Two hand weapons to consider include Stormedge, Ironsoul, Voldrethar and Rune Edge. The first thing you notice when you look at them is the rather hefty amount of armor pen on these items, ranging from 70 to 84, translating to between 4.5% to 5.46% actual armor reduction. For an arms warrior in battle stance, that’s between 14 and 15% baseline armor reduction: an arms warrior with mace specialization and Ironsoul, we’re talking 30% armor reduction. That’s ridiculously solid. Even a fury warrior can count on 10% armor reduction by dual wielding these weapons. (Sadly, Lotrafen is a polearm, so Arms won’t get the mace spec benefit and fury can’t DW it. I can still imagine a lot of Arms Warriors going nuts for it.) Whether or not this is a wise spending of item budget remains to be seen.With all of this in mind, we’re looking at a situation where a warrior could pretty easily reduce armor by 10 to 15% depending on spec and stance. (An arms warrior in battle stance would gain 10% actual armor reduction from his tance and around 5% actual armor reduction from his weapon, while a fury warrior dual wielding these weapons could easily reduce armor by 10-11% just from the weapons.) Mix in the effect of a trinket like Grim Toll, and you’re looking at nearly 50 to 55% armor reduction during a proc. That’s pretty substantial, and it’s not even counting the effect of other armor pen on gear.
With a Grim Toll proc, you’re looking at almost 50% armor reduction for a fury warrior, and an arms warrior with mace spec and ironsoul could be looking at 80%. That would mean, as an example, that a target with 10k armor would have effectively 2k armor against the warrior, while a target with 2k armor would have 400 armor, rendering him or her effectively naked. Since the more armor you ignore the better the effect (a 1% armor reduction is pretty trivial due to DR on armor, but a 10% is far more substantial) Armor Pen seems to be scaling better for warriors (who do mostly physical DPS) than for almost anyone else, especially after the Deep Wounds nerfs. (Hunters would also possibly see some benefits here.)
As for tanking weapons, there’s only one thats really looking intended for tanking, Stoneguard from Ulduar-10. It’s solid, better than anything outside of Last Laugh. It doesn’t seem as indicative of a difference in stat weighting the way the 2h weapons seem to.
There’s also quite a lot of Emblem of Conquest gear to consider. It’s competitive with the loot that drops in Ulduar: the DPS neck for warriors that we can buy for emlems is superior to the Ulduar drop, in my opinion. The tanking neck is very strong. The itemization here is conventional (look at the tanking and DPS plate belts) with the familiar broader application of stats so as to make good choices for DK, warrior or paladin tank/DPS. You want your emblem gear to be useful for more classes, obviously, no surprises there. There’s still some interesting armor pen items as well, which is definitely indicative of Blizzard’s stated goal to buff ArP if nothing else.
There’s lots of plate gear to look at so far. Most of the drops we’re getting to see are DPS plate, and most are still itemized with crit, hit, str and stam, with only the new BP having armor pen on it. ArP may be better in this upcoming patch, and may scale best for warriors out of the melee classes, but I’m still relieved to be able to gear fro crit, hit and AP as well. A look at the physical DPS neck that drops in Ulduar reveals that it will be better for anyone but a warrior due to haste being buffed for Paladins, Druids, Shamans and Death Knights, but not warriors, in patch 3.1.
- Mania went exploring in Silvermoon on the PTR to find the new low level Tenacity pets that young Blood Elf Hunters will be able to tame in Patch 3.1.
- TankingTips has their 7th Podcast up covering Dual Specs, true Main Tanks and when to step down as MT.
- Bloodarrow has created a video explaing his Survival Hunter UI (embedded above). The list of AddOns he used in the video are listed in the sidebar of his site.
- One Rogue’s Journey has also created a video, this one to show how the ClassTimer AddOn works in his new Friday Morning Mod series.
- Lorecrafted.com gathers what we know about Ulduar lore and speculates what is going on with Northrend’s major players.
