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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Some more talent changes

Synopsis
Latest PTR patchnotes include some more changes for feral druids.


  • Rend and Tear now increases the critical strike chance of your Ferocious Bite ability on bleeding targets by 5/10/15/20/25%. (Down from 10/20/30/40/50%)
  • Primal Tenacity now reduces fear effects duration and damage taken while stunned while in Cat Form only.
What does that mean? We can stack up to 75% crit now! The 1st soft cap at 50% for FB has gone up to 75%. The other soft cap for glancing blows (which as I understand it can not crit) is at 76.something%. They are closer together though I doubt any druid will ever get to that percentage this expansion. It seems more like a pvp nerf.
Also with dual speccing Rend and Tear in catform might not be worth it anymore. I don't have the time to do the math though, but we might look at spending those 5 talentpoints somewhere else (if there is such a place). Then again I suspect us being able to do a lot more FB during a bossfight then we do now with the new glyphs and the new 4t8 bonus. That would increase the value of Rend and Tear.

On a somewhat positive note, for PVE that is, there is no longer the odd choice to take 3 talent points in Primal Tenacity when tanking. Those few fights in which you could be stunned you won't be asked to respec and take those 3 talents (in case of progress raiding). It is now purely PVP.

Trees are relaxed

Synopsis
A movie I made a year ago or so. It is a dutch song, sorry for non-dutch people. Might feel inspired to make a movie on a english song one day.


So here ya go. Enjoy.

Monday, March 30, 2009

The art of money making

Synopsis
Making money is one of the most important things in WoW to be able to get you whatever you want. This is how I do it.


I don't want to buy money. Out of principle, because I think it is cheating, and because if you get caught Blizzard has all rights to close your account.

There was a time I didn't have much money. In TBC I started working the auctionhouse by means of enchanting. Buy greens cheap, and sell the disenchanted materials for a lot. This is still doable, but I am not selling those mats. I rather keep them and use em on enchants. I made about 1k a week doing that in TBC. But the market crashed a bit at the end. And others discovering that way of money making, meant I got more competition and I just didn't like it. Selling enchants will make you some money too, but it is not that much to be honest.

I then realized that the best way to make money is to not spend money on every day things. If you can stop spending money on food (IRL) you'd be able to afford a decent car at the end of the year!
So I dropped leatherworking and got myself herbalism. Herbalism + druid = win anyway. I never had to pay for flasks, elixirs or potions ever again. I already had fishing + cooking to the max so food was no problem either. Being an enchanter myself I had enough enchanting materials and could get the mats cheap from disenchanting. The only thing I had to buy were gems.

Then I got bored. I was resto and I leveled a warlock to do some pewpew. Never played her much and instead went feral with my druid and did way more damage then my lock. My lock had tailoring and mining. That made some money, but tailoring was boring (Lock is boring in general). Then when WotLK was announced and I knew herbalism's buff (2k hot) sucked completely for PVE (come on... I am a druid. If I need a hot I will heal myself, and if I am in combat, 2k over 12 secs on 30k health is sucky at best). So I would go for inscription, mostly because it was new and I wanted to see it and the buff would be good. The 7th glyph was changed to shoulder enchant, which is meh, but still ok.

So I dropped herbalism on my druid. Lock dropped tailoring and gained herbalism. Lock + herbalism is not as much win as druid + herbalism, but the thing is that it is the 2nd best option. With a Felguard and heavy Demonology spec you can land, dot the mob(s) and set your Felguard at it. With 2 or 3 dots and you can start Herbing without being interrupted while the mobs lowly dies. It is about the same as Beasmaster Hunter, but better. Then I also found out that herbing + mining is uber win! Made a macro to alternate tracking, bound it to a mousebutton and I am now solely flying on my minimap.

Now in WotLK I can fly around in Sholazar basin and in 1 hour grind (approximately):
  • 6 stacks of Adder's Tongue
  • 3 stacks of Goldclover
  • 3 stacks of Tiger Lily
  • 2 stacks of Deadnetle
  • 5 Frost Lotus
  • 6 Eternal Life
From mining I get about:
  • 7 stacks of Saronite ore
  • 4 stacks of Eternal Shadow
  • 4 stacks of Eternal Earth
  • a few Titanium
  • 1 rare quality gem
  • Some lesser gems and other Eternals
How much does it make? Well if you prospect all the ore, cut the gems, mill all the herbs and make em into Frost Oil, and sell the Eternals. You will make about 500 to 700 gold an hour (on my server). So fuck dailies. I did dailies pure for the rep (all maxed) and got the 1000 dailies done achievement. So only the cooking (and soon to be fishing daily) left. Also I do the one that can reward the polar bear mount untill I have it.
Do I level? Nope! My lock is lvl 78 and has been so for 2 whole days played and is only at 60% of the level it. Of course being fully rested and wearing the +10% xp shoulders.

Are there any other ways I make money? Sure. The Titanium I smelt. I send my miner 1 eternal fire and with the shadow and earth it makes Titansteel every day. Some life I send to one of my 2 transmute alchemists and make fire from it. The other one I have turn earth into air. Just as long as I need air to stock up.

I cut the gems myself with one of my alts (with whom I do the JC daily every day, and could sell the Dragon's Eye but I don't) and so the only thing I had to buy before I can do now too. There are a few other things I need other players for (making pots and elixirs/flasks) but in my guild we have enough masters so that is no problem.
Now In WotLk the things I was unable to make myself were an eternal belt buckle (so I leveled a DK in blacksmithing, though that costed like 4k gold). I have a skinner who can supply my girlfriends druid with the materials to make leg enchants. The only thing I buy now and then are Frozen orbs.

So as a summary, if you truly want to make money and make repair costs the only thing you have to spent money on... Get yourself some alts. My main and alts are:
  • 80 Druid: Enchanting + Inscription
  • 78 Warlock: Mining + Herbing
  • 71 Paladin: Alchemy (transmute master) + Jewelcrafting
  • 70 Hunter: Skinning + Engineering (totally wasted profession moneymaking wise, but fun)
  • 68 Deathknight: Alchemy (transmute master) + Blacksmithing
All got their skills to 440 or higher.
The only thing you need to invest is time.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

You are not prepaired...

Synopsis
Preparation for Ulduar non stop hardcore raiding.


So Ulduar is coming in a few weeks. We plan to be raiding whenever enough people are online to do so. No set times, just whenever possible. Subbing people in and out.
This means there is not much time to grind and prepare for a raid in between, unless you are frequently online during the day or late.
I am starting a new job (though part time) soon and I have other work beside that. So not many long nights ahead and playtime during the day is cut too.
So... I prepared myself:


This is my own bank-alt's guildbank btw.
Since the flasks are gonna change (2 flasks for the same mats, lasting only 1 hour) I haven't crafted them yet. I have been told you can change the old flasks for new ones once 3.1 hits, but still. I rather keep the ingredients ready.
A small 300 speed potions, about 130 armor potions and mats for 40 1h AP and 40 1h health flasks (filled the non-full stack of frost lotus to 20 at this point).
For food I have dumped materials in our guildbank to make 80 fish feasts. Next to that I fished 400 Dragonfin Angelfish. Took me 5.5 hours btw. Now I have 240 agility food ready and waiting (had 40 left) and I have some strength food too.
When I get new gear it will need gems and enchants. So instead of selling them I have a stack of about 10 to 14 of each kind of rare gem (uncut) lying around and if some nice craftable leather items drop (when they are not BoP), I have between 30 and 60 eternals of each kind too. I am an enchanter so my enchanting mats are plenty too. I got leg enchants lying around and enough frost oil for the inscriptions on shoulders (I am inscriber).

