Sar's Yarn

After the dawn…

So 4.0.1 has dropped, and we've had 3 days or so to get used to things. So how are things stacking up atm?

Well....

Tanking has become a metric fuckton more difficult, because DPS at the moment isn't tuned now for level 80, as Blizzard have stated that it's now tuned for level 85 content. Sorry, but what sort of company fucks over their paying customers for 2 to 3 months until the majority of the raiding player-base hits 85? Taking into consideration that we won't be able to level past 80 at all for 2 months until Cataclysm is released.

What about the levelling process if everything is tuned towards level 85 mechanics?

Gawd.

Anyway, I'm sticking with it, despite all this, because whilst it's a lot more difficult to hold threat against DPS who are suddenly pulling gigantic DPS figures from out of their nethers (30k isn't unheard of against Festergut for instance for some classes - and yes, that is the DPS figure for ONE player, not the raid as a whole!) it will work itself out over the medium to long term. I have faith!

However running 5 man content from Wrath, which was famously all about the AoE-fests is a trifle more difficult as we're already lumbered with the Cataclysm mechanics where AoE tank threat has been nerfed and has become exponentially harder to hold threat on a pack of anything more than 2 mobs. Seriously. Stuff we'd faceroll hold threat on has suddenly become a huge challenge. Not least because DPS tend not to give you time to crank up threat. Previously this wasn't such a huge issue, as you could generate some snap aggro pretty quickly on the pull, but that's gone to the wall now, as have most of the DPS classes threat-reduction talents with the re-designed 31 point talent trees.

So tanks need to relearn how to play the current content, and DPS need to learn to hold the fuck off on AoE'ing everything in sight. The one grace about the stupidly high DPS output now is that with everyone's health pools being larger (my tank gained 7,000 health overnight, whilst the mage gained a lollerific 12k health and 10k mana!) overnight, most heroic dungeon mobs are dead before they can start wading into the dps to kill everything.

So trash is fine, but boss tanking is going to be very ping-pong for a couple of months until we can start getting lots of Cataclysm level gear to up our threat levels to those that are already being put out by DPS.

Speaking of gear, and despite the 5 man horribleness, I intend to run enough dungeons this weekend to get myself kitted out in full T10 gear, as running dungeons now gives Justice Points, which have replaced both Emblems of Triumph (the old dungeon badges) and Emblems of Frost (the old raid badges). So hopefully the jump in gear will help with coping with the new threat management and play-style that that entails, that all tanks have suddenly have thrust upon them, as it's not just me, nor paladin tanks that are seeing these same threat problems; it's all tanks of all classes.

4.01 – The Dawn of a new Era

4.0.1 will be released this Wednesday, and with it comes a whole lotta changes, not just for tanks & mages, but for every single class in the game...

I'll not go into the changes in any detail, as other tanking blogs have been there and done that in detail aplenty. I will however say that I am looking forward to 4.01 a lot, even if it does change (slightly) the way in which a Paladin Tank plays. In essence Blizzard's lead designer, Ghostcrawler, wanted Paladin tanks to be a bit less faceroll in their gameplay.

A laudable ideal, and for the longer term tanks (which I'm not) a bit of a blessing in that his stated ideal was to have us play a lot more dynamically and not 969 it all the time. So the rotation has gone from hitting a 9 second ability then a 6 second one, back to a 9 second ability to....

Hitting a 3 second ability (always Crusader Strike) then a 9 second ability, back to a 3 second ability etc etc. I have thus dubbed this the CSx rotation. CS followed by x where x equals Judgement (just the one now!), Avenger's Shield, Exorcism, Consecrate (now on a 30 second cool-down) etc.

So even more face-rollingly undynamic. GG Ghostcrawler!

Mind you when it was beta'd that we'd have an FCFS-like priority system similar to Ret Paladins the amount of crying and wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual place (the official WoW forums, where else?) was loud enough to be heard from space. And yes, I know sound doesn't travel in a vacuum. It was THAT LOUD.

There have also been problems with tanks in general and their ability to hold threat, so there's been a helluva lot of tweakin' goin' on before 4.01 hits this Wednesday.

