Healer Envy

I... Want... Control...!

2011-02-24T08:59:00.000+01:00

When I started my WoW career, I was all into healing. After a while, I figured out that a good tank can do so much more to change the outcome of an encounter than a healer can. In fact, there is very little a healer can do to change the outcome of a fight, apart from healing like crazy. Sometimes, the healer saves the day. But I figured that more often than not, it wasn't the healer. It was the tank who managed to take control of the fight. The tank could prevent more damage to the group than the healer ever could heal.

Since then, I've played all four specs of tanks. My two non-tank classes, Zuna the priest and Kirba the shaman, has mostly been lying idle except for some short bursts of "I'm going to level up Engineering" or "I'm going to finish What A Long Strange Trip It's Been" (I have, by the way, finished it with 4 characters now).

Most recently, I had fun with my goblin warrior, whom I started after Cataclysm. I've played PVP a lot with her. Mostly as protection. I fell in love with how much control I can bring to a fight. I am really bad dps, barring a lucky reflected spell, but I could change the outcome of a fight with allies at my side, by enabling them to kill the enemy team unhindered.

When I was around 65 with my warrior, my wife decided to play with me again. She has a tauren druid, at that time lvl 63. We played together a lot, but I was always higher level than her. In addition, I had heirlooms and played BGs on my own. Sum it up, and I raced from her in XP. So she asked me to wait so she could catch up with me.

I froze my XP at level 74, when my wife had just entered Northrend. I still tried to play BGs, but since I had frozen XP I would only meet other players with frozen XP, in effect twinks. You know what I really didn't like about that? No, I didn't mind meeting much tougher opponents. I minded the extremely long BG queues. Several hours, sometimes.

So... rather than wait forever to get into BGs, I decided to play with my other characters. I went through all my tanking characters and played BGs, all of them in the 80-84 bracket except my pally who is 85. The thing I found out is that none of the other tanking specs have anywhere near the amount of control that a warrior has.

Blood Death Knights

A death knight tank has very good survivability. But control? I have a 60% snare, which I need to reapply using a rune every 8 sec. It was crippling to try to keep an enemy perma-snared, not least to my dps. Desecration in Unholy might solve some of this, but at the loss of extremely good PVP talents in the first two Frost tiers.

I was, however, able to bother healers by Death-gripping them out of range of their healing targets, strangulating them and mind freezing them, so I wasn't completely useless. But it certainly felt so. I respecced to Unholy and found that my control improved vastly, which actually improved my survivability in most fights. No need to mitigate damage that never happens because I can kite, eh? And my dots still tick (they do as Blood too, but waaaay much lower), my ghoul still damages, and my Death Coils hit like trucks range.

Feral druids

The interesting thing about feral is that you can't avoid picking up a lot of dps talents along with the necessary tanking talents. Not all of them, but enough that I really felt I could deal some damage. I've learned that a good feral druids know when to shift, and shifts fast. It takes practice. After some hours in BGs, I wasn't all that bad at it. Bear when focused or need bash, cat when I'm ignored, caster to cyclone/root and heal a wee bit, or just shift to the same form to remove snares.

Druids actually have a fair bit of control. It's very handy that the snare is attached to other abilities, meaning I'm snaring my target at almost all times. Nature's Grasp is very handy for bothering anything attacking me, and I can use Entangling Roots and Cyclone to give my enemies a headache. Feral Charge is awesome fun, though in most cases worse than the warrior charge/intercept. Bash is an on-demand stun, and Prowl -> Pounce was very handy against anyone attacking my allies when we were defending a flag. In addition, it's very handy to be able to run from most situations. Note that I played before 4.0.6, meaning I used instant Entangling Roots with the glyph, I could still break roots and not only snares by shifting and berserk made me immune to fear. Druids really needed that nerf, though.

However, despite doing fairly well, I never really felt that I was "in control" of the fight like I often did as a warrior. Truth to be told, most of the fights was more like "I hope we can kill them before they kill us", hammering my keys in desperation. And healers? Healers were gods. Outside of gettting the jump on them from prowl with berserk up, I never managed to kill one alone. It's nice that feral druids get a spell interrupt, but they kitty version costs 25 energy! Compare that to kick (rogue interrupt) who costs 15 energy. That is 2.5 secs worth of energy regeneration compared to 1.5 secs. It really takes a bit of planning to interrupt successfully.

I think I like being resto better in PVP. Tons of control attached, yes please. Someone said "If you are casting more heals than cyclones as a druid healer, you're doing it wrong".

Protection paladins

<rant>

I know I've said this before, but I have to say it again: I really don't like Hammer of Justice.

First, it has too long duraction, in fact sharing the first place as longest stun in the game with a 5-CP Kidney Shot. It worked out slightly better when there were lots of stun-reducing talents around.

Second, I feel it is "too common" in the sense that I encounter it very often, since it's shared by 3 different specs.

Third, it is a one-shot pony. With that I mean it's a long cooldown that many paladins practically rely on it to win. A lucky resist/miss or a class that can remove stuns like Mages (Blink) or Death Knights (Icebound Fortitude after 4.0.6) and very much of the paladin's control is gone. It would be better if it was a 4 sec stun on a 30 sec cooldown or something like that.

Fourth, it has no bloody requirement combined with a very generous 15 yard range glyphed. I believe every other stun in the game has requirements, and all but Kidney Shot lasts shorter.

</rant>

Okay, done ranting. Seriously, though: the only snare available to protection paladins is the glyphed Avenger's Shield. It's ... interesting, but it's dispellable and can't be easily reapplied. I've spent lots of time running after my target as a pally. Snares are very common, and as soon as Hand of Freedom is on cooldown, you're as kitable as they come.

The thing about protection pallies, as far as I've discovered, is that they are very reliant on a proc: Grand Crusader which resets the cooldown on Avenger's Shield. It only procs on Hammer of the Righteous and Crusader Strike, both of which requires melee. So if you are being kited, you have nothing more to do than wait for the cooldown to refresh on it's own (15 sec), bubble or try a hammer of justice.

It is, however, possible to get to melee in the duration of Avenger's Shield. Then, if you are lucky with the procs, you can perma-silence an enemy target. In fact, up to three, if they are clumped up. It's very fun when it happens, but very annoying when you don't get any procs at all. Not to mention it must be annoying as freakin' hell to the enemy who can't do anything at all because of all the silences.

Even less than with feral druids, I really didn't feel in control of the fights as a protection pally. In fact, it felt like I was riding the back seat of some wild RNG race.

I can haz idea!

At this point, I had an idea. If I want control, why am I not playing a class with any amount of REAL control? So I picked up my mage, Rime, who had been my bank alt since I abondoned her at lvl 23 since ... classic. Four-five years ago.

I went into a BG and ... got trashed so bad it was not even remotely funny. I logged out in a true nerd-rage. I'm not proud to admit it.

After that, I tried to get into BGs with my warrior again. Still endless queues. Fun while it lasted, not so fun to wait. After a few days, I was ready for another attempt with my mage. However, rather than heading into BGs, I went into Ragefire Chasm and soloed the place. I practiced, learning how to make a shatter combo, got a feeling on how long I had to stay away to be out of melee reach, how long my freezes lasted etc. Not to mention mana management. I ran out of mana all the time.

Then I tried a BG again. Okay, this was way much better. I could kill a warrior or rogue (provided they didn't get the jump on me) without taking any damage at all. I could take on most enemies, except hunters. Hunters outranged and outdps'ed me, and they don't seem to have any kind of deadzone anymore. I just polymorphed them and ran away whenever I encountered on alone, provided I didn't die in the ~2 sec it took to cast polymorph.

Since then, I've been doing a lot of BGs. Yesterday my better half was away, so I dinged 59 after two winning AVs, and got Wrecking Ball in the last. I have found my love... ehem... a class I love ...for now. I know myself, and know that I won't sit at a class for too long. But for now, I am in control. MOHAHAHAHAHA!

Post-cataclysmic journal from an AV-loving warrior

2011-01-18T10:21:00.002+01:00

My goblin warrior Shoosa recently entered Northrend. I've done AV all weekend, now revered with my very own Frostwolf Howler. Between AVs, I've skilled up cooking.

Complains from the Lunch Lady

Cooking is much tougher to level to 300 now that a lot of the cooking recipes are simply unavailable. In particular, it's no longer possible to skill up using only fish.

I don't get it, Blizz: You give us Pilgrim which is like free cooking skill, but you make it way much harder to level the old-fashioned way? Design philosphy, please?

Mohaha, eat spell reflect, palatards!

I hate pally stuns with a vengeance. Okay, it's probably balanced to stand stunned for 6 seconds at level 85 with a lot of health and resilience, but at anything lower than that, 6 seconds is waaay too long. Before, when spell ranks existed, it lasted shorter at lower levels, and you bought ranks as you gained levels which increased the stun duration.

However, as a prot-warrior, I have an answer to that. With the glyph, Spell reflection has a 5 sec duration and 6 sec cooldown. If I play my move smart, I make sure to silence or stun the paladin for the last vulnerable second, and I'm - almost - unstunnable. In addition, it's hilarious fun to see the pally eating his own stun.

The exception is a smart pally that will burn my spell reflection on some other spell, but that's not necessarily a bit problem. I don't mind loosing to smart paladins. I mind loosing to everyone else, and I'm sure that not every paladin player I've met so far have been smart.

Oh, and it's also fun (though much harder) to stun Frost Mages with their own deep freeze.

Tough, huh?

After I realized what I could do, every game I've just charged straight for our mine. I can charge/intercept and just run through all the mobs there, pulling more than 20 without any risk of dying and no usage of cooldowns.

How? Rend one, Thunderclap to spread it around (with the talent), spam spell reflect and throw a shockwave once I've collected some 10+, and Victory Rush shines up like a christmas tree all the time.

I also took down a rogue who 3 levels higher than me while having more than 5 mobs on me. In fact, they helped me a lot. They granted me a ton of rage through a talent, and broke Blind and Gouge on me instantly.

However, there are tougher around...

No matter how tough I like to think I am, Prot Pallies are tougher in one-on-one fights. Possibly Blood DKs too, haven't met too many of those. Enough pallies around, though. With Word of Glory every 9 sec, it's hard to keep up with their self-healing ... so far.

At least I'll get something in a few levels... Shattering Throw. Say bye bye, bubble-boy.

Perhaps surprisingly, Resto druids are also tougher in one-vs-one. I just can't bring them down. Only instant heals, which I can dispel one of every 6 seconds, and they can slowly take me down with Insect Swarm and Moonfire. Emphasis on slowly, I ran away after a 2 min fight with a druid, and I still had half my health left. She, however, had full health and almost full mana.

Looking forward to the next AV weekend

Which is some 2 months from now. I really enjoy AV, and it almost never comes up with random BG. And I'm not a fan of queing just for that and waiting around forever.

For some weird reason, though, Isle of Conquest comes up a ton during prime time with the random, though. How come only IoC and not AV? No idea.

I have one design issue with AV, though. It yields *way* more honor and rep to those that fight north, and very little to those that choose to stay south and defend and retake towers/GYs.

A very simple change would be to grant the same "honorable defender" buff in AV as you get in AB. Wouldn't solve anything, but it would make slightly more people defend south. Right now, I understand why so many choose to rush north; it's just way better rewards, both on a win and a loose. Even if it was a critical defense that granted the victory.

How to survive stupid PUGs: SIT DOWN!

2011-01-10T14:12:00.000+01:00

This is primarily written to tanks and healers.

You enter an instance using the LFG tool. After the first pull, you know this is going to be a real bad experience. Some signs:

One of the dps pulls.
One or more of the dps don't attack the skull.
People stand in the whirlwind.
Nobody (except possibly you) interrupts enemy spellcasters.
The dps don't burn down adds when it's an important boss mechanic.
The dps deals less damage than the tank (on a non AoE-fight).
People randomly goes afk, without a single word.
People refuse to CC.
... or worse: People AoEs, thereby breaking the CC.

If you've ended up in one of those groups, and you happen to be healer or tank, there's something you can do about it.

Sit down. Tell the rest that you refuse to heal/tank if people don't start doing their job properly. Tell them what they can do different, keeping it very concrete. Be polite, but firm.

You are not polite if you just play along and try to heal or tank and build up a lot of frustration because people don't care about the fight mechanics. You just burn yourself out.

You will experience a lot of nerd rage this way. You may even be kicked from the group. But as long as you are polite and say what should be done, most people will recognize this and behave. In many cases, you get to kick the worst offenders.

You are a vital part of the group. It's about time you demand the respect you deserve.

Professions that really help your alts

2010-12-02T10:04:00.002+01:00

I've got 6 characters at 80, 5 of them at the same server.

Since we're less than a week away from Cata, I've started planning which characters I want to play and in which order. I couldn't help but notice that I'm very influenced by my choice of professions for said characters.

First and foremost, I ought to consider which class mechanics I'd rather want to work with for a while. However, after playing all healers and almost all tanks (save warrior which is reserved for my goblin), I've just realized two things. One: the grass will always be greener on the other side, no matter what fence I'm on. Second: Barring broken class mechanics, I can work with almost any class, and I consider them pretty balanced too.

With that in mind, I've started thinking about which professions I'd prefer to have maxed out first. There are several things to keep in mind here. The first is that (practically) every profession offers useful stuff for that character itself. So while some of them look really neat and cool, I try to disregard that information when evaluating professions. Instead, I'm looking at what each profession can provide for my other characters.

Alchemy

I've decided that I will be leveling my paladin first. It sounds strange for me to say that, but I really enjoy paladins now with the new 4.0 mechanic, and since I've paid for a race change, I no longer have as much trouble with the theme. In fact, I think Sunwalker is a cool theme. I have Alchemy / Herbalism on my paladin, which is a very nice thing to level first. After all, everyone can benefit from elixirs and flasks.

In addition, alchemy also bring some other gems, namely with Transmutation. Since transmutation has a 1 day cooldown, the faster I can get it the more items I can get from it. Add to that that my paladin Koiane (formerly Tirvin) is a transmutation master, meaning I can gain more than what I started with using transmutation.

There's also the Potion of Treasure Finding, which all my alts can benfit from.

I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm really excited about the ability to transform myself into a dragon. For that particular reason, I've decided not to spend time getting a nice-looking flying mount for my pally. However, ... personal benefit only, and it's only a cosmetical upgrade unless I'm going to carry friends around.

Inscription

My other full hybrid, Ayeba (druid), has inscription / herbalism. It is a very useful profession, but just not as useful anymore after 350. As far as I can see, there are no new glyphs. There are an almost-as-good-as-Fortitude-runescroll, a book that gives you a random buff on a 4 hour cooldown, the ability to create darkmoon decks and relics and off-hands. Only my priest will benefit from off-hand items apart from the druid herself. I've got several characters who can benefit from relics, though. However, it will grant no benefit if the other characters are decently equipped, then the items crafted will be stricly worse.

The interesting part for me is that I can level inscription with herbs from Koiane without actually leveling Ayeba. However, I will probably level my druid anyway, as it's a neat class in itself.

Enchanting

My death knight is enchanter / miner. Enchanting will be very useful for all classes at top level. Less useful while leveling, though.

Mining is also handy, because it can provide me with raw materials for...

Jewelcrafting

Jewelcrafting is still a top profession. Gems will always be usefulf or all classes, mostly at top level. Unfortunately, I've got JC on my shaman, which I'm not planning to level anytime soon. Right now you can call me tank-a-lot, and shamans don't qualify. However, if I spend time on my death knight, I can level the jewelcrafting without actually leveling my shaman.

Engineering

My priest is an engineer. I've had an awful lot of fun with it in the past, but unless I've missed something, it's still a very 'egoistical' profession that offers little for alts/other classes. Okay, there are a few new cool group benefits, but they require the user to be an engineer himself or herself, meaning I can't send it to alts.

I must admit I'm really tempted to play my priest just for Leap of Faith. However, no tanking here either (in fact, less so than with shamans), and other classes also get cool new stuff.

Blacksmithing

I don't have a blacksmith... yet. However, give me a few weeks and I'll probably have a goblin warrior one. (If you've been reading my journals, I decided to make my goblin a blacksmith instead of an alchemist because I now have an alchemist, namely my paladin). However, I'll need months to get it to top level, if I'm going to spend any time at all with my current 80s.

Blacksmithing is a semi-useful skill. It has the potential to be useful for my plate-wielding alts, but requires that the blacksmither becomes 85 before the other plate-wielders. Since that's not going to happen, blacksmithing will only offer stuff for personal benefits. Correct me if I'm wrong here. The only item I know of is the "enchant" that grants an extra gem slot in a belt item.

Leatherworking, Tailoring, Skinning

Got none of either, so not applicable. My wife has a skinner / leatherworker, but she's not playing WoW now and possibly never will again. Both leatherworkers and tailors, however, suffer from the same problem as blacksmithing and to a certain degree inscription 350-425: They grant only benefits to lower-level alts. With the exception of the leg-specific enchant.

Bottom line

Alchemy, Enchanting and Jewelcrafting are, in my opinion, the top three professions for helping your other characters. All three continue to help other classes even when they're all at 85.

The other professions can help lower-level alts, but grant very little once you're all at 85.

The challenges and possibilities of meta-spells for healers

2010-11-24T08:24:00.000+01:00

Just for clarity: I define meta-spells as spells that don't do anything themselves, but instead enhance other spells. Technically, all buff spells such as Flametongue totem are meta-spells, but since they can have 100% uptime, they don't really really affect your playstyle at all... well, as long as you remember to buff up. This article only discusses meta-spells for healers.

Many on-use trinkets work like meta-spells. Take Ephmeral Snowflake.

Types of meta-spells

I'm going to divide meta-spells into three categories.

The first category includes activated spells, talents or items with a cooldown. Example: Inner Focus.

The second category include talents (generally) that grant a limited duration effect when casting certain spells. Example: Borrowed Time.

The third category include passive procs, generally from items. Often has an internal cooldown of 45 sec or stacks up multiple times. Example: Binding Stone stacks up a buff, while Althor's Abacus is a proc with a 45 sec internal cooldown.

Meta-spells by class

All healers have meta-spells. Even if I've played all four healer classes at 80, I easily forget some spells. Here's those I remember.

Shamans have

Nature's Swiftness: Many use this simply as another heal in their repertoire combined with Greater Healing Wave.
Spiritwalker's Grace: Cast spells while moving. Doesn't improve theoretical output.
Unleash Elements, the Earthliving Weapon version. Increases the next heal by 20%. It has so short cooldown it's doubtful whether it belongs here.
Bloodlust (or Heroism): Also rather special, as it has a very long duration and cooldown for such a spell.
They also used to have Tidal Force, but I can't find it in the current talent tree. Perhaps it was removed in 4.0.

Druids have one spell: Nature's Swiftness. I don't know about anyone else. Okay, if you really want to count it: Barskin.

Priests have Archangel, though it's rather special in the way it works since it requires you to cast Smite before this has any effect.

Discipline priests also have Inner Focus, as mentioned above, and Power Infusion. Complete with cool graphics. Holy priests have their signature spell, Chakra, which changes how certain other spells work. However, it can have 100% uptime, so you don't want to save it for any purpose.

Paladins have several meta-spells that can be combined together.

Avenging Wrath: 20% more healing. Oh, and pretty wings. Ooh! Shiny!
Divine Favor: +20% haste, +20% spell crit.
Guardian of Ancient Kings, the holy variant Ancient Healer. Casts Light of Ancient Kings. Against a single isolated target, it doubles your healing. More if there are other allies nearby.

They also have a rather special meta-spell, DIvine Plea, which reduces all healing done by 50%.

In addition, all classes can have on-use trinkets. Lifeblood, the granted ability from Herbalism, activates a 20-sec internal cooldown with on-use trinkets.

The challenge with meta-spells

Meta-spells can be very powerful. They can significantly improve the throughput of your spells. However, they can also be completely wasted. You may activate your meta-spells only to discover that there were no need for them, and waste the CD. Worse, you may wait for the perfect opportunity to use, only to forget to use it when you really really need it.

To be the best healer you can be, you need to remember to use your full repertoire of spells, including meta-spells.

A big challenge of meta-spells is finding out how you want to combine them. My paladin has herbalism, and so always has access to Lifeblood. That gives me 4 on-use meta-spells. I can use them separately, and I can combine them.

Combining them all gives me +20% healing, +20% haste, +20% crit, +480 haste, and my next 5 heals are duplicated and also splashes to nearby targets. That at least doubles my throughput, possibly triples it. Phew.

However, if you don't count Valithria Dreamwalker, it is rather likely that stacking so much healing at once will result in a lot of overhealing. So it's probably better to not spend everything at the same time.

I still need to figure out how to best combine my cooldowns. Add to that they have different cooldowns, so macroing two abilities with different cooldowns means that I'll either wait for both to come off cooldown before using them, wasting one of them, or spend them separately after the first time. Which isn't necessarily such a bad idea.

With that said, I love the feeling I get when I blow all my cooldowns (often while having Concentration Aura and Aura Mastery or Divine Shield up) while healing left and right in a hectic battleground fight.

I've also had much fun actually being able to kill something as a healer. All the paladin cooldowns except Guardian of Ancient Kings work on Exorcism too. Yay! I can kill stuff! ... and I call myself a healer.

Essences chapter 6: Native

2010-11-23T09:52:00.002+01:00

It was early evening when Din arrived town. She had had a clear plan about returning to town, but not what she was going to do once she arrived.

At least she could finally get a decent bath. With a bit of luck, she'd even be able to wash of the stench of sweat without resorting to a shovel. It felt about that dense now.

She made her way to the same place Din and Rob had rented a room earlier. The rent was fairly cheap, and it was a decent in more than one way. For a start, there was a landlady and not a landlord, which felt a bit comforting right now. Din still had some money left, enough that she had no reason to worry immediately.

Like earlier, she attracted a lot of stares. She tried as best she can to avoid meeting any eyes, walking as fast as her tired feet would carry her while looking mostly down. It really bothered her. She wondered if it felt like that for other woman all the time, or if there were something special about her. She really wished they'd just ignore her like they had mostly done when she was still a boy.

The landlady was thankfully home, and opened the door quickly. She looked middle-aged and fairly plump, but nice as long as you didn't test her patience. Right now, she looked a bit puzzled at Din.

"Yes? What can I do for you, girl?" she asked, her tone indicating that she really wasn't sure what to make of her.

"I'm in need of a room for a few days," Din asked.

The landlady looked slightly more puzzled. Had Din said anything wrong? Was she somehow suspicious?

"Yes, that can be arranged," the landlady replied, "How many rooms do you require?"

Now it was Din's turn to be a bit puzzled. "Only one. For me."

"Oh," the landlady said, "I'm sorry. I just assumed you were a maid from your dress and your lack of accent."

Din hadn't thought about that. Most natives spoke with at least a bit of accent.

The landlady led the way inside. "No luggage, dear?" Din shook her head. "Perhaps you've run away from your master, hmm?" the landlady inquired. She caught that Din looked a bit scared. "No need to worry, dear. I'm not going to tell anyone. In fact, if you don't want me to, I won't even say you're here if they ask."

"T-that won't be necessary. No one will come asking for me," Din stuttered in reply.

"No? That's a rather sad fate, having no one miss you," the landlady said as she handed Din the key. "Second floor, first room on your right."

The room was simple, and fine. It was next to the room where Din and Rob had lived until recently. She could stay here for a bit, until she figured out what she would do. Or until her money ran dry.

She wondered what her family thought. Rob was going to tell them that Din wanted to stick around some more in town, but that story wouldn't hold up forever. She was fond of her family, but that didn't mean she wanted to return home, live with her family and eventually get married away.

It was time to get the bath she had thought of for quite some time now. In order to do that, she had to fetch a bathtub, get water from the well, heat it up in the common room below, and carry everything up. The landlady commented how she was happy that Din found herself comfortable in the middle of the second bucket of water. It dawned to Din that it might have been a better idea to ask first. She didn't want the landlady to get suspicious. Well, more suspicious.

Finally, the bath was ready. Din undressed fairly fast, making sure not to breathe in with her nose, and lowered herself into the tub. However, the tub wasn't big enough to cover everything, and so she had a very good look at her breasts above the water.

She had both dreaded and looked forward to this. Dreaded because she now had to find out more about her new body, and she was still uncomfortable about it. Looked forward to because it turned her on a bit. That, in turn, brought even more mixed feelings.

When she emerged from the water a good while later, she had learned quite a bit. For a start, she was very sensitive several places. Second, she had no experience at this. Finally, it had been so many strange feelings that she didn't know where to start.

Sleep came fast. She had been hungry, but not enough to prevent her from easily falling asleep.

She saw herself. Or, another version of herself. The priestess. She was clad in a kind of dress so thin you could see the silhouette of her body through it. She was leading a man to a tent. Judging from the scars and the muscles, the man was a warrior. He was also recently wounded, the bandage around his head was fresh with blood. He was wearing nothing but something that resembled a pair of pants.

As soon as the "door" was closed, the priestess started kissing the warrior. He reacted with almost animal instinct, kissing her back and holding her tight. If Din could close her eyes, she would've done so. However, even closing her eyes wouldn't help, she could somehow feel the warrior's aggressive kissing on her lips, his strong hand fondling her butt, and his warm and hard body against hers. Not to mention the very hard thing about crotch-height.

The kissing didn't last very long, because the warrior was far too impatient. Soon he was kissing her neck. His other hand reached down, between her legs...

She darted up to a sitting position in her bed. Momentarily confused, it took her several moments to figure out where she was. The dream had felt so real. She felt really strange between her legs. Wet, too. She touched her lips and her neck where the warrior had bitten her. She couldn't feel anything there right now, but the memory was still vivid and alive.

It took some time before the mix of panic and arousal settled down. She tried to think rationally about what had happened, but it was hard. Tendrils of panic and ... something else kept creeping into her thoughts.

After a few minutes, her thought started to swim. She gave up trying to make sense of it. Whatever had happened and possibly still was happening wouldn't be any easier to handle if she was lacking sleep as well.

------

note: The title 'Essences' is just a working title. I have a feeling it'll stick, but I reserve the possibility to change it.

Heard between Cielstrasza and Alextrasza

2010-11-17T08:02:00.001+01:00

Alextrasza: Cielstraza, can you come over here for a moment?

Cielstrasza: Of course, Life-Binder.

Alextrasza: What just happened?

Cielstrasza: A blood elf flew in. He was very eager to get our tabard and champion for our cause. Then he left.

Alextrasza: Yes, I noticed he jumped down. So why is there a blood elf corpse with our tabard on the ground by the temple now?

Cielstrasza: I'm not sure, Life-Binder. He appeared to be unconcerned about the height when he jumped off. He seemed to cast a spell, which as far as I can tell, rendered him immune to all damage.

Alextrasza: That still does not explain why there is a corpse there.

Cielstrasza: I don't know myself. He said something about 'oh no, they've reduced the duration!' as he fell.

Alextrasza: ...

Alextrasza: I'm starting to doubt whether out our tabard to all these mortals really aid our cause.

-----------------

If you didn't get it, I fell to my death because Divine Shield now lasts 8 seconds rather than 12. The first thing after I bought and equipped the Wyrmrest Accord tabard. I just imagined the conversation in my head as I flew back (at snail speed) to my corpse.

What to write? Decisions, decisions

2010-11-17T07:47:00.000+01:00

Since the last post, I haven't been writing much at all on my (now no longer) NaNoWriMo story. It's just as far from balance as writing all the time at the expense of everything else.

My original plan was to publish my NaNoWriMo story here in November, and go back to my "regular schedule". Now, I'm not sure what to do.

Who am I writing for?

A good question to start with.

Originally, I intended to write for myself, mostly. To have something to look back to. However, I'd also like other people to read what I write. I've got a lot of stuff on my mind I want to share. Recently, I've also wanted to write about non-WoW-related stuff. Okay, I have done that before, but at a very minor scale.

I don't have any clue how many read this blog. I know how many official followers I have, but I've got a heapload of blogs in my own reader, and I'm only officially following one of them.

WTB votes plz

I'm adding a poll to my blog for a while. Hopefully some people will vote on it. You can vote for multiple alternatives. If you feel I'm lacking any alternative, please post in a comment here. It closes at the end of November.

On an almost unrelated note...

There's also another reason why the writing is slow. I was recently recommended I should read a comic called Gunnerkrigg Court by a friend. It was completely awesome, and I'll be following all updates at it.

NaNoWriMo status and thoughts

2010-11-11T19:42:00.003+01:00

My wife complained a bit about how long the chapters have been so far. I'm making a test with shorter chapters. Perhaps that makes them more easily readable.

Apart from that, I'm lagging far behind the expected writing speed. An average of 1666 words a day means that even a single day skipped will result in a good amount more words on the remaining days.

Two evenings ago, I had an argument with my wife. She felt I was focusing too much on the writing at the expense of family life. I have only about 1 to 1 1/2 hour time during the evening after my daughter has gone to bed, and I need some time to land right before heading to bed. So writing one evening means sacrificing all social life.

I've decided that spending time with my wife is often more important than writing for NaNoWriMo. However, I'm also glad that I finally got started with my story. So I'll keep writing, but I won't be sad for not meeting the deadline. The real downside, however, is that without the deadline, I'm more likely to skip writing in favor of doing other relaxing stuff.

I need to reach a balance. I want to write, but I don't want to write so much I burn myself out and start hating it. I also want to play WoW and do other stuff, but not at the expense of everything else.

With all that said, I've got a lot of the story planned in my notebook. If I write long chapters, about 3 to 5 more chapters. If I write short, obviously a lot more. It's fairly easy for me to come up with more ideas for the story. All my sessions as a GM probably helps, but I had a pretty wild fantasy as a kid too. I could sit for hours with my Middle-Age "Knight" Lego and roleplay with myself. Needless to say, it included quite a lot heroic stuff.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 5: Returning

2010-11-11T19:31:00.004+01:00

It took them another two days to reach civilization. Or at least, the outlying farms. The trip was uneventful, or "refreshingly boring," as Rob put it.

The only events were Din's dreams. She recalled only bits of it in the morning, but seemed to remember the blue woman each time. She never explained much, and Din wasn't sure what to make of it. As long as Din and Rob talked, Din didn't think much about it, but it certainly bothered her when she was alone and couldn't help think. And then it was the presence that always seemed to bother her. One way to put together two and two gave birth to the theory that it was the blue woman who was watching him all the time. The thought scared Din, and she couldn't quite dismiss it either.

On the first farm they came across, Rob had asked Din to wait in a fair distance while he bought some food. Din agreed to that, figuring that all the blood on her clothes probably wouldn't attract a good reaction.

He returned with more than enough for a good meal, even eggs. He also brought an old dress belonging to a former maid. Din was a bit baffled, but accepted the dress. She figured that wearing a dress would be preferable to walking around in the blood-stained clothes any more than she had to.

She changed behind a tree, with Rob sitting like a statue facing the other direction. Her nose reminded her how much she needed a bath. However, she didn't feel very keen on finding out just how freezing the water was. She was glad Rob had gotten a pair of long wool socks as well, the air and wind made it quite chilly.

It felt really weird to be wearing a dress. Rob seemed to think that it was a bit strange sight as well. "Wow... it looks ... really good on you. It's just... strange seeing you in a dress and knowing it's you, Din," he commented. Din felt herself blush slightly at the comment.

Reaching the farms also meant that they were splitting up soon. Din wanted Rob to join her back to town, but Rob had been adamant about going home. He had, in fact, tried to pursue Din to return to her own farm and convince her parents with Rob's help. However, Din hadn't been very positive about that idea. There was also something else bothering her. She had something she needed to do, but she couldn't really describe what it was.

They said their farewells when they were still out of eyesight of Din's farm. She felt a bit sad by it, even after Rob assured her he'd come visit her in town once his leg had gotten better. For a moment, she felt it would be natural to hug him goodbye, but discarded the thought.

It felt strange to walk all alone. As she was getting closer to the town, there were more people around too. She felt she got some strange stares, and wondered what could be the reason. Okay, she could think of several reasons, but she didn't know exactly why they looked at her that way.

It wasn't a very long walk from her farm to town. Her family used to go there to purchase what they couldn't produce themselves. She remembered when he, as a young boy, was allowed to go with her father to town. In particular, she recalled seeing an essence-user for the first time in town. A man that looked like a giant to the young Din had walked past while carrying several timbers on his shoulder, engulfed in a red flame as he walked past them. The sight had been forever burned itself into Din's memory.

When Din and Rob had left their homes, they'd found themselves a room in town. They had planned it for quite some time prior to leaving home. Din had an older brother who would inherit the farm, so their parents agreed it would be a good idea to live for himself for a bit. Rob had just wanted to try something different for a while, and while his father hadn't agreed, at least he hadn't prevented him from doing it.

They had originally planned to find work and earn money for themselves. They had gotten work too, but perhaps not as adventurous as they had hoped for. Cleaning the stables was neither very exciting nor very well-paid. Besides, Din felt he had spent enough time cleaning stables at home, even if they only had a single horse.

So when the offer came up for to join the adventurers to the crypt, they had been far too eager to accept it. Din wondered how they would have ended up if they'd rejected the offer. Somehow, she didn't really regret it, despite all that had happened. While she wasn't comfortable with all the changes, at least she had some of the adventure she'd always dreamed of now. And she was fairly certain it wasn't over yet.

Oooh, pretty colors

2010-11-09T20:36:00.001+01:00

My wife complained about how hard it was to read white text on a black background.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 4: Visions

2010-11-07T19:56:00.001+01:00

Blue. As far as the eye could see. It wasn't the same blue everywhere. One place was light blue as the morning sky. Another shared the dark blue of the dusk sky. Yet another was solid blue a rich man's cloak. The color gradually changed from one point to another, so subtlety that there were no borders to be seen.

Din looked down to realize that she was standing on something that reminded of water, yet it carried her weight. She didn't know why, but she felt quite comfortable. Somehow, she knew she was safe here, wherever here was. It didn't seem like a very important question right now.

Something appeared in front of her. Actually, it looked like it had been there all the time, but it took some time for the eye to discern what it was from the background. It was a woman. Her features looked like the priestess in the other dream, but this woman was all various shades of blue. She didn't share the same blue color as the background, yet she was somehow very hard to notice. Once Din had spotted her, though, she was easy to see.

For some reason, Din got the feeling that she was really powerful. She seemed to have a good reason for her confident smile. When she spoke, it felt like the words appeared in Din's mind. There were no voice. Or rather, it was Din's own voice, speaking words in her mind like thoughts popping up.

"Your name is Faith, like the avatars before you," the words said. That was all. Din wanted to ask something, but never got the chance. She felt herself being gently pulled away. The woman and the blue background become one, and became smaller and smaller.

Din awoke. She was freezing slightly. It took her a few moments of confusion to figure out where she was. It was early morning, with the cold, clear air of fall. The ground was all covered with rime. The fire had gone out. Din sat up, and spotted Rob. It looked like he had fallen asleep while guarding, and now sat leaning against the cave wall by the opening. She felt sorry for him. He had been so tired last night, yet he had tried to stay awake all night.

Din got up and stretched. She felt much better today. Still a bit stiff muscles, but far better than yesterday. Her head felt clear and sharp. Her body still felt weird, but at least it seemed to obey her. Moving a bit helped her feel warmer, too.

She picked up the cloak she'd been lying on for several days and put it around the sleeping Rob. He was lacking color on his nose and ears, and looked like he was freezing as well. She immediately went to work getting the fire running again. The embers had gone cold, so she'd have to start a new using flint and steel. Fortunately, Rob had stacked up a lot of firewood yesterday.

After some attempts, she managed to get the thinnest bark burning. She slowly fed the fire with increasingly bitter twigs until she dared to put on a more solid stick.

All the while working the fire, she couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her. She glanced around several times, even into the cave. However, she couldn't see anyone. The cave was fairly swallow, and with the morning light she was fairly certain nothing could be hiding from her sight.

Once the fire was burning good, she looked for some food. Her search quickly yielded success. In a pouch on the ground next to the fire she found the rest of the rabbit Rob had caught yesterday. It looked like he had saved about half for her. Rob obviously had more talent as a trapper than as a cook. It was unevenly cooked and burnt in several places, but tasted absolutely wonderful. It felt like it was the best rabbit she had ever eaten, but she knew that her hunger might be tampering with her perception.

She considered saving something for Rob as well, but her stomach protested so loudly she decided against it. The water tasted good as well. She noticed that the waterskin was almost empty now, they had to find more water soon.

After the meal, she felt the need to go again. She went into the same place as yesterday, walking slowly to make sure there really weren't anything in there. 'My mind is playing tricks on me,' she told herself, trying to dismiss the feeling of the presence. Not quite successful, though.

It was easier than yesterday. For a start, she wasn't so stiff. She also knew what to do, and was more prepared for the strange feelings when she wiped herself. It was a lot colder than yesterday, making her finish as fast as possible so she could pull on her clothes again. At some point, she knew she needed to find out more about how it looked and felt down there, but this really wasn't a good time.

