Holding patterns

So here in the States, it’s Thanksgiving week…a time where we take trips to see family members we really don’t want to see, eat until we’d want to puke except the l-tryptophan in the turkey’s made us too sleepy to lean over the toilet, and, oh yeah, watch the Detroit Lions lose.  Again.  (In the Panzercow family’s case, this Thanksgiving week will be taken up by packing, cleaning, and moving into a new bunker across town, broken by Thanksgiving dinner at Maggiano’s.  Something tells me by Saturday, I’ll be thankful for Ben-Gay.)

A lot of raids, including The Anvil, are off this week–in our case, because we raid Thursday and Friday, taking the week off is a no-brainer.  This enforced rest is a good time to sit and think about what we’ve done in the past near-year of Wrath of the Lich King, and start planning for what’s coming over the horizon…patch 3.3 and Icecrown Citadel, the last big raid before Blizzard blows the whole thing up with Cataclysm sometime next year.

Let’s talk about Lich King raids.  In the beginning, of course, there was Naxxramas.  Yeah, Blizzard grabbed Naxxramas out of the bottom of one of those bright blue plastic recycling bins and ran it through the crusher to reform it into Wrath of the Lich King’s first raid.  But Naxx in and of itself is, I think, a fairly well-designed raid instance.  You can tell it’s an old-world vanilla WoW raid because of the amount of trash inside…overall, though, they did a pretty good job freshening it up for level 80s.

The thing that shocked people upon starting to play around in Naxxramas was how fecking easy it was, by design.  Naxxramas was proof that Blizzard wanted to make raiding accessible to far more people in WotLK, and they succeeded.  Any raid group that wasn’t made up of people who ate lots of lead-based paint as a child could walk in there and clear two wings the very first night.  Get yourself a reasonable amount of heroic dungeon or ilevel 200 crafted gear, and lrn2play, and yes, you too could stand astride Naxxramas like a colossus.  We didn’t exactly dominate the entire place in one night when we started 25-mans in there, but it didn’t take us that long.  We went from a standing stop to dropping Kel’Thuzad in something like five weeks.  In BC, with largely the same cast of characters, we spent longer than that working on Lady Vashj in Serpentshrine Cavern alone.  We never did get Kael’thas down until the 3.0 patch went in, at which point we were able to roflstomp him.  After SSC and TK, Naxxramas was a Caribbean vacation, complete with college girls (or cabana boys, if you’d prefer).

Enter Ulduar.  Ulduar was a return–somewhat–to old-school raiding.  Unlike Naxxramas, Ulduar made you work, at least a little, for your rewards.  I wrote about this a few times back in April when The Anvil started on 25-man Ulduar.  It still wasn’t SSC or TK or Hyjal or Black Temple, and nowhere close to the oh-God-kill-me-now difficulty in Sunwell Plateau.  But compared to Naxx, it was challenging.

And Ulduar itself, I think, is Blizzard’s crowning achievement in raid instances, just barely displacing Karazhan from that spot.  It’s big, it feels grand and epic.  It’s pretty.  There’s enough trash to help you make your repair bills back, and the trash will bite you if you get lazy.  And the boss fights are varied and interesting.  There’s a vehicle fight that, unlike Malygos, doesn’t suck a bowling ball through a silly straw.  There’s fights that require offtanking, fights that require tank-switching, fights that require splitting your group, fights that require mobility, fights that are straight-up tank-and-spanks…and Yogg-Saron, which is up to fifteen minutes of pure craziness on crystal meth.  And with the introduction of “hard modes,” once you’d mastered the basic content, you could start ramping up the difficulty at your own pace and ability, in order to score achievements and some extra loot.  I’m not a big fan of hard modes in general because it feels like I’m only getting half the content I would be otherwise, but even I have to admit, in Ulduar, it worked.  We’ve been raiding Ulduar for seven months and we’ve only just now been able to get XT-002’s Heartbreaker, for example…and are still working on things like Freya +2, Thorim hardmode, or (oh God the pain) Mimiron’s Firefighter.

And then, we got patch 3.2.  And we got the Icecrown County Fair…uh, Trial of the Crusader.  In which Blizzard took all the good stuff about Ulduar and threw it right out the window into a passing garbage truck.

Now, I know that 3.2 was “filler” content between Ulduar in 3.1 and Icecrown Citadel in 3.3.  To ask for a Double Stuf Oreo’s worth of filling in between those two crunchy cookies, eh, that may be a bit much.  But ToC isn’t even a real Oreo.  It’s one of those crappy store-brand versions that’s got about 0.3 mm of godawful fake-vanilla stuff in between two stale soggy wafers.