To be fair, those types encounters can be done with little organization before hand. I know the first time I went into Naxx and Obsidian Sanctum wearing half blues, a smattering of crafted epics and the odd green or two. Having the healing set up in advance helped out a lot and reassured people. Sometimes it helps the raid morale some when they know the confidence emanating from healers who know who they’re healing is there. I’ve joined my share of pickup groups in the past few months. I usually play on my alt Shaman. I’m more of the Shatner type that hurls bolts of lightning. I’ve experienced mixed success. On bosses like Archavon, Anub’Rekhan and Sartharion with no drakes active, I notice not a whole lot of organized healing is done. Either that or it was organized behind the scenes via whispers.
So today’s topic: What do you do if the other raiders are scoffing at your suggestion to assign healing?
On the other hand, what if the tanks aren’t up to par? What if the DPS is sucking? What if you hit the enrage timer? Obviously it isn’t entirely the healers fault if the enraged timer is hit (unless the reason for that is because half the DPS is dead). This is going to be one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t-situations. If you want to take the 25 seconds to assign healing, you’ll be laughed at because “this fight” is so ridiculously easy it doesn’t need coordination, right?
In which case, the last thing you might see is this:
“You have joined Looking For Group”
“You have been removed from the party”
In other words, you’re damned if you want to set up healing and you’re damned if you don’t (especially if a wipe takes place).
Is there a specific way for each class to heal on the fly? Yeah, each class has their own tools and mindset. For me as a Priest, I focus on one tank or two tanks and try to keep them both alive at the same time. I’ll let the rest of the healers worry about the rest of the raid.
On the fly healing isn’t something that can be taught. It’s more of a discretionary thing where healers have to exercise their judgment. Being able to predict damage is a big plus. A clairvoyant healer is one that will get far in this game.
The best thing you can do in this situation (or the least you can do) is announce to the raid who you are healing. That’s it! If you’re healing Joe Tankenstein, let the raid know. If you’re going to heal the this groups 4 and 5 on Loatheb, let the raid know. This cues the rest of the healers on what isn’t being taken care of and they can handle that accordingly.
At the very least, you have nothing to lose. If your target dies, the raid can isolate the problem. If someone else’s healing target dies, your butt’s covered because you were focusing on your job (I hope).
PTR build 9658 has finally put Fire Mages back in the news. The changes aren’t anything huge on the surface, but they speak to a new direction in Blizzard’s design philosophy for the spec, and with any luck will lead to more changes. After the break, you’ll find the complete changes, along with a look at the current and future state of Fire Mages as a spec. You wear your flame-retardant gear, and so will I.I became a little excited when we were told that Patch 3.1 would bring “more survivability for Fire spec in PvP.” Though it wasn’t anything big or flashy, finally I might have something to report on regarding everybody’s favorite fire-starters. Then the PTR patch notes came and went, bearing with them no real Fire-related change to speak of. I keep forgetting that the PTR notes change by the day.
The Impact change
We’ve heard for some time now that Blizzard wants to move away from stun procs, and Impact was one of the talents on their radar. Now the other shoe has dropped, and Impact as we knew it is no more. Never again will we see stuns proc at whenever they choose to, without us having to think about them. When we want a stun, we will now have to trigger it ourselves.
Impact will now be a controllable, interactive proc on par with things like Brain Freeze and Missile Barrage. I like these kinds of mechanics, in part because they’re just more fun, but mostly because I have can make them happen at the push of a button. I have to wait for a proc, yes, but once it pops, I can choose the hows, whens and who’s of its deployment. Instead of having to pray that the Feral Druid behind me gets a stun from my Molten Armor, I can now save an Impact proc from my initial Fireball salvo to use on him when he pounces. I like control, and this gives me control over a stunning Fire Blast whenever the talent procs. Read the rest of this entry »
Demonology
Ritual of Doom - Cooldown lowered from 1 hour to 30 minutes.