It occurred to Din that she never had had the chance to experience sex before she got turned into a girl. The thought of sex from a female point of view caused all manner of strange thoughts to fight for her attention, and she felt her face quickly growing hot with embarrassment. The opinion that it was a disgusting thought won, and she tried to think of something else.

It took a good while for Rob to wake up. Din risked exploring the immediate area around the cave while gathering a bit more firewood. Most animals left humans alone, but there was always the risk that there was an essence-beast around here. She tried to look for Rob's traps, but had no clue where to look. Rob's father was a trapper. Din's was a farmer. In the end, she returned with just the wood.

Rob looked quite disoriented when he awoke. He wasn't very happy about falling asleep during the night without intending it. Din brought up the point that he had been awake for more than a day and a night already, which helped his pride somewhat.

They left about an hour later, after some food and Rob checking his traps. He had successfully caught another rabbit, which they brought for the next meal. They had quite some ground to cover. The trip from the town to the crypt had taken almost a full day, and now they had to take it much slower due to Rob's leg. Besides, last time they had waded right through the wilderness like they owned it, or at least were not afraid of the real owner. This time, they were cautious, as they certainly didn't want to catch the attention of any animals around there.

Din had wondered at first why they adventurers didn't have horses. He had later understood Will was really scared of horses for some reasons, and he'd been the closest thing they'd had to a leader. Besides, he'd argued, if they spent money on horses, they'd most likely find them dead by predators by the time they returned from the crypts. Right now, Din would've given a lot to have a horse, for Rob's sake.

While traveling, they spoke together about almost everything. Din told Rob what little he recalled from his dreams, which mostly summed up to "a strange blue woman" from the night's sleep and lots of fighting from the dreams before that. Rob agreed that the dreams were strange, but could offer no other insight.

They also talked about a lot other stuff. Stuff they used to talk about before they'd left home. Din felt a bit strange discussing girls, and Rob looked downright uncomfortable, so they stayed away from that topic.

They talked about essence-beasts instead. After all, they could run into one at any point during the travel. Once when Rob had joined his father hunting, he had seen the Yellow Stag. It was commonly known in the area. It had first showed up when Din and Rob were only children. The name had come from its antlers. When it showed itself to humans, it displayed supernaturally big antlers which glowed yellow. It had also been spotted with more normal antlers, which made it reasonable to believe it had an yellow essence. It also seemed reasonably intelligent. If it showed up to humans, it was meant as a warning. It did not attack as long as the humans left the area, but had killed those that chose to ignore the warning. Everything considered, it was not one of the worst essence-beasts to meet, as long as you were prepared to turn around.

There were also the Red Bison. It was always seen with the rest of its kin, but were easy to spot. It was significantly larger than others of his kind. It was said that it once demolished an entire caravan because they insisted on moving towards the bisons. Fortunately, they weren't going to run into it on their way back to town, it belonged with the other bisons farther west.

The Red Bison and Yellow Stag were among the most powerful known essence-beasts in the area. Since essence-beasts were one of the biggest dangers to settlers, the local authorities quickly put out rewards to the dangerous ones. The Red Bison in particular had a huge reward on its head, but had already bested dozens of bounty hunters. Most others were put down fairly quickly.

There were also a lot of harmless essence-beasts. They talked about the Blue Squirrel which lived close to Din's home farm. It was quite fascinating to watch it gather nuts. It moved almost faster than the eyes could follow, leaving a blue streak in its wake, while moving from tree to tree. However, it was just as bad at remembering where it had hid its nuts as your average squirrel, so you could often find piles of nuts dug in the ground or stoved in trees in the nearby forest.

They moved as fast as Rob's leg allowed, which weren't very fast. In addition, he needed breaks now and then, adding to the duration of the trip. While they saw a lot of wildlife, fortunately none of them seemed to bother them. They found some berries, but they proved be very sour since it was so late in the year. Fortunately, some of the mushrooms were still edible, and Din knew which ones were safe to eat. They also got their waterskins filled.

When they found a place to camp for the night, Din was very tired. She felt less enduring than she was used to as a boy, but that might also be because her muscles still were a bit stiff. After Rob set up some traps and Din built a fire, they talked about what they'd do when they got back. Rob told Din he had decided to return to his father. He was quite satisfied to escape with his life. If he saved up some money for a healer, he might be able to walk again without limping.

Din didn't know what to do, except find some more fitting clothes and have a bath. She wasn't sure she'd be able to convince her parents that it was still Din inside the native girl, and even if she did, she wasn't sure that returning to the farm was what she wanted. Despite having been much closer to death than Rob was, she felt she ought to do something more than just settle down on a farm.

"I don't know if you've thought about it, but you might run into some prejudices now," Rob told her. "I mean, now that you're a native girl. Native, that is. Well, there might be someone who has something against girls too, but ..." he continued, stumbling in his own words and blushing more by the moment. "Relax, Rob," Din broke off her friend, "It'll be okay, somehow." They talked no more about it.

That night, Din had another strange dream. Possibly more than one, but she could only recall one afterwards. She found herself in the same blue "room" as last time. It gave her the same sense of safety like last time. Perhaps because she expected it, she spotted the blue woman immediately. She held something up, offering it to Din. It looked like a dagger, identical to the one the priestess had wielded in Din's first dream.

Din hesitated. The blue woman offered the knife again. "It belongs to you now," said words spoken in her mind. Din took the knife from the blue woman's hand. It felt a bit cold to touch, but was somehow very comfortable in her hand.

The blue woman seemed pleased. She turned around and pointed. "Behold. Our enemies," she heard. A little spot in the distance turned red, which quickly grew bigger. Soon everything around them were red. The feeling of safety was all gone, replaced by a sense of danger which sent shivers down Din's spine. It felt somehow burning hot, like it tried to sear Din from all directions at once. Like the blue earlier, the red had different shades, but the shades were much more frequently switching colors, like waves.

Some distance away, a man appeared. Like the blue woman, it felt like he had been standing there all the time, but that it took time to discern him from the background, somehow. He was different colors of red, fairly tall and with very wide shoulders. Like the blue woman, he looked immensely powerful, but also far more dangerous. Perhaps because the blue woman seemed to consider Din an ally or something. It seemed like he hadn't noticed them, and Din hoped he kept that up.

The blue woman turned to a different direction and pointed. A yellow spot expanded to engulf the entire room. It felt dangerous here as well, but in a different way. Din lacked the words to describe it, but the room felt "sharp", like it threatened to cut or puncture her at any moment. Unlike the other two "rooms", Din could easily spot the borders between the different yellow colors.

She spotted a yellow man, though it was harder to know for sure it was a man. He was very tall and also quite thin. His features looked sharp and perfect, like a statue. Only his lack of any obvious breasts gave Din the impression it was a male, otherwise it could just as well have been a female. His face, in particular, could just as well belong to a woman. Like the red man, he didn't notice them.

The blue woman took the two of them back to the blue room. The safety here was very welcome after feeling all that danger. The woman seemed to understand that Din had been afraid. "You are not yet prepared. But soon..." the words in her head formed. With that, the woman and the blue room faded away.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 3: Changes

2010-11-04T11:10:00.002+01:00

At first it was just a background noise. Constant and soft. As Din gradually grew more awake, he recognized the noise. The sound of soft rain.

He opened his eyes. The light was soft, like morning or evening. He was staring straight at rock. Lots of rock, some meters away from his face.

He closed his eyes again. His body ached all over, and his head felt like lead. The weight lightened as sleep lost its grip on him, but it was still too strong to resist for nothing less than a life-threatening reason.

Dreams. He had had some extremely vivid dreams. He couldn't recall everything, but he distinctly remembered a native woman.

There was something about violence too. Much more than he was used to. In his ordinary dreams, there could be violence such as when he was the hero, blazing with the fiery flame of the red essence, and fighting against bandits attacking the village. But there were never so much blood. The memory of his dreams slipped further away as he neared a state that could be called awake.

He opened his eyes again. Tilting his head, he noticed the treetops bathed in a stream of soft rain. Some leaves had already fell off, but most of them remained, creating a beautiful picture of the colors of the fall. Din had always liked Fall.

Tilting his head further revealed the still warm coals of a campfire. He recognized the place. It was the cave they had camped the night before entering the crypts. Mist had found the natural cave. Not very deep, but enough to provide cover. No need to sleep in the open unless you had to.

Mist. He was the only one of the adventurers who had been friendly to the four of them. He had shared a tale and food with them. The other three adventurers had been about as polite to them as they'd been to cattle. And now he was dead.

Dead?

Din should've be dead too. He recalled lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, freezing as unconsciousness dragged him under, unable to breathe as his chest seemed to have stopped obeying him.

He felt strange sensations and pain from his entire body. Not pain as when he'd hurt himself, but the pain in his muscles after a full day working the fields. Make that two. However, pain was usually a good hint that he was alive. He was fairly certain dead people didn't feel any pain.

He seemed to be able to breathe now, somehow. Ignoring the protests from his body, he raised his arm and put it on his chest. It felt strange. There was something weird there. Din pulled his head up and looked down.

Shock hit him like an anvil. Now he was definitely wide awake. And possibly crazy. He almost leap up into a sitting position and looked down.

He was still wearing the same clothes as earlier. They were full of dust and some dirt, completely stained with blood and drenched in sweat. Okay, he could live with that. But they were as fitting as a fat man's on a starving beggar. That was scary, but not too bad either.

He poked his own chest, confirming what he had felt earlier. There were something there. Not only something, but a woman's breast. Boobs. Tits. Din and Rob had spent quite some time watching women, and that had been one of the favorite parts to look at when they didn't notice you were looking.

They neither felt nor looked very big, though. Not like the daughter on the next farm, who were really endowed with an enormous size. On the other hand, it was a bit hard for Din to measure. It wasn't like he was used to seeing them from this angle.

There were something else strange, too. More than one thing. He just realized he didn't recognize his hand. It looked smaller, and had a different skin color than he was used to. Darker, but not like the tan you got when working outdoors during summer.

He recognized that color from somewhere. The native woman from his dreams.

Din realized he was hyperventilating. He was probably in a state of panic, he remembered seeing that on a little girl that watched her mother getting run over by a horse. He put his hand over his mouth, and tried to relax. Panic wasn't getting him anywhere. On the other hand, if he actually had gone crazy, panic would possibly not be such a bad idea for dealing with the situation.

He closed his eyes again, and tried to recall the images from his dream. A memory rose in his mind, a scene where a woman walked up to a statue, touched it, and somehow turned into that girl. He couldn't recall touching any statue himself, but he had somehow ended up like that woman. It seemed like the only reasonable explanation he could come up with, even if it was lacking.

'Okay,' he told himself, 'so I'm a girl now.' Given the choice, he very much preferred to be a girl over being dead. With a bit of luck, it was even reversible.

If it wasn't reversible, or until he could get it reversed, it would take some time getting used to. If he was hoping to ever getting used to it, he 'd have to start with thinking of himself as ... herself. A 'she'. It felt incredibly weird.

He ... She relaxed a bit more. As she felt the wave of stress fade back, the wave of fatigue he had suppressed in her panic came back with a vengeance. Her muscles felt really sore. It made sense, in a way, after undergoing such a transformation.

Taking it slow, she examined the rest of her body. She had expected to find nothing between her legs, but it was still rather rather unnerving to actually feel it with her hand. There were all kinds of strange sensations she wasn't used to from her body when she touched herself down there. She withdrew her hand.

Putting her hands on her head, she could feel that her hair was different. It had a different ... feel, somehow. It was no longer than he was used to, but fell in a different way. Touching her face, she wished she had a mirror. On the other hand, perhaps it was better not to expose herself to too much shock at a time.

She returned her hands to her breast. They were surprisingly stiff, and felt rather sore. Just as he was squeezing them, he heard a voice. "Good to see you awake."

He recognized Rob. Instantly blushing, Din pulled her hands away from her chest. Rob seemed to be a bit uncomfortable as well. Rob dropped a small bundle of firewood on the ground. He kept holding one piece, as if wielding a weapon in one hand. His other arm was busy leaning on a make-shift crutch.

"... Din? Is it still you in there?" her friend asked.

"Ye... " she started her reply, but stopped as soon as she heard her own voice. Okay, she should have expected that. A female body, a female voice. "Y-yes," she tried again, "I think so. I still have memories from before the crypt, at least."

Rob seemed to relax a bit more. He sat down, very carefully, and put down his weapon. However, Din noticed that he laid it much closer to his hand than what was strictly necessary. He wanted it within reach. He was a bit frightened, or at least careful, and trying not to show it.

He looked tired, and his clothes were far from clean. In fact, they were even more covered in mud than his own. The black field under his eyes suggested he had been sleeping very little.

Rob unfastened a rabbit from his belt. "I've had some luck with my traps," he smiled. The notion of food instantly caused Din's stomach to complain about the lack of food lately.

Rob seemed to have figured that out on his own. "It'll take some time to get the rabbit finished, but I've got some roots cooked here." He dug into the earth next to the campfire and pulled out several thick roots with his knife. "I baked them in the warmth from the campfire. Careful, still hot," he told Din as he handed them over. He also produced a waterskin to him.

Rob just sat and watched Din as she started digging in with great appetite. Din was aware of this, but didn't mind. After all, he'd have good reason to be suspicious on her. For all he knew, she could be possessed by a demon or something. For all she knew, too.

"I must admit I wasn't too sure, but I believe it's you now," Rob said, breaking the silence between them. "You still eat like there's you had a pack of wolves on your heels," he chuckled. Din couldn't help but smile herself too. One of her, or perhaps his, less graceful properties suddenly came in handy.

"How are you feeling?" Rob asked. Din could hear from his voice that he was genuinely worried about her. "Like a bull has been using all my muscles to pull a cart for a week," she replied. She had meant for it to be a funny, but Rob didn't seem very entertained by it.

"No, I mean, how are you feeling now that you're a ... a ... woman?" he asked. Din wondered by he had such trouble saying it. He could think of several reasons, but decided to leave it for now.

"I'm glad to be alive," Din replied, "If it means I have to live as a woman for a while, I can deal with that. I hope. Even more than that, I hope it's reversible, somehow."

They sat silent for a moment. After a few moments, Din noticed that Rob was about to ask another question. She broke in before he had the chance. "Tell me what you saw back there, Rob."

Rob looked down and started building up a new fire. "I'm not sure. I assume you mean after Brick caught fire? I saw him pick you up, and then when he was about to finish you off, something strange happened to him. He looked like he quickly turned into a statue of ice, and he certainly wasn't expecting that."

"However, after he 'shattered', the real weird thing happened. You started floating into the air in a sort of blue cloud, and ... changed, somehow. Transformed. I don't know how to describe it, I've never seen it before. But when it was done, the blue cloud dissipated, leaving the ... your current form slowly floating down to the ground. And then you laid completely still."

Din felt a bit sorry for her friend. Okay, she was the one that had changed, but he looked so uncomfortable about this that she almost wanted him to stop talking. Almost.

"I wasn't sure you were still alive. Heck, I wasn't sure the girl was you. But I crawled over to the girl, and she was breathing slowly, like she was asleep. You. I ... must admit I hadn't thought about the girl as you until now. If it somehow weren't you, I was afraid you'd attack me or something, and if I thought about the girl as you I was afraid I wouldn't be able to fight back."

Rob proceeded to tell how he had struggled to get back out with Din. He had hardly been able to stand at all, and carrying Din while staggering proved to be an impossible plan. In his attempt, though, he had noticed that Din seemed to weigh much less now than he did as a boy. It made sense since he now was both shorter and thinner, but it didn't make sense where all the weight had gone. Din could only shrug in response.

Eventually, Rob found a solution. He tied a rope around girl-Din and lay her on his cloak. He'd then crawl or limp, depending on whether he had a wall to lean on, and stop every few meters to pull Din to him and then move on. He had been worried that she'd get hurt by the rope or if there were some sharp stones on the floor, but couldn't think of any better plan.

On his way out, Rob had been very careful to walk the exact same route as they got in. Mist had disabled a few traps on their way in, and Rob wasn't very keen on finding out if Mist had missed some. He succeeded in not setting off any trap. However, once when he had pulled Din up to him, he heard a click, and a sword-like item appeared from a wall to cut thin air where a waist normally would've been on a standing person. After that, Rob had to take several minutes to recover from the shock of having been near killed if he had stepped on another stone.

It had taken him several hours to reach the entrance to the crypts again. He didn't know how many, but it was already evening. He had been dead tired, and had risked a rest before moving on. However, he had fallen asleep without intending it.

When he woke up, it was night. He had been afraid that Din had frozen to death on the cold floor, but she looked alive. More than that, it had looked like she was dreaming fiercely. The sounds escaping from her lips had suggested it was not a good dream. Rob hadn't known whether it was a better idea to wake her up or leave her like that. In the end, he had waited until she fell into deep sleep again. Rob had figured that it was a better idea to stay where they were until morning, but he hadn't dared to fall asleep again.

The next morning, he had crawled out to some nearby trees and cut himself a makeshift crutch. It had taken him more than an hour, but it was a big help. With the help of his crutch, he had managed to carry Din to the cave where they'd camped. He had spent the rest of the day looking for food, setting up traps, and recover a bit. Occasionally, Din had moved slightly in his dreams before falling asleep again. Rob had risked some sleep during the day, figuring they were less likely to be attacked by animals during the sunlight hours. He had sat guard all night, with a campfire and a ready torch as his only weapon.

And now, finally, Din had woken up, after about two and a half days of sleep.

Din put down the inedible parts of root and picked up the waterskin. The only sounds were her drinking , Rob blowing on the embers to get the fire burning again and the constant tickle of rain. She put down the skin and stared out into the increasingly darker evening.

"Thanks, Rob. I owe you my life," she said after a while. Rob looked up from the embers. He smiled at her. "And I owe you mine," he replied.

They sat in silence for a long time while Rob got the fire running again and put on more sticks.

Din suddenly became aware of a pressure in his lower region. "I have to take a piss," he said, absentmindedly. Instantly, a lot of thoughts fought for his attention. 'How do you pee as a girl?', 'Now I have to see what's down there' and 'I don't want Rob to see me,' were the most prominent among them.

Rob also looked like he suddenly had a lot of thoughts. "Erm," he started, "ehm... you could do it further in in the cave," he told her and turned towards the entrance, "I won't look, I promise," he told her. She believed him. Though they had used to take any chances they got at peeking at woman, Din knew how much Rob hated facing stuff that he found embarrassing, and this obviously fell into that category.

Din got to his feet, still aching. "Hey, my arm's fine now," she suddenly realized, looking at it while turning it back and forth. Then she recalled the reason she had gotten to his feet. She walked with stiff movements further into the cave.

Now came the difficult part. 'relax,' she told herself, 'this is nothing scary, half of the world do this every day.' It was true, but it didn't mean it helped her a lot. However, she had some experience. She recalled helping his little sister take off her clothes to pie when she had been younger.

Din peeked at the cave entrance, confirming that Rob was sitting like a statue looking in the other direction. Even if he turned around, he would hardly be able to see anything in here in the dimness of the cave. Din pulled down her trousers, and was immediately greeted by a strong smell of sweat. It smelled fairly bad on the outside, but horribly inside. She wanted a bath, if the opportunity arose.

Sitting down, she looked at herself. Just looking at it sent a lot of strange sensations through her body. A part of her was slightly turned on by this, but most of her mind was freaked out. She looked up, realizing she wasn't making this any easier for herself.

She tried to relax again, close her eyes and breathe slowly. The muscles felt a bit different than she was used to as a man, but close enough that she managed to relax the correct ones. A thin sound of water hitting the hard ground greeted her ears, accompanied by a feeling of relief.

However, she wasn't sure what to do when she was done. She remembered her mother telling her little sister to wipe herself. Din had no clue what she was wiping it with. And it wasn't like she could shake it to remove the remaining drops.

She ended up wiping herself with her left hand. It felt incredibly strange, so she finished it as quickly as possible. Afterwards, she wiped her hand on the ground. She was fairly certain that wasn't the best way to do it, but couldn't figure out any better given the circumstances.

Din returned to the fire. Rob still sat with his back towards her, even if she was sure he heard her approaching again. "You can turn around now," she told him.

He did so, hesitatingly, as if he was half-expecting her to be naked. When she proved not to be, he relaxed a bit more. He watched her while she stiffly lie down on the cloak again.

"Remember how we used to pretend we had essences?" he asked her, trying to lighten the situation a bit. She nodded, smiling. "We didn't play it like this, though," he said, sighing. "No," she shook her head, and then tried to suppress a yawn. Despite only being awake for a short while, she was already sleepy. Perhaps from the exhaustion after her transformation, she wasn't sure.

She closed her eyes. Rob looked at her in silence. "Say... do you have an essence now?" he asked her after a while.

Din opened her eyes again. "I honestly don't know," she replied in a sleepy voice. "If I have, I don't how to use it. If I can somehow feel it, I guess I've got too many other unfamiliar feelings to sort out that single one at the moment."

"Perhaps we should try to find an essence user and have him tell you how to find out," Rob suggested. Din just nodded and closed her eyes again. She felt a bit bad cheating his already tired friend for more sleep, but didn't really feel like she had a choice. Either she slept now, or she'd just fall unconscious very soon anyway.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 2: Patience

2010-11-03T06:02:00.003+01:00

Din watched a woman making a speech. He couldn't catch any words, but from the fire in her eyes, the dagger in her hand and her encouraging voice he understood she was edging people to war. She had the same, slightly darker skin color as the natives of this land, and raven-black hair that fell wild down to her shoulders. Her clothes reminded him of the ritual clothes of the priests, complete with a sign in front that looked like somehow religious.

He slowly became aware of the surroundings too. She was standing on top of a staircase of some kind, seemingly made of stone. The sun shone behind her. Looking around him, Din noticed a lot of people dressed for war. Like her, they looked like the natives of this land, and carried mostly bows and spears. It looked like the speech was working, the people were so fired up they looked ready to kill whatever she pointed at.

The woman walked down to the people and lead the way, with everyone trailing after. Din found himself following as well.

Suddenly they had arrived at a forest. Rather, they were standing at the edge of a forest, looking at the plains. It was evening now. A lot of tents of some kind made up a small village. With a howl, the woman charged the tents, and all the warriors followed, both men and women. The woman didn't run, she somehow just skipped the space between the group and the tents, leaving only a blue streak of light lingering in the air where she had moved. An elderly man fell down to his knees with his arms clutching his throat. The woman stood behind him, with her bloody dagger in hand. Then she was somewhere else, leaving only the blue streak behind.

The warriors reached the tents and started killing as well. Now the group in the tents were making a valiant defense too, but they were sorely unprepared for the assault. After what felt like a very short amount of time, all the locals were dead. Men, women and children. The priestess-like woman stood in the middle of the group, edging them even further.

Once again, time seemed to pass. It was another battle. They were fighting on a mountainside, with some primitive-looking houses in the background. The priestess was once more leading the battle. However, this time they were facing a much more even enemy. The other group seemed to be organizing their defense, and had the advantage of the higher grounds. Still, the woman darted from man to man and stuck her knife at chests, throats, eyes... vital points.

Suddenly, a very visible man appeared. He was practically looming over the others of his tribe, with a frame even bigger than Brick's. He looked like he was burning with a red flame, but the fire wasn't harming him. He charged several warriors of the priestess' group, with a kind of hammer risen into the air. When he struck, he literally sent three men flying, and already before landing they were far beyond any hope of surviving.

The priestess appeared behind him and stuck her knife. However, she seemed unable to puncture the man's skin, despite him being naked from the waist and up. He turned to strike at her, but she was already gone. They clashed together a few times, and she managed to inflict minor wounds on him. However, she couldn't stop his charge as he slaughtered her warriors. Changing plan, she slaughtered the man's warriors instead.

Then there were only the two of them alive, and they fought. After what felt like an eternity it looked like they were running dry of whatever fueled them. Din seemed able to finally follow her movements with his eyes rather than her darting faster than he could follow, and the man no longer half-demolished mountains with each missed strike. His resistance to attacks seemed lowered to more ordinary human level.

Finally, he managed to get in a good hit. She fell to the ground, with her head turned in a very unnatural direction, her neck broken. The man stood over her, blood seeping from dozens of wounds. He staggered and fell, and did not rise again.

The scene changed. Din looked at a group of men and women clad in the same ritual clothes as the priestess had been. They seemed to have reached a decision. One young woman from the group broke away from the others and walked up the stairs to the place the woman had descended from. At the top, on an altar, was a statue that looked identical to the dead priestess. It seemed to glow blue.

The young woman touched it. She started floating up in the air, and a blue smoke-like substance engulfed her. Something was happening to her, but Din couldn't figure out what it was. The glow subsided and she fell to the ground. Two other priest-like people went up to her and helped her rise to her feet. Somehow, she now looked like an identical twin to the priestess Din had seen gotten killed earlier, except a lot more exhausted.

The scenes started flowing faster. Most included fighting. Lots of them included killing. Some included the priestess, or at least one of her twins, getting killed.

Din also spotted the huge man that died earlier again. There were also a few other notable figures, in particular a fairly tall and very thin man who seemed to have a yellow shadow. He threw some yellow, glowing items that pierced through several of the priestess warriors. For a moment, Din saw the conclusion of the fight with the man dead before the priestess, but somehow he showed up later in another scene.

The last scene was of the priestess dying yet again. Somehow he expected to see a new woman being transformed into her twin yet again, but it just stopped there. He somehow got the feeling that someone was very angry about this. Not a searing hot type of rage, but a cool, controlled fury of someone who will wait as long as necessary to get what she or he wants. And for some reason, Din felt it was more likely that it was a "she".

NaNoWriMo: a word about age

2010-11-03T06:01:00.000+01:00

I'm not American, and I don't really know the American aging system well. I'd just like to let any sensitive minds reading this know that the story is not very Disney'ish. Probably some 13ish limit, but I'll label it 18-something so hopefully no one can come and bite me afterwards.

Wanted: Webcomic drawer. Alive.

2010-11-02T08:00:00.000+01:00

The story I'm publishing is an idea I've thought of for a loooong time. It's really a manuscript for a webcomic. However, I can't draw for the life of mine, so I've just had it lying around for some time.

If you happen to be (or know a) drawer of moderate skill, let me know. I'd love to see my story published.

I'll also have you know that I'm hoping that said drawer also will be a co-writer in the sense that we can discuss the story and shape it together. With that said, it's okay for me with just a writer, I have people I can discuss the story with already too. It's just something different from discussing it generally and discussing it because you're actually getting it published.

I'd also like to link a webcomic I recently found: Ninmu Nanmu. I really enjoy it. I even asked the author to draw for me, but he was far too busy to do that, especially since he already had a webcomic and a story he wanted to tell.

I'm also lacking a title for my story so far. I figure it's not really important to have one yet, though.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 1: Avatar

2010-11-02T07:51:00.002+01:00

'I'm not afraid,' Din thought to himself. He knew that he was lying to himself. His swallow breaths, the goose bumps on his skin, the shiver down his spine. 'Okay, so I'm a bit scared,' he resigned.

It wasn't only him. He could see that Rob wasn't feeling much better, despite his attempts to hide it. Din could spot it easily, after knowing Rob for so many years. The other two volunteers behind them was also looking a bit bleak.

Somehow, it made him slightly more comfortable knowing that he wasn't the only scared one. He was starting to doubt that this was such a good idea anyway, but it wasn't an option to back out now. The adventurers had seemed so... confident when they asked for volunteers to join them on their trip to the crypt. It had seemed like such a good offer; you took some minor risk and had a good opportunity to get your own essence. Rob and Din had spoken so much what they'd do if they had essences of their own, and now that an offer came up...

... Except the offer hadn't been minor risk. The offer had been to take a good amount of risk. Would it be worth it? Doubts were starting to fill his mind, but they were already far into the crypts. And going back now and risk triggering any traps they'd missed earlier seemed like an even worse deal: You'd still risk death, just without any chance of getting an essence.

Thankfully, they weren't alone in there. The adventurers seemed to know what they were doing. In particular Mist, the agile one. He had already saved Din's life once, by pulling him back when he was about to step on a trapdoor. Without him, they'd probably be long dead already.

Din kept watching Mist, trying to learn how he was working to traps. It wasn't very hard, as he was following only a few steps behind him, with the other three volunteers trailing right behind him. The other half of the party were the rest of the adventurers. They obviously had no need to take more risk than necessary, and that was probably why they'd survived as long as they had.

The tunnel they were walking in stopped abruptly in a door. Mist held up his hand to let the others know that he wanted some space to work. He slowly moved closer, practically crawling, checking every stone along the way. Behind him, Din could hear the other two volunteers whisper amongst themselves. He had heard their names, but failed to catch them. Their whispers were too soft for him to catch any words.

"What's taking you so long?" one of the adventurers in the back row called out. It was the big one, Brick. Din was fairly certain that he was a red essence user, just judging from his massive frame and his nickname. Mist seemed to be ignoring this as he pushed and prodded the door. "I'm sure you could do it much better," one of the other adventurers replied. Din was pretty it came from the one called Will.

"Yeah, just watch," Brick replied. He waded past the four volunteers up to the door. Mist took the hint and moved away from the door. Far away, too. The four volunteers got the point as well, backed around the corner. Still, they were far too fascinated not to watch Brick working his magic.

The big adventurer tried the handle of the door once, with no success. "Here's how you open a locked door," he exclaimed. The red essence flames began to dance around his body. Din knew they weren't real flames, just a sort of display that came with essence usage. He had seen it several times before, though not as powerful as these. Perhaps the lack of light except their torches made it more visible as well.

Brick readied himself, pulling his arm behind. His fist was already read with his essence. With a fierce roar, he launched a punch at the door... through the door. Despite being made of stone, the door shattered in several pieces, sending small bits of stone flying in several directions.

The four volunteers stood practically frozen for several more moments, completely fascinated by Brick's strength. The big adventurer just pushed the remaining pieces of stone out of the doorframe and walked through it. "Much more effective, right?" he asked to the others, without expecting any answer.

He walked a few steps into the next room before stopping. "Your turn again, Mist," he called, obviously a bit impatient. Mist moved swiftly up to Brick, and stood next to him, just taking in the room. "Come on, now, you guys too," the last adventurer called behind the volunteers. Din hadn't gotten his name yet. They did as they were told, and walked into the room, stopping right behind the two in front.

The room they had entered was a bit different from the rest of the crypt they'd seen so far. For a start, the air wasn't stale here. The sound of running water was a welcome change from the silence they'd encountered so far.

The room was rectangular, with the entrance point on a short wall. On their left hand was an altar of sorts, with a big, circular plate of some kind of metal full of inscriptions on the wall behind it. On each side of the alter a big pillar loomed, all the way up to the ceiling. It looked like it had been very well intricately carved, too. Most of the wall on the right hand was simply missing, leaving an open view to the underground river beneath them. Perhaps because of the water, this was the first room in which they'd seen vegetation. Vines crept up the wall above the opening to the underground river.

They could see the exit on the other side of the room, but for some reason there were a lot of half-decayed skeletons littered on the floor all the way up to it. 'Correction, probably for some bad reason,' Din thought to himself. "Well, this looks like a trap if I've ever seen one," Mist said out loudly.

"If you say so. In that case, time for you to make yourself useful," Will spoke behind them. Din felt his blood freeze into ice. The thought of walking into a trap was not a merry one. "No need for that, I can..." Mist tried to interrupt, but Will waved him off. "It'd take you far too long to move through the entire room. And, after all, they are getting a share of the loot, why shouldn't they work for it too?"

"Yes, move it," Brick chimed in and pushed them forward. A quick glance at Rob revealed that he was feeling as extatic about this as Din was. One of the other volunteers looked at Brick, obviously frightened. Brick, in return, just cracked his knuckles, replying in a silent way that this wasn't open for negotiation. "Stand apart with about an arm's width between each of you and walk towards the other door," Will commanded them, "and be careful where you step," he added, with a chuckle from Brick.

Din looked down at the floor. He had noticed that Mist always seemed to be walking with the weight on his back leg, and always stopping if there were anything unusual about the stones on the floor. He walked slowly forward, trying each stone before putting weight on it. "Will you look at that," Brick said, "seems like you've gotten yourself an apprentice, Mist." Din ignored him, and kept moving forward. Despite moving slow, he seemed to be deciding the pace for all of them, as noone dared move past the others. He carefully stepped over any skeletons on his way. Some of them seemed to have some equipment still lying around, but most of it had decayed over time.

"There's something strange about this room," Mist said, "Why would they leave a wall open to the river?" "Bah, they probably threw their dead into it or something," Brick replied, attempting to end the conversation as soon as possible. "And then there's the skeletons. I'm fairly certain that the door was sealed," Mist went on, overlooking Brick's reply.

Din couldn't help but follow that thought further. What could've killed these guys? They'd obviously been here for quite some time. He tried to shake the thought away for now, focusing on the floor. It was looking good so far. Wait, one of the rocks there looked strange. It was further elevated then at the rest. Just as he was about to shout out a warning, Rob stepped on it. They heard a loud click, and the sounds of some mechanism being triggered under the floor. They all stopped dead in their tracks, listening.

Suddenly, the room was filled with the sounds of bones grinding against each other. The skeletons, despite being obviously dead and even half-decayed, were rising to their feet, and they weren't looking friendly.

"Heads up," Will called out. With a bang, the first of them were crushed into dust by Brick's mighty strike. "Good, I was starting to get bored," he replied, already in the middle of attacking the next one as well. The other three adventurers quickly faced the skeletons, sending them flying left and right.

Unfortunately, it wasn't fast enough to help the four volunteers who were now surrounded. The skeletons moved slow, but there were too many of them to keep in view, and they weren't waiting for their turns. Din felt the adrenaline rush into his veins. All he had to do was survive long enough for the adventurers to take care of them. His sling wasn't of much use here. One of the skeletons lounged at him. He dodged low, and then kicked the skeleton's leg, causing it to fall. Fortunately, they seemed to lack in balance. He saw another strike at him, and brought his arm up to cover his head. However, the skeleton never connected as Rob body tackled him. Unfortunately, he wasn't fast enough on his legs, and felt another skeleton drive his arm, lacking a hand, into his leg.

All between the dodging, Din couldn't shake the thought that there was something else going on. Why was there still ticking under the floor? He turned as he heard a click behind the altar. The big, round plate. He turned to the other wall. The river.

Two thoughts connected, just as he dodged another swipe. "Rob! The veins!" he shouted. He ran towards the open wall, and leapt at the veins over it. Rob had still not gotten to his feet when the big plate suddenly opened wide, revealing tons of water from beneath it. The water poured into the room with massive force, catching everything and pushing it into the river. Din saw Rob being washed away by the river and reached for his friend. He felt a massive tug at his arm as Rob caught his arm. A sharp pain shot through his arms, and only the adrenaline in his veins kept him from loosing his grip with the other arm. Rob managed to get a grip himself right before Din would have had to let go of them both.

He noticed that Mist was holding on to a vein as well. Will seemed to fly for a moment, and landed on the veins, holding on to them. He glanced over at the other side of the room and saw Brick, holding on to the alter with all his strength, a massive red essence flame engulfing him.

The water quickly subsided, leaving only a tiny stream left. All of the skeletons had been washed away, as had the last of the adventurers and the other two volunteers. "Rob, help," Din called out. Rob nodded. Din let go of his grip, and felt himself being pushed by Rob away from the river under him. He landed on his feet and immediately tripped on the slippery surface, crashing with his shoulder first into the ground. A groan of pain escaped his lips. He heard Rob land right behind him, slightly more elegant than himself, despite his wounded leg. As the adrenaline faded, the arm Din had used to catch Rob started to radiate strong pain.

As he rose to his feet, he heard Mist and Will talking. "Ah, that unlucky moron," Will said. "He wouldn'tve liked you calling him that," Mist replied, "... but it doesn't matter much now. I'm also sorry for the youngsters who died that way." "Ah, forget them," Brick broke in, "the strongest survive, that's the way it works."

"Now, let's get moving," Brick said, turning to Din and Rob. Din's arm hung useless, and Rob was unable to get to walk. "Lead the way," Brick commanded Rin.

"No." Din stated sharply. "No?" Brick echoed, surprised at Din's sudden defiance. "I'm not leaving my friend alone here." Din explained.

Brick glared at Din. Red essence flames started engulfing his body. Din could hear a part of him screaming in fear, but tried to shut it out as long as he could. "Brick," Mist broke in, "no need for this. If he doesn't want to come, he can stay here, and he gets no share of any essences we find."

Brick kept glancing at Din for a few more moments before turning away. The red essence flames faded again. "Yes, you can stay here and rot for all I care." He walked over to the exit and pushed the door through the hinges without bothering to check for traps. Mist sighed. "We'll pick you up on our way out," he told Rob and Din before following the barbarian. Will nodded goodbye and walked after the other two.

