Sunday, March 28, 2010

The King Beckons


This is it. We are finally up to the final boss in Wrath. I had played through Warcraft 3 and I loved Arthas as a character. When I controlled him as a human as he fell from grace, to killing his father, and destroying all of Azeroth as leader of the Scourge. It was an amazing experience. I own 2 copies of the Arthas novel. One that I read and other one is a collector's edition that my best friend had bought me. When Wrath had come out we both landed on howling fjord and one of the first quests given to you was to enter the spirit world. In the distance you see the Lich King and of coarse I had to walk up to him. He spots me and instantly kills me in 1 shot. It was one of the more epic moments in Wrath.

I leveled up to 80 and killed a bunch of his lieutenants, and gear out in epics to enter his citadel. I took out his guards and now I have entered his throne room and challenge him to the death. And death is exactly what he gave me and my 24 guild mates. I didn't think I would be doing what I am doing right now. I am the main tank for the lich king. As a paladin throughout vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade I would tank but no one would take me seriously for progression encounters. When Wrath came out I was good at my job. After quiting the game for a while I never thought I would be in a position where I would be standing toe to toe taking blows from the lich king but here I am. My best friend plays a druid tank and he is so jealous because he quit the game as well but wants to experience the Lich King.

So here we are, Last Hope vs the Lich King. We have been trying for a couple of raid nights to bring him down. Like other ICC bosses he is relatively complicated and has a lot of stages. Phase 1 is pretty easy. I tank the Lich King where he stands and he summons a whole bunch of minions. The stronger minions get tanked by the off tank and if you get a disease you run to the off tank and get cleansed. Once you hit 70% he forces you to the edge of the room while he casts remorseless winter. We have a small problem in this transition phase because he will spawn Spirits that have to be tanked. The problem is regardless of if I taunt or hit him with a hard attack he seems to one shot somebody around him. It is frustrating because it seems that they kill somebody as they are materializing and don't have a hit box that I can attack.

Phase 2 is currently where we are stuck. I have the best gear that I can possibly have minus a shield and he hits for about 30k a swing. He also will cast Soul Reaper on me which is 60k shadow damage after 5 seconds. While he hits hard the healers do a pretty good job of keeping me alive. What wipes the raid is the Valkyr's and the defile. The Lich King will summon 3 valkyr's that will pick up a random person and drop them off the edge of the platform if they aren't dpsed down. Our problem is to get them going in the same direction and stunning them enough before they get to the edge. The other problem is defile. It picks a random person and puts a black circle under them. If anyone is standing on the circle it grows. Often times it will kill the people standing on them and grow further so that other people are standing on it and thus wiping the raid. We're slowly but surely figuring out how to handle this encounter and we are showing progress. We still have one more transition phase and phase 3 to contend with before the boss goes down.

I really like the guild that I am in but one thing that I hate is the DKP system. There is never going to be a perfect dkp system but there are things that a dkp system should account for. The way it works currently is you get dkp for showing up and if there is an item that drops that you want then you can bid on the item. The problem is that it is a blind dkp bid. You have no idea what other people are going to bid and you can bid all your dkp, part of it, or the bare minimum. This is one of the most annoying systems ever invented. I believe that a dkp system should reward the people who deserve items. If you show up regularly you get dkp and you have priority on that item if you have enough. You spend the dkp you get the item. Because you spent the dkp you have less then before so you might not get the next item you want if someone else shows up about equally as you do. I have never ever missed a raid ever since I joined this guild. A lot of people show up whenever they want or hardly at all.

I have 100 dkp and items are usually between 5 -30 dkp. If an item I really want drops and every other tank wants it how much should I bid. I have no idea. If the next highest tank has 80 dkp do I bid 81 this way I am guaranteed to beat them. That seems kind of absurd to bid almost everything I earned since I joined the guild for one item. When I talked to the officers about it they acted like that is what you are supposed to do. I looked at them like they were insane. So to get 1 highly sought after item I have to basically use all my dkp to the point where I won't be anywhere close to getting another item for a while unless no one wants it. As a tank this isn't that big of a deal because I only have 2 other people to fight for. If I was a dps I would probably go crazy in this system and possibly gquit. Trinkets are an item that benefit a lot of classes and specs but there are so few of them that are very good. When they do drop there is a mad dash for them and the people who win them often times don't have any dkp to spend for a long time. If you are smart with your dkp certain slots just never get filled because its not worth lossing all your dkp over.

It is hard to find a balance between spending your dkp wisely and just wanting an item so badly that you pay a ridiculous amount. The thing I hate most about this system is that it rewards the most greedy and not necessarily the person who most deserves it. We had a tank who didn't show up regularly that one day just blew all his dkp on some tier tokens and just leave. It was a highly sought after items and the people who did show up regularly didn't want to blow over 40 dkp on it. He made out like a bandit and the guild is left there scratching their head. While the officers don't like this idea no one is willing to change the system to something that works a bit better. I believe gear should have priority on people who show up regularly and have a set price attached to it. Its hard to find a balance between giving gear to people who deserve it and have new people who show up get geared up as well. The thing I notice is that gear is plentiful. Most slots get filled up pretty quickly and new people get geared out relatively fast. We can still give those people gear but find a way to reward the people who show up with Priority on the highly sought after loot without giving themselves an aneurysm figuring out how much dkp to spend.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Frost Queen


There is a time in a tier cycle where things start becoming smooth. On our last raid reset we were able to clear out 2 wings on Tuesday and the rest of the farm content on Wednesday with an hour left in raiding. This gave us a lot of time to work on our latest challenge, Sindragosa. We spent the last hour on Wednesday, all of Thursday and Monday working on this boss.

