Losing raiders and what to do next

Occasionally, you’ll lose members of your core team. It’s just a thing that’s going to happen – sometimes you can adjust to keep people happy, but sometimes people will just want to move on or want to change what they’re doing drastically enough that you won’t be able to keep them. Think, for example, someone decides they want to switch from DPS to tanking, but you don’t have any open tank slots, and your existing tanks are happy in their roles – or maybe your top healer isn’t satisfied with how fast you’re progressing through content, and leaves for another guild. Either way, you’re going to be down a player for a little while, and you may have to figure out exactly how to fill that hole in the meantime. There’s no great answer here, but there are at least a few steps you can take to mitigate the impact on your raid team.

Active Recruiting and Tryouts

With the way that raids are designed these days, being able to have up to 15 optional slots in normal and heroic gives you a lot of leeway to cycle through people and determine personality and skill fits. Bring people in, cycle them through roles, and talk to them. If you find someone who meshes with your core group, you can easily find good replacements right there. One of the things that my old guild did was run regular, attendance-optional PUG runs with guild alts, and we got some of our best raiders from recruiting from those runs.

Flexible Raiders

I’m coming at this from a couple different angles. First, and most importantly, having a couple people that might not be in your core group but may want to step in and earn a spot can be helpful to fill holes in the regular roster – if you’re counting on the same 10 people to show up every week, for example, it’s going to be hard when 3 of them have commitments on raid night one week. Better to have 13 or 14, bring your alternate folks in on farm bosses, and trim down for progression. (Of course, this advice probably applies better to Mythic with flex raiding in place, but I figure Mythic guilds probably have their crap together already.)

Secondly, if you are fortunate enough to have some raiders who can effectively play multiple specs and are also willing to do so, encourage them to step up to fill holes! If you lose a tank and your fury warrior is willing to fill in as Prot until you get a new full-time tank, you’re gonna be much better off than if you have to play Trade Chat Roulette to fill a core raid spot every week.

Don’t Hold On

Finally, and I think this is a core point, if someone leaves, don’t get hung up on it. They left, they had a reason to leave, and that’s pretty much all you need to have. It’s kind of the same thing as far as if someone wants to switch to a role you don’t have room for in your raid – you can’t be afraid to just say “nope, we don’t have openings for that, you have to stay where you are role-wise or you can leave”. It really does need to be that simple. If someone tries to turn it into more than that, then they were never a good fit for your team in the first place.

Oh, and never cave to ultimatums. If someone comes to you saying “I’m switching to my resto druid next week or I’m quitting”, simply shrug your shoulders and let them quit – and while you’re at it, immediately look for someone to fill that spot.

Raid leading: How to maximize fun for you AND your guild

A couple of years back, I shut down this blog.

A couple months ago, I wrote a post or two about leadership and opened things back up a little bit.

I figure I’ll throw my hat in the ring one more time and give my opinions as they relate to the actual role of “raid leader”, since that was my primary focus while I was involved with guild leadership as a calling. I’ve already posted about this once back in 2013, but looking back over that I found it less than helpful from the perspective of someone new to the position, and probably a little basic for an experienced leader, so I’m going to gear this post more towards a newer leader, and make sure to hit the high points of how to actually get started in this kind of a leadership role.

So, let’s start with the basics. You’ve just been tapped to lead raids for your guild, and are looking for guidance on where to start. What are the real key points that you’re going to need to have ready to go for raid night next week?

Know The Raid

The obvious first point, of course, is that you’ll definitely need to have the strategy and mechanics for whatever bosses you’re planning on clearing or attempting down cold. As the raid leader, you’ll need to build a strategy for each boss centered around your raid team, and that probably means watching videos, reading guides, and reviewing the mechanics of the fight in the Dungeon Journal. When you get to a boss, be prepared to lay out the key points of the fight in a clear, concise manner – not all of your raiders will have done their homework, so you’ll need to make sure that everyone understands their role in the fight.

Sometimes, this will require adapting a strategy to fit your raid group. If you find your group is having trouble executing a mechanic, you may need to adjust on the fly – maybe having some people switch to full-time add management, or a dedicated interrupt rotation, whatever. Making these little tweaks over time will lead to a better experience for everyone – bashing your head into a failing strategy for hours will only lead to frustration.

