Since that time, the Alt became the Main as far as raiding is concerned.  He’s learned by trial and fire how to tank.  He’s discovered that he really likes it.  I mean hell…. who wouldn’t like getting their face beat in day after day. 

Lets be honest, its a very high profile position in a raid.  What’s the first question the healers ask?  “Who’s the tank?”  Who do people pin their hopes on in 25 mans and 10 mans?  The Tank and the healers, but honestly.. tanks are more visual.  When you’re looking at killing the boss, you see the tank.  You half the time don’t notice the guys propping him/her up and keeping their furry …er… plated…. buttocks up and running.  Its not fair to healers, but it is what it is.

We keep in touch from time to time.  He has moved on to tank on the Alliance side on Whisperwind.  I’m of course tanking on the horde side on Thunderhorn.  So as I was babbling on, we got to talking and the conversation kind of progressed like this….

Me:  Rough night in ICC.

Him:  Which boss?

Me:  Not a boss, more of just a general feeling of people being off tonight.  Not terrible, just didn’t quite make it as far as we wanted.

Him:  Yeah?  …. hey do you mind if I ask you a question?

Me:  No sweat

(queue… long wait)

Me: Uh oh.. must be a long question??!!!

Him:  Ok… so I’m pondering is it normal to feel like you want to be the Main Tank and not the Off Tank anymore?  Is that a normal feeling? 

Good question… lets pursue it shall we???

For GLORY!!!

I’ve been tanking for about… (checks the calendar) 4 years.  I started playing vanilla wow back in the day.  It had probably been out for a little over a year (maybe less than a year?)  I loved druids and to be honest I loved feral druids. 

I was forced to PUG 5 mans and even way back in the day people always needed tanks.  So I tanked and I tanked.  Its kind of a glorious position.  In 5 mans though once you get over geared for an instance, it kind of starts to wear on you.  You find it easy.. or you start doing things like grabbing 4 packs just to see if the healer is awake.  Hell you figure the healer is bored and NEEDs the excitement.

However in a raiding situation, tanks take a whole different role.  In a raid, you’re the guy with 40k+ health who is sitting between the bad guy with 3million + health just trying to stay alive long enough to see them keel over first.  Yes… its glorious.  Its very visual.  You’re the person standing between the raid and death!!

Understanding the Main Tank

Main Tanks are chosen for a variety of reasons.  Lets look at a few shall we?

1. Skill
2. The MT is the GM/Raid leader of the guild
3. The MT is a friend/sig other/whatever of the GM of the guild
4. Health
5. Gear
6. Drama….

Some people are chosen for skill.  Yes… we all like to believe we’re the bees knees when it comes to tanking, but we all have strong and weak points.  I’m exceptionally good with dealing with large packs of mobs.  I tend to do fights like Ignis where I’m the only tank and I’m picking up the adds and the boss and just saying “SCREW IT!  I’ll tank em all!!!”

I’m not as good at single target threat.  I don’t suck at single target threat, but I’m always doing four things at once when I’m raid leading.  So my rotation isn’t as perfect as it could be.  I have a partner tank in my guild who has the opposite.  His single target threat is fantastic.  His aoe threat?  Not so good.  But that works well.  We compliment each other well in this situation.

Main tanks are chosen for plenty of reasons.  Its not always personal.  I’ve been a main tank quite a bit in my time.  I main tanked in Karazhan.  I off tanked in SSC and The Eye.  I’ve OT’d in Mt. Hyjal.  I’ve MT’d in Zul Aman.  I have main tanked Naxxramas and Ulduar and TOC. 

At the end of the day, what I have to say about being the main tank?  It can get boring.  Why you ask?  well… to be honest, its very repetitive.  Take this boss… stand in this one spot.  Do your maximum threat rotation.  Move the boss at this point… do this… do that….  Honestly it gets a bit tedious.

Lets look at some of the fights.

Marrowgar:  Tank boss, stay next to the OT and move out of flames.  Intercept after he stops bone storm.

Lady Deathwhisper:  Oddly an interesting fight for all tanks involved.  Pick up adds, tank stuff.  move a lot.

Gunship:  Tank the adds on your ship or go tank Muradin (why the hell we don’t kill him with only 2.4 million health is beyond me.!!!!)

Deathbring Saurfang:  Stand in one spot… taunt.  DPS a little… Taunt

Festergut:  Stand in one spot.  Tank… swap tank, DPS a bit… Taunt… Tank… blow cooldowns in proper sequence.

Rotface:  Tank boss in middle… Rotate 90 degrees periodically…..

Professor Putricide:  Tank boss on left.  Tank boss on right… rinse repeat…. Kite boss to avoid killing entire raid.