Like any boss encounter the first couple of times are very sloppy. Sindriagosa is basically Sapphiron 2.0. Phase 1 consists of basic Dragon mechanics. Stay away from the front to avoid cleaves, and frost breaths. Stay away from the tail to avoid tail smash so basically everyone is dpsing her hind leg. In addition to this there is a raid wide frost damage aura and every 30 seconds she will pull everyone close to her and do Blistering Cold. The raid has about 5 second to move away before she does Blistering Cold which will kill anyone but a tank. During this phase she will randomly cast Unchained magic on the ranged/healers forcing them to stop casting for a few seconds so they don't take to much Backlash damage if their stacks get to high. The melee have their own version of this called Permeating Cold, where each attack will has a 40% chance to make them take damage over time also stacking They will have to stop attacking after 5 or so stacks or they will take to much damage This is also a very hard fight for me as a tank when it comes to threat. As melee Permeating Cold forces me to stop dpsing every so often. Also every Frost breath that I don't resist will put a 2 minute debuff on me reducing my Melee swing time by 50% a stack. This is all while wearing my frost resist gear which has no threat stats on it whatsoever. Every 90 seconds or so she will enter the air phase.

In her Air phase she will randomly select 5 people that will get frost tombed. Unlike the Sapphiron encounter the people who get tombed have to be broken out. The purpose of the tombs is to hide behind from from bombs but again unlike Sapphiron where it was one big bomb in the center you get 5 of them in random locations so you will have to adjust your line of site to the bomb. Originally we would have 5 people line up in a row and try to bring them down to 40% before breaking them out. The problem with that is people have an issue with throttling their dps so they would break out early before the last frost bomb went off and the other frost tombs were still close to 100% by the time she landed. We adjusted our strategy to have 3 people at the bottom of the stairs and 2 right behind them. This allowed us to go crazy and break out the first 2 and by the time the 3 in the front were close to dying she would have cast her last frost tomb and start landing.

Once she gets down to 35% she enters phase 3. After a few attempts we were consistently getting past the first 2 phases without and issues. The last 3 raid nights we spent just trying to get past this final phase and we still haven't been able to defeat her yet. She remains grounded on this phase but she starts doing Mystic Buffet. It's cast every 10 seconds and increases your magic damage taken by 15%. She will also casts frost tomb on 1 random person in the raid. We would assign that person to be close to her head but far enough away from cleave range. Everyone would run behind it to drop their debuff before it got to high and we would swap tanks back and forth while we also dropped our debuffs. During this phase we would have a ton off issues. The first frost tomb would be in a good position but during the second frost tomb we would have multiple people getting frost tombed or frost tombs going down to quick for people to loose their buffs. Slowly we would just loose people during this phase and we got to a point where there were to many people down to complete the encounter. We'll head back into it this week and get her down.

They have released the patch notes for 3.3.3 as well as confirming a whole bunch of other mini patches before the release of cataclysm. Looks like we will have the Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.5 as well that promises some new loot and a bunch of trinkets to look forward to. We will also be taking back Gnomergon and thwarting off the Twilight Cult. With it as well tanking stats are changing a descent amount for Cataclysm. First defense is going to be completely removed and you will get uncrittable by going into "tank mode" such as putting up Righteous Fury. This will be good if you are ret/arms/dps dk and don't have a secondary spec but you have some gear for tanking. You can now enter an instance and do well enough to get you through a dungeon or heroic.

Also parry is getting a pretty interesting change. Instead of being a clone of dodge it will reduce the swings damage by 50% and the next one by 50% as well. Because there is no more defense we won't increase our miss, dodge, parry, or block by a small amount because of it. Usually once you get beyond 540 defense you would gain about 10% avoidance due to miss and dodge/parry. Blizzard wants to reduce avoidance across the board. Right now a good tank can have up to 60% avoidance. That is only 40% of the time where you actually take damage. To challenge us they have to make the boss hit extremely hard or add a magical component to the attack table. In cataclysm we'll probably be closer to 15-20% dodge and about 5% miss. We'll be parrying 50% of the damage and when we block we will mitigate 30% of the hit as well. So as a tank we will be constantly be getting hit but we'll be mitigating more damage instead of just avoiding it. This will allow healers breathing room and us as tanks to better gauge when to use cooldowns.

I'm liking a lot of what Blizzard has planned with Cataclysm. A stat that excites me is mastery. Every class/spec will gain something different with mastery. It will probably end up being 3 different thing s as well. With retribution it will probably be strength, crit, and possible reduced cooldown time. With protection it will probably be armor, dodge, and some form of damage reduction. So regardless of what you play it will always be good for you. Bosses wll also scale in different tiers. Probably the first tier of raiding you will need 5% hit to cap, and probably have a 3% crit suppression. When you get into the next tier it will probably be 8% hit cap and 5% crit suppression while the bosses get expertise so the tanks loose 2% dodge and parry. This makes gearing less about pure "power stats " and keeps you desiring more as you move on. While I am really enjoying IceCrown Citadel I want the next expansion. I want to see all the world changes and I love getting upgrades. I am sitting at mostly 264 gear right now so there won't be much upgrades coming in the next month. The idea of exploring new dungeons and gearing up for new raid content is exciting. How long do you think we will have to wait?