M'partner wondered this aloud. I spent 76 levels as a bear, and found it miserable. The toolset was tiny, the gear confusing, and the bear model still eats up way too much screen area. I respec'ed tree, and didn't look back... for several weeks.
Then I took some carefully hoarded pennies and my long-unused flight form*, walked up to the annoying elf with a dragonhawk who loiters on Krasus' Landing spamming emotes... then ended up in Thunder Bluff, in front of a druid trainer, considerably lighter of pocket and spending a second set of talent points in a disturbingly bearlike fashion.
Why?
Mostly, I think it was this superb look at the 'feel' of druid tanking. After playing a warrior, the way a bear's tools fall short felt absolutely stifling. But the above post kind of turned that on its head - bears don't feel like prot warriors (despite having mostly reskinned prot skills), and that is entirely OK. They have a simple priority system for single-target threat, a couple of debuffs and a DoT to track, wear a lot of kitty-gear... they really do feel more like a DPS that wants aggro.
Bears, on single targets and rage allowing, keep Faerie Fire and Mangle on cooldown, keep Lacerate up, keep Maulin' every attack ('tis on my mousewheel down, sharing a bind with Heroic Strike, and drives my partner nuts with the incessant whirring) and... um, fill in with Swipe. With a glyphed Maul, this also covers two targets. On three or more, I try to Lacerate/FF/Mangle the first kill target just in case the planets align and the DPS elect to follow the kill order, and then just Swipe+Maul my way to the bank. It's all very simple, although as with DPS classes getting used to the timing so you don't over-refresh Lacerate or let it fall off takes practise. I'm guilty of both, as well as not applying Demo. Roar most of the time - but hey, I do that on the warrior as well. At least I consistently fail at AP-debuffs**.
It's so very simple. No procs to worry about, Infected Wounds is self-applying, and with Mangle/FF sharing a cooldown duration (I don't spec Imp. Mangle at the moment) it practically falls into a rotation. Combined with the crazy crit rates bears get (40% odd, unbuffed, with terrible gear!), it really does feel like DPS. Once I'd reconciled this with the fact that it was still tanking, I've felt a lot more friendly towards the bear's smaller toolbox.
* I did hoard some more pennies and get cold weather flying shortly afterwards, so the poor thing can - at last - flap slowly around Northrend.
** I think the general reason for this is I'm really, really paranoid about getting a solid aggro lead - especially on AoE pulls - that I feel I can't afford the GCD to slip it in at the start of a fight. By the time I actually feel secure in the threat tables, trash is nearly dead anyway. This behaviour reinforces itself, and Demo. Roar/Shout slowly falls down my internal priority list until I forget about it. Bad Bear!
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Tankin' HoR - It's Hard
My poor little undergeared bear has been thrown into Halls of Reflection twice, now. I suspect this is the fault of my (considerably nicer) healing gear, but I've made a stab at it.
First time went without a hitch. The priest healer kept one of the ranged spirits shackled at all times, and the DPS paid attention to Omen (I make a point of mentioning my new-ness and generally low threat output on joining an instance, but people listening is still a rarity).
Second time, we had no priest, and no other useful CC either. The DPS had better gear, and were veritable aggromonkeys. We wiped twice on the last wave of spirits before the very first boss, before deciding it wasn't happening. I couldn't control all the mobs without the help of some CC, and I was too squishy to let the healer focus on keeping DPS alive when they did pull aggro. It ended politely, but still. Bit of a sad ending to an otherwise productive night of bearing.
From the perspective of a noob-bear, the instance is a real pain. I had to use growl and FFF on cooldown to try to keep the riflemen and magi focused on me, and swipe-spam in the alcove to keep the melee mobs semi-controlled. If any of them got loose, it was painful to reacquire threat given that growl was generally on cooldown. Charging one of the ranged mobs after getting concrete threat on the melee did help, but was risky. And if I hate that alcove for giving me viewing problems on my shaman, it's ten times worse with a giant bear arse obscuring the screen!
