Omen of Clarity

Blizzcast

2009-08-17T19:26:00.003+02:00

Blizzard has had it's own Podcast for a while now. It is named Blizzcast. Since I got an iPhone last week I've discovered this. Listened to the first 3 podcasts already, 7 more to come.

The reason I am doing this though having stopped playing is that I am in heart a fan of their stuff, WoW still is the greatest game ever, and I am now working in the gaming industry. So by this I have a chance to learn some stuff from the, in my eyes, absolute masters.

It is really great to listen to some people who have a job that you would literally kill for, and you get to know them a bit better.
Then again listening back to what is being said I am a bit sad of the way Blizzard went with some stuff, being able to view the information given to me from a year later in time.

A few things I wanna talk to you about are in the 3rd podcast. I am really bad with names. I could not even identify a barbeque for a minute last friday. I kept on saying: That thing! and pointing towards a black oval shaped object. So you will have to forgive me if I do not name the person. Listen to it yourself or look it up. you will find it ;)

The words that inspired me to write this entry went something like this: "I would not panic if patchwork dies early on in the expansion, that's what he is there for"
Sure, ok, fine. I get that. But we took him in week 3 and others on our server took him in week 2 of WotLK and that included leveling to level 80, and I did not even play on one of the best servers there is. I don't know when Patchwork went down first, but in my turn I would not be surprised if he went down in week 1 of WotLK. After that the rest of the bosses were pretty easy and only tactic dependent, not so much depending on gear (which was what stopped my guild from killing Patchwork in week 2). So looking in hindsight, me currently not knowing when he went down, I, at that point would have been willing to bet that Kel'Thuzad went down in week 1.

Now these words spoken came from one of the lead instance/raid designers/developers from Blizzard. I think it is kind of sad that they apparently let a lot go of the ideas which they had for WotLK at that point in time (around the release of 2.4).

He also added that he often saw people in /2 going: "We absolutely need a shadow priest, or a frost mage to go blablabla..." He didn't like that aspect and thus later at a point came to the conclusion that CC was no longer something you would want in an instance, nor a raid and it resulted in the least amount of CC I have ever seen since the days I played. Making in fact the game boring instead of challenging tbh.

He also said: "We definitely want to do some unlocking of instances in some form". Seems he didn't find out what form. The instances are not as much aligned to factions as in TBC so that was hard to figure out (and in hindsight got scrapped). Attunement quests also got scrapped though. Unless I am mistaken there is 0 attunement in WotLK. So I feel bad they didn't get to do what they intended to do.

One of the cool things to learn is that, something I actually already knew, is said often in the Podcasts. "It isn't finished until it is finished". Meaning: we will not release it unless we feel it is ready. Kinda though feels that on some points they caved on that philosophy. They do not cave to the media, investors or whatever, but they do cave to the players. They give them what they want instead of making a good game.

That however must be taken in perspective. It has been a while since test versions could be played of Starcraft 2. They still have to set a quarter in which it will be shipped. They haven't picked a date yet, but they can't even say if it will be playable this year or the next or that we have to wait even longer!?
This all does build a myth. A myth they have to live up to not to disappoint a lot of people the day of the release. However it is something that I think they feel up to. And I believe they are. I have heard Blizzard people say that Starcraft 2 is gonna be the best game ever... Though that might be a lie, I think he wasn't lying.

World of warcraft is a bit different. It is a game with a LOT of people playing it already. They want new and more stuff. Blizzard says they can develop stuff much faster now then in the past, but that in my opinion is no reason to make easy mode on all content. I do understand it now though.

I would like to end with a quote, but it is hard to find the right one, so I will write my own quote. I am pretty sure some philosopher in the past said this before. If you can point me to that guy I would appreciate it.

The quote: "If you give a person too much of what he wants he becomes unhappy."

To clarify; I think Blizzard gave in to the wishes of people too rapidly without really thinking it through. Thus changing the game, removing a lot of challenges and handing all desires on a platter. As a result, for me, there was nothing left to want. What do you give a man who has everything? More of the same!... but in the end it is worthless.
I wonder how, compared to 2.x, the satisfaction of the people playing WoW is now. I think it is less. A cookie a day is better then a truckload of cookies delivered in your front lawn that will last the rest of your life. Dull lazy and bored is the result.

I just logged in!

2009-07-30T23:38:00.001+02:00

I just logged in to the server and was just in time to drink the brewfest achievement part brew. Tomorrow I dont have time and it would have been the last day that I could log in.
1 member of my guild was online. Someone who stopped raiding with us over 1.5 years ago and she was on her lvl 77 warlock.

Most sad of all, I still have currently a 54 minute cooldown left on ribbon dancing...
Go figure ;)

The train has departed...

2009-07-20T22:37:00.002+02:00

This morning catching my train to work failed. I was 20 seconds too late. So I lost 30 minutes of my life.

I didn't really expect it but I did not ever felt the need to log back into wow. Cancelled my account today which will run till October 17th though. So I'll get the brewfest stuff done and the dragon from the festival stuff and I might get 75 pets since I am close already.

So I might write a few things here but this is it for me. I had hoped it would run a bit longer, but I am glad that at least some people found it interesting to read what I had to say here. I want to thank you for the time you spent reading my blog and I hope you enjoyed it.

Bye people, see you out there sometimes. And if you ever come across a character named Monedula, ask him if it is me ;)

The train is leaving the station

2009-07-13T16:00:00.003+02:00

After I quit 2 weeks ago it has been 4 or 5 others who left a few days after (probably not due to my leaving though). Today there are 5 messages on the forum of people leaving including an officer and main raider.

Looks to me the guild is done for and dead. It held for 2.5 years or so. Pretty nice what we did accomplish though. We came from position 50 and it took to Ulduar to show the server how good we were. 3 server first kills and all horde first.

That was in some way I think the last drop for the guild though. We did what we wanted to do. No real goals left. WotLK raiding setup where you kill all in week 1 or 2 is sucky at best (you know my standpoint on that). So there is nothing left for us... well that is how a lot of people feel.

So a premature RIP for The Esoteric Foundation from me. Premature but in my opinion inevitable.

A little too relaxed...

2009-06-28T20:07:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
This is the message I wrote on my guild's forum.

It has been fun.

Hey guys. I sadly have to announce that raiding is no longer an option for me. Last week I had to unsign all raids because of my newly started job which at that point drained all my energy.
Looking to the future I see other stuff coming my way, next to my new full time work, and I have not the time to spend on raiding as is required. Sadly I don't get too much joy from raiding in WotLK as I once did. If that was the case I might have been able to get energy from raiding, though currently it is draining more from me then I can give with my new irl situation. So this is it for me.
Being here from day 1 I feel at home in TEF and if you would let me I'd like to stay in the guild as a social member, though I can understand if you don't.

Good luck in Ulduar and I bet you will be at least horde first in 3.2 as well!

So what does it mean for this blog? Well basically I won't be raiding. I will have no drive to do hard calculations on what talent is best for what and what a certain development means for the future of druids in raids. Nor will you will get any valuable information (for as much that was the case before) about raiding.

This blog will become a more casual blog. Next upcoming post will be about the bearforms and cat forms I just saw on PTR and how disappointed I am in them. I might join a few raids or instances but most of the time I see myself doing non-raiding and non-pvp (hate pvp) achievements. Not as much game achievements though personal achievements. Leveling my 4 alts to 80, gearing them a bit, grinding mobs for that one drop (which believe it or not I think is fun and is taken largely out of WotLK), playing casual and just for the fun.

Relax, take it easy

2009-06-24T19:43:00.002+02:00

Damn I hate that song... rather the singer. Anyway. I am not playing much these days. Just started a new job. I feel relaxed about it, like it, knew I would like it, but getting into the rythm of getting up early and sunday to monday somehow only sleeping 1 hours has exhausted me a bit. I am not playing at the moment. The thought of anything else but sitting on the couch watching tv is exhausting enough. So I'll write a bit later I think.

Praat geen poep!

2009-06-19T19:03:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Sorry for the Dutch title. Translated it means "Don't talk shit". It is funny in Dutch because it is not usual word usage. The sentence in itself is a direct translation, word for word, from English to dutch.
Anyway it refers to Blizzard PTR patchnotes. It is talking shit.

What the hell does this mean: Ranks 4 and 5 base points reduced by about 11%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.

??? Any idea anyone?

I think it might refer to a system like items. An item has x points to spread. Some in agility, some in stamina etc. If I am correct it means that in case of mangle, mangle is reduced by 11%.

If so I did a bit of calculation.
Instead of 5.9k dps on General Vezax I would do about 5.5k. The value was really close to 5% dps loss. One thing though, this os on a fight where you can non stop use the boss as a target dummy. Other fights, like Yogg where you mangle more then Shred and Rip, you will see more dps lost.

Still only guessing. Tell me if someone at Blizzard grew some brains and tried to explain to us how the internal point value of abilities is used. Bogus patchnotes imo.

Here is the (Dutch) "song" by Dingetje. I think I was 10 at the time this was a "hit". Prolly 20 years ago.

Quick balance update

2009-06-19T00:06:00.005+02:00

Synopsis
Balance results.

Not raided yet, just been trying on a heroic target dummy. At the moment (only me) I have 2.9k dps on the dummy and non stop casting (no out of 5sr) I last about 7 minutes.

Is that ok? (Not using treants though)
Basically I spam wrath till eclipse, then starfire for the duration of eclipse. Then 3 or 4 more starfires (depending on when I have to refresh my dots), followed by wrath spam again.

I want one thing though, I want to see when eclipse is off cooldown. Meaning when I should stop starfire because I want the eclipse that is triggered by wrath, not the one triggered by starfire.

PS, on general vezax today I did 5.9k DPS and at some point was at 107% of the DK tank's threat :P We can use a bit of a nerf (patchnotes).

I hope...

2009-06-18T16:48:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Apparently the bitching got through to Blizzard.

The current normal/heroic/hardmode shit is fucked and people hate it. Well at least some people. Well at least me (and Darksend).

This is what I found on my guild's forum. Posted by my guildmaster:

Quote:
"Blizzard is getting ready to put the next raids on PTR, they're going to be the Crusader's Coliseum and they'll have an interesting twist to them. For the first time, we'll now see Heroic 25 man raids and Normal 25 man raids. Massive LFG-confusion is sure to ensue, but this is the list:

10-man
10-man Heroic
25-man
25-man Heroic"

I hope this means no longer hardmode/normal mode. I hope there will be different loot tables for each as well! We will see t9.10n and t9.10h, t9.25n, t9.25h.
I hope, I hope... So now (I hope) when you kill hardmode 25 you will be looking not the same as every (possible) noob out there. This also means people can still experience the game content. I hardcore raiders will be a lot more satisfied.

He goes on; quote:
"The new system in the coliseum is interesting, in Heroic Modes you get rewarded based on how few tries you use to kill a certain boss. You only have X pulls every week, and the sooner you kill the boss the better/more rewards (loot too, I assume) you get."

This means that say there is a boss like Flame Leviathan is now in Ulduar. And say it is way too hard. You can't get past him. After 6 (?) tries or so he will be gone. You can move on to the next boss.
Also this means that any group of green wearing level 80 players can see every fight (for a short period before they die) in a week and get 0 loot, still having seen the end boss.
I think that is fair. Good Idea from Blizzard. Everyone can learn all the fights easy mode (normal). When you go hardmode (heroic), after having done it in easy mode it will not fuck up the loot you get in reference to gearing players. This means that the problem blizzard had before is solved.