One of my biggest failings when I first started out was very long-winded explanations. Try and keep digressions to a minimum – you probably don’t need to say “Arcane Cleave is a stacking debuff that makes the tank take 50% more damage per stack, so tanks need to taunt at 2 stacks” when you can just leave it at “There’s a debuff in phase 1, tanks keep your eyes out and swap at 2 stacks”. Basically, explain what your raiders need to do to counter mechanics rather than go into detail about the mechanics themselves – there’s a lot of stuff that can be generalized as “stay out of fire”, “cleanse”, or “taunt rotation” without discussing the specific details of what makes this one thing different between boss X and boss Y.

Finally, remember to be open to suggestions. If something isn’t working, make sure your team knows that they can whisper you and give you ideas. I personally found it to be distracting to open the floor to suggestions in voice chat, but going through private one-on-one talks worked really well. I definitely recommend a UI mod like WIM or similar to keep your conversations in order and organize your thoughts, though, because otherwise you can end up with just walls of text in your chat panes.

Know Your Raiders

Also important is having a good grasp on the members of your raid team – their strengths, their weaknesses, who can fulfill roles best. Have a mechanic that requires a kiter, and two hunters? It’s best to know right away who you can trust with the job and who’s better used as pure boss DPS. Similarly, if you have someone who’s underperforming, you need to know that so you (or, more likely, a class leader) can schedule some one-on-one time to help them out. You’ll need to have at least a basic grounding in most classes’ toolkits to be an effective leader – I recommend playing every class for at least a few hours and skimming the Icy Veins “easy mode” guides – but advanced knowledge should, of course, be left to class leads or any other appropriate officer your guild might have.

This doesn’t just extend to skill sets, though – it also goes to personalities. You’re not just dealing with a bunch of Lego blocks that you can slot into where they need to go, you’re dealing with people. That means it’s important to account for that while you’re setting up roles. Got someone who’s very invested in meters every week? Don’t give him that kiting role if you can help it. I’m not saying you have to cater to all the snowflakes in your raid – obviously, prioritize progression over someone’s personal role preferences – but if it’s not going to harm anything, keeping your raiders happy is a nice bonus.

Know Where To Look

Awareness is an absolutely essential trait for a raid leader to have. You’re not just there to call out DBM timers – it’s your job to provide essential information as the fight goes on. That means zooming your camera out and keeping an eye on all aspects of the fight as you’re playing. Watch for mechanics that your raiders aren’t executing properly so you can give quick reminders as the fight is progressing (move in/out of ground targeted mechanics, add management, tank taunt rotations, movement and positioning, whatever), and make sure you’re actively guiding the fight rather than just being a passive observer. Remember, you designed the strategy here – it’s your job to coordinate and make sure that it’s being executed properly.

This is probably part of the reason I find it a lot easier to lead a group when I’m tanking. For a lot of fights in the past, tanking’s been a fairly straightforward role: yes, you have to worry about positioning and tank rotation, but with enough practice these things become fairly ingrained and you can focus on zooming your camera out and simply watching the fight. While some of the new fights seem to add some complexity to the role, experienced tanks should be fine.

Hope this has helped – I know a lot of these points will probably not come as a huge surprise to most raid leaders, but I think it’s good for those trying to get into leading for the first time. In the future, I might go over some more advanced stuff like how to deal with underperformers and motivating your raid, but that’s probably a topic best left for another post.

Guild leadership 101: separation of powers

As a GM, you can’t take on every leadership role, especially in a raiding guild. You’re going to have to delegate stuff – primarily because you can’t wear a million hats, but also because it’s impossible to be an expert at every facet of the game. Unless you’re treating the game as a full-time job, you won’t have time to do everything anyway, so that’s where this comes in.

The first step is to find what aspect of leadership you’re good at. As a GM, you shouldn’t delegate everything, but you should focus on your areas of expertise. Are you a good raid leader? Great, stick with that. Good with people? Manage recruitment or handle interpersonal stuff in the guild. Heck, even appoint yourself the person to keep your guild bank organized if you want. Just don’t do it all at once, which brings me to the second step of this process.

