This time should hopefully be the last move, because TSO appear to be quite excellent when it comes to reliability and speed. Certainly the Thunder website's performance has been superb since the move last week, with none of the problems of our previous host.

So Xmas has come and gone, as has another birthday, raid tier in WoW, and computer

I had got myself a new graphics card , but whilst testing it out some dust got into the casing and fried the motherboard :/

So that meant I had to purchase new equipment! So now my rig looks like this:

i5-2500k @ 3.3Ghz

Asus GTX 560TI

4Gb DDR3 Ram

I'm still using my old Antec 900 case, and the same soundcard and hard drives, but the above in conjunction with the new internet pipe mean everything is absolutely flying along now. It's great purchasing a game on Steam, and being able to play it less than 30 minutes later

As for WoW, Tier 13, Dragon Soul, was released at the start of December. We beat normal mode inside 2 weeks.

I shit thee not. It's dead easy :/

Only really the last fight presents any significant challenge, and only because the tricky part, phase 2, is behind 11 minutes of repetitive action smacking tentacles in the face like some PG version of a Hentai Tentacle short animated feature.

To say we were disappointed was fair. We had 2 groups out on the first raid night and both groups one shot the first boss. Ridiculously easy, he may as well have just farted and popped out his purples once we cleared his minimal trash.

We'll start T13 hard modes next week, as we gear up for it, but this content has to last us for about 5-6 months at a guess. I can forsee us losing bored raiders as a result...

Anyway, last post of 2011, so have a great 2012, and here's hoping the Inca's were wrong and the world doesn't end this time next year!

So in the quest for proper broadband speeds (over and above the "ok" speeds I'd had with Be, which in themselves were a HUGE improvement over the 1.5Mbs I'd had previously!), I went back to BT.

Yep, the dreaded BT

The reason?

Fibre Optic connection bitches!

4.52Mbs per second! Holy shit!

Yeah, you read that right: 4.52mbs per SECOND. BOOM!

No, that's not the speed of my connection, that's the speed of my downloads. Or put it another way: 16.36Gbs an hour. A Gb of data takes 3mins and 40 seconds on average to download.

My connection speed is somewhere around 36Mb/s, and uploading I'm getting just over 8Mbs per second.

Regretting it? Not so far. There were a few issues with Battle.net connectivity during the week, which meant the last 15 minutes of my raid in WoW was more or less an early night. That aside it's been brilliant. I can watch 1080p videos on Youtube no problem. No buffering, no pausing at the start for 5 minutes, just load the page and watch in realtime

Plus that and the deal for the FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) connection and the phone line works out about £30 a month cheaper than what we had previously.

Win-Win-Win

Yes, better than the iphone 4

The Samsung Galaxy S2 is gorgeous. It has a MASSIVE 4.3 inch screen with a Super Amoled display running at 800 * 480. It also is a dual core beast with currently the world's fastest mobile browser. It loads pages near instantly. Faster even than a desktop PC.

I've attached a screen-shot from the phone from my gear list over on Wow-heroes.com, just to show you how black the blacks really are on this thing.

It also has a great 8mp camera and a 2mp camera facing the user for video calling. Throw in the ability to play any media file you can throw at it, including mkv files which is commonly used for blu-ray rips and you have a mobile film experience bettered by none that I know of.

In addition to the above I've also moved webhosts this weekend. So hopefully things should be a bit nippier and less prone to going down. As usual, any screw ups anywhere let me know

Block Capped! \o/

Hail to the king baby, hail to the king

Next up: Get there without buff food or flask, which is 315 extra mastery over what I have now. Should be doable this tier I reckon

Bet Blizz gives Mastery diminishing returns next patch or something. Gah.

Raiding wise I took it easy for the first week, just to ease myself back into the old routine, helming some Tier 11 runs, because in all honesty I wasn't up to the stress of doing progression stuff for that first week back, so T11 content was absolutely ideal for me, just to give me a raiding environment to ease back into. Then last week I started into the T12 content, Firelands. So far it's been pretty easy, with 3 kills under my belt so far (2 x Bethtilac and 1 x Shannox). So far in total Thunder are sitting at 3/7 already, with Beth, Shannox and Baleroc conquered, and Alysrazor and Rhyolith on our radar having had a couple of nights so far on each.

So far the fights look pretty easy, it'll just be a case of mechanics practice in order to get a good bit into the content, and I'd imagine we'll be up to Ragnaros in about a month or so tbh. It's hardly a ton of content to be fair, and a pretty big misjudgement by Blizzard offering such a short raid tier, especially if we're meant to be raiding it for 6 months as we are with each raid tier generally (T10 and ICC was a big exception, as it was end of expansion content and therefore lasted a year while Blizz polished off Cata for release).