Example: You are able to kill boss 1 in an instance every week, but boss 2 needs some work. There is 4 (?) loots every week. That sucks for gearing people. You need to farm the first few bosses for weeks before you are geared to take the last one.
People used to solve that by farming trash. Go into Sunwell, kill the first pack of trash, loot it, get out, reset, go in and kill trash again. Dropping a few recipes, a few things needed to craft stuff and maybe a trash epic.

Now you can still get upgrades by killing it on normal (easy) mode. Then you can try and get some loot from hardmodes.

This all leads me to conclude there are no hardmodes. There are still achievements, though no hardmodes. Trying for hardmodes will require "wipenights". Those are definitely gone. After x tries the boss is gone. So if loot is gonna drop 6 (?) items for a oneshot and 1 (?) on the last possible try this means the following; Doing hardmodes fucks you over! Hardmodes need a few things; skill and gear. If you decide to do hardmodes early on you will not get gear. Others who decide to do hardmodes in week 10 will get lots and lots of loot and then do the hardmode easy in said week 10, where the ones trying hardmode from the beginning get no gear.

I hope Blizzard has seen the light. Achievements in raids suck. Achievements to get 100 horsies is nice, but don't integrate them as a requirement into PVE.

I hope... I hope...

Remember, this is hearsay from PTR which is not even "live" on PTR yet. So all may change, but I think it will change for the better.... I hope

Balance coming up... I think?

2009-06-18T12:13:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
A head's up of my Balance adventures.

Yesterday I realized how much I like to dps when standing still. I so hate those huge like mobs without a real defined hitbox. Most of all the arms of Kologarn. I never know where the fuck I am. I have to watch my messages to see why the fuck I am not hitting him. "You need to face your target". With large groups I have one selected, doing Berserk and wanna swipe. Well the mob is either somehow behind me or too far in front of me. How fucking annoying.

So since we have a huge wave of newbies we are doing a lot of bosses easy mode. Next Wednesday I will go Balance if they let me. Would mean a 1.5k dps reduction or so, but that should not be that much of a deal on 25 man easy mode.

My gear is pretty much ok. A lot of gear that was being disenchanted (nobody greeded) I got, and instead of disenchanting I kept the caster gear, swapped it for crappier caster gear I already had and then disenchanted the crappy thing. The guild still had the shards, and my gear is very nice!

Yesterday I spent some time (too much time) configuring my gear. Don't know how well Rawr is for balance, but I used it to see where I could get upgrades. So now I have my 3rd t8.5 helmet. Now when fully gemmed I am hitcapped (266 rating, which is 3 above the cap I am told), I have 409 haste, but not too much crit though. Though I still have to see where I am at when I have respecced. My spellpower, coming from gear alone (and maybe some random feral stat) is at 1820. So that should be close to 2k selfbuffed in the correct spec.

Not bad for off-offspec gear. No?

PS I really want to see triple spec (Meaning dual spec + 1 extra).

Game within a game

2009-06-16T16:20:00.006+02:00

Synopsis
At the moment I never ever fly from point to point on my own. I always use flightpaths. I even go out of my way to find a flightpath to fly to the closest flightpath near my destination... why? Here is why.

It cost you a few flightpath gold but...

Curse Bejeweled link

My highscores are:
- Timed 580 (about)
- Normal 111k (about)

Also check out Peggle!

Curse Peggle link

Currently got 6 / 12 completely cleared.

Saturday night dailies - a story

2009-06-14T01:54:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
How a DK can make your day.

Meet Drethen. I met him about an hour ago. As you can see he is fully epic and has 4 pieces of the Valarous set. If he would fight you at first you would think he would be able to at least do you some harm. No?

Well there I was, doing dailies. I was in Brunhildar village and I had to hit 6 lazy people over the head with a cane. Still doing that daily because I want the polar bear mount.
So I ran in there, hit 1, 2, 3 mobs. I never kill them. I just hit em, keep on running in catform and after I hit the last one I dash out of there. I don't bother killing them and they only get me down 3k health max or so.

After hitting mob nr 3 I ran past an ally. Didn't bother to check him. I suddenly noticed I had stopped running and had some ice chain thing around my ankles. I turned and saw him coming after me. I went bearform (which versus melee is the easiest to do I find, being in bear spec and gear already). So I started hitting him, swiping and in the process having 4 additional Vrykul on my ass.
To my surprise Drethen died really fast. He wasn't naked for as far as I could see. I don't know where his health went that fast, but it being Saturday night, I guess he was drunk :D

So he died. I swiped the Vrykul to death and was still at 80% of my health ^^. I laughed hard and then when he ressed next to me I decided to become a masochist. I was in cat, hit him a few times, 5CP Rip and then as he ran away I walked after him very slowly, making sure not to hit him, watching him die from the ticks.
I hid, killed him again. Then I went and finished my quest. On my way out I could not resist myself. I met him again, made sure I did a /laugh before I killed him and then went to turn in the quest.

What the hell was he thinking attacking a druid who was clearly wearing an Ulduar weapon... What the hell was he thinking. My lvl 70 hunter could have killed him.

This totally made my day.
If you ever read this Dreathen, thank you! ;)

Zildjar's lament

2009-06-11T16:20:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
A byebye post to a guildy with whom I go back a long time. He accidentally (?) removed his forum rights so I was unable to say something to him.

A lot of players have stopped playing in my guild. Most of them I can't remember how I met them. I just know they are there and I know who they are. Not Zildjar though. I remember meeting him explicitly.

So most of you wonder who this Zildjar is.
Armory link
He's a rogue and I met him in Vanilla. He was leveling while I was leveling my druid. He followed kind of the same road as I did. I was a healer back then so the best way for me to level was doing instances. I met him a lot. He was always 1 or 2 levels higher then me. I wanted to overtake him and hit 60 before he did, but he didn't let me.

When I was about level 40 I was bored of leveling without guild, I remembered Zild's tabard. It was black and I liked that so I asked him if I could join. My intention was to have a leveling guild, rather then a raiding guild at that time, though I never had to change guilds to get my raiding hours. A simple whisper to the guildleader of Brotherhood of Thrall was enough to get an invite.
One day later we merged with Nordic Chapter, keeping their name. Together we raided and when blizzard released all HWL gear for honor grinders we were about to hit BWL but never entered because we could not get the people needed.

In TBC we were still casual and we were raiding Kara (4 bosses in or so). The name Nordic Chapter was not RP apparently (???) and instead of choosing a new name, without much warning the guild split.
Difficult time because there were 2 guilds formed. I had to choose between friends. Zild wasn't one I considered in that (though he choose the same guild), but eventually I choose The Esoteric Foundation. We were an RP guild (lol) but later went hardcore raiding climbing up from server position 50 to 5 within the remainder of TBC.

Zildjar was known by many things. Glaiveboy (having a warglaive) was one of the first. The later one; Zild-can't stay alive-jar, because he used to go all out on trash and tank them while he could not :D
Later he conspired with other members to divert that name to Grunee by constantly misdirecting to him :D.

Grunee, who also stopped raiding, is a whole different story all together. In short; he is a DPS warrior, who used to be MT in TBC and got famous for constantly falling off the platforms at the Al'ar fight resulting in a wipe.

Anyway Zildjar now stopped and I just wanted to thank him for all the countless hours we spent together and I wish him all the best in a wow-less life.

10 man hardmodes

2009-06-10T13:39:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Yesterday I joined a guild 10 man hardmodes try. To my surprise, I liked it a lot.

I haven't played a lot of 10 man. The days that there is no guild raid scheduled I tend to want to spent otherwise. Invest some time in real life and not play 50+ hours wow anymore. Also 10 man didn't appeal to me. There is nothing to get there. Most of the loot I want is in 25 man.
Since we are struggling with getting 25 man runs going, and some kills (Yogg) are very sucky without 25. So we yesterday (for Europeans last day of the raiding week) skipped 25 man. Left it for what it was and continued the 10 man hardmode run some of us had already started.

2 weeks ago a lot of hardmodes for unlocking Agalon were done already. So this week there were 2 left basically. Freya 3 watchers + Mimiron. How much as I hate Freya 25 man I really loved playing Freya 10 man. The raid consisted of a lot of the top notch best players from our guild. The discipline was amazing! All knew what to do, nobody making much mistakes. A little bit learning there was involved and we killed her.
Now I must say Freya 10 man is quite a bit easier then 25 man. But still.

We went on to try Mimiron. That fight is incredibly hard. I liked to really progress raid here. After 10 tries we managed to get to phase 2 with 10 people alive. We got him to about 40% when only our DK tank was still alive. He actually managed to get him to 33% before he himself died. Which was fun to see. Mimiron vs a DK for 2 minutes long!

Having some bosses left we decided not to wipe there endlessly and killed him normal mode. Nobody touched a mine... but me :( Achievement gone. It was phase 4 and I had seen the gap, went for it but the damn middle and top part obstructed my view. The thing above him there also doesn't count for a wall so you can (not) see right through. I hate the way this fight is in that manner. Next Time I better strafe out.

We then went for Vezax. We did his hardmode really close a few times but it ended up with the MT dying. Not because of mana problems, but because he wasn't healed enough. Sad to not have gotten him, but still amused by the enjoyment we had gotten from the fight, we killed him normal mode and moved to Yogg Saron. After a accidental wipe we then were well adjusted and did him hard mode (within 7 minutes) which wasn't really a chalenge and then went to finish off council, ending up oneshotting them hardmode with the big guy killed last.

Now you are thinking; "Ok. What is this post about?"

In reference to my previous post I am a bit confused. I liked 10 man hardmodes. I don't feel for 25 man hardmodes. Should I stop doing 25 man and only do 10 man? Why did I like 10 man so much? Because it was easy? Because it was attainable?
I think it is the following; We were a group of 10 very good players. If I have to name 6 of the top players in my guild they were all in that group.

So I think the conclusion in respect to my previous post, next to what was said in there (which was true), also the following is contributing to the fact that I dislike Ulduar (or Blizzards way of implementing instances now);
Blizzard made it "easy" for all to clear naxx. A lot of people joined in good raiding guilds, replacing some excellent players that just stop (it happens too), but aren't really that good. My guild tries to have only the best players but since they are spread too thin on my server we have the problem that we don't have the luxury to do it anymore. There simply aren't that many good players.

The one thing to hope for is that my guild holds out and some other top guild doesn't. Hoping a guild will fail is not really nice, but it is the only thing that is a real solution. There are 4 other horde guilds having the same problems we do. Not enough (skilled) raiders. If one of them tumbles we would get a couple of their players and get a full group of good players. I think that is one of the things that would make my joy in 25 man raiding come back.

Still next to the summer and people having vacation time Blizzard is to blame for this too. There is less skill required to play, making "bad" players go unnoticed. Rather then blame the players, I blame Blizzard's current implementation. The players don't have to improve themselves. It is simply not needed. Pre WotLK when we got a new player we knew we had to put some extra time in him/her. You would see him underperform. Currently you don't, meaning the whole group of players performs not as good as they should/could.

How Blizzard killed PVE

2009-06-07T15:47:00.005+02:00

Synopsis
Lots of players leaving and others not enjoying WoW as much as it could have been. It has been talked about a lot, but I today realized exactly what it is and how. Though it is personal and some of you might have figured this out LONG time ago.

WoW is no longer the game it used to be. My guild has had a lot of people not feeling the drive anymore. As a result they are leaving. There are others that don't feel the drive too. Coinciding with summer (and no longer being locked inside to flee the cold) this is very bad for the raiding communities in WoW.