So yeah... I am prepared...

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Of Spice and men

Synopsis
Old spice is slower then baby spice.


Just something fun I found out...
Today while flying I thew some old spice on me. Then i went beck to flightform. A few seconds later I threw baby spice on me. Spices are slower then epic flight form so they could not catch up with me.
After 2 minutes of flying I landed. And about 15 seconds later baby spice caught up with me. Then it took a minute before old spice arrived.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

My UI and Addons

Synopsis
How I have configured my UI and what addons I use.


So here it is, my "long" awaited post on my UI and what addons I use. first of all if you are not using it yet, install the Curse Client. It is so easy to download and install it is unbelievable. All addons I use are available on curse.



First of all I am using a widescreen monitor. If you are not, get yourself one if funds allow it. The UI backgound picture I designed myself, see my previous post: The art of the UI. Here you can also read about the bars I use and why there are 18 buttons to the left. It has also info about macaroon (which you can now also download via Curse).

I marked nearly every addon with letter and they'll be listed below here. What I didn't mark is Fubar, of which I am using a bar to the top and 1 to the bottom. It holds a number of addons which for the most part are self explanatory. If you wonder what it is just ask!
One very important mod that is missing is Baggins. It automatically organizes all items and gear in the right place. It does the same for your bank. It allows you to create sections. I made a Tanking Section holding tanking gear (added by item id, which I can see using the addon iteminfo which is also not shown). I made sections for pvp gear, cat gear etc, etc... Really can't do without!

As for the numbered items (I suggest not to read all, just what you are interested in from looking at the screenshot):
  • A: Autobar. Configurable bar to hold consumables and other often used (preferably not in combat) which folds out. For instance the section Battle Elixirs folds out on mouseover to show you all battle elixirs you have.
  • B: Elkano's Buffbars. Better then the default icons blizzard gives you. Readable time left and readable names. It however when raiding gets really huge and in my case disappears behind grid. But I use that only to watch for buffs before I start a bossfight anyway. It has 3 default sections; buffs, weapon buffs and debuffs. I have placed my debuff list to the right of the buffs list. (At the time of the screenshot I have 0 debuffs). That way they are always in the same place (very usefull at Thaddius).
  • C: Cooldown monitor (I belive this is ora2?). It is not part of fubar, I just placed it there.
  • D:Deadly Boss Mods. In my opinion way better then BigWigs. Ecspecially Blue text in the center and for the sound effect at the moments you need to pay extra attention. Example: A sound played when polarity shifts at Thaddius, and the soundclip "Run away little girl, run away" at the moment a firewall comes on Sartharion. It jumps to the center of the screen at 10 seconds left.
  • E: Grid. I tried a lot of different raidframes but Grid, though not really pretty is the best imo. Ofcourse you need to add some grid addons. I use 3 different texts, devided each corner icon into 4 icons (as you can see on me, Mone, I have 2 of 4 icons active to he bottom left of my frame). It also shows mana/energy/rage/runic energy and I have raidicons active on it. It is mostly configured for healer still (together with Clique) but not that much needed for feral druids though. The big benefit of grid is that you can configure height and width of each frame yourself. And because it is so minimalistic it doesnlt loose space for vital information.
  • F: Archud. Nice headup display to see energy and combopoints (none were up at the moment of the screenshot, but it shows 1, 2,... 5 in big yellow numbers in the center).
  • G: TellMeWhen (see previous post Tell Me When).
  • H: Decursive. Not often used when you are feral though.
  • I: Main Tank Targets (part of Ora2)
  • J: AG_Unitframes. With some addons also shows castbar (though that is on archud too). It is easy configurable and clear. I don't show buffs or debuffs (only minimalsitic). What I do show are debuffs on target of target so I can keep track of debuffs on the MT to know when I need to taunt to start tanking.
  • K: Cowtip
  • L: Chinchilla. One of the minimap addons I like. I really dislike minimapicons and unless I forget to disable em only gatherer is active (to be able to easliy share nodes with others). I have no gethering skills on Monedula, but it still get the info from other guildies.
  • M: Space reserved for recount. Though recount made me crash a couple of times. At least I didn't crash as often with recount disabled. So it is empty for now.
  • N: Omen2 Threatmeter.
Forgot to mention I use prat to modify my chatframe, and I use OmniCC to display seconds on a cooldown.

That was pretty much it. Any questions, suggestion or compliments are always welcome.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Sartharion alternative positioning strategy

Synopsis
An alternative position to the more usual position for tanking Sarth.


Made as a somewhat more extensive reply to Karthis' Sarth 3d post. I feel this positioning strategy has a lot of good things and only 1 downside you should watch.
Simply put the MT stands in the lava bihind him while he is misdirected by a hunter. When Sartharion stops moving forward the MT goes to the little island to the right.

In the picture below you can see a schematic drawing of the area. The blueish area's represent the flame walls when you have to go to the middle hole. The yellow circle is Sartherion. The green circle is the MT.


There are 2 situations possible. Walls come from the right (east for this example), or the walls come from the (west for this example):
  • From the east: It is middle holes. The MT has a short time to react. But instead doesn't have to react at all! He is safe already!
  • From the west: The MT sees em coming a mile away since he is looking towards that spot already. So he has very much time to move north, let the walls pass.
So this is very easy for the MT.
There is an other major plus to this. And that is that when all drakes are down everyone can stand just above the yellow circle and melee/ranged dps. same possibilities on walls again:
  • From the east: It is middle hole. The whole raid sees this coming and are positioned on the totally other side as whre the wall is coming from. There is enough time to adjust.
  • From the wast: Everybody is already positioned perfectly. Just keep standing there and dpssing as if there was no wall.
The only thing you should so is spread the healers over the 2 possible holes so at all times there are healers that do not need to move. Not that this phase is the most difficult one, but why risk it?

There is only one downside. The place where vesperon lands is a tricky spot. If you move too far towards Sartherion he will oneshot the tank and/or all melee. So this is something the Vesperon tank should be aware of. After picking him up move towards the side hole and then towards the center again (making sure not so go too far south, just south of the opening for the middle hole is best). Now Vesperon points towards the north/north-west. Melee will never get hit by Sartharions breath.

PS on picking up Tenebron. There is a safe spot in the absolute north (just don't stand in the lava, or hit the lava if you must). Make sure you get a misdirect, and when it is middle hole just stand still, no wall will hit you. If it is sideholes hit him and run to the south as fast as possible. Never failed to run towards that gap myself.

Blogsourcing: Malygos DPS

Synopsis
I am asking you to take a look at my malygos tries and tell me what I did wrong or if druid dps at the moment really sucks.


So we did Malygos 6 minute tries tonight. Now you must know as soon as we knew it was fail we stopped, well at least didn't do the last phase. Last try we were able to get him to 50% before he went in the air the 2nd time. We failed in phase 3 though. I got 2 beams and a cloud I didn't notice soon enough and I died way too early. 6:30 was the time we used.

A couple of things. I was the only feral druid (meaning I had to mangle). I tanked in phase 2... and I am melee. The dps buff things were not placed optimal a lot of times for melee. You can see rogues struggling too. And we can't dps when he is in the air. Well not optimal anyway.