Find some competent people that you can trust to do aspects of the leadership job, including someone to fill in for whatever duties you’re handling in case you’re not around. In a large raiding guild, this probably includes an overall raid coordinator, raid leaders if you have multiple teams, guild bank/auction manager (treasurer?), class leads, and a recruitment officer, at the very least. Your mileage may vary here depending on the size of your guild – only have one druid? probably don’t need a druid class leader – but in general this is a pretty good jumping off point. Keep in touch with these folks and check in regularly to see if they need anything, but in general you should be hands off as far as telling them how to do their job. You’ve delegated tasks to these folks, now stand back and let them accomplish them. If there’s something that you think can be done differently or better, bring it up in periodic – monthly, probably – one-on-one chats with them, or if it’s a systematic issue discuss it in an officer meeting.

That’s one thing that you will need to keep under your purview as GM, is managing your officers. That will entail setting goals – see my previous post – as well as overarching policy stuff (guild rules, loot guidelines, so on and so forth), but it’ll also involve making sure everyone’s on the same page. Officer meetings are crucial in making sure that everyone’s in sync, and also a good opportunity for collaborative work to build up your guild and make it better. Similarly, one-on-one meetings give another good opportunity for bidirectional feedback, where you can give direction to your officers but also where they can point out things that they might see as areas of improvement. This is important, too – feedback needs to flow both ways. Back when I was GMing a raiding guild, I would have been lost without my officers giving me constructive feedback on what they were seeing in the guild and what they thought could be done better. I took their feedback, decided if it made sense to me, and acted on it if I thought action was warranted – and the guild was better for it.

If problems are recurring with one of your officers – maybe one of your class leads isn’t keeping current with the state of their class, or the raid leader’s having sporadic attendance problems – you will have to look at maybe replacing them. This shouldn’t be a drama-filled discussion. In your next one-on-one meeting, explain what the problem is, talk about what needs to be done for them to keep their position, and let them know that if things don’t get better you’ll need to replace them. If they get back on track, so much the better – if not, follow through and find a replacement for them. In my experience, there’s no shortage of people who want to be an officer in an average raiding guild.

Guild leadership 101: managing expectations

If you’re looking to manage a guild, there’s a lot of management and people skills that have to go into that. I’ve written on that a couple times before, but every now and then something new comes up. While I don’t manage a guild anymore, I still occasionally find a useful tidbit that I hadn’t thought to actually explain in as many words. Something came up tonight, so here’s me, passing it on.

(Don’t call it a comeback. It’s not. It’s me being pretentious and pretending to know something about this silly game that you are playing.)

It’s important to be up front with your members about what the guild’s actually about. Managing expectations  is super important, as well as being in tune with what your members actually want out of the guild. If you’re advertising as a casual guild, don’t expect to be downing heroic modes on day one – and maybe ever. If there’s a disconnect between what people are looking for and what people think the guild is, there is going to be friction.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that goals can evolve over time, too. Some people might decide that they want something more – or just different –  out of the game than what your guild can offer, and that’s okay! That’s where you need to make a decision, though – whether to change guild-wide goals or whether to stick with what you were doing and possibly lose people. At the very least, at some point, you’ll probably need to realign with your members to make sure that you are on the same page and there’s no miscommunication.

Also, don’t take it too badly if people do decide to leave. Like I said, goals evolve over time, and that speaks to both guild and individual goals. If someone needs to move on to maximize their enjoyment from the game, then that’s fine. Keep in mind that it’s a lot easier to find a new guild member and keep a former one as a friend than to try and talk someone into realigning their view of what they see as fun or to realign your entire guild for one or two people.

Finally, it’s fine to do whatever you want with your guild – casual, flex progression, 5-man, mythic progression, PvP, whatever – but don’t try and do more than one thing. You’re going to end up splitting your membership base, and that’s not a good place to be. When you have people with conflicting goals, it’s really hard to include all of them in equally engaging guild activities. The word combination “casual-progression” is one that I heard a lot over the years, and it’s awfully difficult to pull that off. Casual guilds are typically pretty inclusive in guild activities, but your casual members are going to be unable to keep up with your progression raiders for the purposes of raiding, and your progression raiders will end up way ahead of the rest of your guild in terms of content. Eventually, you’re going to hit a wall, and then that alignment of goals that I talked about earlier is going to be 100% necessary – and there will be people that will end up leaving or feeling abandoned by the guild over that. It’s best to avoid that as much as you can. The only times I’ve ever seen this, the guild either wasn’t actually casual or ended up falling apart. Yours will be no exception.