I'm not sure what to do about that place, except get a better weapon and try to sharpen my focus. The emphasis is there because my druid still hasn't seen the polearm from HoR. Nor the one from ToC. Nor even the staff from VH - she's stuck with the drudgery of the tournament dailies to pick up the Staff of Feral Furies at some point in the distant future, because precious little else is dropping for her. /grump
Speaking of focus, I managed to fail utterly and repeatedly in Old Kingdom. Never tank whilst tired and using a new UI mod that wrecks your frame rate - the combination is not shiny. I guess I had become blasé about tanking the 'normal' heroics to even consider this, and ate a mounded helping of humble pie as a result.
Tanking takes concentration and sensible reflexes to do well. Who'd have thought?
First time went without a hitch. The priest healer kept one of the ranged spirits shackled at all times, and the DPS paid attention to Omen (I make a point of mentioning my new-ness and generally low threat output on joining an instance, but people listening is still a rarity).
Second time, we had no priest, and no other useful CC either. The DPS had better gear, and were veritable aggromonkeys. We wiped twice on the last wave of spirits before the very first boss, before deciding it wasn't happening. I couldn't control all the mobs without the help of some CC, and I was too squishy to let the healer focus on keeping DPS alive when they did pull aggro. It ended politely, but still. Bit of a sad ending to an otherwise productive night of bearing.
From the perspective of a noob-bear, the instance is a real pain. I had to use growl and FFF on cooldown to try to keep the riflemen and magi focused on me, and swipe-spam in the alcove to keep the melee mobs semi-controlled. If any of them got loose, it was painful to reacquire threat given that growl was generally on cooldown. Charging one of the ranged mobs after getting concrete threat on the melee did help, but was risky. And if I hate that alcove for giving me viewing problems on my shaman, it's ten times worse with a giant bear arse obscuring the screen!
I'm not sure what to do about that place, except get a better weapon and try to sharpen my focus. The emphasis is there because my druid still hasn't seen the polearm from HoR. Nor the one from ToC. Nor even the staff from VH - she's stuck with the drudgery of the tournament dailies to pick up the Staff of Feral Furies at some point in the distant future, because precious little else is dropping for her. /grump
Speaking of focus, I managed to fail utterly and repeatedly in Old Kingdom. Never tank whilst tired and using a new UI mod that wrecks your frame rate - the combination is not shiny. I guess I had become blasé about tanking the 'normal' heroics to even consider this, and ate a mounded helping of humble pie as a result.
Tanking takes concentration and sensible reflexes to do well. Who'd have thought?
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Slowly It Grows
Whee! This is going to be a scatterbrained post, even more so than usual.
Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.
Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!
I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.
So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.
Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.
So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.
I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.
For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.
Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.
Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!
I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.
So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.
Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.
So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.
I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.
For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.
Monday, 1 February 2010
Changes
Sooo, my guild fell apart a bit. There was a lot of drama and silliness, raiding wasn't happening, and my partner again reminded me that she had many characters on a different realm.
With a surprising amount of trepidation, I moved my main to Darkmoon Faire and joined a smallish guild. I know a few members from university, and the flavour of the guild reflects that kind of gathering. Guild chat is frequently home to discussion of theorycrafting, people are very willing to debate and don't hesitate to call out spurious statements. It's not unpleasant, but it's certainly different.
I think I've only managed two guild-normative faux pas. I severely understated the value of the more interactive Arcane playstyle (too long as fire, clearly), and performed a semi-wowcock move when HPS discussions arose about Festergut.
I've managed to do a couple of ICC10 bosses with the new guild as a stand-in DPS. Blowing the dust off of my PvE elemental gear was a bit strange (2T8! Eek!), but I think I performed adequately and we got Saurfang down on the third attempt. I've since farmed up another couple of bits of T9 and I'm working on the cloth headpiece now, so hopefully I'll be able to contribute a bit more should I need to DPS again. Of course, I'm gently prodding towards a healing spot but the new guild has a plethora of tanks, melee and healers and a distinct lack of ranged DPS. Bleh.
DMF is an RP realm, but so far it's been light and mostly confined to Silvermoon. All to the good, I don't have much desire to RP and none whatsoever on my main. We'll see what happens if I fling tinyTank across, though. If all goes well I'll move at least a few alts over to join the main - mostly, if I'm being honest, because they have handy professions and it's convenient to have such things available.
