Controlling Chaos

Over the course of Warcraft bosses have been getting more and more complex. Back in Molten Core almost every fight was a tank and spank with very few elements to it. Sometimes it would be decurse everyone, stance dance, or don't stand in the fire. Those elements are fine in the beginning but people start learning and you need to throw new twists at them. The first time I stepped in BlackWing Lair the first boss blew my mind. The idea of a room full of constantly spawning adds that had to be kited while having the boss be mind controlled was unheard of. The first couple of times we tried the encounter it almost seemed impossible. As time went on and many wipes later we were able to control the chaos.

Fast forward to the present we now have an encounter like Yogg-Sarron. Coordinating 25 people on this fight seems a very daunting task. On top of that Yogg has 3 distinct phases and very different strategies for each of those phases. We finally downed Yogg the other day and I must say it is a very fun fight. Now that I've done all the normal encounters in Ulduar I am very happy with the direction blizzard went with the dungeon. Every fight always has 7-10 things you have to deal with. Things such as Death Rays, Brain Links, Sanity, Portals, 3 types of Tenticles, Guardians, Illusions, clouds, and a host of other mechanics force you to always be on your toes on this fight. I can't wait to see what is in store for us in the Coliseum and Icecrown Citadel.

Now that we have the isntance cleared its time to start working on hard modes. I have a love hate relationship with achievements and hard modes. The game should be fun and part of the fun is being rewarded for completing difficult tasks in the game. I hate achievements that are difficult for no reason then for the sake of being difficult and have no reward to them. Dward Medium-rare is one of hose achievements where it is just really really stupid idea of an achievement with no real incentive to doing it outside of it being part of a meta achievement to get a mount. We tried this the other day and it boggles my mind that blizzard things this is an idea of a fun achievement. Achievements such as crazy cat lady and Disarmed are examples of good achievements that require skill but are not stupidly designed.

Then there are hard modes. I love them because they reward you for skill but as the name implies they are hard. Most of the bosses will require top notch healing, tanking, and dps. All this has to happen while dealing with all the other factors you have to deal with on the fight. This means there will be a lot of learning associated with downing the encoutner and that means there will be a ton of wipes as well. Wiping is a natural part of raiding but that doesn't make it any more fun. The fun happen when you finally get to that point where you see you are about to do it and everything just falls into place and so does the boss.

In 3.2 Blizzard is changing the way that PVP works a bit. The biggest change that I am excited for and a bit scared of is the resilience change. Currently resilience only reduces chance to be crit and crit damage done. While that helps a lot on burst a lot of damage a person puts out is not always crit damage. When the patch hits resilience will reduce all incoming damage by a percentage. This should be a better system overall because now you can stack crit and it won't be diminished compared to your overall firepower. What really scares me about this change is how is how much of a buff is it for healers. Most healers can usually heal a wounded target to full health in 1 or 2 GCD's.

As a ret paladin there really isn't much I can do about healing. Most of the time when I face off against disc priest and druids they just stand there and tank my damage. The amount of damage they can withstand is insane while having incredible healing capacity without having to actually cast anything. My only real option is to time my stun or repentance at the right time or be doomed to failure. I don't know why I keep doing it but there is nothing that gets me more frustrated in life then Arena. I love it and am always looking forward to the next battle but loosing to something that you can't really control or by bullshit just gets my blood boiling. I hardly ever curse or throw things around but a match that shouldn't end the way it did will make the people around me very scared.

A big change that I am very excited about in the patch is the way badges are changing. When the patch hits every boss that drops any type of badge will only drop emblems of conquest. The exception to this is the coliseum which will drop the new emblems of triumph. There is an issue I have with hard core raiders and this is the fact that they don't want anyone else who didn't go through what they go through to have a chance at having a shot at what they have. I can understand this to a certain extent. There will always be a sense of competition of being the best of what you do. Being the best guild, having the best gear on the server, or having the top dps of your class are things that drive people forward. But once you are ready to step up and get the newest and greatest items why do you care if someone can get your left overs? If you are getting purples from Ulduar why do you care if a new 80 can start getting purples from Naxx? Once we have the coliseum and start gearing out there people will only start getting conquest badges and start gearing up a level behind you.

I think its awesome for me because it gives me a reason to start running heroics and tier 7 content again. I love doing heroics but I am a goal oriented guy. I need a reward for doing something. Its very hard for me to do anything without a carrot being hung in front of me. I am constantly thinking about how I can maximize my character and often times things that are not getting me to that goal is burning up my precious time. Raiding does cause burnout. There is only so much of one thing you can do before you get tired of it. The core raiding roster of a guild now is not going to be the same as it will be 6 months from now. Often times you need to get fresh faces in there to replace the ones you've lost.