------------------

As soon as the adventurers left, Din and Rob worked together to bandage Rob's leg. Din could only use one of his arms. Fortunately for him, his right. The wound in Rob's leg didn't bleed too much, but seemed to have done quite a lot of harm anyway. Rob was unable to stand on it, he had no strength at all in it.

Din let Rob examine his arm. "It looks like it is pulled out of the socket," he declared. "I don't know how to put it back in, and it'll probably hurt like hell, too." Din commented that it already hurt, although not like hell yet.

Sitting against the altar, they broke out some food and relaxed. There was nothing much else to do, except wait for the adventurers to come back.

------------------

Meanwhile, the three remaining adventurers passed a few more traps and reached the inner chamber. It was quite large and tall, considering it was dug out from the stone. At the center, on the top of a lot of stairs, an altar resided with a figure on top of it. It was a small statue of a female figure. Even from the entrance, they could see the glow of a blue essence. It looked like blue smoke, vaporizing from the statue. It was also very strong, considering it was only from an inanimate object.

They knew that if the essence was strong enough, the first one to touch the statue would absorb it. They hadn't really discussed the possibility that such a strong essence would be down here. Now that they were here, it seemed reasonable that they'd discuss who would get the essence, to the greatest effect of the group.

At least, that seemed reasonable to Will and Mist. To Brick it seemed more reasonable that whoever got it first would get it. With an essence-infused leap, he was already a good way up the stairs.

Will immediately understood what was happening, and pursued the big man. He literally flew up, trying to catch up with Brick. Mist was left with only his legs as an option to get up the stairs quickly, and both of them had quite a lead on him.

Brick reached the top first. He heard Will shout "Wait!" from behind him, but completely ignored. Will was just landing beside him as Brick touched the statue. As the other two watched, a blue-red flickering engulfed him, so fiery and wild that it was almost blinding to watch. He seemed to experience some inner struggle for a few moments, then the aura settled down a bit more.

Will was about to open his mouth to speak when he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his neck. Suddenly, his point of view changed, and it took a few moments to realize that he was watching his own decapitated body sinking together from his head falling down the stairs. He also spotted Mist sprinting out the door they entered by. Brick's strike had been so swift and hard that he hadn't even spotted it. That was also one of his last thoughts.

-----------------------------

Din and Rob heard sounds of struggle, and tried to figure out what was happening. Din stood up, looking down the hallway the other had left through. He spotted Mist as he rounded the corner. The alarmed look on Mist's face immediately warned Din that something was very wrong. Just a moment later, another figure appeared, with a streak of blue-red fiery smoke following his speedy movements. In mere moments, it struck Mist into the ground so hard that Din could hear the crack of bones clearly from his position. Only then the figure stopped enough that Din could recognize it. It was Brick, but the look in his eyes was one of a true madman. It was the eyes of a man who will not only kill everything in his way, but also kill just for the sake of killing.

As he loomed over Mist's body, Din quickly understood that he'd suffer the same fate in a moment. Rob too. He had to do something quickly, and there was no way he could outrun the abomination. Even if he could, he wasn't going to leave Rob alone if he could help it.

Thinking quickly, he turned the bag of sling stones in his belt upside down, letting them all fall out. "Hey, weakling," he called out, almost unable to believe that he was actually taunting Brick rather than hiding. As Din had predicted, the barbarian easily bit the bait. "Who are you calling weak? I'll show you,"

The red-blue glowing Brick closed the distance between them in just a second. Fortunately for Din, he was too far lost to look down. Unfortunately for Din, he had no time to dodge. As the big figure of the tripping barbarian practically flew through the air, he also knocked down Din. He felt an intense pain in his chest. 'Probably a broken rib,' he thought to himself, 'or several.' he added after feeling an explosion of pain as he attempted to breathe.

However, he had no time to hesitate. Brick was already getting to his feet again. "Take t--that," Din called as he threw an object at Brick. The barbarian just waved the object away before it hit him. However, even if the flask was crushed and pushed away, the oil in it mostly kept travelling in the same direction, splashing over the barbarian. He looked confused for a moment, then turned to face the puny human again, even more enraged than before.

Din had used the opportunity to dart behind one of the pillars. Brick charged it. He wasn't going to play around at all. In particular, he wasn't going to get around the pillar. With a red essence-infused punch, he struck right through it with his fist.

Just as he did so, a spark escaped from Din's dagger. He had been holding it against the pillar in anticipation of the attack, and the impact of the stone being pushed against the metal had generated sparks. For a moment, it seemed time stood still as the barbarian realized what was going to happen. Then he was engulfed in a flame, this time a real, hot flame, as the oil he was soaked in caught fire.

Din, on the other hand, was flung against the wall behind the pillar. The impact from the stone pillar had sent him flying, and he felt himself crashing against the back wall like a rag doll. He fell together in a heap, unable to move from his wounds. His conscious was fading in the sea of agony.

He was violently jerked back to the living as Brick picked him up. The barbarian was badly burnt, and a few traces of the oil was still burning on his skin. He readied his fist to deliver a punch so hard that it would utterly crush Din into pieces. Just as he sent his fist flying, he found himself unable to move. He felt something strange from his lower body. Looking down, he could not make any sense of it. It looked like his body was quickly turning into ice.

Din was dropped as the ice reached the upper body. The now ice statue of Brick fell forward, lacking any possibility to keep the balance. It crashed into the floor in a thousand small pieces, with the legs hitting Din.

Once again, Din felt himself fading into unconsciousness. This time, however, it was with a smile. At least Rob would survive.

However, as he was dying, Din saw a vision. A blue woman appeared in his sights. She looked naked, but somehow it didn't seem very important to Din at the moment. Despite him lying on the side, she was standing upright in his view.

"Do you want to live?" he heard a female voice in his head ask. With his lung punctured, he was not even able to answer her vocally. Still, he thought 'yes' in response.

Somehow, the woman caught it even so. "Then you shall be my Avatar," he heard her say.

Suddenly, his body was somehow picked up into the air. It was as if it had stopped obeying gravity, as it hung in mid-air. He also noticed a blue glow around him. Then the strangest of sensations hit him, it felt as if he was pulled, tugged and pushed in every direction at once. It wasn't painful, it was ... beyond what his senses could express.

However, he couldn't miss the pain subsiding. In fact, it disappeared completely. In its wake, a growing feeling of exhaustion appeared. It felt as if he had been pushed harder than he had ever done, twice.

After what seemed to him like several minutes, the strange feelings from his body subsided, and he felt himself once more falling to the ground. He felt himself falling into deep sleep from the exhaustion. It felt different than the dying he had just witnessed first-hand. He caught sight of Rob as he fell asleep, and his last thoughts were 'why are you looking so strangely at me?'

Ding 80 nr 6 and NaNoWriMo

2010-11-01T07:48:00.001+01:00

I dinged 80 with my paladin Tirvin yesterday, and hit 450 Alchemy soon after. I have a lot of stuff I could write about it, but I've decided to make an attempt at NaNoWriMo. I suspect the demands for writing far exceeds what I can do, but I'll still take a shot at it.

My November posts will all be my story, not the usual WoW-related stuff. The story itself is not WoW-related at all.

Herbalism: Lifeblood changed

2010-10-25T08:15:00.000+02:00

The ability that comes with Herbalism, Lifeblood, is changed. Previously, it healed the character for a decent amount of health. Now, it grants haste (240 for 450 herbalism, less if you have less skill) and a minor amount of health.

It now triggers a shared 20-sec cooldown on all on-use trinkets that grant haste, attack power, spell power and you name it.

That means herbalism is now a good pick for profession for all characters.

Haste grants

Faster spellcasting = more dps and more hps
Less time between auto-attacks = more dps and more procs (f. ex. Maelstrom Weapon
More rage gained (warrior, bears)
Faster energy regeneration (rogues, kitties)
Faster rune regeneration (death knights)
Faster focus regeneration (hunters)
Shorter Crusader Strike cooldown for Retribution pallies (provided they have Sanctity of Battle)

Tanks are probably the role that benefit the least from haste. However, faster auto-attacks and more resources (rage and runes) are always handy, and translates into more threat. Unfortunately, it does nothing to improve Protection paladin resources (mana and holy power), but it still grants faster auto-attacks (and more Seal of Truth and Reckoning procs)

A simple pally macro for herbalism:

#showtooltip
/cast Avenging Wrath
/cast Lifeblood

Something happened to the mob/level formula...

2010-10-25T07:46:00.000+02:00

In my mind, orange mobs are hard. Like, your attacks barely dent them, while they crush you all the time. I'm currently repainting that picture.

While leveling through Northrend with Tirvin (my second pally past 70, by the way), I'm just having such an easy time it's getting silly. At level 71, I soloed Sarathstra for the quest Sarathstra, Scourge of the North. It was a level 75 elite, originally intended for a 5-man group. I was never even remotely in any danger, and killed her without using a single cooldown. The self-healing from Word of Glory kept me up with no trouble at all. In fact, I only spent about every second Holy Power dump on Word of Glory, the others went into Shield of the Righteous.

I did less dps than I could do with yellow mobs. However, my damage was much less reduced compared to what I remember from pre-4.0. Part of that may be because I had a decent amount of Vengeance all the time, but I didn't notice a lot of glancing hits. Similarly, I took much less crushing blows than I used to.

I tested it with other higher-level mobs too, and nope, they weren't really dangerous at all. At 72, I pulled groups of four lvl 75 mobs at a time in Grizzly Hills. With that many mobs, I was starting to take about as much damage as I could self-heal without cooldowns. If it weren't for the level requirement to pick up quests, I'd be in far higher-level areas already.

I'm also taking this opportunity to do some other quests I've skipped with my 5 other 80s. With all of those, I focused on quests that would get me reputation with the Northrend fractions. This time, I don't need to bother with that. In a month and a half, the reputation in Northrend will have very little to say, unless you're an achievement collector.

I'm looking forward to a lot of cool quest chains in Grizzly Hills. Just dinged 73 last night when I finished Battle for the Undercity. It's rather cool, and since it'll be gone in 4.0.3, I took the opportunity to do it one final time. Sylvanas and Thrall are just badass!

I'm looking forward to see how badass Baine Bloodhoof will be in Cataclysm.

"Anyone else thinks paladins are overpowered?"

2010-10-19T09:11:00.003+02:00

The quote above was said in party chat when I was tanking Utgarde Keep yesterday.

I hadn't played for several weeks when the patch hit. I went online and started fixing glyphs for all my characters... I'm fairly certain I made more than 100 glyphs with Ayeba, my druid. Fortunately, I had a lot of materials stacked up. Sadly, I lacked several key glyphs, but every glyph I could make myself saved me a lot of gold. If I'd been greedy and not so lazy, I would've sold glyphs with my mats instead of making them for myself.

After I had fixed up glyphs and talents for all my characters, I still lacked key bindings and macros. I was not sure what to do. What was there for me to do? I don't raid, PVP was a tad broken, I didn't need anything... so I decided I could spend time leveling my paladin which have stayed at 62 for more than a year. I figured it also gave me a good opportunity to test out the new holy power change.

Three words on my personal feelings of the new system. "I" "LOVE" "IT". I never managed to really enjoy the old paladin mechanic, but this... this is just awesome. While the system needs some polishing and possibly rounding off, it is a much, much better framework than the old system.

Retribution

I tested Retribution for some quests and one instance. The system felt much more interesting than it did before. No more just cooldown-smashing, now I actually had to watch out for procs (Divine Purpose) and use different attacks based on what I was doing, primarly deciding between Templar's Verdict and Divine Storm as a holy power finisher, occasionally using Word of Glory for self-healing. I expect it to get even better at 70 when I get Mastery Hand of Light and at 71 when I get Inquisition.

My biggest problem was that I lacked some sort of way to keep track of Holy Power without looking at the top left corner of my screen. I searched and tested a few addons, and decided that the one I liked best was Class Combo Points, positioned right below the center of the screen (just edit frame.lua and set cfg.pointx = -70 instead of the default value of -150.

In other notes, Long Arm of the Law was a great distance closer. Okay, not as great as Charge, but I also (ab)used it to run away and to move fast in instances by judging distant mobs and critters. The Art of War was not in itself dramatically different (except it no longer allowed healing, but I got that from Word of Glory instead), but the visual proc made it a heapload better. Thanks, Blizz!

I felt retribution was much better now than it ever was before. However, I'm not sure that it sails up as my personal favorite dps spec, even so. But as long as it's not gravely annoying, I'm all good. After all, the reason I want to play a paladin is to heal and tank primarily.

Protection

Okay, protection was just so much fun I had trouble controlling myself. The reason I didn't like it before was that it felt awfully... static. It was just a very locked rotation.

In a way, it's still locked, but there's so much more choices and versatility in it now than earlier. The locked part is the 3 sec cooldown of Hammer of the Righteous and Crusader Strike (Ignore the tooltip, both have 3 sec CD as protection). 3 sec CD means you can use it every second GCD, and in most cases, you should. It provides good threat, gives a point of Holy Power, has a chance to reset the cooldown on Avenger's Shield, and deals a decent amount of AoE damage as well (in the case of Hammer of the Rigtheous).

However, there are still circumstances where I decided not to use it every second GCD, such as when I needed to both dump Holy Power into Shield of the Rigtheous or throw an Avenger's Shield. And it felt like I wasn't seriously punishing myself doing that.

Speaking of which, Avenger's Shield is completely awesome. I love having it as a proc, since it hits like a truck, particularly considering it can hit 3 mobs. Part of the reason I love it is the new power auras which display when I've gotten a proc. The silence effect is a welcome boost as well. I still think it's a bit ... ehm... cheesy, for lack of a better word, but I guess I can live with that.

There's also another proc available, Sacred Duty. For some reason it doesn't show up in the Power Auras, most annoying. It's also much more passive... it rarely changes the way I use my powers. The only exception might be if I have 2 holy power, and Hammer of the Righteous, Crusader Strike, Judgement and Holy Wrath are all on cooldown. Then I might consider dropping a 2 HP guaranteed crit Shield of the Righteous on my target... otherwise, I'd just use another ability and wait for the 3rd Holy Power. In fact, I decided to drop the 2 points in the talent in my latest respec.

I have almost never had any trouble with mana while tanking since the patch. There have been a few exceptions, but as long as I remember to Judge and keep Holy Shield up, I'm usually good.

Now, there's one thing I don't understand, but don't complain about. I am doing so much dps, while tanking. I managed to tank an entire instance once forgetting to buff myself with Righteous Fury, just because I dealt so much damage. I mean, I was at 2k dps at lvl 68 in Utgarde Keep, while the dps (lvl 68-71) were below 1k on trash mobs. On bosses I was still above 1k dps, unless I spent all my HP on self-healing. And I'm not even very well-geared for my level, still having several green pieces from low-level Outland quests and no enchants. On every single instance in Outland I've topped the dps charts, usually by a wide margin.

Speaking of self-healing, casting Word of Glory on myself with Guarded by the Light and Divinity yields a massive amount of healing done. It heals for about 2-2.5k/holy power at level 68, and it can crit, healing me above full health. Unlike percentage-based heals (like Death Pact and Enraged Regeneration) it will probably be much less powerful at level 85, but at this level it's just too awesome, particularly since I can throw out one every 9 seconds. After a Shattered Halls run, I found that I missed some quest mobs, so I went back to kill them after the last boss was downed. Only a hunter went with me, and together we took down packs of 5 mobs (the gladiators with a single centurion), with the only source of healing being my own. With careful pulling, I'm sure we could've taken the entire instance that way, possibly not including the bosses.

Conclusion: I've really enjoyed paladin tanking, so much more than before the patch. I really look forward to lvl 82 when I can get Pursuit of Justice in my tanking build, too.

Holy

I respecced from Retribution to Holy and healed an instance with it, having only about 50% of my gear as healer gear. Fortunately, the tank didn't take too much damage, so I was good. It gave me a chance to test out the new holy power system here too.

I won't go into too much details since I've got much less experience healing than tanking so far, but the impression is that it rocks. Much more dynamic, way much more mobile. When Daybreak procs, I can ften throw out two Holy Shocks and a Word of Glory in rapid succession while moving.

Unlike most other Holy Power dumps, Word of Glory scales linearly with holy power, while Shield of the Righteous, Templar's Verdict and Divine Storm scales semi-exponentially. It means that it is not necessarily a bad idea to throw out a 2 HP Word of Glory if that's what you need to top off someone, while throwing a 2 HP Templar's Verdict is a guaranteed dps loss.

I will probably at some point (probably at 85) to test out a Holy DPS build, based on Blazing Light, Enlightened Judgements, Infusion of Light, Crusade, Speed of Light (from the beta, where it provides 3% haste), Judgements of the Pure, Conviction, Rule of Law, Divine Favor and primarily Denounce. Paragon of Virtue will also be handy to use Avenging Wrath more often. All holy power will be dumped into Inquisition. As you can see, there are quite a lot of talents that can improve holy dps. The Glyph of Exorcism and Holy Shock and either Judgement or Divine Favor are natural selections here.

I see three problems with such a spec. The first is mana. While Exorcism is fairly cheap with Denounce (7.5% base mana), with no mana returns except Divine Plea (which should be glyphed) and Lay on Hands (which should be glyphed not once, but twice), you might run dry during a long battle. Of course, you can stack Spirit since you still have Meditation.

The second problem is range. Holy Shock has a mere 20 yards reach, and there are no talents to improve that. However, it's just annoying, it's not critical.

The third and most important is boredom. The rotation is just boring. The instant Exorcism proc from Denounce doesn't change anything in the rotation, so it's just spam Holy Shock on cooldown, spam Exorcism else and use Judgement to keep up the haste buff. If Judgement deals enough damage, it can be part of the roation, but so far it seems it doesn't.

Edit: lack of AoE...

Outland in 2 days

I blazed through Outland (admittedly, from lvl 62) in two days. Most of the time in instances, and I know that's suboptimal for leveling once you've expended your rested XP.

During that time, I also achieved Revered with Sporeggar to get Transmute Primal Earth to Air, skilled from 330 to 350 Alchemy and grinded 4 Primal Air for the Primal Might I need for Master of Transmutation. Fortunately, I had plenty of Primal Earth and Primal Fire on my bank alt from mining with other characters. I ended up buying the Primal Manas from the auction house, since they cost only 7 gold a piece. The primal air, on the other hand, cost 45 gold each, and a primal might cost 180 gold.

During my grinding of Primal Air I killed a lot of level 71 mobs, at level 68. I was not even remotely in danger at any time despite having two or three mobs on me, and they went down fast! Protection is just an awesome spec for soloing as well, possibly more so than before.

Serious surgery incoming

I've decided to pay the money to change race on my paladin from Blood Elf to Tauren, once that becomes available. I just like the tauren paladin theme a lot more, and I really like taurens. Too bad their racials are strictly worse. At least I get the benefit of Cultivation.

I am already renaming the paladin abilities in my head to better suit the new theme. Guarded by the Light can be Bathed in Sunlight.

A candidate for very illogical naming...

One thing I've thought of. The talent Protector of the Innocent. It heals only the paladin himself or herself. Does that imply that the paladin is innocent? Bah, yeah, right. How many mobs have you killed during your level up, mister of-so-innocent pally? How many of those have not been a threat to anyone, and have just minded their own business until they were attacked?

It can also imply that the paladin is the only innocent, since it doesn't heal anyone else. Even worse...

I can see an interpretation where the paladin need to stay alive to help others, in effect, the innocent, but it's not a good way to base the naming on. You could rather name it Dancing in the Light or something like that. For my tauren paladin, this talent will be something like Walking in the Sun.

Druids: Soothe now dispels Enrage effects!

2010-10-15T07:22:00.004+02:00

For all I know, this change might have been live for some time. However, I just discovered it by reading a tooltip. The former Soothe Animal, now Soothe, removes an enrage effect, and it's dirt cheap to cast too.

Dispelling enrage effects have some utility in PVE. However, in PVP, it'll reduce warrior damage by 10% (removing Wrecking Crew, Enrage and Bastion of Defense for the three different specs of warriors) and preventing one of their self-heals (Enraged Regeneration). Don't rely on being able to stop them from healing, though, as they can just wait for their next enrage effect (since it's a passive proc) and use Enraged Regeneration before you manage to get off a Soothe.

It should also be possible to remove Hunter's Bestial Wrath and The Beast Within. Haven't tested it yet, though. It's also possible that just soothing the pet will take care of the hunter too, at least with the way the talent is worded.

There have been a lot of other changes to spells as well, but this one had so far managed to stay under my radar.

Edit: There might also be other enrage effects it can dispel. Owlkin Frenzy is a possible candidate.

Are bears still a bleak copy of Protection Warriors?

2010-10-13T15:39:00.002+02:00

We're entering a new era... World of Warcraft version 4.0.

When I started playing WoW in classic, bears were really a bleak copy of protection warriors. Fast forward to Cataclysm. How do they feel today?

Identical abilities

The first comparison isn't even fair. Growl and Taunt are the identically same abilities, but they're also identical to Hand of Reckoning and Dark Command.

Moving on, Demoralizing Roar and Demoralizing Shout are identical. So are Challenging Roar and Challenging Shout. Interestingly enough, druids can glyph their version for 30 sec less cooldown, but I haven't been able to find a similar glyph for warriors. However, they pick up a talent (Drums of War) which reduces the rage cost of both shouts to 0 rage. Most handy.

Maul and Heroic Strike are basically the same. However, glyphed Maul will hit an additional target (albeit for 50%), which is starting to remind very much of Cleave. Then again, glyphed Cleave hits two additional target.

Similar abilities

Survival Instincts reduces damage by 60%, while Shield Wall reduces damage by 40%... however the latter can be glyphed to reduce damage by 60% as well, increasing its cooldown. However, with the talent Shield Mastery, the cooldown, even glyphed, drops below that of Survival Instincts.

Bash and Concussive Blow are pretty similar. The main difference is that Concussive Shot has a shorter cooldown and deals damage as well. Still, pretty similar.

Skull bash and Shield Bash are also similar, though Shield Bash has two seconds longer cooldown (provided the bear picks up Brutal Impact, which every bear with a bit of self-respect should). Shield Bash is affected by a lot of talents, though, among others reducing the rage cost to 0 and granting it a 100% chance to silence and daze the target.

Frenzied Regeneration now increases health by 30%, just like Last Stand. It also converts rage to health, similar to Enraged Regenration. The glyphed version increases healing taken instead.

Abilities which have the same purpose

Now we're arrived at abilities which aren't necessarily very similar, but works for the same purpose.

First, the primary skill for each spec. Mangle and Shield Slam both share a 6 second cooldown and are high-threat single-target moves. Mangle also applies a bleed debuff, while Shield Slam removes a magic buff. Both abilities have talents which gives a proc that reset their cooldown and cause them to cost no rage. For druids, it procs of Lacerate ticks, while warriors proc them off Devestate and Revenge.

Thunder Clap and Swipe are both AoE-threat abilities which share a 6 sec cooldown. In addition, Thunder Clap reduces attack speed of the opponents. Druids have this ability attached to Mangle and Maul with the talent Infected Wounds. In addition, Infected Wounds slow the target.

Druids also get a second AoE-threat ability on a 6 sec cooldown at level 81, Thrash, which applies a bleed effect to all targets. Warriors can talent Thunder Clap to spread the bleed from a Rend to all targets.

Then there's gap closers. Feral Charge and Charge both share a 15 sec cooldown unglyphed, 14 sec glyphed. The druid version immobilizes the opponent, the warrior version stuns. However, protection warriors also have Intercept and soon Heroic Leap.

Druids get Omen of Clarity for free, allowing a rage free ability now and then. Warriors can spec into Battle Trance, which does pretty much the same, but has a higher proc chance from a smaller selection of abilities... namely Shield Slam only.

Stuff which are not so similar

Faerie Fire and Devastate (or Sunder Armor for low-level warriors) both reduce armor by 4% and stack up to 3. However, they are not very identical in the way they are handled in the rotation. Faerie Fire has a long reach, a 6 sec cooldown, and with an almost mandatory bear talent (Feral Aggression) applies 3 stacks each cast. Thus, a druid doesn't spend time stacking up FF.

However, druids stack Lacerate 3 times. They throw down Pulverize to consume the stack and get a self-buff, unlike warriors who just keep Sunder Armor up throughout the battle.

Warriors do have a bleed, Rend, but it isn't vitally important the way Lacerate is.

Barkskin and Shield Block have some resemblance in usage as both reduce incoming damage slightly on a fairly short cooldown. Talented, Shield Block only has 30 sec CD, while Barkskin remains at 1 min. In addition, with Heavy Repercussions Shield Block becomes an offensive utility as well, doubling the damage of Shield Slam while it is up.

The passive mechanic to block incoming attacks for a warrior has somewhat the same purpose as Savage Defense, namely reduce incoming damage somewhat. Both are also focus of the mastery for each class.

Unique abilities to each class

Enrage was originally a copy of the warrior ability Bloodrage. However, it is now gone, leaving druids with an original ability.

In addition to some abilities mentioned above, druids also get Berserk, Stampeding Roar and Omen of Clarity. It might be mentioned that druids also get Rebirth, one of the very few ways to bring someone back to life mid-combat. Useful also for a tank, in a fight with phases where they can shift out between the different phases without risking to get squashed.

Warriors get a heapload of original stuff they can use while tanking. Which isn't too strange, since they can't shift out of their rage-form, like druids can. Listing them quickly: Intervene, Slam (not sure this is of any use while tanking), Vigilance, Shockwave, Disarm, Revenge, Spell Reflection, Heroic Throw, Victory Rush, Inner Rage, Berserker Rage and Intimidating Shout.

The two classes also bring different buffs and debuffs which benefit their party/raid. Well, almost. Both bring the armor reduction debuff. In addition, druids bring Leader of the Pack, the Mangle bleed increase and Mark of the Wild. Warriors bring Battle Shout, Commanding Shout and Vigilance. It feels like I've forgotten something here.

Conclusion?

The two subspecs (bears and protection warriors) still shares a good amount of mechanics. However, they also have enough difference that it doesn't feel like you're playing the same class. Then again, if you do have one of them and want to try a different tanking style, it might be a better idea to try Death Knight or Paladin first, to get a feel of something entirely different.

What I don't like about the paladin theme... don't read if you're easily offended.

2010-10-04T09:08:00.000+02:00

I've never really had a paladin as my main. However, I've tried three times. The results are an belf 63 pally on my home server, and a dwarven 30ish paladin and a belf 80 paladin on two other servers.

I've run into two problems with paladins, time and again. The first have been that the playstyle of protection and retribution have been incredibly boring. It looks like that's going to change in Cataclsym.

The other problem is the very theme of a paladin... protector of the innocent, bringers of pure light, yada yada, self-righteous bastards. I don't like the concept much. Part of the reason is of course that I hated paladins as horde during classic. Old habits die hard.

When Blood Elves could be paladins, it helped a lot, since the idea was that belfs just (ab)used the power for their own, egoistical purposes. A concept I can much more easily relate to. However, they use the same names for their spells. Hm... perhaps if I just renamed them for my own benefit?

I'd like to briefly tell you what I don't like about the theme. I may step on, probably even stomp on, some toes here.

The concept of paladin reminds me far too much of the middle-age Catholic Church. And from history, that lead to a lot of bad stuff. The worst part of it was when people with no conscience used people who only wanted to do good as pawns for their plans.

Take the Crusades, for example... lots of good people died, an even greater number of people got abused, and a small number of people reaped a lot of benefit from it, with malevolent intentions from the very beginning.

I also firmly believe that humans are creatures controlled by hormones and chemicals. There's a saying which I'll rephrase from memory: "A man is only rational for a total of about one hour each day." It captures what I believe in.

Yes, people want to be rational, but most of the time, they aren't. A lot of people are prepared to rationally accept a life in celibacy. However, most people will eventually fail because their very genes constantly urge them towards reproducing. When they succumb to their desires, since it is not openly accepted, it must happen in secret, and often lead to very tragic fates on the other end.

I believe in open communication, for a lack of a better term. Being open to communicate with others are the very premise of any working relationship, both between family, lovers, friends and enemies. In the case of enemies, a "working relationship" may be seen as a state in which you respect each other's borders, even if you don't like the other side.

There still need to be work beyond having open communication to actually make a relationship work. However, if you fail to communicate, the relationship is almost guaranteed to fail. Many live constantly in failing relationships, and it works because one side is dominating the other. For any sort of relationship where the two sides want to be on equal terms, communication is the key.

If you feel offended after reading this, I'm all open for discussion.

Keybindings and Macros Galore

2010-09-28T09:59:00.000+02:00

I'm not exactly the first person to ever write a post about key bindings. Rather than focusing on exact key bindings, I'll share some of my thoughts regarding how I make up the system.

Muscle Memory

When playing a game such as World of Warcraft, you develop something called "Muscle memory". I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I believe it is something like this: When you decided to activate a certain ability in WoW, your brain does not consciously connect which ability is on which key binding. You have developed a muscle memory that allows your brain to just decide which ability to use, and then the fingers do the rest. Perhaps the connection is in the nerves of your hand, or your spine?

If you lack the muscle memory for a given class, you need extra time to connect the ability to the key binding you want to use. In some cases, you even need to look for the key on the display.

High level PVP players can often play several classes at top level. However, even they have the problem that they can't maintain a muscle memory for too many classes at the same time. Their reaction time is superb, but their response time suffers from the extra time they need to figure out the key binding.

A semi-counter for this is to have key bindings which are similar for all characters. It does not automatically make you better at the game, but I believe it personally helps me learn the key bindings faster... or re-learn them into my muscle memory whenever I switch class (again!).

Everything available

Even if you only play a single class, you can perform better if you need less movement of the hand to do what you want to. If your rotation requires you to often hit 1 and G, for example, you will probably be a bit faster if you change it to two keys next to each other, after some time learning the new keys.

Re-learning time for key binding

Before every expansion, during the beta, I look up all abilities for classes that either have gone through big modifications, or have gotten some new abilities added as part of the main rotation (at least buttons that need to be hit regularly), or just new classes I intend to level, like a warrior this time. Then I sit down with pen, paper, and a list of all abilities of a given class. After about two hours (usually split into several half-hour sessions) I've set up the key bindings as I want them in the next expansion.

However, that often means I've changed a lot of abilities around. It can be a real pain to learn a new set of key bindings. It takes a lot of time for your muscle memory to forget the old key bindings and replace them with the new, leading to a lot of circumstances where I end up hitting the wrong button at a critical moment. However, levelling is the best time to make such a change, as you usually play a lot of solo and only yourself suffer from the mess-ups.

It also takes a certain mindset to successfully do it. If you constantly irritate yourself over the messed-up keybindings, you're probably better off with the old. You need to think of the learning as a useful process and not just an irritating one, or the irritation will prevent you from learning effectively.

WASD or ESDF?

I have remapped the movement keys for all first-person shooter games and WoW from WASD (that is, forward with W, strafe left with A, etc) to ESDG (forward with E, left with S, etc). It took some time to learn, but I don't regret it.

The main advantage as I see it is that you have a lot more keys close to your fingers. From the usual position WASD, the following keys are easily reachable (not including the movement keys): |, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, q, e, r, (t), f, (g), <, z, x, c, v. Total of 15 keys easily reachable, 17 if you include t and g. From ESDF, you can reasily reach all of the following keys: (|), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, q, w, r, t, (y), a, g, (h), <, z, x, c, v, b. Total of 18 keys easily reachable, and 21 if you include the fairly easy to reach ones. That means another 3-4 abilities easily within reach. For a game like WoW where each class has some 40+ keys (including stuff common for all, such as follow), that can be extremely valuable. The second, minor benefit is that it is slightly easier to find the position on the keyboard if you keep in mind that your right-movement finger is on F, which always has a slight bump or some other ways of tactile detection on all keyboards. I hope that made sense.

Multiple usage of a key with shift and ctrl

You can map multiple abilities to the same key. For example, Q can have one ability, Ctrl-Q can have another, Shift-Q can have a third. I recommend not using Alt-Q or any other alt-modification key-binding, as alt is terribly place for ease of reach during a hectic battle. In addition, should you happen to hit alt-tab, you've just accidently tabbed out of WoW (in Windows, that is).

With that said, I sometimes use Alt-Q (or something similar) for macroing abilities that need to be cast are to be cast on my focus target.

Macros, macros, macros

Macros 101

There are two ways to get multiple key-bindings on the same key. One is to bind three different "slots" to for example Q, ctrl-Q and shift-Q, and then drop each ability into one slot.

The other is to macro them, and put the macro into the slot Q. Bring up the macro interface by typing /macro in the chat area. Create a new macro. Call it whatever you want, and use the question mark (?) as icon.

The following macro is an example, using three mage abilities, but you can replace them with whatever you want.

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:shift] Frostbolt; [mod:ctrl] Frostfire Bolt; Fireball

Now drop the icon into a slot, and close the macro interface. The icon should be for Fireball when you don't press anything on the keyboard. If you now hold [ctrl], the icon should change to Frostfire Bolt. Finally, if you hold [shift], the icon should change to Frostbolt.

Now you can either hold [shift] and click the icon with your mouse to cast frostbolt, or you can hold [shift] and push the key bind for the slot you've dropped the ability into, for example Q. WARNING: If you have bound another slot to Shift-Q (or whichever key you're using), hitting [shift]-Q will activate that slot, not the one you've assigned to Q. Same with ctrl-Q. You need to unbind any slots you have with ctrl- and shift-keys for these types of macros to work.

Short explanation of the macro: The first line (#showtooltip) will tell the icon to change depending on which ability is triggered in the macro. Without it, the icon will be static. The macro will still work, but not the icon. It only works if you've chosen the question mark (?) as an icon for the macro.

The next line of the macro says something like this: If Shift is pressed ([mod:shift]), use Frostbolt. If shift is not pressed, but ctrl is pressed ([mod:ctrl]), use Frostfire Bolt. If neither ctrl nor shift is pressed, use Fireball.

Macros 102

A macro is always evaluated in order, meaning the first trigger to happen will be used. I'll give an example. Say you want to add something to the macro. If a friend is targetted, you want to cast Arcane Intellect instead. You can add that to a macro by typing "[help] Arcane Intellect". The [help] means that it only triggers if you have a target you can help. The opposite is [harm].

Consider the following macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:shift] Frostbolt; [mod:ctrl] Frostfire Bolt; Fireball; [help] Arcane Intellect

This macro will work exactly like the one above. It will never allow you to cast Arcane Intellect. Why? The [help] condition comes after Fireball, which does not have any conditions at all. You effectively say "Always cast fireball if nothing else is triggered before that".

The next version of the macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:shift] Frostbolt; [mod:ctrl] Frostfire Bolt; [help] Arcane Intellect; Fireball

This time, it will evaluate the condition "can I help the target" before it attempts to cast fireball if nothing else fails, but after it checks if ctrl and/or shift are pressed. That means: If you press ctrl or shift, even if you have a friendly target selected, it will attempt to cast frostbolt or frostfire bolt, hopefully producing an error message. (If not, go buckwild blasting your friends to death!)

The last version of the macro looks like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [help] Arcane Intellect; [mod:shift] Frostbolt; [mod:ctrl] Frostfire Bolt; Fireball

This target will check if the target is friendly first, before testing if you've pressed shift and/or control.

Note that there is (usually) no right or wrong concerning these macros. They are only correct or not in the sense that they do what you what them to do. Either of the last two might fulfill your needs if you want to create a macro for all four spells.

Macros 1042

Now we arrive at some slightly advanced macros. This one is specifically aimed at healers. I'll present the way I use now. I'll start by presenting a macro, from my druid arsenal.

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:shift, @player] [mod:ctrl, @focus] [@mouseover, help] [help] Regrowth; Wrath

Now, this is what it'll do.

If shift is pressed, cast Regrowth on myself
Else, if ctrl is pressed, cast Regrowth on my focus target. I could easily add that it should only cast on my macro target if it exists and is alive, but I want it to fail it isn't.
Else, if I have my mouse over a target that can be helped (either on a unit frame, raid frame, Grid or on the actual character), cast Regrowth on that target
Else, if I am targetting something friendly, cast Regrowth on it.
Else, cast Wrath.

Using a macro like this, I don't need an addon like Clique. I just move my mouse to the target in the raid I want to heal and hit the button I've assigned to this macro, R in my case.

When healing in raids, I focus the main tank and target off-tank (and I have sticky targeting enabled in the interface options). When healing the main-tank, I hit Ctrl-R. When healing the off-tank, I hit R. When healing any other target, I move my mouse to the target on my grid addon (but it also works on the core raid frames) and hit R. If I need to heal myself, I hit Shift-R.

The reason I choose to focus the main tank rather than targeting it, is that there's a risk my mouse happen to be over any friendly target when I'm casting R and trying to heal the off-tank. If that happens, the heal will go on the mouseovered target instead. With practice, it rarely happens at all, but if it does, I don't want to get the main tank killed over such a mistake.

Macros 10-gazilliion

There is also a lot of other fun stuff you can do with macros, but I'm really derailing from my intended topic here. Check out a macro-guide if you're interested.