The reason for it is not that Ulduar is not what we expected it to be. It is exactly what we expect it to be. However WoW itself has changed drastically. WoW have become socialistic bastards. "We want more people to experience end game encounters". In other words; if you suck ass you will one day kill Yogg Saron. This makes good players sad.
It is an attempt of Blizzard to make even more money. However I feel it has destroyed the game completely. The main driving force behind new and more people starting to play WoW, I think, was the mouth-to-mouth talk from friends on how awesome WoW was. At the moment I would recommend nobody to start playing WoW. Try some game that is not dying. The game is dying and it is time for a reanimation force from Blizzard.

Ulduar is a great instance, and yet it sucks monkey balls. The bossfights are awesome, but then again disappointing. There is no progress. Or at least not like it used to be. Previously you would work one week on a boss and finally get him down. Now you work 2 hours on him and he is dead. Then you can spent some time working on hardmode. And this is where it goes wrong. If you raid with 25 people at least a few of them do not really care about hardmodes. This depends on the server though. The top guilds on a heavily populated pve server will get those people. But if you don't you are screwed.

Now as to what this change has accomplished. A lot more people will see Yogg Saron. Basically, if you want to you can. Yay, but it means it is totally unrewarding for anyone skilled.

Pre 3.0 there were no hardmodes. Or rather there were no easy modes. Freya would always have her 3 watchers up. Flame leviathan would be way one of the last (optional) bosses since you need to kill him with 4 towers always. Then downing Flame leviathan would mean something. We last week went for the "easy" achievements and with not even a full raid we got 2 easy achievments done. 3 actually, nobody dying (part of a meta), no repairs and no overload. Where is the challenge?

Pre 3.0 you used to be in a guild and hear some guild took boss x and boss y and you would imagine yourself killing them one day. If your guild would suck you could choose to join an other (how ever hard that choice may be sometimes). If you wanted to you could see all bosses in an expansion. If you were in a top guild you would be walking around with great gear and all would see how great you looked and envy you. That is something that gives satisfaction.

What is the satisfaction now? Everyone looks the same after 2 months of raiding. If you are in a crappy guild you will kill Yogg Saron eventually for sure, as long as you have a PVE focus. There is no room for self improvement. And good players, the ones hooked to WoW are finding less and less enjoyment in it.

This will result in the biggest "Yay! WoW!"-sayers to go: "Yeah... WoW :S"

I don't know about PvP but I think Blizzard should hurry up with the new MMORPG game (non Warcraft) of which I have heard rumors. In my opinion WoW is dying and they need a followup.

As a closing statement;
To reach for a goal is to get the ultimate. The thing you can't get or have to do a lot for to get. Once you have it and you can't set any new goals you get depressed.
WoW has lost any ultimate can't-get factor it had in PvE. No goals so depression sets in.

How nelf cats should really look

2009-06-06T13:54:00.002+02:00

Synopsys
Someone made this;
Quote: "I'm a little underwhelmed by the new elf cat models. I don't think they truly capture the essence of the Night Elf race so I went ahead and made a few improvements. I think you can see this is the right direction."

Blizzard finally agrees. Allieds suck!

2009-06-05T03:47:00.007+02:00

Synopsis
New catform lol.

Sorry to all you nightelves out there. About half of you play nightelves. Being Tauren I naturally hate allies for how pathetic they are when they have to kill me on an escort quest, fishing or whatever. I am sure a lot of you on pvp realms think the same about horde, though I am pretty sure a lot of kids play more allied and are more childish the horde. Though you nightelves think the same about horde ;)

[don't take this comment serious]

Anyway, WoW will be a lot more funny when 3.2 comes. I will laugh being ganked by a feral druid. My first reaction when I saw your catforms: "WHAHA! Your cats look gay!" (no offense to gay people).

Now still when I look at your catforms I am laughing my fat cow ass off. Putting a picture here just for the fun. Haha you are so hard screwed with these forms. If I were you I would petition blizzard not to change nelf druid form at all. I would prefer the old one over the new ones.

*snicker*

Oh forget snicker.... MOEWAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAA

Seriously though, I pitty you... WHAHAHAH

Jerks are unfriendly...

2009-06-04T17:47:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
Elitist jerks. I hope those people never have to review my tax return.

I used to be active on Elitist jerks. I don't like the guys.
I used one abbreviation and a misspell in the first post. I got flamed by a moderator for 3 things I had written wrong. Infraction. Although they guy admitted that on of those reasons was not valid and was his own stupidity I still got the infraction.

I was then pretty new to all druid mechanics. So some "stupid" post I made, of something I was unaware gave me an infraction.

I find that harsh. But ok, I get it.

Also being friendly doesn't get you much there.

Got an other for wanting to post a question. I went to the forum and thought I had to respond to someone else first. I could have ignored him, but I had some good advise for him (for which he thanked me in a personal message). I forgot what my own question was about so I left the forum. Later I remembered it and asked it. It was not one line and something completely different then my response. So I made a new post. WARNING WRONG WARNING! Double posting. Infraction.

Some more crappy things that I disagree with they gave me an infraction for.

Now today someone asked a pretty basic question in the simple questions section. If he had searched harder on the forum he would have found the answer. But since it was simple questions I gave him a response. So I got another infraction.

3 simple rules I learned from this.
1: Don't be nice;
2: Stay away from anyone who calls himself elitist;
3: Start your own blog and write any crap you WTFPWNED LOLOLOL you want to write yourself.

PS I know a lot of you are on there as well and I most likely agree with you and understand that there is a need to keep it strict, but to lack common sense is something else.

Catforms

2009-06-03T00:06:00.003+02:00

Just saying one thing, I have been playing with a pacman quality figure all this time compared to the new forms.

Dailies tactics

2009-05-30T13:54:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
The "new" dailies are pretty easy for tanks. Well that is what I found.

Just something in between druid/raiding related posts. About the "new" dailies in 3.1.

I don't do dailies for money. I rather grind on my herbing/ming alt. I do dailies for other purposes. Those are in general 2 things, rep and reward/purchasable items.
With regard to rep, I have all faction rep maxed (at least those factions that have dailies) so there is no need to do it.
I recently stopped doing WG dailies since I got enough of those stone thingies to buy the pvp mammoth. Yes I know I don't run (have not ever done) enough heroics. But then again there was never a need for that really.

So what dailies do I have left? Ice bear mount. Brunhildar (if I write it correctly) village one. I still need that mount. Fishing (I just love to fish), cooking (need to cook some food sometimes, and I want that chef's hat).

Then there are the tournament dailies, new in 3.1. I do those every day, just to get the pets and mounts. These quests are really nice when you are a druid, or a tank in general.
First the obvious, Threat from above. 3 man quests that for any decent gear tanking druid is pretty easy (until some sad allied guy thinks it is funny to gank you). Luckily it isn't that much of a problem.

Now the non obvious one. Jousting. Winning from the champions while riding your mount. I am talking doing it solo, and not with you just keeping the shield down and an other player killing your mob instead of you.

My girlfriend sucks at killing the champions. Though she isn't a raider, I have found that a very effective strategy is kinda like tanking. It goes like this.
When you are fighting (close combat) from time to time the champion walks away. If you wait you can throw a shield breaking thing, but you have seldom the time to charge too, while the champion itself has time to do both. So a defensive (very slow) tactic is to charge as soon as possible, giving the champion not the chance to throw and charge himself.
Sometimes you charge and overshoot the champion you turn around and get the chance to throw a shield breaking thing afterwards.

Now to speed it all up this is where things we have learned by tanking comes in very handy. ALWAYS walk backwards. Kite him, something that comes natural to tanks for positioning purposes, whereas non tanks might always move by the mouse.

Walking backwards results in the following; You are in close combat, spam the 1 and 2 button. When he is too close you hit 1 and damage him. If he somehow stops moving for a sec you hit him with the shield breaking thing if possible.
Then he goes and walks away. You have to be not unlucky here where he walks away in your direction. If he walks away in any other direction, because you ware walking backwards you get to throw that thing WAY earlier. Then when GCD is down you charge him, and if possible, overshoot him turn around and throw one more shield breaker thing.
You will most likely loose 1 (seldom 2) shields. But that in no way weight up to the 2 or 3 the champion looses. Then in close combat refresh your shield. It is a can't fail tactic that is very fast.

Ps, while moving backwards use the left and right button to navigate.

Yes... we are evil!

2009-05-28T00:26:00.001+02:00

Fascinatingly logical

2009-05-26T22:02:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
NEW DRUID CAT AND BEAR FORMS

That is pretty much self explanatory. I'll be one of many people making a post about. Hell I am not the first. I wanted however share my view on the implementation of it all.

The way it is implemented is as follows; The type of look you have depends on your hair color. Since Taurens don't have hair color they will be the only ones to go into a barbershop and change skin color. I think. Most likely it is restricted to Tauren druids, but could be something all Taurens will be able to do, or it might be that everyone will be able to do it.
But then again, it should stay Tauren only. They are currently the only ones not able to change haircolor while their whole body is covered with hair!
Bepending on that (for your faction) parameter your bearfrom and catform depend. They are linked and most likely not all combinations will be available.

I myself had thought of a couple of other ways it could be implemented. Have 2 extra item/form slots for each druid (bear and cat slot). If left empty you keep your current colors. If an item is placed in them you can get a different color. The item could be made by scribes, could be bought from vendors, be quest rewards, but the most awesome looking ones could drop from bosses.

The other was "aspect of the cat" or "aspect of the bear" where a druid would, quite like hunter's tame ability, assume the colors of the cat/bear selected. Target a polar bear and your bearform will be white. A white tiger and you will look like a tiger.

But those were not the case. Why not? I think I know the answer. "Lazy" programmers. being a programmer myself I know that the lazier we are the better. Never do more work then needed!

When someone gets in my range the server will submit my data to him/her. That data is a lot of things. Status (swimming, running, walking, sitting, casting, etc), what I am casting, which way I move etc. That is submitted to the player at the moment I am within range and I submit that information to the server. Those are the main part of all information submitted to players in my range.

Other things however that define the way I look work in exact the same way. Hair / skin color is also submitted to someone in my range. It can change just like everything else (when I change it in a barbershop). And upon change it is submitted to the server which on his turn submits that data to all players in range.

Next to gear, there is one more important thing that defines the way you look. Buffs. If I am hexed it doesn't tell the other player I look like a frog, it simply tells him I am hexed. The player will then render me as a frog. If I have baby spice the player will render me smaller since it also knows what effect baby spice has on someone.

Now to the part where this implementation becomes very logical.
If druids would get some extra thing that defines the way they look in catform / bearform it would mean a total change, or at least an addition to the data submitted. That could lead to bugs of all sorts. Now this part is completely avoided! It can work just like before. The only thing that has to be done is to change the way a druid with the buff "bearform" is rendered. No servers involved, just simple rendering.

Previously it was like this:
Catform -> getCatTexture() -> Display()

Now it will be like this:
Catform -> getCatTexture(Faction = Horde ? Skintype : Hairtype) -> Display()

Sorry for writing it in a sort of program style, but what it basically says is that instead of loading a default texture the texture now depends on a value already known. Which is really really really simple. Really!

"It is the only logical solution captain."

Never buy mana drinks...

2009-05-20T16:19:00.002+02:00

Synopsis
You don't ever have to wait to shapeshift after a spec change.

When respeccing you go all out of mana. That kinda sucks. You have to wait before you can shapeshift. But there are ways to avoid it.

Innervate, kinda self explanatory and it refenerates your mana to full now (new patch) in 5 or 6 seconds. Well if you are not earing any intellect items that is.
Be in the shape you want to be in. Cat to bear spec: First equip tanking gear, heal to full, go to bearform and then respec. No need for mana.
Eat! Nice if you have a mage with you, but if you are doing anythign else then a raid it is a waste to have mana food with you. And using buff food is not really needed and kind of a waste too.
Lifebloom! Not having any lifebloom improvements it lasts 7 seconds. Cast lifebloom on yourself and if possible on someone friendly target. Get 3 stacks on both. Be sure to first do the friendly target, then yourself and immediately after (within 0.5 seconds, a bit longer with haste) respec. You will get about 500 mana returned from your lifebloom. Per stack. In total there are 6 stacks. So you get returned about 3k mana. Kinda nice I think.