The other big news is that my plans for Thunder are starting to bear fruition. In order to survive the demise of WoW, which will probably come about in the next 5 years or so, I've started our expansion into other games. The first one up is Rift, and Tkalec has taken on the GM reins there to get us up and running in our second game. The current Thunder Council will oversee all games we start out in, and each game will still have its own GM/Council that are responsible to the Thunder Council. Hopefully it'll function well and allow us to retain members even if they leave WoW and decide to try other games out. It's always better to play new games with people you already know, so that's the idea behind it, and we will be expanding into other games as time goes by. The next one we'll kick off in will likely be SW: TOR when it gets released towards the end of the year.

So, about that titular CTC...

Yep, onto that. The 4.2 patch brought a couple of changes, and so far the Holy Shield change hasn't made MUCH difference. Still a pain knowing that most of the time I'm taking 10% more damage than I used to, but having the extra button I suppose is coming in handy. Especially in the likes of the Bethtilac & Shannox fights where the last 20% or so are pretty frenzied and there's a lot of tank damage going on.

Plus currently with my CTC set, I'm about 0.76% away from the block cap

For those for whom the above sentence makes no sense, don't worry, grab a cup of coffee and I'll explain

You're saying I can dodge bullets?

For every attempt to hit made in the game, be it by a boss on you, or by you on a mob or a boss, behind the scenes WoW rolls a virtual dice to determine the outcomes. Big dice. 100 sided dice to be fairly general (102.4 sided dice to be exact, but I'll get to that bit later). So for every time you activate an ability you will have a roll made for you behind the scenes, and the dice roll determines if your arcane missiles hit the boss, or if they missed. Or if your Avengers' Shield hits, misses, get parried or dodged. The majority of the time, even with zero hit rating these rolls will result in you hitting the boss.

The CTC I mentioned earlier stands for Combat Table Coverage. The Combat Table is basically the table with 1-100 (say) with the determined outcome against each dice roll. Now each player in the game regardless of gear and stats has a basic 5% chance to dodge a boss attack. Healers, dps, tanks, ranged & melee all have that 5% chance to pull a swift one and duck the boss's cleave. So when the dice is rolled and the result lies between 1 and 5 congratulations! You've just managed to dodge that nasty head splitting attack!

Beyond that basic 5% chance for bosses to miss you you then have other stats stacked on top. So next up comes Dodge. As a tank my dodge rating will be a lot lot higher than any other class. Most tanks are, as Dodge is one of our basic stats we look to build upon with it being a secondary "Green" stat on our gear. So as a tank with dodge rating, I have about a 12% chance to further dodge attacks, on top of the 5% chance I already have from my base chance. That gives me a 17% chance to dodge a boss attack completely. So if the dice results in a number between 1 and 17 then I've just managed to completely avoid the boss and his attempt to splatter my head open like a ripe cantaloupe.

Next up is Parry, which is like dodge, except I manage to get my weapon in the way and deflect the attack resulting in no damage taken. So in essence dodge and parry are the same thing really. With my stats that's another 13% chance to not get hit. That brings me up to 30% or thereabouts to be missed, dodge or parry an attack. So I basically have a 30% chance to avoid all melee damage and hit attempts on me by the boss.

When you're ready, you won't have to...

Furthermore there's Block. I'm a shield class, so I usually have a big frickin lump of metal on my left arm to block attacks. Now a blocked attack, unlike one that is dodged or parried, does in fact result in taking damage. Currently as a Paladin tank my block, in conjunction with my Meta-gem (which adds an additional 1% block value), will block 31% of damage taken, after armour reductions etc.

With 40,000 armour, any hit I take is automatically reduced by about 60%. So if the boss hits me with an attack that would normally hit unmitigated for say 100,000 hit points, that gets reduced by my block to 69,000 damage. My armour will reduce that by a further 60% resulting in damage around 27.6k. A big reduction from the original 100k.

After that your cooldowns come into play, such as Holy Shield (extra block value of 20%, meaning a 51% damage reduction upon a successful block), Divine Protection (basic 20% damage reduction) and so on. It's at this stage absorbs like Power Word: Shield etc are also accounted for.