With a surprising amount of trepidation, I moved my main to Darkmoon Faire and joined a smallish guild. I know a few members from university, and the flavour of the guild reflects that kind of gathering. Guild chat is frequently home to discussion of theorycrafting, people are very willing to debate and don't hesitate to call out spurious statements. It's not unpleasant, but it's certainly different.
I think I've only managed two guild-normative faux pas. I severely understated the value of the more interactive Arcane playstyle (too long as fire, clearly), and performed a semi-wowcock move when HPS discussions arose about Festergut.
I've managed to do a couple of ICC10 bosses with the new guild as a stand-in DPS. Blowing the dust off of my PvE elemental gear was a bit strange (2T8! Eek!), but I think I performed adequately and we got Saurfang down on the third attempt. I've since farmed up another couple of bits of T9 and I'm working on the cloth headpiece now, so hopefully I'll be able to contribute a bit more should I need to DPS again. Of course, I'm gently prodding towards a healing spot but the new guild has a plethora of tanks, melee and healers and a distinct lack of ranged DPS. Bleh.
DMF is an RP realm, but so far it's been light and mostly confined to Silvermoon. All to the good, I don't have much desire to RP and none whatsoever on my main. We'll see what happens if I fling tinyTank across, though. If all goes well I'll move at least a few alts over to join the main - mostly, if I'm being honest, because they have handy professions and it's convenient to have such things available.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
The Community That Cried Nerf
So, fresh furore over this rather minor comment from a blue.
The thread rapidly derailed into discussing the relative merits of and issues with some heroic boss abilities, based on this li'l snippet:
"With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn'Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters."
And there was some angry blogging about it in various places, too.
My take on the whole afair, this apparent nerf to boss abilities? Good.
When first stepping into heroics, in my mixture of blues and greens, some of these abilities were challenging. They were interesting. They broke up the fight into palatable chunks, and did indeed help train me for some basic aspects of raiding such as target switching, not standing in fire, interrupts, and tank damage spikes. The problem is twofold. The abilities concerned are tied to the boss health bar - so the higher your party's damage output, the more frequently they occur. They also render the boss immune to damage for at least some time, often long enough for a little speech plus the time taken to target and dispose of the add, so their 'interrupt the battle' abilities scale relatively less with increased player damage than their health bar does.
So, essentially, a fight which was designed to be a fun and interesting mix of phases and adds and abilities boils down to 10% time spent tearing through the boss at a crazy rate, 88% watching boss emote whilst invulnerable, and perhaps 2% blowing up a hapless add. This is not fun. I don't care how long the boss takes, within sensible limits, as bosses aren't the bottleneck for heroic runs anyway. The pacing and feel of the encounter have been broken by our gear spiralling ever-higher in item level, replaced with pointless vexation.
Some other examples off the top of my head...
Anub'arak in AN. He barely pops up to say hello before burrowing again.
Svala Sorrowgrave in UP. With even a single geared and competant ranged DPS, the melee are basically sitting on their thumbs as she yoyos. Killing the adds for almost the entire boss fight. Yawn.
Ymiron, again in UP. His stun/fear went from a critical part of the fight (getting stunned in those AoE damage effects was troublesome, I recall), to merely a very annoying but increasingly large portion of the encounter.
Others spring to mind, but the basic point is that this kind of fight doesn't scale appropriately with gear, and thanks to frequent badge upgrades and easier access to high-level gear (both things I agree with entirely) everyone is getting gear these days and exposing the weaknesses. These abilities do not make the boss fights harder, just more irritating. They do make the fights a little longer, but really not by much compared to their sheer annoyance factor.
It could be argued that the designers should have forseen these problems with heroic bosses 'scaling' in the wrong way. Abilities on a timer, or a combination health/timer (will perform X ability every Y% health, but at most every Z seconds) are less likely to break with higher DPS. I think it is entirely reasonable that heroics become trivially easy over time, especially if there's a steady trickle of new five-man instances appropriate to the current level of gear, as long as they don't become annoying.
Yeah, the proposed fix for OK (and probably other dungeons as well, in time) is also a nerf. But really, no-one experiencing the issues with the boss spending more time floating in the air than being smacked in the face should be concerned with that. Hey, if they want to later give those same bosses more health or mitigation to artifically inflate the length of the fight to pre-fix levels, I wonder if anyone would complain?