Principles for key bindings

O----kay. That was a lengthy introduction to what I was really writing about. Key bindings.

Here are my own rules.

Never change key bindings across specs

Any core ability which all specs have should always be on the same key. That also applies for talents which all specs take, such as Inner Focus for priests (well, up to Cataclysm, then only Disc priests will have it).

Healer, heal thyself

For any key that contains a targeted heal, which means 90% of them, macro it to heal myself with Shift pressed. It doesn't apply to non-targeted heals such as Holy Nova.

Main rotation on QWRT

The most commonly used abilities for any spec should be on W, R, which are the easiest reachable of any keys, possible not including A and space. The next should be on Q and T. After that I'll use 3 first, then 2 and 4.

For casters, I try to place cast-time spells on QWR and possibly T, and instant spells on 1-6. For healers, I always macro together all heals with harmful spells, depending on the target, like I've listed in the macro section above.

Abilities that need to be refreshed or are exclusive on A

For my shaman I have Water Shield on A and lighting shield on ctrl-A (no idea why I chose ctrl-A over shift-A). For my priest, I'll have Inner Fire and Inner Will on A, easy to switch. For my warrior, I'll have Commanding Shout and Battle Shout there. For my DK, I have Horn of Winter on A, actually macroed so that it will attempt to raise my pet if it's not already up in Unholy spec and then cast Horn of Winter.

If a class/spec have no such abilities, I just bind it to some ability that seem handy.

Emergency ability on H

Slightly tinted towards PVP. This includes Psychic Scream for a priest, Barkskin / Nature's Grasp for a druid, Stoneclaw Totem (glyphed) for a shaman, Divine Shield / Divine Protection for a paladin, Icebound Fortitude for a DK and Shield Wall (in defensive stance, else Retaliation/Recklessness) for a warrior.

Reactive abilities at G

Abilities that need to be cast to prevent something from affecting myself from an enemy (usually in PVP). Grounding totem for a shaman, Spell Reflect for a warrior, Anti-Magic Shell for a DK, Dispersion for a shadow priest, recast form for a druid (breaking snares and polymorph).

Spell interrupts at 4

Shield Bash / Pummel for a warrior, Wind Shear for a shaman, Skull Bash (in cata) for druid, Rebuke (in cata) for retribution pally, Avenger's Shield (since it silences) for a protection pally, Silence for shadow priest, Mind Freeze for a DK.

I also bind stuns and secondary silences on ctrl-4, such as Hammer of Justice (pally), Bash (feral druid) and Strangulate (DK).

Stances on ZXCVB

In the case of druids and warriors.

Taunts at 6

Taunt, Growl, Hand of Reckoning and Dark Command. On Shift-6: Challenging Shout, Challenging Roar, Righteous Defense and Death Grip (since it also taunts). Actually, I've macroed so that hovering the mouse on a friend as a pally will cast Righteous defense without shift as well.

Focus target on <

I'm not sure I'm too happy with this keybinding, but it has been there for so long... A macro that will focus the target if no focus exists, select the focus if a focus exists, and clear the focus if the target is dead. If ctrl is pressed, force re-focus even if the old focus still exists and is alive.

I don't have the macro here, but it was slightly complicated, so I dare not attempt to reproduce it here without testing it first. If you really want it, let me know in the comment, and I'll dig it up.

Talented abilities

I macro in a way that lets the same key be used for different abilities depending on which spec I'm currently in. For example: I'll use the same button for Shield Slam / Mortal Strike / Bloodthirst for my warrior, depending on what spec I'm in.

Unfortunately, not all specs have the same number of talented moves, so I'll just make do on the odd abilities that remain.

Multi-binding on the same key

For any ability that can not be cast on a friendly target, I macro another ability on the shift-version of the same key. I always try to stuff cooldown-abilities on the non-modifier version of these macros, so that I can see the cooldown on the icon without hitting shift. For example, for cataclysm I'll have macroed Judgement / Exorcism to the same button. Judgement has a cooldown, Exorcism has none.

In the cases where I have several cooldown-abilities I need to bind to the same button, I'll use the least most likely without shift or ctrl pressed.

Abilities across stances

I try to group ablities on the same button that are exclusive to a given stance (warrior or druid) and that makes sense together. For example: I've macroed Thunder Clap and Whirlwind to the same button. Thunder Clap can only be used in Battle or Defensive Stance. Whirlwind can only be used in Berserker stance. Both are AoE abilities, and thus have a logical connection.

Heals sorted by casttime

All healers in Cataclysm will have one cheap heal (Heal, Nourish, Healing Wave, Holy Light), one big heal (Greater Heal, Healing Touch, Greater Healing Wave, Divine Light) and one fast heal (Flash Heal, Regrowth, Healing Surge, Flash of Light). I place the big heals on Q, the cheap heals on W and the fast heals on R.

I use T for an instant heal, slightly depending on class. For disc priests, I use Penance (well, sort of instant. At least the first tick hits instantly). For holy priests I'll use Holy Word: Chastice there in Cataclysm, since it morphs into a healing spell in a chakra state. (Haven't been holy for the entire Wrath...)

For druids, I've used Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch there up until recently, but will most likely change it to Swiftmend. For shamans, recently Nature's Switness + Grater Healing Wave, but in cataclysm Unleash Elements, common for all specs. For paladins, I've placed the new Word of Glory there for cataclysm, common to all specs.

Damage spells sorted by casttime, too

I group damage spells on the same principle as the cast-time spells, placing the highest cast-time (and usually highest dps) on Q, and then advancing through W and R. With some exceptions where I can't find fitting abilties. Paladins, for example, have only one cast-time damage spell, Exorcism.

Be flexible

Even with the best logic in the world, I often find that there's something not fully working during levelling. When I do, I spend some time to try to come up with a better solution, often switching several key bindings around.

These are a few of my favorite things...

2010-09-21T13:21:00.000+02:00

Each class have some utility abilities that's mostly there for convenience... but a lot of convenience. The kind of abilities I miss when I'm not playing said class. I've listed my personal favorites for my high-level characters.

Death Knight

Path of Frost is awesome for doing fishing. It's so much easier to avoid aggro (in most areas) and hit the fish schools when standing on water instead of standing knee-high in it.

When doing dailies, I also love On a Pale Horse.

Druid

Dash is great to have when you have to enter buildings for any reason. Long enough duration and short enough cooldown to be handy for a lot of purposes.

Herbing while flying is also very handy. In BGs, the ability to track humanoids is great whenever you're on defense.

Paladin

For the same reasons as a DK, Crusader Aura is completely awesome.

It's stretching it to call Divine Shield a utility spell. However, it's great for just dropping your flying mount mid-air with no risk of dying.

Priest

Levitate combines the no-damage-from-falling property of Divine Shield and Path of Frost. Too bad it has so short duration, I need to recast it at every fish of school.

I've also made great use of Mind Vision at times, such as spying out the flag carrier in WSG before you could see it on the radar, and look for rares in instances. It doesn't get much use these days, though.

Shaman

Astral Recall, combined with the ordinary hearthstone, is great when you want to sell your services, dropping by the auction house, doing dailies and you name it, without the risk of getting stuck in Orgrimmar until your hearthstone's off cooldown.

Water Walking is almost the same spell as Path of Frost, with one annoying exception: You can't cast it while mounted. Why not? Come on, Blizz!

Portals!

The one thing I really envy mages are their portals... well, okay, not the only thing. Invisibility too comes to my mind among utility spells.

Otherwise, I imagine the full tracking of a hunter would be handy. I also envy Shadowstep some times.

... What do warriors have, anyway?

Soon, the point of no return...

2010-09-13T09:22:00.006+02:00

4.0 (actually 4.0.1) is on the test realm. That translates to it hitting live servers soon. I'm really looking forward to it, although there's a few things I'll miss.

I'm not a fan of whining and complaining about changes. I believe that Blizzard does what they think is best for the game, even if that includes nerfing the class I currently play. When I stop believing that, I'll probably stop playing the game. However, so far it has worked out fine. Thus, I consider all change "good" in the broad sense that they'll over time make the game better and better.

I'd just like to list what I look forward to. I think it'll be fun looking back at it in a half year's time.

I look forward to practically every overhauled talent tree. It's just exciting to see the new possibilities and combinations, and test out various new or overhauled talents. Some specific highlights.

Before we start, I just got to say I really love that Mortal Strike and the similar abilities no longer halve healing, but reduce it by 25%. It'll be balanced in the end, but I think I like the balance that I can heal a bit more consistently no matter what enemy I'm facing.

Death-tards

First and foremost, the dedicated Blood tanking tree for DKs. I'm going to test something like this for tanking. I'll also test a modified version, for example this, for PVP as blood.

The other two DK trees look... fair enough. Good thing they're overhauled, but no super-changes I'm all wired up about.

Tree-huggers

Generally, I'm looking forward to the overhauled Thorns. I hope it'll be castable on yourself while tanking.

Bothersome Bear Boredom

The first two steps towards more entertaining tanking for bears: Pulverize and Skull Bash. Thrash is obtained at 81. Going to a bear-tanking spec like this for tanking.

Coming out of the closet... or bark

Druid healing without tree form, yay! Unlike a lot of other druids, I'm super-excited about it. This is how I PVP as a resto druid already. The resto tree is so full of awesome that I'm having a very hard time figuring out what to spec. Most likely a case of repeated respecs. I'll probably try a PVP-oriented build first, and see how well it works for PVE as well.

Just let me see if I got this correctly: Fury of Stormrage reduces the mana cost of Wrath by 100% at all times? So I can chain-gun wraths like there's no tomorrow, if noone is in need of healing? Oh, I'm so excited that I just can't hide it!

Ability to remove magic, fantastic!

The new spell costs will take some time getting my head bent around. The speedy healer, Regrowth, and the big healer, Healing Touch, costs almost the exact amount of mana. Meanwhile, Nourish, which heals for about the same as Regrowth, costs only a fifth as much mana. Hm. Interesting.

However, with talents, Regrowth is an almost guaranteed crit for 150% healing (an additional 60% + 4% from talents), and then provides both a Living Seed for an additional 30% of the critted amount, meaning about 45% of the normal amount, and a bed of pretty flowers under your feet for another 30% of the critted amount, or 45% of the normal amount. So assuming it crits, which it will do often, it can potentially heal for 240% on the main target plus a heal over time, and 45% of everyone else who happen to be standing in it. Given at least three targets in the zone, its approaching the efficiency of Nourish.

Finally, I'm all excited about the new Tree of Life, now on a cooldown. All the enhanced spells... so much fun.

Sailor Moon... kin!

I'm not going to test it straight away, but I am looking forward to the balance changes as well. Ranged knockdown and spell interrupt, great! I'm just not as excited as the other trees.

Huntards

I've never had a hunter before, but I'll probably make a Worgen one. Both to test out the starting area and story, and the class itself. It's rather low priority, though.

Water-vendors

I have a low-level mage, which I'm intending to pick up just to test the various new mage specs. Pretty low priority as well, though.

Loladins

So many great changes here. I'll definitely test them out, to see if paladins may actually suit me now. It'd be great to have a single character that can both tank and heal, and so far I've found paladins lacking due to general boredom.

The new resource system, holy power, looks really neat. Now, finally paladins will have to make some choices about how to use their resources as opposed to earlier (where holy paladins spammed a single spell, tanks just used a rotation, and retribution paladins just mashed whatever button came off cooldown first). Not just what to spend it on, but whether to spend it at one, two or three charges of holy power.

Tanking without a rotation, oh, how I look forward to that. Dps with a more depth than just cooldown-mashing, great. AoE healing and more choices while healing. Without even testing it, I am 100% sure that this is a great step in the right direction for paladins.

Interestingly enough, paladins can now (finally?) chain-cast a dps spell, Exorcism.

Preists

(That was intentionally misspelled, by the way)

Lots of neat stuff here. However, priests where already a pretty well-rounded class, so I look at the changes are more of rounding off an already great class, with a few exceptions.

The ability to heal by damaging enemies looks interesting, particularly when combined with a stacking buff and an mana restoring and healing increasing effect. I really wonder how it'll work out. At least healing in 5-mans needn't be boring when you're overgearing the place.

The priestly version of Anti-magic Zone looks neat, not least because it reduces all damage and not just spells. Pretty much superior to AMZ, in fact.

Blizzard is trying to make Holy priests viable for PVP now. Or, more viable, this is probably their third attempt or something. Chastise is back. I never got a chance to test it while it was a racial spell.

Chakra looks like it could be real fun, particularly with Chastise morphing to other spells while chackra'ed. By the way, I can't stop thinking of Naruto each time I hear the word Chakra.

The shadow tree looks polished and neat, but apart from the Shadow Orbs doesn't strike me as anything really new. However, it worked well before, it'll probably work slightly better now.

Rouge

(This, too, was intentionally misspelled)

I've got three RL friends who play rogues, so I keep an eye on the changes here so I can discuss it with them. However, I don't have a rogue, I've never had a rogue, and I'm not even remotely planning on getting one myself.

It does, however, look to me that rogues will be completely and utterly overpowered until the health pools increase. Bypass 50% armor for 10 sec after an opener? Probably a bit broken in combination with the health pools and dps of level 80 characters.

Ehm... lightning-huggers?

Sadly, I don't know any pun on shammies.

I think the changes here will be great. However, I'm not sure how I feel about the class. I do have a 80 which I've had a lot of fun with, and I will probably level her at some point, not least since Jewelcrafting is a great profession for all my characters.

However... I'm not sure I want to spend too much time as a shammy anymore. With that said, if the changes are good enough, I might. In particular, Elemental and Enhancement never agreed too well with me. Resto was good. I'm certainly going to test out the new talents and stuff.

Interestingly enough, I look forward to buffs getting lowered. Shamans had, in my opinion, too many buffs, and they're balanced around having all those buffs. Now that the buffs aren't quite so powerful, they'll need to be balanced around that, which means that they'll be more powerful when buffs are present... translate that to most PVP action.

For Resto, I'm in particular excited about the ability to remove magic, restore mana by casting lightning bolt, improving healing by shocking and 15% improved speed at all times.

I'm wondering if they have or will change Mana Tide Totem. I did read that they intended to change it, but can't see it anywhere. In PVP it's way less effective than every other mana-restoration ability for healers.

I'm still not sure I'll be a great fan of Elemental. I'm not sure how well Earthquake will work. Time will tell how well it'll work.

healthstone-vendors

I've got my level 34 alliance lock which I stopped levelling about two weeks ago. Will test out stuff with her. Honestly, the changes look really great, particularly after annoying myself to death with the old soul shard mechanic... lack of bag space, anyone?

As a low level lock, I'm also excited about getting the specialization spells now instead of having to wait until level 60.

Meat shields

I do have a warrior, retired a loooong time ago at level 34. ... how come I abondon several classes at that level?

However, come Cata, and I intend to make a goblin warrior. Since I don't have too much experience, I can't really tell what changes are good and what's not. But it looks quite interesting.

... and that's not all, folks

I'm also looking forward to the non-class specific changes. Too many to list here, but the spell alerts look particularly good.

Until 4.0, I've decided to get Crusader on my DK, to get the "bank access anywhere on a cooldown" thing. Lacking 5 days of dailies. You may also call me sir-fish-a-lot. So far, some 1200 fish and no turtle.

There's one thing I'll miss, though... the ability to tank as an Unholy DK... but oh well, can't have it all.

Preparing for Cataclysm

2010-09-10T21:19:00.001+02:00

I'm spending my time preparing for Cataclysm these days. I did join for a weekly pug once and some random dungeons, but only with the goal in mind to have fun with the group there and then, and that was it.

I'm preparing for my baby goblin warrior. Prepared so far:

4 20-slot bags
4 16-slot bags
lots of gold (easily prepared)
heirloom mail chest and shoulders, for the pre-40 levels. +4 all stats on chest.
heirloom plate chest and shoulders, for the post-40 levels. Actually, shoulders twice, since I've gotten both the PVP ones and the PVE ones. +4 all stats on chest.
heirloom haste trinket
heirloom PVP trinket
heirloom 2-h axe with Crusader
heirloom 1-h sword (main-hand) with crusader
heirloom 1-h PVP sword (off-hand) with lifestealing
heirloom bow... just for the extra stats
Prepared a heapload of buff food for levelling. See below.

For the rest of my characters, I've fished up Weather-beaten journal to get fish finding skill my druid, shaman, DK and priest. I've also gotten the turtle on my priest. I don't bother on my druid (glyphed aquatic form), but I'd like it on my DK. So far, 800 fish and no turtle there.

I've also skilled up cooking for all to 450. Easy with all the fish I've caught.

What remains?

Attempt to win the Kalu'ak fishing contest for the heirloom ring
Fish up a turtle
Figure what else to spend my time on.

PS: Bonus point to whoever can figure out how many badges I've spent on heirloom stuff.

Looking for GOOD dps

2010-09-08T09:01:00.000+02:00

After I decided to pick up my priest again, I've spent some time gearing her up. It was fairly easy, actually, up to a certain point. I got two ilvl 264 PVP items, bought PVE gear with emblembs and got a lot of drops from the new instances.

However, it stopped in Halls of Reflection. Let me tell you a secret of mine. I love the place! No, really. It was the only instance that gave me a consistent challenge when I was tanking.

It is quite entertaining to heal too, actually. But Blizzard really did their job here, the instance requires that all the roles perform good. A tank that can both keep aggro on all targets and survive a few seconds of no healing, a healer that can keep everyone more or less alive, and dps that can pull on average 3k dps or so. In addition, you need to prioritize the targets and preferably crowd control too. There's a reason that the instance has a gear requirement before joining in the queue...

When I dinged 80 with my priest, I could pull about 2k dps on bosses. Hyperspeed Accelerators and Berserking were a big part of that, of course. I don't remember every character, but I believe all of them broke 1.5k dps before they dinged 80, given a dps spec.

I've attempted HoR 8 times now, with numerous wipes and a lot of waiting time for people to join after other have left. Six of those times were due to bad tanks. One in particular was extremely well-geared, but spent all his time in melee with two mobs, ignoring the rest. Another just plainly refused to even try, despite being well-geared. One was very polite and skilled, but just not tough enough for the job. I don't recall the rest exactly.

But... two times I've gotten good tanks. Not just good, but great. The tanks that every healer dream of queuing up with. Controls the groups, leaves the crowd-controlled mob alone, are patient and just as an added bonus interrupts spell casts on the mobs or spell reflect them.

What happened those two times? We had to give up because of too low dps. I remember in particular a rogue that averaged 1.2k dps. Because of the low group dps, we couldn't take down one wave at the start before the next spawned. We wiped when I ran out of mana. I'm not geared to chain-cast heals through all the waves without any drinking in between. And then he had the nerve to blame me for the wipe. Yes, technically it was my mana running out. However, I have no mana trouble when running the instance as intended, even healing three waves without drinking. I let him know what I thought about it.

I also recall a hunter who could pull some 2.5k dps... not too shabby, but completely ignored all my pleas for leaving the CC'ed mob alone. "Lol, this isn't ICC," he let me know.

If I'm ever going to lead a raiding group, I'd base my invitations on how a given person handled an instance such as this. Even if you overgear it, your playstyle tells me a lot about what kind of person you are in a raid group. Of course, everyone would play nice with a raid leader watching, so I'd somehow had to do it without them knowing I was watching, like having them join me with an alt they didn't know of or something.

So... now I've given up gearing up my priest anymore. I don't see much point in wading through all those frustrations when I don't have to. It's my spare time, and I'm going to take responsibility for it by not wasting too much on it on such frustrations. Instead, I've started preparing for Cataclysm.

The items I never sold or destroyed...

2010-08-30T09:00:00.003+02:00

I just got my account stolen, leading to a serious amount of paranoia. It turned out it was my own fault; I had entered my username and password on a phishing site. Some of the phishing mails are good, some are insanely good. This one was pretty good.

Anyway. I just suddenly got mail that my account was suspended because of gold selling. I filled out a contact form, and after about a day, the suspension was lifted and most items was returned to me.

The downside; What a mess. Full cleaning required, please. In addition, I noticed a few items that the GM hadn't restored that I got when I asked specifically for it. I have no guarantee that there might not be other items missing as well. It just comes down to my memory, which frankly is a bit bad with 8 different characters.

The upside: I got a good opportunity to look through my items.

My priest is my oldest character. I had no less than two 16-slot bags in my bag full of technically useless stuff. Vanity items, if I can call it that. I got a chance to see through them now.

Each of them tells a tale. I did sell a lot of them during this cleanup, but there are still some that I can't destroy. I'd like to share the tale of a few of them.

My Gnomish Battle Chicken

Its level is dependent on your engineering skill - it is for example lvl 82 at my current skill, I believe. Anyway, at somewhere around 35 I had skilled engineering all the way up to 300, despite being low level, with the help of materials from guildmates and friends. In battlegrounds, walking around with a lvl 60 battle chicken at level 35 was actually a real threat. Oh, what fun! Since it has a 20 min cooldown, I constantly switched trinkets after each one had been used.

Arena Grand Master

If you don't know, it requires you to "win" the gurubashi arena chest 12 times in order to get it. And I did it long before level 60? How? Well, three ways, really.

One was to ally myself with any horde interested that was there. Before the fight, we agreed on who would loot the chest should we win, usually by /roll. I never fought horde in the arena, for roleplaying reasons. If some horde didn't want to join my cause, I didn't enter the arena until they had died or the chest was gone.

The other way was to go for it at 6 in the morning. Since it spawned exactly at 6, 12, 18 and 24, "all" I had to do was stand up early and get the chest if there were none other nearby.

The final way was combined with one of the other, namely the Gnomish Mind Control Cap. I did sell that one in BC, though, as it was useless then. Of course, sometimes I ended up fighting FOR the one I tried mind control (backlash), but fair enough, that was in hindsight fun as well.

My best memory was when there was a lvl 60 night elf druid who really, really wanted the chest. I stood behind a pillar and watched her kill all alliance left and right. I was only lvl 45, not a real threat to her at all. Anyway: I just leapt into the arena while she looted the chest, and used the cap. Then I looted the chest, while she (mind controlled, like a minion) attacked an alliance player who just had respawned. Naturally, I ran afterwards. Boy, was she angry at me! She chased me for a loooong time. Fortunately, she didn't have epic riding skill, and I had the carrot on a stick, so I eventually outran her.

Imperial Red Robe

This one I bought purely for roleplaying reasons and its looks. I still think it looks neat. I paid 5 gold for it, which was a rather big fortune at that point in my career, somewhere around 30ish, long before I could actually equip it. I used about a handful of times on roleplaying occassions, and even got offered 15g for it, which I refused.

Piccolo of the Flaming Fire

I never got this one in classic. I got it at the end of BC, I think, while soloing a part of Stratholme. It wasn't even intentional, I just aggroed the rare mob and had to defend myself. It's a sort of item I just can't throw away, since it's so hard to get hold of again. But would I really miss it? I doubt so.

Hydrocane

I spent a few hours farming for this one. It was hard for a discipline priest at level 55ish. And in BC I didn't even have a use for it. I finally decided to sell it yesterday. I also sold Azure Silk Belt, which I had made for the purpose of swimming. I figured I can just use Levitate instead to run on the water.

Speeeeed! Gimme what I neeeeed

From my WSG career: Nifty Stopwatch and Skull of Impending Doom. Who knows, these might come in handy again in Cataclysm with rated BGs? I actually got half-way through revered just by playing WSG and enjoying it. Yes, I know a lot of people are exalted, but I also know that most of them painfully grinded it. I didn't play if I didn't find it fun.

Various irreplaceable quest-items

I'm considering selling Barov Peasant Caller. I don't think I'll ever use it, and it's not really great. However, it is irreplaceable. I can find a bit more reason to hang on to Moist Towelette. I used it on my shaman to get Intense Cold. They're less useful for a priest than say a shaman, though. In Cata all healers can remove magic anyway. I just can't help but some day... some day I'll find a use for it. Bah. Highly unlikely. However, also possible with rated battlegrounds.

What do you mean? You SOLD it?

Those mentioned above are what I decided to keep. I sold the rest. I do actually regret not hanging on to my enchanted White Wedding Dress, the one I was "married" in. However, seeing that it wasn't soulbound, I gave it away to another troll who was marrying after me. Oh, fun roleplaying times.

I also got rid of the Warden Staff, my classic PVP staff, a long time ago. I caused a druid in my guild to guild quit when he discovered he had it, despite him having farmed and attempted to buy it off the auction house for a long time. I think I paid 150g on the auction house, which was a pretty big heap of gold for that time.

If any of you have any vanity item tales to tell, feel free. I'm all ears.

A recommendation

2010-08-23T09:37:00.002+02:00

I'd just like to recommend an awesome wow-related comic and blog: Thoughts for Food.

Look! A diversion!

2010-08-23T09:27:00.001+02:00

I suddenly felt the need to write something again. I guess a quick update is in order.

While on a "break" from WoW, I've been playing mainly Team Fortress 2, and Mass Effect 1 and 2. Team Fortress is fun for a while, but it never manages to keep me stuck for very long. Mass Effect was awesome. Played through the first game three times as an adept (since you need to unlock difficulties in order to beat Insanity). Played through the second game once on Hardcore, and half-way again on Insanity. First time as an adept (imported from ME1), the second time as a Vanguard. After I beat the Collossus on Tali's recruitment mission by charging right up to it and beating it in melee on insanity, I didn't find the motivation to play through the rest. Felt like I had done what I wanted with the game.

Anyway. I've been playing some WoW again recently. About three weeks ago, I created my first "real" alliance character, a gnome warlock with a mean faced called Malict (by the way, if she happens to be undressed it is because I've mailed the heirloom robe to my low-level horde mage).

My initial motivation for creating her was that I wanted to experience the retaking of Gnomeregan once it becomes available, first-hand. It has already been greatly parodied by Complex Actions, with a follow-up. I reckon level 10 or so would be enough, but while playing I found that I enjoyed it a lot and just kept leveling for a while.

It was fun and interesting playing a warlock. I've always liked dots when playing dps, and so affliction came pretty naturally for me. I also liked having a pet from my death knight, and warlock pets are even more functional than the ghoul. Since I've never had an alliance character, I could only mail heirlooms, not money. Thus, I had to earn my keep by using the auction house. It was also pretty entertaining in moderate amounts, and I only earned as much as I needed to buy glyphs, train and live "comfortably", not buy equipment.

Being only dps and not having the option to tank or heal was a different experience. Sure, I've dps'ed before, but this time I *had* to dps. I must admit, I missed the possibility to choose between the two. Or three, in the case of druids.

A downside was naturally that I didn't get to play affliction in any instance. Yes, I was specced affliction, but almost all mobs died before I'd gotten even a full corruption on them, meaning I was ruining my own dps by dotting them instead of just nuking them. Almost all trash mobs ended with me channeling Rain of Fire repeatedly.

Seeing new places (or at least, places from a different angle) was pretty interesting. All the zones seemed very ... empty, though. Not strange, I guess. I just missed any social interaction at all. And in instances, most people are pretty silent. Add to that that I had buttons to click almost all the time to keep up my dps.

I spent some levels as demonology, speccing for max survivability for PVP. However, I specced back at 30 to get Curse of Exhaustion and Siphon Life. I loved those. However, at the same time, my survivability in PVP against rogues went down by 80%.

Last night I found I wasn't very keen on leveling Malicit anymore. I was wondering if I should pick up my troll mage Rime instead, whom I've had at level 20-something since the second year of wow. Look at it this way, her name is Rime. Practically every name meaning anything at all in any vocabulary have already been taken a long time ago.

I've thought a lot about what I want to play in Cataclysm. I guess I'll write more about it later.

Liquidatin' mah resources and reading

2010-04-21T15:24:00.004+02:00

Since I'm sort of on a break, I decided that I don't need the materials I had stocked up. During three weekends where I only posted on saturday mornings, I sold off most of it, leaving me now with somewhere between 30-40k across my characters. Handy. Not exactly Greedy Goblin-amounts, but enough to fulfill my needs for quite some time. Now my account time has run out until I decide to pay and play again.

I'm eagerly reading all blue posts and information regarding Cataclysm. I'm one step closer to finding out what I want to play in Cataclysm now. I'm just no paladin. I'm probably no priest either. So most likely it will be something like this in Cataclysm, in order of most likely at the moment.

Shaman as my healer in PVE/PVP, Death Knight as my tank in PVE and dps in PVP.
Druid as tank in PVE and healer in PVP.
Keep all three more or less active.
Druid as my healer in PVE/PVP, Death Knight as my tank in PVE and dps in PVP.
Shaman as my healer, Warrior (!) as my tank in PVE and dps in PVP.

The last alternative is ... very unlikely. But for the moment more likely than playing my paladin. I've just considered levelling one, probably a goblin, to see the new starting zone and enjoy the new levelling experience. I'll probably play the Worgen starting area too. Possibly as a hunter, never had one of those. And then I can retire after the starting area, unless I fiercely fall in love with it.

By the way, just because I'm not going to play a priest or paladin doesn't mean I won't be envying them sometimes...

Status: Offline, waiting and excited

2010-04-07T12:26:00.001+02:00

I've found that I don't have much motivation to play WoW right now. There are just no goals for me to accomplish. The only goal is to see the big, cool fights. However, to do that, I either need to join a raiding force, or I'll have to join a pug that successfully takes down the bosses. Since ICC is self-nerfing, I figure I can just wait a while and join a pug when it has become much easier.

In the end, I haven't found out which class I want to focus on for PVP either. That means I run around with a lot of moderately-equipped characters, none of them really standing a chance against a top-equipped PVPer.

Despite this, I'm not done with WoW. In fact, I'm really looking forward to Cataclysm, and reading every blue post about the design changes. So I'll be playing again then. Until then, the only stuff I do in WoW is getting my seasonal stuff done to get 310% mounts with all my characters. I've looted about 1000 eggs the last two days. I'm not a fun of RNG in achievements. One random pet in one of the eggs saved me for another 100 eggs.

In the meantime, I've tried playing a bit Team Fortress 2. While it's fun for a while, it's not a game that keeps my interest up for long. I've also borrowed Zelda: The Twilight Princess for Nintendo Wii, and Mirror's Edge for PC. Just something to play when I'm bored. It's nice playing single-player games for a change. By the way, I loved Portal. The actual portals was a nice gameplay idea, however the story was what really enthralled me. It was just pure awesome. And the song at the end? I'm still listening to it on Youtube several weeks after I played through the game. Portal 2, come to me.

I've also decided to start a D&D 4th edition campaign using Google Wave. I'm playing in two others already. That will certainly be a challenge to me. Did I mention I'm not a native english speaker?

I'm trying to keep the blog to WoW-stuff, so I don't think I will blog much about other games (applies to both computer and roleplaying games).

I've earlier tried to comment whether announced changes are "good" or "bad". In my opinion, practically every change is "good" because it is intended to improve the game. Even if class A gets nerfed and I love class A, I think it's a good thing that the balance has just been improved. I could say whether I like or dislike a change.

Today's first news, that Death Knights will be tanking only as blood, is a mixed blessing for me. I've really enjoyed tanking as Unholy and splatting corpses all over the walls. However, I can still do that by subspeccing into Unholy with my tank spec. In the end, I think I'll like the change.

I know that Blizz will improve druid tanking some. My sincere hope is that they'll improve it a lot, allowing them to actually have an interesting and challenging inherit mechanic for tanking. The rage change was a nice start.

I'm so looking forward to hearing the rest of the changes that will be announced the next tree days.

Offline...

2010-03-23T18:44:00.000+01:00

I'll be taking a break from WoW and blogging until after Easter. Just letting you know.

Pally vs DK tanking

2010-03-12T17:19:00.002+01:00

...and to a lesser extent, druid tanking. I've tanked a lot of instances on my way to 80 with my paladin. While some things change when you go from taking "normal" instances to heroics and raids, the general "feel" of the class remains the same. The way you tank. The rotation. And to some degree, whether you like it or not. If you hate your tanking class in raids, chances are rather overwhelming you hate your tanking class in 5-mans too, and the other way around.

Now, assuming you like to tank, you should also be comfortable with the tools for the job. The four tanking classes each tank in a different way. If you don't like the way your tanking class tanks, you're probably not going to perform as well as you could otherwise. I don't like the current implementation of druid tanking, and I'm fairly certain I became a better tank when I switched to my DK for tanking instead.

I won't say anything about effective health, and very little about mitigation and avoidance. This post is not aimed towards the all-high elitists who will switch tanking class if the other has 5% more effective health or whatever. Besides, I lack the time to invest into the theorycrafting necessary for that kind of analysis, and the experience to be able to talk from an empirical point of view.

Resources

Resource management

I assume you have a basic understanding of the resource systems available in WoW. But, veeery quickly; DKs have a dual-resource system of runes and runic power. Most abilities cost one or more runes. Each rune expended will refresh itself after 10 sec, sometimes less. All rune attacks generate runic power. Some abilities cost runic power to activate.

Because of the nature of the runes and runic power, DKs have the exact same resources available to them no matter what kind of content they're tanking.

Paladins use mana as their resource. No tanking gear has intellect on it, so a paladin only has the base mana pool of their class, modified by Arcane Intellect, Mark of the Wild and Blessing of Kings, depending on the raid setup. They burn through mana rather quicly, and have a three major ways to regain it. First, they regain mana constantly with Divine Plea, which with talents have a constant uptime as long as you're fighting. It is affected by int buffs. Second, they regain mana when they block, dodge or parry an attack, as long as they've buffed themselves with Blessing of Sanctuary. Since it also grants -3% damage taken, it's a very bad idea not to buff yourself with it when tanking. Third, they regain mana by being healed.

The mana gained from Divine Plea is near constant, no matter what content you're facing. It's only affected by buffs, so usually a bit higher in raids than in 5-mans because the chances that there's a mage, druid, and several paladins increase the more people there are. The mana gained from Blessing of Sanctuary is much higher when tanking multiple mobs than a single mob. It is about the same when facing a single raid boss and a single 5-man boss. The mana gained from being healed depend on how much healing you need, so it is much higher in raids than it is in 5-mans.

Druids (and warriors) have a rage system which generates rage on hitting and being hit, and depend on how much damage they take. Thus, they generate a lot more rage in raids than in 5-mans.

It seems to me that Paladins are balanced around having infinite amount of mana available, and druids and warriors are balanced around having infinite amount of rage available, when it comes to raids. Unfortunately, it means that sometimes the three tank classes will go around mana/rage-starved in 5-mans, especially if they're overgearing the content. Less problem now than what it was, but it's not unheard of of paladin tanks to take off some of their armor when tanking 5-mans, to regain enough mana to get the job done. Ever seen a pants-less paladin? Not to be confused with a pantsy paladin.

Resources vs cooldowns

The nature of the rune system means DKs can't spam the same attack times and again. They will (in most cases) run out of at least one type of rune after 2 consequensive attacks. That means that their rotation is primarily limited by the resources, namely the runes, and almost no attack used in their rotation has a cooldown. There is one notable exception: Death and Decay has a cooldown. It's rather annoying, too, in my opinion, because the minimum cooldown of 15 sec talented doesn't fit with the 10 sec rune cooldown, meaning you have to hold back some runes if you want to cast it on every cooldown. A "simple" fix would be to use it every 20 sec instead of every 15 sec, but sometimes (like Halls of Reflection) you need it RIGHT NOW.

On the other hand, both a rage and a mana system allows a character to hit the same attack several times in a row. In fact, were it not for cooldowns, most tanks would be spamming the highest-threat ability all the time. Imagine a tank spamming Thunderclap or a paladin spamming Hammer of the Righteous against AoE packs. To avoid that, all of a paladin's attacks have a cooldown attached to it. As far as I've understood, the ability is put on cooldown even if the attacks fails to connect. In most cases, a paladin tank just have to worry about managing these cooldowns with a proper rotation, and can safely ignore the mana issue. However, tanking low-level stuff and content you overgear tends to make you bang your head into the keyboard for lack of mana all the time.

Druids (and warriors) have a similar design, however, both have a "basic attack" they can spam to no end (Sunder Armor / Lacerate). All other attacks have cooldowns. To avoid tanks spamming their basic attack all the time, all other attacks available to these tanks generate higher threat, and should be prioritized.

Rotation

Paladins, with their cooldown-based tanking system, have a true rotation, dubbed 96969. It comes from the fact that if you use the abilities in the wrong order, you end up having no abilities not on cooldown somtimes, while at other times several abilities refresh from cooldown at the same time. To avoid that, you alternate between six-second cooldown moves (Hammer of the Righteous and Shield of the Righteous) and nine-second cooldown moves (Holy Shield, Consecration and Judgement). There are no real nine-second cooldown abilities, all the mentioned have 8 sec (talented) CDs. However, if you alternate these with the six-cooldown moves, you generate max threat, and they sort of "work" like they were on a 9-second cooldown each.