Where to start.  Well, how about…it’s one room? That’s it.  One big round room.  It might as well be a Coke machine.  Right-click human dude to insert $1.25, machine dispenses refreshing beverage…uh, pissy magmataur, two huge-ass worms, and a yeti.  (Don’t stand in the yeti.)  What’s worse?  They recycled the same frigging room for the 5-man heroic dungeon.  Art fail.

But the real screwup isn’t how it looks, it’s how it plays.  When we finally headed into ToC for the first time, we dropped the first three encounters in about 2 1/2 hours.  That’s pretty good for a first time into a raid instance.  But here’s the trick–we got loot off those three encounters that absolutely peed all over the loot we were getting out of Ulduar at the time…where we were still working on difficult fights like Thorim and Vezax.

The fights in ToC aren’t difficult.  They’re stupidly easy for the rewards that you’re given.  They’re gimmick fights…learn the gimmick, and they’re yawners.  Only Faction Champions (the ultimate broken-ass faux-PvP nerdrage fight, now nerfed down to Faction Declawed Kittens) and Anub’arak will keep you awake in normal ToC.  Pretty soon, we were sharding two-thirds of the loot we picked up in Ulduar because our core group had already blown past that tier of stuff and were picking up ilevel 239/245 things out of 10- or 25-man ToC every week.

We cleared normal ToC after four weeks of work.  That’s right, kids, we cleared a Tier 9 instance faster than we did Naxxramas.  And all that time, we were scoring ilevel 245 loot and Tier 9 badges at a feverish pace.  This wasn’t just a vending machine, it was a stuck vending machine that kept dropping cold Cokes on our feet.  We can now walk into normal ToC and clear the whole thing out in less than an hour and fifteen minutes…and get around sixteen piece of ilevel 245 loot and 15 Badges of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.  Were it not for hard modes, we wouldn’t even be going to Ulduar any more.  And even when we do get the hard modes, it’s just to say we did it.  The rewards from them simply can’t compare to what we get sleepwalking our way through ToC.  Mudflation, much?

But ToC has one final kick in the nuts to deliver.  Switch it to heroic.

Our raid group could demolish ToC normal, no sweat.  Then we walked in there on heroic and got owned. As in, couldn’t get Gormok past 35%, forget the Twin Jormungar or Icehowl.  Gormok’s Impales were landing for 40k–that was 85% of my buffed health, in one shot–near the end of the fight.  Yes, I know, you’re supposed to use a rotation similar to what the tank gets on Mimiron’s Shock Blast–Hand of Something, Pain Suppression, Shield Wall, etc.  But I am not, to put it mildly, a fan of fights that basically come down to “if the priest lags for a half-second, and the RNG hates your dodge%, you’re dead and there’s damn all you can do about it.”  That issue aside, now this is the beat-your-face-in difficulty level I expect from a Tier 9 instance that can give me ilevel 245+ stuff.

The difficulty gap between Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader is the size of the Grand Canyon.  And it’s not so much because ToGC is too hard, although I’ve got issues with some of the fight designs (see Gormok above).  It’s because ToC is way, way, waaaaaay too easy for the rewards you get.

It is horrific design all around, and even though I go every week and tank it or DPS it for The Anvil, I am most heartily sick of it.  I do my job so we can get out of there faster and get on to something else that is actually fun and challenging…be it Ulduar, be it Onyxia (which still rocks my socks off), be it even Trial of the Grand Oh God Not The Face.

This leaves us, as a raid, in a holding pattern, and the strain may be starting to show.  We’re doing ToC every week to gear up for Icecrown, but it’s not like we can try hardmodes on normal ToC a la Ulduar.  We grind through our 15 badges, and then we go to the familiar confines of Ulduar to work on hardmodes, which are still actually hard to us, or Onyxia.  Every so often we take another poke at ToGC to see if we’ve ramped up our DPS and strategy for Beasts, but I don’t know how much heart we’ve got in that right now…because that will be a long grind to power through, given how hard it is, and 3.3 draws ever closer.

You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to Icecrown Citadel.  Bring it on, Arthas, I’m waiting.

Faction Champions: a “worthless scrub” of a fight

I’ve decided that I, the player behind your kindly, warm, fuzzy Panzercow, am going to learn a foreign language.  Maybe Russian, that sounds pretty macho.  Or German…lots of glottal stops and hard vowels and eleventy-syllable compound words, and besides, my wife majored in it in college.  Heck, maybe I’ll just have some fun and go for Klingon.  Klingon is pretty metal.