Oculus, as an aside
I hate Oculus. It's a mess. A halting, on-again off-again mess of an instance. There is no opportunity to play here. The dungeon will not let you engage with it outside the stifling parameters expressed by disconnected platforms and your pitifully equipped drakes.
It is not fun. For a little while, it was interesting at least, but it has no depth and the space circumscribed by its mechanics does not allow for any. As a guild we decided to spice up the Nexus by kiting Anomalus and Omorok to the mage boss, and it seems to be the new standard to drag the Infinite Corrupter to Mal'ganis in CoS for the jokingly titled 'hard mode'. These instances do admit play, so if we feel like making a simple daily run more interesting you can. Oculus does not and cannot, due to simple layout issues and the horrible, horrible drakes.
My resolve weakened enough for me to run it with guildies when it popped as the daily, and lo I was rewarded with a blue drake, a rare gem and some extra badges. Great. Now I can go back to instantly dropping group every time it loads, as even the miniscule bonus of a mount I'll never use is a non-issue. Badges and gems? Pfft. Have to do a lot better than that to convince me I can't find a better way to spend fifteen minutes!
The thread rapidly derailed into discussing the relative merits of and issues with some heroic boss abilities, based on this li'l snippet:
"With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn'Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters."
And there was some angry blogging about it in various places, too.
My take on the whole afair, this apparent nerf to boss abilities? Good.
When first stepping into heroics, in my mixture of blues and greens, some of these abilities were challenging. They were interesting. They broke up the fight into palatable chunks, and did indeed help train me for some basic aspects of raiding such as target switching, not standing in fire, interrupts, and tank damage spikes. The problem is twofold. The abilities concerned are tied to the boss health bar - so the higher your party's damage output, the more frequently they occur. They also render the boss immune to damage for at least some time, often long enough for a little speech plus the time taken to target and dispose of the add, so their 'interrupt the battle' abilities scale relatively less with increased player damage than their health bar does.
So, essentially, a fight which was designed to be a fun and interesting mix of phases and adds and abilities boils down to 10% time spent tearing through the boss at a crazy rate, 88% watching boss emote whilst invulnerable, and perhaps 2% blowing up a hapless add. This is not fun. I don't care how long the boss takes, within sensible limits, as bosses aren't the bottleneck for heroic runs anyway. The pacing and feel of the encounter have been broken by our gear spiralling ever-higher in item level, replaced with pointless vexation.
Some other examples off the top of my head...
Anub'arak in AN. He barely pops up to say hello before burrowing again.
Svala Sorrowgrave in UP. With even a single geared and competant ranged DPS, the melee are basically sitting on their thumbs as she yoyos. Killing the adds for almost the entire boss fight. Yawn.
Ymiron, again in UP. His stun/fear went from a critical part of the fight (getting stunned in those AoE damage effects was troublesome, I recall), to merely a very annoying but increasingly large portion of the encounter.
Others spring to mind, but the basic point is that this kind of fight doesn't scale appropriately with gear, and thanks to frequent badge upgrades and easier access to high-level gear (both things I agree with entirely) everyone is getting gear these days and exposing the weaknesses. These abilities do not make the boss fights harder, just more irritating. They do make the fights a little longer, but really not by much compared to their sheer annoyance factor.
It could be argued that the designers should have forseen these problems with heroic bosses 'scaling' in the wrong way. Abilities on a timer, or a combination health/timer (will perform X ability every Y% health, but at most every Z seconds) are less likely to break with higher DPS. I think it is entirely reasonable that heroics become trivially easy over time, especially if there's a steady trickle of new five-man instances appropriate to the current level of gear, as long as they don't become annoying.
Yeah, the proposed fix for OK (and probably other dungeons as well, in time) is also a nerf. But really, no-one experiencing the issues with the boss spending more time floating in the air than being smacked in the face should be concerned with that. Hey, if they want to later give those same bosses more health or mitigation to artifically inflate the length of the fight to pre-fix levels, I wonder if anyone would complain?
Oculus, as an aside
I hate Oculus. It's a mess. A halting, on-again off-again mess of an instance. There is no opportunity to play here. The dungeon will not let you engage with it outside the stifling parameters expressed by disconnected platforms and your pitifully equipped drakes.