The rotation is so strict that you could create a macro for it. However, any tank worth his or her salt should do it manually, because the various attacks have different priority depending on the situation. For example: Hammer of the Rigtheous hits several targets, and should be earlier in the rotation than Shield of the Righteous against multiple enemies. However, against a single enemy, SotR outthreats HotR. And so on.

Druids can also have a true rotation, at least on single target fights. Highest priority is... Feral Faerie fire, ironically enough. At least last time I checked, it provided the most threat, and for the cheapest price... for free. But most use Mangle, which activates some idols and applies the debuff. All free global cooldowns should be filled with Lacerate.

If you don't put talents into Mangle, the rotation is simple; Faerie fire, Mangle, Lacerate, Lacerate. If you put talents into Mangle, there is no longer a rotation, but a priority queue: Mangle on every cooldown, Faerie fire if it's up, otherwise Lacerate. Reason: If you give priority to Faerie Fire then Mangle, both will come off cooldown the same moment, so you don't get any benefit from talenting Mangle at all. Macro Maul to activate on all the mentioned attacks.

On AoE fights, you just hit Swipe every global cooldown. If you have a single mob you need to keep sticking to you, mix in a Faerie Fire, Mangle, or both, betwen the Swipes. That makes them different from paladins: They need to choose either to generate max single target threat or some AoE threat. Paladins just use the same rotation regardless of whatever is hitting you, with the possible exception of adding Holy Wrath against multiple undead or demon mobs.

A DK doesn't have a true rotation. "True" as in you know what button you're going to hit every global cooldown. They have more of a priority system. Knowing what to hit every GCD is a matter of knowing how your abilities interact with each other, assessing the current situation, and knowning what resources you have available... in effect, which runes are off cooldown. I'm not planning to write a "DK tanking 101" now, if you want more details, have a look at Gravity's excellent site pwnwear.com.

The short version is that you have a priority like this:

Keep diseses up on all mobs.
Spend your runs whenever they come off cooldown to generate as much threat as possible, on the targets you want threat on. That's a bit messily written, easier with an example. Let's say a blood rune comes off cooldown. Do I want to spend it immediately on single-target threat (Blood or Heart Strike, depending on spec), AoE threat (Blood Boil), wait for a frost and unholy rune to throw down a lot of AoE threat (Death and Decay), or refresh diseases on all off-targets to avoid them falling off (Pestilence)?
If all runes are on cooldown, spend Runic Power, but only if I have enough to spare that I won't be starved when I need Runic Strikes.

Runic strike deserves a special note. It is not an instant attack, but an "on-next-melee-hit" ability, like Maul and Heroic Strike. It's usually macroed to every single attack, for ease of convenience. I think it was designed to let DK tanks put their spare runic power to good use, rather than just let their runic power be capped at 100% all the time. Unlike dps, a DK tank's rotation must be adjusted to whether they hit or not. Many aren't hit capped, and even if they are, bosses parry, dodge and block a lot of attacks from the front. Since rune attacks have higher priority (since they do more damage) than runic power attacks, DK tanks don't usually have any GCDs to spare to use runic power attacks at all. Anyway, no matter what the original design was, Runic Strike is vital to generate max threat, and should be used as often as possible.

When I explain it like this, DK tanking sounds really hard. It is certianly harder than druid tanking, but then again, bear tanking rotation is so easy it's trivial (flame me a comment if you disagree). Any addon that shows the status for each rune will make the job a lot easier. I can't say if it's harder than the paladin rotation or not. For the moment, I've got far too much training in DK tanking and far too little in paladin tanking. I find DK tanking to be really "logical". At least after it was cleaned up, each DK ability has it's spesific use, and it's woven really well together. Compare that to paladin, which is much more "brute-force"; No abilities depend on each other to do increase threat, like most of a DKs abilities depend on having the diseases on a target. You just hit the attacks in the order of whoever generates the most threat, with the notable exception that Holy Shield has highest priority because it also adds in mitigating incoming damage.

Keep it up, buddy

All the tanks have some abilities that must be "kept up" in some way.

A DK needs to keep up diseases on all mobs all tanked mobs all the time. Besides threat, it provides the -20% attack speed debuff that reduces incoming damage. In addition, they need to keep up Blade Barrier all the time, a talent that reduces all incoming damage by 5%. Keeping it up is actually really easy; Just spend runes. The buff is refreshened each time all blood runes (and death runes from the same blood runes) are on cooldown. So if you just attack more or less normally, it will be up almost all the time.

A paladin must first and foremost keep up Holy Shield, to increase both threat generated and mitigation. In addition, they want to keep up Divine Plea as much as possible, since it provides them with mana and -3% damage taken glyphed. It is a bit special; as long as they're hitting something, it's up. It fades if not fighting for 15 seconds, but can be buffed up again immidiately again if it's been at least 1 min since it was last "started". In practice, on boss fights there is very little a paladin can do to prevent it from running out if there's a break in the fight. Finally, to generate max threat and dps, they want to keep up the stack of Vengeance from Seal of Vengeance/Corruption all the time. However, as with Divine Plea, there is very little they can do to prevent it from falling off whenever the boss is not in melee range, such as when it's flying, submerged, the tank needs to run away, etc. They also want to keep up Vindication, but it's virtually impossible not to keep up as long as you're fighting a mob.

A druid must keep up Demoralizing Roar by refreshing it every 30 sec or more often. They also want to keep up Faerie Fire and the Mangle debuff to increase threat and dps for all physical dps in the raid. Both are pretty easy to keep up, as they're a part of the core rotation. Soon, it'll even be even easier since Mangle will last for an entire minute in the next patch. Finally, they want, to a lesser degree, to keep up Lacerate. While it's handy for personal dps, it's not deprimental to threat if they lose it, as the instant portion of Lacerate generates a ton of extra threat, while each tick of Lacreate generates 80% less threat than the damage should imply. Thus, it's sort of "handy to keep up", but not vital.

Stickiness

It's of course vital that a tank can keep aggro when he wants to. Short version, if they're doing their job correctly, any tank can hold aggro. If they can't, then they're doing something wrong, or Blizz will most likely buff them very soon. However, there are some notes on differences in how they generate threat.

Mobile threat-generation

Druids have no "stationary" way of generating threat. They can move and generate full threat, provided they remain in range of their targets all the time.

DKs have one stationary threat move, Death and Decay. It's a more or less vital part of the initial pull on multiple mobs, but it's not vital after that. As long as they've got diseases ticking on all mobs, they're pretty mobile as well. Most DKs doesn't use Death and Decay after the initial pull, instead spending runes on Blood Boil because they don't have to "save" runes to wait for one rune of each type to be ready.

Paladins have a very stationary threat move, Consecration. In addition to being stationary, it is always cast on the feet of the paladin, as opposed to Death and Decay which can be targetted on the ground anywhere within range. To make matters worse, it has a pitifully low radius. And finally, it's the only way a paladin has to generate guaranteed threat on more than 4 targets. The other three ways of generating AoE threat have limited targets. Hammer of the Rigtheous is limited to the primary target and 2 (or 3, glyphed) more targets, which seems to be picked semi-randomly from the close mobs by the server. Avenger's shield works on the exact same principle. Holy Shield requires a mob to actually hit you when you're blocking, and there's no way to guarantee that a given mob will hit you often enough that it will remain on you. Good thing for them that paladins have so much taunting power. More on that in a moment.

"Your mother!"

All the tanks have a single-target taunt on a 8 second cooldown. The paladin version is notable for also generating a fair bit of damage (around 1-2k on a new 80), meaning it's much more likely that the mob will stick to you.

In addition, a druid has Challenging Roar, which taunts all mobs within 10 feet and sticks them to you for 6 seconds, on a 3 min cooldown. Very powerful stuff. 6 seconds is half an eternity in a crisis situation. Warriors have the exact same ability.

Paladins also have another taunt on a 8 sec cooldown, Righteous Defense. Instead of taunting a mob, it taunts up to three mobs targetting the friendly unit you target. Use it with a macro and target=targettarget, and it taunts the selected mob and up to 2 others targetting the same ally. Incredibly handy. On the other hand, since a paladin tank usually isn't hit capped, they often need it to guarantee a tank switch will go smoothly.

Death Knights doesn't have a secondary taunt, but they have a "force enemy to focus on you for 3 sec" with their Death Grip. In a way, the DKs get the short end of the stick here. I haven't felt it was a huge disadvantage when tanking, though. Of course, it's more important when things *not* go smoothly.

Tanking cooldowns

Tanking cooldowns generally comes in two variants; cooldowns that increase your threat generation and cooldowns that in some way increase your chances of surviving.

Druids have one threat generation cooldown, Berserk. It also doubles as a short fear breaker/immunity on a long cooldown. Mangle looses it cooldown and hits three targets for the duration. Nothing can ever hope to catch you on threat again after you've spammed 10 mangles on a mob.

They have three cooldowns, Barkskin on a 1 min which reduces incoming damage by 20%. Survival Instincts which glyphed increase your max health by a whopping 45%. Cutting-edge bears can hit almost 100k health with his up. Finally, Frenzied Regeneration which converts rage to health. More importantly, glyphed it increase all healing received by 20%.

The druid survival cooldowns feel fairly powerful. They can overlap each other, resulting in a huge survivability increase for a short duration. In particular, I very often combine the latter two while tanking, while I use Barkskin almost every cooldown just to reduce general incoming damage.

Paladins have one threat generation cooldown, namely their pretty wings Avenging Wrath. You might also count Avenging Wrath as a mini-threat cooldown. Their wings increase all damage (and thus threat) by 20%. Besides looking pretty on screenshots (and very unpaladinish, imo) they're really handy for pulling far away on the threatmeters fast.

On the flip side of the coin, paladins have only two real defensive tanking cooldowns unless you spec a bit strangely into the Holy tree. First, they got an active cooldown in Divine Protection. -50% damage taken on a 2 min cooldown. Pretty powerful. HOWEVER, it may not be used within 30 sec of Avenging Wrath, or within 2 min of using Divine Shield or Lay on Hands on yourself. That's kinda annoying. That means you can't freely use Avenging Wrath when you want/need to generate extra threat, you got to know the fight and only throw it if you know you won't be needing Divine Protection for the next 30 seconds. I know that this is because of PVP balance, but I still think it's a bad design.

You can, as earlier mentioned, use Lay on Hands and Divine Shield too, but all three are exclusive with each other because of a 2 min Foreberance debuff. Lay on Hands might be more powerful against weak mobs that doesn't damage you too much, but Divine Protection will almost always trumph it in raids. With the very strange but possible exception that you're low on mana and need Lay on Hands to recover some of your own mana. You can also use Divine Shield, but while it redmoves all incoming damage, it also means that you have an effective threat score of 0 for the duration of it. The only thing that persists through it is "force to attack" abilities. There is one notable way to use it; since it always clears all debuffs without any chance of failure, you can taunt a mob (stick it to you for 3 sec) cast Divine Shield and immidiately cancel the shield (using a macro with /cancelaura). Now you're debuff free, and the mob is still on you. However, you can't use Divine Protection for 2 min. There aren't too many cases where it's worth it.

The other "real" defensive cooldown is the Ardent Defender. It is passive. In addition to reducing all damage taken while at low health, it allows you to survive certain death and recover half your health once every 2 min. It is powerful. It translates to having a health pool at least 1.5 times your size on a 3 min cooldown. However, it's also a last resort thing; You can depend on it, but you (almost) never intentionally use it.

To be fair, they also have some other abilities. Divine Guardian reduces the damage taken by the entire raid by 20% for 6 seconds, but also moves 30% of all the remaining damage to you. It breaks when you're at 20%. The "breaks at 20%" allows it to be used while tanking, whoever it's still risky. While the entire raid may be taking more damage, you may end up taking more. And while you have Ardent Defender to fall back on, it's never a good idea for a tank to intentionally be reduced to 20%.

They can also spend talents to get Aura Mastery or Improved Lay on Hands in Holy. The first can give them a short armor or resistance boost, depending on what aura they're currently using, but it's nothing spectacular. The other will allow them to take -20% physical damage for a period, but causes Forebereance like a normal LoH does, so then you get that and the normal effects of LoH instead of Divine Protection. Finally, they can glyph Hand of Salvation to make themselves take 20% less damage for a short period. That *is* handy, however, you also get the normal effects of salvation, -10% threat. Not so good thing, especially not on threat-sensitive fights like those where two tanks taunt the boss off each other regularly.

I didn't like the set of defensive cooldown a protection paladin has. It feels ... too few. Only one emergency button to hit. While Ardent Defender is really dependable, it's not so overpowering that pallies don't need anything else.

Now, DKs. Cooldowns a-plenty, as mentioned earlier. Quickly going through the list: Icebound Fortitude for some 50%ish damage reduction. A 1-min CD talent depending on what tree said DK is specced into (Unbreakable Armor = more armor, Bone Shield = less damage taken, or Vampiric Blood = health and incoming healing increased). Another talented CD for two of three trees (Anti-Magic Zone or Rune Tap). Raise Dead + Death Pact to instantly heal 40%. Anti-Magic Shell to greatly reduce incoming damage on a 45 sec cooldown, also hindering application of any magic debuff. To a lesser extent Army of the Dead, the act of summoning them grans damage reduction for a short while, usable against spell and unavoidable damage. They can also Death Strike like crazy to heal themselves, often paired with Empower Rune Weapon. ERW can also be used as an offensive cooldown.

The army is a very interesting ability, as it taunts everything BUT raid bosses. It increases your dps, but not your threat. Same with Summon Ghoul.

DKs have a huge toolbox of cooldowns. I love having all the tools available. Not all of them are very handy for raids, but most of them are. My personal all-time high favorite is Anti-Magic Shell, a skill I sorely miss if I'm on any other tank than my DK.

Mitigation and avoidance

A few words on this topic too. Though, a lot will change with Cataclysm.

Paladins block a lot. Usually at least 65% from talents alone. They also parry and dodge some attacks.

Death knights parry a lot. Usually around the same amount they dodge, somewhere around 20% or higher. They can also dodge, but not block.

Druids dodge a lot. Usually more than 40% of the time. They can't parry or block.

Kick, or we wipe!

Paladins lack any true spell-interrupt. What is a true spell-interrupt? An ability that's off the global cooldown and that spesifically interrupt spells. They can interrupt with Hammer of Justice or Avenger's Shield, but both are on the global cooldown, making them harder to time properly. As a blood elf, however, I get Arcane Torrent which interrupts off the global cooldown.

Druids have only a ranged interrupt, Feral Charge. Since you spend most of your time in melee range, you have only Bash, a 1-min CD stun to interrupt spells with.

Death Knights have a true interrupt, Mind Freeze, on a 10 sec cooldown. They also have a silence which can be used to interrupt, Strangulate. The latter even has a range. Most handy.

Interrupts are not vital for raids, as you will (almost) always have someone else available who can do the job. However, it is most handy for 5-mans and some raid bosses.

AP debuff

For some reason, Death Knights are the only class without an AP debuffs. Why? Beats me. Vindication and Demoralizing Roar do the trick for paladins and druids.

Poison? Magic? Disease? Mohaha, I'm a pally!

Paladins have the special ability to cleanse themselves of a lot of debuffs while tanking. At the cost of some threat. Like interrupts, very handy for 5-mans, less so for raids.

Buffs

You probably know what classes bring which buffs. If you're lazy, Death Knights have the easiest to apply buff, Horn of Winter. Whereas you must be expected to bring reagents and buff people randomly dying as a druid or paladin.

Which buffs are more powerful? I'm not going to say a lot about that. In a raid, you're almost certain to have all the buffs anyway.

Conclusion

If you want to tank, find a tank class that you're comfortable with. As you may or may not have noticed, I'm strongly in favor of death knights myself. Find out what you like yourself, if you're going to tank. Test another class if you're not happy with your current.

Hot topic: Shaman tanks

2010-03-10T15:56:00.001+01:00

Some days ago, I wrote a post where I made a wish of seeing shaman tanks. When I checked today, I had gotten a ton of comments. Well, not literally a ton, but 12 (at the time this is written), which is like 4 times as many as any other post I've written earlier. It's rather obvious there are strong opinions on the topic.

I'd like to reply to all comments. Not necessarily defend myself, as a lot of you have very good arguments, so good that I'd rather be convinced that believe I'm the unmatched authorithy on the topic.

Obviously, shaman tanks aren't a new idea. Generally, among shamans themselves, it seems that there are very strong feelings on the subject. A lot of people want shamans to be able to tank again. A lot of other people want shamans to remain as they are now. Colm points out that there are inherit problems combining dps and tank in a single talent tree (like feral druids). I agree on that. It will cause a lot of tweaking and adjusting to get the balance right, and that takes a lot of time, if it will ever be done.

Gravity suggests that they don't get plate-equivalent armor but stay at mail and off-tank with that. I strongly disagree with this point. If you want them to be tank, you need them to be full-blown tanks. I've got BC far too fresh in memory, where you had there different types of tanks for different purposes. That was a pain, pure and simple. No, either they should be able to tank anything, or not at all. However, they could remain at mail and get their mitigation from other sources instead of boosting their armor. The problem with that from a game-design view is that non-cloth/leather/mail items with armor on, such as some trinkets, would be far more valuable for shamans than for other tanking classes. Look at it this way: If you have 30k armor and increase armor by 2k, you get less mitigation increase than if you have 20k armor and add another 2k.

Stormcrazed misses the days of 2-handed smashing. I never had a shaman in classic, but I did heal a lot of them in PVP. What I remember about them was their burst... both ways. They were very easy to burst down, and had very high bursts if not killed themselves. Fairly hard to keep up, but of course clothies dropped faster when focused by melee. I haven't tried lately; What is preventing you from just grabbing a big 2-hander and doing some WSG now? Is the dps so inferior to dual-wielding these days?

Stri'dah feels I neglected totems a lot in my post. I did, and it was fairly intentional. My thoughts were that since most of a shamans utility is tied up to totems, it was a bad thing to mess too much with them, or they'd lose that utility. However, as he points out, you could add additional effects to the various totems. Well, he didn't point that out explicitly, but I thought about from reading his comments. As long as you avoid shaman becoming the "stationary" tank by having them suffer too much from moving away from their totems, it could work out. However, you need to avoid the problem that as soon as a totem is taken out (for example by some adds spawning) the tank is no longer uncrittable. THAT would be messy.

In fact, Stri'dah was so fired up by the idea that he wrote his own blog post on the topic. Quite a lot of intesting ideas there. I particularly liked how he shared stuff from the lore that I previously didn't know about.

I particularly liked the idea of having water totems provide a temporary health increase. One thing I've been wondering about for some time; When streamlining all the buffs in the game, why didn't Blizz make Stoneskin totem and Devotion aura provide the same buff?

Suggestions about Rockbiter comes up times and again in the comments. Shamans already have a threat-increasing weapon buff, why just not keep that? Good point, really. At least it solves the problem that dps shamans that doesn't want to shouldn't get aggro. The only minor problem is that rockbiter is fairly ... uninteresting, compared to the other weapon enchants. Tanks should have some fun as well. On the other hand, while RNG burst dps isn't a problem (Windfury), RNG burst threat is a problem. You want to have reliable threat generation, and boring but reliable beats interesting but ineffective any day.

An anonymous commenter has a lot of ideas about abilities that could be used while tanking. At this point, I'd like to point out that the basic idea of my post was to make shaman working tanks. I wanted to post some suggestions on how it could be done. There are also a lot of other ideas on how it could be done, and mine are not necessarily better than others. In fact, I'm 100% sure that a lot of people have better ideas than me on the topic, I don't do this for a living.

I'd just like to comment on one thing in particular. Apply a taunt to Frost Shock might be a bad idea. If Earth Shock (or some other tanking shock) generates more threat, not much problem. However, if Frost Shock generates the most threat as well, then you'll have the problem that you need two rotations for the shaman tank, one for main tank duty and one for off-tank duty. The off-tank doesn't want to taunt the boss all the time. Even the main-tank doesn't want to taunt him all the time, if it's diminishing returns on the taunts.

Otherwise, I found the other ideas interesting.

Windsoar illuminated me; some shamans have been tanking, even on Anub'arak. Neat! Too bad we're not going to see shaman tanks in random 5-mans anytime soon unless they get some tank-buff-loving. It'd be fun to watch that video, though. The next poster even included the name of the guy. Phew. It must be hard to make it work despite the system trying (sortof) to hinder you all the time.

I did include a tanking shield spell, Ice Shield. But as further comments suggest, Ice is not a good choice of theme for a shaman tank.

Let's talk themes. There are four classic elements: Fire, Water/Ice, Wind/Air and Earth/Rock. There's also various talks about a fifth element, such as a "spirit" element and the "spirits of azeroth" that Stri'dah mentions. Then there are three (fitting) magic schools in WoW: Fire, Frost and Nature. So, Fire and Frost has their spesific damage type, while Wind/Air and Earth/Rock share the nature school.

Current staus:

Restoration has a lot of water-themed spells. You could argue that Chain Heal is slightly themed of Chain Lightning, in effect air. They also have one spell that's clearly different, Earth Shield. No prize for guessing what element it is based on. Restoration lacks (obviously) any damage spells, so they don't care about any school of magic at all.

Elemental has a lot of fire-themed spells, such as Lava Burst, Flame Shock, Magma Totem, Fire Nova and to a lesser degree Totem of Wrath. But a huge part of their rotation consists of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning, which are Air/Nature spells. In addition, they've got Thunderstorm, and a lot of talents that has names reminding of storms and stuff. They've also got a talent which specifically lowers the cooldown of Frost Shock (and Flame Shock).

Enhancement has a lot of Earth and Air spells. Earth Shock is their main earth spell, but they also got talens like Earthen Power. They also use a lot of Air spells, and Lightning Shield must be said to be included in that. You can argue that Maelstrom Weapon is also air-themed, but it could also be water-themed, unless I misunderstand the concept. Then there are some focus on frost spells, but that has mainly been aimed towards PVP enhancement, a rather uncommon design choice among any of their trees.

The reason I chose to theme my suggestions of Ice/Water/Frost was that Stormstrike buffs nature damage. I thought that it was better to make Frost the tank damage-theme, and Nature the enhancement dps-theme. However, it does make a lot more sense to base tanking on Earth/Rock rather than ice/water.

You could rename Earth Shield to Spirit shield, as suggested by someone. To avoid naming confusion, you could have Rock Shield as the main tanking-shield spell, and it might work like suggested about Ice Shield in my last post. Another shock could be introduced, Lightning or Thunder Shock, which could be the main dps shock while Earth Shock became the main tank shock. You could change Stormstrike to increase the damage of lightning spells instead of nature spells, then it would include all dps elements (the new shock, lightning bolt, chain lightning, and lightning shield). As a commenter suggested, you could make the tanking spells more based around mountains. Make Landslide as an initial threat spell like Shockwave and Avenger's Shield. Change my suggested Icicle to something with earth... Earthquake Shield? Not completely satisfied with that suggestion...

I like that better, when I think about it. Thanks for the heads-up.

Wulfy: Thrall is probably my favorite person in all of WoW's lore. ... Would be awesome to tank as he does.

Thanks for all the comments. It made me very happy to know that my posts are actually being read. Perhaps I should follow Gravity's suggestion and move to Wordpress so I can get a hit-counter on the site. Perhaps someone can point me out to a gadget that can do that on blogspot?

Sins of a speed-leveller

2010-03-08T10:07:00.001+01:00

I very recently decided that I wanted to play some with my paladin, to test the healing aspect at 80. I also wanted to get the Honor your Elders meta-achievement with her. It requires level 77 to get into Utgarde Pinnacle and get the elder there.

I played a bit with her, earning a bit XP here and there. If my memory serves me right, she was she was half-way through level 74 last Tuesday, March 2nd. I initially believed that the Lunar Festival would end on Friday, so I thought I had to get her to level 77 and get the instance within that time limit.

She is on another server than my other toons. No heirloom gear granting additional XP or a major dps boost. No flying mount until level 77. Had almost full rested XP, though. At that point, she had a retribution and a protection spec. Will respec on of those to holy, just not sure which one yet.

Enter speedlevelling

I had done every quest in Dragonblight with my other characters already, so I knew where to go. The new Blizz quest interface made it even easier, for the quests I didn't remember exact location of. I tried Carbonite (Addon) at one point, but found out I didn't like it too much.

Questing was incredibly painless as a paladin. The class is practically made for this sort of stuff. Heavy armor translated to fairly little damage taken. Judgement of Light and Divine Storm healed up any damage from even-level non-elites, even groups. And I could use the Art of War procs to heal even more. Nonexistant downtime. Heals between combat if necessary to get up again, even in-combat when necessary. Judgement of the Wise to recover mana. With a glyphed Seal of Command, it was a fairly large amount too. Divine Plea on a mere 1 minute cooldown as well.

But it gets even better! Paladins have no ramp-up dps time when using Seal of Command, and a huge amount of cleave damage. I could solo with ease multiple mobs. Just switched to the least damaged all the time. Crusader Strike cleaved three mobs. Divine Storm hit four. Judgement also cleaved 3, as far as I could see. Using Consecration burned a lot of mana, so I didn't use it all the time, only on several mobs. It hit all of them. And against undead or demon mobs, it was almost silly: Holy Wrath for huge damage and a 3 sec stun on all mobs.

We're not done yet! They have an innate mounted speed increase with Crusader Aura. Some other classes can get it through talents, but usually only for one of their specs. Further, a 15% running speed increase all the time through Pursuit of Justice. And then we haven't mentioned a single cooldown yet. Avenging Wrath for a nice dps increase. Divine Protection to burn through multiple mobs fast without taking too much damage. Divine Shield to play the "can't touch this"-game with the mobs. Lay on Hands to just complete the list of overpowered abilities. Granted, they can no longer burn Lay on Hands, Divine Protection and Divine Shield during the same combat unless it lasts at least 2 min, but even without that they're practically overpowered.

Finally, a protection spec may be inferior for dps compared to Retribution, but completely superior for survivability. I soloed one 3-man quest at my level as Retribution... barely. Died once first, had to really plan the use of cooldowns during that one. For the next one, I opted to try protection instead. "No Art of War," I thought. "Much less healing." Cancel that thought. I took so little damage it was silly, and Judgement of Light kept me topped at all time. So I soloed all other 3-man quests in Dragonblight with ease. The only one that proved some challenge was the magnataur at the end of a chain, but even against him I didn't need a single cooldown, not even Ardent Defender.

A 80 warrior called out for help against the 5-man dragon, so I never got the chance to test my luck against her. It would probably have been a bit much for soloing at the intended level, though.

Bottom line: Overpowered. Not that it's a problem, it's only a minor aspect of the game. However, it was incredibly fast.

Elder Mirlei

By Thursday I had achieved level 77, and finished Utgarde Pinnacle. I got a minor heart-attack when I saw I still didn't get the meta-achivement, but a quick check proved that I lacked the elders in Storm Peaks that require a flying mount to get. Fair enough, that was easy to fix.

Fly faster, you slowpoke

At this point, I slowed a bit down. I had gotten my cold weather flying, but with only 2k gold in my pocket after that, I couldn't afford a flying mount. Thus, I intended to play the auction house game a bit to get earn money for epic flying training with the stuff I had gotten while questing. Mirlei is a skinner and a miner precisely to earn money, so I had a good amount of tradeskill materials to auction away. Will probably make her a blacksmith if I continue to seriously play her. I never bought any equipment or anything at all while levelling.

How long time did it take me to raise the 2.5k gold necessary (total 4.5k gold, with honored discount)? 3 days. I'm not kidding. I never bought anything, just sold. The auctioneer addon, particularly the "Appraiser", helped put things out quickly. I earned 2k gold of the auction house during those 3 days, and the other 500 gold by questing. By sunday evening, I had my epic flier... with literally 8g left across Mirlei and my bank/auctioneering alt left. I had forgotten that the actual mount also costs a bit, 90g honored.

Honor... no, wait, Revere me, baby

As you probably know, Blizz increased the reputation gains on a lot of the Northrend factions in 3.3. By the time I was done in Dragonblight, I was revered with Wyrmrest. Handy. I also gained Revered with Horde Expedition and the Kal'uak, but neither of those was subject to the increased reputation multiplier in 3.3.

Getting reputation with Sons of Hodir was certianly easier. That would mean that it took less time to raise it from Neutral to Exalted, right? Yes, but not only that. You start out as hated and "at war" with them. During the questline with Thorim, you normally gain a ton of reputation, enough to raise it to neutral with the Sons of Hodir. However, this amount of reputation is also increased. During a single day I went from not having Sons of Hodir on my rep bar at all to be revered with them, and it included only a single round of each daily quest available and no trip to Halls of Lightning. Phew! Most handy, I had dreaded having to do the dailies until my brain bleeded again.

I also realized how expensive the reputation-bought gear is. 70 gold at revered, for each of their items. At this point I had just bought my epic flying training and was broke. However, a single round of dailies with the Sons of Hodir yielded almost 150 gold.

Other quests

I also did the questline to take Crusader's Pinacle and the Shadow Vault. In addition, I'm doing the dailies on the Argent Tournament grounds, to at least get to buy the champion gear.

Plans are for pansies

What's the plan now? I had assumed I had to quest a bit more before 80. Do the Onslaught quests in Icecrown. I can still do that, but I don't "need" to anymore. However, I probably will, just because I find it interesting to slaughter the Scarlet fanatics. I'm not really fan of fanatics anywhere else either, and that's not limited to religion. Atheist fanatics also annoy me. In fact, anyone who think they know better than me what I should do with my life.

Back on topic. I will do some heroics until I'm ready to join some pug raids, and then test out paladin healing first-hand. I'm looking forward to the experience. First impression of Sacred Shield: It's fairly neat, but I was really surprised. You don't get the Flash of Light heal over time unless Sacred Shield is actually absorbing damage right now. That means they don't got a "true" on-demand HoT. I'll need more experience before I can tell if that's really a problem.

What else? I'm not sure. I've played too much this last week, averaging 3 hours a day. I want to relax my wow-addiction again. Last night (just after I dinged 80), me and my wife watched the first episode of Samura Champloo. No offense to those that like it, but I think dubbing sucks. Glad I had the DVD and could switch language.

LFG tank, last spot

What about tanking? I have gotten a fair emount of first-hand experience on paladin tanking now. It's certianly different. I want to write a full post on the topic.

Then there's also the post about shaman healing, which I've postponed for a long time.

Wish for Cataclysm: Shaman tanks!

2010-03-05T10:20:00.007+01:00

I was going to write a post about shamanic healing, but then an idea suddenly popped in my head and I couldn't resist pursuing the thought further.

The background is something like this: I've spent some time levelling my paladin recently. While I've come to enjoy the paladin class a lot more, I still find I'm at odds with the "feel" of the class; The righteous, holier-than-thou warrior. I also got some of the same feeling from my priest when I spent some time playing her recently; a theme based on light and shadow is not what I'm really after. It works for many, and it's okay for me too, but I find I enjoy other themes more.

I enjoy druids. While they have some in-game quirks I'm not too happy about, they're decently cool. Well, I have some trouble with the moonkin form, but I can live with that. By the way, what is the wrath spell anyway? It just doesn't make much sense to me.

But, the healer class I really like from a theme-perspective is shaman. Then the thought trailed further, and I started imagining how it would be if they could tank. It would be awesome if shamans could tank as well! While it wouldn't solve the "tank crisis", it might be one step closer to it.

Anyway, I started thinking what would be necessary to make them tanks. That made me think about the other tanking classes, and what made them tanks. Like feral druids, melee dps shamans and tank shamans would share the enhancement tree as their main spec tree.

Theme

All classes have some themes they range over. In addition, each talent tree has an underlying theme or focus, which usually is a sub-theme of the main class. In that way, each tank has a theme they are tilted towards.

For example: Warriors are, like the name implies, fighters skilled in the use of weaponry. Arms warriors are the iconic fighter with a huge sword or axe that fights with great skill. Fury warriors embody the raging barbarians. Protection warriors are the sword'n'board fighters who also use their shield offensively.

Druid tanks have (obviously) bears as their theme. Protection paladins have ... ehm... Captain America as their ideal? Seriously, though, it's more the protecting, self-sacrificing holy warrior. Death Knights are semi-unique, since they can tank in any tree. The choice of tree have more effect than whether they are tanking or not, though they are slightly tilted towards Frost as their tanking theme (Frost Presence, and frost fever causing the necessary attack speed reduction on enemies).

For shamans, they are themed around the powerful and sometimes destructive elements found in the world. Restoration shamans embody the ocean and water. Elemental shamans are most tilted towards fire, flame and lava, but also storms and lightning. Enhancement shamans are more focused on storms and lightning, with a hint of cold/ice.

For a shaman tank, it would mainly be based on the already existing shamanic theme, but could be further tilted towards ice and cold. It fits with Frost Shock already causing higher threat than the other two shocks.

Holding Aggro

There is nothing more annoying than joining a group and watch the tank unable to keep aggro on anything at all.

Threat

The first important property of a tank, he must be able to hold aggro. However, shamans must also be able to avoid aggro when they're not tanking. Their attacks must cause more threat than they currently do if they want a decent hope of holding aggro. Looking at the other classes: warriors have stances, death knights has presences, druids have forms, and paladins have a "threat spell". That would probably be the easiest way to solve it, give them a spell they can cast to cause additional threat, which lasts until cancelled.

I'm thinking something like "Stormtouched", which looks like they're charging up with electricity when it's cast, and improves all threat caused by something like 60-90%, subject to balance with other tank classes. Not exactly fitting with the earlier mentioned cold theme, though, but fits with the general shaman feel.

Taunts

All tank classes have a single-target taunt with 30 yards range and 8 sec cooldown. They also have a glyph which increases the chances for the taunt to land by 8%. They are all identical, except that the paladin variant causes some damage modified by attack power. Awfully handy, by the way.

In addition, every tank class have a secondary taunt or taunt-like ability, on another cooldown. Warriors have Challenging Shout and druids have Challenging Roar. The two abilities are practically identical except for the rage cost, and taunts all enemies in 10 sec radius, in addition to forcing them to attack you for 6 seconds on a 3 min cooldown. Paladins have Righteous Defense which taunts up to three mobs targeting a friendly ally. Almost always macroed to use the target's target (your ally) as the recipent of the spell, so you can cast it on a mob. Death Knights have Death Grip, which forces an enemy to attack you for 3 sec.

Taunt and "forcing someone to attack you" are slightly different things. The first gives you threat on the enemy equal to the highest threat of whatever the monster has on it's list, and the other merely forces them to attack you without modifying threat, so it's highly likely that they mob will attack someone else when the "forced target" period is over unless you were already high on threat. All threats also have a "forced target" period, usually 3 seconds unless otherwise noted.

Shamans would need a 8 sec cooldown taunt spell. No idea of name for this one.

All shamans have access to Earth Elemental, which is kind of a long cooldown very unique threat.

As for a secondary threat, I don't know right now. It can't be any ability that you use as part of rotation, or you can't offtank. Something unique would be cool, too. I haven't come up with any concept I really like yet.

Survivability

When the tank has established aggro, the next step is to make sure he survives it.

Armor and crittability

When a shaman equips a shield, they get a decent amount of armor. They're still lacking a bit to get to plate levels. A very simple fix here to bring them up to warrior and paladin level is to have Stormtouched increase armor on mail, leather and cloth items by X percent, where X is (plate armor) / (mail armor) coefficients. It should also make the shaman immune to crit from creatuers. This has the problem that you want to be Stormtouched all the time in PVP.

To counter that, you could add a damage reducer such as the -5% damage done that Defensive stance packs. In that way, it becomes a trade-off in the same way as using various presences are. You can PVP in frost presence and have additional damage reduction, but only at a cost. However, resto shamans don't suffer much from that. While that may be okay (resto shamans aren't the most durable in the world of PVP healers, they might use a buff) you could instead attach a -10% crit chance or -10% haste chance to the talent. Now, that would certianly be felt. If you attach negative haste, no shaman would ever use it in PVP. If you attach negative crit chance, some might still use it, but that would sort of be okay. They're now a slightly more defensive hybrid.

Flat damage reduction

The other tanking classes all have some flat damage reduction on their tank-ability, with the exception of paladins who must talent for it. The same solution could be used here: Stormtouched could be talented (deep enhancment) to add up to 6 or 8% flat damage reduction, perhaps more.

Avoidance

Shamans can block, parry and dodge already. However, all the other tanking classes has higher than normal levels. Druids scale with agility, and recieve extra dodge from it too. Death Knights gain additional chance to parry from strength. Paladins block 65% of all incoming attacks from talents alone when Redoubt and Holy Shield is up. Warriors can block extra on demand, and sometimes twice as much as normal.

Since Shamans would also scale with agility, they would already be getting higher dodge levels than normal. Unlike druids, they can parry and block, so they would most likely not need any extra avoidance like druids get extra dodge from agility.