If blizzard doesn't give people a chance to get to a descent level of gear they will fall behind and have no chance of getting into a well established guild. Those well established guilds won't get the recruits that can handle the new content and it becomes a vicious cycle of guilds dying out and what was once many guild fighting for first place becomes a handful of guilds with few choices for anyone who wants to get into the raiding game. A lot of hardcore people would be completely find with this because they like the idea of being in an exclusive club just for the privileged. Blizzard knows what keeps people playing and its smart of them to push there newer players to keep playing.

During the end of Burning Crusade I had to change my hours at work for a promotion. Unfortunately there were no late night raiding guilds at that point and there wasn't much I could do even though I loved raiding. With every new patch blizzard kept giving me ways to improve my character. With the introduction of the isle and new badge rewards I constantly had a reason to keep playing and bring my character up to a descent level. With the way Conquest badges will work there are tons of people out there like me who have no way of gearing up to return to their toons and have a reason to play the characters they love.

3.2 Changes

Blizzard has released some new information on the upcoming Patch 3.2. There are a lot of changes we have been asking for and a few surprises. First up is Protection. The biggest problem protection had was cooldowns. Paladins really only had 1 cooldown that they can use once every 2 minutes. Lay on Hands doesn't really count since its just a big heal and on a 20 minute cooldown. With 3.2 Ardent Defender sees a huge buff. Currently it reduces your damage taken by 30% when you are below 35%. When so many bosses hit for around 20k with around 42k health it really doesn't save lives all that often. Not to say its a bad talent but its really not reliable.

They changed the talent to now reduce any attack that would reduce your health to 35% or below by 30%. This is a huge buff since boss attacks are so hard. On top of that every 2 minutes we get a free guardian spirit on us without having to hit any buttons. This went from being an OK talent to probably the most over powered tanking talent out there.

Block is also getting changed a bit for 3.2. Most Paladins and Warriors don't waste much time on block. If it is a good piece and it has some block value or rating (Conqueror's Helm) we'll throw it on. Most of the time we'll just completely pass it up and go for pieces with pure dodge or parry. Ulduar bosses hit pretty hard and dodging an attack mitigates about 20k damage vs block which usually only shaves off 1.5k damage of that 20k hit.

Block was a much more useful stat back during Burning Crusade when block would push crushing blows off the table all together. If you weren't at 102.4% avoidance/block the remaining percentage was converted to a full 150% crushing blow. So effectively every time you block you would reduce a 10k normal hit from being a 15k crushing blow while probably blocking 500 damage. So in essence you blocked 5.5k damage which is a huge chunk of damage.

Since 3.0 started crushing blows have been removed from bosses so blocks don't have the same impact they once had. Block Value still keeps its high item budget that it once did even though its not really contributing much to reducing damage taken while taking away possible Dodge/Parry. Blizzard's answer to this is to double all block value items. This doesn't affect base block value from shield nor the block value we get from strength. Doing some basic theory crafting I notice that this probably won't matter much. In the gear I choose for tanking I have very little block value. Before my libram I block around 1.2k on any blocked attack. On the gear that I have only around 100 block value so that would be doubled. I would basically block for around 1.4k but with libram probably around 1.8k.

If I were to start changing around my gear and adding block value items to it my dodge/parry would drop a descent amount. There would also be a lot of wasted block rating considering you can't get block value without getting block rating to go with it. Without getting to technical I would probably convert abotu 5% avoidance for 5% block but in return I would have the 40% of the blocks I do block for more. If I were to add about 400 block value to my gear bringing me up to 500 value and then double that with the 3.2 changes. I would probably be blocking 2.3k before libram and close to 3k with libram.

Lets say the average ends up being 2.5k. So if a boss hits for about 20k on a normal hit and he hits 100 times. the 5% I lost to avoidance would be 100k damage. Block would be 2.5k x40 hits would also be 100k. So while it looks like this would mean that they both do about the same amount of mitigation I would still be blocking 35% of the time in my avoidance gear for around 1.5k. That would be around 52.5k damage blocked so I would still be up 47k damage mitigated over my block gear.

With all that being said tanking math isn't perfect. Depending on if you take less hits or make every hit for less the thing that matters the most is do you survive through it long enough for the dps to bring the boss down. Do the healers have a hard time keeping you up? Its hard to measure exactly what is the best way to gear for an encounter and that is why most of us have different sets of gear depending on how the fight itself.


