Where no cow has gone before

I've blown up more shit in two stardates than they did in three years of the original series.

Meet Lieutenant (Grade Eight) Jonathan Harmon, erstwhile commander of the Federation light cruiser USS Altair, NCC-93165.  Jon comes from a family of totally undistinguished Starfleet officers; he’s the sixth generation of Harmons to serve in Starfleet, and not one of them ever made it past Lieutenant or commanded a starship, so he’s already ahead of the game.  Fresh from graduating in the bottom half of his class at Starfleet Academy, armed with nothing more than youthful idiocy and a bad haircut, he was all set to continue the family mediocrity when he reported to the Altair for a training cruise, and then things kinda went wrong at Vega Colony…

Yes, your humble Panzercow has taken a couple of days off from WoW and is giving Star Trek Online a whirl.

Now I’m not a huge Trekkie or Trekker or whatever they want to be called these days.  Yes, as a kid in the mid-’70s, I grew up on reruns of the original 1966-1969 series broadcast every afternoon at 4:30 on local TV in Lynchburg, Virginia.  But by the time Star Trek:  The Next Generation came out, I was over it.  In fact, I learned to dislike the show by sheer reflex–most of my friends at the time were absolutely addicted to it, and if I was over visiting them when it came on, everything frigging stopped–talking and noise were verboten for that hour.  It was annoying.  I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an entire episode of Deep Space Nine or Voyager, and never saw any of the ST movies in the theater.  The only one I ever suffered through on TV was Star Trek V:  The Final Frontier and I still haven’t quite figured out why, because it was a total piece of crap.

But, there’s something about the richness and depth of the Star Trek universe that’s appealing.  Plus, I’m a sucker for games in space–I still have an account in EVE Online and play irregularly, and was very heavily into the Lucasarts X-Wing/TIE Fighter series and the whole Wing Commander line as well.  (In fact, true geek story–I met my wife, the lovely and gracious Aggro Kitty, fourteen years ago on a Compuserve board devoted to tips and fiction around the Lucasarts X-Wing/TIE Fighter games.)  So on a whim on Monday, while still snowed in at home, I picked up STO via Steam.  I ended up playing most of the day Monday and Tuesday evening, which means I’ve taken my first two-day hiatus from WoW in months, maybe years.

Star Trek Online is set about thirty years after the events of Star Trek:  Nemesis, the tenth and (thank God) final of the original series of ST movies.  It’s 2409, and as you’d expect in an MMO, things in the Federation have gone to hell in a replicator.  A supernova has destroyed the Romulan homeworlds (as referenced in the J.J. Abrams reboot movie Star Trek), despite the heroic efforts of Spock, and the remnants of the Romulans are pissed off.  The Klingons have broken with the Federation for reasons I can’t quite figure out and are one of the primary Bad Guy races.  (You can roll a Klingon character after you get 6 levels as Federation.)  The Orions, Gorn, Nausicaans, and a shapechanging race called the Undine are causing trouble all over the place.  And, oh yeah, as you find out early on, the Borg are back and there’s gonna be trouble (hey yaa, hey yaaaaa, the Borg are back).  No, you’ll never run out of things to do in your Starfleet career, or at least, never run out of stuff to blow up.

Installation was quick and easy, and really, for an initial release, the game feels surprisingly solid.  Yes, there are a few bugs here and there, but I have yet to find anything truly crippling.  Probably the worst so far was a bug with forcing anti-aliasing in the game on my Geforce 8800GTS; as soon as I turned it on via the Options menu, shadows appeared several feet in the air.  So that’s turned off for now.  There’s been a couple of weird things happen with missions, and some intermittent server lag (and one crash on Monday), but so far, it looks like the beta period did a good job cleaning the game up.

And it is a very pretty game.  The backdrops for space missions are gorgeous.  The ships are vintage Trek, beautifully rendered.  Phasers, disruptors, and torpedoes look great, and come complete with vintage Trek sound effects.  Ground environments aren’t quite as spectacular, but they’re still nice.  Animations are a bit jerky for my liking, but that’s a relatively minor nit to pick.

The character creator is what I wish the WoW character creator was.  You have tremendous flexibility over your toon’s appearance and size, and can be one of any number of Trekiverse races–you can even create your own alien.  In the end, though, they’re all bipedal and roughly human-sized, so sorry, no gnomes.  (I wonder if I can make a create-your-own-alien look Tauren-ish.  Hmm.  Lieutenant Linedan.  I’ll make a note to work on that.)

Once you create your character, you play through a few hours of introductory tutorials structured around a Borg invasion of the Vega Colony.  You come out the other side as a fuzzy-cheeked Lieutenant, Grade 1, with your very own starship to play with and a couple of simple starter quests–uh, missions–to get you going.   There are 50 levels, split into five ranks–Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, Captain, and Admiral–with 10 “grades” within each rank.  You gain ranks by spending “skill points,” which are like experience points in other games, on various skills within a skillset limited by your chosen specialty at creation (tactical, engineering, or science) and by your rank.  Earn and spend enough points, and eventually you’ll get promoted from Lieutenant 10 to Lieutenant Commander 1–at which point, a whole new set of skills open up, and you get to drive bigger and fancier starships.  Your starter ship, a “light cruiser,” comes with two phasers front and back, and a photon torpedo launcher up front.  You can upgrade the various bits on your ship–weapons, shields, engines, etc.–through loot that you get off destroyed enemy ships, or by buying it, or by mission rewards.

But how’s the content and gameplay, you might ask?  Well, content-wise, it’s not bad so far.  There are WoW-quest-like “episode missions” where you’re led through a scripted series of linked actions–go here, blow this up, beam down here, blow the bad guys away, warp out, profit.  There are “patrol missions” where you’re given a list of star systems in a particular area to visit, and you end up getting a different mission in each one.  These patrol missions are what Cryptic calls “open instanced” content–you will be automatically teamed up with other players in the same system on the same mission in sort of a forced random PUG.  In fact, I have yet to see a patrol mission involving ship combat that could be soloed in a default light cruiser.  They do require minimal teamwork, and can get pretty nasty if you don’t have at least 3-4 people, or somebody in a bigger ship.  There’s also “sector patrols” where you find enemy contacts out in deep space–in these, you’ll be in the same instanced area with other players, but you aren’t forced onto a team.  It’ll still take all of you to kill the eight squadrons of Klingons you need to fulfill the mission, though.  There are exploration missions, which (surprise!) tend to end up with you in star systems blowing the crap out of stuff.  And finally, there are “fleet actions,” which are humongous recurring battles with massive NPC fleets that reward high scorers.  You do not want to get caught in one of these, alone, with a light cruiser.  Trust me on this.  I lasted about two seconds.