Attack speed reduction

Shamans can get the same attack speed reduction that other tanks get. Earth Shock provides 10% attack speed reduction, and Earthen Power provides an addition 10% for 20% attack speed reduction. It can only be used on a single target, but the same applies to a paladin's judgement which is also an attack speed reduction when talented in Judgements of the Just.

However, the problem is that Frost Shock and Earth Shock are on the same cooldown, so you'd have to choose between attack speed reduction and threat. A fix here might be to allow Frost Shock to provide the same attack speed reduction as Earth Shock, in addition to higher threat. It might also just work to keep them seperate, then requiring the tank to first apply Earth Shock to get the attack speed reduction and afterwards Frost Shock to get threat, provided the attack speed reduction lasted pretty long. At least 18 sec or something.

Compromising like that between threat and survivability is not a very good design, though. No other tank classes (as far as I can think of) has to do that. Compromising between single- or AoE threat is okay, though.

The 20% speed reduction would have to be attached to any ability that that is part of the normal tank rotation.

Emergency buttons

Shamans already have one emergency button, Shamanistic Rage on a 1 min cooldown. It can be kept like it is, though 30% damage reduction for 15 sec on a 1 min cd might be bordering overpowered. They would, however, need one more tank CD, which should not be so powerful that it will upset PVP balance. To balance PVP, the shamanistic rage could be reduced to 20%, and you could have one additional ability on a longer cooldown which could overlap with the other if necessary.

However, they do have another cooldown. Feral Spirit. It provides some healing done to the shaman. However, health received like that doesn't scale good enough to be useful in a serious tanking situation, so it would have to have another ability attached, like increasing healing received. However, there are some designs issues with that. It's a reason the original feral druid talent Berserk was split into two different spells; one which could be used to increase threat and another which increase health (Survival Instincts). You want to be able to use threat cooldowns (increase threat) without having to blow a survivability cooldown so they're available later.

Feral Spirit could, however, be modified to be a threat cooldown. Simply add to it; "the threat caused by the wolves is applied to the shaman if he is Stormtouched". Since the healing is based on AP, it would heal less for a tank than for a dps. All the tank classes also have some way of getting health back on a long cooldown (Warrior: Enraged Regeneration, Druid: Frenzied Regeneration, Paladin: Lay on Hands, Death Knight: Death Pact), so this would be the shaman way.

So, another ability should be added. Powerful enough to be useful, and not so powerful it upsets PVP completely. In addition, it's an advantage if it's a bit unique.

Other tanks have:

Reduced damage taken on demand cooldowns
Reduced damage taken on low health
Increased health cooldowns
Increased healing recieved cooldowns

Something unique would be cool. Can't think of anyting right now, though. Could be something with totems, but it would also have to work on the run. What about an ability that delays 30% of the damage? At least unique, but would be hellish for the programmers to fix.

Abilities

Resources vs cooldowns

Like a paladin, a shaman would have to have his abilities mainly limited by cooldowns, since it's a bad idea to design a tank around going oom all the time.

Mana

Again like a paladin, a shaman would need some way of reliably generating mana all the time. Hitting with Improved Stormstrike isn't good enough, as you can't demand a tank to have enough hit to reliable connect each time. It's tricky to design some way of regenerating mana that isn't too limiting and at the same time not too powerful, and hardest of all, make it scale and work both when the shaman is low- or high-geared for the content he's working on.

Water Shield is fairly reliable for low-geared stuff, but scales negatively with aviodance. The amount would probably have to be increased, though. Besides, I've also toyed with the idea of a new type of shield like lightning and water, Ice shield for tanking. I also think that 'mental shamans should get a new type of shield, like Magma/Lava/Flame/Molten shield.

A suggestion here is to allow Stormtouched (possibly talented) to also grant mana when damaged by direct damage or cleave abilities. Not AoE abilities. To avoid it being abused for healing. If you get aggro, you've got bigger trouble than your mana pool, and in healer gear even stormtouched you're not tough enough to tank serious stuff. It can grant the same amount as Spiritual Attunment, or perhaps slightly more since it's a bit more limiting.

But, granting mana only when you take damage means you'll be constantly mana-starved when you're tanking stuff you're overgeared for. So, you also need an ability which scales with your avoidance. I suggest adding the same benefit of Blessing of Sanctuary, gain 2% mana on dodge, block or parry, to either Stormtouched or Ice shield through talents. You might also add a 3% less damage taken passive ability to Stormtouched through talents, exclusive with Blessing of Sanctuary, so you don't have to buff shamans with Sanctuary at all. After all, since they scale with Agility, they will want Kings.

Now, you can choose to use Water Shield for tanking. It should be like a paladin using Seal of Wisdom: Handy in some cases like when you're overgearing stuff, but strictly unecessary for tanking stuff of your gear level or higher.

Spells and talents

Looking at exisiting abilities and how they can be used in tanking:

(Frost) Shock

Shocks, in particularly frost shock, should be a major part of the rotation, every 6 second. It should also be possible for some benefit (like a druid taking Improved Mangle) to take Reverbation, but only give arbitrary benefit. In effect: It's one valid choice among several, not a ton better for getting max threat.

The downside of Frost Shock is that it is a spell, and thus uses spell hit rather than melee hit. A talent or glyph might add 9% hit to Frost Shock (or some other number), making it require only the normal melee hit to reliably hit.

Stormstrike

Stormstrike should be a major part of the rotation, every 10 sec. Since Stormstrike does more damage with slower weapons, I've given that special regard in the Itemization section below. The +nature damage taken debuff doesn't give any benefit to the shaman tank rotation I've imagined, so there should be a secondary benefit to it. Since you still want dps enhancement shamans to focus on nature damage, one suggestion is to allow the next 4 frost attacks you deal to it to yield 20% higher threat.

Fire Nova

Fire nova would most likely be a major part of the rotation. 10 sec base cooldown, 8 sec glyphed. It should not provide so much threat increase to the rotation that you *have* to glyph it. However, it's not enough in itself to hold AoE threat, so some other ability would also be required.

Magma totem

Magma totem, as far as I know, has it's own threat table, making it useless to gain threat while tanking. It could be changed when you use it with Stormtouched, but I think it's a better idea to leave it as it is. If you require it as a part of a rotation, you need to have a massive mana gain somewhere (since it's very expensive) and effectively say that "shaman tanks never buff spellpower with Flametongue totem". I'd rather keep it as it is now. You could still throw it down to help dps, but it's doesn't help you from a threat perspective.

Lava Lash

Lava Lash should remain only usable with an off-hand weapon, and should thus not be a part of the tank rotation.

Wind Shear

Wind Shear need to get the part about "reduces threat" removed when it's used while Stormtouched.

New spell: Ice Shield

I'm thinking of adding a new type of tanking shield. It can last as long as the other shields, but since you will be taking damage a lot more often, it will need to be refreshened much more often. It should still be mana-free, so there's no problem refreshening it before it has run out except spending a GCD. With 4 charges it, it will last a minimum of 6 seconds with an internal 2 sec cooldown.

A question is whether it should also trigger on other stuff than just getting hit. For example: It can be added to the existing talent Static Shock that you can also expend charges of Ice Shield when hitting the enemy, but that no more than one orb can be expended every 2 sec for any reason. This to make sure it lasts at least 6 seconds, and thus can be a part of a rotation.

Now, the question is how you fix it's damage. It must generally be worse than Lightning Shield for dps, except in special circuimstances. However, if it's worse than Lightning Shield for dps (and thus threat), why would tanks use it?

I've got some ideas. One is to make it cause AoE damage when a charge is expended. The damage could be 1/3th of Lightning Shield, making it better in just some circuimstances for dps. Also recall that Lightning Shield is further buffed by the Stormstrike debuff. Then many tanks would use LS for single-target fights and IS for multiple-target.

Another idea is to attach some minor defensive benefit to it, like holy shield improves block chance. That would make every single shaman tank use it for almost all purposes. For example 5% less damage taken (like Blade Barrier).

Yet another idea is to simply say that it produces high threat, so that the threat produced exceeds Lightning Shield even on single-target fights.

New spell: Icicle

You also need at least one more spell to get a proper rotation. There are several ways to think around this one, but I've got a proposal.

Icicle could be a baseline spell, meaning all shamans get it. It has no cooldown. It should be mainly used for tanking (and perhaps resto soloing). The base damage is low, so that it has lower priority in regard to threat than Stormstrike, Frost Shock and Ice Shield.

It should have a debuff of some kind, and the best would be to allow the debuff to stack up to five. I'm thinking Lacerate, a damage dot stacking up to 5. Shamans already have a ton of utility, they don't need one more buff to bring along. However, to avoid it to become a part of Enhancement rotation, it can be used only while you're wearing a shield. Think about it as "cause your shield to sprout icicles at your target".

I'm thinking it should also work with Maelstrom weapon. The problem is that maelstrom weapon requires you to stack it up to full (5) before you cast Lightning Bolt / Chain Lightning, otherwise you start casting (even fast), which resets your current swing timer and reduces avoidance to 0 for it's duration. That would make for a very steep learning curve for any newbie shammy tank.

I suggest that it works like this: Icicle consumes Maelstrom Weapon, and causes X damage to all enemies within 10 yards for each buff in the maelstrom stack. It scales lineary. That means that you don't lose any dps (AoE or otherwise) by using a stack early (in fact, that's the main use), you don't get any special benefit by waiting until it's stacked up to 5, and you will loose dps and threat if you don't use it when it's at a full stack.

This also have a secondary benefit: Since Icicle is used relatively often in the rotation, you clear the maelstrom charges very often. This prevents the tank from using Maelstrom weapon to heal himself a lot, unless he's willing to sacrifice a lot of threat for it. Even saving up and using heals to keep yourself up, it will be a veeeery minor increase in incoming heals on any raid encounter.

Weapon enchants

You could have the shaman use the normal temporary weapon enchants (Windfury or Frostbrand and Flametongue, perhaps), or create specific tanking temporary weapon enchants. Not thought much about it.

Initial threat

A shaman can use Chain Lightning to gain some initial threat on up to three mobs, Lighting Bolt and Frost Shock for a single mob. They might have problems generating initial AoE threat like a warrior using Thunder Clap and Shockwave, a druid using Swipe and a death knight using Death and Decay or Howling Blast. However, paladins have a bit of the same problem; Their AoE threat rocks, but it has a slight ramp-up time. Shamans would be able to use Fire Nova for their initial AoE threat, and then rely on Icicle / Maelstrom Weapon slash AoE and Ice shield.

Rotation

The rotation priority would be something like:

Keep up Ice Shield, 6s+ "CD"
Icicle if at full stack of Maelstrom Weapon
Stormstrike, 10s CD
Frost Shock, 5-6s CD
Fire Nova, 8-10s CD
Refresh Ice Shield if it's low on charges, to avoid several some CD refreshing at the same moment that Ice Shield fades
Icicle otherwise

Might need some adjustement, but something along those lines. You could also argue that you would want to Icicle a lot early to get up stacks. Same thoughts as for druid tanking: Handy, but threat is usually better by using Faerie Fire (feral) and Mangle on every cooldown.

Other stuff

Other thoughts I came up with while comparing tanks.

Gap closer?

Druids and warriors have various abilities to get into melee fast, gap closers. Death Knights have a reverse gap closer, brigning the enemy to them instead. Paladins don't have that, which might be why their normal taunt deals damage. Shamans can probably also work fine without a gap closer. The problem is that you don't want to make Enhancement shamans too sticky in PVP, they are already relatively sticky. While it would rock with another pull like Death Grip, it's probably not necessary.

Utility

Shamans have a ton of utility already. No reason not to bring them along for their lack of utility.

Dps

As noted above, a shaman tank would have to be lower on dps than their dps friends in the enhancement business. Part of this is solved by having to compromise talents like feral druids too, another is to simply make them use a single weapon and shield instead of dual-wielding. Might just do the trick. If you attack the -10% haste or crit, it helps even more.

Itemization

Shamans can't equip swords, a very commonly used tank weapon. They also derive no benefit from Strength, which all the plate classes do. Druids have their own weapons.

I propose balancing shamans around tanking with a +agility, slow dps weapon. Two reasons for that. First, it provides better damage = more threat on Stormstrike. Second, you don't want to have to add even more weapons into the game, in particularly not weapons that only a single sub-spec will put to use. So, to close the gap tanking weapons provide, you'll have to add some ability, talent or glyph that provides a shaman with the necessary stats to close the gap since he's not using a tank weapon. Death Knights, which are balanced around tanking with dps weapons, have Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (2-handed weapons) and Rune of the Nerubian Carapace (1-handed weapons) for that purpose. It could be a temporary weapon enchant for shamans, but I don't see any reaons why you don't want them to use the normal weapon enchants.

I'm crazy, right?

Why did I write all this?

It was a fun thought experiment, and allowed me to think throughly about what makes or breaks a tank.

I don't think it'll be implemented for Cataclysm. It's probably too late in the design process for Blizz, and the chances that some Blizz employee will read this post and totally fall in love with the idea is very low. The chances that said emplyee will actually put it into Cataclysm is even lower, hovering around winning the national lottery.

But... it was fun. And admit it, it would be completely awesome. Thrall can tank (Battle for Undercity), every shaman should be allowed to share that fun!

[EDIT] I've written a follow-up post, after all the comments on this topic.

The World Event Menace

2010-02-25T09:01:00.001+01:00

It's been a while. More than two weeks, in fact. I've got two major reasons for that, apart from the looming reason of laziness. And some trouble with blogspot. Using Chrome helped.

First, I've been unable to sit much in front of a computer for medical reasons. Second, I've been busy with the World Event stuff recently. Which is the first thing I'd like to discuss.

The World Event Menace

I've got a bunch of characters, as you may have guessed by now. Of which I "invest" in five of them. One for each healer class, and a death knight. That does not mean I try to get every one of those top-geared. Just that those five are the "mains" I switch between. My usual pattern is a few weeks on one "main", then I switch to another for a while. Since I've rolled my DK, I've done the daily random heroic each time with him, but I've spent a lot time on various healers too. I like tanking, but I also enjoy healing.

Anyway. When Cataclysm arrives, stuff will change... again. Equipment gained today is useless tomorrow. Doesn't matter if I've gotten a full tier 10, it will be replaced within a month anyway. Thus, that's only a temporary investment. Very handy and necessary to get the job done, but not something I hoard for the sake of it itself.

Crafting materials will also be reduced to dust-collectors, with a few exceptions. Some special items will still be worth making, such as the item that grants an extra gem socket on a belt. Some special items will be worth making for others that doesn't have them already, such as the tailoring flying carpets, the engineering turbo-charged flying machine, non-combat pets... but it's mostly useless.

Gold in itself will still be valuable. However, it will suffer some amount of inflation. 5k gold in one year is most likely the same as 1-2k gold is today. Still, it's worth selling stuff that's still valuable to get gold for later.

Profession skills are somewhat useful. The actual recipes/patterns/design will most likely be less used, but the skill points make it easier to get to top-level again. However, the first skill points for each new expansion is ridicilously easy to get anyway, so it's only a minor help. Some recipes will still be worth selling, though, especially for levelling up. The exception is Inscription, many of the low-level recipes there will be useful forever.

For achievementcollectors, very few of those go away, and so they're useful in themselves. I care very little for achivements for the sake the achivement itself. I do care some for "internal" achievements. That is, goals and challenges I overcome and feel I've achieved something myself, not because of another 10 points on the achievements page. Successfully beating a hard mode boss you've spent time mastering would be such an achivement.

Vanity items, such as clothes, fireworks and all that junk that's filling a bag in your bank is worth exactly as much next expansion as today.

But... one thing will be useful... Oh so useful. 310% flying mounts. Getting quest done faster, spend less time travelling. Makes looking for metal nodes or herbs easier too.

However, since I'm not in any serious raid force, there are only two ways to get a 310% mount. First, a random drop from certain raid bosses. Second, the "What a strange, long trip it's been" meta-achivement for doing most world event achivements.

Trying to get one of those rare mounts from various bosses are practically a waste of time. In the first place, it has a 0.2% chance of dropping 25-man mode only, and then you've got to win the following raid roll. Even if you raid the same boss every week, you've still only got a 10% chance of seeing the mount actually dropping, and then you haven't even started the raid roll!

My own conclusion is that I've got to do the World Event stuff on all characters that I want to someday get the mount. Sadly, when WotLK launched, I didn't know about the reward and couldn't care less for the achivements themselves, so I got started kinda late.

My shaman just got her Violet Proto-Drake. She was my main at the time I first started doing these achievements, May last year. I started doing it with my druid as well when the Fire Festival event started, meaning she lacks only two world event meta-achivements now, Noblegarden and Children's Week. I started doing stuff with my death knight on the Hallow's End event, so he'll be done with the Brewfest this year. Finally, I just started doing the meta-achivements with my priest and paladin. Since neither is level 80, they couldn't get the Love is in the Air meta-achievement (requires you to enter Naxxramas which requires level 80), so they'll be done around this time next year.

Doing the achievements with all my characters is a huge time-sink. Fortunately, I've combined most of them with reading manga (History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi, an awesome manga on mangafox.com) while travelling, making it much less annoying to get it done.

I feel sort of forced to do this. Since I know myself, I know that I'll be switching back and forth between my characters a lot later too, that's why I "need" to get it done with all of them. There is no time when I feel more addicted to this game than this during these events. Bah. I'd rather want to skip it, yet I still do it. How important is that 10% flying mount speed increase worth, really?

Current status for each of my characters:

Kirba (shaman)

Done with the entire world event stuff. Yay!

To get the achivement Charming, I've joined a lot of heroic dungeons as dps. I find Elemental a lot less stressful now. I believe it's the same with almost any dps spec, you'll get used to the "rotation" (or priority system) if you practice enough.

Healing 5-mans is just trival for shamans. Not that it's hard for any class, but Earth Shield + Healing Stream Totem will cover practically all damage taken by both the party and the raid. For ease of convinience, I've glyphed Healing Stream Totem. 500 health to each party member every 3 sec? That's 2.5k every 3 sec, or 833 health per second.

I've also started to see how powerful Chain Heal can be. The problem, though, is that it requires a good knowledge about the positioning of the raid. Hit a hunter at max range, and you'll get no bumping at all. Melee are almost always safe bets. Tanks in particular. I often cast it on myself during raid damage, both to heal myself up but mostly because I always know who is within range of myself by looking around.

It seems to me that Chain heal has higher throughput than most other forms of raid healing. I guess Prayer of Healing can outpace it, but since it only targets one group, chain heal have a higher probability of hitting targets that's in need of actual healing. Good organization of the groups or knowledge of who does what (in effect, a stable raid group) also helps. Well, rogues, death knights and warriors are always in melee, but any other class can be almost anywhere.

I found that it was much faster doing quests to get Charming. I could - barely - solo a 5-man quest in Icecrown as Elemental. Much easier as Restoration, but a bloody lot slower. Questing in itself is awfully painless as a 'mental shammy, though. No downtime, not much running (the mobs run to you once you hit them), lots of cooldowns to blow if you're feeling threatened or just bored.

Ayeba (druid)

Done with this world event. To get Charming done with her I spent two instances dps'ing. However, I found that kitties aren't generally the killing-blow scorers. Bears are actually better at it. Kitties might be better if you're working hard on timing, but if you're working towards optimal dps they don't get too many killing blows.

So, I spent a lot of time tanking with my druid to get all the charming stuff and then all the elders of the dungeons. You know what? AoE threat for a druid is rather low. Even spamming swipe until my fingers bleeded (macroed with Maul so I get single-target threat too), dps would regularly pull aggro on one of the AoE targets. To get aggro on all, I had to tab through the crowd to get in mauls everywhere as well. Good thing I'm fast on my taunt-finger. Granted, many dps were better equipped than me, but still...

Like Kirba, I ended up soloing and questing to get Charming done. Not only because it's faster, but also because there were some quests in Icecrown I'd like to do just for the lore. I easily soloed the questline with the Scarlet Onslaught, including the end-boss. I think it was even easier than on my death knight. The 4% of your maximum health heals (Improved Leader of the Pack) every 6 sec just rocks too much combined with low incoming damage (relatively) and the higher health pool of druid tanks.

Vigan (death knight)

On the topic of the world event thing, Vigan is the one I've done the least with. Not because I'm not interested, but because I can do that while waiting in LFR or for battlegrounds, something I don't do too much with the other characters. Yay for 20% speed increase from talents. Just lacking Azjol-Nerub of the dungeon elders, gotten the rest through random daily heroics.

I'm still enjoying tanking as a death knight. Will respec to Blood soon to test it again with the changes to the talents in 3.3.5. Two pieces of Tier 10 should help on AoE threat as well, especially if I throw in a glyph as well.

Regarding PVP, I've gotten kinda dis-hearted. Great survivability, but not enough pressure. Without a healing debuff we got lots of trouble in arenas against any team with a healer. Rather than go get a tank class with a MS debuff (warrior), I've shifted more towards being a healer. Than someone else can bring that debuff. Or I can go with a caster team or something.

Zuna (priest)

Lacking Kalimdor, Utgarde Keep and all the high-level dungeons. She's level 77, so she can enter almost all of them now. After those are done, I won't play her more for a bit. The other characters of mine interests me more.

I've found I'm in need of a lot more practice before I can master the shadow rotation. Particularly on trash; How many mobs should there be before I ought to use Mind Sear over single-target dpsing the mobs? There's also something about the shadow stuff... it's just not as cool (in my mind) as throwing lava and lightning around.

Mirlei (paladin)

Done with the season except for the high level dungeon elders. However, she can't access them yet because she's only level 74, so I got to level a lot if I want to get it done this year with her.

Though I played her to get some healing done, I ended up with a tank and a dps spec. It's just much easier to get groups as a tank, and much less annoyance involved when I control the fights. So many bad tanks out there... Interestingly enough, I pull 1.5-2k dps on trash groups. Granted, that's AoE, but unmatched by almost any other dps at that level. I'm sorely beaten (as I should be) on single-target boss fights, though. The curious thing is that I don't have a single heirloom item, enchant or gem with her, while many of the other dps are way better equipped than me.

I could spec tank and healer, but I'm on a PVP server and want to level painlessly. I even got drafted in as dps in a group once recently. That was quite the intresting experience. I'm learning the retribution stuff, but it seems to me the most effective is to use Crusader Strike every 3rd GCD and weave the other abilities in-between those. Perhaps every 4th GCD with decent amount of haste to push the GCD down to 1 sec. Further, Seal of Command seems to be the trash-clearing seal while Seal of Corruption (since I'm horde) is the preference for boss fights. When tanking I just go Seal of Corruption all the time for the ton of extra expertise I gain from the glyph. Can't beat that.

I've had some fun using my abilities in a high-level dungeon (for me). I joined Drak'Thron Keep as dps at level 73. We got three groups at the same time, and our healer wasn't exactly top-notch. So I tossed Hand of Sacrifice on the tank, blew Divine Sacrifice and healed like crazy, judging to get up mana and stunning and silencing to reduce incoming damage. A bit earlier I had tanked the raptor boss after the tank died, successfully. If Divine Sacrifice and Hand of Sacrifice actually stacks when used at the same time, that's a crazy amount of damage reduction.

Posts I want to write

Shamanic healing
Challenge of non-heroic dungeons at the appropriate levels
Dee Pee Ace

Something wrong with blogspot and me for the moment, can't write any posts...

2010-02-24T14:24:00.001+01:00

Hear my plea: Will a paladin suit me?

2010-02-05T09:43:00.001+01:00

Ah...paladins. Being Horde in classic WoW (before BC) meant I hated paladins. Then BC came, and I intended to switch main to a paladin. However, I found their playstyle to be dirt boring, so I gave up and returned to my other characters. Now I'm "back" again. I still think their playstyle is boring as hell at low level, but now it no longer bothers me much because I'm far above the level where that is a problem.

Demand 1:

PVE healing style that fits me

Hm. Paladins have changed since BC, but a lot remains the same. First and foremost, the huge difference between the healing spell design of paladins vs other healers mostly remain. Priests and shamans both have a quick healing spell with good throughput and low mana-efficiency, Flash Heal and Lesser Healing Wave, resepctively. Druids have lacked such a small heal for a long time, but got one at level 80. In addition, priests, shamans and druids have a slow-casting healing spell with good throughput and good mana-efficiency, namely Greater Heal, Healing Wave and Healing Touch. But... since it's so slow and big, you can't use it all the time.

Now, paladins have the opposite. A quick healing spell with low throughput which is mana-efficient, and a slow-casting healing spell with great throughput but bad mana-efficiency. So, while the other healing classes wanted to use their big spells as much as possible to be as efficient as possible, paladins wanted to spam their small heals until kingdom come.

Of course, more than that have changed. A discipline priest speccing and glyphing for it has a fairly mana-efficient flash heal as well. Druids have gotten Nourish, which is mana-efficient when specced and glyphed and their target is hotted up. Not to mention they can now turn their big slow Healing Touch into a small fast heal by glyphing it, though few do that at 80. Shamans have gotten more utility with Lesser Healing Wave, namely 25% crit as long as Tidal Waves is up. In addition, paladins' spells have changed a bit as well, particularly the glyph of Holy Light which turns it into a semi-AoE spell.

Interestingly enough, paladins have only three heals. Flash of Light, Holy Light and Holy Shock. The latter is the only instant, direct healing spell on a low cooldown in the game. Can be glyphed to 5 seconds too. Granted, Empowered Healing, Riptide and Prayer of Mending might count, but the first two aren't very powerful (and it's very unwise to spam them on the same target mana-wise), and the last requires another hit to actually heal, which is not guaranteed when healing a non-tank. But, in addition to their three heals, paladins have a rather big toolbox of meta-spells (Divine Favor, Beacon of Light, Divine Illumination) and utility spells (Hand of Freedom/Sacrifice/Protection/Salvation etc). If you want to stretch it, you can also call Judgement of Light a healing spell. Stretching it even more is calling Seal of Light a healing spell. Granted, it indirectly heals, but only the caster when he's auto-attacking. I've never ever seen a paladin healer do that in 5-mans, for a good reason.

For a long time, I used to call it easy-mode healing. Now, healing in itself can be challenging as any class, but I believe there is still some truth in this. However, a lot changed when the Beacon of Light was added and modified until it's current version. Their Beacon of Light (or Bacon of Light, if you deliberately want to misspell it) is now one of paladins' most defining class features. I've been envious of the beacon on several occasions. For PVE, they can snipe heals on raid members while healing the tank, much to the annoyance of my shaman who was trying to heal them up with chain heal. In the end, I gave up and sniped heals myself with Lesser Healig Waves, when it had less than a sec cast time. Paladins can also heal the main tank and off-tank at the same time... I was red with envy when I watched a single paladin keep up both tanks on Koralon during Meteor Fist after every other healer had died. Or they can just heal around while being practically immortal by beaconing themselves.

They used to lack any type of healing over time (like Renew, Rejuvenation and Riptide) and healing on demand spells (like Earth Shield, Prayer of Mending and Living Seed). They still do, up 'till level 80. That's the most annoying with healing in 5-mans as a paladin, you have no way of easing the incoming damage without brute-force healing it down like a crazy whack-a-mole game. If they'd still lacked them at 80 too, I would never think twice about considering paladins. Too annoying for my taste. Since I don't have a 80 paladin yet, I don't know how powerful their heals are. However, I know that Sacred Shield is considered "bloody powerful" by a lot people. It was not without reason that it was limited to a single target.

They also lack any direct AoE spells. However, with the advent of their Beacon, they can at least hit two people at the same time. Still, for the few occassions where everyone is taking damage in 5-mans a paladin healer really got to make use of every single global cooldown to keep everyone up. Loken, for example. However, they have the advantage that they never have to make the choice between keeping the tank up or keeping everyone else up. As long as the beacon is on the tank, they will keep the tank up while healing the other party members.

Speaking of tank healing, paladins are certainly among the elites there. Add to that that they got a damage reduction spell without spending a single talent, Hand of Sacrifice. It has a limit on how much it absorbs and might still kill the paladin, though, but combine it with either self-healing (still with beacon on tank) or Divine Shield or Divine Protection, and they're good. On cutting-edge raids, Nature's Swiftness (both shaman and druid version) can't compete at all with abilities that scale, such as Hand of Sacrifice, Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit. But hey, paladins can even spec into another emergency button, Divine Sacrifice. Has some limits as well, but is now fail-safe in the sense that it can no longer kill you. Speaking of Nature's Swiftness, paladins have an even more powerful version of that, Lay on Hands, which doubles as another damage reduction abilitiy when specced for it. A single healer can have three such emergency buttons... did someone say overpowered? Definitely powerful in the hands of a skilled healer. On the other hand, they lack an Inspiration-like talent, but druids have managed fine for a long time without it.

There are also their buffs... in particular Blessing of Kings. I've seen 25-man raids that refuse to start until they've got a paladin to buff Kings. Blessing of Wisdom and Might are also powerful stuff, but can be duplicated by others. Handy that they no longer need to be refreshened every 5 min. They are also the most powerful buffers in the sense that three different paladins can provide three different buffs. Shamans can come close, but they only have two unique buffs for most slots, unless you are in need of a particular resistance. Oh, and then you can have three different paladins provide three different auras. Not only that, but their auras have a longer range and are more reliable than a shaman's totems, making them the first choice for resistance effects such as Fire Resistance.

On the topic of survival... let's see... plate armor which allows them to mitigate a lot of physical damage, divine shield that makes them completely immune to (almost) everything, and their various "hands" which can reduce threat, remove any movement-impairing efect, completely drop aggro / ignore physical damage and the ability to spam huge heals on both themselves and the tank at the same time? Yes, they are solid.

The ability to help recover from a wipe, or at the very least ignore any repair costs once in a while, Divine Intervention, is just icing the cake.

Yes, I think I can get used to the paladin toolbox.

Demand 2:

Potential as PVP healer

Again, I have no direct experience here at high level. The only experience I have is battlegrounds at lower level. However, arenajunkies.com clearly show that paladins are among the most common healer in arenas... in fact THE most common healer, from what I can see. That alone should say something.

The infamous bubble is perhaps their most known (and hated) feature. While it can now be dispelled by two classes, no matter how fast you dispel it it will at least clear you of all debuffs. If there are no dangers to your bubble nearby, you've got 12 seconds of free healing... almost. Solid, but a paladin can't rely on that alone. However, there is also another use for the forbearance trick: Divine Protection. It is clearly weaker, but has the advantage that it can't be dispelled by warriors, has a shorter cooldown, and priests often miss that it's on due to it's rather subtle graphics. Compared to Divine Shield at least. A good priest won't be fooled, though.

What else do they have? Hand of Protection to give an ally (or yourself) completely immunity to all physical attacks? Nice. Hand of Freedom to make an ally or yourself completely immune to movement-impairing effects? Very nice. Slap it on a warrior and watch him crush the mage into small pieces, unless he's got his Ice Block off cooldown. Hand of Salvation which glyphed provides a -20% damage taken buff on yourself? And I thought I was going to miss barkskin. Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice to make you immune or at least highly resistant to a lot crowd control, not to mention it makes the damage on your target much more manageable.

Oh, and there's still beacon. Except now you'll slap it on yourself instead, and copy all healing you do to yourself. Mohahahaha! In arena it's just as good to slap it on a team memer, depending on who's going to take more damage. Add to the survivability that they also has a lot of armor that will always passively protect them.

In battlegrounds you can really feel the difference with Crusader Aura. Not least, this enables you to ride away from others. The opposite is rather frustrating, when you only got 100% speed and your tail got 120%... trust me on that one. Crusader Aura is handy when travelling anywhere, not just in arenas. Paladins are the only healer with a mounted speed buff of any kind.

Now, they lack a snare, but they have a very special ability... Judgement of Justice. As a holy paladin, it has a 40 yard range. Use it to semi-dismount people from a long range. They can't run away using abilities such as Ghost Wolf, Travel Form, Sprint or a mount.

Paladins got a reliable stun, on a 40 sec cooldown talented. They can also fear and stun undead and demons. But that's the limit of their crowd-controlling abilities.

On the topic of mana, 1 min cooldown on Divine Plea rocks for battelgrounds. Can't say how well it works in arenas, with the healing debuff slapped on it. I know that my arenamate (a paladin) and me could outlast a lot of enemy teams. The only ones we had trouble outlasting was druids... but they couldn't run us out either. After about 15 min, they gave up.

What do they lack? Well, they lack any sort of sprint themselves. Shamans and druids can often run away, while priests and paladins have to stay to take the heat unless they got enough range to mount up. Fair enough. Just as in PVE, they don't have Hots to play with. They do have one, but it's on one target only, making it unusuable for healing damage in battleground effectively. Sure helps on that one target though. Going to miss that from my druid. Aura Mastery allows them 6 sec of playtime every 2 min, but they can still be stunned and death gripped. So under heavy fire, they're not always able to get out heals at all.

Aside from Hand of Freedom, they have a hard time with debuffs. Sure, they can remove 3 different types, but only every time they hit cleanse and burn a global cooldown. Priests, shamans and druids all have a "persistant" dispel that keeps dispelling several times after the initial gcd (Abolish Disease, Abolish Poison, Cleansing Totem). Priests can also dispel two magic debuffs every gcd, making them able to compete with a frost mage's ability to apply debuffs. The talent Sacred Cleansing can help, but it's not reliable.

Now, paladins have the same problem as druids; lack of dps in healer spec. But there's also a difference: While the druid can only cast heals, paladins can actually cast other spels as well. It came as a surprise to me, but my paladin partner could actually throw in a decent nuke to help me (as a DK) finish my enemies off: Hammer of Wrath, Holy Shock and Judgement actually made a difference. My healer often ended up with more killing blows than me, of course with me being a heck of a lot higher on damage done. That may make all the difference to me. I don't need a lot of sustained dps in a healer spec, only the ability to throw in a decent nuke. Like priests can chain Holy Fire (+ Smite) + SW:D for some burst. Druids lack that. The closest thing they come is chain-gunning Wrath if they've spent talent points to get it down to 1.5 sec. Shamans have a very decent burst with Flame Shock + (Lightning Bolt + Chain Lightning) + Lava Burst.

PVP healing will take some time to get used to since I've been healing a lot as a druid earlier... but it'll work out, I hope.

Demand 3:

Potential as ranged dps

Fail!

Second options

Paladins can't do ranged dps, but they got two other options: Tanking and dpsing. Why would I want to tank as a paladin when I can tank as a DK? For one thing, it might be easier to find groups that way. Tanks are in even shorter supply than healers, but it's pretty easy to get groups as a healer too. And who knows, I might really like their tanking. I can't tell 'till I've tried. Well, I have tried, but not as a full-fledged high level protection paladin, only as a retribution paladin at level 71 and a protection paladin at level 62. Might write a seperate post about that.

The tempting thing about going Retribution is that it allows you to be a semi-healer in PVP. You don't have the faintest chance to compete with a full-fledged healer, but you still got Hand of Sacrifice and Protection. In addition, Hand of Freedom can be used to remove stuns when talented, and why skip that for PVP? While dpsing, you can also throw out a lot of instant Flash of Lights, and Cleansing is possible as well. Too much of it will naturally drain the mana pool in no time, but judging on every cooldown with a glyphed Seal of Command generates a pretty good amount of mana. I have tried it a bit at 71, and it was fun. With that said, as a DK you can peel your allies extremely well, use Anti-Magic Shell to reduce damage taken, use ghoul stun and silence casters to prevent incoming damage. In effect, I'm trading one toolbox for another, and it's not necessarily a better one for my purposes.

One decent thing is the ability to self-heal between combat in battlegrounds/Wintergrasp. As a DK, I'm forced to eat unless I've taken so little damage that a bandage will do.

So, I'll have to give up the idea of going ranged dps. I think I can live with that, but then I might just as well go druid, right?

Feel

Generally, I don't like paladins. No, seriously, I don't like the paladin feel.

To start somewhere... the original paladins were special members of the church who were given permission to dabble in heretic magic to further the church's goal. That dissapeared somewhere along the line. I don't like the "purity" and "holier than thou" feeling. Granted, the wings are cool, but belong to priests, not paladins. I like the feel of blood elf paladins a lot better, as they didn't care for the holier-than-thou stuff, just for the power.

But... it's "just" a game, and I'm not roleplaying much these days.

Conclusions

Need more experience

I'll just have to spend some more time finding out if they're suited for me. As Gravity noted, I'm a crazy altoholic, and this won't exactly reduce that impression.

The paladin I will level (Mirlei) is on a RP-PVP server, where all my other characters are on a RP server. Tirvin, my paladin on Earthen Ring, is dedicated to play with my wife. And she doesn't play much at all these days. Since Mirlei is on a different server, she can't benefit from all the high-level crafting materials I've gathered, my max-level jewelcrafting, inscription, engineering and enchanting, and she can't have heirloom items. ... Actually, the worst part is not being able to fly. Old-school. Extra challenge too? The game isn't exactly very challenging itself until max-level cutting-edge content.