Seals are also seeing a major change all around. First is that they are completely removing Seal of Martyr/Blood. They want to take Seal of Vengeance and make it the primary DPS Seal. They want to make Ret burst less substantial and this is one of the ways they are doing it. We are going to have to get 5 stacks of vengeance up before we can do our full 33% of weapon damage as holy damage. This is not a bad change because we'll be doing full damage on bosses, the dot component of the seal and Righteous Vengeance from talents. Also to reduce burst they are reducing our cooldown of Crusader Strike to 4 sec but at 75% damage. Not bad changes for the sake of balance but we'll have to see how it actually affects our position on the damage meters once people can get some tests on it.

Holy seems to have both some significant buffs and nerfs. The biggest buff comes in the form of Beacon of Light. Currently it only affects your affective healing and paladins are the masters of over healing so a lot of the heal would be lost. That is no longer the case with the changes. The entire heal regardless of over healing will transfer over to the beacon target. This allows paladins to help heal the raid without fear of the tank not having enough heals. Also they are changing the way flash of light and sacred shield interact.

If the target has sacred shield and you heal with flash of light it will leave a hot component on that target. This is supposed to help us with raid healing but I see it being a problem just because we can only keep sacred shield on 1 target at a time and it will cost us 2 global cooldowns to get a heal up on that target. In order to offset this blizzard is cutting our illumination talent from 60% to 30%. They want to give paladins more options instead of just dropping holy lights on the tank without worry of mana. Also in the name of balance they are buffing all mp5 gear by 25%. This will give us more of a choice between gear with crit vs mp5.

Random Ramblings

My guild, Zealous has a lot of talent. I used to be in a guild in BC that was constantly getting server firsts. When I came over to Zealous I had little faith that we would be getting anywhere that fast. Once I saw how much we did accomplish I was pleasently suprised. Biggest problem is getting enough of those people together to get a quality 25 man going. While we got up to Vezax last week we were lacking in numbers to take him down.

Though with all that talent we make a pretty impressive 10 man raid. We decided to blow through some hard modes this weekend and in one night we got Flame Leviathan +2 towers, Ignis speed kill, XT hard mode, Kologram's open arms, Auriaya's crazy cat lady, Hodir 3 minute kill, Thorim hard mode, Freya +1, and up to Vezax all in one night. That is an impressive first night of 10 man raiding.

Yogg is a complicated fight with a lot of stuff going on in all 3 of his phases. Last night our group spent over 4 hours learning this fight. In the beginning we looked like a bunch of stumbling idiots trying to get through phase 1. As the night went on we were constantly getting to phase 2 figuring out all the action that happens inside and outside the portals. We all were feeling how close we were to downing the boss and were salivating to make it happen. We get into phase 3 and try to keep control of what was going on. Over vent we called out to kill adds, face our character around, and keeping everyone alive. Once we finally did take him down there were shouts all over vent. We all had wanted to do this for so long and we finally were able to say we had conquered Ulduar.

If you are a good raider you are always looking for ways to improve your character. Once you know how to play your character to the max potential it usually comes down to getting improvements in gear. As a damage dealer you want your gear to push your dps to the max. As a healer you want to increase your healing throughput and longevity. As a tank you push up your survivability as high as it can go. But once you gear to the point where you never will die under normal circumstances is more gear wasteful?

Going through Ulduar there is a certain gear threshold you have to meet. If you look at many of the encounters there isn't a lot of tank damage. Yes the bosses do hit hard but if you are geared well enough they really don't ramp up in physical damage done. The final boss doesn't even get tanked. Also if you look at the hard modes throughout the instance only two bosses do increased damage.

XT is a dps check and a movement check, Iron Council will auto kill your tanks because of the debuff, Hodir is a dps check, Thorim is a dps race with increased raid healing. Freya does 50% increased damage but her damage wasn't high to begin with. Its more about the damage of the adds and raid damage. Mimiron is another dps check with a stay out of the fire component thrown in. Vezax is about mana management of your raid with an extra add to dps down. Yogg is where things get complicated. The watchers give the raid buffs and provide helpful extras. Not having those means less health and less dps.

As a raid leader and you look at all these encounters you probably notice a trend. Having more dps and being smarter wins most encounters. So if you had a choice of how to increase your raid's chance to down encounters how would you proceed.