TEF is Recruiting

2009-05-19T10:18:00.005+02:00

Synopsis
TEF is recruiting.

Hey all. Nothing about feral druids, but I guess sometimes some non ferals are reading this as well. My guild, The Esoteric Foundation, is recruiting atm, lots of classes. We had some people drop due to not raiding enough and some others just proved not good enough. Then of course there are the couple of people that have things going on in their personal life etc.
One thing. We are not really recruiting feral druids at the moment, but if you are a good player there is a decent chance you will get in.

Who is The Esoteric Foundation?
We are the nr1 horde guild, PVE progress wise, on the server at the moment, only 1 alliance guild is a bit ahead of us. So we expect pretty good skills and dedication. Everybody says that their guild is a friendly guild. I myself never was in many guilds, been a member of TEF for a long time now, but what I hear from people that have left us is that they really miss the atmosphere and the people in the guild.
TEF is playing on EU server called Defias Brotherhood, RP-PVP server, but there is not much RP going on there. Though If you would wish to idle some time in Dalaran and RP a bit you are more likely to find others to join you then on other servers of course.

So if you are interested and you got a rogue friend, a dedicated DK buddy or your wife is a warlock, or none of that all, check out our site and make an application on our forum.
http://www.esoteric-foundation.com/
Here you can check out all classes we are looking for (top left). At the moment we are looking for everything basically. Everything but hunters and priests.

Oh one thing. You must be able to take criticism by a somewhat pissed off raidleader from time to time... only if you fuck up of course. ;)

What happened to expertise?

2009-05-18T01:54:00.002+02:00

Synopsis
I am starving for expertise right now!

I have a dilemma. Before 3.1 I used to be craving for hit rating. Now I got Twisted Visage and I probably won't get an other weapon. It has a lot of hit. Then all other items that dropped also have a lot of hit. Got a couple of items that used to be worth a lot to me. Now that I have this much hit rating those that have hit rating have devaluated a lot.

Now with t8.5 I find myself looking at the other cap. Expertise. My tanking gear can't miss anything though I am barely expertise (soft) capped. That isn't too bad. The items are still BiS (best in slot), or the best I have. So overall it is better.

Now for cat I am a bit more worried. I had balanced that gear around expertise cap. The items I have now are so much better that I really want to equip them but it makes me loose the expertise cap. Being below expertise cap is something I really don't want. There are a couple of bosses in Ulduar you can;t really dps from behind So now in Ulduar expertise is worth more then it was before I seem to be lacking it.

Only thing to do is to get the 226 level item trinket that also boosts haste from Malygos. I kinda feel trinkets in WotLK are made for that special reason; to fill in for those extra stats you want but can't get from gear unless gimping yourself a lot since they mostly only got 1 or 2 stats.
But since that boss is bugged now I probably won't get it any time soon.

Any of you experiencing the same?

So long... friend?

2009-05-16T00:32:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Today (well yesterday for me at least) Karthis announced he'll stop playing WoW. The title is not to announce me stopping. I am addressing it to Karthis, if he'll allow me to call him a friend.

Most of you know Karthis or at least his blog, Of Teeth and Claws. I myself found him a couple of months ago and he was an inspiration for me to start this blog and a good source of information.
He is a friendly guy and I am sad to see him stop playing WoW. I might have seen it coming, might have known in the back of my head. It doesn't really come as a surprise to me, though I didn't know, as he mentioned, he had quit a few times before already for some periods of time.

I myself have quit playing WoW a couple of times too. Most of the times it seems to coincide with me moving. First time (was playing my lock back then, august 2005), I went from a student house to my own apartment and I stopped playing. Then after 6 months I realized there was nothing else that came close to WoW and came back. Then I stopped twice more. Both for about a month or 2 when I first moved in with my girlfriend, the second time when we moved to where we live now. I never stopped my subscription though. Moving was more important then.

After that I never stopped from the game, and only stopped raiding for a period of 6 months since it had nothing much to offer me. I had seen Illidan. We took him down (when I was not there) and the week after when I met him we had two 1% wipes. Mission accomplished. Never cared about Sunwell at all. The game was done. End boss killed. Basta.

Now I find myself in kind of the same situation as Karthis if I am honest. I am not planning to stop playing and I owe it to the rest of the guild to keep tanking, but I don't feel compelled to anything in the game really. Probably because I am working more these days. I tend to value sleep more then farming. I only raid and do some dailies. Today and 2 other days this week I didn't even bother logging in to do the dailies. Though on 2 of those 3 days there were raids, I could not join them because I had not enough time that day. I could have logged an hour for dailies only though, but to my own surprise I didn't.

So I wonder why? I realize that having everything I want from the game in 3 weeks of 3.1 is kinda demoralizing. In Naxx I wanted to get all those items, get all BiS items there were. Huge upgrades. Lots of loot drops! Yes! Gief!
Now it is like... Ok, I got full t8.5. I got the best staff. The rest, like boots are relatively big upgrades, but still minor ones compared to 3.0 upgrades. I don't want anything from the game anymore really.

So what does it have left to offer for me? Hard modes? I totally agree with Karthis there. It is nice yes, but it is so boring to do that week after week. I saw a real nice upgrade left for me. It only drops from hard mode 10 man Yogg-saron. Come on!? I have to strain myself to the max for 10 man? I have to hope for it to drop? I am not gonna do that. Screw em. So screw me.

The wait till 3.2 when a new instance is opened. That is actually what the game has to offer me. I hope I find some fun in stuff to come though. Maybe go balance instead of feral dps, though balance seemed to me incredibly dull those 3 days that I played it.

One last thing. I thought about what it would be like if I wasn't this geared. If we were at Mimiron or anything before that. What it would be like if my guild was like it used to be. Wiping on Prince while others were killing Kael'thas. Essentially I would have to step down and join a worse guild. I don't think I could do that though. The best way I think is to describe it with a metaphor.

It is like driving a Porsche that handles really well and makes driving easy and dull. So to make it exiting again you would sell your Porsche and buy a Toyota Corolla without power steering instead. But you would not be able to enjoy it at all, knowing what it feels like going from 0 to 100 kmph in 6 seconds in a Porsche.
The only option left is to keep your Porsche and go hard mode. Drive 200 kmph (where for non-metric the speed limit is 120) and dodge all speed traps and police cars.

So I guess it is the pedal to the metal for me then.

Trashloot

2009-05-08T15:22:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Some mobs in Ulduar have guaranteed trash epix??? Do not miss them. Get em all!

Last wednesday when we were doing Ulduar 25 we went for Hodir. Now what happened there might be pure luck, a glitch or it might be intended.

The trash before Hodir consists of 4 different kinds of mobs:

small snakes that spawn from heaps of snow;
large stone elementals, who are accompanied by...
.. 3 smaller stone elementals;
big giants.

The first trash you encounter is such a giant. He dropped an epic.
Then a bit further in, the cave forks. At that point is the second giant. He dropped an epic.
Now here you go left, clear some other trash and you are at Hodir. WRONG! Go right. It is a dead end. No trash at all, except for 1 giant. And guess what? He dropped an epic too.

So whenever you are clearing towards Hodir, don't forget to clear the giant at the right.

I am so happy now!

2009-05-07T01:53:00.007+02:00

Synopsis
It has been a bit quiet from me in posting. Was thinking about making a post on General Vezax dps (which is the best fight for me). But I think I'll wait for that a bit cause with my recent upgrade I might overagro the tank this week.

Pictures say more then words...

Today was a real nice raiding day. We had a few stupid wipes. Killed 7 bosses in Ulduar, all of the Vault and Malygos and Sarth2d, just for the loot. All withing a normal raiding time (4 hours... a bit more).

We killed Thorim, oneshotted him. I got my t8.5 helmet. Completing my whole t8.5 set. I am even hitcapped now in cps gear. Would like a bit more expertise tbh, but I am quite happy I have 18% spell hit rating on Growl ;)

And what I am even more happy about... I got the most imba weapon in the game at the moment (excluding the pvp one). Twisted Visage.

Kinda sad that the only upgrades I can get most likely will not change the way I look. So till 3.2 this is what I look like. Maybe I get a better tanking helmet.

Blogsourcing: How can I gain 118 times SD with 93 crits?

2009-05-02T13:58:00.006+02:00

Synopsis
We switched from WWS to World of Logs. If looks much nicer. Was just looking at our 10 man Hodir wight where I was MT and noticed something weird about SD.

Here is the link:
Worls of Logs

If you look at the tab Buff Gained you will see that I have 118 times gained SD. If you look at damage done I did 93 crits.
Now 2 things can be here. 1 the data is not 100% correct. Though I find that strange. So how is it possible?

Also I can't find how often it is removed and total damage absorbed. Anyone less blind then me or is it not in there?

[edit]
Thanks to Yrkoonia; it is the lacerate ticks which in the statistics show no crits, just an average. 25 crits in 63 ticks seems about right.
[/edit]

Epic Movie

2009-05-01T17:19:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
This movie of Yogg-saron got me even more excited then the kill itself... and it is our kill!

This is truly the most epic movie I have ever seen on wow. I made bosskill movies on all bosses in TBC, except for 2 and SW. And though I thought they were great, this one beats them all combined. The music is awesome and the kill is good too. It is made by Stoke, our DK Tank who used to be our Lock. He is also responsible for the How to Paladin moview. It has a 5/5 rating on Warcraftmovies.com

Download the whole full thing. It is of superb quality.
If you don't want to, here is youtube embed too.

PS, I am the only cat in there. Easy to spot.

Link to Warcraftmovies.com

Part 1

Part 2

Normal mode

2009-05-01T03:04:00.003+02:00

Synopis
Ulduar 10 man cleared too.

Today we started raiding at a little past 19:30. There were not enough people available for 25 so we did 10 man. First time I was there 10 man. We had cleared all bosses by 2:20. Ok a bit late, so it is not a real one raid kill but it soon will.
Unbelievable how easy Ulduar 10 man is. I fucked up on Yogg-saron otherwise that too would have been a oneshot without death. We did about 4 hard modes/extra achievement things, gotten 6 boses oneshotted without a death. Ulduar 10 man is really easy.

I'll do it next week and the next and just simply farm achievements. There are a few really hard ones, but a lot of things are really forgiving.

Ulduar cleared!

2009-04-29T02:31:00.004+02:00

Synosis
Last night at a it before 23:00 we killed Yogg-saron and we officially cleared (for now) Ulduar.

Last week Tuesday we first saw Yogg-saron when we, after about 15 tries we managed to briefly see phase 2 before we all died.

This week after in total 2.5 wipenights this night resulted in a kill. The problem we had was mostly the switch between phase 2 and 3. We got that down 2-ce. The first time it was a 6% wipe where we got some real good practices on switching between the mobs. The last time it was an excellent performance..

I again got the t8.5 item. I have gotten so many items because of tanking loot prio (though I dps more often then tank recently) that I now have 4/5 items. When we stop with tanking prio it will be a long while before I get any item I ever want again.

Don't I look great?

The value of Expertise and Primal Precision

2009-04-26T22:37:00.011+02:00

Synopsis
If you can equip a best in slot item with expertise and are over expertise cap rather then equiping something else remove the talent point from Primal Precision.
Sadly there is no real alternative.

[edit]Corrected some math[/edit]

Recently I have heard from 2 different sides that Primal Precision (PP) is not really worth it. So I decided to do some thinking again.

