the outland items are giving me about 2/3rd the values they were at 70, simply because of the way Ratings scale. For levelling and instancing, I've basically reduced myself to aiming for roughly the same amount of Stamina, keeping enough Defense Rating for at least 5.4% uncrittability and a good chunk of Strength on top of that.

He hit 75 about 3 hours ago and I've spent the time since then playing with Shield of Righteousness. Even in his slightly gimped gear, Ulu hits for 1.4k on it, or 2.8k on a crit. That's a tasty chunk of threat, and it actually gives Ulu some meaningful DPS.

I'll write more on Tuesday afternoon when I'm back at work. Laters.

Incoming + Defense Advice

So it's almost here. Excited folks? I know I am!

For those of you unsure about what to do, Ciderhelm over at Tankspot has made a nice guide for folks. It's slightly Warrior-centric, but most of it applies to Tankadins as well, except for the bit about stacking Shield Block value, which really on applies to Warriors before level 75 when we get Shield of Righteousness. And we probably don't need quite as much food/healing potions.

For me, I'm sticking with Ulu's main tanking gear as shown in the armory for the most part. I'm going to keep a few spare +Defense items on hand for when the increase in the Defense Rating-to-point but I'm not bothered too much if I become slightly crittable in the levelling dungeons. I could create a secondary "DPS" set which focussed on Strength/AP, but that just feels like too much effort for not enough reward.

On the subject of +Defense though, I'd advise each and every one of you to keep your eyes out for items with a high amount of +Defense Rating as you level. Currently to reach uncrittable at level 70 we need 328 Defense Rating (2.34 Defense Rating = 1 Defense Skill). At level 80 that becomes the rather frightening 689! (4.92 rating = 1 skill). Then again, with the removal of Crushing blows from Raid bosses, that 689 is our only hard-and-fast gearing requirement, so get it, and then get other tanking stats as you like.

A Call For Calm

This started as a reply to Galoheart's quitting post I figured I'd open it out to a (slightly) wider audience.

It's easy to feel put upon, to see these nerfs as some massive anti-Paladin conspiracy, but for some reason I'm not donning my Tinfoil hat to keep Blizz out of my thoughts just yet.

The timing could have been better I'll admit, but I choose to believe that they had used that time to exhaust every other option before attempting a drastic, 11th hour move.

I believe they'll fix Prot damage if it needs fixing. Of course until we see the numbers at 80 with Shield of Righteousness, we won't know how much extra damage we need to be competitive.

There's an easy switch to flip in order to give Prot and Holy their judgements back, and that's to bake a damage increase back into Judgements of the Just/Pure. I'm not saying that's the route they should take, but it's certainly the one I'd take.

There are three things I know:

1. Blizzard is intending tanks to do meaningful damage, rather than relying on stacked threat multipliers.
2. Blizzard has stated repeatedly that Paladins are intended to be Main Tanks in WotLK in a way they weren't really intended to be in TBC.
3. This latest raft of changes won't be the last by a long shot. Just because we're down now doesn't mean we'll stay there.

National Lampoon's Tankadin Nerfs

I watched Animal House a few too many times as a kid...

Knaughty: War's over, man. Ghostcrawler dropped the big one.
Ulu: Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Bara: Germans?
Snake: Forget it, he's rolling.
Ulu: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...
[thinks hard]
Ulu: the tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go!
[runs out, alone; then returns]
Ulu: What the fuck happened to the Tankadins I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? This could be the greatest expansion of our lives, but you're gonna let it be the worst. "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Ulu, they nerfed our seals." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Kel'thuzad? he's a dead man! Magylos? dead! ARTHAS...
Bara: Dead! Ulu's right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with Warrior tanks, maybe spec Ret, that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.
Ulu: We're just the guys to do it.
Knaughty: Let's do it.
Ulu: *Let’s do it*!

Names shamelessly lifted from Maintankadin regulars.

Back & Laughing in the Face of Nerfs.

Well, it's been a while since my last post.

I had a week's annual vacation to take last week, and without coffee breaks and lunchtimes spent in the dreary industrial estate where my office is situated, I just didn't have the motivation to update this thing.

Instead, I played Fable 2 and read with a sigh the reactions to our latest nerfs. It's not the nerfs themselves that bother me, sure they're far-reaching, but Wow is a constantly changing game, and numbers go up as well as down. No, it's the reaction from a community I had thought until now was reasonably intelligent, mature and thick-skinned that has really depressed me.

And then I realised today that it mostly was. Most of the people who I've looked to for intelligent and reasonable responses to the changes have given them. However, they've been drowned out by the overwhelming sea of "ZOMG we sucks nau", or "lol, I reroll Warrior" posts.

For the most part, I can see where Blizz has been coming from. They've tried minor changes and bug fixes to balance Retribution and when it didn't work, they went and turned the biggest knobe they could find to see if that fixes the problem. It's not brilliant science, but it's a move out of desperation, which is a relatively human thing.

And now they're waiting for the smoke to clear to assess the effects of these changes and to help those worst hit. I can understand that, and even with the game being released in a little over a week, we still have 3-4 weeks before there'll be serious raiding at 80. That's hopefully going to be enough time to collect data and assess the best fixes to make. That assumes that we do need these fixes at 80.

For what It's worth, I'm staying Prot and levelling Prot. I did it 1-70 back when things were nowhere near as good for us as they are now. When they open up dual speccing, I'm going to grab Retribution as Ulu's second spec, but only because it'll make one-tank fights smoother to have as much DPS as possible.