Understanding the Off Tank

When I first went over to my current home, I had to admit it was a bit of an adjustment for me.  I realized that I was coming into a previously set up raid program.  It wasn’t my program.  I was coming into a program with two tanks already.  Tanks that had worked together quite a while actually.  So I was walking into a situation where I knew.. I wasn’t familiar with their tanking style.  I wasn’t familiar with their kill strategies. 

Off tank has a very interesting role.  Its a learning opportunity.  When you’re the off tank, you typically have a slightly different view on the fight.  You may not be staring at ankles the entire time.  You also get the opportunity to learn the style of strategy the group uses. 

Off tank does not mean unimportant.  On plenty of fights, the off tank can be critical to the successful completion of the fight.  In the Festergut fight, the OT needs to know when to taunt and has to be able to dish out some serious DPS in the off times.  In the Rotface fight, if you don’t kite the adds properly, everyone’s dead… period end of story.  In the Lord Jaraxxus fight, if the off tank doesn’t pick up the adds, everyone dies.  Rinse repeat.

Yes… some days your job is just as important as… stand next to the main tank so he/she doesn’t get one shot!.  Other times its… Taunt the boss so this debuff doesn’t do anything.

I’ve personally found my time as an off tank has been more fun than the times I was the main tank.  I typically have to move… A LOT.  I get to see more of the battlefield. 

Tank Envy… the Guys and Gals that Tank Stuff

Tank envy is completely understandable.  As a raid leader, I’m usually looking for who can tank what.  If I have a tank that generates obscene amounts of threat right out of the gate on a very DPS sensitive fight?  That tank is my tank for the fight. 

If I have a fight where its critical that adds get picked up and pulled to a specific location, I”m going to pick the tank for that assignment with the best reflexes.  I’ve known tanks that just seem to have a near perfect sense of timing with picking up adds.  It almost borders on precognition. 

Other tanks are just amazing at feets of AOE tanking.  My personal opinion is that if you’re going to put a program together, develop what I call a Tank Corps.  The goal is to have a group of people that works together, trains together and swaps in and out of roles.  The reason being that the one night your adds tank decides they need to spend time with their wife in the Bahamas, you’re gonna be hurting. 

Don’t get hung up on what you get to tank.. just enjoy it and learn.. and be the best damned tank you can be.

I think when I started this blog, it was for an entirely different reason than why I write now.  I won’t ever be a Matticus. 

I won’t ever be hard core theorist.  What I am… is a 30 something disorganized raid leader with a little bit of whit and a whole hell of a lot of sarcasm.  Plus I have some good friends who watch here looking to see what I am doing from time to time.  Which is encouraging.  I’m not an expert at anything in particular.  Some people would say I probably don’t give myself enough credit, but to be honest, I believe in thinking you always have group to grow and learn.

I am… I am Not

What I am…

I am… a good tank.  That’s my own opinion of myself.  If you tank, you need to be confident in your own abilities.

I am… a raid leader.  Its just how I’m wired.

I am… a druid lover.  I fell in love with the class before I logged in the first time and its been with me ever since.  I doubt I’ll ever love another class better.

I am… disorganized.  I’m not the most organized person in the world.  I keep a lot of things straight in my head, but overall, I suffer a bit from a wandering mind… oo… look… shiny??!!!

What I’m not…

I’m probably not a guy to put together a comprehensive guide on how to do everything under the sun for raid leading. 

I’m knowledgeable… its just that I’m disorganized.

I’m probably not a guy who’s going to give you an in depth theoretical analysis of what’s the best druid rotation.

Where to next?

Well to be honest I’m going to do what I do best.  I’m going to let my wandering mind wander.  I’m going to write when I feel like it.  I’m going to write about what’s relevant and every once in a while I’ll probably end up with some simple little gem that will suddenly slaughter my server with thousands of hits from people over at Wow.com.  I usually pull that off a couple of times a year.

You can probably expect a couple of posts a week.  Some weeks more.. some less.  If you have a desire to write and you feel this would be a good home for you, I’m looking at the possibility of having other writers onboard.  So if you want to give it a go, just email me with a sample of your work and we’ll discuss from there.

What the hell have you been up to?

Wow where do I begin…. Yes… K$… this ones’ for you.

I’ve been relatively busy.  My wife is nearing the end of the RAF program.  So I spend a decent amount of time working with her to try to play catch up on her characters.  She holds firmly to the thought that she doesn’t want to transfer her level 80 mage.  So… we’re leveling a couple more for her.  She now has a level 66 mage and she’s working on multiple druids (ANOTHER CONVERT!!!), and a hunter.  By the end I think she’ll have 3 or 4 characters at or really near to 60 which gives her a lot of choices of characters to play.  However doing a lot of speed leveling kind of grinds on you.  So I really haven’t been wanting to do a whole heck of a lot else for my own characters.

I did transfer my mage to Thunderhorn, and I have enjoyed working on him.  Its nice when you spend most of your time tanking to have a character that you just have to stand back and blow stuff up.  Plus you can compete with yourself and other people to see how far you can push your undergeared character.  Of course being undergeared doesn’t last long.  With the way heroics go, its just a hop skip and a jump to gear with the badges and the new 5 mans.