The first was honest mistake. The person thought that the expertise cap was at 15 for tanking. It is however at 15% (generally accepted cap) which for druids is 60 expertise. If you are below 26 expertise any expertise is double the value since until you are dodge capped it counts towards both caps.

The second one was the following: It stated that when expertise capped by gear Primal Precision is not worth it. I wondered how much it was worth really.

So how can I see what it is worth? If you look at gems you will see that 16 expertise = 16 agility = 16 strength = 32 AP.
Now those gems all have different values for each class, making them perfect for one class, more worthless to an other.

If you look at enchants you will see that on gloves for instance 15 Expertise holds the same slot as 44 AP. You can not look at this for real though, since the expertise enchant is way cheaper. An expertise enchant on gloves is of would be a "green" enchant where 44Ap would be a "blue" enchant (as in green "uncommon" gems and blue "rare" gems). To have the same value expertise enchant it should be 22 expertise (if you follow me).

I did the comparison in a different way: I used Rawr (raidbuffed).
I am expertise capped by using Inevitable Defeat (78 exp). To make that useless I equipped Chestguard of the Recluse (83 expertise).
The dps value from Inevitable defeat dropped from 1583 to 1523. So 78 expertise is worth about 60 dps.

I did the same for Chestguard of the Recluse. I unequipped Inevitable Defeat and was still expertise capped. The chastguard's value went up from 314 to 385. That is 71 dps. So it is about the same.

1 expertise ~= 0.8 dps.

So 10 expertise = 2.5% = 2.5* 32 rating = 80 expertise rating.
PP therefore (for me) is worth about 80 dps on gear. When, and only when, you are expertise capped (26 expertise). If I would not have PP I would have to get it on gear loosing 60 dps.

Total dps is 6363 what rawr tells me. If I had to get that by gear alone I would have 6303 dps. 60 / 6303 = 0.95%%, that is 0.48% per talent point.

So that is not really much. It is that there are not really any other talent points for cat that are worth more.

Once again, don't be mistaken. When you are not capped by gear alone the talent point is worth much more since 1 talentpoint will increase dps with 2.5% alone (double parry and dodge cap). I am only saying that if you find a better place for your talentpoint and your best in slot items have expertise plenty... only then you can remove a point in PP.

Correction! iMangle does not own

2009-04-25T12:06:00.006+02:00

Synopsis
Tarskin has pointed out that I forgot the difference in Maul and Lacerate dots when they get 4% MMS damage. So I did the math again. MMS is better by 1.3%.

Let me state first that this post is a comparison between a very popular tanking spec 0/55/16, holding SS and MSS, and an alternative spec 0/60/11 holding iMangle and no MMS.

I forgot Maul and Lacerate dots in the rotation. The damage for MMS and not MMS is different of course.

So I went back to rawr. Because some values had changed I redid the spreadsheat.
Some weird things I saw; Windfury totem changes the damage per maul. Of course it changes the total damage by Maul, but now also changes the average damage and threat done by Maul apparently. If anyone has an explanation for this I'd like to hear it.

New spreadsheet:

It shows that with WF totem the threat you loose with iMangle rotation is 105 threat per second. This is 1.3% threat loss.

So if you are looking for max threat, MMS spec is the way to go. Well, to be honest, drop something like IW and ask someone else to apply the same debuff. Get iMangle too. That does the most threat.
However you can also ask the few top dpssers to hold back a little bit or use some threat reducing effects (FD) or get hunters and rogues to misdirect to you.

Still, in the end, my conclusion stands I think. 1.3% threat loss on a boss is something not that bad. You get 5% more uptime from Idol of the Corruptor it halves it's downtime. That is worth it I think. If you can dodge an attack that otherwise would have killed you it saves you from a wipe.

PS. This all made me think to what things can you expect normally for being raidbuffed (25 man).
So my next post will hold the raidbuffs you can normally expect in a raid and should be checked while comparing items to eachother.

Breaking news: iMangle rotation owns!!!

2009-04-24T19:02:00.005+02:00

Synopsis
Get yourself to an iMangle rotation, even if you don't have the idol!

[edit]
See next post. The breaking news was broken. It is not true. Thanks go to Tarskin for that. Thank you very much. :-( XD
[/edit]

Either iMangle roation own, or rawr lies.
Inspired by Tarskin's post on Faerie Fire / iMangle rotation I took my head our of my ass and saw that FFF is huge threat. Definately do it every time you can.

I took his post and extended it a bit.

This is a screenshot of my calculations.

First of all the rotation. All rotations are based on a continues cycle. It doesn't say what you should start out with. They all start at the moment lacerate is renewed, thus the first action is Lacerate.

Instead of only looking at Mangle / Fearie Fire I took Lacerate into the cycle. Lacerate can not be allowed to drop, so do that at least every 9 actions. Atfer 10 actions it will have dropped.

6 sec Mangle:
If you are doing Mangle / FFF every 6 seconds, you have to do lacerate every 12 seconds. If you do that every 13.5 seconds if will inevitable collide with Mangle or FFF. It would mean the cycle you would have would be very long, and hard to execute.

That means the rotation would look something like this:
8 moves; 12 seconds: 2 Mangles, 2 FFF, 1 lacerate and 3 swipes.

Lacerate
Mangle
FFF
Swipe
Swipe
Mangle
FFF
Swipe

4.5 second Mangle:
For refreshing Lacerate it has to be done at least once every 13.5 seconds.
That is coincidentally exactly 3 Mangles. This gives us a 9 move cycle.
9 moves; 13.5 seconds: 3 Mangles, 2 FFF, 1 lacerate, 3 swipes.

Lacerate
Mangle
FFF
Swipe
Mangle
Swipe
FFF
Mangle
Swipe

I must say this rotation is a bit more complex, but I'll show you it is worth it.

It is not disputed that iMangle does more damage. However the fact that if you take iMangle means you will have to drop Master shapeshifter. And everything does less damage.

So from Rawr, using my own gear and fully raidbuffed I took the following average values. I took the average values because you have to count crits too. Here I only discuss threat though damage can also be seen in the spreadsheet:
iMangle spec:

Mangle: 4552
FFF: 3434
Lacerate: 1128
Swipe: 2142

Master shapeshifter spec:

Mangle: 4734
FFF: 3434
Lacerate: 1153
Swipe: 2228

This shows that a 6 sec Mangle cycle gives me 24173 threat = 3022 TPS
An iMangle 4.5 sec Mangle cycle gives me 28078 threat = 3120 TPS

So taking iMangle over master shapeshifter is 100% the right thing to do and it even leaves 2 extra talentpoints you can spend somethere you like.
Unless ofcourse my rawr data is wrong.

Invasion of the dutch!

2009-04-24T17:36:00.003+02:00

Synosis
Too short a post for a synopsis.

A fellow dutchman, Tarskin, has started his own blog recently. Check it out!
http://tarskin.blogspot.com/

Ulduar WWS

2009-04-24T03:11:00.006+02:00

Synopsis
Cat dps is really nice! Really nice. However some fights are not made for us.

My raidleader finally got to put up some WWS from fights.

First up General Vezax (last week). We did some wrong strategies on him to start out with. Ranged dps gets an imba buff but not for the fights where we were.

WWS Vezax tries
(Showing only Bosses, I was tanking on trash).
I do not have the Savage Roar glyph yet and in most of the fights I needed to mangle. In all fairness the DK often had to pull a cloud and the rogues were on interrupt duty. For the tries that we did with the tactic that got em down in the 4th try the next day, the WWS is bugged. There was more ranged dps at the top. The last try we took him down on I really screwed up my rotation. A try before that I was at nr1 damage done, 5.2k dps (recount data) 4 or 5 minutes into the fight.

Other fights are often not as nice for druids. Our main dps comes from Rip. We do ok, but when Rip comes in we go to the top. There are a lot of fights that have us on waves of trash. That is not nice for us.

This week we took down 10 bosses in 2 days already. I was there for all fights this time and tanked a lot. I listed the bosses below. Linked a WWS for most of em. (Those that are not linked you can find if you select different fights in the other WWS)

Flame leviathan
Fun fight, no traditional fight. So nothing much I can say about it.

XT-002
Cat; Was new for me. We 2-shotted him so I never got the chance to learn the fight. The rogues are up there so I should be near there too. However the boss completely becoming immune a couple of times in the fight means you loose all dots. My dps should be higher, though it is more suited for rogues.

Kalogarn
Cat; We 2-shotted this one too. So my dps is low again. I was learning the fight, while most knew what to do. Though the targets that are up are really good for cat DPS. When you are on the arm you will move away before it dies and let ranged finish it. In that time you can have Rip ticking while you focus on the main target.

Auriaya
The only boss we really had difficulties with that day.
I was tank here. You need 4 tanks to survive the 4 adds which die within a minute. Makes you pretty much useless for the rest of the fight. The main task I set before myself was to make sure nobody died. Whenever the large pack of little cats was nuking 1 guy I did Demoralising Roar. I think it is really helpful, though in later fights healers got it down and never let a person die again.
Something else I did was assist in killing the jumping add away from the raid. Taunting it too when the jumping was over. If he dies in the pack the whole raid is standing in a voidzone. This guy is really not tankable. Control of raid dps is a must here.

We then skipped a few bosses;

Hodir
Main Tanked him all the way. Full frost resistance.

Freya
Tanked adds here. We tried 3 tries with 1 tree up. That is really hard. Because it was late we took it down and killed Freya easily.

The next day...

Thorim
Tanking; The gauntlet was not that hard anymore (after wiping the weak before for a few hours). Get 2 mages to sheep the whirlwinding mobs that stun. Didn't do the gauntlet though, I tanked in the arena.
At first we tanked em in 3 groups (3 tanks). We didn't get the adds down, though that should not be really bad since you just need to survive till the gauntlet is done. However the less adds the better. Best to do is all aoe tank in the center. The tank who gets agro tanks the champions. These need to be disarmed and there is no real problem. All adds get aoe'd down.
Then when Thorim comes he does a real nasty debuff to tanks once in a while, that will get em easily killed. We started taunting and having alternative tanking by 2 tanks. Though phase 1 might not need that much tanks when all stay in the center, it is a nice thing to have 4 tanks so you can risk 2 dying. However we needed to battleress them too.

Mimiron
Cat; Something like last week. No WWS available. I managed to see dps I did in phase 1. 5.2k and top 3 for sure. Even with running in and out. In phase 2 you need to run to his back all the time and dps suffers. In phase 3 I stood under the head again. Doing nothing, just soaking blows from bomb bots bearform, cat gear and spec. Dps suffered there enormously.
Phase 4 I was again high on dps. When the tank died the lower part immediately turned to me and before I could go bear I died. Not my fault I died this time. Luckily our DPS DK tanked him till the end.

It was near the end of the raid day and with 30 minute trash killing ahead we went back and took some bosses we skipped.

Razorscale
Tanked adds; oneshotted him. Can't believe how easy he was. Of course most of us knew the fight already, but the tactics were so simple to learn and understand.

Ignis the Furnace Master
Tanking; The boss our guild knows the best of all guilds on my server probably. We had the server's first kill. This boss has been fixed and hugely nerfed. Kiting him, I only was in danger once (35% health) and I used Barkskin. Since nobody died in the fight we all got the meta-part for the immortal variant in Ulduar.

2 days of no raiding ahead. Getting some sleep, reading, replying to Tarskin. Sunday we'll get to Yogg-saron and hopefully/probably kill him on monday or teusday.