So I am gonna leave this to people who can compare to their own experiences. I am a lonely druid in my guild. One joined us recently but wasn't on this fight. How did I do? Outsourcing on my blog.. blogsourcing. I hope you people can help me.

Some other information. I was in full cat spec and full cat gear. Only switched my main hand when I was tanking in phase 2.

Numbers say more then gear. So Rawr tells me that my unbuffed damage with my current gear should be doing 2963 dps. If you want to check my gear you might be able to see my gear on my armory profile (see left for link) but I am often in tank spec and in tanking gear.

WWS Link

Would love to hear you tell me where I suck! ;)

Friday, March 20, 2009

Immortal not far away - a fail story

Synopsis
We tried an immortal run this week. We didn't get it but it was not far away.


We tried to casually do an immortal run. It was our first serious try. We didn't expect to be able to do it. But we would try our best at least.

We started out on Razuvious and there was some interruption of the MC which killed someone. That meant full reset. Run out, reform the raid with a new leader and go back in. Try him again. Downside, you have to clear all trash again. This time fill military quarter went without death.
The construction quarter was next. At Thaddius we used to have lost of disconnect at times. Now one of our more stable raiders (who disconnects seldom), which is nearly everyone really, now disconnected. So we quickly adjusted and moved to the sides. This unfortunately coincided with a polarity shift. While I am using DBM that gave me a huge warning, stopped running to the sides and crossed over diagonally... some others didn't I think. They realized too late their polarity had shifted and they died. The disconnecting hunter survived the whole fight...
We went on and because of kidding around some people died. For instance on Noth I saw a mage had agro (living bomb) and he did not get into the paladin's consecration. If I would have been in bearform (which I would have been was it still immortal, take no risks!) I could have taunted earlier and he would not have died.

The only thing that went wrong further on was a rogue dying on KT, but that might have been because the focus was low.

Anyway, next week a new try. We are also trying to do malygos under 6 minutes. If those 2 succeed I only need 20 man naxx and to die on sarth 25 (like in ont of my previous posts) to get the heroic raiding drake.

I wonder how many weeks are left before the patch. I hope at least some. I like mounts!

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The art of the UI

Synopsis
How to make your own user interface look like something completely different by using eepanels.


This is not the expected post about the different addons I am using. This post is about one of them, name eepanels.

Basically eepanels adds square pictures (tga files) to your interface. For some parts of the file the seethrough has been set to 100% so you just see the normal game.

The first interface I did with this:

I thought it would be fun to have gaps in my UI. Well I can advice you, don't! The text is often unreadable. A unicolor background (dark) is best. For this design I took a picture of lightning, added some effects in photoshop and cut it out.
Note I was resto at that point.

The second design.

I got myself a logitech G11 keyboard. If you ever need a new keyboard. Get one of those as well! (Link to logitech). That resulted in me wanting to have a visual representation of the 18 extra keys to the left. So I did that. I used some screenshots I made for this. Me in breaform and a huge barely visable closeup of flightform in the center. Didn't really like the colors and I wanted to use redesign my UI with having myself and my target in the center to the bottom. So I made a frotsmourne/WotLK themed UI as you can see below.

This is the first version. I edited it all a little bit later, like the chat font. For this I drew the stalactites with my bamboo and added some shade effect to them. The snow is also some photoshop effects layers thing.

At this point I found myself wanting more buttons. I was short on bars (2 bars for caster form, 2 for bear and 2 for cat) leaves you with only 4 more bars to use. Since I wanted 3 different sets of buttons to the right it required stance bar, and 2 extra bars. I had button paging (ctr) on the center bottom left bar. So that was my last bar.
I really wanted to use my F1 to F12 buttons to set general (also not often used) spells in. I dont use F1 to F12 for anything so why not utilize that?

by that time I was pointed at Macaroon. It is a great, or rather was. The thing it does, it allows you to make a large number of bars having x columns and y rows, or even in circle form (around a round map for instance. You can drag icons in it and instead of a real button it creates a macro, but it works exactly like a button even with keybinding. You have to look at how to use it because instead of a macro the button can also represent an original button. Anyway with some tinkering you will find it out.
This lead to the following UI initially. Every button was macaroon.

The design isn't that great, I just didnt feel like investing a lot of time in it.
However, don't use macaroon for everything. If you jump on a vehicle macaroon will stick there. You won;t be able to use the vehicle. So the main bar(s) 1-12 (in my case "1-6/alt1 - alt6"-bar and the "7-=/alt7 - alt="-bars). should still be bartender.
The rest can be macaroon, no problem... wait yes problem.
When I want from 3.0.2 to 3.0.8 it crashed. Aparently I had to backup something in the WTF folder before installing. To repair it i had to edit the addon;s code but it was way to irritating to me. Not that I am too stupid, I just thought this was bloody idiotic. So instead of trying to repair I hoped for a new version. I eventually gave up. In 3.1 I might try and install it again. Hopefully it works.
So I replaced all with normal barender again which lead to the current UI as seenbelow.

Now you might be wanting to use eepanels yourself but have no idea how to do that. Here is a manual I used. Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Ulduar testing - General Vezax

Synopsis
Ulduar is fun!


2 days ago I went to Ulduar on PTR to test General Vezax. Finally there was hard trash!
It was really fun to do a boss/trash of which you know virtually nothing.

First of all there are no glyphs in PTR testing. They disappear when you zone. So there was no glyph of maul. If you have that glyph (and you should, there is a good chance you are tanking 2 mobs, like I did), you need to make sure you don't hit a cc-ed target. Yes you hear it. You need to cc trash!

In the rest of the post you will find some description of the fight, a bit on tactics and how druids are good with that. Also at the end there is some remark of awesome druid dps.

The trash before the boss consists of 4 packs. They are all level 82 (heroic 5-man boss level). The pack consists of about 9 or 10 mobs. You have to work with corner pulls and MD to tanks so the mobs will come closer before you attack. You need 2 tanks minimum, but with the great thing called dual spec you can have a couple of melee dps convert to tank for the trash if you want. You'll need to cc 4 or 5 mobs. Some mobs fear, others stun. Fear will wipe you if you run into a second group.
So tactics is back. Now we are finally getting a buff to swipe we might not even want it because you have to be away from cc-ed mobs instead of standing with your ass to them.

After killing 2 of the 4 groups (in our case the 1st and 3rd group) a sort of miniboss (hard mob) is set loose. It will patrol and you will agro it. You need to pick it up and tank. It will shoot out some kind or shadow thing which you can easily walk away from if you watch for it. At 25% intervals there will be an add spawning and the boss will become immune untill the add is down.

We did the trash with 3 tanks, me being one of them, tanking 2 melee adds. I felt safer using cooldowns on them once in a while. That is how hard they are. I have no real testing information on the tanking though.

I didn't get too much info on the boss. After 5 tries Ulduar shut down. Some things I know of, the boss itself hits very hard and there is no mana regen for mana users. Max int gear is needed. You need to stand in green stuff to regen mana, but for each mana regenerated you loose life. So melee; never go into it! The boss needs to be kited. I myself am thinking of a tactic where the MT healers are constantly in the green shit and a couple of raidhealers that heal the healers and rest of the raid.