The missions themselves have a fair balance between ship combat and ground combat, but the key word is “combat.”  This is not your father’s idealistic Star Trek.  You, Lieutenant, end up kicking ass and taking names more often than not.

Ship combat is, to me, the more interesting part of the game.  EVE Online disappoints me in this regard; typically, combat against NPCs involves me making sure I’ve got aggro on all the nearby ships, then launching a bunch of drones from my battleship and running bravely away while my drones chew things up and my weapons autofire.  Boooorrriiiing.  90% of PvE combat in EVE is in the pre-fight ship setup.  STO is more active.  You actually drive your ship around (with the mouse or good old WASD) and try to get a good firing position while watching your four shields (front, back, left, right) and keeping your strong shield toward the bad guy(s).  The starter ship has two phasers with wide arcs of fire that overlap to the sides, so broadsides are good–but the torpedo launcher, your big nuke, has a narrow arc forward, and torpedoes are only truly devastating once you chew through shields.  It’s sorta-kinda three-dimensional; you don’t truly have three degrees of freedom, and there’s no top and bottom shields, but you can maneuver up and down to a limited extent.  You can juggle the power levels on your ship to bias things toward weapons, shields, or engines (and adjust shield power to boost a weakened side).  Imagine a fight in WoW where you have to keep moving constantly, and yet still pound buttons to use your weapons, without auto-attack.  That’s a ship fight in STO.

Ground combat is similar–in fact, it’s fairly generic, similar to WoW.  You’ll have an “away team” of four NPCs–typically your bridge officers, filled out by generic disposable redshirts as needed–following you around like hunter pets, and you can give them limited orders.  You can equip two weapons and switch between them on the fly; each weapon seems, so far, to have one primary attack mode bound to “1,” a secondary attack mode (with a cooldown) bound to “2,” and a melee attack bound to “3.”  Yes, that’s right kids, you can take that phaser rifle and go upside somebody’s head with the stock.  There’s no autofire, not that I’ve yet found.  So for me so far, ground combat has been spamming “1″ like a rogue, hitting “2″ when it’s up, and hitting “3″ when something gets in my face, so I can knock it down and hit “1″ again.  Not exactly as demanding as a prot warrior’s tanking priority system.

Speaking of bridge officers!  You get three manning the stations onboard your ship–Tactical, Engineering, and Science.  Each one ranks up just like you do, and you train skills on each one just like your toon…and like you, they have skills useful on the ship, and useful on the ground.  Now personally, when it came time to beam down to a planet and shoot some Klingons?  I’d rather send in the Marines.  It’s not like Bull Halsey landed on Okinawa right alongside the Marines, y’know.  But this is Star Trek, and apparently, all bridge officers want to be Marines.  So they get to perform double duty.  Bridge officers are a tradable commodity, just like items.  You can have them train your existing crew, or you can trade them to other players (gotta catch ‘em all!), and you even get them as mission rewards.  You can also customize the appearance of your ship by rearranging the types of nacelles, saucer, struts, etc. that you have.  All ships of a type have the same basic stats, but you can tweak the appearance in myriad different ways to create a look that’s right for you.  And yes, the name you give your ship is proudly displayed on the saucer, as any good Star Trek ship’s would be.

So, in the final analysis, is this going to be a WoW-killer?  Nope, certainly not for me.  It’s a nice diversion, certainly.  I’m enjoying it.  But at the same time, I’m concerned about the content getting repetitive, depending on how many variations of “ZOMG KILL ALL TEH EBIL GORNS!!” I get on patrol missions.  Cryptic is going to have a challenge keeping the content fresh as the playerbase levels and heads toward whatever counts as the endgame.  They’re also fighting with server lag and stability issues due to the number of players.  Instancing virtually every piece of content helps (even when in open space, you’re in an “instanced” area and can only see and interact with a limited number of players) but they’re still trying to cram tens of thousands of players onto one single server cluster.  EVE Online’s been putting 50,000+ on one server for years, but the EVE universe is much bigger than STO’s.

In STO’s favor, however…there are tribbles.

3.3.2 prot warrior changes announced

Blizzard has released the patch notes for the next minor content patch, v3.3.2, over on the Korean WoW site, and wow.com picked them up.  For those of us of the Prot warrior persuasion, here’s the changes we’ve been waiting to hear about:

Warrior

Protection

• Concussion Blow: Damage decreased by 50%. Threat level remains unchanged.
• Devastate: Damage increased by 20%.
• Shield Slam: Damage modifier from block value decreased, and scales worse at low block value levels. Players in high-end gear shouldn’t notice the change. In addition, threat generated by Shield Slam has been increased by 30%.
• Warbringer: This talent no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares. Intervene remains unaffected. In other words, you can still Charge and Intercept in any stance and while in combat.

Basically, there’s nothing here that we didn’t expect.  The Warbringer change is a straight-up PvP nerf, which will have limited effect to those of us who hang out mostly on the PvE side…although let’s just say I’m not looking forward to dealing with Faction Champions without my snare breaks.  The Concussion Blow nerf was one I hadn’t heard about, and I assume that’s a PvP nerf as well, because honestly, I don’t think we were exactly blowing the top off the charts on Festergut with our l33t 30-second-cooldown Concussion Blow deeps.  Actually, while Concussion Blow can hit for a few thousand damage, I can’t see why it’s getting nerfed at all considering the 30-second cooldown.