So after all that, my basic block chance (thanks to Paladin's Mastery interpretation) is about 67%. Now with that 67% that means that 67% of bosses attacks will be successfully taken on my shield, not in the guts. Thankfully. So add in the earlier 30% chance to dodge or parry an attack, and that has me sitting at about a 97% chance to mitigate or dodge/parry a boss attack. Buff food and Mark of the Wild or Blessing of Kings will bring this up further, so at the moment, fully buffed etc I am sitting with a total of 101.64% chance to dodge, parry or block an attack. Sadly, still not enough...

Moar than 100%? Lolz whut?

Yep, 101.64%. You see bosses are always considered to be +3 levels above maximum level players, regardless of what level the player is. So even now Arthas, even though he is level 80 content, and was at the time thus considered as a level 83 NPC with regards to game mechanics, is now considered level 88 for level 85 players. It's a game mechanic thing in order to stop bosses becoming too trivial and allowing players to solo content too early.

So for every level above you, a boss (or other mob) has a bonus extra 0.8% chance to hit you successfully, getting past your dodge, parries and shield blocks. With raid bosses in T11 and T12 being considered level 88 (+3 to max level players), that results in them having an extra 2.4% (0.8 x 3) chance to hit you over and above your already 100% mitigation. That means tanks have to have 102.4% avoidance (technically not avoidance, more mitigation, but that's the common parlance) in order to remove unmitigated hits from the aforementioned Combat Table.

So that Combat Table will look something like this for me without buffs (Bosses Dice roll vs Result):

1: Miss
2: Miss
~ (5% miss chance from rolls >1 to <6)
5: Miss
6: Dodge
7: Dodge
~ (12% dodge from >6 to <18)
17: Dodge
18: Parry
~ (13% parry from >18 to <31)
30: Parry
31: Block
~ (67% block from >31 to <98)
97: Block
98: Full painful kick in the nads
99: Full painful kick in the nads
100: Full painful kick in the nads
Boss bonus levels!
101:Full painful kick in the nads
102: Full painful kick in the nads
102.4: Full painful kick in the nads
Combat Table Ends.

Buff food and Elixir of the Master will give me an extra 315 mastery which will push those full painful kicks in the nads another 4% or so further down the table (actually called pushing hits off the table!).

So that's how CTC works, and why it's desirable for shield tanks (Paladins and Warriors†) to try and get to that magical 102.4% chance to mitigate an attack (which is called being Block Capped, as you're capping the Combat Table by your block chance), as it will make sure you at least block all attacks, thereby taking a minimum of 31% less damage, before cooldowns, and thereby making me a hell of a lot easier to heal, as that's 31% minimum that healers don't have to expend mana on healing.

Your chance to hit the boss works on similar principles, which is why players have hit ratings, expertise and the likes, to reduce the chance that the boss will push your attempts to hit off his combat table, or be dodged or avoided etc.

Didn't think I'd do all that when I set out to write this post, but there you go!

*Those who have suffered my raid leading will attest to how long my fight explanations are - sometimes it'd just be quicker to watch the Tankspot vids

† DK's and Druids function slightly differently. DK's use a lot of dodge & parry with self healing as mitigation (Death Strike spam!) whereas Druids in bear form still operate on the model of dodging attacks or soaking them up with high health levels, which isn't ideal in the current healer-mana-micro-management raid environment, which is why bear tanks are having such a hard time at the moment in WoW.

My father started coughing up small bits of blood about 6/7 weeks ago, and my mum urged him to go to the doctor's to get it seen to. So he went, despite the fact that he hates doctors and going to see them to be poked, prodded and examined.

It was lung cancer.

On May 31st he was called by the surgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and told to pack an overnight bag, as he would be going in the next day to have a lung re-section, which involves cutting away the part of the lung with the tumour as well as a decent portion of the surrounding tissue in order to make pretty certain of getting all the visible and other parts of the tumour in a single surgery.

On June 1st he was admitted to hospital and had the surgery that day, and in all he had 60% of his right lung removed.

So he was in the ward for 5/6 days and got the results back. He was cancer free. They had gotten all of the tumour and he would be free to return home soon. We were overjoyed.

A night or so later his drain in his side got tangled up, infecting the wound in his side. The following night his left lung collapsed (he said he felt like he was having a heart attack) and he was brought into the Intensive Care Unit the following day after spending the previous day pretty much solidly on the oxygen supply.

From the time he went into the ICU until today he had setback after setback.

He developed a blood clot in his left leg, as his foot stopped circulating blood. He was immediately brought in for surgery to remove the clot, which was successful. 3 hours later he was re-admitted to surgery. He had developed a blood clot in his right leg this time. Again the new surgery was a success. At this time he's still having serious problems breathing, and needs the support of a ventilator to have his remaining lung capacity oxygenate his blood supply.