Hopefully this helps. I haven’t played let alone led a guild in years, but occasionally this comes up, so…

Dos and don’ts of raid leading

I was having a conversation the other day with my girlfriend, and she mentioned that the raid group she had been running with recently had been having some issues with their raid leadership. This led to a discussion about what’s good and bad in a raid leader, and how to effectively raid lead and motivate people. Although I don’t raid much these days (as evidenced by the dead blog), I have done plenty of raid leading in my day and I think I have some information that’s worth sharing.

First, let’s talk about what not to do. I’ve seen raid leaders singling out individuals in Ventrilo when they screw up or when they die, but I think that this is a good way to demotivate people. If you do things like this, not only does it encourage other raiders to do the same (especially if you start focusing on one person) but it also leads the singled out individual to either feel angry and hard-done-by or even stop raiding. Not a good way to effectively motivate people.

I remember the last time I tried to lead a raid in this way. It led to one person that I was criticizing muting/ignoring me – which obviously leads to some problems with guiding that person through fights. Needless to say, I stopped doing that fairly quickly.

At the same time, I think there has to be some element of public criticism in raids. Typically, what I would do is make this criticism more general (if I noticed a raider consistently standing in defile on Lich King, I’d say things like “get out of defile” during the fight, sure, but after the fight or before our next attempt I’d bring it up as a general principle: “Hey guys, this attempt let’s really focus on making sure Defile doesn’t spread in phase 2 and 3”). Without doing this, your raiders may feel resentful or feel like they are carrying some of the less skilled players in your group – they need to see that you’re doing something to address the problem.

One thing that can help you as a raid leader is also bringing things up with raiders in whispers. If you think it’s a tactical issue that they may be able to fix between attempts, send them a whisper. Don’t be overly confrontational unless it’s the third or fourth time you’ve seen this, but for the first couple of times a simple “hey, I noticed you’ve been having issues with X boss mechanic, I’d really like you to focus on that for our next attempt and make sure you’re doing it right” should suffice.

If issues are chronic or speaking to them quickly as above isn’t fixing an issue, then I honestly think it’s your responsibility as a raid leader to talk with them about it after the raid. Pull them into another channel in Vent and talk with them about what you’re seeing. “Hey, I’ve noticed your DPS is consistently pretty low. I really need you to work on fixing this, because it’s seriously affecting our raid.” If necessary (for example, if you don’t necessarily know their class), put them in contact with a class leader or someone you know who can help them improve – don’t just say they need to get better and leave it at that.

I know I’ve spent a lot of time touching on how to effectively give criticism, but as a raid leader it’s also important to motivate through positivity. If you see someone really excelling, don’t hesitate to point it out. I’ve kind of gone back and forth about doing this through whispers or more publicly through Ventrilo, and at the end of my raid leading tenure I was doing it through whispers. The point is that it’s a great motivator as a raider to be told you did a good job. It shows that your leadership is taking an active interest in your performance.

The other part of this is that you should also be watching people who have been criticized on something recently and watch for improvement. If you do see improvement, you need to make sure you’re commenting on it! I remember one of my raiders during ICC had all sorts of trouble with Sindragosa’s frost bombs. I talked with him about it, and after a couple of attempts he started doing the fight absolutely perfectly. I then whispered him and let him know that I was really impressed with his improvement. I think he really took that to heart, because when we moved on to heroic modes he was letter-perfect on almost every single new mechanic we were learning as a group.

I hope the above ramblings can help you in your role as a raid leader. I think that the above principles have certainly served me well during my time leading. Best of luck moving forward in the tail end of 5.1, and happy raiding during the upcoming Hall of the Thunder King!