The Shield Slam change…now that’s interesting.  “Damage modifier from block value decreased, and scales worse at low block value levels.”  But weren’t Prot PvPers stacking huge amounts of +block value?  Or, were they stacking huge amounts of +armor penetration instead?  In any case, I’ll be tracking how this affects things not just on Linedan, with his full rack of T9/T10-level epics and 2600 SBV in his block set…I’ll also be looking at how it effects Latisha, my 71 Alliance-side Prot warrior, with her level 70ish quest greens and King’s Bulwark.  If Blizzard’s found a way to fix the problem with Prot PvP burst damage (and you have no freaking idea how weird it is for me to type that) and not significantly lower Shield Slam damage in PvE, I’ll be mightily impressed.  In fact, if they didn’t lower Shield Slam damage by 30% at the high end–which would be a massive damage nerf–they’ve just increased its net threat, which may mean our snap threat, which was already excellent, is even better.  We’ll have to see once it goes into place and people can run some tests.

Finally, Devastate continues to get buffed.  Everything I’ve written on Prot warrior priority systems last year looks like it may be out the window now, because +20% more damage on Devastate will move it way up the list.  It may not be the “do it if everything’s on cooldown” move anymore.  It already hits quite hard once fully stacked at 5, so +20% may move it above Revenge in terms of sheer damage output.  Goody, yet more keys to frantically spam every GCD!

(EDIT:  I’m also wondering if yet another Devastate buff will drag the Puncture talent off the scrapheap.  Very few of the “conventional” 51- or 53-point Protection builds take Puncture right now, preferring the more general boost from Focused Rage instead.)

And troll makes five

I'm bringin' sexeh back, mon.

Meet your friendly Panzercow’s fifth level 80 character…Sakula the troll enhancement shaman, from the guild Supercow (or, as he says it, “SUPAHCOW!”, complete with exclamation point).

Sakula was the beneficiary of me going on a bit of a WoW binge on Sunday.  He started the day, before I left for church, about 250,000 xp short of level 79, wearing half mid-70s blues and half quest greens (nothing higher than ilevel 174), swinging 91 dps mainhand and 93 dps offhand green fist weapons.  He ended the day, a little after midnight, at level 80, with the two 143 dps epic weapons you see in the picture above–Greed mainhand, The Fleshshaper offhand–his first piece of T9 (shoulders), and a rack of new ilevel 187 and ilevel 200 blues.

It really wasn’t that hard.  I scattered a few normal random dungeon runs through the leveling process, breaking up the grind of questing.  The last part of 78 was done in Sholazar, and at 79, I headed over to the Argent Vanguard in Icecrown and worked through the Argent Vanguard, Crusader’s Pinnacle, Crusader Bridenbrad, and Shadow Vault lines as quickly as I could.  It is very easy to rapid-fire those quests in sequence and roll up mad xp, especially if you’re wearing at least one heirloom piece.  Combine those with normal dungeon runs that were good for 10-15% of a level per run, and the Ladies’ Troll spent no more than five hours at level 79.

I have to say, I am really liking this whole enhancement shaman thing.  I had a very hard time leveling Sakula…up until about level 50, it felt like a giant grind.  He felt hugely underpowered.  I was having to stop and drink every few fights, his DPS was bad, he was getting his ass kicked and nearly dying constantly.  It felt like trying to level a warrior in bad gear, only without the toughness of the warrior class, and with mana issues on top of all of it.  But around level 50–maybe when I picked up Shamanistic Rage–things started to turn around, slowly.  By the time Sakula arrived in Hellfire Peninsula, the grind had eased up a bit.  And come Northrend, with his faithful spirit wolves on three-minute cooldown and a pretty nice chunk of nature’s fury (and two weapons) in his hands, he wasn’t having much trouble with doing quests.

And now at 80, in instances?  Fun tiems! The new Fire Nova is awesome in a can.  Combine that with Maelstrom Weaponed Chain Lightning, and I can sort of hold my own on those constant crazy AOE pulls you get in random PUGs.  Plus…he’s a troll. Trolls are cool!  Trolls be flippin’ out, mon!  He talks to the spirits and the loas…and apparently, the spirits and the loas usually tell him to beat the shit out of things.

As much as I like Moktor, and as much as I find the death nugget class interesting (and despite my frequently ragging on it, I do find it interesting), Sakula may displace the orc bitch as my undergeared non-raiding alt of choice.  I’ll probably be randoming him to gear him up while looking for help on how I should glyph/gem/enchant him for enhancement, and then thinking about whether I want to dual-spec him, and if so, do I give him a second DPS spec as elemental…or do I cowboy up and actually, finally, after five years, give one of my characters a healing spec and dive into the terrifying world of keeping health bars full?

There are numbers, and then there are numbers

As you probably know if you keep up with things involving Prot warriors, there’s a bit of a snitstorm going on regarding potential changes to Warbringer and Shield Slam brought on by the fact that Prot warriors have occasionally been committing unauthorized pwnings of their betters–y’know, mages, hunters, etc.–in arenas.  Now one of the things that we in the Prot community have been maintaining is that Prot warriors generally have the lowest damage output of the four tank classes when we’re tanking, and that this change will lower that damage even further.  Ghostcrawler, while acknowledging that this change will slightly lower Prot warrior PvE damage output, doesn’t seem to think it’s a serious problem:

We understand that warrior damage is on the low end but regarding the raid progression, it’s a hard case to say that your wipe on Festergut (as an example) was caused by the difference between tank damage when the dps from focused classes like rogue, warlock, etc. can probably improve to beat the enrage timer.

And in response to Prot warriors worried that the lack of Prot DPS output will cost us raid spots on balls-to-the-wall DPS races like Festergut, he says:

[...] I honestly think it’s hard to argue that your choice of tank often costs you a kill because of the dps of the tank. Often those numbers are rounding errors compared to the damage capable by the dps specs in the raid. However, I don’t think you even need to invoke that argument. I think it just feels crappy when your dps is lower than other tanks.

(Quotes catalogued by my brother in beef Tarsus over at Tanking for Dummies.)

Now, I don’t know any Prot warrior who thinks we should be cranking out 6000+ DPS like the rogues and the hunters.  That’s crazy talk.  It’ll never happen and it shouldn’t happen.  But there’s an open question here–just how low is Prot warrior damage compared to the other tanking classes?  Is it just a “rounding error,” or something more?