Two days later he is re-admitted to surgery. Yet more blood clots, again in each leg. And yet again both surgeries were successful. But we were warned another time and it would be highly unlikely that the future clots would be removable, and amputation might have to be the only option.

He's still having trouble with his breathing and by now it's not getting better. We're told he has contracted pneumonia, and that it's not really clearing up any.

A few days later he has heart scans and stomach scans in order to try and determine the source of the clots, but nothing is found. Still his breathing is ventilator reliant and getting gradually worse.

A week ago things started to improve. His legs had cleared up and no more clots, diagnosed kidney damage and abnormal liver results had both been cleared up and the only thing left keeping him in the ICU was his lung problems.

The following day my mother, sister and I were called in to speak with the doctor in charge of his case, and were told that since he had entered the ICU a few weeks prior that his lung function just had not improved at all. In fact it was still getting gradually worse, and the level of oxygen getting into his blood stream was getting lower and lower. They had tried nearly everything that they could think of, but nothing was working, and unless there was a significant turnaround in 24-48 hours then the chances of his surviving his ICU stint were "very poor".

The turnaround we were hoping and praying for never came.

At 1:30pm on June 27th 2011, my father, Sydney James, died. He was barely 60.

For the two weeks leading up to his death, my family and I have been heartbroken, knowing that he's critically ill, and everything seemed to go against him. 6 operations in all, including a tracheotomy 4 days ago to help him be more comfortable, and he came through each one with flying colours. Sadly though 47 years of smoking had damaged his remaining lung capacity beyond any hope of repair or healing. The Staphylococcus Aureus pneumonia caught hold in his lung and whilst it was being held at bay by the seriously strong anti-biotics he was being drip-fed, the damage and trauma to his lungs was in the end just far too much.

He will be cremated on June 30th.

His family, friends and work mates all loved and adored him. He was a gentle, kind and loving man, who I will miss dearly with all my heart and soul. He was my role model and the man I admired most in the world. I will miss him each and every day I have left to me in this life and hope, somehow, somewhere, that I will see him again.

I love you dad. Rest in peace.

So chuffed we finally got there, and before the content was nerfed too

We will kick off hard modes this week, starting with Magmaw and Halfus. And the amusing thing is, casual old Thunder are only one week behind our more hardcore Alliance sister guild, Lightning!

We have recruited some excellent players over the past few months, and with a mix of them and some reliable old Thunderites, we have finally completed what I had set out to do - get through the normal level content again, same as I had us do in Wrath, whilst it's still current content.

I'm also pretty proud that I lead 11/12 of the raids that downed each of the bosses for the first time. Initially it was because there was no-one else active to raid lead, but more towards the end because I think people really started to pull together and focus on the job that needed doing.

So Firelands inside the next fortnight or so, which looks like it has some fights with interesting mechanics. Ex Pilotwings players will be at an advantage believe it or not with one fight

Yeah yeah, I know, I've said it a million times before, and likely a million times more, but I do want to keep the site active and updated as often as possible. That might mean shorter posts, but we'll try anyway and see how it pans out.

So a new theme, a bit simpler and less showy than the last one, although I still do like the Arras/Classical Gamer theme, so much so that I use it for the Thunder website.

As far as wow goes, we're currently still sitting at 10 out of 12 of the end bosses downed. Been stuck on Nefarian and Al'Akir for what seems like an eternity now, and with the T11 normal content nerfs the impending 4.2 patch is bringing, I would seriously like us to get it done before the nerfs hit, as they're substantial reductions in boss difficulty across the board. Most to the tune of -20%, in health, attack power, damage done, longer Feedback debuffs on Al'akir (meaning you don't have to stack the adds in P2, just kill them as they pop), less adds etc. As I said, substantial nerfs, and I thought we were at a stage now where we should be polishing off normal level content at the very least.

Yes, we're a casual guild, but that doesn't mean in attitude towards raids. I still expect raiders to do their utmost to do the job precisely and well. Hell if I can spend literally hours poring over my gear's stats, debating threat vs mitigation, gemming choices, rotation etc, why isn't everyone doing the same?

Either way, if we don't get them down before I go on holiday in 2 weeks it's likely we'll be looking at killing the nerfed versions. Which won't be satisfying to anywhere near the same degree otherwise.

4.2 of course brings Firelands with it, and the return of Ragnaros, the fire elemental Lord. Molten Core was merely a setback!