It is not fun. For a little while, it was interesting at least, but it has no depth and the space circumscribed by its mechanics does not allow for any. As a guild we decided to spice up the Nexus by kiting Anomalus and Omorok to the mage boss, and it seems to be the new standard to drag the Infinite Corrupter to Mal'ganis in CoS for the jokingly titled 'hard mode'. These instances do admit play, so if we feel like making a simple daily run more interesting you can. Oculus does not and cannot, due to simple layout issues and the horrible, horrible drakes.
My resolve weakened enough for me to run it with guildies when it popped as the daily, and lo I was rewarded with a blue drake, a rare gem and some extra badges. Great. Now I can go back to instantly dropping group every time it loads, as even the miniscule bonus of a mount I'll never use is a non-issue. Badges and gems? Pfft. Have to do a lot better than that to convince me I can't find a better way to spend fifteen minutes!
Monday, 18 January 2010
Hodgepodge
Icecrown
Eight attempts remaining on Putricide. I'm hoping that enough people log to use those attempts up before the reset. I want that kilt, damnit!
On the subject of loot, there's an aweful lot of haste/MP5 mail in there. As in, far too much. The haste is nice, and as a Solace still eludes me the MP5 isn't worthless, but I'd really rather have some haste/crit options. I'm not really assembling a personal BiS list just yet, but trying to look ahead and pick out where I want offset gear and how I should prioritise tier acquisition. I'm thinking that I'll pick up the two-piece bonus with the chest, a direct upgrade from T9.232. That will break my T9 set bonus, making it a little less painful to pick up the horribly itemised T10 gloves (cheap!) and then the headpiece, which is a slight upgrade from the Gunship helm, to complete the four-piece. If the Rippling Flesh Kilt still eludes me by then, the crafted mail legs are very nice and the boots aren't half-bad either. The emblem trinket is a nice upgrade from Sif's Remembrance, and the mail/cloth emblem gloves will be good for fights where 4T10 isn't useful.
Yep, I do think that given our usual raiding lineup and healing assignments, 4T10 will be worth wearing the crappy gloves. Three pieces are nicely itemised anyway, so it won't be that much of a hardship.
And to whinge a little: why are none of the items with fun procs available in the ten man version? I really appreciate that with the addition of hard modes I can pick up 264 gear from my preferred raiding environment, and I really like that the ten man trinkets are not completely awful this time (TotC, I'm looking at you). But I'd quite like an Althor's Abacus, or a Trauma, and I'm unlikely to ever get them due to the weird ongoing 10/25 loot dichotomy. It seems like it'd be interesting to allow the normal twenty-five man versions (item level 264) to drop in ten-man heroic fights, at least for the stuff that isn't represented in ten-man normal (funky trinkets and weapons with procs, at this point). Or, y'know, make some ten-man items with the same kind of fun principles. Larger guilds end up roflstomping the smaller raids anyway for emblems, achievements and the odd bit of well-itemised gear, so I can't see much of a flaw in spreading the goodies a bit.
Tanking
Levelling with the LFG tool is proving very interesting. Close to level 55 now, with only a few spates of questing/profession training interspersing dungeon runs. So far, it's not gone too badly. Had an... interesting experience with the Sunken Temple, where we did the lower area first (ever tried communicating the order of statues to click on to an almost silent pug? The ret just kept following me, everyone else stood where asked but seemed incapable of clicking the statues... sigh. Thankfully the healer was (a) from my realm and (b) entirely competant, so we just did the lighting up ourselves). By the time we'd done all this, killed the ugly troll dude, run back upstairs, killed the six guys keeping the barrier up and cleared the dragonkin from the central chamber it was getting a bit late, sowe I rushed a bit when we got to the Prophet. Pulled one group of the trash, killed, waited for ghosts to dissipate. Emboldened by several large pulls earlier in the instance, I grabbed two groups this time... but didn't move them very much, in a tragic error of judgement. Melee DPS charge in, start their face-beating, and promptly get feared.
Crap. I'd forgotten about that. Crapcrapcrap.