A few more tips:
  1. Everyone should be down from the platforms when you enter the room. If not the raid gets massive damage.
  2. When you wipe on the patrolling add, stay away from the edge of the platform. It will deathgrip people from the platform and kill them instantly.
As far as cat dps goes (I dpssed on the boss) it is HUGE. My dps was always on top or near (only to be passed by some elemental shaman that had a 50% dps buff). Even when I totally screwed up my rotation I was at nr 5. The damage done varied. Once the MT dies (moving healers forgetting to heal the tank... you can't always count on the best healers when pugging on PTR) the boss will pick up the raid one by one and oneshotting them.
Also I finally had some other (decent/good geared) cats with me in the raid. I did more dps then they did, so that is some sort of confirmation that I don't totally suck on dps.

Found out that TellMeWhen is a bit bugged on PTR (I think). Whenever my Rake was finished, I then saw it up again with 2 seconds left or so, which was probably the rake cast by someone else. That was very confusing making me not as efficient in dps as I could be. Also a note for self; don't change the setup of TellMeWhen on PTR compared to live. It confuses!

Monday, March 16, 2009

Keylogger warning

Synosis
Offtipoc, keylogger warning. Watch out for the newest tactic by account hackers. Don't use a link you might get in the mail by a guildy.


Our guild today was targeted by an account hacker. We're not stupid (at least no idea if anyone in our guild has been stupid... yet.)

What happened: We have a random person in our guild with an "i" in the name. For instance "Hillary". Well someone created a character name "Híllary". As you see the i looks very similar but is not the same. He then in game mailed a lot (if not all)of our guildmembers the following messgage:

"Hey my brothers

This is a publicity video about our guild, everyone can go watch it.
And give me some advice!

www.badurl.com/video.exe

thanks"

The urls has been changed. But the exe file is a keylogger. Clicking this means you loose everything that is in your bank and all good items out of your guildvault. Ye be warned!

On the same topic, I know a of a different tactic that was used in previous games. It goes like this.
A hacker pretends he is a girl and talks to someone and flirts with him. Then he send some pictures via msn or mail. Pictures of a "hot" girl. Then one of the pictures doesn't work and seems broken. That picture is in fact a trojan to be made to look like a picture. Then the hacker crashes the players game, which forces him to log in again and the hacker knows username and password now. He crashes the game again and now quickly changes the password. Then logs in as the player, gets all the loot he wants and trades that to a friend who is waiting at some spot. Then logs out.
Ofcourse it is wrong, but the beauty of it is that after logging out the password is changed back to the old password. This is sarcasm or whatever it is called in the highest form. That part made me kinda lol ;)

Will the real Twilight Opal please stand up...

Synopsis
The Shifting Twilight Opal will be available in 3.1


MMO-Champion
Blue sockets for bear usually hold stamina, for cats you can often find a green stamina & hit or crit gem. But what if you have too much stamina already as bear, or are already hitcapped for cat?
Bears you were "forced" to take 8 dodge rating & stamina and cats usually have 8 str + stamina. The thing we really want there is agility (at lest for cat in 3.1.) I think it is even more frustrating for rogues. Agility and stamina gem was there on wowhead and in rawr and that was frustrating since there is no recipe for it yet.
In 3.1 there is! Shifting Twilight Opal can be purchased for only 3 daily tokens. So if you are a JC, have some purple gems on the side and 3 tokens ready. Sell them for a lot on the AH!

Saturday, March 14, 2009

PTR news: Swipe roundhouse kick

Synopsis
On the previous posts I discussed Swipe. Some new news is out on that.


Quick update: Swipe (bear) now goes 360 degrees. There is a bug that its range is reduced and it no longer chains to targets up to 10 yards away. If it indeed is a bug, once fixed swipe has become in my opinion the best aoe tanking ability of all tanks. We'll get other classes complaining about that!

[edit]
The rage of swipe will be 8 yards. So similar to other tanking aoe effects.
[/edit]

Recap on blizzard brain malfunction.

Synopsis
My thoughts on PTR proposed nerfs. Or rather... why Blizzard doesn't know what it is doing.


This is a little bit old, but still valid I think. It happened before I had my blog and posted it in other places. So here it is.

Most of you know Ghostcrawler. I am talking about the Blizzard Blue poster. I always liked him and his insights on druid mechanics and his affords to do whatever they did in the past. It has only come to me recently that the poor chap obviously has no brain or is either telling flat out lies: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15443285411&pageNo=12#228

The post he did was on the stamina nerf druids are getting in PTR.
Quote:
"In order to keep our goal of having all 4 tank classes capable of handling Ulduar, we need to get tank health pools a little closer together.

While I won't hide that this is a nerf for bears, we also don't want to get to the point of having a "mana sponge" tank, now that we are making mana more of an issue for healers.

If druids slip behind as a result of lack of mitigation, avoidance or cooldowns, we will buff them."

I can understand their goal to make us all have about equal health so not one class is preferred over any other for tanking. Having a lot of health to compensate for the fewer mitigation of druids will indeed lead to mana sponging. The thing that makes me angry is the part where a flat out stamina nerf without anything in return is considered to make druid tanks easier on the healers. If anything we will now require a lot more healing (and mana).
  1. Take 2 tanks. Both druid, both have 40% dodge and 30k armor. One has 45k health, the other has 35k health. Since the one with 35k health is closer to death you will have to heal him harder to make sure spike damage will not kill him. That means more overhealing. So less health is more mana needed, thus lowering stamina will make us require more healer mana.
  2. Druids that have the Essence of Gossamer, like me, will see that once they are fully raidbuffed, the stamina boost has lost a lot of its value. Rawr shows unbuffed it is the nr2 trinket, while fully buffed it has dropped to the 4th place. The Valor Medal of the First War is way more valuable. Now we will see a stamina nerf making all items that have stamina on them have more value. Also coinciding with an armor nerf we will see items that have armor on them becoming a lot more worth in value too. This means more stamina and armor items then agility/dodge items. So we get hit a lot more because this is indirectly a dodge nerf. More hits is more healing required. More healing required means a more healer mana consumed.
As said I don't really disagree with the stamina nerf but Ghostcrawler let me down big time. Treating us druids like little kids by giving a bullshit reason. He seriously offended me.
Instead he should have said they think we are currently OP. That could be debated and would have been a valid reason. Don't tell me to a nerf is good for the healers.

Sorry about the nagging ;)

Friday, March 13, 2009

New PTR Patch

Synopsis
New things on the PTR's latest patch; t8 bonus calculations and enchant.
Warning if you are weak on math, don't break your head over this, just assume the numbers are true!