Send those donuts anyway, because this is all sorts of awesome. The Doom Guard is the highest DPS pet Warlocks have right now, and the more times we can bring out this big boy, the sexier our DPS gets.
Destruction
Decimation effect added - Soulfires cast under the effect of Decimation cost no shard.
This is just a technical change, as the Decimation talent already allowed Soul Fires to consume no shards. Excellent talent, although a bit buggy the last time I tested it, as it didn’t always reduce the cast time of Soul Fire.
There are just a few changes for build 9658, but it’s enough to whet the appetite. I wouldn’t get so worked up with the nerfs just yet, as there’s a lot of time for things to change.
Affliction
Pandemic - Grants the periodic damage from your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells the ability to critically hit for 100% increased damage.
The talent was simplified to enable Corruption and Unstable Affliction to crit, but could have been interpreted as a nerf because spells normally just crit for 50% more damage. The new build should quell those apprehensions. The spell is effectively the same for one point instead of three. That, my friends, is a buff.
Malediction - Increases your spell damage by 1/2/3%, and increases the periodic critical strike chance of your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells by 3/6/9%.
With the bonus to Curse of the Elements made baseline, Malediction became a vanilla spell damage increase. The build 9658 version makes it a mandatory talent that will do crazy, sexy things to Affliction DPS. Send some donuts to Irvine. Let’s make sure this makes it to the live realms.
Eradication - When you deal damage with Corruption, you have 6% chance to increase your spell casting speed by 6/12/20% for 10 sec.
This is a reversion and an effective nerf. An earlier build redesigned the talent to increase Shadow Bolt crits, but this change nerfs the talent by forcing players to invest three points (most builds currently put only one) to get the full effect but with a lower proc rate. Hold those donuts.
Siphon Life - When you deal damage with your Corruption spell, you are instantly healed for 40% of the damage done. In addition, the damage done by your Corruption, Seed of Corruption and Unstable Affliction damage over time effects is increased by 5%.
In an effort to simplify Affliction’s rotation, the Siphon Life talent was changed so that it was no longer a spell but a heal effect tacked on to Corruption. That means the life drain component was lost, which is a net loss in DPS. Ghostcrawler admitted as much, but felt that the minor nerf was offset by the fact that not casting Siphon Life freed up some GCD. Not really. The damage boost in this latest build should probably even it out, though.
Soul Siphon - Increases the amount drained by your Drain Life and Drain Soul spells by an additional 3/6% (up from 2/4%) for each of your Affliction effects on the target, up to a maximum of 9/18% (down from 24/60%) additional effect.
Napkin math indicates that this is a nerf. There are less Affliction effects to stack in 3.1 and more importantly, Warlocks can now only get the bonus from their own Affliction effects. Not that there ever was a problem with Warlock stacking, but this greatly lowers theoretical potential by a huge margin.
Protection
Hand of Sacrifice - Lasts 12 sec or until the caster has transfered 100% of their maximum health.
This is another effective nerf although will scale excellently with Protection Paladins. It’s just not as effective when used by other specs, and seems to be part of Ulduar tuning which seems to be toning down mitigation abilities.
Targets affected by Divine Shield, Hand of Protection or Divine Protection can no longer be affected by any of these spell for 2 minutes. (Down from 3 minutes)
We’re probably never going to see Forbearance return to one minute, but at least Blizzard seems to realize that three minutes is just plain silly.
Divine Sacrifice *New Talent* (Tier 3) - 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin’s health). Instant, 2 min cooldown.
Finally, some good news! This is an extremely attractive talent to pick up and oddly seems counter to the whole mitigation ability nerfs. Coupled with Divine Guardian, this translates to a 60% damage soak albeit scaling with health. Considering it affects all party or raid members, that cap will be reached rather quickly during those ‘oh $#!+’ moments and looks very attractive for PvP, as well. So much love going Protection’s way in Patch 3.1, it almost makes up for Holy going through the crapper.