One major change/tweak is Righteous Fury. It now affects all damage done by the Paladin, and boosts its threat a whopping 200%, waaay up from the 80% boost to holy damage only as is currently on live in 3.3.5.

Of course the one huge massive change I haven't mentioned yet: Holy Power.

This is something akin to a rogue's combo points in that you have a maximum of 3 at any time, and you can use it in conjunction with several abilities in order to boost their effectiveness. The major ability for Tankadins that will benefit is Shield of the Righteous, which will see its threat and damage output boosted a hell of a lot with a stack of 3 Holy Power behind it.

Crusader Strike is of course now a baseline ability for all Paladin specs, having been formerly the domain of Ret Paladins only. This is infact our baseline ability for not only threat generation, but for generating Holy Power as well, as each time we use CS we will generate 1 charge of HP. So every 5 global cooldowns we'll be firing off a SotR with 3HP behind it.

Mind you with Cataclysm's apparent emphasis and return to vanilla Wow's tanking ethos of "Tank one mob and CC everything else" AoE tanking will be a sparsely used "skill", but we'll still have Hammer of the Righteous to replace CS in a trash-tanking capacity.

And the other bonus with the patch is that Tier 10 gear will be purchasable with the rewards from running heroic dungeons. All emblems and badges will be converted into points of various flavours so we'll all be able to get full T10 gear inside a week or two of the patch! Yay!

Tankading!

The Paladin is now 80 finally which means the process of gearing up has begun in earnest.

I had a few pieces crafted, including some top level boots, and 3 days after hitting 80 I now am ready to tank Naxx and Ulduar 25 man! Skill notwithstanding of course!

So I have run through a few heroic 5 man dungeons, and begun gathering my Emblems of Frost. I've also purchased a couple of pieces of level 245 gear via Triumph emblems.

Far faster than the mage, because everyone wants and needs a tank, DPS is dime a dozen and readily available.

So I have a few pieces of level 200 gear left to upgrade, and I'm picking up 1 piece of gear per day on average, with 232 gloves being the most recent gear I picked up last night.

So next week should see me ready to start taking in ICC. Tanking against higher geared players is hard, but it's fun. Trying to keep aggro on bosses whilst DPS are putting out between 7k and 10k (seriously, in a heroic 5 man?) is quite the challenge, but an enjoyable one at that.

So far I can hold aggro against DPS pulling 6k or so. Just about. So in about a week I should be good to go for ICC10 tanking at the least.

I've also started soloing 5 man dungeons. Last night kicked off with Burning Crusade's Hellfire Ramparts on normal. Piece of piss, and didn't even break a sweat.

Might go for the classic raids solo as well :p

Tankadin. FTW.

So my formerly Retribution Paladin, Melée, has now switched to become a full time Protection Pally, or in layman's terms: A Tank.

It's been interesting to find out that I'm not bad at tanking tbh, it's a lot of fun and certainly a completely different ball game to DPS, as this is the first time I have ever tanked on any character in any MMO. Previously it's been either melee or ranged DPS, but this is proving to be a lot of fun in comparison.

Sure you run into some complete dicks in 5 mans, particularly the DPS who either obviously haven't got a threat meter like Omen or Skada installed, or just don't give a shit. Then you have the healers with crap gear who OOM after each trash pack, which is a very stop-start experience. The odd time however you get a group that just works. DPS watch their threat levels, the healer does a great job and keeps you topped up, and everyone works together to finish the instance. Only happens about 20% of the time, but the cocks make those great groups just all the greater in comparison.

So as I said, I'm enjoying it quite a bit, and have found out I'm pretty decent at it. Definitely a challenge trying to ensure you've got the attention of all the mobs when you're picking up packs of trash and the DPS lets rip on the AOE - especially Mages and Warlocks. Blizzard and Seed of Corruption are the biggest threats respectively there. Boss tanking is a piece of piss tbh, and a lot easier than tanking packs of mobs. Although it does make life interesting for the healer

You'd expect to get the odd bit of criticism, but there hasn't been really any tbh, and none of the groups have cottoned on to the fact that I'm only tanking less than a week! It only came about because I tried queuing as a tank whilst still in Ret spec and got a group within 5 seconds. Seriously. Tanks get groups SO damn quick, I'm lucky if I have time to reach round for my headphones behind me before the LFG pops up. DPS on the other hand, especially running lower level normal dungeons, can and do take upwards of 30 minutes.