As a tank I am pretty happy with my gear. Outside of hard modes I feel as if I have some of the best gear I can get. There is always room to improve but most of it will give me like a .5% increased chance to survive. The other problem is that there is a lot less +defense on the gear in Ulduar. If I were to equip some of the items there I would have to change my other gear around to remain uncrittable.

I am a tank about 60-75% of the time. I go back and forth with our other main tank depending on if we need more dps or more healing. Throwing more dps is usually a better choice if you have a good healing core already in place. A quicker boss death is usually preferred over the alternative. Whenever there is a fight that only requires one tank I usually am asked to switch over to my ret set.

My ret set is pretty solid. Looking through Rawr and Max Dps I have some pretty solid gear and there are only a few pieces out there I can readily receive if I wanted to increase my effectiveness. So considering my tank set is top notch should I spend my emblems of conquest on more tank gear or spiff up my ret set? I'm not going to be at a disadvantage as a tank if I dont get an ugprade anytime soon but if I can push out an extra 100 dps it might be more beneficial to the raid.

What our raid really needs is people showing up constantly. We all have been there where we are pushing content and don't have the people we had the night before. Its frustrating and with as much talent as we have in Zealous we could be in such a better place if only we can fill in the holes.

The Hidden Resource

When it comes to raiding every guild has good days and bad days. You remember the days when you blew through 10 bosses in less then 3 hours of raiding without as much as a hiccup. Then there are days when you have almost half your team dead on every encounter and you sputter your way through the instance. For the most part your core group is the same plus or minus a few people. You know the skill level of the people that you play with is superb but you are still having a hard time. What made tonight different then the awesome day you had last week?

I like to call this hidden resource Resolve. Resolve is a combination of belief, desire, and willingness. My guild leader has a saying "Whether you believe you can do it or can not do it you are right" If you have the belief that the people you are running with have the capacity to down the boss you will do it. If you start doubting yourself and your team you will fail. You also need to have the desire to do it. If you want to kill the boss you will find a way to be more attentive and think on the fly to make sure you do your part to make the boss fall down. The other thing is willingness. We have all had those days when our heart is just not into it. We are going through the motions. We feel like we are doing what we always do but we get lazy. We don't watch our cooldowns well. We might not move quick enough. We're not aware of the variables being thrown at us. This is mostly attributed to "sloppy play".

There are many times you walk into a raid and you see all those familiar faces ready to go but things just don't fall into place the way they should. Also our resolve can change depending on the situation. We can come in with our Resolve resource already being low. Having a bad day, being tired, computer issues, real life problems are all a part of our WoW experience. The better those are the better our resolve is. Through the course of a raid a lot of factors can change individual resolve and resolve of the entire raid. Everyone has those nights when people randomly disconnect and they usually happen at the absolute worst time. There will always be issues of "girlfriend aggro", "parents aggro", "omg my grandma's in the hospital", and the famous "brb putting together a home gym set". Resolve can go up and down depending on who is invited and who has to leave early. Probably the biggest issue for us as a guild is people showing up. You can be amped up ready to kill a new boss but when only 20 people log in and you need 25 playing at max capacity resolve takes a big nose dive.

So as a guild or officer how do you effect resolve. We are not robots and are affected by resolve so we have to take these factors into account. Being human also means we can be pushed into having more resolve. How many times have you been constantly wiping and you have lost your will to fight but your guild leader will come out and start having a "talk" with the guild. Sometimes these are positive in nature. He will talk about about all the previous accomplishments of the guild and how they have done it before with less. Also they will acknowledge the skill and power of each individual in the guild. What can work equally as well is being a prick. Sometimes it takes a harsh leader to whip the group into shape. The acknowledgement of the skill and how there is a lack of it during the encounter. Calling people out and forcing them to do better for fear of punishment. Guild leaders can make individuals fearful of making mistakes, being more attentive, and holding every misstep accountable.

It is important in any raid to try to keep resolve at a high level. Each individual can bring up or down the resolve of the rest of the group. Officers should find ways to pick up on the ques' and promote them in raid. Some guilds thrive on having a joking fun nature throughout raid. Everyone talking on vent, picking fun at each other can lead to a smooth run downing multiple bosses and everyone having a great time. Other guilds need to be serious and focus up. Keeping vent clear for instructions and having one voice keeping order helps make the raid smooth and efficient.

Regardless of any raiding situation there will always be days with ups and downs. Its important that we know when its happening and try to keep resolve high and salvage a failing raid. If we can figure a way to make that happen we'll continue to progress forward and down harder content. If not we will probably end up calling raids early and might even see some of our best raiders and good friends finding themselves a new home.