Holy
Sacred Shield - Cannot be on more than one target at any one time.
Ouch. So much for raid damage mitigation. Back to single target healing, the lot of you!
Infusion of Light - No longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.
Double ouch. This seems to be a PvP nerf to me, and others are crying out the same on the forums. Without addressing it directly, Ghostcrawler states that “several of those changes were made for PvE reasons”. He was, of course, referring to Sacred Shield, considering that one of Blizzard’s concerns was the increasing number of mitigation abilities going into Ulduar. Losing half-a-second Holy Lights will be severely palpable to Holy Paladins in Arenas.
The test realms haven’t actually come back up yet so I’m unfortunately unable to get a list of recipes that have changed, but it sounds like leveling Cooking will suck much less. I think my it took my Priest longer to hit 450 Cooking than it took my Paladin to hit 450 Blacksmithing. After grinding through that, I never want to make another Feast again. Unfortunately, I’m sure I’ll be making them by the dozen when Ulduar rolls around. Sigh.
It’s being reported that high end Cooking has received a bit of an overhaul in the latest Patch 3.1 PTR build. Well over 20 recipes have been changed so they won’t go grey quite so early, making the trip to 450 Cooking a much easier process.
15 Minutes of Fame: Steve, we visited your character on the Armory, and it looks like you’ve been ticking right along through the content. Rama –
Have you ever gotten any inspiration or ideas from WoW?
Well if I said I did that, then I might be able to be sued by Blizzard. (pauses for a long beat, laughs) In my line of work, obviously there’s the directors and the art directors; those people are the people that are making a lot of the broader-stroke artistic decisions. World of Warcraft hadn’t even come out when I was on Lord of the Rings, so I don’t think I’ve worked on something that’s in that genre since it’s come out.
Do any of your coworkers play?
Yeah, you know there was even a post [on the previous WoW Insider post from] one of the guys plays an Undead Rogue also, and he works at DD [Digital Domain]. But he didn’t say who he was or who he is here [Burninator, that's your cue!]. You walk around the studio and people bring their laptops, and often times at lunch you’ll see someone at the Auction House or running around on their free time while they’re sitting at their desk.
Have you been getting any special attention in the game for your work or your Oscar?
As far as in the guild, we’re all in Vent together and I’ve been playing with a lot of these guys for four years or something, so they kinda know who I am anyway. I’m just another guy in the guild. I don’t really talk about work outside of people inside the guild that ask me what’s going on. Outside the guild, I fly a bit under the radar, I guess.
Any celebrations planned?
Well actually, I’m going to have a real party at my house, which is now going to be a combination of Oscar and Sarth-3D party. Anyone that is in the guild is invited. We’re going to just have food and drink and hang out. I’ve met a bunch of the people already, but there are a bunch of people that in the area who’ve joined since the last time we had a gathering, that it’ll be interesting to meet them.
What does your family think about all these gaming folks?
(laughs) I think they’re ok with it. My son enjoys gaming too, so he thinks it’s neat. My daughter thinks it’s kind of geeky, but that’s ok. She likes to play the Wii.
[As for his Oscar photo companion, Steve adds:] Her name is Janelle Croshaw, she is my girlfriend and we live together — and no she doesn’t play WoW, nor does she condone my playing. 
What’s next for you, in game and out?
Outside the game, my next project here is Tron 2.
Inside the game, I think we’ll work on Ulduar a little bit, but I think we’ll sort of take it easy before the patch is officially released. Like I said, we’re not super-hardcore. Even if we have a three-hour scheduled raid, if we go in and bang our heads against the wall for an hour, we’ll probably just call it and go do something fun.
No one’s required to raid, no one’s required to do anything in our guild. It’s a very relaxed … You can just be in the guild to hang out and chat with people if you want. We have some pretty good PvPers; we’ve had a number of gladiators last season. Some of those people don’t raid at all, some of the people don’t PvP at all, some of the people are really only there because their friend is in the guild and they don’t do anything other than five-man content. Pretty relaxed and a nice place for people to hang out, and very friendly. We get rid of people that are a little too serious. We like just being a friendly guild, I think.