Enter Warwench over at Tankspot, and a Google spreadsheet comprising tank-spec DPS log parses of the top 120 attempts logged at World of Logs so far on each of the Icecrown 25-man bosses currently available.  (The thread over at Tankspot is here.  Thanks to Veneretio over at Tanking Tips for originally Tweeting this yesterday.)  This is an attempt to quantify what tank-spec characters are putting out in the pain department on cutting-edge content.  It’s not complete, because WoL apparently can’t break out tank-spec death nuggets from DPS-spec, so Warwench couldn’t include DKs in the data–a significant omission.  But it’s a start.

The results, I think, are surprising.  Not that paladins are the top DPS-output tanks, we knew that already.  But druids are doing very well for themselves.  Bares, clearly, are storng for fite.  And warriors aren’t just at the bottom…we’re in the basement.  In fact, on some fights, we’re not even in the basement–we’re doing a Jimmy Hoffa in the foundation.

On Lord Marrowgar, for example, we seem to be running about 15% below the average damage output of paladins, bears, and warriors combined.  Lady Deathwhisper?  20% down.  Festergut, the biggest straight-up pure DPS race since Patchwerk?  18% down.  Rotface?  A bit closer at about 11% under average.  Saurfang, a fight where we can just stand in one spot and tee off with occasional back-and-forth taunts?  A very consistent 17% to 18% under average.  Only on Professor Putricide, for some reason–maybe the mechanics?–do Prot warriors seem to be able to score consistently above average.  Warwench also added in a set of about 40 data points for the “gold standard” of DPS yardsticks, Patchwerk.  On those Patchwerk fights, warriors were about 10% under the combined average for paladins, druids, and warriors.

What these numbers seem to indicate is that warriors consistently rank 500 to 1000 DPS behind paladins or druids in every fight in ICC-25 save one.  Looking at Festergut, the average difference seems to be about 1000 DPS.  In a five-minute fight like Festergut, that 1000 DPS difference comes out to three hundred thousand damage. That’s about 1% of Festergut’s health.  How many raids have wiped on Festergut at 1% so far?  A few, I guess, maybe not many.

Numbers can be twisted a lot of different ways–lies, damned lies, and statistics, and all that.  Personally I think Warwench has done the whole tanking community a service by putting these out there so we can see what the top tanks can do in terms of DPS, and how at least three of the four tank classes compare to each other.  But the question still stands–are Prot warriors so far down on DPS that raids might not take them in place of a paladin or druid or DK?

Well…maybe.  I don’t know.  There’s a lot of other factors involved.  The Anvil, for example, has two warrior tanks, and as far as I know, neither of us are going anywhere no matter how many 1% wipes we ever do on Festergut.  Other raids, where loyalty is less important than pushing the envelope, may factor this into their decisions on who goes and who sits.  1000 to 2000 DPS can, as GC says, probably be made up by the DPS classes fine-tuning things (especially since there’s usually about 15 of them compared to two or three tanks).  So no, I don’t think this is the end of the world for warrior tanks.  But it is, as Ghostcrawler says, normal to “feel crappy” when your damage is that far down compared to your brothers in the trenches.

All I know is this…the damage output difference between warriors and the other tank classes, as documented here, is damn sure not just a “rounding error.”  And with the proposed Prot warrior Shield Slam scaling changes, along with some others (Rune Strike changes to DKs a while back as an example), Blizzard seems to be backsliding from the Wrath of the Lich King principle of “threat through damage” and returning to the older paradigm of lower tank damage, but using “bonus threat” to make up for it.  Well, at least for some tanks.

The nerfing will not be televised

I think I’ve left this world behind and fallen through some bizarre space-time portal into a mirror universe.  Seriously.  Superman’s a bad guy, pizza is good for you, and hey, there’s Mr. Spock in a goatee and carrying some neural torturer device thing.

How else can I possibly explain seeing this little nugget pop up from the esteemed Ghostcrawler:

– Protection warriors have too much utility and damage for PvP. (We don’t want to hurt their tanking in PvE of course.)

…wut?  I mean, wut? Protection.  Warriors.  Too.  Much.  Damage.  DOES NOT COMPUTE.

As near as I can tell, this was brought on by the fact that somebody actually got killed in an arena match by a Prot warrior–probably a mage.  This is apparently a violation of some sort of arena rule that Prot warriors are not ever actually allowed to kill anything, or be anything more than “annoying.”

Now, frankly?  Arenas can go die in a toxic waste spill for all I care.  My only arena experience was helping a couple of friends intentionally wreck their 3v3 rating to see how low they could go.  (799, btw.  Do you know how freaking hard it is to actually lose a match in the 900 bracket, even if you’re trying?)  As a PvE player, arenas have done nothing for me except to screw up various and sundry of my toons in various and sundry ways, as they get nerfed to compensate for the hardcore e-sporters screaming “zomg unbalanced!”

And now, this.  Protection warriors–protection warriors, people–are doing too much damage in PvP and have to get nerfed.  So just how does Blizzard think they’re going to nerf us incredibly overpowered Prot warriors, as we go slaughtering everything in sight in PvP (cough cough)?  Well, here’s some info from Bornakk about it:

In the next content patch the current plan is to change Warbringer a bit so that it no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares but Intervene would remain unaffected.

We’ll see if any further changes come down the pipeline.

Not a massive nerf for PvE.  I like having Charge and Intercept bust me out of snares, but I could live without it.  As long as we can still use all our abilities without having to switch stances…meh, it’s a nerf, but not a huge one.

We are also considering some changes to Shield Slam to where it won’t affect players in normal tanking gear but it will affect the scaling of block value for those who are stacking it. This isn’t guaranteed as we still want to make sure it doesn’t have a real negative effect on PvE, but in turn we may have the threat caused by Shield Slam just straight increased. We’ll see how this goes as we test it internally.

DANGER.  DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.  DAMAGE NERF INCOMING.

There seems to be some confusion on what changes we are currently looking at that will affect Shield Slam.