PS I have 3 t8.5 items now. The gloves. Using EPGP (dkp) system I will get such a low rating that after we stop with tanking prio it will take 3 months for me to get another item.
Do I now have 2t8 in cat? Sadly no. I have the gloves from Malygos (226) that have a lot of hit. Replacing that 226 gloves and nerfing the rest of my gear to get hitcapped again for another 226 item just for the 2t8 set... I don't know if I should do it. I rather save some emblems for the headslot item and get that enchanted properly.

Go for improved Mangle!

2009-04-22T01:09:00.007+02:00

Synopsis
Is it better to get improved mangle or master shapeshifter? With Idol of the corruptor; I think so. iMangle here I come!

Today I just thought of this when I saw the following item on wowhead. Idol of the Corruptor.

As if it was it's destiny, today we got General Vezax down. And guess what he dropped. And guess who got the item. Yep yours truly has the idol now. Now I don't have the time to do this at some point, but I have to do it now, tomorrow Ulduar is waiting again. (Btw more on the Vezax fight later. It is a really nice druid cat fight).

I tested it very shortly, just before we went Yogg-Saron. I did it on cat, and it has no cooldown and a very high proc rate. I guess it is a copy of Idol of Terror, but then with way higher stats. Also there is no cooldown what soever. I think the Idol of terror used to have one. The duration is also 12 seconds and not 10.

Ok so we know it is nice. The thing is, is it worth it taking iMangle for it?

The proc rate for me calculating miss is 61.5%. (see math block 1 below).

With this we can calculate the uptime on a 6 sec cycle and on a 4.5 sec cycle with a 12 seconds duration. This is a really complex thing. I did an attempt to it (see math block 2 and 3 below). If you have real math send it my way!
6 second cycle:
9.1% downtime.

4.5 second cycle:
4.2% downtime.

The difference is 4.9%

Now simplified; (It is late):
What does it give: 2.44% dodge and 1.98% crit for me.
4.9% extra downtime comes to 0.12% dodge and 0.10% crit.
In bossfights you have to consider the fact that you will be not able to dps some time. Meaning the buff drops often. The sooner it can be up the better. It is a stab in the dark but I would double those values. Then it is pretty significant.

For iMangle we would sacrifice Shapshifter and Master Shapeshifter. You dont want to drop anything else really.
2 points in Master Shapeshifter give 4% damage done = 4% threat.

iMangle gives threat back in a dps cycle. Taking a quick look at an old post by Kalon we can see that iMangle does 2.8% more threat.
I don't now how valid the stats currently are. But I want to believe that what he posted then is in general true.

In total we would loose 1.2% threat and gain dodge and a bit more SD.
Also we can go back to 5/5 furor which is really nice since you can't always choose the moment the pull is gonna be. Having a 100% certain 10 rage can avoid some nasty stuff.

As I have seldom threat issues I am willing to trade the threat for some extra dodge, especially when progressing in Ulduar. This will be my spec as of tomorrow: Link

Below you will find the math I used to calculate the values as mentioned in Block 1, 2 and 3.

Math Block 1
First of all the proc rate. Idol of Terror is said to have 68% proc rate (wowhead.com) I did a quick test on a lvl 83 target dummy. For me I got 52 procs in 51 hits, 28 crits and 6 misses. On hit/crit for me that comes down to 52 / (51 + 28) ~= 66%. So I'll take the 68% as a fact for now.
I also, with current gear, miss 2.33% percent of the time. I get parried (15% cap) 7.25% of the time. So that is a 100 - 2.33 - 7.25 = 90.42% hit chance.
Total percentage of proc = 68% * 90.42% ~= 61.5%. The chance to miss is 38.5%.

Math Block 2
When it procs it has to be renewed within 6 seconds or 12 seconds. So there are 2 chances not to drop it. The chance it drops is when they both miss = 38.5% ^ 2 = 14.8%
Every time mangle is off cd it can be renewed at 38.5% chance.
1 time: 38.5% ^ 1 = 38.5%
2 time: 38.5% ^ 1 = 14.8%
3 time: 38.5% ^ 1 = 5.7%
4 time: 38.5% ^ 1 = 2.2%
5 time: 38.5% ^ 1 = 0.8%

Now there is a 0.8% is will go to 5 misses.
This means that there is a 2.2% - 0.8% chance = 1.4% chance it will only go to 4 misses. This has been implemented below:

So if it drops is will be down for:
30 seconds 0.8% of the time
24 seconds 1.4% of the time
18 seconds 3.5% of the time.
12 sec 9.1% of the time.
6 sec 23.7% of the time.

Average downtime calculation:
time * percentage
-> 6 * 23.7% + 12 * 9.1% + etc.
-> 6 * 0.237 + 12 * 0.091 + etc.
The result is the average downtime.

Average downtime = 3.72 seconds IF it is down. Chance on that is 14.8% so average downtime with 12 seconds is 3.72 * 14.8% = 0.55 seconds per 6 seconds = 9.1% downtime.

Math Block 3
When it procs it has to be renewed within 4.5 seconds, or 9 seconds. If not it can be renewed after only a 1.5 second downtime. So there are 2 chances not to drop it.
(Most of the math is the same as in block 2)

So if it drops is will be down for:
19.5 seconds 0.8% of the time
15 seconds 1.4% of the time
10.5 seconds 3.5% of the time.
6 sec 9.1% of the time.
1.5 sec 23.7% of the time.

Average downtime calculation (see block 2)

Average downtime = 1.70 seconds IF it is down. Chance on that is 14.8% so average downtime with 12 seconds is 1.70 * 14.8% = 0.25 seconds per 6 seconds = 4.2% downtime.

First Mimiron - an epic story

2009-04-20T16:00:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Last night we killed Mimiron. It wasn't pretty. But then it wouldn't be epic now would it?

Last night was the 4th day of raiding in Ulduar for our guild. We skipped Saturday and went at it again on Sunday.

We went back to the hotfixed Ignis and killed him, first on the server. We got the server first because we spent 3 hours wiping on him on Wednesday already (before the fix). After that we went to Mimiron, who promised to be a real challenge. I wasn't there for the most part. Wasn't online soon enough and the raid was full as we don't use signups while progress raiding. As soon as enough people are online we go at it.
I did get subbed in at Mimiron and then got subbed out (see my previous post).

Then I got back in and we got to phase 4 that try with half the raid alive. The next try we went to phase 4 again, but this time with all 25 people alive. This is where it became epic.

None of us had any real practice on phase 4. Though phase 4 is a combination of phase 1, 2 and 3. So we acted like it was phase 1, dodging the barrage and having a tank on the head.
However for me phase 4 ended very quickly. The lower part started to cast his aoe and I ran out. Hard to see where mines are (with the middle and top part stacked on top of the lower part) I managed to not hit any mine! I turned around and ran to his back again. Just at that time it occurred to me that he was doing barrage. Which is like Lurker but slower and only 150 degrees or so.

You might wonder: How did you notice the barrage then. Well I saw my fat Tauren corpse on the floor. That was pretty much it for me.
The fight continued though. One by one we started dying (I was not the first to die btw). Rockets, barrage, the top part killing our ranged tank, some melee getting hit by a mine, and of course the normal shooting an hitting of the middle and bottom part respectively.

All 3 parts have to die simultaneously (within 10 or 15 seconds), or they repair to 50%. So we were trying to coordinate that. First time ever we were doing that so it was 3 people yelling different numbers on vent. "Stop at 5!" - "It is at 3.5" - "Bottom part is at 2.1million" - "No stop at 5%"

When you kill them there is actually a small bar left. They are not fully dead. So it is kinda hard to see if a part is dead or not. Because of people dying we had to take them close to death or else we could not burst the last few to death.
The lower part died first, then the head, though it seemed the head had died first. The few people left were nuking all they had. At that point the lower part was at 20% health again. It had started repair! People on vent crying out in dispair when just at that moment: DING! 25 people had gotten the achievement. Apparently the lower part had not repaired fully yet meaning it was still dead.

The raidleader and tank were so overjoyed they accidentally ran into a mine afterwards and died. We had 6 people left standing.

Next up General Vezax.

Status: 10 bosses down, 3 server first kills, 10 horde first kills. Working on general Vezax atm.

PS. A lot is happening in wow now. Making a pretty large number of posts. Be sure to check if you didn't miss any.

Great addons have lazy people behind it.

2009-04-20T14:52:00.000+02:00

Synopsis
Go RPB if you are not hooked to TMW yet.

I have told you about TellMeWhen in this (link) post.

I have told you about macaroon being bugged, and the lazy programmer finally making a new version that now in 3.1 works (though there was no working version for the first 2 weeks of 3.0.8.

The same thing happened to TMW. The programmer was lazy. I posted on curse 2 weeks before 3.1 went live the following bug (on PTR);

The setting: Show me only if casted by myself was bugged. It should show Rip and Rake only when I casted it, but instead it will show any Rip and Rake casted by anyone. However if mine is active it will show mine before any others.

It really pissed me off because I got subbed from Mimiron because I was doing low dps. I got back in though after the other druid had to leave and we killed him! There was no other druid so the buggy addon didn't bother me much then, though my dps was still low because of me soaking bomb bot blows in phase 3 and doing little else.

This is the supposed fix: (didn't get a chance to try it yet).

elseif ( isMine or not icon.onlyMine ) then

replace it with:

elseif ( (isMine and UnitIsUnit(isMine, "player")) or not icon.onlyMine ) then

Also TellMeWhen doesn't always show Mangle (Cat)/Mangle (Bear). I need to test that and see if it works with what I posted in my previous post.

So if you are looking for using TMW or RPB, go for RPB. TMW is a great addon, but the programmer behind it is not really interested in making his product work.

Mangle & Swipe

2009-04-19T19:14:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
The names of Mangle and Swipe have been changed. But even with the new names they might not work in macro's. Here's the solution.

In addition of Karthis' post "Mangle - Skill name changes" I think it is important for people to be aware that his post was not fully complete (at least for Macro's and not RPB). I posted it as comment nr 6 there, but people might miss it. Therefore this post.

I use macro's to not cast Maul and make it easy to keep a cycle up, not having to spam buttons. Something Kalon brought to my attention in the first place.

This is the macro I used:

#showtooltip Mangle - Bear
/cast !Maul
/cast Mangle - Bear

This didn't work anymore. The reason being that the name has been changed to "Mangle (Bear)".
Still replacing "Mangle - Bear" by "Mangle (Bear)" did not work. To make it work you should be using the following:

#showtooltip Mangle (Bear)()
/cast !Maul
/cast Mangle (Bear)()

Same goes for Swipe, since that name has also been changed.

#showtooltip Swipe (Bear)()
/cast !Maul
/cast Swipe (Bear)()

This is probably a bug, something to be fixed by Blizzard later. I don't know if "Mangle (Bear)()" will stop working, though if I had to program it I would make it possible for both to be used so macro's with "()" will not stop working all of a sudden.

PS. This might very well be true for the cat versions too, but I am not using macro's for those. If you are keep this post in mind.

Drake ^ 2

2009-04-19T17:20:00.005+02:00

Synopsis
What to do when you already have a Green Proto-Drake... ?

This is no photoshop. My GF got a Green Proto-Drake a week ago. She screamed so Loud I nearly forgot to tank Sarth. Then Teusday she had a new egg ready. And it contained ANOTHER Proto-Drake. It is like getting pwned by Blizzard. It is imba, but at this point it is sitting in her bank and is worth less then Aged Yolk. The egg and the Drake are Soulbound so she can't even give it to me or sell for a lot of money... Sigh.

Hey everybody come and see how great I look!

2009-04-17T20:12:00.007+02:00

Synopsis
I GOT T8.5 !!!

Just a quick one. got little time. And any time I have I should be raiding but...