Raiding easy-mode: AVR + RaidWatch 2

I’ve been doing some experenting with new raiding addons recently. Deadly Boss Mods was all well and good, but it was getting a bit old, and honestly – it looked pretty ugly. Certainly not in keeping with my nice, sleek, modern-looking UI. I stumbled across the post on MMO-Champion about AVR , and thought it looked pretty cool – and then when I made my way over to the Curse site, found out that it was compatible with a boss mod called RaidWatch 2, which included bars, timers, pretty much everything DBM had – and it even looked nicer! I took a couple of days to set it up, and it ended up looking pretty nice. Bars come up in about the same places that I had them in DBM, but it’s just a much sleeker look to the UI.

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I'll be explaining some more aspects of this screenshot later.

What I ended up doing was reworking some aspects of my UI – it’s still a little cluttered, but it’s honestly not too bad right now.  (Of course, I’ve ended up designing different UIs with different addons for each of my characters – still using X-Perl on some characters – but I do make a point of keeping some elements of my UI, such as boss mods and damage/threat meters, consistent). I’ll probably be posting some about the druid’s healing UI in a future post, and you’ll get to see what I’m running with now then, but for now this is a pretty serviceable image as far as what RaidWatch 2 looks like. I really like how the bars look – and that there are 3 possible locations for bars depending on length rather than 2, so I can put long timers like enrages somewhere unobtrusive and they won’t get grouped with the other >10 second timers.

The other addon that I downloaded was AVR – and I actual feel somewhat silly right now, but I actually managed to not get a screenshot of the addon in action. I’ll try to get one up at some point in the near future, though. Promise. 🙂

For now, though, a short explanation will have to suffice. Basically, what AVR does is allow raiders and their addons to draw shapes on the ground or centered around characters of a specific radius, as well as draw arrows pointing to important things if necessary. This allows for quite a lot of cool things – like, for example, my personal favorite, Rotface. RaidWatch 2 uses AVR to draw a circle around every person in the raid during Unstable Ooze Explosion, giving you an easy reference for where you need to be to avoid taking any damage. So far, it hasn’t led me wrong, and indeed has managed to make that fight a lot easier for me. Used to be, I’d run way way out to make sure I wasn’t in an AOE effect – but after getting AVR, I’ve minimized my movement, which helps especially when I’m healing that encounter.

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Paladin’s UI with DBM. Kind of an old screenshot, but meh.

Back to RaidWatch 2 for a minute, though. This screenshot’s, again, a bit old, but it really shows the difference between the two addons. DBM’s kind of ugly and bland, while RW2 just looks nicer and is, I think, a little easier to pay attention to, especially for announces. Plus, the AVR compatibility is a huge plus.

Being a raid leader for my guild gives me a pretty large say in what addons are mandatory for raiding. I’ve already recommended that we switch over from DBM to AVR and RaidWatch 2, and I’d suggest that you and your guild do the same. They’re really nice on fights where there’s any sort of ground effect – definitely something to take a look at!

Now that I’m done with my shameless plug for that addon, I’d like to add that originally, this blog post was supposed to include some stuff about my druid healing UI. However, my computer crashed, and I decided to just cut it here rather than rewrite the entire other half of the blog. I’ll be working on a more polished overview of my healing UI – specifically, healing with PitBull instead of Grid, as well as a couple other things.

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AVR on Rotface - red circles are where not to stand during ooze explosion
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AVR on Festergut. Here, red circles indicate the radius of the spore effect.

 

Cataclysm Raids: 10- and 25-player shared lockouts

So, Lich King still isn’t down in our 10-man, and in 25’s last week, we couldn’t even get past Rotface. I am a bit depressed.

That’s not the point of this blog, though!

It’s been a while since I’ve really written a decent content-heavy blog, and I guess now would be the time to do so. Blizzard recently made an announcement regarding their plans to merge 10-man and 25-man lockouts.

The “bullet points” –

  • Lockouts are merged – can only defeat each raid boss once per week. That means once on EITHER 10 OR 25 MAN.
  • Loot tables are merged in 10- and 25- man raids. There will be more loot per member on 25-man, and more badges per boss.
  • Opening raids will be tuned for blue/crafted gear.
  • 10 man and 25 man raids will have equal difficulty or as close to it as possible.
  • Progression will be gated.
  • Multiple raids per tier, similar to SSC/TK.

Time to tackle these points from the bottom up after the break.