Raiding has been going well.  We have been clearing regularly up through Festergut.  We haven’t been really working on the Crimson Halls yet.  We’ve been determined to nail Rotface as a 10 man guild.  Its interesting to see how many of the strategies out there for 10 man are written assuming you’re a 25 man guild killing it in 10 man.  In our case, the fight is complicated by the fact that we’re a 10 man guild with 10 man gear killing the boss.

I’m fairly certain we’re one of the first guilds who do strictly 10 man progress who have downed Rotface on Thunderhorn.  Checking sites like Guildox, only one other guild has completed the Plagueworks and nobody has completed the Crimson Halls or anything else (though it just came out yesterday).

We’re looking at scaling up.  We’ve inherited a few raiders lately and to be honest they are all good.  So we’re in that position where now I’ve got extra healers (only one.. but still) and extra DPS.  So if everyone shows up… we’re going to have 5-7 people sitting out on a given night.  That being said, we’re looking at scaling up into 25 man.  Its not going to be overnight, but we’re going to make a shot at it.  Worse come to worse we’ll have two solid 10 man teams.  So if you know solid players hanging around on Thunderhorn who want a new home, let me know… idiots and primadona’s need not apply.

So expect to see a bit more on how we approach ICC and what tips and tricks we’re using to get through.

Now… why?

Well lots of reasons.  Not the least of which is… I am a very busy man.  I have a lot going on with my kids.  I’m extremely busy at work, and I find my free time in the game filled with a million details as we work our way through Icecrown Citadel.

When I I first started this blog to be honest I was bored at work, I had a lot of free time and my kids were younger.  Since then my son’s in Karate 4 days a week and we’re trying to juggle everyone’s schedule and I have a different situation at work. 

I love to write, but its just not something I feel I have the time to do well…  I’ll give it a couple of weeks to just kind of mull over, before I put my final decision here.  In that mean time, I may post… or I may not.

*salute*

Happy raiding folks.

So we headed on in to Icecrown Citadel.  I suspect there was a bug as we were granted 8 attempts at Saurfang, but I’m not going to complain… we downed him.  Lets crank it up and see what we learned about Deathbringer Saurfang.

The Basics…..

Deathbringer Saurfang is at its core level… a denial and burn fight.  Deathbringer Saurfang builds one key power called Blood Power.  He gains it when:

• He casts Rune of Blood on someone and then he damages them
• He casts Blood Boil on someone and every time that DoT ticks.
• He casts Blood Nova and anyone hit by the blood nova
• He summons blood beasts and anyone hit by a blood beasts gives him one blood point.
• He casts Mark of the Fallen Champion on someone and they take a tick from the damage.

So the theory is… the more blood power he gains, the more damage he does… the more ugly the fight becomes.  So.. you have to deny him blood power and burn him as hard as you can.  The longer the fight lasts, the more blood power, the more Marks of the Fallen Champion… the more Blood power… you get the idea.

Denial Strategy

For our group, we used two bear tanks and ONLY two healers.  Our third healer went DPS.  Realistically if you do the fight correctly there isn’t that much damage going on the tanks.  Its completely healable and a third healer is probably going to be a waste and drag this fight out too long.

To deny him blood power everyone is going to have a job.  If your a tank, you need to be on your toes watching for Rune of Blood being put on the other tank.  You need to taunt him as quickly as you can to limit two things… One he heals for 10 times the damage he does to the tanks when the rune is active.  Two… he gets blood power during that time if he hits the other tank.  So you have to be quick on the taunt.

The healers have kind of a unique job… for anyone with Blood Boil, if you have a way to cleanse it (say Hand Of Protection), you’ll prevent a lot of blood gain this way.  The second thing you have to do is…. well…. let someone die.  If someone gets Mark of th Fallen Champion… you need to let them die… do not battle rez… do not collect $200.  Yes you heard me… go against your better judgment and just let them keel over dead.  If you keep them healed, you’re going to generate blood power for as long as they are alive. 

Now… how on earth can you deal with Mark of the Fallen Champion?  Well we stumbled upon a method that may be a bug and unintended, but it worked… so I’m not bitching…

First and foremost… this is completely subjective and random and well… no guarantees.  If he casts it on a rogue, they should vanish before he finishes casting.  However you need to vanish at almost the end of the cast.  If they do, they WON”T have the Mark.  Based on that, I think theoretically it will work for Feign Death.  My next theory is also that you MIGHT be able to DI (divine intervention) someone as he’s casting it.  If you’re prepped with battle rez’s, it might be worth it.  We have three in our raid.

Of course… if that doesn’t work.. you can always just let the person die… which I recommend (unless its one of your two healers… which it might be.)

Blood Beast… wherefor art though..