I am the first horde on the server to have t8.5 chest, together with a warrior from my guild. Probably the allied guild Revelations got that already. Good chance I am the first druid.
We killed Hodir. He was super easy really. First try we got him to 41%. We took him down third try. I MT-ed with full frost resistance (535).
Some DBM lag (I think) made the other tank die. I Taunted him off too late, though I taunted him as soon as possible. He was supposed to tank without much frost resistance. I don't know why we used 2 tanks to begin with. I tanked him solo the last 30%, though threat was a bit low (with 4 frost items with no offensive stats at all). But I held it ok.

More on Ulduar to come.

Status now: 6 bosses down. (Of course Heroic, what else is there).
First 2 bosses were server fists. The rest is horde first.

Diminished returns

2009-04-13T12:43:00.004+02:00

Synopsis
Reason why posts aren't as frequent as usual.

Nope. sorry, not a post about my calculations on diminished returns.
Most of you noticed me not posting as frequent as what you are used of me. Couple of reasons; Easter, new job and I have said all things I wanted to say before starting this blog. One of the other reasons is that there is little news. PTR is pretty quiet, the game has nothing much to offer at this point. Will be back with reports on Ulduar either PTR or Live.

One tip; If you can craft stuff, check out this site: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=856
It shows all changes and new recipes there are for you.

Rotation study (Blogsourcing)

2009-04-08T19:23:00.000+02:00

Synopsis
Since I had so much trouble with the 12 second mangle rotation I tried some more and this is what I found.

I started out dpssing, again on a lvl 80 dummy, and not berserking ever. Berserk will screw up whatever you are able to call a "rotation".

This is the DPS is did over a LONG time (calculated form white damage hits it is 45 minutes).

At the start I was at 3450, that then got to 3650. It went a bit down after some screwups in rotation, but it is a good average. 3.1 PTR servers are in America. Meaning that I did suffer a bit from latency. Renewing Rip and Rake had to be calculated. Do it at 0.5 seconds left, not too soon or the last tick won't get through, not too late or there is a too long period without Rake/Rip.

Below I will tell you what rules I tried to dps by which resulted in this. I ask you the same, if you are possible and willing. Tell me what you found on ptr (not using Mangle glyph). Don't Berserk and upload a screenshot (or post it on you own blog) and link it in as a comment. Judging from white hit damage there is a good comparison to what your total dps to mine would be. If yours is higher i'll try to find out why.

The rules I tried to live by:
Ability strategy:

SR always up. If it is down and have no CP get 1 CP SR up at least. Then depending on Rip uptime do a 4/5 CP SR.
Mangle over Rake. Rake does nice damage but Rip does a lot more. Mangle increases that with 30%. Mangle doesn't always have to drop before renewing.
FB is overrated. It doesn't always crit. Rather keep the 5 CP to keep up SR and Rip then to let one of those drp.
SR > Rip > Mangle > Rake

Energy strategy:

WAIT! If SR, Rip, Mangle and Rake are up you have all the time of the world. Stock up on energy. Don't let it get too high because OoC procs a lot now. You should spend as little time as possible at 100 energy. (I'd like to be rogue and have 110 or 120 energy to have more time.)
Don't get to 5 CP asap. Wait to see what happens. If Mangle and Rake need a refresh soon, stop at 2/3/4 CP, get engery refresh en and then wait for SR or Rip to drop to renew it.

CP Strategy:

Try to go for 3CP SR. It is about the same time Rip takes. That is a way to go for a normalisation in Rotation. It will not always hold up and you are seldom able to do it, but it if the choise it is available do that. You will have max time to be ready to renew Rip (where a 2CP SR could have the SR needing refreshing before Rip. Als a 3CP SR gives you that little extra time to build a new 3CP SR after you have renewed Rip.
The 3 ways to spend CP are SR, Rip and FB. FB should be avoided as much as possible. Saving up on energy and Mangle + Rake to get to 5CP might leave you with a lot of energy (having OoC).
When to FB? Only when you have plenty of time left on Rip and SR. I find that to be about 12-14 seconds. It will not ensure having SR and Rip up 100% of the time, but the alternatives are worse. (As you see in 45 minutes I only did FB 33 times vs the 4 per 3 minutes I did before, not counting the extra FB I did after a Berserk).
When not to FB: 1: Less then 12-14 seconds on SR only. Wait till the last moment (is having 100 energy) and refresh SR. If Mangle and Rake both drop, do it earlier. so Mangle and Rake are not of or at least not a long time. It is worth it to wait for 70 energy to be able to SR + Mangle + Rake immediately as a combo.
When not to FB: 2: Less then 12-14 seconds on Rip only. The same as above. Try to avoid this situation. With high time left on Rip (10 sec) you should get the last of the 5 CP's from Mangle and Rake so you dont have them down or are forced to do an early Rip to refresh Mangle + Rake
When not to FB: 3: Less then 12-14 seconds left on both, Rip to expire before SR. Wait till rip is expired and refresh. 1CP SR (or more if possible) right after.
When not to FB: 4: Less then 12-14 seconds left on both, SR Expires before Rip. Depends on how long the difference is. If the difference is up 3 seconds you can refresh Rip just before SR drops. (Then 1CPSR after). If the difference is higher, refresh SR immediately (overwriting 10 seconds or so) and use the remaining seconds to get 5CP Rip asap.

This is kinda it. Would love to hear your input and see your tests.
PS, this is not a strategy I did when testing on live (3.0.8) servers. So applying this strategy on live servers can not be compared to my previously posted live dps test.

The fairer sex

2009-04-06T02:49:00.007+02:00

Synopsis
It occured to me theat though male WoW players play almost every class there is in WoW equally, I find that females are more drawn to certain types of classes.

[edit]
This is a entry that is in no way to be considered a serious one.
[/edit]

So to start off, lets be a male and thus blunt, generalize as much as possible here. If you are a woman and playing WoW you are most likely playing a Priest, Paladin or Hunter. Am I right guys? Am I? Oh yes I am!!! High five!

Well let me calm myself down and be a bit less of a drunken bar macho. Doesn't change the fact that this is true though. From the female players I have met in wow I have yet to see one that does like melee dps, though, of the classes mentioned, one can be melee dps. I myself know 2 female tankadins. But seriously, they have been hanging around with guys too much.

I have yet to encounter my first female rogue, warrior or DK. And by that I mean a level 80. Because who hasn't tried making a DK yet?

Of all classes a woman can play I would rate it like this:

23% Priest
18% Hunter
18%Paladin
12% Druid
11% Warlock
8% Shaman
7% Mage
1% Deathknight
1% Rogue
1% Warrior

Now to be totally stereotypical... this is why:

Women like to heal and nurture (healer classes)
Women want to multitask and need an overview of the fight to get themselves distracted (ranged).
Woman want to see all the pretty artwork while nuking a boss to hell (ranged)
Women like to have a pet cause they are so cute and absolutely adoring (hunter).
Woman playing wow are dark and broody types (preferring warlock over a dull mage)

Now you all let your girlfriends who play wow react and tell me I am an asshole.
Then after you can react and tell me that I am telling the truth. Because... come on. It is so obvious!

PS I have a girlfriend myself... Morituri te salutant.

DPS test

2009-04-06T01:30:00.000+02:00

Synopsis
This is a little dps test with about the same gear on 3.0.8 and 3.1. Lvl 80 dummy.

I promised this a while back and now did it finally. A dps test. Now I am not the best dpsser there is. I lack experience. Though I did ok I think. I dpssed on a lvl 80 dummy (not 83 boss) because they were mostly occupied.
Both test were done over about 6 minutes (2 berserks).

So first in 3.0.8:
Glyphs:

Glyph of Mangle
Glyph of Rip
Glyph of Rake (though this does nothing dps wise)

All cycles ended a few seconds after berserk was of the 2nd cooldown. So this dps is the dps I did over that period. It was easy keeping the cycles up and didn't let any buff/debuff go off for too long. So it is pretty accurate and ok dps I think.
I did Ferocious bite 6 times. That is every time I berserk and 2-ce in the rest of the 3 minutes, done when Tigers fury gave me energy and Rip and SR had a long uptime already.

Now for 3.1.0 (PTR):
Glyphs:

Glyph of Savage roar (3% extra damage when SR is up)
Glyph of Shred (2 seconds extra Rip time, maximum iof 6)
Glyph of Rip

The glyph of Savage Roar is available on PTR. It can not be discovered in traditional way though (Northrend Inscription Research). I did those all and there are none left. They will be thought by drops from bosses. A book that when read will give inscribers a random glyph they don't know yet. Glyphs on PTR can be bought from vendors (in Dalaran) for a few silver.

Since I had no Glyph of Mangle this was a hard test. After a few tries I got the hang of the cycle. The DPS meter shows 3884, but should be more like 3950 cause after the 6 minutes rip ticked on a bit. The real dps should have been higher too because I did a misclick and hit SR when it was up at 25 seconds left and Rip was off. Having no SR for extra energy then and unlucky crits made rip not tick for about 10 seconds.
It was easy keeping Faerie Fire up though. 5 minute cooldown is nice. Though it is bugged on TellMeWhen (and maybe all timers) since it didn't show uptime left.
The DPS is not as high as it promised to be a while ago, even though I have Glyph of Savage Roar now. One reason for it is that FB doesn't always crit now. (Only 25% extra from Rend and Tear).

Now the comparison:

White damage: is about the same. 373k damage vs 372k damage. That did not change much, or at all.
Ferocious bite: in 3.1.0 I had the opportunity to do a LOT more FB then in 3.0.8. One FB every Berserk and 4 in between Rips. Main reason for this is the 26 seconds Rip takes. When having 5 CP and more then 10 seconds left on both SR and Rip you are "forced" to do FB. Also, not all FB were crits anymore. Total FB is up but average damage is down.
Rake and Rip: In 3.1 I had trouble with the rotation, though they did a lot more damage. Rip did 84 % more damage per tick though Rake did only 10% more per tick.
Mangle and Shred: I did more mangle (only 12 seconds debuff vs 18 seconds), though the total number of shreds and Manlge is up. The reason is that you get more energy to spend on those hits because Rip takes less damage. It was a bit hard to always get 3 shreds in before rip was down though.

Cionclusion; The main damage increase comes from Rip. So it looks like I might should be doing less FB and more Rip, waste some energy and with 15 seconds left on Rip and 10 on SR I should be doing SR in that case and be ready to hold Rip up.
You can see I had trouble with the cycles. Rip and Rake ticked a lot more in 3.0.8 then in 3.1.0. Though they did a lot more damage (due to Crits). Main reason for this was Rip being up longer. I was also able to get more total mangle + shred. The main reason for this was that Rip was up a lot longer.
To be continued...

Some more blue posts

2009-04-05T15:48:00.002+02:00

Synopsis
Some blue post and my comment on it.

Blue post: Feral DPS
The main issue we are running into here is that the PvE dps, when pulled off properly, can be pretty high and that is what has caused some of the nerfs in 3.1. We recognize that maximizing PvE dps can require a fairly complex rotation which doesn't translate very well to PvP dps and we are considering some changes to improve that in the future.
One example would be to make Rend and Tear include mangle in its damage bonuses or add a glyph of some kind that affects more PvP centric abilities. We are just trying to be very careful to not be so focused on one aspect of the game (PvE or PvP) that we over do it in the other one.

Maybe it would be good to simplify the rotation a bit then? I don't want to be compared to a warlock that spams shadowbolt this way. Melee is not as simple as ranged DPS as it is. When you can't stand still and dps, your rotation will be screwed up. Don't give us the potential to be OP, remove that potential and make us as good as any other class.
And mangle is only a PvP thing. It has been established that mangle is a necessary evil for dps, but shred is not a real thing to use in pvp.