What we are changing is block’s scaling on Shield Slam and not block value itself. Shield Slam’s scaling is being altered so this includes Shield Block Value, but it also includes all of the Strength on the PvE dps gear.

For players wearing normal PvE tanking gear, they should not see much of a difference, but we are increasing the threat of Shield Slam to make sure. Anybody stacking a lot of damage gear will probably notice a difference in their Shield Slams though.

Spock:  “Captain, sensors identify a damage nerf incoming, bearing two two six mark eight five, speed Warp Six.”

The problem with the PvP side of Warbringer is that when you consider prot warrior versus mage (just as an example), there was nothing a mage could do to a well versed warrior. The warrior carries a lot of stuns, silences, and then any attempt to root him is broken by multiple abilities. So then the warrior’s teammate (like a hunter) is just doing tons of damage while the target has no defenses.

Um…wait.  Wasn’t there a word for what used to happen when a warrior chased after a mage and couldn’t catch up because of roots or snares and the mage could just /point, /laugh, and /nuke?  Oh yeah, kiting. Apparently it is preferable for a mage to be able to kite a warrior than a warrior to be able to bitchslap the mage.  I guess the mages have a better political action committee than we do.

Here are some more specifics on the (possible) Shield Slam changed. Remember, nothing is finalized at this point.

The diminishing returns on shield slam damage now starts to kick in when shield block value is more than 1960 (at level 80). It maxes at behaving as if your shield block value is 2072 when your block value is actually 3160 (again, at level 80). Remember this includes the scaling from both shield block value on gear AND shield block value from Strength.

Oh, but “it won’t affect us in PvE.”  Uh…yes it fucking will.

Linedan’s tank gear–not stacked for shield block value at all–has almost 2000 SBV when he’s raid buffed.  His threat set, which stacks strength and SBV to maximize damage, has closer to 3000.  In his threat set, he’s already gotten nerfed damage-wise once.  And now he’s about to take another one.

All of this might not send me into the realm of a full rage bar IRL except for one undeniable, cold, hard fact:  warriors are already the lowest-damage class out of the four tanking classes. Look at your raid’s or guild’s tanks on Recount sometime.  Compare what the death nuggets and paladins and even druids can do compared to a warrior.  Boy, I’d sure love to be able to crank out 3500 dps while tanking a raid boss.  I do, typically, somewhere in the low 2000s…less if it’s a fight where I have to switch off with another tank (Saurfang) and spend significant time not being hit, even less if I’m offtanking and have to run around and gather adds without the benefit of Consecrate or Death & Decay or Death Grip.

“But your job isn’t to do damage, it’s to hold threat!”  Yes, I know.  That’s a frequent argument that DPS throws at tanks.  It’s a correct one…to a point.  But answer me this, Gentle Reader…if you’ve got two capable tanks, and you’re staring a DPS race like Festergut in the face, who would you rather have?  The death nugget who can push 4k DPS on the fight, or the warrior who does 2k?  What if you’re the offtank, what do you do during the part of the fight when it’s not your job to hold threat?  Have your damage lowered even more?  Would you rather have “bonus threat” instead of damage?  I wouldn’t.  Screw “bonus threat.”  I want to generate my threat the way that Blizzard said that threat would be generated in Wrath of the Lich King…through damage. Instead, I get lowered damage and “bonus threat.”

So here we are, the lowest-damage tanking class by a mile…and Blizzard is talking about lowering our Shield Slam damage even more because of fucking arenas. Well yay.  Excuse me if I’m not sitting in the stands at the next MLG event.

Guess it was our turn in the gunsights sooner or later.

You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry

Ho. Ho. Ho. Happy Winterveil.

Yes, that’s right.  The cheery, festive, and heavily armed Panzercow you see above you, resplendent in his Red Winter Hat (thank you, Grand Magus Telestra), has switched his DPS offspec from Arms to Fury.  (And no, this does not make me a fury furry.)

Why?  Well, frankly, because I wanted to, and because my raid was OK with it even though we already bring a Fury warrior who’s much better-geared and much better at it.  As I’ve written before, I never really wanted Linedan to be a tank.  I’d just gotten done playing a warrior tank in Everquest for the better part of four years, and, quite frankly, I wanted to own some face.  It wasn’t until Karazhan that I ended up having to spec him Protection full-time.  For a while in vanilla, he was an odd build, a two-hand Fury/Prot hybrid (5/31/15) that was supposed to be a good DPS/offtank build.  But, he never had the gear to make it really work.

When I was fortunate enough to pick up the two nice weapons in the picture above–the Dual-Blade Butcher from ToC-25 and the Keen Obsidian Edged Blade from Onyxia-10–I figured it was time to give Fury another try after years away.  And so far, I’m having quite a lot of fun at it.  (The Keen OEB is particularly special to me…when Lin was first running Molten Core with the Anvil back in the day, all I wanted to get him was an Obsidian Edged Blade, because it looked cool and would’ve been a significant upgrade.  Between DKP and poor luck on drops, it took him four freaking months to finally get one…and it’s still in my bank to this day.)

I’ve been running more heroics as DPS than tank on Lin, to get practice (and because I don’t always want to deal with tanking for a PUG).  Fury has a reasonably simple rotation, and doesn’t have all of the waiting-for-Godot that Arms does.  The downside is, well, it’ll get you killed.  A lot.  Considering that your primary attack is Whirlwind, which hits five targets for the damage of both your weapons?  And that your burst damage with a lot of rage can be ridiculously high, with you in melee range and thus not having that extra 20% threat buffer?  Hellooooo, agro.  Like a lot of DPS specs, you can go balls-out and e-peen some pretty impressive numbers on the meters without a lot of skill, you just need the gear.  The skill comes in knowing when not to mash the pedal to the floor…when to hold off a second on a Whirlwind or when to use something else.  You know, when to not be That Guy who’s pulling agro and pissing off the tank, stressing the healer, and getting yourself deaded.  Because Fury warriors have no agro dump except the Sprawl of Shame.