As posted by Karthis there is a new PTR patch available at the moment (mmo champion)

Before joining in on the tier 8 bonus I'd like to make 2 remarks on other things in the patch.
  • Faerie Fire (Feral) now deals [15% of AP + 1] damage. (Up from [5% of AP + 1])
So instead of about 250 damage it will do 3 times the damage =~ 750. No idea why this is done. I don't know the other tanking classes that well, but I don't think other tanks have something similar to begin with. The only explanation I can give to this increase is that now there is a smaller chance healer agro will overagro you thus giving you an extra "taunt-like" thingy to grab early agro on mobs. It will probably make swipe and positioning a bit easier but it is by far an answer to a 360 degree agro thing.
  • Enchant Weapon - Blood Draining *New* - Permanently enchants your weapon to sometimes grant Blood Reserve when striking an enemy or inflicting damage with bleed attacks. When you fall below 35% health, Blood Reserve restores 1750 to 2250 health. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.
Finally there will be a choice for feral tanks in the enchant on their weapon. The 75 stamina thing was shot down and left us with mongoose only (or the 35 agi one if you preferred that). Is this weapon enchant better? Hard to say. Are tanks much under 35% health? On some bosses yes, often. On others... you better find yourself some better healers! So initially looking great it is a bit of a downer if you look at it closer.
However, depending on the exact workings of this enchant it could be really good when you have 2 weapons!
Start of the fight you equip the Blood Draining (BD) and you get the buff. Once you have it press a macro and switch to the Mongoose Weapon. As soon as the buff is gone (this can either be that you dropped below 35% or the buff timer is done) re-equip BD again till you have to buff.
2 ways this would not work, would maybe work, but would be too much of a hassle to do.
  1. The buff is removed when you have no weapon with BD equipped.
  2. The buff only lasts a couple of seconds (10 or so). This would mean too much switching.
It also all depends on the proc chance of BD. I will do some testing on it on PTR (whenever I have the time) and also do a dps test which I promised a couple of posts ago.
On a side note, I am also still unable to research new glyphs. I now even get a message I have no target (probably a placeholder message to not waste research materials when you research while nothing is available).

So, now to the tier 8 bonus sets as they are currently (everything can change on PTR) available.
  • 2t8: The periodic damage dealt by your Rake, Rip, and Lacerate abilities has a chance to cause you to enter a Clearcasting state.
  • 4t8: Increases the duration of Savage Roar and Survival Instinct by 8 sec.
For bear this means nothing. Our set bonusses on 2t7 were not that super, these are neither. 2t8 gives more threat as 2t7 did and 4t8 will increase our survivability by a minimum margin. The 4t7 was better, not much, but as bear you will most likely equip the t8 items anyway. More armor, more stamina, more agility, more everything.

Now Cat get a huge boost from the 2t8 bonus. No question about that. The real thing we have to look at here is: does 4t8 outweigh 2t7 buff.

With the new shred glyph Rip would last 22 seconds instead of 26. It has to be up at 5CP always (preferably). 100% uptime means no loss in DPS, it only means that you have 4 seconds less to gather 5 CP to renew Rip.
As can be seen from the calculations below (**) you can see to need 5 CP you need an average of 3.5625 CP generating abilitities. I take an average of energy needed for one ability of 40 (some are a bit above, others are below).

Thus to do Rip you need 3.6525 * 40 + 30 (Rip itself) = 172.5 energy.
Loosing 4 seconds on Rip we would need now 172.5 * (26/22) = 203.86 energy to keep Rip up the same time.
That is an energy loss per second of (203.86 - 172.5) / 26 = 1.21 energy lost per second.

Now the 4t8 bonus would give 8 seconds on SR. At the moment most people use a 4 CP SR (see below *) rotation. A 1 CP SR rotation would last to short to safely do a Rip. With the 8 seconds longer SR I'll take a look at both.

A few things up front: (wee below **).
The average CP generating abilities needed to do 1 CP SR = 1. With a proc chance of 50% it will eaither be 1 CP SR or 2 CP SR. It will thus last an average time of (0.5 * 14 + 0.5 * 19 =) 16.5 seconds (not counting 4t8).
The average CP generating abilities needed todo 4 CP SP = 2.875. With a proc chance of 50% it will be either 4 CP SR (68.75%) or 5 CP SR (31.25%). It will thus last an average of time of (0.6875 * 29 + 0.3125 * 34 =) 30.56 seconds (not counting 4t8).

Using no 4t8, below we see that 1 CP SR is more energy efficient then 4 CP SR.
1 CP SR = 16.5 sec / (40 * 1 + 25 energy) = 16.5/65 = 0.254 sec uptime per energy.
4 CP SR = 30.56 sec / (40 * 2.875 + 25 energy) = 30.56 / 140 = 0.218 sec uptime per energy.
The ratio is 0.254 / 0.218 = 1.164 = 16.4% more efficient.
However as said 1 CP Sr can't be used reliably.

Using new 4t8 we can add 8 seconds to the duration.
1 CP SR = 16.5 + 8 sec / 65 energy 24.5/65 = 0.377 sec uptime per energy.
4 CP SR = 30.56 + 8 sec / 140 energy = 38.56 / 140 = 0.275 sec uptime per energy.
The ratio is 0.377 / 0.275 = 1.369 = 36.9% more efficient.

Now not having unreliable 1 CP SR uptime and a efficientce of nearly 37% vs 4 CP SR you would be stupid not stay using 4 CP SR.

But now what does that mean for engergy save vs the energy lost.

4 CP SR costs 140 energy (see above). 4t8 gives a 38.56 sec duration vs 30.56 duration.
Without 4t8 it would cost 140 / 30.56 = 4.58 energy per second.
With 4t8 it would cost 140 / 38.56 = 3.63 energy per second.
4.58 - 3.63 = 0.95 energy per second gain.
This does not weigh up to the 1.21 energy per second lost on rip.

Since we are gonna use 1 CP SR let's see how that does;
Without 4t8 it would cost 65 / 16.5 = 3.94 energy per second.
With 4t8 it would cost 65 / 24.5 = 2.65 energy per second.
3.94 - 2.65 = 1.28 energy per second gain.
This does weigh up to the 1.21 energy per second lost on rip.

So this proves the 4t8 bonus next to the better stats is already better for people who were using (for me) unreliable 1 CP SR.
But if you were using 4 CP SR the bonus is huge!
4.58 - 2.65 = 1.93 energy per second gain.
This completely obliterates the 1.21 energy per second lost on rip.

In conclusion this makes me say definitely go for 4t8! It makes the rotation so much easier ( I suspect it does, it will be months before it is thoroughly tested) and more energy efficient!

Any input on this is welcome.



* Why 4 CP and not 5? If you go for a 5CP SR you have the chance of critting while you are at 4 CP. Meaning it is a wasted crit! You only get 1 CP anyway. Therefore when you are at 4 CP, use SR, don't go for a 5th. If you are at 3 and you crit you might be at 5 CP anyway, but at least you did not waste a crit!

** The ways to get to 4 CP are:
Situation => Chance on situation => Sum of moves

Hit + hit + hit + (hit/crit) => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 4
Hit + hit + crit => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 3
Hit + crit + (hit/crit) => (50%^2) = 25% => 3
Crit + hit + (hit/crit) => (50%^2) = 25% => 3
Crit + crit => (50%^2) = 25% => 2
Sum percentages = 100%

Average finishing moves needed = 2.875
Percentage of 5 combopoints: (12.5% + 25% + 25%) / 2 = 31.25%

The ways to get to 5 CP are:
Situation => Chance on situation => Sum of moves

Hit + hit + hit + hit + (hit/crit) => (50%^4) = 6.25% => 5
Hit + hit + hit + crit => (50%^4) = 6.25% => 4
Hit + hit + crit + (hit/crit) => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 4
Hit + crit + hit + (hit/crit) => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 4
Crit + hit + hit + (hit/crit) => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 4
Crit + hit + crit => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 3
Hit + crit + crit => (50%^3) = 12.5% => 3
Crit + crit + (hit/crit) => (50%^2) = 25% => 3
Sum percentages = 100%

Average finishing moves needed = 3.5625

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Achievement-whorism

Synopsis
Monedula the achievement-whore...