Continue reading “Cataclysm Raids: 10- and 25-player shared lockouts”

Paladin 4pT10 and cooldown management

I was a little leery of picking up the Paladin T10 4-set bonus, I’m not gonna lie. Doing so dropped me under defense cap from gear (I’m socketing a couple hybrid gems and am now in full defense enchants as well). I was also a little sad about dropping my set bonuses from Tier 9 as they were ridiculously good.

Fortunately, after I got my 4pT10, I took it into 10-ICC the following night – and absolutely destroyed as far as tanking skill goes. The extra cooldown from Divine Plea use is a great tool for damage reduction. Combined with my respec (down into Divine Guardian, as well as picking up Divinity for increased survivability), I’m much better equipped to survive both sustained and burst damage.

So where does the “cooldown management” part of this post come in? Right here!

I’ve now got four tanking cooldowns, really – my mini-Last Stand off of Juggernaut’s Vitality, the dodge on-use effect from Heart of Iron (soon to be replaced, I hope), Divine Protection, and Divine Plea. In addition, I’ve got both Hand of Sacrifice (if it’s a two-tank fight and I’m not tanking, I’ll often pop this on the other tank) and Divine Sacrifice (which is even better now that I have Divine Guardian specced), as well as Sacred Shield if we don’t have enough holy paladins.

The question is, then, when to use each of these cooldowns. Obviously, HoS and DS should only be used when not tanking, but they’re powerful cooldowns nonetheless. HoS basically gives your other tank a mini-Shield Wall, which is pretty huge – granted, you’re gonna take some damage, but it’s easier to heal two targets that are both taking less damage than to heal one target taking a lot of damage, as on Festergut. Divine Sacrifice, after talents, is even better – a 20% (plus whatever you mitigate from the skill itself) shield wall to the ENTIRE RAID for 6 seconds. In addition, neither of these add Forbearance, so you can still pop LOH on the other tank if it’s needed, or something like that. DS is exceptionally good on fights like Festergut early on when the raid is taking massive damage. Giving the healers 6 seconds to position and start heals before damage starts getting crazy is a really big plus. As a side bonus, you can get a 60 second Sacred Shield from speccing into Divine Guardian – last night in ICC progression, we didn’t have a holy paladin, so this was a godsend. Usually we only have one anyway, so I think I’ll start using that as a mitigation ability more often. Less damage = more victory, right? 🙂

So there’s the cooldowns that aren’t necessarily just for you – but now that we’re looking at 4pT10, we have 4 cooldowns (assuming on-use trinkets, which most higher-level tanking trinkets are) to manage for ourselves. Right now, I have the following:

  • Divine Protection – 12 second buff, 2 minute cooldown
  • Divine Plea – 10 second buff, 1 minute cooldown
  • Heart of Iron – 20 second buff, 2 minute cooldown
  • Juggernaut’s Vitality – 15 second buff, 3 minute cooldown

So the question here is, how would I go about utilizing these cooldowns most effectively? Yes, there are times where you run into a “OHSHIT POP EVERYTHING” moment, but largely you’ll want to stagger cooldown usage. If we work it out, we have 10% ideal uptime on Divine Protection, 8.33% uptime on Juggernaut’s Vitality, 17.67% uptime on Heart of Iron, and 17.67% uptime on Divine Plea. This equates out to around 54% total time with cooldowns up if you’re staggering cooldowns, which is pretty crazy. Taking less damage or having some more health to soak hits with for half the time? Yes please! (In addition, if you’re tanking something like 3-inhale Festergut, you can actually stagger cooldowns for 57 straight seconds – and then have Divine Plea up after waiting 3 seconds – longer than the time you’ll be tanking with 3 inhales on the boss).

My philosophy is pop your shorter cooldown abilities first. This means Divine Plea would be my first cooldown, followed by Divine Protection and/or Heart of Iron, and finally followed by my mini-Last Stand. This is because if you’ve already used a shorter-cooldown ability, and then you need to use another cooldown or need to pop stuff for a prolonged period of time, the cooldowns that you used early would be up sooner. Makes sense, right?

Tanking enchants

As I mentioned earlier, I was gonna put together a tanking enchant list. Here it be – if anyone has anything to add/wants to contribute their thoughts, feel free! I wrote this primarily from a paladin viewpoint, so if something is different for your class by all means let me know.