I'm not going to migrate her to another server. I want to try some world PVP action, and the ability to gank alliance that annoys me. Note that I don't do that without reason, only if they go after my mining veins. If anything, I could transfer a bank alt to her server with gold, heirloom items, crafted items and stuff. But that costs real money, and it's hardly worth it.

Test of Faith: Are priests my thing?

2010-02-03T09:59:00.001+01:00

Zuna, my priest, was my first 60. I've healed a lot with her, and watched the priest class move through changes. When I think about it, though, priests have been one of the more stable classes in the game, except for the complete re-haul of Discipline.

Because of my uncertainty, I decided to pick her up again and play with her a bit. Test things out.

Demand 1:

PVE healing style that fits me

Priests have two distinct PVE healing styles to choose from. To be completely fair: Every healer class have several healing styles, but none as different as holy vs discipline. With that said, it is different to raid heal with a shaman laser-chain-heal style and tank heal. Same with a druid. Can't speak about paladins, no direct experience in raids there.

Holy

I've only got experience as a raid-healing priest at lvl 70, and that was as holy. Still, I don't think it is a completely different experience now... well, except that Circle of Healing is on cooldown.

Holy has, when specced for it, a very strong hot in Renew. Glyphing it is completely overkill for normal 5-mans, but I can see how that could be useful in raids. Empowered Renew remind me of Riptide. I like it.

Surge of Light is also fun, especially since it can proc multiple times on a single Prayer of Mending. However, if I were to stay a holy priest, I'd get some addon that shows me when I've got a proc up. Too easy to miss.

Mana regeneration is also top-notch as holy (including Meditation, mind you). In fact, I often threw in some damage because I had mana to spare.

I didn't get to test out a lot of Holy's group healing in 5-mans. A random Circle of Healing (which practically guaranteed a Surge of Light following), once in a while a Prayer of Healing. I know from experience it is solid. In fact, I think Holy has the best tools for handling damage to a lot of party members in 5-mans.

I enjoy Guardian Spirit. It is very powerful and fun. I also played around with Body and Soul. Fun, and handy in PVP, but not a MUST-HAVE. Inspiration is as usual powerful.

The thing I didn't like so well with Holy was handling lots of tank damage. But that's comparing to Discipline and druid-healing, which is a bit unfair.

All in all... I liked holy healing fairly well.

What I didn't like so well is the Shadowfiend. Long cooldown (compared to Innervate and Divine Plea), too. That's not limited to Holy, though.

Discipline

Ah... discipline. For a loooong time, I insisted on being a discipline priest, long before the rehaul that made discipline actually good. Back when Divine Spirit was the 31-point talent.

Anyway... I like discipline too. Powerful shields which can be tossed out extremely fast thanks to Borrowed Time and Penance that can heal a tank up from nada to full (almost) in no time are the two main selling points. Renew ticks for a lot less, naturally. Prayer of Mending is still powerful, though.

But, to start somewhere else: Discipline is not scaled well for below-max-level mana management. The mana returns from Rapture is just way more powerful when you got a good lvl 80 mana pool. At 71, I had trouble with my mana as discipline. Had to sit down and drink every third pull, less with a very tough tank. I know from second-hand experience that Discipline's mana is in a pretty good state, though. Had a disc priest heal my DK when I tanked the two groups after Ick and Krick. He ended up with more mana after the two groups than before he started, and he didn't use his Shadowfiend.

I also find the lack of a instant-heal slightly frustrating. Ironically. I'm tossing out shields like there's no tomorrow... which translates to everyone having Weakened Soul on them all the time. At least everyone who is taking damage. But it isn't that bad, I'm just not used to it from being a holy priest for a long time.

Discipline has a lot more cooldowns to play with. Good thing? Bad thing? Definitely something I need to learn. I didn't use them too well.

By the way, Engineering gloves enchant + Berserking troll racial + Power Infusion + Borrowed Time + Enlightenment is a sick amount of haste together. Resurrection in 4 seconds, anyone?

Demand 2:

Potential as PVP healer

If you look at any kind of rated arena, Discipline is the only way to go. Blizz has tried to make Holy viable with talents like Body and Soul, Blessed Resilience and so on, but Disc is still king. I don't mind, though.

Disc priests are very powerful in PVP. Priest-Mage-Rogue, anyone? They have powerful crowd-control in their Psychic Scream, shields that ignore any healing debuffs, penance that insta-heals the first tick and nearly the second too, Mana burn goodness for the right compositions (double healer + dps, for example), both offensively and defensively dispels, quick nukes at the right times... powerful, indeed. They're not built for outlasting another team, they are an offensive-type healer.

Sadly, I can't test too well. Walking into PVP with no resilience these days is a sure way of getting blown up, particularly as a healer. So I'll just have to take the word of the community, which says priests doesn't suck. Still... cloth means that my nemesis is warrior and to some extent rogue. I liked being tough and not fearing warriors as a DK.

Shadowfiend is worse in PVP. Can get kited around and killed easily, reducing my possible mana returns.

Demand 3:

Potential as ranged dps

Interestingly enough, this is the first time I've really specced shadow during all those years of being a priest. Dual-spec, I love you.

I like shadow. It's cool with the shadow ... stuff which seems to evaporate from you all the time. I like having three dots to play with, one CD nuke and one no-CD nuke. Creates a game of weaving, where I need to make sure stuff are up all the time. I can get used to that, and thrive with it. No proc-watching involved.

It wasn't so entertaining in PVP, but then again that might steem from my complete lack of resilience. There are some shadow priests among high-ranked arena teams, which should say they are viable. I liked the immunity Dispersion provides. The only good answer against a bladestorming warrior... haha, eat that.

I missed a snare. Mind Flay provides a semi-snare, but I have to stay immobile to maintain it, and that means I can't kite anything around.

Feel

That's a tough question... do I like the priest feel? The question is really, what is the priest feel? From the artwork on some of their armor, they're sort of Oracles, bringers of divine fury, angels... stuff. What do they worship? Easy to answer or a human or night elf, hard for a troll or an undead. And come Cataclysm, and we'll have gnome priests as well.

Angels and stuff are cool and all that, but it's not ... well... shamans are cooler, I'm certain about that.

Conclusions

Possible

I think the priestly playstyle might fit me. I'm not completely sure.

Diseases last insanely short in WoW...

2010-01-31T08:18:00.002+01:00

...compared to real life, where you can be knocked out for almost a week easily.

Tree-healing, gotta find your roots.

2010-01-18T09:43:00.001+01:00

I'll make one blog post about each of the healer classes and what I like and don't like about them.

Demand 1:

PVE healing style that fits me

I generally enjoy druid-healing. I've always - or at least since BC - thought that a good druid healer is a godsend to any raid. While they're not able to keep up everyone alone, on any encounter where a large part of the raid often take damage, they can ease the damage taken by spreading out their hots. A druid healers' throughput when they've got hots running everywhere is rivaled only by paladins spamming glyphed Holy Light through their beacon, if all of it is effective healing. Paladins are also the only to rival druids at overhealing. Can't stop the hot from ticking even if the target has been healed up, after all.

Druids also make good tank-healers. With 3-5 hots rolling and glyphed Nourish to cover spikes, they've got solid tank-healing.

I also like the fact that Nourish with Nature's Grace and Nature's Bounty has so good throughput while still being a short cast when massive healing is required.

Another good thing for PVE healing is Barkskin. It can when properly used help them staying alive through large bursts.

Druids lack any buffs which gives a good reason to stack several druids, like shamans and paladins can provide a bigger range of buffs when there are several of them available. They also lack any kind of damage reduction ability on the tank, such as Pain Suppression and Hand of Sacrifice, so they've got to heal through it all. Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch is the closest thing they've got to an emergency button. It's not too bad, but it lacks the scaling of Pain Suppression and the like. However, they're the only healing class with a battle res, which can in some cases enable you to avoid the wipe despite losing a tank or something earlier.

All in all, I believe I'm fine with their PVE healing.

Demand 2:

Potential as PVP healer

Well, reading at arenajunkies.com, it seems druids are not in that bad position. They're generally regarded as the "outlasting" healer, as opposed to disc priests who are better fit in arena teams where the goal is to win in less than a minute, max two.

In battlegrounds/Wintergrasp/world PVP, they have the advantage that they can away from most fights. Particularly if they're healing, then they usually have a decent range from the action when they start noticing things go bad and run. Innervate is also awesome for mana regen.

What I don't like with druids in PVP is two connected problems. One is that their healing and survivability potential is tied to staying in tree-form. They have a rather serious arsenal of crowd-control abilities, but need to drop tree-form to do anything apart from healing, which in most cases means at least a 10% drop in healing done until they return to tree again and a drop in damage mitigated = easier to die. The other problem is that I feel a resto druid seriously lacks dps. Granted, healers aren't "supposed to" be good dps, but they're really only beaten by holy paladins in the "bad dps" apartment. It's very handy in arena that the healer can put out some dps when you need to burst someone down. Besides, doing dps as a druid healer destroys any advantage they have in mana-conservation over other healers.

Conclusion: Druid healer PVP is not my personal favorite.

Demand 3:

Potential as ranged dps

This is a less important demand, but I consider it an advantage if I could have a dual-spec healer who can also do ranged dps. I can do melee dps with my DK if I desperately want to. To be the best healer I can be, the optimal situation is to have two healer specs, one PVP and one PVE. However, since I'm not doing anything cutting-edge, I'd stick with a PVP healer spec and use that for PVE as well. The difference isn't that noticeable for anything below serious raiding.

Ranged druid dps translates to boomkin. Hm. Getting good balance dps is highly dependant on squeezing the maximum benefit of Eclipse. And Eclipse procs randomly on Wrath and Starfire. I left Frost because I didn't like the proc-watching, and this isn't much better.

There's also another reason why I don't want to be boomkin. I've yet to meet a single boomkin in PVP as my DK that actually posed a serious threat against me in 1 vs 1. Of course they are dangerous if left alone, but their dps is nada and they can't keep me off as long as I'm focusing on them. I use Anti-magic shell to go immune to Nature's Grasp, Death Grip to stop them from Cycloning me after Typhoon, I interrupt any of their nature spells with Mind Freeze, and got Strangulate for any kind of emergency or just chain it with Mind Freeze to really stop them from casting spells. Their instant-healing (Rejuvenation and Lifebloom) isn't strong enough to keep them alive for long, and I'll stop any attempt to use cast-time heals. I can see how they can pose a threat if they can live through my initial arsenal of shorter cooldowns, in effect with a healer to back them up. However, they'd be terrible with a healer in arena. If I'm sticking with my DK on top of them, I can stop a lot of their dps.

So... ranged druid dps is not my cup of poison.

Second options

I could go cat-dps with a druid. While I have done some cat dps earlier, I've never done so while kitty-specced and glyphed. I kinda like the kitty dps style, it's fairly challenging to put out good dps. Can even tank a random heroic in kitty-spec, but not in a raid. Which is fine for me.

Feel

I like the druid feel. Protectors or avenger of nature, or any other RP variant. Ironically from one who also enjoy the death knight feel, they are practically opposites.

Conclusions

Possible, but not probable

I like druid healing fairly well. They've got potential for PVP, with a minor annoyance for me. I don't like druid tanking or ranged dps. So, while I can make it work, I'll test my other options first.

Confessions of an altoholic

2010-01-14T11:05:00.001+01:00

I've always been weak for female tauren. I'm sure Freud would've had something to say about that. Like the female dwarf, they aren't sexy to the point of being extreme. They are ... cute, in their own way. What's more, they are, along with female dwarfs, the least populated gender/race combination in the game. I've always enjoyed being a bit underdog.

Anyway, I wasn't going to write a full post about my psychological relationship with my characters. However, I was intending to write down in which order I've played the various classes.

My third character ever was a female tauren druid. My first two were a white-haired female gnome mage, and a dark-skinned female dwarven priest. I reached level 12 before deciding I'd much rather be horde. The druid made it to level 30, then I deleted her because I had built up quite a bit of bad rep with my temper. I decided that I wouldn't let my temper get the better of me in 5-mans with my next character. It took time before I managed to fulfill that decision, though.

My next character was a troll priest, Zuna. At this time my wife started playing, and made a troll rogue. After getting Zuna up to 60 - which took almost two years, I was a primary roleplayer at that time - I decided I wanted a druid again and rolled Ayeba on a RPPVP server, and levelled her alone when my wife and I couldn't play together. RPPVP servers didn't exist at the time I created Zuna. I got her to 60 right before Burning Crusade. My first raiding experience was raiding Zul'Gurub with Zuna.

When BC hit, I created Tirvin, my paladin. Again solo. For some time he was my main, then I returned to both Zuna and Ayeba. I never managed to decide whether to stick to Zuna or Ayeba, and so I took turns playing each of them. My wife stuck to her rogue all the time. Got them both to 70 right before the end of Burning Crusade.

When WotLK hit, my wife was almost done with WoW. She had a druid at low level which she played with my paladin. We got them as far as level 61, then she more or less topped played. I left Zuna at 70, played a bit with Ayeba up to 72ish, and left her alone. Then I rolled an orc shaman, Kirba, and got her up to 80. After having Kirba as my main for a while, I decided I wanted a tank, and leveled Ayeba to 80. Kirba was put on the sideline, Ayeba was my new main.

At some point I picked up a low-level paladin on another server and levelled her to 71, and abruptly stopped. I also got my taste of a serious raiding force. They needed a shaman more than a druid, so I played a lot to get Kirba up to date on equipment, dashed through Trial of the Crusader 10-man, and wiped several times on Mimiron hard mode. My one night of raiding.

At this point I created my Death Knight, Vigan. Played with him a bit, and loved it. Leveled him fairly quickly to 80 and made him my new main.

Now I'm at another crossroad; Which character to pick up again as my healer?

My options:

My druid Ayeba. She's already geared for healing the new heroics, making it faster.
My shaman Kirba. She's geared as well.
My priest Zuna. She's level 73 now. However, I've played with her a lot earlier, it was almost nostalgic when I ran a few dungeons with her again.
My paladin on the other server at level 71. Not Tirvin. I need to keep Tirvin at that level in case my wife wants to start playing again. In which case she'll most likely want to pick up her druid rather than her rogue, as she seemed to enjoy healing more than dps.

I have healed, and enjoyed, all the healing classes in various stages of the game. What to do now? I'm not sure. In fact, I'm very unsure what to do.

I'll be creating separate posts outlining what I like and dislike about the various healer classes. I'm fairly certain I've done that earlier. However, I consider myself a bit more experienced now, and have had some viewpoints changed.

Just when I thought healing was soooo last year...

2010-01-13T11:06:00.000+01:00

Just when I thought I was happy with my DK... I suddenly feel like healing again. Bah. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I can imagine why, too.

My current theory is that I've hit the "roof" with my DK. The only thing left to do with him is serious raiding - which I can't do because I can't meet any raid force attendance requirement - and arena PVP - which I can only do in limited amounts due to the same limit. So, I run my daily random heroic and some pug raids, but generally, there's not much more to do with my DK.

So, I've reasoned a bit. Obviously I can't heal as a DK. However, I can tank as a DK. What's more, I like it a lot.

If I could, I'd prefer to have only one character to rep and gear up. Originally, the plan was to get a character that could both tank and heal. In effect, a druid or a paladin. However, as noted in the last post, I've come to dislike the druid spam-tanking, thus they are no longer an option. That leaves paladins. I've never liked them too much... which is an elitist opinion I'd rather rid myself of. They are still an option. I even leveled a paladin once to 71 on a different server. It's an option to pick her up again. I'm seriously considering it.

Anyway, since I joined the dark side, I've thought that I no longer need a healing class; I'm happy being tank in PVE and dps in PVP. Worked for me for a while, too... 3 months? That's quite decent for me.

Now, I want to heal again. Apart from the paladin option, that means I have to keep up two characters. Still possible.

The question, which of the characters to pick up? My priest (72), druid (80) or shaman (80)? Obviously I make it much easier for myself if I go for either of the latter two.

The character I want to heal with need to work for me both in PVP and PVE. "Work" is a relative term. It means they have to be effective enough to not annoy myself to death in PVP, and have a playstyle I'm comfortable with in both PVE and PVP. Every healer class works in PVE, as a matter of fact.

So, I ran through heroic Pit of Saron with both my druid and my shaman as healers to gauge how well I liked them. Then I ran a few random dungeons with my priest. I need to test PVP later.

Okay, the comparison between my druid and my shaman wasn't quite fair. I got a crittable, slightly underequipped, and less experienced tank with my druid. I still liked him, though, he was willing to learn. My shaman got an ICC equipped pally tank. Talk about difference.

First thought: Addons make a hell of a lot of difference. Having Grid set up to tell me exactly what hots/buffs were on each party member and how much damage they had taken made all the difference in the world. Without addons, healing is a lot harder, in my opinion.

Second thought: I'm rusty. It know the classes as I've healed a lot with each of time. However, it took time to put myself back in the healing mindset again. In fact, I found tanking a lot less stressful than healing. With a bit practice, it'll come back again.

This post was getting awfully long, so I chose to split it into more than one post.

DK vs Druid tanking

2010-01-08T11:11:00.001+01:00

(Note: I decided not to spend the time parsing all spell names to wowhead-links. If someone miss that, let me know in a comment, and I'll start doing it again.)

I decided to test out the new instances with my druid, Ayeba. She's geared enough for that place, but far from overgearing it. I tanked Forge of Souls heroic and healed Pit of Saron heroic. I might discuss the healing in another post, but for now I'll focus on the tanking side.

Okay... where to start...

Gathering the mobs

First, Death Knights have a HUGE advantage when attempting to gather mobs. Against "ordinary" melee mobs, I need to get close enough to hit them all with swipe at least once. I'm used to dropping a Death and Decay (which is really rather big) and it will tag almost all mobs so they'll run to me. Slightly irritating, but I can live with that.

Now, what about ranged mobs? Uh-oh... bad stuff. Druids have no way of moving them at all to where you want to tank them, apart from getting aggro and breaking Line of Sight on them. Bash? Stuns them, they just start casting from the exact same position when the stun fades. Feral Charge? Immobilizes them for exactly as long as the interrupt lasts.

In effect, any group with at least two spellcasters who aren't already grouped are a pain. Consider the third group in FoS (excluding the single skull): as a druid I have to run back and forth all the time to keep aggro on all. It is also possible to keep aggro on a single ranged by hitting him with Feral Faerie Fire every time it's off cooldown, but painful. While running, I risk putting my back towards the melee mobs, killing all the avoidance I have.

Death Knights have... Death Grip! Oh, how I love it. But also Mind Freeze, usually causing the spellcaster to follow for as long as the spell school is locked out, and Strangulate to silence at range, guaranteeing that they will come to you. And I don't even need to collect them all to keep aggro on them: If I target a mob in the middle, I can keep aggro in a 30 yards range. Pestilence has 15 yards ranged glyphed in every direction, and once I've got diseases ticking, I can usually hold threat on them.

Health and avoidance

My druid had 45k health during the run... but some 40% avoidance. My DK has only 34k health self-buffed, but almost 60% avoidance. I do notice the difference. Avoidance stacking is not recommended, but I don't recommend stamina stacking either. If damage taken is fairly low, though, Improved Leader of the Pack rocks with a high max-health.

Generally, it's a trade-off, with both having their advantages. However, the tank will require more healing over the course of a raid or instance the lower avoidance is.

Emergency buttons

Druids have 3 emergency buttons.

A bear-tree? Tree-bear?

Barkskin is solid, -20% damage from all sources, lasts 12 sec, only 1 min cooldown, and doesn't cost any resources at all. It (usually) lasts longer than Bone Shield, provides more damage reduction than Unbreakable Armor and works against magic as well. Bonus that it can be used while feared or stunned.

FRENZYYYY!

Frenzied Regeneration is a bit so-and-so in itself. It's very costly on rage, meaning that it's hard to get off any other rage attacks while it's on without hurting it, but glyphed it's pretty good. +20% healing taken compared to Vampiric Blood's +35% healing taken. Lasts fairly short, though, only 10 sec, compared to Vampiric Blood's 15 sec glyphed duration.

Must survive. Must survive.

Survival Instincts is rock solid. Increases current and max health by 45% (glyphed) of your total health for 20 sec. More than Vampiric Blood's 15%, and lasts longer.

Druid roundup

Survival Instincts and Frenzied Regeneration work extremely well together. God-like survivability. That's both an advantage and a disadvantage: Many times I feel I have to save both for the same time, because Frenzied Regeneration isn't too powerful on it's own. So, you get either a fairly good 1-min CD and a superb 3-min CD (combining both), or you get a fairly good 1-min CD, one decent 3-min CD and one good 3-min CD.

The same logic can be applied to any tanking class: of course you get a much better CD if you combine two at the same time. But all CDs should be powerful enough on their own to be worth using alone. I don't feel Frenzied Regeneration is, particularly not unglyphed.

The next sad thing is that you have to glyph two survivability cooldowns, leaving you only one for threat-generation or utility.

OMG Owerpowered magic-ignoring stuff

Now, DKs. They have Anti-magic shell, which has 3 simultaneous effects. First, it absorbs 75% of spell damage taken for it's duration. Second, it prevents the application of any negative stuff and suppresses debuff auras for its duration. Third, it converts spell damage absorbed into runic power. It also works on poisons, diseases and curses. It has low duration, 5 sec unglyphed (and no tanks I've ever seen choose to glyph it), but also a fairly short CD of 45 sec.

There are fights where AMS doesn't help at all. However, I think most boss fights feature something AMS shell works against.

I love AMS. It almost trivializes some fights, like Goarfrost where you can reset the debuff stack, and Falric, where it suppresses his -75% healing and damage done debuff for it's duration, allowing you to be healed fully up.

Chill out, dude

Icebound Fortitude is possibly the most powerful DK cooldown. In non-tanking gear, it reduces damage taken by 20%, equal to Barkskin or Bone Shield. At 540 defense (raid boss crit immunity) it reduces damage taken by 41%. At 600 defense it grants 50% damage reduction, same as Divine Protection. Most DKs have something in-between, meaning it mitigates between 41% and 50%. Quite solid. It also grants stun immunity, but this is very rarely important in PVE. It's a solid cooldown.

Rise and ... never mind, die again

Death Pact provides instantly 40% of total health back. Usually used with Raise Dead, but can also be used with Army of the Dead or Summon Gargoyle. The latter is a very rare talent in a tank build, though. I like it. Especially poweful when combined with Vampiric Blood, restoring 54% of your health. Less powerful in raids, but does have it's place to help the healers overcome a spike.

1 min talent CDs

Each talent tree has a tanking cooldown: Vampiric Blood for ... guess what, Blood. Unbreakable Armor for Frost. Bone Shield for Unholy. Personally, I think Vampiric Blood is the best of these three cooldowns. The other two are fairly good too. Unbreakable Armor does nothing against magic damage, and Bone Shield is a bit unstable; it can fade in as fast as 6 seconds, or last for 5 min... though the latter is very unlikely. The nice thing about Bone Shield, though, is that you can pre-cast it and have it ready again when you enter combat, so you can "chain" it from the start of a fight, or have it up at the start and use it again before 1 min has passed. Bone Shield's duration can be extended by combining Bone Shield with an activated avoidance trinket, like Glyph of Indomitability.

The downside of all these three cooldowns is that they require a rune... which means you either must save one rune until you need it (loss of threat), wait until it comes off cooldown when you need it (risky) or combine it with Blood Tap which also has a 1 min cooldown. I have a macro which I press without modifiers to cast the CD, and press with shift to cast Blood Tap -> CD.

Wait wait, another talent CD

In addition to the 1-min CD, Blood and Unholy has another tanking CD you can spec into.

For 4 talent points in Blood you can have Improved Rune Tap, which restores 20% of your health on a 30 sec at the cost of a blood rune. Frost and Unholy tanks can get the 10% health on a 1 min cooldown without sacrificing much. However, only blood tanks can really use this talent well. To effectively use it, you need to save a blood rune for it (loss of threat, loss of blade barrier), wait until it's off cooldown (risky) or use it with Blood Tap (which means you can't use it with your 1-min CD) or with Empower Runic Weapon (5-min cooldown). I don't like it. Blood has much easier access to blood runes since you can turn both unholy and frost runes into death runes. The unimproved version isn't very powerful at all. The improved version is fairly good, especially combined with the rest of Blood's arsenal like Vampiric Blood, then it restores 27%.

Unholy tanks can spend 4 talents points as well to get Anti-Magic Zone. 3 of those points boost AMS to 100% and reduces spell damage taken by 6% at all times. Anti-magic Zone requires an Unholy rune, and thus is a bit unpractical. However, it can absorb a ton of magic damage, well worth spending Empower Runic Weapon on if you need. It lasts for 10 sec or until it's absorbed enough damage, then fades. Unfortunately it's extermely stationary. It's a very circuimstancal cooldown, and can really shine on some bosses. Since it also absorbs damage on your party, it has extra utility.

Frost doesn't have a second cooldown, but Icebound Fortitude lasts 16 sec for a frost tank, compared to 10 sec for everyone else.

My flesh was only getting in my way

Army of the Dead can be used in one of two ways. While channeling the army (4 sec), you take reduced damage equal to your parry + dodge chance, which means somewhere between 40% and 60% damage reduction. However, the duration is painfully short, and you can't avoid anything at the same time. Statistically you will take the same damage in the long term against dodge/parryable attacks. However, against attacks which are unparryable/undodgable, it will still reduce damage. It is very circumstantial to use the army this way.

The second way of using the army is that it will taunt anything lower level than a raid-boss. Each skeleton dies pretty fast, though, so it's only a temporary help. The main problem is that you can't taunt the boss of them again until they're gone, or they'll just retaunt. Their taunt seem to have a 1 sec cooldown EACH. That means you can't move the boss where you want him or her, and that can prove death for your group certain places. Against a raid boss, they will provide a bit extra damage and fodder for Death Pact, but nothing else.

Desperate measures

If all other cooldowns are on ... cooldown, it is possible to spam Death Strike like crazy. For a Blood or Unholy tank it restores 15% of your health for each DS that hits, and 10% for a frost tank. Combine it with Empower Runic Weapon and you can theoretically restore 60% of your health (without Vampiric Blood) over 4 GCDs.

DK roundup

DKs have a lot of cooldowns. The main difference between theirs and a druids' is that many of their cooldowns are very circuimstancal. I believe they're better if you can use them in the right circuimstances, but for general-purpose they're about equal.

Threat

Any properly equipped tank can hold aggro on a single target without any trouble at all, barring a string or dodges/parries from their target.

Well, not true. A druid must choose to spend his GCDs swiping (generating AoE threat) or Mangling/Lacerating/Fairie Firing (generating single target threat). Maul will usually be macroed to all those attacks, causing your auto-attacks to generate solid amounts of threat. Glyphed it will even hit two targets. However, I found that I was not always able to hold threat on my primary target while only swiping: I had to throw a mangle or something to stick an enemy to me.

Even spamming swipe, I felt that my AoE threat was only on par with a blood DK. That might be because my DK is better geared than my druid now, but it was very annoying still. Frost and Unholy seem able to put out much more AoE threat.

This is the part of druid tanking I hate the most, and the reason I switched to a DK in the first place; The endless, mindless spamming. Granted, a DK rotation can also be viewed as a bit spammy, but a 20 sec rotation is much more interesting than a 6 sec rotation. And AoE is much smoother as a DK. You drop Death and Decay and get some threat on all enemies, then you hit your primary target with Icy Touch and Plague Strike and then pestilence. The two single-target attacks on your primary target + auto-attacks provide enough threat to hold the primary target to you. Then you weave your abilities as you best see fit.

Conclusions, sort of

I hate swipe-spamming. Otherwise druids are okay. I'll definitely stick to my DK for now.

Your daily heroic addiction-shot

2010-01-05T13:13:00.001+01:00

This post is based on a nagging feeling I've had lately. Let me take it from the start.

Let's assume we can divide the player-base into three parts. On one end, we have the hardcores. I define them as players logging on every day. It doesn't matter if you're not actually raiding or doing arenas or anything, you just log on every day to do whatever you like to do in WoW.

On the other end of the scale, we have the very casuals, who just log now and then. They don't spend much off their time when they're not logged on thinking about WoW. They might be pure RPers, or just level alts (or mains) very slowly. They have no goals such as "become level 80, down a specific boss, obtain a specific item".

On the middle end, you have the group of moderate casuals. They log on regularly, but not every day. They have goals, and might even raid. However, they have a measure of control over their game-time and are generally not addicts.

Enter the daily heroic

I belong mostly in the last group, the moderate casuals. At least used to. Okay, I've always had a lot of playtime on release of new content, but generally. Now I'm feeling I belong more in the first group. Why? Because I feel I lose something if I don't log on every day to do the daily heroic random. Somehow, it's gotten worse in patch 3.3. In 3.2, I knew that whatever gear I acquired with Emblems of Triumph were much easier to get in 3.3, and it was a lot of places dropping them. VoA, Onyxia, Trial of the Champion...

I like doing the daily random heroic, but I don't like the fact that I feel forced to play every day. The "forcing" is of course all in my own mind. It feels like it's pushing me further into WoW-addiction.

The end of the line of casual upgrades

2009-12-28T12:03:00.001+01:00

Enter 3.3. Emblems of Triumphs available for farming.

Fast forward a few weeks to today.

I've got no further upgrades to look forward to as a tank.

Not true. I do have a few left, but the list is incredibly short.

1. Farm the new heroics, hoping to get a Battered Hilt and then win the following need roll by everyone. I mean, it's worth so much that anyone will roll need even if they already have it to sell it to someone else, just like any BoE epic. In effect, I can do it as long as it is fun, but I don't have any desire to farm every mob in there just to increase my chance of it dropping by 0.01% per run.

2. Fly around and get Titanium, smelt Titansteel, and get crafted BoE gear that requires Crusader Orbs, purchasable with Emblembs of Triumph. However... titanium is a rare spawn node... Bah. Boring. I do grind sometimes on off-hours, though.

3. Buy stuff. Always an option. But then I'd have to grind gold. Bah. Boring. Can quest, though, there are some storylines it would be neat to finish before WotLK ends.

4. Join pug raids, particularly Onyxia 25-man, Icecrown Citadel, TotC 25-man, TotGC or VoA. Hope for some drops. I'm actually geared enough to tank ICC 25 now.

5. Get 2 frost Emblems of Frost every day from the random heroic, and 5 from the weekly raid. Slowly upgrade stuff. Next will probably be the +226 stamina trinket. 2.5k extra health? Now we're talking.

Meanwhile, I'm spending my Emblems of Triumph on ilvl 232 PVP gear. Joining an arena team now ... about time. I've got the solution to my schedule problem: I'll join a 2vs2 and 3vs3 with the same two guys. When I'm not available, they'll go with their 2vs2. When all are available, 3vs3. Then I don't need to drag down any arenamate relying only on me.

When the blame hits the fan...

2009-12-23T08:47:00.002+01:00

Imagine the following situation. You've just wiped. The tank died first, and held all threat until he started hugging the ground. He did no obvious mistakes like standing in the fire.

In almost any pug, 5-man or raid, the first question that will pop up is: Whose fault was it? The healer(s) or the tank?

I've encountered the situation several times. It's just as embarrassing and annoying every time.

The blame game

The main problem is the focus of the group: The focus should not be "whom to blame?", but "what can we do next time to prevent it from happening again?". It's freakin' hard to admit you did any mistakes when you need to eat through a heck of a lot of mean words in addition to the weight your conscience is already putting on your mind. Most people prefer to remain silent in such a situation, and that's a very bad starting point for finding out what could be done differently.

There are times when you just need to replace someone in your pug. However, that ought to be plan B or C, not plan A. Plan A should always be to try again, improving from last time.

The people that like to blame are also prone to leaving whenever something goes wrong. Just yesterday, we did the weekly raid quest to kill Razorscale in Ulduar 25. We waded in with no plan whatsoever and wiped at 2%. People started leaving. What the heck? 2%? It's nothing left. We were practically guaranteed to get him down on next attempt, and we did. Similarly, when the new 5-man instances just were released, I wiped with my group 5 times on Garfrost because people insisted on doing it as a dps race. While that is possible, it requires Frost Resistance Aura, Frost Resistance Totem, a very special setup consisting of only classes capable of removing debuffs including a paladin healer, or lots of lucky resists. Several people came and left. Only me and one other persisted. And we learned the encounter the hard way, how we were supposed to hide behind the boulders to clear the debuff stack. We got him down. It felt just as good as downing any raid boss the first time.

Some people cannot be unbroken

There might be some reasons for replacing people, however. Unwillingness to learn is the primary reason I want to kick people. People insisting on repeating the same mistakes despite a different strategy being agreed on in the chat. I'll give another example.

We wiped times and times on the 9th wave in Halls of Reflection. The healer complained that I was taking too much damage, he couldn't possibly keep up. He wasn't superiorly geared, but neither was he particularly undergeared for the instance. He said I wasn't usually taking too much damage, except when I got stunned. Not strange. I got almost 60% avoidance normally, but when I get stunned I avoid 0% damage. That means I take more than twice the normal damage. We discussed in party chat, and decided on killing the mercenaries first. It worked like a charm. Except for one rogue, who insisted on killing the priests first, because "that's what had worked for him earlier". That meant I had to maintain lots of threat on two targets rather than one, and it took longer to burn down the primary target. Annoying. We were, however, successful. However, I dislike people doing it like that. At the very least, he could've protested on party chat, letting us know he disagreed before we actually got into the fray.

Call me undergeared, huh?

Another thing that annoys me is people entering the group, taking a look at my unbuffed health (about 32k now, was around 30k earlier) and leaving. They consider me undergeared because I don't have 40k health. That buggers me seriously off.

Before my current career as a DK tank, I was a druid tank and healer. Once I was pulled into a group in Trial of the Champion heroic, as healer. The tank was a druid with 45k health self-buffed. Great, I thought, the tank is well equipped, this ought to be easy to heal.

It wasn't. It was actually harder to heal than most other tanks I had healed. Why? It turned out he had skipped on all kinds of avoidance to buff his health sky-high. That meant he took much more damage over the instance than one who had had more balanced stats.

Consider it this way: Let's say the tank is going to take 1 million damage before avoidance but including mitigation (armor). If he avoids 30% of the damage, he will take a total of 700.000 damage. If he avoids 50% of the damage, he will take a total of 500.000 damage. That's 28.5% (the difference, 200.000, divided by the total, 700.000) less damage taken, a huge difference. Note that the difference is more than 20%, the actual difference in avoidance.

I go with balanced stats. That yields me less health than tanks going all-out stamina, but allows me to take less damage over the instance. While it is less effective against magic damage, there are almost no encounter that does not combine magical damage with physical (avoidable) damage. take Koralon in VoA 25. He hits for a lot of unavoidable magical damage with his meteor fist. At the same time, he auto-attacks. If I can parry or dodge on of those, I'll have better chances on getting healed in time compared to a tank who avoids nothing but has more health to soak the damage.

No, you can't depend on avoidance. At the same time, you can. The waves in Halls of Reflection heroic hits for a lot together. Since they hit separately, you get a lot more attacks incoming per second than a single boss with the same total damage would've given you. That's where you can depend on avoidance: As you take more hits, the number of actually avoided attacks get closer and closer to the number on your character sheet. See the difference between how much damage the tank normally and when he's stunned on those encounters, and you'll see.

I do have the Black Heart myself, but I've skipped it in favor of an avoidance and a mitigation trinket of higher item level.

When healing fails

Sometimes, though, it's just not enough. You've got a properly equipped tank, he's not taking unnecessary damage, and he's holding threat on all mobs. Blizz has in the latest 5-mans added a lot of abilities which hits a random target member. You need to keep everyone alive while not losing the tank.

There are a few things that can be done differently. Talents might matter. Sometimes they make a major difference. Once we had trouble with an encounter, I (tank) died first every time. The healer was a bit underequipped, but not horribly much so. He shared his frustration with us. I inspected the druid healer to see that he had skipped Nature's Grace, one of the most hardcore tank-healing talents. However, in most cases, talents are not the problem.

However, priority often seem to be a problem. Many healers overreach themselves. Some need to be told that while healing, the tank and the healer is priority. If they have trouble keeping up, let dps die first, not the tank. In particular, this holds true when dps takes excessive damage. Not moving out of the AoE on the ground? Dpsing while everyone else hides? Let them die. Sometimes the healer can carry them through their mistakes, but that's not how it is supposed to be done. If the healer has trouble keeping everyone up, they should die and usually will die first.

There might be some parts of the encounter that someone in the group is not familiar with. I've beat encounters with seriously underequipped people as long as they know exactly what to do.

Often a dps can do something different that can change the outcome of the fight. CC a mob? Use a different totem (like Grounding Totem or Cleansing Totem)? Change Aura? Stun more, even at the expense of dps? Put a pet on a mob, letting it "tank" it and die rather than letting the tank take more damage?

Finally, most encounters are impossible to do without enough dps. If dps is lacking, it's neither the healer nor the tank's fault.