Blood Beasts deserve their own special attention.  If your DPS isn’t up to the task, the fight will drag on entirely too long and you’ll have a nightmare time dealing with the blood beasts.

Tanks have a special role in dealing with these guys.  First and foremost, you have to time the use of AOE abilities to avoid agroing the Blood Beasts.  Saurfang generates blood power when the blood beasts do damage.  So nobody should get hit.  The theory we went with was to use all the tricks we had to keep them slowed… rooted etc.  Anything you can do to kill them fast, slow them down and get back on the boss is helpful.

For us, we used hunter frost traps, druid roots and a DK pulling mobs back and using Chains of Ice to avoid mobs getting to the ranged.  Our melee (except for the DK) kept primarily on the boss.  Other good abilities to use include:

• Thunderstorm with the knockback from an elemental shaman
• Typhoon with the knockback from a boomkin

Maximizing DPS via Tanks

For our fight, we decided we wanted to shorten the fight as much as possible.  So what we did was have the tanks go kitty form after every taunt.  As the off tank really isn’t doing anything (I mean seriously… you’re just standing there…) you might as well dish out some damage.  For feral druids we went full bore kitty DPS.  I would save my Berserk cool downs for when I was DPSing.  You have to watch carefully to shift back to bear and taunt, but overall, you can cut a TON of time off of your fight if the tank goes into a DPS mode.

For warriors it might be worth having a macro to swap weapons and stances.  For DK’s I’d imagine you could swap prescence and gain a little bit of DPS.  Pally’s… well you might be able to swap weapons around as well to gain a little extra DPS. 

Depending on the firepower of your ranged, you might need the extra boost from your tanks to keep the fight sufficiently short.

Planning for Marks and 30%

There are two really dangerous times for tanks.  When a Mark of the Fallen Champion is coming up, your tanks will take more and more damage.  Saurfang gains 1% damage for every blood power he has.  So at near 100 blood power, Saufang is doing 200% damage to the tank.  So you want to save your trinkets for that time to maximize your survival.

The second thing you need to watch for is when he hits 30%.  At 30%, he soft enrages and starts dishing out considerably more damage.  The tanks need to save long cooldowns for this time.  I recommend burning your bloodlust/heroism after the 30% mark.  This will really help you speed that last 30% down. 

Overall, the fight is straight forward and pretty much the same from start to finish.  You need to just execute on slowing down his blood gain and saving cool downs for the right time of the fight.

The goal of the 15 minute challenge is to see if you can turn your party loose on the world faster than the cooldown on the LFG tool.  So in theory, the second you accept, and it teleports you into the instance, your 15 minute debuff starts that prevents you from going to a new instance using the tool.  So your goal…is to beat that timer.

Rule #1:  All BOSSES MUST DIE

You can’t just walk into some place like Halls of Stone, kill the one boss, kill the final boss and out.  Every boss must die.  You don’t have to kill every bit of trash.  The goal is all bosses.. period end of story.

RULE #2:  Timer stops the second the final boss keels over dead.

Yes… you beat your way through all mobs.. look up.. is the debuff on you?

Here are some quick tips and tricks.

1. Be overgeared.  Expect that you’re going to not need anything in the instance.
2. Looting is Optional…. it will slow you down.  Loot’ is stuck to green when you use the tool… so…. you’ll see it if someone clicks on it anyways.
3. Pull, Pull, Pull…. I only recommend stopping if your healer is running on empty.  Most heroics do not require everyone to be at full mana before you pull the boss.
4.  Burn cooldowns… don’t hold them for a rainy day… if you can hold two packs of mobs and AOE tank them if you burn a cooldown, DO IT!
5. Consider dropping a healer.  Have your healer DPS and just hard burn the instance.

Now some instances won’t lend themselves to a speed run.  COT Stratholme?  Not gonna happen.  You spend so much time waiting in between waves, or waiting for Arthas to catch up to you, that you’re not likely to pull it off.  The new instances would be hard to pull off unless you’re doing Forge of Souls. 

Otherwise… challenge yourself… challenge your group… pull pull pull and have a blast!!!

But what is it that has made the newer instances like Pit of Saron so interesting?  Why do they seem like they are a hell of a lot more fun?

The Story Factor….

I’m not here to ruin anyone’s fun… honestly if you don’t care, then don’t read it, but I think what really sells the new five mans is the story.  Its not just… here is a big dungeon.. go kill bosses till you get to the end guy.  There is a story.  You enter, and either Jaina or Sylvannas has brought an attack force… they are suddenly killed and poof… you need to get some reinforcements.  There’s a reason for you to battle through.  There’s a reason to need to free some slaves. 

Blizzard provided a reason for you to be doing something.. its not just an instance… its not something lame like… stand in this one room.  You watched this guy on a protodrake slaughter a whole assault squad… its payback time.