There are a few slots that you pretty much only get one choice for, but others have multiple options. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s good for what, sorted into three categories: avoidance (mitigation through block/dodge/parry), effective health (your health as figured using avoidance, stamina, and armor), and threat (crit strike, hit, expertise, etc). In some cases there may be better threat enchants than those listed, but I tried to stick with specifically tanking enchants rather than moving into what are primarily DPS enchants.

Hope this guide helps you optimize your enchant selection for your tanking style. Enjoy!

This is a work in progress; I’m testing out various enchants as I go along.

Continue reading “Tanking enchants”

3.2.2 Arcane: Optimizing for ToC with Incanter’s Absorption

One of my guildies and I were brainstorming some ideas for a new Arcane spec taking advantage of the mechanics in the fights in ToC, and we came up with a nice spec that maximizes theoretical DPS while keeping all of the core talents of the build.

Here’s a link to my WoW Armory profile; I may have my active spec set incorrectly, but you can still look at the Arcane spec.

Some of the major differences you may note are the lack of any points in either Arcane Stability or Magic Attunement (I don’t really feel the lack of 6 yd of range), as well as not taking Arcane Barrage. This is because, as I have mentioned before, the ideal rotation for Arcane is Arcane Blast x4 (or more, if you have the gear – which I don’t anymore) -> Arcane Missiles. What I’ve done with the extra talent points I freed up was dump them into Student of the Mind for a small crit bonus (although I’m not really geared for Spirit; once I get some more gear, this talent will only get better), and also pick up 3/3 Incanter’s Absorption.

Yes, Incanter’s Absorption. I don’t know whether I’ve said this on my blog, but I held for a very long time that IA was a cool sounding talent with no practical application, as you’d burn too much mana with Mana Shield absorbing incidental damage. I ended up being proved very, very wrong in 3.2 – you still aren’t burning mana, GCD’s, or anything using Mana Shield, Frost Ward, or Fire Ward, but Blizzard gave us a really cool opportunity to have a LOT of spellpower on certain fights.

Think about the mechanics of Val’kyr Twins. You pick a color aura to have – and both twins are doing a 1500/x time global AoE. By picking up an aura from the portal, you…ABSORB the damage from that color aura. ABSORB. That means…a HUGE bonus to spellpower from IA. We’re talking a hundreds-of-DPS increase here – my spellpower literally went up by 800 or more.

Situationally, you could probably gain some DPS in certain situations too – I’m thinking fires on some fights with a situational Flame Ward, or something to that effect – but largely you’re going to see the benefit coming from incidental, fight-based absorptions. Regardless, IA has shown itself as a decent utility talent, and I recommend grabbing it.

My Aion experiences

I recently cancelled my Aion account.

It was a fun game, but I had some problems with it; mainly, it felt way too grindy. I could kill mobs for much better XP/hour than I could get questing, which in my opinion is bad design. In addition, I just wasn’t getting as much enjoyment value out of it as I do with WoW.

There were some serious upsides to Aion, though; the graphics were outstanding, as was the character customization – I could change every aspect of my character’s appearance, which was pretty neat. Although class diversity was limited, the secondary class system combined with chain skills made playing any class unique and fun. Area design was also excellent, with diverse landscapes, each with its own set of mobs and quests. Abyss stuff was really neat, too, but again, it just wasn’t as fun for me as WoW is.

My overall impression of the game was that of a polished work, but not one that could sustain my interest. There were some very well done aspects of the game, and others that were less awesome – it definitely would appeal to some people, but alas, I am not one of them.

I’ve started playing Champions Online now, too – I’ll post my impressions of that game sometime in the near future.

Mage speculation in 3.3

I noticed a few changes to Frost in 3.3, mainly the glyph that allows your Water Elemental to become permanent. I’m *hoping* this means Frost will be viable in 3.3, but we’ll see. It seems like it could be a lot of fun to try, but it doesn’t solve the problem of a very monotonous spell rotation. If they can fix that, I have a feeling that Frost could be a lot of fun in future raiding, especially since there’s that 1% of health every so often taken as damage debuff in Icecrown, at least on the PTR.

Another cool change that I noticed was the Ferocious Inspiration being spread out to Arcane mages – this gives mages another reason to go Arcane, in that it gives the raid a nice 3% damage buff. I foresee this being a pretty big deal in T10 content, especially since it looks like Beast Mastery hunters still aren’t gonna be really great DPS.