Both make fear-inspired beelines to two separate trash groups, who I rush forward to collect in full panic-mode. I'm now tanking an ungodly number of the things in the middle of the room, the healer is in full manic heal-spam, everyone's desperately using every cooldown they have...
Then the DPS get feared again, and one runs straight to the boss. By this time the entire room is aggro'd, a large number not on me, and the bosses joining in just hasten the inevitable. Not my finest tanking moment, although everyone (who spoke at all) had the good grace to gently poke fun rather than get nasty. On the way back trash started to respawn literally as I was running through it so we called the run without killing the Prophet or Eranikus. Eh, well.
Point. I had a point here, what was it... aha! Yes, I remember now.
The classic instances are in many cases brutal. At best they can just deal harshly with those that do not approach with caution (see above, or Princess in Maraudon...), but at worst they're downright evil. Zul'Farrak with the mobs who polymorph the tank, for example, with subsequent complete chaos as they drop threat. Horrible. Eranikus with his absurd sleep ability. And I'd almost forgotten the joys of ubiquitous mobs that flee on low health, leading to hilarious results in BRD. Silences, stuns and disarms feel common and awfully long in duration for their frequency.
Of course, an awful lot of this can be negated by choice of tank (hello druids!) or with snappy dispels from an appropriate class, and smart DPS is always a plus. But when you're pugging your way up the levels those are the exception rather than the rule, and watching your party get nommed by things while you, as tank, are CC'd is... unpleasant.
Thing is, it's often a lot of fun. It encourages good play when people work together, and at least strongly impresses the limits of your own class when they don't. All good stuff, for a levelling tank. I seem to recall TBC dungeons continuing to be somewhat evil (MgT anyone?), but throughout WotLK there are far fewer situations where a tank gets CCd. In fact, I'm so used to seeing lines such as "... and the boss will never use this ability on his current aggro target" that I was starting to think of the alternative as unfair.
For shame.
Eight attempts remaining on Putricide. I'm hoping that enough people log to use those attempts up before the reset. I want that kilt, damnit!
On the subject of loot, there's an aweful lot of haste/MP5 mail in there. As in, far too much. The haste is nice, and as a Solace still eludes me the MP5 isn't worthless, but I'd really rather have some haste/crit options. I'm not really assembling a personal BiS list just yet, but trying to look ahead and pick out where I want offset gear and how I should prioritise tier acquisition. I'm thinking that I'll pick up the two-piece bonus with the chest, a direct upgrade from T9.232. That will break my T9 set bonus, making it a little less painful to pick up the horribly itemised T10 gloves (cheap!) and then the headpiece, which is a slight upgrade from the Gunship helm, to complete the four-piece. If the Rippling Flesh Kilt still eludes me by then, the crafted mail legs are very nice and the boots aren't half-bad either. The emblem trinket is a nice upgrade from Sif's Remembrance, and the mail/cloth emblem gloves will be good for fights where 4T10 isn't useful.
Yep, I do think that given our usual raiding lineup and healing assignments, 4T10 will be worth wearing the crappy gloves. Three pieces are nicely itemised anyway, so it won't be that much of a hardship.
And to whinge a little: why are none of the items with fun procs available in the ten man version? I really appreciate that with the addition of hard modes I can pick up 264 gear from my preferred raiding environment, and I really like that the ten man trinkets are not completely awful this time (TotC, I'm looking at you). But I'd quite like an Althor's Abacus, or a Trauma, and I'm unlikely to ever get them due to the weird ongoing 10/25 loot dichotomy. It seems like it'd be interesting to allow the normal twenty-five man versions (item level 264) to drop in ten-man heroic fights, at least for the stuff that isn't represented in ten-man normal (funky trinkets and weapons with procs, at this point). Or, y'know, make some ten-man items with the same kind of fun principles. Larger guilds end up roflstomping the smaller raids anyway for emblems, achievements and the odd bit of well-itemised gear, so I can't see much of a flaw in spreading the goodies a bit.