Why, you ask?  Because English, as wonderful a language as it is, simply does not have enough nasty-sounding words for me to express just how incredibly fucking much I hate the Faction Champions fight in the Crusader’s Coliseum. 

Not even “fucking,” that wonderful all-purpose spiked warhammer of a dirty word, quite gets the point across just how much I despise the Delrissa-on-Steroids encounter–even if I use italics.  Let’s take a look at all the various bits and pieces of this lovely little ten minutes of computerized Hell and see how they combine to turn the entire thing into a giant toasted turd sandwich garnished with fail and lovingly drizzled in noobsauce, shall we?

First, there’s the setup.  My thoughts about the entire Icecrown County Fair in general have been well-documented, and need not be repeated in depth here–overall, I think it’s kind of stupid.  The principle behind the Crusader’s Coliseum kicks it up a notch…gee, Tirion, I thought your Light-worshipping kinder-and-gentler human kind had evolved beyond bloody gladiatorial spectacles.  And then there’s Varian “The Chin” Wrynn–former slave gladiator–standing up there getting off on the entire thing having a grand old time like he’s parked on the fifty-yard line on NFL game day.  I can see Garrosh thinking the entire thing is great fun, but Wrynn?  A guy who’s literally “been there, done that, got the scars to prove it” is standing up there whooping it up with a big blue “Alliance #1″ foam finger and watching people die?  I don’t doubt for a second that Wrynn’s various ordeals have knocked a few things out of alignment upstairs, but I have a hard time believing that somebody who was enslaved and fought beasts to the death for a living would wish it on anybody else, at least on his own Alliance.  (OK, he probably would love to see us Horde get nommed by not one, but two Jormungar.)

So then the entire thing takes a bit of a turn after Lord Jaraxxus eats dirt.  (As an aside, why don’t we just kill the gnome?  It’s more fun and saves a lot of trouble.)  Garrosh gets his ass up on his shoulders about the Alliance summoning a demon…well, duh, Einstein, Tirion Fordring said the gnome was a warlock and that he was working for the Crusade, not for the Alliance.  But of course, Wrynn loses his cookies like a seven-year-old at the swingset, and the “nuh-uhhh” “uh-huh” “no u” “no u” “ur mom” “no ur mom” flies back and forth over our heads for a minute until Fordring has to sigh and say, “OK, Varian, send your people down to fight their people if it’ll shut you two the fuck up.  Oy, I’m getting a headache.”

(An aside:  Where are Thrall and Jaina through all this?  Why doesn’t Thrall turn around and lay the Doomhammer upside Garrosh’s punk head?  Why doesn’t Jaina raise one perfectly manicured hand and tell Wrynn he’s being a doosh?  Listen, you two, stop making goo-goo eyes at each other from across the arena and act like you run things, k?  K.)

The concept behind the fight itself is simple enough.  25 of you, 10 of them from the opposing faction, chosen from 14 different characters.  (On 25-man heroic, I think it’s supposed to be 25v13.)  It is a pretty straight copy of the Delrissa encounter from Magister’s Terrace.  The faction champions don’t have normal agro tables.  They switch targets frequently.  They have, and use, almost all the capabilities of their designated class–especially the annoying ones.  So the arms warrior pops Retaliation, Bladestorms, Mortal Strikes, Hamstrings, etc.  The resto druid pops various heals, thorns, etc.  The shamans (one resto, one enhancement) drop appropriate totems, they pop Heroism or Bloodlust, they heal, etc.  It’s a fight where you can’t simply say “tank this, offtank this, burn down this,” because you can’t control their agro.  It favors crowd control over raw DPS.

That’s the theory.  In practice, it combines the worst elements of PvE and PvP into one big spring roll of suck.

Where it runs into difficulty is in the entire concept of “locking down” certain faction champions, and the concept of “diminishing returns.”  We all know that things like taunts and stuns are on diminishing returns timers…by the fourth time or so that you use any one of them in rapid succession, the target is immune.  Now in PvP, that’s not always that big a problem, because your target’s got maybe 40 or 45 thousand health, max.  If you can keep them stunlocked or controlled and you have a couple of people to focus fire on them, by the time your control mechanisms become ineffective, your target’s going to be dead.

Try that when the target has 1.9 million health.