First of all welcome to all the new people viewing my blog. I hope you like it and stick around. Thanks to Karthis for that referral.

So achievements. before 3.0 they were there already. At least for me to keep things interesting. A few achievements I went for in TBC;
  • Killing a lot of bosses
  • Getting a full feral set (next to my resto set)
  • Getting all enchants available
  • Leveling alts to become fully self sufficient (not needing to buy anything from AH).
  • ...and a few more
Never fully completed those self made achievements. I am still missing a few TBC enchants for instance and never gotten further then T4 in feral gear.

Now there often are rewards for achievements and the DING: "you completed the achievement" is nice. It however made me into an achievement-whore. Since armory tracks your achievements is possible to read the information and use that to compare achievements to other players. There are a couple of sites like this, I am sure. I don't know them though, but I do know this site: Achievements Database, which tracks all information for my Realm, Defias Brotherhood.
It is run by the nr1 guild on my server, Revelations, an allied guild, and it is maintained by the biggest achievement-whore on the server, Slidor, nr 1 on the list with a total (at the moment) of 7,325 achievement points. Of course he is in Revelations and I must say that helps a lot.
I myself can currently be found at place 59 with 5,805 points.

The fun thing about this site is that you can see if you were first to complete something or maybe within the first 50, which is still an awesome achievement if your server has 5000 registered characters. It also shows how far you are on achievements. For example, I was nr 6 on the server to do every achievement in the quest section. It is an epeen enlarger, an ego booster and something fun besides the game itself. It is there to fight boredom.

If you ever wonder why newer games are not as popular as WoW and seem to fail, it is because Blizzard is awesome in making us into addicts. Achievements are like drugs. I am not a crack-whore, I'm an achievement-whore. And I am proud of it! ;)

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Roundhouse kick

Synopsis
There are possibly going to be some changes to swipe.


3.1 content is far from being complete. Lots of loot has been seen in Ulduar that are simple placeholders (see Karthis' most recent post) for which yet has to be figured out what the stats should be.

According to a recent blue post they want to take a new look at swipe. Rather then making it a test of skill to be positioned right to swipe them all they want to make it a bit easier which should improve aoe tanking. There will be some form of 360 degrees aoe that builds a lot more threat then Demoralizing Roar

I think swipe will still be the main aoe ability, the thing they are looking at, I think, is something to grab initial agro, after which you can walk a bit back making them all face you from one side.
There are, lorewise, 2 ways that can be done, imo. Some roar or some physical thing, rather then something magical which is not something feral druids do. What I would really like to see, as I said before, is a roundhouse kick/roundhouse swipe, for comical purposes referred to as a "Chucky Swipe" or something!. The druid turns around it's own axis in 0.5 sec or something and swipes all around him.

It would look awesome, but that would require a new animation where as a new shout would just be one of the the same animations already in game. For 3.1 that is possibly too short time so I am afraid it'll be a shout, if it is implemented in 3.1 at all.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Achievement fun

Synopsis
Achievements are stupid, or rather "It is not a bug, it's a feature"!


I skipped a day of posting on the blog. Maybe better not to flood stuff and maybe also better to do some other stuff the always posting. Anyway the reason was that I have gotten old (it was my 30th birthday Sunday).

Anyway since we killed Sarth 3D it is a nice chance to get a pretty dragon (Glory of the raider). Since we are probably never gonna do immortal, aiming for that dragon on normal is the best thing to go for. Especially because the dragons are going to be removed as rewards after 3.1.

Being a bit unlucky on an undying run, but knowing undying is going to be really doable, I had 4 achievements left. Malygos in under 6 minutes is the only really hard one left and the Grand Widow Faerlina achievement was one of the others.

The last two I wanted to kill 2 birds with 8 stones. Sarth 8 man and Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows.
Avoiding those lava strikes is pure luck and nothing you should ever focus on in a raid. If you die from the first lava wall (you are a noob) you will not get any of them. So the achievement is said to be a reward for sucking. Today we proved it is not always a "bug", it is a feature! To get enough people to have that achievement you need to let them die in the start, in the process making the Sartharion fight a lot more fun.

We had me and 2 others dying in the beginning and we were also doing 8-man. So we had 5 people left alive to kill Sartharion. A paladin alt tanked the boss and he once got to 6k health, that was the minimum. Our healer paladin had 20+ blazes on him at the end while the rest was trying to get the boss down (only 3 dps vs 6 makes that last part last loooong).

Anyway here is a screenshot to prove it. And again, the 3 dead guys were intended!


PS You can see my interface here. I'll make a post on that later, but if you have any questions now, just ask em.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Frost Resistance

Synopsis
Even though druids are getting nerfs they might be favored in certain fights in Ulduar.


Judging from what I have heard form guildmates, Ulduar has bosses where you either need huge armor or huge (frost) resistance. The polar set is something that a lot of druids already have (+ ring). They have max frost resistance and more importantly they are already defense capped. With current gear it might be impossible or otherwise very difficult for other plate wearers to wear the full plate frost resistance set and be defense capped. Instead of only equipping 3 or 4 frost resistance items (and thus nerfning other stats) they also have to equip a couple of defense items nerfing them more on those fights then druids.
With new Ulduar gear that might be more attainable but this is good news for druid tanks. We are complaining about being nerfed, but SD shield should weigh up to the armor loss and is a lot better versus magic then melee, making us better on magic fights (ehrm... I was wrong, read edit). And since there is no problem for druids to wear the full frost resistance set druids might be very much favored for progress raiding.
The fear druids had to be never ever be picked as MT is canceled out since we seem to be the preferred tank on any frost damage fight (for now). For progress raiding we look to become necessary rather then a nuisance.

This is a bit strange if you look at blizzards ultimate goal to make all tanks equal. But I think it might be that blizzard has realized that since each tank kind has a different way of tanking those tiny small changes will be utilized to the max in progress raiding. So as long as we have some difference versus other tanks there will be fights where druids are preferred.

[edit]
See comments. The SD shield is only physical so that sucks ;)
[/edit]

Friday, March 6, 2009

Tell Me When

Synopsis
For cat DPS I use the addon TellMeWhen to have a good visual of buffs and debuffs. This is on how to set it up and my experiences with it.


When I started this blog a few days ago I had a lot of thoughts about what I could write here. Karthis and I seem to inspire each other. He made a post on his user layout which I also had in mind. Since he is on that subject I'll add to that and tell you what I find so great about the addon TellMeWhen. Btw, credits on this go to a poster on Elitist Jerks who first introduced me to TellMeWhen.

First of all a screenshot.


This is the setup screen. Don't mind the things in the bottom. They are part of my own fully customised UI. The only thing important is what is above my unitframe Orange bar Monedula, which is if you must know ag_unitframes mod. It is pretty much in the center, maybe a bit too much in the center for some, but at least it is obviously there and can't be missed.
First of all it is made up out of 4 different bars. In the standard game inteface > addons > TellMeWhen you can set those up. Either enable or disable them, how many columns they have and how many rows. You can easily resize them (right bottom corner) to make them bigger or smaller.
For each button you can set the following:
  • The name of the spell. Note: It must be the full name (i.e. Mangle - Cat, not just mangle)
  • The type of the Icon. I only use cooldown or buff/debuff.
For buff/debuff (which is the most used option) you then can set whether it is a buff or a debuff, on you or on your target, you want to show it when it is active or not active, whether you want to see a cooldown timer, and last, most importantly, whether it should be shown when it is the debuff you applied or a debuff applied by whomever.