Tanking
Levelling with the LFG tool is proving very interesting. Close to level 55 now, with only a few spates of questing/profession training interspersing dungeon runs. So far, it's not gone too badly. Had an... interesting experience with the Sunken Temple, where we did the lower area first (ever tried communicating the order of statues to click on to an almost silent pug? The ret just kept following me, everyone else stood where asked but seemed incapable of clicking the statues... sigh. Thankfully the healer was (a) from my realm and (b) entirely competant, so we just did the lighting up ourselves). By the time we'd done all this, killed the ugly troll dude, run back upstairs, killed the six guys keeping the barrier up and cleared the dragonkin from the central chamber it was getting a bit late, so
Crap. I'd forgotten about that. Crapcrapcrap.
Both make fear-inspired beelines to two separate trash groups, who I rush forward to collect in full panic-mode. I'm now tanking an ungodly number of the things in the middle of the room, the healer is in full manic heal-spam, everyone's desperately using every cooldown they have...
Then the DPS get feared again, and one runs straight to the boss. By this time the entire room is aggro'd, a large number not on me, and the bosses joining in just hasten the inevitable. Not my finest tanking moment, although everyone (who spoke at all) had the good grace to gently poke fun rather than get nasty. On the way back trash started to respawn literally as I was running through it so we called the run without killing the Prophet or Eranikus. Eh, well.
Point. I had a point here, what was it... aha! Yes, I remember now.
The classic instances are in many cases brutal. At best they can just deal harshly with those that do not approach with caution (see above, or Princess in Maraudon...), but at worst they're downright evil. Zul'Farrak with the mobs who polymorph the tank, for example, with subsequent complete chaos as they drop threat. Horrible. Eranikus with his absurd sleep ability. And I'd almost forgotten the joys of ubiquitous mobs that flee on low health, leading to hilarious results in BRD. Silences, stuns and disarms feel common and awfully long in duration for their frequency.
Of course, an awful lot of this can be negated by choice of tank (hello druids!) or with snappy dispels from an appropriate class, and smart DPS is always a plus. But when you're pugging your way up the levels those are the exception rather than the rule, and watching your party get nommed by things while you, as tank, are CC'd is... unpleasant.
Thing is, it's often a lot of fun. It encourages good play when people work together, and at least strongly impresses the limits of your own class when they don't. All good stuff, for a levelling tank. I seem to recall TBC dungeons continuing to be somewhat evil (MgT anyone?), but throughout WotLK there are far fewer situations where a tank gets CCd. In fact, I'm so used to seeing lines such as "... and the boss will never use this ability on his current aggro target" that I was starting to think of the alternative as unfair.
For shame.
Monday, 11 January 2010
Assorted Stuffs
So, we cleared the trash (Princess and Stinky were the highpoints) and spent a while wiping on Rotface, and then slightly less time wiping on Festergut.
The former fight I think we can resolve by dropping to two healers, as we were repeatedly wiping at the 15-20% mark with five DPS. At this point, he was dropping infections too quickly to easily handle, so it dissolved into a chaotic mess and failure.
The latter I'm not even going to contemplate fewer than three healers, but swapping the tanks around so the better geared gets the first three-stack period and slightly improved cooldown usage should sort it. It's a very simple fight in comparison to Rotface, but quite frustrating to heal with no mitigation cooldowns. I guess our tanks and non-shaman healers need to have a discussion on this.
As an aside, something which I find a bit weird... Rotface's infection debuff really messes with my healing intuitions. I don't know why, but whilst I can generally happily heal through a Mortal Strike-like debuff just fine, in this case I was constantly overestimating incoming healing on infected targets despite Grid helpfully informing me of the reduced estimates. Hmm. Not sure about that, but it's messy. The kiting tank also spent altogether too long outside of healing range. Things that experience will help with, both.
So, that's enough about the new bosses - we've not downed them yet, despite two nights of wiping. Overall I'd consider that a good thing, it's nice to be challenged a bit.
Babytank has been fun. She's had some good pugs, and some baddish ones, but no true failpugs for a while. Learning to tank as a warrior is interesting, to say the least. I don't really thing my brain is wired for red bars, but I certainly can't complain that I lack tools.
My druid, when tanking, basically has spammable-AoE, spammable-on-next-attack-high-threat attack, a taunt, free-aggro-thingy-on-cooldown... and Lacerate, which is some kind of mutant nonscaling failthing.