From then on out, events get shaped around scripted events.  The instance feels alive.  The story jumps out at you and draws you in…

Hard = Fun

I realize the five man on normal isn’t particularly hard if you have some decent gear.  The heroic version can be a really pain once you get to the gauntlet, but that’s part of what makes it so much more interesting.  The packs of mobs are mixed.  None of this… “its all melee mobs and they’ll all just come to you” junk.  You can’t just rely on multimob tanking everything and burning it down.  Blizzard is retraining us to use a little bit of CC.  Sure.. you CAN just multimob tank everything, but I found that to be less effective than just CCing one or two mobs and then burning the rest down. 

The other thing that I really want to applaud blizzard for is that Heroic Pit of Saron actually teaches applicable skills for raiding.  The bosses use raid like abilities.  Frequently there are effects that… hmmm you need to hide behind an object to avoid.  This was really helpful on Sapphiron (and Sindragosa from my understanding…).  There’s a boss with junk on the ground.  There’s a boss with poison novas you need to run out of.  There’s a lot of practice moving so you don’t get yourself killed. 

Also you get to the final boss via a guantlet.  Teaching people to move constantly and dodge damage.  See the big white spots on the floor?  That’s gonna be you flat as a pancake in a minute.  Keep moving… DPS when you’re in a safe spot… hit em hard.  As one person pointed out to me…. “You know… the trash in these instances has as many hit points as the bosses in other heroic dungeons?”  Um… wow I hadn’t even realized… Mobs with 500k HP.  Yes… that’s boss level.  We’re killing bosses with 1.1 million hit points.  Thats insane in a 5 man.

Wiping = Learning

I think the thing that really struck us as we have progressed in the new 5 mans is that we’re learning.  We’re learning about the instances.  Its not like TOC where there was one or two new mechanics and the rest was just… ok… kill the next boss… lets get it over with.  The entire instance is about learning… working on skill and occassionally wiping.  I mean I’ve had nights where I’m doing raid style learning in a five man.  Yes… I’ve had 80g repair bills.  Its not a bad thing.  It means Blizzard is teaching a modicum of humility before we move on to the real challenges in ICC. 

Yes… wiping can be frustrating, but overall, I love the new five mans.  Plus they are just graphically cool…

I’m sorry if you disagree, but Blizzard in my opinion has proved why they deserve the king of the hill for MMOs.  With the release of 3.3, they’ve redefined what it is to play WoW… again.

Forge of Pit of Reflection

Our guild likes to pride itself on how fast we can clear most heroics.  Its like a speed run where you basically say… “aw screw it.. we aren’t even going to take a healer lets just burn it.”  Well we’re a might be more cautious on newer instances, but I have to say… the new 5 mans were really impressive.  They thoroughly kicked our butts on heroic..

I’ve never been more happy to pay for a repair bill out of a five man instance than I have after coming out of those three instances.  Forge of Souls is your straight forward of the three.  It has a few difficult trash pulls where you might consider using some CC, but only because there are a large number of casters in the group.  Its hard to AOE tank a mob that stands 15 yards away from you and pelts the ranged/healers.

The bosses are pretty straight forward in Forge of Souls, but it is your intro story.  I think what really sold it for me was the storytelling Blizzard crafted into the instances.  All three have very distinct and beautiful art styles and flow nicely from one to another.

They are sufficiently hard that they keep you interested.  I’ve both tanked and healed them.  Tanking them requires in some cases just simple AOE tanking, but there are plenty of pulls where you’ll not be able to quite reach all of the mobs so you’re juggling some taunts and keeping the DPS alive.  I’ve run with both PUG and complete guild groups.  These dungeons on heroic are not for the faint at heart. 

I was blessed enough out of my third run through Pit of Saron to walk out of there with the broken hilt that people are lusting after.  One of our DPS won it, but decided that since I was still using a tanking staff from Naxxramas, that it was a much bigger upgrade for me.  And it is… my threat generation has gone through the roof since I got my new shiny mace.

Halls of Reflection.. now that deserves a post all of its own…

LFG…. redux

The new queuing system for dungeons in my opinion is unbelievably cool.  Not only does it basically reduce your time to get your daily badges down to like 15 minutes, it makes it so you can basically head out into the world and farm your heart out.  You  can queue for a dungeon, sit there farming till it pops and then teleport right there.

Of course if you’re a healer or a tank, you won’t even have to wait.  I’ve never waited longer than about 5 seconds before the LFG tool said… “DING>>>>> YOUR INSTANCE IS READY!!!”  Now that’s not to say that I haven’t had to wait for the instance servers to actually have space on them, but a group was formed super quick.

DPS… you’re milage may vary.

We beat him when he was hard!

This is the obligatory…. “hey… we get to QQ because we beat Marrowgar before he was nerfed… Blizzard… you suck… you are dissing our skills because we downed him before you reduced the damage….