I myself have it setup as follows:
4 bars:

3 columns:
  • Tiger's Fury (cooldown: show if ready)
  • Berserk (cooldown: show if ready)
  • Lacerate (debuff on target, for when I tank. It shows stacks also + clock timer)
2 columns:
  • Clearcasting (buff active on me + clock timer). This one is huge, I don't want to miss it
  • Twilight Torment (debuff active on me). Also huge, I don't want to hit and stress healers unless necessary on the sarth 3d fight.
5 columns:
  • Savage Roar (buff active on me + clock timer)
  • Rake (debuff active on target + clock timer)
  • Rip (debuff on target + clock timer)
  • Faerie Fire (Feral) (debuff on target + clock timer, done by anyone)
  • Faerie Fire (debuff on target + clock, done by anyone)
3 icons:
  • Trauma (debuff on target, done by anyone)
  • Mangle - Cat (debuff on target + clock timer, done by anyone)
  • Mangle - Bear (debuff on target + clock timer, done by anyone)
Positive things:
You can track other peoples debuffs on target so you don't need to apply them (Mangle).
You can add any debuff you got so you can be carefull if needed.
Compared to a bar system each icon has its own place. If an icon is missing you know which one it is!
Important icons can be HUGE!

In action it would look like this:

You can see the clock timers active on the icons (for instance Savage Roar here is a 14 second buff that has 13 seconds left till it is gone). I also installed OmniCC which displays the seconds. In PTR this will become really important if you have TellMeWhen. Why I will explain later.
To continue, here you can see both Tigers Fury and Berserk are ready and I have all my debuffs active on the target. A huge Clearcasting proc int he middle (kinda over my character, but that is ok, I don't want to miss my free shred!)
As you can (not) see, there is no lacerate (to the right of berserk) active ont he target. Something that is not active will not be shown.

One more thing, some spells (as can be seen int he first screenshot) are depicted by a watch. This is a default Icon for when the icon is not available (yet). For instance Faerie Fire (Feral) is a spell you don't have in normal form and is not available. Also TellMeWhen does not know what Clearcasting looks like. However after combat it does know these things and when going back to the configuration display you will see those spells have the correct icon now.

One last thing I promised on why OmniCC will become important.

The new Glyph of Shred in PTR will add 2 seconds to mangle every time you do shred (max 3 times). So max 26 seconds. Currently if you are not using OmniCC you will see a clock timer on Rip that will have made a complete circle in 20 seconds. When you look at the buff and see it is half way you know it will take 10 seconds before it is finished.
Now the way Shred increasing Rip is implemented on PTR is this.
You do Rip. Rip lasts 20 seconds:
  • Rip debuff 20 seconds, time left 20 seconds.
When you then shred at 8 seconds rather then doing the following:
  • Rip debuff 22 seconds, time left 10 seconds. <- this is not the way it works!
The implementation is as follows:
  • Rip debuff 10 seconds, time left 10 seconds.
If you were to use a clock timer only the clock timer cooldown would be reset to 0 and now go at double speed. The clock timer half way done means 5 seconds left! So without OmniCC telling you exactly how many seconds are left it will be very hard to keep track of Rip duration.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Swipe swoop - another epic story

Synopsys
Swipe might be OP... Ya think?


This will be a bit more shorter then my last story. More of a joke with a great punchline.
Last night we did Naxx 25 again. As boring as it is on the spider wing our DK tank wanted to make it a... bit... more exiting. In Grand Widow Faerlinas room the trash consists of 4 or 5 packs of 10 caster trash and a pack of about 15 small spider. So he pulled them all!
I was fully cat on this run and I had planned on swiping these mobs. I must say I was lucky I was one of the last to die (how I managed to live that long, I have no idea). Anyway I had SR up the whole time (gotten myself a 34 sec buff on a big spider before that) but I did not use Berserk which would have meant even more dps.

On that trash on damage done I (Monedula) am just a bit over our DK tank, but just look at the DPS.



17k DPS. So swipe might be a wee bit OP!

Unimplemented PTR stuff

Synopsys
New Glyphs are not yet implemented on PTR.


I just logged in into PTR and did a glyph research. I discovered nothing. Since that is also for live it means I have all glyphs that are currently in the game. Meaning the new glyphs that should be in 3.1 are not there yet, which we already knew for SD. So it is not possible to test the new SR glyph and we still don't know if the multiplier is:
   Damage * 1.36
OR
   Damage * 1.3 * 1.06 = Damage * 1.378

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

First view of emblem loot

Synopsys
There are some new PTR emblem items that would easy be best in slot for any feral druid and the blizzard policy of introducing new emblems with increasing raid difficulty.


With Ulduar there are going to be new emblems called Emblem of Conquest. I really like this. No more TBC affairs where you could buy items better then Tier 5 while farming for badges in Heroics and Karazhan. If you don't progress further then current 10 mans or heroics you will be stuck at emblem of heroism items. This way you will get recognition for raiding on a high level rather then seeing someone in blues with the same belt as you.

The items as they are now on PTR seem to be better then any item for the same slot that is in the game now. They have a lot of agility and a lot of stamina. They are 100% rogue but have no armor penetration which for druids is as far as I know the worst stat. [edit] This is goes for tanks only. From a multiple usability perspective they have no wasted stats for neither cat nor tank. [/edit] There is hit, expertise, haste and crit which, with the likely introduction of SD will be valuable for catform and bearform. Because of the leg enchant you probably need different pants for tanking and dps, but you can gem them with agility which is already the stat for tanking and will become a lot more valuable for cat dps (possibly more then strength).

So here they are; keep in mind this is early PTR and some stuff will probably change.





PS. There are also new necks available, but I don't know what to think of them. The agility one is clearly for cat, but for tanks it is comparing apples and oranges. They are good, but I have no idea which one would be better.
Tanking neck
Agility neck
Strenght neck

PS2. As of current PTR I did a quick test and saw mangle is no longer bugged. A hit gives now one CP and a crit gives 2. This means it is now possible to do a real DPS test. Stay tuned.

Here I am to save the day - an epic story

Synopsis
A story about a disastrous battle versus Kel'Thuzad whit a happy ending; starring Monedula.


Ok, time for a first druid post. Not as much a post about tanking or dps, theorycrafting or mechanics, but a story of a fight verses Kel'Thuzad on Naxxramas 25 man. that happened about a week ago.

First of all you must know that our tactic on Kel'Thuzad makes use of 3 tanks. One maintank, and 2 offtanks. Could be done with 1 offtank, but having 2 offtanks means, first of all, it is easier to pick up the 4 scarab-like adds and thus less raid damage. Second, tanks are melee and that would endanger the maintank and other melee on Kel'Thuzad in case of a frostblast. We don't need the extra dps that much either. Third, it is easier to heal 2 tanks then 1 getting double damage.

My roll was that of an offtank. A Deathknight was the maintank. A paladin was the other offtank. We started out fine but at 50% something went wrong. I don't know what exactly but our Deathknight maintank died. Me and the Paladin both went to get Kel'Thuzad and the Paladin won. So I went to give a combat ress to the Deathknight. Both me and the Deathknight went back to the entrance of the chamber waiting for the adds.