Sounds like you frown on getting too deep.
It is worrisome sometimes to see how much time some of these people are spending online, even in my guild. I know that some of those guys who are online a lot, they do have jobs and are doing fine. I guess they’re balancing it as well. I also know some people in our guild who disappeared for a little while to get their grades back up. So someone’s watching some of those people. (WoW can) definitely be a potential threat to people’s motivation outside the game. It’s a bit scary.
how do you say your name?
Steve Preeg/Ramases: (clearing his throat to speak, then chuckling at his publicist) She’s laughing at me already.
Publicist Julie Miller: No, no – umm, only if you want me to.
Ramases: It’s RAM-ah-sis. My son actually made the character. He at the time had a pretty short attention span, so he basically would make a character, level it to like level 4, then go make another one. Most of my characters, he made. I don’t know where he got the names.
What’s <incoming> doing these days?
We’re pretty much waiting on the patch right now. Just last night, for the first time, we did Sarth + 3. We’ve had Naxx-25 on farm for quite a while now; everybody does, even pugs nowadays. There’s still some achievements (left), like the timed Malys, but we’ve basically done all the different content that’s there now. We’re all getting on the PTR so we can go play around in Ulduar.
You’ll be doing that as a group, as a guild?
We’re planning it. We’re planning to do it 25-man, but it may very well be that we only have enough people to go play a 10-man.
But you’re leading that, right? You’re the GM?
Actually, not right now. I just handed it over to another guy not too long ago. I had handed it over during Benjamin Button, part of that, because I was pretty busy. Then when Benjamin Button wrapped, that guy gave it back to me, and then I had that since last October or so. Things have been ramping up a little bit again, so I handed it off to another guy for now. So I’m a figurehead.
So how do you manage to fit in WoW with film schedules? Does your work occur mostly in bursts around projects, or do you have a fairly consistent schedule?
We try to have a pretty consistent play schedule. Obviously, if you’re trying to do 25-man content, you need to have some kind of consistency. I’m not necessarily the most consistent of the group at this point. (laughs) Like (during) Benjamin Button, I was pretty tied up for a good couple of years. I tried to go when I could – and I certainly did. We didn’t quite finish up things like Sunwell before Wrath of the Lich King came out, but we finished Black Temple and stuff like that. We weren’t quite at the end of things. We’re not quite as hardcore as some of the other, bigger guilds … But we’re out there somewhere.
How much time would you say you play during a typical week – or is there even such a thing as a typical week?
Our scheduled raids are three times a week for three hours. We’ve actually been finishing up a bit early. I’ll do my cooking dailies and such in the morning or whatever – it just depends on my schedule. So I don’t know, any time between 10 and 20 hours a week, maybe.
You sound pretty focused on your main.
I have a level 80 Paladin also, but yes.
Does your family play with you as well?
My son would play, but he’s sort of a little bit grounded because of his grades right now. And my brother’s in the guild, so I play with my brother quite a bit.
So work, family, WoW … How does it fit together?
Obviously, things outside (like) work have to come first. For me, I’m fortunate because people in the guild are really good people and it’s able to be run by committee a little bit. There’s a lot of trust put in by this group of people, and I didn’t need to be there all the time. They’ll move on anyway.
You’ve got plenty of time to play, so don’t give up on the other stuff. Make sure you do your stuff that you need to do before. It’s leisure – it’s just like watching TV or going to the movies or something. You don’t necessarily skip out on work or school to go see a movie – or maybe you do, but then you’re … (laughs)
How long have you been gaming?
My family bought Pong when it first came out in the ’70s. We were the first people on our block to have a Pong machine. We had all the console games back then. I’ve been on and off gaming my whole life.
Any MMOs before WoW?
I only played one. I play City of Heroes.