How impressive are the numbers?  Well, not very–remember, I’m still learning it.  But with a mish-mash of Ulduar- and ToC-level gear, mostly ilevels between 219 and 245, I can push well over 3000 in heroics and get near 4000 in raids (much more on trash, where Whirlwind + glyphed Cleave really pads numbers).  I know I can do better, I’m still working on it.  But it’s better than Arms, and it’s enough that on nights where I am not in the Anvil’s tank rotation, I can contribute without being totally humiliated.

I love tanking.  I never want to give up being Prot at this point (Ghostcrawler notwithstanding…but that’s a rant for another time).  But occasionally, it just feels good to pick up two gigantic weapons and just destroy everything in your path.  Cow smash!

Shining Pearls of Wisdom–Your PUG Tank and You

The awesome orcish hawtness that is Kadomi tweeted this beautiful little nugget from the WoW Europe forums today…it’s so good, I think it needs its own blog post.  An excerpt:

“Gogogogogogogogogogogogogo”:
This actually enrages basicly every tank, it’s pushing and annoying, and could easily be repaced by: “I’m ready ” or “Pull when you are ready”.
- If you want your tank to accidentaly let you die, use gogogogo.
- If not, just use a more friendly way to let the tank know you want to move on.
- Give the tank some time to get ready, find out what is the best way to pull the mobs, regain mana/rage etc.
- Keep in mind that the Tank might be waiting for the healer to be on full mana.
- Don’t pull. And by that I really mean, don’t pull. If you’re out of luck, the tank and healer will just let you die.

You have to read the entire post to understand just how fantastic it is.  Sourabaya (the OP) pretty much hits every annoyance that a tank can run into when tanking a PUG.  “Helpful” pullers, people ragging on your gear, the “zomg pull fastur u noob” spam, it’s all there.

I may have a deeper post on this later, but honestly, I don’t think I can add very much to what Sourabaya posted.  Read it for now, and maybe I can find a different tack on this later on this week.

LFD: Looking For D-Bags

(Before we begin, please observe a moment of silence for my home computer’s hard drive, whose crappy firmware last night decided to depart this fallen earth and leave behind its bricked metal shell.  This may also be used as a cautionary tale…if you’ve got a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA drive in your machine, back the damn thing up now. This is the second one I’ve had fail in less than eighteen months.  DIAF, Seagate, I’m done with you.  It’s off to Worst Buy tonight for some Western Digital lovin’ and an evening spent reinstalling everydamnthing on my computer instead of hanging out with my guild for our in-game Winterveil party.)

Obviously, a lot of the chatter in the WoW blogosphere has been about patch 3.3’s awesome new Looking for Dungeon cross-server instancing tool.  It is, after all, simplicity itself.  It removes anything resembling thought, effort, or social interaction from running your favorite five-man instances!  Just push a few buttons, sit back and wait (note:  the waiting part is optional if you are a tank or healer), and voila.  You too will be thrown into a wonderful garden spot like Utgarde Keep or Gun’drak with four total strangers with whom you will engage in 10 to 30 minutes of frenzied activity and then never see again.  As others are wondering, is this what casual sex feels like?

I have run about, eh, 25 or so random heroics since the patch went in.  About half have been on Beltar, my dwarf hunter, with the remainder split between Linedan and my other level 80 alts.  I’ve only tanked three randoms on Lin–the others, I’ve gone as DPS to practice on his new offspec (more on that in another post).  And much to my surprise, generally, my experiences have been neutral to pleasant.

Now, I’m not generally accused of a huge amount of charity toward my fellow WoW players.  I never liked to PUG that much before the LFD tool came along.  But suddenly, I find it strangely addicting.  Part of it, I think, is that I’m finding that my two most undergeared alts–Illithanis the BM hunter and Moktor the blood DK–don’t actually suck as much as I thought they did, or perhaps I don’t suck as much at playing them as I thought I did, or some of both.  (The links are to their respective Armory pages, so you may gaze upon them and laugh.)  Both of them are generally running with a good bit of ilevel 200 gear, Illy more so because she actually got into a few 10-man Naxx runs several months back.  Both seem capable of consistently bringing 1800-2200 dps in heroics, despite Illy’s wasp dying regularly and my seeming inability to grasp the DK concept of “PS – IT - HS – HS - DS - RP  //  DS – HS – HS – HS – HS - RP”.  (I get my DS before my HS, or I stop and RP instead of actually using runic power, or some such.  Letturs r hard.)  Anyhoo, while neither of them are going to rizzock the hizzouse in Ulduar or higher anytime soon, so far, they’ve not even been laughed at by a heroic group, much less votekicked.  In fact, Illy, with her pedestrian 2k dps, has topped the meters more than once.

No, really, I’ve only seen one person get kicked (a rogue, in full Hateful Gladiator’s with 25k health, only doing 800 dps), and no massive displays of incompetence.  Now what I have seen are a few examples of some pretty serious douchebag ex machina, and the one overriding thing…silence.

Let’s talk about the d-bags.  There haven’t been many, and contrary to what some of us RP-server types might think, these weren’t primarily from PvP servers.  Probably the biggest example I saw was when I had dps!Linedan on a heroic Azjol-Nerub run.  The tank was a death nugget that had about 29,500 health buffed out.  Nobody said anything, even though there seems to be this unspoken rule that if your tank has less than about 45k health, THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN POSSIBLY TANK A HEROIC AZJOL AMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.  Never mind that I tanked heroic AN back in the day with 25k in crafted blues and epics.  Poorly, but I did it.  And I had to walk uphill in the snow four miles each way to do it.

So off we went, and it was a perfectly normal dungeon run.  Nobody died, we killed Anub v1.0 and everything was peachy.  Then the following conversation ensued between the healer, a tree druid from Uldum, and the tank:

Tree says, “hey, (tank name here)?”

Tank says, “huh?”

Tree says, “Nothing.  I just wanted you to respond so I could ignore you and never group with you again.  Get some gear, noob.”

Now mind you, nobody died.  We never wiped.  The tank never lost agro, even on the trash-filled last part of Anub, which can still get a little bit pear-shaped even in high-zoot Tier gear.  Apparently, the tree actually might’ve had to work a little at healing the DK, and we can’t possibly have that.