My warrior, despite lacking 30 levels on the druid, has far more tools, and they're more fun. More are on cooldowns, there are Revenge procs, Shield Block generates mitigation and rage and Shield Slam awesomeness, and Cleave is fun. I understand a bit more already about why it can sometimes seem easy to pull things off a warrior tank if you follow the tank's target - chances are they're just tabbing through things dropping high-threat attacks until something properly AoE comes off cooldown - and also why DPS entering a fight late might all start to attack different targets based on the tank's current target. It explains a few things I've seen while healing, should I be feeling generous enough not to invoke the standard 'the DPS are drivelling idiots' line.
Warriors are definitely different to the other tanks when it comes to AoE threat. They generate it in a spiky manner, and have to work like mad to keep aggro on everything between those AoE cooldowns. It can get quite manic. They are a lot more fun than druids at this stage though. I still don't recommend having a boomkin pull enormous packs of trolls in Zul'Farrak by using Hurricane, but outside of that rampant e-peening it mostly felt like something that can be handled with experience.
Even so: not having aggro on some quantity of mobs, and having no rage to deal with this, is a horrible feeling. I may have to make an enormous stack of rage potions.
Also: Shouts suck. They're the most annoying buff system I've seen since shaman weapon imbues had a five minute duration.
And I really need an addon to track Vigilance. I spent the talent point, damnit, I should use my only sensible buff more often.
The former fight I think we can resolve by dropping to two healers, as we were repeatedly wiping at the 15-20% mark with five DPS. At this point, he was dropping infections too quickly to easily handle, so it dissolved into a chaotic mess and failure.
The latter I'm not even going to contemplate fewer than three healers, but swapping the tanks around so the better geared gets the first three-stack period and slightly improved cooldown usage should sort it. It's a very simple fight in comparison to Rotface, but quite frustrating to heal with no mitigation cooldowns. I guess our tanks and non-shaman healers need to have a discussion on this.
As an aside, something which I find a bit weird... Rotface's infection debuff really messes with my healing intuitions. I don't know why, but whilst I can generally happily heal through a Mortal Strike-like debuff just fine, in this case I was constantly overestimating incoming healing on infected targets despite Grid helpfully informing me of the reduced estimates. Hmm. Not sure about that, but it's messy. The kiting tank also spent altogether too long outside of healing range. Things that experience will help with, both.
So, that's enough about the new bosses - we've not downed them yet, despite two nights of wiping. Overall I'd consider that a good thing, it's nice to be challenged a bit.
Babytank has been fun. She's had some good pugs, and some baddish ones, but no true failpugs for a while. Learning to tank as a warrior is interesting, to say the least. I don't really thing my brain is wired for red bars, but I certainly can't complain that I lack tools.
My druid, when tanking, basically has spammable-AoE, spammable-on-next-attack-high-threat attack, a taunt, free-aggro-thingy-on-cooldown... and Lacerate, which is some kind of mutant nonscaling failthing.
My warrior, despite lacking 30 levels on the druid, has far more tools, and they're more fun. More are on cooldowns, there are Revenge procs, Shield Block generates mitigation and rage and Shield Slam awesomeness, and Cleave is fun. I understand a bit more already about why it can sometimes seem easy to pull things off a warrior tank if you follow the tank's target - chances are they're just tabbing through things dropping high-threat attacks until something properly AoE comes off cooldown - and also why DPS entering a fight late might all start to attack different targets based on the tank's current target. It explains a few things I've seen while healing, should I be feeling generous enough not to invoke the standard 'the DPS are drivelling idiots' line.
Warriors are definitely different to the other tanks when it comes to AoE threat. They generate it in a spiky manner, and have to work like mad to keep aggro on everything between those AoE cooldowns. It can get quite manic. They are a lot more fun than druids at this stage though. I still don't recommend having a boomkin pull enormous packs of trolls in Zul'Farrak by using Hurricane, but outside of that rampant e-peening it mostly felt like something that can be handled with experience.
Even so: not having aggro on some quantity of mobs, and having no rage to deal with this, is a horrible feeling. I may have to make an enormous stack of rage potions.
Also: Shouts suck. They're the most annoying buff system I've seen since shaman weapon imbues had a five minute duration.
And I really need an addon to track Vigilance. I spent the talent point, damnit, I should use my only sensible buff more often.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)