Naw… I honestly don’t care.  Its been a good week of raiding.  In our two nights of working on Icecrown Citadel, we consider ourselves to have killed 3.5 of the bosses.  Our first night was just absolutely brutal.  Learning Lord Marrowgar is quite an experience when you’ve been bored off your gourd for 2-3 months farming in TOC… you kind of lose your edge, but once you shake that little bit of rust, there’s a nice keen razor’s edge to be found just waiting to be honed a bit.

However the team bucked up and we downed him our first night in which is probably not that uncommon.  Our raid times are short.  So downing the mountain of trash in front of him (and bear in mind you can see the guy from the front door practically….) and getting him down I still think is a great accomplishment.  Our second night in we downed Lady Deathwhisper and the Gunship battle and got 4 solid attempts on Deathbringer Saurfang. 

On our best attempt we got him down to around 30% before we lost control of the blood ability.  That’s pretty close for me.  That tells me we need to tune a little bit, and then we’ll probably nail him.  Get the DPS a bit more familiar with the fight, work on timing of abilities used and just go nuts.

On leading raids…

Yes… I told you … I wouldn’t be able to stay away.  I had a bit of time on Monday leading the raid and it felt good to get back in the saddle again, but interestingly enough what I liked best about it was that the team actually functions as a very solid team.  They openly discuss tactics and present feedback on what’s working, what isn’t and basically suggestions on where we might go next.  As a tank, I can’t always see what’s going on everywhere and it helps a ton to have that extra feedback from the people in the trenches.  It helped a lot with our success on getting down three bosses in our first week.  Sure… they’re the early bosses.  Sure… there will be a gateway, but you know what… It was hella fun… all 120g of repair bills… worth every single… penny…

Let me explain why after the break.

But there is PVP in my PVE!!!!

The number one complaint I hear over and over about the Faction Champions is that the fight is a PVP fight.  Let me be clear.  I’ve completed it almost 10 times at this point successfully.  Its NOT a PVP fight.  Its a PVE raid fight with SOME PVP rules.

Everyone remember the Moroes fight?  That fight had 10 people fighting 5.  3 were usually CC’d.  One was burned down and one off tanked.  The theory is similar, but it takes it one step further.  Your CC is only so effective.  You have to swap your CC if you want it to remain consistent.  The AI is a lot smarter about how it picks its targets.

Yes… its frustrating, but its a FUN mechanic.  The fight entails basically learning on the fly to prioritize targets and avoid damage.  The difference is… the damage follows you.  The damage will gang bang you if you aren’t paying attention.

Lions and Bears and Casters Oh MY!!!

Druids are in my opinion one of the most versatile of the “hybrid” classes.  If your spec is tank, you still have access to 90% of the spells and abilities of the other two specs.  Are you as effective?  No, but you have them.  That means you have options.

As a tanking druid with a healer off spec, I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of options to do OMG damage during the PVP fight.  I’m going to do respectable damage, but I make my goal a bit different than a lot of people.  My goal in that fight is to control… lock down and prevent damage.

Let me explain.  In the 10 man fight, you’ll almost always have….

2 Healer mobs.
2 Melee Mobs.
2 Ranged Mobs.

For the start of the fight, we always pick a priority list of things to kill.  It typically looks like this.

1. Kill one of the healer mobs
2. Lock down the second healer mob.
3. Kill ANY pets.
4. Kill the second healer.
5. Kill some squishy, but annoying caster (typically mage or warlock due to CC ability)
6. Kill second caster
7. Clean up melee

For my role, I typically chose to lock down the secondary healer as soon as the initial wave of CC wears off.  For instance… we’ll have a hunter or boomkin CC the caster for the first 10-15 seconds of the fight.  After that passes, I take over.

This is where being a druid is fun… with a capital F.  When you tank, you have one basical role… keep the bad man angry.  You do your threat rotation.  You don’t stand in bad things and generally… you stay somewhat static.  You see ankles or crotch.  That’s basically the extent of what you get to see.

In this fight, you are free to use every damned trick in the book.

Opening up the book of tricks

Ok… lets look at why I think this is so much fun.  Lets walk through a typical fight.  Picking on our fight from last night, we had the following set up.

Healer Priest
Healer Pally
Mage
Boomkin
Shaman
Rogue

So the general gameplan was as follows.  We decided to kill the priest first.  The trick here is that you don’t want to let the pally stay active.  So you need to control the pally while you’re dealing with the priest.  Otherwise the pally bubbles the priest and you waste a whole boatload of time.  So we wanted to CC the pally and “keep them busy” while we hard burned the priest.  Once the priest was dead, move on to the pally.  Then the mage, boomkin, shaman then rogue.

My first job when I set up for this fight is to set the secondary healer as my focus target.  This lets me keep track of how their CC is holding up and what they are casting if anything.  We had our boomkin prep to CC the pally right out of the gate.