Blue post: New Druid form models
Druid forms are not coming in 3.1, but (big but) we are working on them. I have to say that when these do go live, it will have been worth the wait.
Finally! I myself am thinking more like an option: Form of the beast, where you can target any cat and assume it's form for catform. Would be nice and confusing though when people are assuming we are pets rather then druids.

Blue post: Feral tanking in 3.1
Bears used to have the highest armor and highest health which is no longer the case (obviously), but we added the shield ability and improve their cooldowns to try and bring them more in-line with other classes. We are keeping an eye on them and will make improvements if they turn out to be a clearly inferior tank.
The word: "clearly inferior" is unsettling. So what if we are an inferior tank, but it is not as clear. We'll be clearly not used as tanks. I recommend my guild to clearly not use any druid as MT. Only because we are not clearly inferior, but only slightly inferior. Why would a progress raiding guild ever use a druid? Why test how good a druid is as tank and wipe an extra 4 hours to find out you better use a warrior to tank?

Get your flasks while you can

2009-04-04T18:14:00.003+02:00

Synopsis
The crafting materials of flask of endless rage is changed. So craft em before 3.1 if you have the mats lying around.

New PTR changes:

Flask of Stoneblood now increases the player's maximum health by 1300. (Up from 750)
Flask of Endless Rage - Now requires 3xGoldclover instead of 3xFire Leaf

So Flask of Stoneblood is a bit better for tanking. Like that one.

Blue post on the flask of stoneblood changes:
We felt the current amount of health from the stoneblood was just ridiculous at how low it was, especially considering the damage from bosses in Ulduar so we buffed it a bit. Just keep in mind that we don't really like the idea of every new flask/upgrade being something with the same stats and just higher numbers every time. As an example it's possible the next tanking flask would have the same or lower health but extra mitigation stats like armor or defense on it.

I sure as hell don't hope it will be defense. Talking about making all tanks the same this will be a nerf to us druids since we can't use the parry rating it gives. The stamina one there is now might be better then still and blizzard pushes us druids back towards stamina again. If anything they would want druids to 100% always go for the flask that has less stamina.

As to the Flask of Endless Rage; all Flasks are getting changed. There won't be 2 hour flasks anymore, they will last 1 hour. But with the same materials alchemists can now craft 2 flasks. Conclusion, general flask usage is down from this. If you raid for 3 hours you will only consume 3 1h flasks vs 2 2h flasks now. This results in you saving 1 1h flask for an other time.
Other good thing about it, they now stack up to 20! I wish they did that for potions too.

If you have 2h flasks at the time patch 3.1 hits you would be able to trade them. Not knowing what this meant I did not craft the flasks yet. Last time I was on PTR I saw my 2h flasks had been transformed into an item that was usable. Using it created 2 1h flasks. Pretty easy. Knowing this it is safe to let the flasks be crafted now. But with the reagent change to Flask of Endless Rage it is important that you let em be crafted now, if, like me, you saved up and got mats lying around.

Back to the fact that defense on a flask would suck and would nerf that flask for druids. If you think about it, the Flask of endless rage already is nerfed for us druids. Hunters and rogues out there go around with 4k AP (something like that?) Where I myself have 6.7k AP. A flask that gives 180 AP is not as much an improvement for druids then it is for other classes (which in my opinion is one of the reasons that druids can't keep up in dps with other classes compared to the dps they did when everybody was badly geared).

The art of trashtanking

2009-04-03T15:31:00.002+02:00

Synopsis
Tanking trash needs dps to understand game mechanics. You can't tank decent with stupid dps.

Last night I was one of 3 tanks in Naxx 25. The trash tanking in Deathknight Wing can be hard. We did it over and over again after resetting the instance several times when we were failing on Razuvious trying for immortal. (Only to find someone dying on the boss right after that.)

Anyway the packs in there are pretty hard and consist of 5 or more and you often get 2 groups. The raidleader said our tanking sucked. And yes indeed the trash was all over the place. Though I really don't think it was because of bad tanking. It was because of bad dps.

Some examples.

A dps gets agro. He starts running away. RUN TO THE TANK!? What are these people who don't know to stay in range of the tanks?
Tanks start out on a group. Charge in and swipe. There are 3 tanks so we all 3 want to get those trash together so all our aoe hits all targets, and others can aoe all at once. We are often not given time to do this and while moving there is already hard aoe and dps on mobs. You loose agro and you have to chase them.
A rogue wanted to have some fun and gets agro on a mob. You taunt it and want to drag it into the pack. Instead the rogue stuns it... dps on the mob still continues, meaning you have to go back to the mob, do dps and hope you got to do enough threat when the mob gets out of the stun.

All the examples above are there because people have lost respect for trash. Understandable, but I think my raidleader should understand that and not say that 3, good, extremely well geared, tanks are sucking so hastily.

Anyway... the next and last example is in my opinion something hard to forgive. The arrogance is so huge and it shows a total lack of knowledge of the game mechanics. Again we are tanking trash. There is aoe damage. Normally swipe can do more threat then any aoe dps can so that is no problem. The only preblem is there when someone does single target dps. In this case a hunter. There are 3 tanks, and 6 mobs. Not all mobs are targetted by the tanks. Sure the tanks can switch between them, but it is really hard to do it correctly (not without marks anyway). So for tanks (at least for) tanking trash is having 1 main target you mangle and maul and the rest you swipe. Call them main target and off-target. next to that I constantly watch for some mob to break out of the pack so I can taunt it.

To continue on the example. The hunter had chosen a target that was an off-target for all 3 tanks and was not being tanked by anyone directly. This mob then ran towards him and I taunted it. It turned, came back to me, but when he was close the taunt had stopped working and the mob ran back towards the hunter. The thing was, all this time the hunter had targeted this mob and had not stopped dps. If this player had been decent he would have done any of the following (decreasing in most appropriate thing to do, nr 1 being the best imo):

before gaining initial agro, he would have seen himself high on the threatlist and switched to a different target. /target tank /assist. Very simple;
before gaining initial agro, seen himself high on the threatlist and he could have done Feign Death;
when the mob was running towards him he could have done a Feign Death;
when the mob was taunted by me he could have changed his target.

No. None of the above. Instead he kept on shooting this target so it ran straight back to him after the taunt was over. I talked to him and he said: "It is the job of the tanks to get them off me". So I really hope he doesn't understand game mechanics rather then be very arrogant, but then again, what is someone like him doing in a hard core raiding guild? Naxx has been to easy on bad players to perform well.

Anyway, to finish my story, if you have dps that doesn't allow you to tank you have to switch your target to the mob running away. You get that mob but that means you can't get threat on other mobs. So they break loose and you have to taunt those, with taunt being on cooldown. It is a cascading effect, that makes it seem you are sucking at tanking. Instead the dps that overagros should wake up and realise they might be doing something wrong...

Maim my ass off... (Blogsourcing)

2009-04-02T14:36:00.009+02:00

Synopsis
With not much melee around there is a good chance you will be maiming in Ulduar.

Last night I was in PTR in Ulduar, testing General Vezax. There was no thrash this time, but compared to last time we only had 1 rogue. The people that could interrupt were that rogue, 1 DK, me and an other druid in catform. I never was in a raid as feral, so I don't even know if Maim could interrupt spellcasts on bosses before 3.0.

Anyway it sucks! For kick a rogue only needs 25 energy. For maim we need to have Combopoints and it costs us 35 energy. A major DPS nerf. When it is your time to interrupt you want to be able to do that immediately. And you have to be ready!. That meant that it sometimes took 20 seconds of waiting time. 20 seconds of keeping GCD ready, 20 seconds of seeing your energy being full, 20 seconds in which you see Rip, SR, Mangle and Rake all drop off from your target... So fair to say my DPS was not optimal. That plus there was a dps nerf about 700 dps for cats on that boss. Well I think it would be about 700 dps even if I didn't interupt.
Also TellMeWhen still isn't fixed and instead of only showing my debuffs it shows debuffs casted by others too, though mine has priority, meaning it will show my rip with 2 seconds left before the other druid's rip with 16 seconds left. But after my Rip is gone it will show the other druid's Rip.

My dps could have been higher but the bossfight itself is totally unreliable too. We were playing from Europe and the server is in the US. That meant we had a .325 latency. Meaning I see the spellcast when it is already going and the boss knows I maimed him somewhat later too. So I had to keep GCD ready.

But it is my thought the boss is bugged. Because of a special shirt GM's provided us for this fight we were all hitcapped and my maim did always hit. The split second I saw the spell being cast I maimed but often the boss kept on casting his spell anyway. He also has the tendency to, after having a cast go through, cast 2 more after that, without others being ready for that. So that was a definite wipe every time.

Now the blogsourcing part of the post; I have a question for you on why maim doesn't always work.
Also I checked combat log and I wonder how that works too. My combat log showed me casting maim and doing x damage. 2 lines below that I saw the General Vezax his spell hit me. The thing I want to know on how that works is: Is the combat log local or server side? For instance, chat is server side. When you type a message and there is a lag you will not see the message. The message has to be processed by the server first and then will be given back to you (and whomever it may concern) and only then the message can be read. Does the combat log work the same? If you maim does the server have to process it and then you will see the maim in your combat log or will the combat log show it the second you cast it, not considering whether the server has received the maim?

PS in this case it could have been that the cast was ready before I maimed and that during those 2 lines I mentioned earlier the spell was traveling from him towards me. Still the change for that is really small, because since I was in melee range the spell (aoe) would have to hit me immediately.

Some more talent changes

2009-03-31T14:27:00.007+02:00

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

2009-03-31T02:16:00.001+02:00

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.

The art of money making

2009-03-30T18:33:00.002+02:00

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.

You are not prepaired...

2009-03-28T18:13:00.006+01:00

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...

Of Spice and men

2009-03-25T23:57:00.002+01:00

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.

My UI and Addons

2009-03-24T23:17:00.004+01:00

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.

Sartharion alternative positioning strategy

2009-03-23T21:04:00.005+01:00

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

2009-03-23T02:57:00.010+01:00

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! ;)

Immortal not far away - a fail story

2009-03-20T11:00:00.005+01:00

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!

The art of the UI

2009-03-19T13:53:00.001+01:00

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!

Ulduar testing - General Vezax

2009-03-18T14:03:00.005+01:00

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:

Everyone should be down from the platforms when you enter the room. If not the raid gets massive damage.
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!

Keylogger warning

2009-03-16T18:12:00.002+01:00

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...

2009-03-16T17:39:00.003+01:00

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!

PTR news: Swipe roundhouse kick

2009-03-14T23:59:00.006+01:00

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.

2009-03-14T17:07:00.008+01:00

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).

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.
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 ;)

New PTR Patch

2009-03-13T14:46:00.007+01:00

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.

The buff is removed when you have no weapon with BD equipped.
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

Achievement-whorism

2009-03-12T16:38:00.005+01:00

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! ;)

Roundhouse kick

2009-03-11T10:54:00.003+01:00

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.

Achievement fun

2009-03-10T00:11:00.007+01:00

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.

Frost Resistance

2009-03-07T18:39:00.009+01:00

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]

Tell Me When

2009-03-06T14:31:00.016+01:00

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.

Swipe swoop - another epic story

2009-03-05T19:58:00.008+01:00

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

2009-03-05T14:56:00.004+01:00

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

First view of emblem loot

2009-03-04T17:44:00.009+01:00

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

2009-03-04T15:42:00.006+01:00

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

2009-03-04T01:54:00.006+01:00

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.

Why Druid?

2009-03-03T13:08:00.006+01:00

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

2009-03-03T02:09:00.003+01:00

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.