The adds came. I was comfortably tanking 2 of them and the same goes for the Deathknight. Again however something went wrong. This was a real disastrous try. Definitely the worst one since we first cleared Naxxramas. What exactly went wrong, I again don't know but the Paladin died. Kel'Thuzad had no tank. Again, now dragging the scarab adds, me and the deathknight raced for Kel'Thuzad. Again I lost, that is to say, the Deathknight taunted first.

Now I realized we had a Deathknight without any buffs tanking 2 adds and Kel'Thuzad. He is very well geared but I would rather have me tanking all the adds then have those on our Deathknight. So I started taunting the adds from the Deathknight. Being in a corner, to prevent people dying from frostblast that might land on me, was not that easy. I got one and hit him a few times. That time the Deathknight died again. Disaster!

Now we had Kel'Thuzad focussing on healers and dps and also a scarab around. At this point I forgot I had an aoe taunt ability (which is not something you use often) and I single target taunted Kel'Thuzad. Went to tank him and started looking for the loose scarab. Once I had targetted him I saw him making a pretty angel out of a holy priest and then I taunted him and he came to me.
I was swiping to get overall agro, and then targetted Kel'Thuzad again. I realized he was out of range and I had lost agro. Luckily he had targeted a rogue who for a few moments was evasion tanking Kel'Thuzad. Taunted again and started swiping and throwing everything at them.

So there I was, Kel'thusad at 20% health with him hitting me, aided by his 4 scarab adds. Half the raid was lying dead on the floor. I used every cooldown I had and I am glad our healers are sublime! Finally the evil bastard died!

It was the most fun I could ever have on what would have otherwise been a pretty boring fight. Everyone else hated it, I loved it! I Love tanking!

Edited the layout

Synopsis
Basically what is said in the title.


So I have edited my layout. It was not easy and being pretty good in html this page's code probably looks like shit. But the view is as I wanted it. In the header that is me, black tauren. Black because Monedula is from Corvus Monedula, latin name for a member of the crow family the jackdaw.

To make an extra column I got the help from what I found on an other blog. If you got any suggestions to add something please do so. I tried adding a poll but it did not work. Maybe when there are actually people visiting this blog I will add one.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Why Druid?

Synopsis
One more introduction post. Something about druids in general. Why am I playing a druid etc.


So I am a druid. I started out playing a warlock on vanilla Beta of which I got to use the beta account of a friend of mine. I was human and when Wow came out I played it from day one. Started a guild, Ordo Lucis, on Aggramar that grew to 200 people and was one of the top guilds there. Played wow for half a year and then kinda lost interest.
In the half year that followed I tried other games but none could give me the same satisfaction as WoW could. So I came back. Didn't want to go back to Ordo Lucis. I wanted a frest start. I wanted to see the horde too, quest there and be ugly! (this is before belf were there).

After trying every class there was till about level 15 I finally tried Druid. Part of sticking with druid was that I know from before that there were few druids. And also that there were few healers. So I leveled to 60 as a healer. At that point there were a lot of people leveling so it was not a bad choice healing instances.
At level 40 I joined a guild that one day later merged into Nordic Chapter. Together we raided ZG, MC, AQ20 and AQ40. We were about to enter Blackwing lair when PvP rewards changed coming TBC. No raids could be formed then.

Went to TBC as feral but changed back to resto at level 70. Raided Karazhan a bit when Nordic Chaper broke up. I did initially join the more RP oriented of the 2, although we continued to become hardcore raiders. Mythicow, my guildleader, who since then has gained some fame on my server at least, then took charge. He pointed us towards hardcore raiding. We had Kara and Gruul down and we went more and more hardcore. We were way behind on progress. We were guild 25 on the server or so. We marched up doing all content. I myself was on an Illidan wipenight (the week after we first cleared whole BT) and we had two 1% wipes.

I didn't really feel like raiding any more at that point. I went to casual Karazhan, farming badges for gear. Since it was hard to find a tank I started collecting tanking gear and later some cat dps gear. The Esoteric foundation made it into Sunwell killing 2 or 3 out of the 6 bosses before 3.0 patch hit.

Wrath of the Lich King came, and I planned what I wanted to do, tanking and doing some cat dps. Knowing how easy it is after while to greed some other types of gear I decided I would absolutely stick with Monedula, my druid. I also Identify myself with him and I invested a lot of time in him which I don't want to go to waste. At the moment I am an achievement whore gathering 5775 points, a lot of mounts and rep with 35 factions now. I can not ever start having my hunter, paladin or warlock (a new warlock, not the ally one I started day 1) as a main.

An other reason for sticking with my druid was the versatility of druids. I really like tanking (though I wonder with current PTR changes druids, me, are that welcome tanking). I also like doing feral dps. It is the hardest I have ever done and I compare it to a circus act where you spin plates on a stick and trying to not ever let them drop. However It is really easy to greed some real good offspec gear after all casters have already the items they need. So I have collected an ok balance set which with some adaptions can be made into healing gear if I would ever change from feral to an other spec. But I doubt it, have been healer too long and balance seems boring to me.
The one thing that makes druids stand out verses any other class is the fact that we can do all types of gaming. We can tank, we can heal, we can melee dps and we can do ranged dps. Paladin is the only thing that is close but they have no ranged dps. So if I would ever get bored I don't have to switch my main to change my game.

So currently my guild has cleared all content long time ago. Last Sunday we did Sarth 3d 10 man, the last hurdle left in my opinion, and in hindsight we would have been able to take him way earlier. I don't really want any more items on my tanking set at the moment and my feral dps gear is really good as well.

I really like to see Ulduar and I plan to be active on the PTR, since we clear most of the content on wednesday which makes the rest of the days a bit boring. I hope we are able to make some server first kills in Ulduar.

First post

Synopsys
The first post describing what the blog will be about.


Hello

Hey you people out there. I am sure nobody is reading this now but hopefully in the future some will. And I hope you like it.
A kinda faq below here ;)

What is this place about?

For random people looking here, this blog is about World of Warcraft, druids in peticular. I choose the name because it is a talent used by every type of druid, balance, feral or resto. At least I think it should be if it isn't part of your talent spec (current 3.0.8 talent tree of course).

Why did I start this blog?

I have been reading a couple of druid blogs. Kalon/Kalbear's ThinkTank. Shamad's Lazy Bear Musings and Karthis' Of Teeth and Claws.
After reading their posts I feel inspired to write something myself. I usually write a big story on their blog but I rather post it here and collect my idea's, thoughts and experiences as a druid.

What will the content of this forum be?

Mostly my idea of how I view things considering feral druids. I am currently feral and intend to stay so (after being resto for 3 years). I am not excluding anything but this blog will mainly about feral things.
It will contain my views on changes, gears, tools and the development in the game. It will also contain stories about things I experience in the game; personal and guild achievements, new boss encounters and bosskills.

Who am I?

I am Monedula of Defias Brotherhood, EU. Defias Brotherhood is an RP-PVP server that is not really great overall in progress. However I am in the nr2 horde raiding guild on the server, and nr3 overall, called The Esoteric Foundation. We don't really have a website but you can read about us on the public section of the forum if you wish.
I will post some more stuff about me later.

Well if you have any more questions post em and I will try answer them. Enjoy!

PS. I will try to change the layout of this blog soon.