Once we pull, then things get fun for me.  I make sure the secondary healer is being CC’d and then we hard burn on the first target.  Once the CC expires on the secondary healer, I go into full CC mode.  For a feral druid I have the following tools available to interrupt spell casting:

• Cyclone
• Feral Charge (bear)
• Bash (bear)
• Maim (cat)

That’s four possible methods of locking out a caster at least temporarily.  And that’s the fun part.  Since I know I won’t be able to crank out as much DPS as the rest of my crew, I can play fielder and pick up mobs that need controlling and lock them down.

It becomes a fun game to try to watch the field at a frantic pace and then control mobs that need to be grabbed.  You start to almost instinctively swap forms to perform your various tasks.  If you see your group has a couple of people getting low on health, you shift out, pop tranquility and then move on.

If you see that your ranged are getting mauled by a melee, you can shift bear, taunt the mob to you, and then lock it on your for 5-10 seconds.  After that you can pull any one of your CC abilities out of your hat and give you healers and casters a little breathing room.  Have an annoying mob that keeps CCing?  Lock it down using your multiple CC abilities and keep it from casting.

For me, this fight was almost custom built for druids.  It gives you all of the flexiblity of your class for the perfect fight.  You can literally just make the best use of your abilities to flow with the heat of battle.

I’ve consulted with the Azerothian Tinfoil Hat Society in an effort the gain a statistical view of the math within the game of WoW.  The ATHS has presented deeply inspiring works such as Pallies QQ Moar: A mathmatecal proof of Blizzard’s hate of Pallies and Do it From Behind: An in depth Rogue Analysis, but they are most famous for their work on Blue Man Group: A trend analysis of Blue posts related to Blizzard’s hate of “pure” classes. 

WARNING:  The following post contains theory crafting as well as mathmatical theorems.  Read at your own risk.

**Warning… post contains gratuitous jokes and is not intended to be taken seriously… read at your own risk.  Writer not responsible for injuries sustained while reading the following post.

** All references to the Azerothian Tinfoil Hat Society are not intended to be linked to any guild/organization or group currently in existence.  The name was selected for comedic value.  If you have a group/guild/organization named as such… you’ll probably laugh anyways.

On Origins of Azerothian Math

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In its most basic form, Azerothian Math can be boiled down to this simple equation.  While this may seem complicated at first, this mathmatical theorem was first postulated by Feragho and Rubix back in the early days of WoW. 

While the skills required to solve this equation take years to perfect, the everyday applications can be seen in the following sections.  These are directly observable events based on a statistical proof. 

Practical Application: Understanding Drop Quests and Attention

Statistically speaking, the odds of completing a drop quest in a given time period while paying attention are 68% less likely to occur than if you just aren’t paying attention.  Given a sample audience of 15 independent characters, the players paying the most attention to the drops took on average 4.6 minutes longer to complete a drop quest than those who just weren’t paying attention to what the hell they were doing.

However as an interesting correlation those paying less attention were 84% more likely to kill an additional 8.7 mobs beyond the required kills to complete the quest.  This lead us to a further analysis.  We took a sample group of 20 players know for their ability to not pay attention to what the hell they were doing and placed them all in the same guild with access to the same mods.  A control group of 10 were given no additional mods.  The remaining 10 were given a mod that would only alert them when a quest was complete.

40% of players in the experimental group were able the see an increase in the efficiency of their playing with the addition of a mod.  Unfortunately, this also lead to the players paying more attention to what they were doing and thus they also saw a subsequent increase in the time required in future drop quests as they were now paying attention to the mod.  10% saw a decrease in their efficiency as they spent more time talking about the mod than actually watching it.  A staggering 50% were so clueless, they completely missed the warning when it popped up.

This leads us to a direct  correlation between between attention span and quest completion.  However… due to the attention paid by the players, there were no more likely to complete quests faster than any other player.

Statistical Anomolies in the Drop Algorithm

It came to our attention that a female player related to one of our researchers suffered from an interesting statistical anomoly.  They were 60% more likely to obtain a drop during a drop quest than people of similar gear, skill and class.  Upon further review of the player, we were able to determine the cause of the glitch.

Due to the deep linkage of Azerothian math with the loot drops of the mobs we were able to find an error in the algorithm used by Blizzard to determine the likelyhood of a drop, there is a random number seed based on a hash function run against the players name.  Certain players for inexplicable reasons seem to gravitate toward names which cause errors in the algorithm based on the random seed.

While this leads to a distinct increase in the likelyhood of drops, the same random seed generation is used in calculations related to agro radius of mobs.  These same characters are four times more likely to agro random mobs while questing.  This leads to only a moderate increase in questing speed as these players are more likely to be fighting two to three mobs at a time due to poor agro radius judgement. 

It also showed a three times increase in the likelyhood of a random mob to respawn on top of the given player when out of mana or health after a long fight.  This leads to a decrease in questing speeds on quests related to killing X number of mobs.