Oh, and I've also changed from a Blood Elf to a Tauren, hence tinned beef

4.2 will also bring some tankadin changes to one of our core damage reduction abilities, Holy Shield (What's that? Another wow patch and they're changing core Paladin abilities again? Well colour me shocked! /sarcasm) This time, instead of its current iteration where it becomes active if you use either Shield of the Righteous or Word of Glory (still an unfortunate acronym, WoG) and giving you a flat 10% increase in the amount of damage blocked upon a successful block, they're changing it to an activated ability that gives you a 20% increase in blocked damage, but stays up for 10 secs and has a 30 second cooldown.

Yay, another button to push in order to reduce damage. That's like what, 5 now?

• 3 min CD: Guardian of Ancient Kings: 50%
• 3 min CD: Ardent Defender: 20% plus 15% self heal on "near death"
• 3 min CD: Divine Guardian: 20% for everyone in the raid bar the paladin
• 1 min CD: Divine Protection: 20%
• ½ min CD: Holy Shield: 20%

We've rapidly gone from being the loltank, which was generally considered to be the easiest tank to play, to something with more buttons and activated abilities than the previously most complex tank class, the warrior.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have the tools to do our job, but with all the other incidental abilities we have that we need to use mid-fight (hands, seals, heals, taunts and hell, what about our attack rotation?), my UI is beginning to look like the fucking control console for the USS Enterprise. Some day soon I swear I'm gonna hit the wrong button and end up ramming through the nearest wall at light speed, leaving behind a rather large bloody Tauren sized smear and the faint smell of cooked beef.

So I started a Goblin warrior 2 weeks ago, and over the course of a 4 day weekend I smashed (not a Richard Keys reference) my old levelling record for 1 to 50, and currently she sits at level 63, in Outland, and a few short levels away from hitting Northrend.

She's enormous fun. Playing a warrior feels very different to the Paladin, much faster and more like a ballet of whirling death, whereas the Pally plays a lot more stolidly and in a more considered fashion. I'm levelling her as both Fury and Arms for the meantime, but when I get to level 69 and gain the ability to dual wield two handed weapons it'll be Fury & Protection from thereon out.

I've yet to even try Protection out as a warrior, and I have no idea if I'll like it or not. I'm very used to all the defensive cooldowns and self healing that the Paladin variety of Tank has at their disposal, so as regards making her my new main for tanking I don't know. If I like it I may well do, but that's a good way off in the future yet, and there's a lot of raid bosses to be taken down in the meantime...

Speaking of which, we've been raiding now for about 6 weeks and in that time we've managed to get 5 bosses licked (including Argaloth) and are pretty close on downing 6 in the shape of the Twin Drakes (Theralion and Valiona). We're also now running a full 4 nights a week raiding schedule, so even the most heavily rotated classes and roles (er, me and the other tanks surprisingly) will get at least 2 games per week on average.

Reputation grinds are once again the order of the day, as a primary means of gaining access to early epic gear and decent enchants.

So atm I am sitting well past the point of gear requirement for heroic 5 mans, and nearly to the point where I am ready to start raiding once again.

So how has the expansion been thus far?

Well the easy answer to that one is a lot more difficult and time consuming than Wrath ever was. 3 hours to do a single 5 man heroic dungeon? Crowd Control measures needed for nearly every single trash pull? Healers running out of mana after every encounter?

So yep, a good bit different from the easy aoe, run and gun fashion of Wrath. Skill requirements are a hell of a lot steeper this time round, at least until encounters become outgeared, and people are intimately familiar with the mechanics of every fight.

Raiding is both an enticing and scary prospect, because people will all have to bring their A Game if they are to succeed in raids this time around.

Of course the hardcore guilds of the world have just started polishing off the final heroic 25 man bosses, whereas we won't begin normal mode raiding until the 19th of this month. Suits us just fine tbh, as the trailblazers will have their experience to pass on to those of us coming along behind them.

Thunder at the moment I think are in a good place, everyone is busy beavering away on rep grinding and heroics slogs. We will likely be re-opening raid recruitment in the next few weeks, now that we have somewhat of a clearer picture of where all our Wrath raiders have settled class and spec wise for the new content.

As for me I am still happy being smashed in the face by large scaly monsters, even though the difficulty involved in tanking has shot up considerably: Balancing threat, with mob positioning, my own positioning, survivability (as much on my shoulders now as the healers, moreso than Wrath ever required), and cooldowns, well timed ability use and optimization of gear in a landscape where not even the hardcore stat nerds are agreed yet on stat weights. Think Wrath difficulty times three, minimum.

All very much up my alley, and I am bloody loving every minute of it!