So 5 seconds or 30 minutes? Hmmm, lemme think that one through...

So I respecced my Holy off-spec into Prot and bought some pieces of tanking gear, and really haven't looked back. It's been a blast so far, and I can't wait to get her to 80 so I can start running heroics and maybe get some MT ICC action before Cataclysm hits!

One final piece of advice I will always remember that I read somewhere: If the tank dies, it's the healer's fault. If the healer dies, it's the tank's fault. If the DPS dies, it's their own damn fault for not watching their threat!

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In other news, and actually quite a while back now (6 weeks or so), Thunder finally killed Arthas (Lich King)! There's a full post over on the new Thunder Website (more about that in a sec). So after 6 weeks or so we finally managed to down him with a fairly core group that had stuck at the task each and every week until the job was done. So we now have 10 Kingslayers in the guild, of which yours truly is one, and this means we can now access heroic 10 man ICC. Mainly on Gunship at the moment, as I'd like to get at least another couple of groups through the LK fight and get some more guildies the title and achievement. Not bad going, especially as most of those weeks was either 1 night, or no nights at all. Rare was the week where we got 2 nights at him, so in all I'd say we probably had 7 nights or so at LK. So not bad going at all.

Especially so as we're still raiding at this point of both the summer (what with the World Cup and all) and of the current expansion. Traditionally Thunder don't finish off the endgame content of an expansion until the next expansion is released, more so because we tend to lose members hand over fist over the summer, as members either lose interest in the game or just want to spend time doing other things.

So I had to come up with a strategy to try and keep the guild together and active as much as possible over the summer and in the lead up to Cataclysm, and so far it appears to be working well. We're still pretty active in ICC, with only the odd 25 man ICC night having to be busted down into 10 man groups or cancelled altogether. Same for 10 man, as we're frequently getting 2 x 10 man groups out of an evening, although this week wasn't great, as it saw a cancelled 10 man group and 25 man not running at all.

But so far the strategy to keep us active and together over the summer has thus far worked pretty well, and we're still pushing progression in 10, although Blood Queen Lana'thel seems to be a bridge too far atm for 25 man for some reason. So we've accomplished some things as a guild that we've never done before - finishing off end game content while it's still current, although we likely won't kill Heroic LK until after Cataclysm hits sometime towards winter.

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So a new website eh?

Yep, that's right we've split from Lightning and decided to go it alone with our own website and forums. That means we can do whatever we need to in order to provide what our members want from the guild. No more trying to go through another Guild Master for stuff we need, despite the fact that I'm the Guild Master for Thunder currently and should have had the same level of access and responsibility as our former Alliance counterparts in Lightning had.

The split is a complete one, which wasn't our choice, as all we wanted was a website and forum of our own, but Lightning decided that they wanted the split to be 100%, and have abandoned the tradition the two guilds had of inviting members of the other side on their alts into their guild. We still have a few Lightning members in Thunder on some of their alts, but they've decided that Thunder members will no longer be able to join Lightning. That's fine, it's their guild and they can do what they like.

As can we

So after a couple of things acted as the final straw, I put the proposal to the Officers and Guild Council that we move to our own website and forums, and following a lot of discussion we went ahead with the move. And I have to say I don't regret the move one little bit. We can now style and structure our forums how we want, and we have a website to be proud of - just another little duty I have to take care of now to add to the list

And yes, I'm now Guild Master of Thunder. Just a title really as we're run by a Guild Council, but what it really means is that I get more work to do. Most likely because I'm the stupid sod that decides to do the majority of the leg work and getting stuff organised and done. Like designing and creating the website, maintaining it and the forums, updating the SK lists, scheduling all our raids for the month ahead, approving half of our raids every week, dealing with recruitment applications on the forums and pretty much everything else that falls by the wayside.

It's a lot of work, but I enjoy doing it because I love the guild so much. And that's basically down to the people in it. Which is why I was so determined to keep as many of us together as I could over the summer and into Cataclysm.