I tried to buck up the DK by telling him, “look, my main spec is prot, I’ve got 4/5 T9.25, I tank ToGC and Icecrown.  I know tanking even if I don’t know how DKs do it.  You did fine.  Screw the haters.”  I hope he believed me.  I wish I could remember the guy’s name and server, so I could give him a shout-out.

And speaking of shouts or the lack thereof…that’s the other creepy thing about LFD.  The total silence.  I’ve gone complete instance runs without anybody in the party–me included–saying a damn thing.  We land at the entrance, buffs fly, and then the tank wordlessly runs off and grabs the first trash group without saying a word.  And off we go to the races, the tank setting a blistering pace (almost without exception) while the DPS and the healer pant along behind.  Chain-pulling is the order of the day, crowd control is not needed.  No strategy, no breaks, no drinking.  I’m damn glad my only mana-using class I’ve taken through randoms has been a hunter, because the ability to regen on the run with Aspect of the Viper is the only thing keeping me from ending up half a mile behind the main group.

Eventually we’ll kill the final boss, get some screen spam and extra emblems…and then, maybe, somebody will say “thanks” or “gg”, and that’s it.  The group’s dissolved, and I’m back wherever I was before I queued, richer by some enchanting mats and badgers, and maybe, on my lesser-geared characters, some new toys.  It’s a fun experience, but it’s oddly empty.  I console myself with the thought that probably I don’t really want to talk to the other four people I just grouped with…but that’s not much of a way to play, and not a very good thought to have, now is it?

I really don’t like only having one roleplay server per battlegroup.  I would love to be able to instance-group with RPers from places like Argent Dawn and Sentinels and Moon Guard (leave your vampire catgirls and sons of Arthas at home plox), and do some of these heroics at a slightly more relaxed pace in-character.  Instead, this is a strictly OOC business we’re in, running these randoms.  It’s all about speed.  I know on the ones that I’ve tanked, I feel pushed because I’m not normally a chain-puller.  I cut my teeth as an undergeared tank that had to wait for healers and DPS to fill their tanks before pulling again, and that’s carried over into Lin’s current pimped-out status.  My very first tank run, I had a DK “helpfully” start pulling “for” me.  Nothing frosts my cornflakes faster than somebody else doing the pulling when I’m the tank.  My theory is simple:  I’d rather take two minutes longer to finish the instance than risk a wipe that’ll cost us five minutes.  So in randoms, I do pull faster, but I always check that there’s at least some blue in the blue bars in my party frames, and that we’re all gathered, before pulling.

Heck, sometimes, I even say things in party chat.  RANK HERESY!

Tirion Fordring is the Marlin Perkins of Icecrown.

(Disclaimer:  The following post is brought to you by Linedan’s player being in a very strange mood. You have been warned.)

For you young people who never had the privilege of knowing who he was, Marlin Perkins was the host of the long-running nature show Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom for over twenty years (1963-1985).  Aside from being one of the pioneers of the nature-show format, Wild Kingdom was semi-famous for having good ol’ Marlin sit back and narrate while his poor long-suffering sidekick–professional zoologist and dangerous animal target Jim Fowler–actually had to go out and do the real hands-on work.  Typically Marlin would be chillin’ like a villain either back at the base camp with the native girls or, more likely, back in some studio somewhere recording voiceovers like “Here’s Jim giving the angry musk ox a hernia exam while I’m at the hotel watching Spectravision and making travel reservations for our flight home.  Don’t forget the latex glove, Jim!”  Jim was a stud.  Basically, Jim was Bear Grylls when Bear Grylls was still wearing diapers.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that Tirion Fordring is our Marlin Perkins.

Think about it.  Here’s Tirion, old veteran undead-wrangler, rebuilder of the Silver Hand, co-founder of the Argent Crusade and the Ashen Verdict (because we obviously needed yet another rep grind).  Compare that to Marlin, who was a respected zoologist and zoo curator for decades before he walked in front of a TV camera.  They’ve both been there, done that, and honestly, have probably earned the right to take a bit of a break from the front lines of either cleaving Scourge in twain or attempting to radio-collar a pissed-off grizzly.  (At least Marlin never had to stand in the same big round room all the time and listen to Garrosh Hellscream and Varian Wrynn neener at each other.)

But really, here’s the analogy.  Marlin always sent Jim out into the bush to do the dirty work while he sat back, right?  So does Tirion.  You walk into Icecrown Citadel, and there’s Tirion hanging out with High Badass Saurfang.  We get a brief glimpse that Bolvar Fordragon may not, in fact, be beyond saving, and Saurfang hauls ass for the Orgrim’s Hammer because hey, if Bolvar’s not dead, then maybe there’s a chance to get Wrynn and Garrosh to quit slapfighting long enough to actually do something about the Scourge.

At which point, Tirion says something like this.  I tuned out for part of it, but this is what I heard:

“Blah.  Blah blah heroes blah blah Arthas blah final battle blah blah justice blah blah shining suns blah blah Verdict blah.  Now let’s watch our heroes get overwhelmed by trash skeletons and sliced and diced by Lord Marrowgar, while I’m back here at base camp in the hot tub learning the finer points of the Pandaren tea ceremony from Lady Proudmoore.”

Or back at the Crusader’s Coliseum:

“Blah blah working together blah challenge blah worthy blah 15 badges of Triumph blah blah.  Now let’s watch our heroes save us from trifling idiot gnomes ‘working of their own volition’ (insert fingerquotes here) while I’m behind the screen discussing the finer points of Enlightenment philosophy with Argent Confessor Paletress.”

So there you have it.  Tirion Fordring is WoW’s version of Marlin Perkins.  Discuss!

Panzercow hits 3.3. 3.3 hits back.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty short on blogfodder.  I’ve been going through a mild burnout with the game and been dabbling in EVE Online and Dragon Age instead.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love my friends in game, raiding with The Anvil, all that fun stuff.  But things had stalled a bit.