How to spot "problems" and solve them

I have three primary tools.

First, inspect. It will give you an idea of what gear level the tank or healer is decked in, and what talents he is using. A Blood tank is going to bring a lot more self-healing, but less AoE-threat. A paladin tank will usually take less damage from most hits because they block so much, but have no particularly defense against magic.

Second, recount. It will tell me what kind of spells the healer is using. Is the healer having trouble keeping you up? Perhaps he's not using Nourish at all (many druids seem to rely only on hots and Swiftmend, scarily enough).

Third, chat. Communication. This is and will always be the primary way of solving any kinds of problems. Talk with the group, acknowledge their frustrations and problems, and work with them to solve the problem you're facing.

The other side of the fence is hereby desecrated

2009-12-09T10:40:00.002+01:00

I have now tested out a lot of specs, in the following order: Unholy, Frost 2h, Blood, Unholy and Frost DW.

First and foremost, I found that I love the Glyph of Anti-magic shell. If I got it on before I get hit by a CC, I can ignore any attempts to CC me using magic for 7 seconds, often enough to drain half my opponents' health. Interestingly enough: It also allows me to run away from non-combat rogues. Combine Toughness, Da Voodoo Shuffle and Enigmatic Skyflare Diamond, and all movement-impairing effects last only half the original duration (actually: 53.55% of the original duration). Crippling Poison actually fades from me during the AMS duration, allowing me to safely run away, leaving a chained rogue behind.

Frost PVP

Supposedly, frost offers superior control compared to Unholy and Blood. I found the main controlling ability, Hungering Cold, to be a one-shot pony. Of course many would trinket it, but that's to be expected. However, since I'm mainly in BGs, and BGs usually are less than perfectly well coordinated, Hungering often broke almost immediately. Not only because of others attacking the targets directly, but because the targets were dotted and cleave damage.

I could put out a decent amount of burst damage if I could stay in melee, but PVP means you run in and out of melee range all the time. I have mixed feelings about the proc system; It's handy when you get a Killing Machine proc to know that you're going to deal a hefty crit with your next Frost Strike or Howling Blast, but unless I also waited for a Rime proc I would waste some of my dps. Technically. So I spent Killing Machine procs as they popped up. The problem is that killing machine seems to proc only on auto-attacks, and PVP has way less auto-attacks than PVE.

I missed a burst ability. A garantueed crit every 2 min is not much burst compared to Dancing Rune Weapon and Summon Gargoyle. Naturally, I also missed a pet, but that was not unexpected.

The worst part is that I felt very squishy. More so than Unholy. Unbreakable Armor looks like a nice cooldown for both dps and damage reduction, but requires a Frost Rune. Frost Runes are what is often lacking in PVP because I need to use Chains of Ice to stop my target from getting away after a Frost Nova or the like. Death Strike has no synergy with the rest of the tree, and heals for only 10% my total health. In addition, Unholy has three diseases that needs to be cleaned instead of just two, a clear advantage when facing dispelling classes.

I liked the fact that Iceblood Fortitude lasted so long. Owned several rogues with it. I also liked the snare, very handy. Howling Blast is also a good ability in itself, especially with the glyph, but it's not able to carry Frost alone unless you like the rest of the tree.

I never tried it as PVE dps. Proc watching like that is not my cup of poison.

Blood PVP

On paper, Blood offers increased survivability compared to the other two. 15% health back regularly, Rune Tap for 20% at a mere 30 sec CD, Mark of Blood, Vampiric Blood... I didn't test Improved Blood Presence and Bloodworms.

Blood was not too bad, but it had a few serious disadvantages. I liked the fact that Death Strike crit like a truck as long as you've got 25 runic power, regardless of any diseases. Having diseases up merely increases the healing it does to you. I also liked the fact that most abilities require a blood rune, which does not mess up your Frost-Unholy rune moves. In addition, with Death Rune Mastery you've got plenty of Blood Runes and Death Runes available. Vampiric Blood -> Rune Tap -> Mark of Blood anyone? For BGs, one of the best features is that Blood has almost no downtime at all. The snare from Glyph of Heart Strike works for its purpose well, but does require that you start any attack with Heart Strike despite having no diseases up, just to apply the snare. Dancing Rune Weapon was awesome for burst damage, especially since it has only 1.5 min CD. The problem, though, is that if you're CCed, the blade does not deal any damage either, so you need to time it well. Compare that to Unholy: The Gargoyle's damage is fire-and-forget.

The disadvantages... Blood is very dependant on staying in melee range. Frost also requires melee to do much, but you can deal ranged damage with Howling Blast (and Death Coil, if you're desperate) and diseases tick for a decent amount. Unholy's diseases hit hard, the pet will often be in melee range even if you're not, and Death Coil can deal good damage from a range. Blood, however... it's diseases ticks as hard as rain and have short duration (you don't have talent points for both Epidemic and Endless Winter). Death Coil hits for way less than Unholy.

I also found the sustained dps a bit lacking. I've read that Blood is very dependant on Armor Penetration. I've got a decent amount of it on my PVE set (around 30-40%) but in my PVP gear I only have 10%.

In addition, any healing reduction like Mortal Strike and Wound Poison hurt like heck. They destroy the advantage Blood has in survivability. Truth to be told, outside of lower downtime, I never really felt the advantage Blood has in survivability over Unholy. In fact, I felt tougher as Unholy.

Unholy PVP

Now I'm back to my roots again. Unholy works best for me. I feel tougher than any of the other two specs. Why? I've tried to think of a few reasons.

Against magic damage, 6% less damage taken all the time and 100% of spell damage absorbed by Anti-Magic Shell actually makes a difference. Anti-Magic Zone is good, but I often use it as a desperation move on my part, as it requires me to stand completely still. Need to find out how I can use it better. One of the cases I know of is when I get frozen by a mage, entangled by a boomkin or rooted by an elemental shammy; Then I'm not going anywhere anyway.

Each of the three trees have their own 1 min tanking cooldown. However, Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable Armor need to be used when you're under attack. Vampiric Blood is effective even on low health, Unbreakable Armor is not. It's also useless against magic damage. Bone Shield, however, can and should be buffed up in advance. It even lasts 5 min. Since there's a CD on 2 sec for each bone, it lasts a minimum of 4 seconds after the first attack. That means that for any surprise attack by a stealth class, I'm taking 20% less damage the first 4 seconds. That's actually a fair amount of damage avoided, especially since you can't trinket the Cheap Shot, you need to save it for Kidney Shot and sometimes for the following Blind.

When we're on the topic of rogue stuns, On a Pale Horse is a good PVP talent. 20% less duration on the stuns, combined with the above, translates to me actually having a fair amount of health left after a rogue or feral druid opener. It's also good against warriors (especially protection, bloody annoying bastards).

The permanent ghoul is also helpful. In particular the stun. I actually put it on auto when defending a node. Hello, rogue, want to stun me? Have a taste of your own medicine. In addition, Death Pact is easily available.

Improved Unholy Presence offers a solid 15% movement increase. That's actually a pretty serious upgrade, and does make a difference. Among other, I can outrun a warrior who is bladestorming me, given that he does not start on top of me. I didn't have any speed enchant on boots when tseting the there specs, which makes the comparison a bit unfair. When I don't have a healer, I'm usually PVPing in Frost Presence. I did try the other two in Unholy Presence, but felt it compromised my survivability too much. Frost Presence offers much longer time to live, and longer time to live means longer time to deal damage to my opponent. In the end, I deal more damage over my total lifespan. Against healers I switch to either of the other two, though.

And then there's Army of the Dead. With the other two specs, that's once in a while. As Unholy, I can use it more often, every 6 min. Nothing rocks calling those up when defending an Arathi Basin flag. I've even seen enemies turn away and head for somewhere else when I start bringing up my army.

A minor difference might also be the combination of stronger Death Coils and Lichborne for self-healing. However, it does not really compare to Blood's Rune Tap.

Finally, Desecration is a much better snare than I first gave it credit for. After all, it's automatically applied to everyone in the area. It allows better kiting of multiple enemies. While it is bad at stopping a single enemy from running away from me, it is probably better for allowing me to run away from an enemy. Besides, I've got Chains of Ice to stop someone anyway.

Aside from the survivability, there are also two other properties of unholy I love. First, the passive damage, namely the dots and pet. I can actually kite and bring a single enemy fairly low using dots alone. Kited a rogue all the way through the Warsong Gulch tunnel, only getting into melee with him for about 4 sec total to hit him with my Plague Strike and refresh Blood Plague on him, using Anti-magic shell to avoid getting snared myself. He did slow me with Deadly Throw, but couldn't catch up because I retaliated with chains myself.

Second, the burst capability. I've macroed Berserking and a trinket to Summon Gargoyle. As long as I can prevent the enemy from running away, the gargoyle deals really serious damage. Even better, it keeps firing even when I get chain-CCed. Has allowed me to win battles despite running around like a feared chicken because it kept firing.

On an unrelated note...

Disarming. It sucks. Royally. Death Knights have one semi-defense against it, though: Rune of Swordshattering. But that would mean sacrificing Rune of the Fallen Crusader, which is a serious dps upgrade. However, without it, rogues eat me for breakfast. Shadow priests and smart warriors too. If I get another identical weapon drop, I can have two different runes depending on the type of enemies I meet.

Conclusions

It's fun playing around, but Unholy really is my game. Not only mine, but 90% of the arena DK population, from what I can gather from reading various forums. With that said, many seem to play it as a support-spec, just applying pressure and allowing their team to set up the kill, often harassing a healer. Mind Freeze + Strangulate + Gnaw + Death Grip to keep healers busy for a long time.

Death Grip, you ask? Yes, it's a trick I learned from watching a PVP movie. You know paladins using Aura Mastery? Immune to silence and interrupts suck, huh? You can still stun them (though DKs are not the master thereof), but more importantly for us you can still Death Grip them. So when they use the mastery, move a bit away, and death grip right before the cast is finished. With good positioning, you can also pull them out of line of sight or range of their healing target. Fun, fun.

Posts I want to write:

Tanking specs testing results

When is it the healer, when is it the tank whose at fault?

When you no longer have access to any gear upgrades

More DK talents, oh joy!

2009-12-05T07:08:00.011+01:00

I apologize to those of you with no interest in this. It's just stuff I sort of think about anyway, and writing them down helps the though process, thus I might just as well make it public. Perhaps some other guy somewhere in the future has the same problem.

First, in my previous post I said that Endless Winter was the PVP talent. While this still holds true, I forgot that in taking it, you usually also take Toughness, Icy Reach and Lichborne, all great PVP talents. Losing out Endless Winter hurts. Losing all of them hurts practically too much.

I've boiled down my options a bit. Focusing on which specs can double for two purposes, I've gotten six possibilities.

Just a word of warning: I've had the 3.3 changes in mind while writing this. The Glyph of Icy Touch will in 3.3 buff Frost Fever by 20%. Scourge Strike will hit harder, meaning Reaping and Epidemic will provide more dps increase.

Option 1: Blood tank/PVP

Combining the PVP and tanking talents for blood, I get something like 51/17/3. Compared to a true tank, I lose Will of the Necropolis and only get three points in Anticipation. Further, I have only 3 points to put in Subversion, Death Rune Mastery and Sudden Doom combined. Both Sudden Doom and Subversion get better with Death Rune Mastery, as it provides two extra Heart Strikes during a 20 sec rotation at the expense of a Death Strike. However, since you both in PVP and tanking regulary take damage, perhaps the loss of a bit dps is offset by the gain of a bit more healing?

Generally, I think this build loses out too much mitigation for tanking and too much dps for PVP.

The other spec would 0/51/20 Frost DW or 17/5/54 Unholy dps.

Option 2: Blood PVP/dps

51/17/3 provides the essential Blood dps talents, and adds 17 in Frost for Endless Winter and 3 in Unholy for Virulence. Actually a fairly balanced build. The two points in Improved Blood Presence could be put anywhere else as well, for example Rune Tap and Scent of Blood (for PVP, mind you).

The loss of Epidemic hurts, though. I've played with the thought of only putting 11 points in Frost and the rest in Unholy, losing Endless Winter. However, that's going to hurt in PVP.

The other spec would be Frost or Unholy tank. Linking to the awesome site Pwnwear.com. Gravity has a much better grip on pure tanking specs than me.

Option 3: Frost tank/PVP

9/55/7 succeeds in getting all essential tanking and PVP talents for frost, as far as I can see. Looks like an interesting option. Alternatively, 9/57/5 switches out the Glyph of Frost Strike with Glyph of Howling Blast, for a single-disease rotation. It drops Epidemic. I put the two spare points in Chill of the Grave, but an interesting option is to put those two points and a single point from Scent of Blood into Acclimation, but then you risk getting seriously Runic Power starved regulary.

The other spec would be 51/0/20 Blood or 17/5/54 Unholy dps.

Option 4: Frost PVP/dps

A suggestion here is 0/51/20 Frost PVP/dps, which includes On a Pale Horse. I don't have the weapons nor the talents points to spare to get DW dps.

The secondary spec would be Blood or Unholy tank.

Option 5: Unholy tank/PVP

It might work with an Unholy tank/PVP build. However, the main problem is that you lose Wandering Plague, only get three points in Blade Barrier, and lack Ravenous Dead, meaning your pet is a heck of a lot easier to kill, and only usable for keeping other players in combat. It's not a combination I would recommend.

The secondary spec would be 51/0/20 Blood or 0/51/20 Frost DW dps.

Option 6: Unholy PVP/dps

I like Unholy for PVP. I'd say something like 0/17/54 is the way to go. It'll serve moderately well as a dps spec as well. Includes On a Pale Horse.

The secondary spec would be Blood or Frost tank.

Playing what I like

All of the above are options that might to a lesser or greater extent work. However, that's only one part of the question what to do. The second is what I like to play.

Listing what I like about the various specs in various roles.

Blood is awesome for the self-healing, particularily in PVP. I'm not sure I like it as a dps spec all that much. For tanking, I like the skill cap resulting in being able to use Death Strike at the correct time. For max threat you will need to spam it. However, for survival, it can be handy to wait some seconds with Death Strike until you take damage. I've had success doing this with boss abilities that are announced in advance, such as Meteor Fist on Koralon and the big AoE on Emalon.

What I don't like with Blood is that it isn't so good for AoE, but then again I'm comparing to Unholy which rocks the AoE hard. In PVP it's also much more physical damage compared to the other two, meaning I don't tear through pallies and warriors as easily.

Frost is great for tanking because of the extra mitigation. It's also great to have Icebound Fortitude lasting 16 seconds, particulary in PVP where it means 16 sec of stun immunity. I like Howling Blast because of it's snappy aggro. What I don't like about Frost is that I need to watch for procs all the time and align them correctly for max dps. Fortunately this is less of an issue for a tank, and for PVP you can't afford to wait with procs, you blow when you get the chance. However, I'd like to try DW tanking in 3.3, and only Forst can offer that without a serious threat loss. I don't think Unholy can put out enough threat while dual-wield tanking. If I do that, I need to go with option 2 or option 6, combining PVP and dps with my other spec.

Unholy is great for having a permanent pet, great AoE, powerful dots and great debuff. In addition, I find the rotation fits me fine, much more than Blood and Frost. It feels like they're slightly less tough as tanks against physical damage, but way better against magical damage. I think Desecration is a kind of bad snare. It takes so long to kick in that the target has time to get out of the area, provided they're moving in a straight line. Without Chains of Ice to fall back on, I'd have given up Unholy for PVP a long time ago. For PVP it's also great that Ebon Plague counts as an extra disease for removing diseases.

Conclusions... sort of

Of the six main options below, I find option 5 to be the worst. Option 1 and 3 combines tanking and PVP, but at the expense of dps. I might end up sacrificing so much dps that I have trouble bringing my enemies down, and that's going to hurt.

I want to test out what I like about a single-disease Howling Blast glyph Frost build somtime, option 3. Perhaps I like it, perhaps I don't.

For the moment, I'm using Option 6, Unholy PVP/dps and Blood tank. It works out well, but I'd like to try the other options as well. If I don't find any I like, I'll return to Unholy PVP/dps. It rocks.

I also think that tanking and PVP are the two most important aspects of the game for me. If I deal 500 or even 1000 dps less (as long as I'm above 3k) it does suck a bit. Howevever, if I take 10% more damage as a tank, it's downright devestating. Similarily, if I can't stick to the enemy (in effect, get snared all the time), I'm going to end up so annoyed I might just skip out of PVP alltogether. That means I'm much more inclined to go with option 2 or 4, since they don't sacrifice anything from the tanking spec, and effectively go dps with a pure PVP spec.

I'm going to pay a lot in respeccing and reglyphing in the following weeks.

WTB Triple-spec

2009-12-04T06:57:00.014+01:00

Blizzard has stated that they don't intend to implement anything beyond dual-spec anytime soon. I can see some logic behind their reasonings; If you implement 3 different specs, why stop there? Why not 4? And then some would cry for 5... Better to leave the beast alone by only giving two specs.

What bothers me about the dual spec system is that I enjoy three aspects of the game. PVE dps, PVE tanking and PVP. With only two specs, I will have to choose either to optimized for two purposes and lacking for the last, or optimized for one and compromised for the two others.

With my druid, it was even worse. Ideally, I wanted five specs with my druid. Tanking, PVE dps, PVE healing, PVP dps, PVP healing.

For the moment I'm running a
Blood tanking spec and a Unholy PVP spec. It works out fairly well. I use the PVP spec when going dps, and still manage to put out above 3k thanks to my gear. I'm wondering if I can reach 4k with the last gear upgrades and a hardcore dps spec.

However, I'd like to experiment with other specs as well. If they don't work out too well, I can always return to status quo.

For tanking, I need mitigation and avoidance talents. No matter what tree I spec into, I'll need Toughness, Improved Icy Touch, Anticipation and Blade Barrier. I don't need all of them to tank 5-man, but for any pug raid I join they're essential. In addition, there's the tree-spesific tanking talents.

For dps, I need the dps-talents of the tree, which various greatly depending on what tree it is.

For PVP, I need a mix. Survival is important, so is utility, but you need dps as well. However, no matter what tree I spec into, Endless Winter is almost a nescessity, along with a more permanent snare. Blood has Glyph of Heart Strike, Frost has Chilblains and Unholy has Desecration. In addition, Virulence can make all the difference in the world against some classes.

For all three aspects of the game, Epidemic is a talent I love. Cleans up rotations, makes losing the enemy in PVP for a few seconds less painful, helps keep up AoE threat... I love it.

Finally, I'd love to have One a Pale Horse in one of my two specs. It's so handy to have an on-demand 20% extra riding speed, both in BGs and when travelling generally. However, only Unholy specs get it easily. Blood or Frost tank specs can't get it at all. Blood and Frost dps specs can get it without sacrificing too much, by sticking at least 17 points in Unholy.

Note that my PVP is limited to BGs and WG for the moment. Might go arena sometime, have a friend I can go with, but we haven't worked out a good schedule for it yet.

I've thought of a few combinations that might work.

A Blood tanking/PVP spec might work, if I sacrifice Endless Winter, but take the Glyph of Heart Strike. Even a tanking spec can attain almost all dps talents in Blood. Tons of survival.

A Blood dps/PVP spec might also work. Less survival, but more dps thanks to the talent points freed up to go into Unholy. Still need Glyph of Heart Strike.

The problem for me with Blood PVP is that with 51 points spent in blood, I don't have points enough for both Epidemic and Endless Winter. Endless Winter is generally more important for PVP, making 51/17/3 the spec of choice for a pure PVP spec. However, that spec lacks the mitigation talents for tanking, and has to chew to a lot of suboptimal dps frost talents to get Endless Winter. However, it is a possibility in the same way as my current Unholy PVP spec. Unholy does, however, benefit more from +10% shadow and frost damage than Blood does.

Frost have a ton of choices connected to it. Unlike Blood, you can successfully go DW or 2h, either might work. I'd love to try DW tanking sometime. However, that sometime will have to wait 'till 3.3. I don't have the gear to attain 540 defense without the Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. 3.3 will add a similar Rune for one-handers, called Rune of the Nerubian Carapace.

Further, since I lack two slow and solid one-handers (above ilvl 200), I'll have to go for 2h until I can get some solid 1h upgrades somewhere.

The next choice for Frost is the Glyph of Howling Blast or not. It allows a single-disease rotation, ignoring Plague Strike and Blood Plague completely. It allows 5 obliterates during a 20 sec rotation rather than the normal 4, but each hit for less. However, that's another 15% chance to proc Rime. It is not a valid choice for a hardcore dps specs. The loss of the damage from Blood Plague hurts, and throwing a Howling Blast from the very start in AoE might steal aggro from tanks that need a bit time to get proper threat on all enemies, particulary other Death Knights.

However, for PVP, for the price of a some dps, you gain a ranged AoE snare with Chilblains. For tanking, you gain even more and snappier AoE threat; Howling Blast -> Blood Boil -> Death and Decay. For either, you can completely avoid casting Icy Touch at all provided Rime procs on one of those Obliterates. No need for Epidemic at all.

So... Frost can offer a HB glyph tank/PVP spec, or a non-HB glyph tank/PVP spec, or a non-HB glyph PVP/dps spec.

Unholy... well, to be honest, Unholy PVP completely sucks without Endless Winter. The snare from Desecration takes a few moments to kick in, and on a moving target often doesn't kick in at all until they're out of the desecrated area. The snare does have it's uses, but it's not completely reliable. That means I don't want to attempt to make a PVP/tank spec. The spec I have now, PVP/dps, works fairly well, but not exactly superb for dps.

So... I'll try to boil down the options I have. It's a safe assumption that if possible, I'd like to delve into two different trees. Before I had tanking gear enough to tank seriously, I ran Unholy dps/Unholy PVP, but it's kinda fun to have different options to fall back on.

Blood tank/PVP, Frost dps

Blood tank/PVP, Unholy dps

Blood tank, Frost PVP/dps

Blood tank, Unholy PVP/dps. My current setup.

Frost tank/PVP, Blood dps

Frost tank/PVP, Unholy dps

Frost tank, Blood PVP/dps

Frost tank, Unholy PVP/dps

Unholy tank, Blood PVP/dps

Unholy tank, Frost PVP/dps

Choices, choices...

Bad dps

2009-11-25T15:12:00.000+01:00

As noted, I've dinged 80 with my third character. I noted something very interesting this time, which I hadn't before.

My first two characters were both geared up as healers. I ran instances as healer, rolling greed on dps gear I needed. As a healer, I could solo stuff, but didn't do much dps. I considered 1.5k dps "good", 2.0k dps "great", and anything above that superb. Why? Most dps I ran heroics with was around 1.5k, some of them lower. When I got a dps that could pull out somewhere above 2.5k, I was amazed.

At some point I got dual spec on my shaman, and could suddenly pull out quite decent dps as elemental. I joined a Naxx25-man, doing somewhere around 2.5-3.0k dps. I was very satisfied. Not that I topped the charts, but I was definitely far from the bottom. I assumed it was because I'd gained so good gear while healing... many ilvl 213-pieces, even.

When I levelled up as bear, I had tanking spec- and glyphs. I could go cat, but I had trouble breaking 3k, even mostly clad in ilvl 219-gear with several pieces higher. I was happy breaking 2k while tanking in bear form.

Now, when I levelled my DK, I did so with a heirloom axe, chest and shoulders, and with a Unholy PVP spec. The most important dps talents, but also stuff like On a Pale Horse, Improved Unholy Presence, and 17 points in Frost to get Endless Winter. 17 points in Blood would've been much better for dps.

At lvl 78, in Culling of Stratholme, I broke 1.5k dps. I'd like to repeat that. Two levels before 80 I did more dps than most dps I had ran with when I was healing at lvl 80. Apart from the heirloom stuff, I had quest blues and greens.

At lvl 80, I quickly broke 2k dps, after respeccing to a pure dps spec. I did 3.5k dps on Onyxia 10-man, but that fight hugely favors Unholy DKs due to the AoE damage on the whelps. Fast forward a few upgrades. Interestingly enough, upgrading from the heirloom axe with Crusader (which hardly does anything at lvl 80) to the ilvl 219 axe from TotC heroic with Rune of the Fallen Crusader was less of an increase on my dps than I'd expected it to be. Unholy is much less dependant on weapon damage than Blood and Frost, I believe.

At the moment, I've got a gear score of around 2000 in wow-heroes.com. That translates to mostly ilvl 200 gear plus 4 ilvl 219 items and three items below ilvl 200. I pull 3-3.5k dps on single target fights in 5-man. Above 4k raid-buffed. Much more on fights featuring adds and cleaving. I pulled well above 7k dps on Onyxia 25-man, but that fight isn't the best to check that kind of stuff.

I've got a fairly good knowledge about death knights, but I'm far from mastering it. I still make noob mistakes like forgetting to save a blood rune for Death and Decay when it's coming off cooldown on AoE fights.

The conclusion I pull from this is that many of the dps I've met lack knowledge of their class. They lack knowledge about what makes the better upgrades, priorities on their attacks, they forget to use cooldowns, and so on. Or to say it with a word: They suck.

Dps is a way more forgiving job than tanking and healing. You can get away with much less knowledge about your class and gear than you can as a healer or tank.

On nice people

2009-11-12T08:54:00.003+01:00

Disclaimer: When you read "nice guy" in this post, substitute "nice guy/girl".

With a handful exceptions, I've pugged all the instances I've done. Well, if it's also pugging when I ask a guy I've met earlier if he'd like to join in.

There are a lot of different people you meet when pugging. I'd like to speak of one specific personality type, one I was a member of myself for my first years of WoW.

The nice guys. The ones that seem to stick around no matter how bad things go, and will accept almost endless amounts of "nerd rage", blaming, accusing, unreasonable favors (like a guy asking to be ressed when the entire group wiped without any reason at all) and other negative communication.

Incidently, the nice guys very often end up as healers, tanks and often also group leaders. Not necessarily the group leader as the tank getting the party leadership to mark targets, but the one that put the group together, was first at the stone to wait several minutes for the next one to show up to summon and so on.

Healers seem to be the most common role for these guys. They want to help. They want to be important to the group or raid force. They want to make a change. Healing is a natural response to that "need", as they're critical to the group, can contribute without competing on a damage meter, and get the warm fuzzy feeling when they succeed on keeping everyone alive, or at least prevent a wipe, despite the odds.

One of the most striking features; They usually don't complain. They feel they shouldn't.

Now, they have a problem. I can describe one of the most common sympthoms. Previously, said person have been working hard for weeks/months, avoiding complaining when psosible, and always done what was best for the group(s). Suddenly he or she burst out in furious anger, and seemingly creates a huge conflict over something others consider small or trivial.

The best example I know of was a raiding druid who let out his rage on the official forums from the time I was a regular there. He was a raiding resto druid at lvl 60. His guild was doing great, downing bosses east and west. A physical dps leather item dropped, and he wanted it for his feral set. The guild leader gave it to a rogue who had recently joined the raiding force and needed it as a minor upgrade.

The druid in question spent half an hour screaming on vent and cursing on guild chat before leaving the guild and the raid force. I don't know what happened afterwards.

Now, the problem was not that the guild leader gave the item to the rogue. It was only the last drop which caused the glass to spill. At best, giving the item to the druid would have delayed the problem, but it would have happened later instead.

The problem didn't necessarily have only a single cause, but I can imagine some. The druid had persisted through lots of wipes without complaining. He had set his own needs aside for the raid force's. He had probably swallowed a lot of frustrations, not wanting to 'cause problems' or 'create drama' until the moment he was unable to swallow it.

I'll go as far as to say there are quite a lot of similarities between this and several break-ups. One person, often the girl/woman, remains silent until she suddenly can take no more. After the following break-up, the partner is unsure what happened.

What can be done to prevent such problems?

The short answer is Communication.

The long answer; There are several means that can help.

The best mean may be for the person to learn to talk about it. It may sound strange, but just getting your problems acknowledged by someone else helps immensly. There's a reason why you feel the need to complain to others when you've experienced something annoying or uncomfortable. It helps even more if you can talk to a person who is in some position where he can understand well what happens. In the case of WoW, a fellow WoW player is better than a random person. A guild member may be even better. A person that participated in the scene that caused the frustration will be even better. Best is probably the if the person him/herself that caused the frustration can acknowledge the problem. Shared first place might be the raid/guild leader.

Getting your problem acknowledged is first step towards solving it. How to solve it will vary with what kind of problem it is and who is involved. In the case of raiding, an officer might make a change, even minor, that can ease the frustration.

But before you can think of a solution, you need to actually identify the problem. After all, this personality archtype doesn't complain in the first place. That's why others, everyone that can, should react to signs that there's something wrong. In particular, the leaders. Asking if everything's okay won't necessarily help.

There's a skill straight out of the child psychology book that can be applied to much more than just children; Achknowledging by describing.

Consider the following situation I participated in yesterday. Simplified for the example.

I was dps, pretty average. We had a moderately well equipped tank. We had a superior healer. We had a superior mage dps. We had a average rogue who was a bit annoying to me. Let me put it this way; Who will ask for a res in TotC heroic after a wipe?

The healer suddenly had to leave after the first boss was down. It's hard to find a healer, harder when you've already downed a boss and you don't get the loot/emblembs/champion's seals.

I calm the group down, and say I'd find a new healer. I had assembled the group in the first place.

I've got black belt in random whispering, saying something like "We're in need of a healer for Trial of the Champion herioc (5-man). We've downed the first boss, then our healer had to leave for a raid. Would you happen to have time and interest in joining us?" to all healer classes at lvl 80 which isn't in a zone that dictates they're doing something I'm disturbing them in.

I come across a priest healer. He doesn't want to join, he'd just had a very bad experience with a pug. He's definately one of the nice guys archtype. I didn't get all the details, but I belive it was somthing like he had stuck around for wipe after wipe with a terrible tank, people leaving and cursing and blaming. I can completely understand that feeling after having "been there" myself several times. While going on whispering others, I reply to the whisper by describing how frustrating that can be, and how I understand he want to take a break from PUGs. Meanwhile I get a 20-30 declines on my offer to join, most of them polite.

After a few minutes, the healer I'm whispering with says he'll join us after all. He says I sound like a guy he'd like to pug with. I graciously accept his offer.

Fast forward. We wipe two more times before finishing the last two bosses. The tank stands completely immobile, and doesn't move out of the Desecration the death knight puts on the floor. Neither does the rogue. I do, leading to a serious downtime in my dps.

When we last succeed, it's with only 3 people standing. The priest ran out of mana healing through all the damage on the desecration. He was "correctly" equipped for the instance. While an overgeared healer might be able to heal through that without a sweat, this priest did nothing wrong and still ran out of mana. We did ask the tank after each wipe to kite the black knight around, not to get caught in his desecration.

The tank and the rogue leaves. The three of us stands around for several minutes. I tell the mage how I appreciated his dps despite the zombies in phase 2 swarming over him, and how we I don't believe we'd succeeded in the first place without his dps. I tell the priest how I saw that he managed to pull it through, despite the tank and a dps taking much more damage than intended by the instance.

What happens next? They open up and talk. A lot. Letting out their frustration and letting me know how they appreciate grouping with me, despite the fact that I was tied for the lowest place in dps. They even go so far that they share the names of their alts with me, hoping to group with me again. I'm not sure they would've opened up if I've asked 'Everything okay?'. Most likely, they'd answered something like 'yes, we're (finally) done' or something.

I believe both of them walked away more satisfied than they otherwise would. Imagine the difference; several wipes, and noone mentions a word about the hard work you put in to make it finally work. Alternatively, several wipes, but someone saw you and what you did, and tells you how they appreciate it. It's different from a 'Good work'. Someone saw exactly what you did, not just that you collectively succeeded.

Neither of them have their problems solved. But they have had some of their problems and work appreciated.

Some ways to solve problems might be for you nice guys to leave the group if it doesn't work with a warning in advance, or perhaps even kicking the 'problem player' if they've got the leadership. Don't hesitate to do that. It's not punishing the player. It's letting him or her know the consequences of his or her annoying behaviour. Just be sure that you share the view with the majority first.

Don't hesitate to talk. You're not causing a problem if you're telling what's bothering you. If you've got a guild leadership who think you are, you're in a very self-destructive guild. It's going to blow up, or rather, implode sooner or later. Guild quit and find a place where you are achknowledged.

I'm no longer one of the nice guys. I'm one of the guys that take responsibility for myself.

PVP strikes back

2009-10-22T13:00:00.005+02:00

I had, for quite a while, neglected a part of WoW I really used to love so much. PVE has lots of fun factors. In particular, I love the cooperation required to bring down bosses, and the excitement of succeeding together. However, playing only one aspect of the game will burn it out faster than playing all aspects.

With the "birth" of my death knight, I played a bit PVP along the way. And heck, what fun I've missed!

While levelling up, my DK has the heirloom PVP shoulders, heirloom PVP trinket, heirloom chest and heirloom axe with Crusader on it.

BG 50-59 was a bit of a joke. More than half of all players joining were death knights. In fact, it was joked that "whichever side has the most death knights wins", something that proved painfully true for all rounds I participated in.

Come 60 and lowest level in BGs. Interestingly enough, I didn't feel underpowered. Quite the opposite, it felt "just right". Most likely because of the superior gear I had for my level (DK starting area blue gear is about equivalent of lvl 65 greens, I think). Of course, I was feeling a bit squishy, so I played all the time in frost presence.

Here's the thing: I don't like following all the stupid sheep that races towards the stables, Balinda or just mindlessly fights in the midfield in Warsong Gulch. I stick around in our base to defend our flag in WSG, I stick at a base in AB and defend it, I try to keep Galv alive, get our towers back and prevents stealth caps in AV.

I'm used to playing a healer. What happens when a single healer sticks around a place to defend? Well... at best I can survive until my mana is all gone. That's the limitation of my abilities.

As a DK, I'm able to succeed on my own. At least some of the time.

Now, I've hit 80 with my DK. There are a few problems.

I'm painfully reliant on a good weapon, and I'm STILL running around with my heirloom axe. It helps a lot being unholy -- I did 4.5k dps in quest blues in the Onyxia 10 pug I joined. Superior AoE, anyone? With a bit of luck, a new weapon will drop sooner or later in TotC heroic.

I still only have two specs to play around. I want three (at least). PVE dps, PVE tank and PVP. For the moment I don't have all that good tanking gear, so I've got PVE dps and PVP. Considering tanking with my PVP spec. It has Toughness, Magic Suppression, Anti-Magic Zone, Bone Shield and even Glyph of Anti-magic Shell, so I'm only lacking Anticipation, Blade Barrier and Improved Icy Touch of the core tanking talents. I can even afford two points in Imp Icy Touch in my PVP spec without losing anything important.

Other than that, I'm gearing up my third character. At a point I got really tired of it and switched back to my shaman for some PVP. It took less than a single AV to recall what I liked about my DK.

The get-out-of-jail-free cards. In particular Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude, but also Strangulate and Chains of Ice. Together, they allowed me to survive for quite some time alone with an enemy. Except retribution paladins, bloody annoying bastards. They stun me for 5 seconds before I got the runic power to get off either AMS or IF.

Just being a tank. Standing around defending a node in frost presence, and a rogue fires up his arsenal at me. But hey, I've got tons of armor, I can survive for quite some time. Compare that to a shaman, even with a shield, whose only defense is trinketing out of a stun or die before the stunlock is up. Well, almost.

I like being a tank in PVP.

Delicious cookies! All mine! Muhahahahahaha...

2009-10-22T11:59:00.004+02:00

... and another blog bites the dust?

Yes, it did. I ought to have made a post telling you why I stopped blogging.

However, I'll start again. This time with a slightly different focus.

What has happened?

Something like this:

Played my shaman for a while, gearing her up for raiding (3.1). Did some pug raids, lots of fun.

Got tired of only healing, wanted to tank again.

Fooled around with a paladin for a bit. Got it to 71.

Returned to my druid, levelled it to 80.

Geared up my druid for raiding. Lead a few Naxx-raids.

Applied, got accepted into a raiding force. Pretty serious 10-man force with good people. However, they were full on druids and wanted shammies.

Geared up my shammy again (3.2)

Raided one night. Found out I can't do it and function normally at work the night after. Bed at midnight, up at 6 AM. I'm a zombie half of the following day.

Got a bit depressed. Considered stopping WoW entirely.

Returned to my druid for a bit, played a bit without any specific focus. Tanked some pug raids, including Koralon 25 right after he was added.

Tried a death knight. Got hooked.

Status quo: DK at 74, fairly speed-leveled. Having fun meanwhile, though. Had a few short breaks to the seasonal stuff. Knowing myself, I will sooner or later want to return to healing. Which class? Don't know, thus I do the seasonal stuff on both my 80 healers (druid and shammy).

So, future stuff will most likely be centered a bit around death knights and leveling stuff. Not much raiding stuff to be expected here, I'm afraid.

I'm going to spend a bit less time writing each post. I expect a post a week, sometimes more often.