Lastly, the long-awaited Scorch change – finally, fire mages can do the same thing that locks can do, and apply their entire Scorch stack in one cast, unglyphed – meaning that any mages that still were using Scorch glyph for the raid can reglyph to something with a true DPS boost. What with Arcane’s 3% raid damage, Fire’s crit buff, and Frost’s replenishment, we may be seeing multiple specs of mages being useful in raids in 3.3, which would be very, very cool.

The long-awaited Paladin Theorycraft blog!

And by “long-awaited” I mean that I mentioned writing something dealing with Paladins waaaayyyy back when I first started blogging, but never got around to doing it. Of course at the time it was going to be about level 30 healing – but never mind that! Tanking’s more fun anyway. 😉

I’m sure a lot of people have heard of the Paladin “96969” tanking rotation, but I find that a lot of players don’t quite know what that means. To clarify:

Protection paladins have 5 abilities that they use in rotation to build threat. 3 of them are on 9-second cooldowns (Judgement, Holy Shield, Consecration) and 2 are on 6-second cooldowns (Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous). The “96969” rotation is built around alternating using a 9-second cooldown, followed by a 6-second cooldown, and so forth. Therefore, a typical Paladin rotation might look like:

  • Judgement of Wisdom
  • Shield of Righteousness
  • Holy Shield
  • Hammer of the Righteous
  • Consecration
  • Shield of Righteousness
  • Judgement of Wisdom
  • Hammer of the Righteous
  • Holy Shield
  • Shield of Righteousness
  • Consecration
  • Hammer of the Righteous
  • (repeat)

The cool thing about this is that you can adjust your cooldown order on any specific fight as needed. The reason I use Judgement first is to proc my Libram of Obstruction, which gives extra block value on using Judgement. Since Shield of Righteousness is affected by block value, it hits harder when I Judge before using it. After that, I throw up Holy Shield to help mitigation, and from there I finally start using my AoE threat abilities. Granted, this could be changed based on what libram you have, or whether you value instant mitigation (Holy Shield first) or slightly more early AoE threat (start with Consecrate, Hammer of the Righteous) – although the highest single-target threat is the listed rotation, as far as I’m aware.

I actually use macros to set my rotation up; if you macro your 9-second cooldowns in a /castsequence macro to one button, and your 6-second cooldowns to another button, you can alternate the two buttons and do your rotation that way.

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=9 Judgement of Wisdom, Holy Shield, Consecration

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous

Works out pretty nicely.

Some final notes: As far as speccing, there are a few things you can do. Taking the 5 points early in the Holy tree for Seals of the Pure is a viable option due to how good Seal of Corruption is right now, but I personally prefer taking Crusade (in Ret) instead, giving me a 0/53/18 spec. Make sure you glyph Divine Plea as it’s another 3% damage reduction (stacking with Blessing of Sanctuary), and keep that up as close to 100% uptime as you can. (e.g. always be hitting things).

I hope this mini-guide to Paladin tanking has helped you out! If I left out some stuff, please let me know. =)

Heroic progression on the paladin; 3.2.2 mage changes

Somehow, and I don’t know how, my paladin only has 3 achievements left till she gets her Red Proto-Drake after getting all of the Old Kingdom achievements today, along with Less-rabi yesterday. She still isn’t even close to epic flying, though. Ah well.

The last three achievements are in Oculus; almost got the timed run today, but someone D/C’d during the Eregos encounter. Also still have to ride a green drake and do a run with no red drakes. Should be fun times.

My more exciting news – and the news that meant I had to write something up here as soon as I found out – was contained in the 3.2.2 PTR patch notes.

Mages are getting a buff to Arcane Blast. It stacks 4 times now, and the 40% proc rate from Arcane Blast towards Missile Barrage means it should be virtually ALWAYS up after 4 stacks. They also nerfed the mana increase per Arcane Blast debuff from 200% to 130%, and made Missile Barrage-procced Arcane Missiles a free cast. Supposedly, it’s 3% DPS over TTW Fireball on stationary fights and 1% over on mobile fights. Looking forward to trying this one out. =)

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