Let’s talk a little bit about visual effect. Do you find yourself looking at things in World of Warcraft with a critical eye, or maybe picking things apart?
I wouldn’t say “picking things apart.” It’s a bit of a different thing because it’s a real-time rendering process in World of Warcraft. I may wonder something like, “I wonder why the shadows behave like that?”, but I’m certainly not going to pick it apart, because I don’t know that side of things.
I’ll certainly watch (Blizzard’s) cinematics very closely. I won’t say I pick them apart because they’re actually really nice! I certainly wouldn’t bag on their cinematics. I do look at their cinematics with a different eye than I do the game. I play the game more just as a game than trying to bring my work into it.
Why the crushing blow was important
One of the biggest differences between pre-Wrath and Wrath tanking is the absence of the crushing blow. If you’re unfamliar with the term, then as a very simple explanation: any given raid boss had a 15% chance per melee hit to perform a 150% damage attack, which was also known as the crushing blow. It was typically a big damage spike and could lead to a wipe on progression content, with healers struggling to compensate in the small window of time before the boss’ next attack landed. Burst damage is very unwelcome as it’s often the greatest contributing factor to tank death. This is why reaching crit immunity is still so important to all tanks, and why the ability to avoid or absorb crushing blows was a fundamental part of pre-Wrath tanking mechanics.
The crushing blow is technically out of the game, but another and worse mechanic has taken its place.
In this article I’m going to try to explain the source of “shield tank” frustration over health pools — and why they are correct to see it as a problem — and the Druid tank’s unhappiness over the nerfing of Heart of the Wild — and why Druids are also correct to see it as a problem.
The only means of avoiding a crush was pushing your dodge/parry/block over 102.4%, which would nullify the boss’ higher weapon skill and render the tank immune to crushing blows. And this is how tanks dealt with that individually:
Warriors would use Shield Block to push their dodge/parry/block over 102.4%.
Paladins would use Holy Shield to push their dodge/parry/block over 102.4%.
Bears would eat it. Prayer was often involved as well.
Bears have no form of avoidance beyond dodge. Because crushing blows were the last attack to be pushed off a boss’ hit table, a bear would need more than 85% dodge even to avoid some of them. While a gear set with >85% dodge was technically possible in late Burning Crusade content (and something similar was used by Rogues to tank bosses with predominately physical damage, which is why you saw all of those Rogue-tanking videos popping up in late BC), the amount of agility you needed to pull it off left you with a tiny health pool and almost no rage generation. You wouldn’t get hit, but you also wouldn’t be able to hold aggro, so it was the sort of catch-22 that made the situation an amusing one to consider, but then you’d laugh and go back to your regular tanking set. Read the rest of this entry »
You have the option of three different vehicles: Siege Engines, Demolishers, and Choppers. In the 10-man version, the only version of the fight currently available, there are two of each available to use. I assume there will be at least twice that for the 25-man version of the encounter. The vehicles do scale with you gear. Note that I said gear and not stats. The scaling seems to be based off of the iLevel of your gear, and not how much of what stat you have.
Matticus, a Discipline Priest in epic PvE gear, would have a Siege Engine with more HP than a Protection Warrior in blues, even if he had dramatically less HP than the Warrior outside of the tanks. Matt’s gear has a higher iLevel, thus his vehicle is better.
Each vehicle has its own set of special abilities, some abilities more useful than others.The Flame Leviathan is the boss (or one of the bosses) that uses siege vehicles in its encounter in the outdoors portion of Ulduar. For the safety of those that do not wish to be spoiled on anything Ulduar related, I’ll put all information on the encounter beneath the cut below.
Again, if you do not want to be spoiled, do not click the link below.
When you first enter Ulduar, the entrance of the zone is filled with NPCs from a few different organizations. The Kirin Tor, various militaries, a Goblin from K3, and of course, Brann Bronzebeard and his expedition. A lot of that stuff is just flavor, and I think you’re more interested in the fight itself for the moment so we’ll move on.