For Linedan, the satisfaction was bleeding out of raiding.  Trial of the Crusader was, frankly, nothing more than a one-hour expedition to dispense 15 badges.  Trial of the Grand Crusader was nothing more than Trial of the Crusader with the red numbers on my screen turned up to ridiculous levels…and maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about taking a fight that we usually roflstomp on normal (Beasts) and having it pimpslap us into the ground on heroic that just grates me a bit.  I don’t get mad at my raid, I just get annoyed with Blizzard for undertuning ToC so badly that they left a cliff wall the size of El Capitan between normal and heroic.  I could, and should, RP with him more, but Lin is not exactly Captain Happy Fun Tiems in his personal interactions.  Besides, a schedule change has left me unable to attend Noxilite’s Monday night storytelling/guild meetup in the Barrens.

With Beltar, it was kind of the opposite.  He doesn’t have a regular raid.  He’s largely a roleplay character these days, and a great one.  But at the same time, I am serious about advancing him gear-wise.  On the rare occasions I can raid with him, I do.  That doesn’t happen often, though…and once you’re through the solo quest content, which he mostly is except for some Icecrown stuff, and you’re already wearing a mix of stuff from a few Naxxes 6-7 months ago and some loot-trashcan pieces from the rare Ulduar, what then?  So while I’ve been having fun roleplaying him, I often wonder just what the little guy could do if he was geared up like Linedan was.

And then there’s my stable of alts–Illithanis (80 BM hunter), Moktor (80 orc death nugget), my up-and-comers like Sakula (77 troll shaman and ladies’ man) and my prot warrior experiment Latisha (currently 68, and yes, she’s wearing Outland slut plate).  They need some love too.  But after the fourth or fifth time, even Storm Peaks gets old.  What to do with them after cap?  All of them are sub-Naxx geared.  They’ll never get into raids–too much of a gear gap to overcome, I’m needed as a tank where I am now, and I don’t have time to raid on any more than two characters as it is.  So why put forth the time?

Enter Patch 3.3:  Fail of the Lich King.  (Yes, I know it’s “Fall of the Lich King.”  Look at the font on the logo when you open your Launcher and tell me it doesn’t look like “Fail of the Lich King,” dammit.)

Suddenly, most of these problems have been solved.

Linedan has a new raid to play with.  No more Trial of the Big Round Room With Two Settings, Too Easy and Too Hard.  Welcome to Icecrown Citadel, and kids, let me tell you, it kicks so much ass it’s painful.  I rang up over 200 gold in repairs in there over the weekend and we only downed one boss (Lord Marrowgar)…and I don’t care. It’s fantastic.  You’d better bring your “A” game, because Arthas is not playing flag football.  Crowd control is back, with a vengeance…most of the trash pulls we’ve seen so far are between six and nine mobs.  (Priests, time to get your shackles out for more than just private fun in the cloisters.)  Lord Marrowgar is challenging but doesn’t seem to be over-the-top impossible once you use a little brainpower and figure out a good movement/tanking strategy.  The two fights we’ve seen so far on 25-man require three tanks–oh frabjous joy for a raid that carries four tanks every week, fewer people forced into their secondary role!

And for a second, ditch the mechanics, ditch the loot…this is Icecrown, people.  That’s Arthas up there.  That’s the Big Bad who’s been hovering over the Warcraft franchise for nigh on ten years now.  The special guest stars are everywhere…Tirion Fordring, Saurfang the Elder (and his son, in a way), Bolvar Fordragon, Muradin Bronzebeard.  Lore whores and roleplayers like me are loving this.  It looks good.  It sounds good.  It is good.

And then there’s the five-mans.  Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection.  I’ve only run them once, on normal, with one other attempt (unsuccessful) at the HoR gauntlet on heroic.  Forge of Souls looks big, but actually is fairly small and linear, and doesn’t appear too awful hard, though all these instances are considerably harder than existing level 80 5-mans, both normal and heroic–think Magister’s Terrace for the difficulty jump.  Pit of Saron is my favorite, a giant outdoor quarry full of Alliance and Horde slaves, with some awesome NPC interaction, funny boss fights (leper gnomes with mohawks FTW), a nasty but cool gauntlet, and twists near the end.

And then there’s Halls of Reflection.  Any instance that can simultaneously have me gushing at how awesome it is and literally screaming in frustration is probably doing something right.  HoR is brutal on tanks from a technical standpoint.  The first boss fight in there left me with an aching wrist and exhausted…and then I had to turn around and flee for my life while holding off waves of undead with the Lich King his own mother-humping self coming to eat my face.  The final gauntlet in HoR is simultaneously brilliant and frustrating, at least if you’re a warrior or a bear.

What about Beltar and the alts?  Looking for Dungeon, baby.  Random heroics.  It works brilliantly.  You can accumulate badges at a ridiculous rate, and at least so far, the idiot quotient seems to be quite low.  Most people I’ve run with have been quiet, and none have been RPers, but they’re mostly at least competent enough to get the job done.  The tanks and healers I’ve run with have, for the most part, actually been quite good.  Oh, and how ridiculous is “a ridiculous rate?”  Ridiculous as in, in one weekend, Beltar has gotten two pieces of Tier 9 (gloves/shoulders), a new gun from heroic Coliseum, a bronze drake from CoS, and the Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement.  In one weekend.

So the final score for WoW over the past four days?

Thursday:  Icecrown Citadel 25-man on Linedan, downed Lord Marrowgar.

Friday:  Icecrown Citadel 25-man and Trial of the Crusader 25-man on Linedan.  Full clear on ToC, didn’t quite get Lady Deathwhisper in ICC but we’re doing better.

Saturday:  Trial of the Crusader 10-man (full clear, 5 for 5 on one-shots), Onyxia 10-man, Naxx 10-man (weekly raid quest, just Anub’rekhan) and ICC 10-man on Linedan with Lord Marrowgar one-shotted.  Plus a couple random heroics on Beltar, and all three of the new 5-mans on normal with Linedan.

Sunday:  7 random heroics on Beltar, two on Moktor my DK, one on Linedan.

Soooo…what do you guys think?  Think I’m burned out any more?

Me neither.

I’ve got a bunch more 3.3 posts mentally lining up.  One on the LFD system and its quirks, one on the five-mans in which I fully accept that Halls of Reflection has made me its bitch and I don’t mind, and one on Icecrown’s first two bosses with a little about strategery and a little about tanking.  Stay tuned.