We’ll continue to take a deeper dive into Azerothian Math on a later date.  Till then, please enjoy your time digesting these findings.

So I was sitting there reading and saw that Blizzard had $5 copies of the base game for the weekend…  Ruh Roh Raggy…. um… Well see I’m an altoholic.  And I was just bitching about how I didn’t have enough support structure right?  Well…. see… I kind of made the mistake of mentioning it in Guild chat that I was thinking of picking up a copy and testing out dual boxing as a nice easy way to level some alts quickly to level 60.

Lets face it… I’m bored.  Moving to a new guild came at a price.  The price was…well… everything is on farm.  So our raiding takes 1.5 hours.  Done.. out for the week.  Ulduar is off the table.  And we’re working on TOGC, but only one day a week.  So ok… fine… our raiding take 4 hours a week, but we haven’t been very consistent on TOGC.  Plus I have this desire to get at least ONE support character to a position where they can help my main. 

Little did I know the wave I’d start….

The Good Natured Ribbing

I deserve it.  The first thing mentioned to me by my friends in the guild was…. “Hey dofus… you know… you just transfered servers and your wife hasn’t transfered any.  You know you should really help HER speed level.”

Oh yeah…. Now money doesn’t grow on trees in my house and if yours is anything like mine during the holidays, you’re probably tighter than normal.  I mean you’ve got hundreds of dollars to spend on Christmas (or insert your favorite end of year celebration here…)  So finding a spare $55 to faction and server transfer isn’t exactly easy.  Plus my wife said it to me this way…. “My mage I leveled on Alliance will always be a human mage… she’s happy that way”.

Ok… well then.  That settles that.  My wife WON’T be transfering any characters.  So her highest is currently a whopping 23.  She doesn’t play anywhere near as much as I do.  So our thought was… lets leverage the Refer a Friend (RAF) program to help speed level her character.  At the end of the day, we can easily level her multiple characters to 60 and give her options to choose from.  Hell… I can’t believe how fast it goes.  We only play for like 1.5 hours and we’ve cranked out like 3-5 levels in  session.  While the triple XP on killing mobs is nice (its really only like 1.5 since you still divide it by two), the quest xp gets OBSCENE.  When you’re level 16 and get 3500 XP for turning in ONE quest… um yeah.

Altoholism Gone Rampant

See I blame myself.  It started with me.  I was buying one copy of the game for me to use.  That turned into one copy for me (which I’m delaying using for a while) and one for my wife.  I’m an altoholic and I really like having a solid support structure.  However… that being said, I started a wave. 

The GM of the guild bought a copy to help his fiance level her last couple of characters with the thought that he could use the spare account for his son when he got old enough to play.  Poof!!! Multiple higher level characters as well as slots for lower level ones.  One or two other people started doing the same.  They bought the $5 copy of the game and started helping friends level or dual boxing.  I mean for $5, who can pass that up?

The Pain of RAF

My GM and his Fiance had the chance to play A LOT on Saturday and Sunday and by the time I looked up, they were already up to something like 44 or 45 before they stopped on Sunday.  Bear in mind, that they would have been considerably higher, but Blizzard has this bulk processing thing.  They don’t completely upgrade your “Trial” account to a full account until after they can verify all the payment information.  I know it occurs as some sort of batch process. 

My GM and I spent like a day and a half playing without the ability to:

1. Trade with anyone
2. Mail ourselves anything

Now that may not sound like such a big deal, but for anyone who played vanilla wow, how big of a problem was it to find bags?  How much of a pain was it when you were trying to level and you didn’t have any cash?

Now multiply that by the fact that you are getting 3x xp.  You aren’t killing nearly as many mobs.  You aren’t doing as many quests.  So you aren’t selling useless greens.  You aren’t getting nearly as many greens as you need to equip yourself.  By level 14, I had 12 unbought abilities.  I had 21 copper on my character sheet.  And ONE 16 slot bag (your initial backpack). 

It took me about 40 steps outside of any town before my bags were completely full.  So my wife was picking up all of the stuff (I’d shipped her my 16 slot bags and my cash.)  So she was selling any greens.  She was selling the greys and whites.  I was saving every bag slot for just quest items.

My GM was level 38 before he bought riding skill.  He was just grateful he picked a shaman to play as they have the ability to use a travel form.

RAF Gotcha Learning Points

1. Make sure you’re standing within 100 yards when killing mobs.  This generally won’t be very hard to do.  You’ll be killing stuff in the same area. 
2. If one of you is impatient, make sure your partner is standing with you before you turn in a quest. 

I made the mistake on number two a couple of times.  I hadn’t realized my wife had gone off to train or to do something else.  We all get into our own little patterns while playing.  She went left… I went right.  I turned in my quest and went… oops… No triple XP for me.  Doh!!!  Wasn’t a huge deal, but still… a little annoying.