With 10 (or more) champions to worry about, unless you dogpile everybody on one or two and let the others roam free, you can’t truly “lock down” any of them, even the healers.  They will get heals off.  You can partially control them, but not totally.  Your hope is to reduce their effectiveness to the point that they aren’t contributing too much to things.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter if you’re a tank or not.  You’re getting stunned.  You’re getting shept.  You’re getting crowd-controlled and bitchslapped by bladestorming warriors and FoKing rogues.  Your AoE damage is reduced by 75% to keep you from just piling them up in the center and having everybody burn them down.  Their AoE damage isn’t reduced at all.  They have 2 million health each.  You have 25 to 45 thousand.

People call this a “PvP fight,” because certain pieces of PvP gear like CC-breaking trinkets help.  But it’s not.  It’s nothing more than a clusterfuck of a PvE fight where agro control is basically unworkable, where you have to try to use certain PvP-like mechanics to survive.  As a tank, these types of fights are mind-blowingly frustrating to me, because our job–the entire damn reason we’re even in the raid with our l33t 2000 dps–is control.  We are the controllers.  We make order out of chaos.  We control who attacks what (on both sides) and where and how the fight happens.  If you take the ability to control out of the fight…I think you can see how infuriating that can be.

And then, there’s the folks who just don’t really like PvP all that much.  Yes, skilled PvPers can be more effective in this fight because they’re used to the total chaos of it all, the fast target-switching, the situational awareness.  If you’re a raider who doesn’t PvP, doesn’t like it, and never learned it, why should you suddenly have to act like you’ve got a 5v5 rating of 1900 in order to get through a PvE raid fight?

Another reason I hate it?  I hate what it does to my raid.  We’re a fairly even-keeled bunch.  Yeah, we get frustrated after repeated wipes, but for the most part, we constructively channel it into thinking about strategy and how we can do better next attempt.  The first week we did Faction Champions, it took us seven tries to beat it.  By the fifth one, our Chief Cat Herder was probably thinking “if you kids don’t stop, I’m going to turn this raid around right now.”  People were snapping at each other like I hadn’t heard in quite a while.  Faction Champions raises the frustration and anger level of people like no other fight I’ve ever seen.

Finally–and tied in with the previous point–there’s a little piece of atmosphere Blizzard throws in for good measure.  Every time one of you dies, Wrynn (in our case) says something.  Sometimes it’s just “HAH!”  More commonly, it’s “Worthless scrub!”  Think about that.  The King of Stormwind, Big Cheese Kahuna of All Humanity and the Alliance and Yes, Even Gnomes, is using the word “scrub.”  (I’m sure Garrosh is equally charming when my Alliance friends have to go through this little ordeal.)  Hey, Blizz, was that really necessary?  You’ve already constructed a fight that sends PvEers like me into rabid convulsions of anger, do you really need to add that little extra cherry on top of Varian Wrynn verbally teabagging the casualties from the peanut gallery?

It’s all enough to make me convinced that the Alliance should’ve just let Wrynn get eaten in his slave pit, and I should’ve left Garrosh sitting in the dirt in Garadar those many months ago, listening to Simple Plan and cutting himself.  The world would’ve been made brighter thereby.

You know it’s going to be a bad night when…

…you’re Arms DPS on Hodir, you get a Storm Cloud buff, you reach for Bladestorm that you’ve bound to Shift-6…

…and you hit Mocking Blow that you’ve bound to Shift-5.

Just like you did last week.

Hi, my name is Linedan…

…and I’m an addon addict.

(“Hiiii, Linedan.”)

It’s pretty amazing, really, that Blizzard made the WoW interface so extensible.  I remember in the old days of the original Everquest, where the UI was the UI and that was that, period, end of sentence, and attempts to alter it one tiny bit would get you banhammered with lightning speed.  (And what a godawful UI it was, at least before changes in one of the early expansions.)  But not so with WoW.  Here, you can download literally thousands of different addons to tweak your experience in Azeroth exactly the way you like it.  Don’t like how–or where–your character’s health is displayed?  No sweat, take your pick of unitframes.  Don’t like that big clunky bottom actionbar with the dargons on the end?  Here, have umptysquillion different bar mods.

But there’s a dangerous, inconvenient downside to this endless tweakability.  Without fail, come time for a patch, especially a big “point-zero” content patch like the one that dropped yesterday…your shit is gonna break sooooo hard.

So that’s why I was up at 5:30 this morning, hitting Curse and WoW Interface before they get slashdotted later in the day, for new copies of all my addons.  And sadly, I run a lot of addons.

It started off small, as most addictions do.  In the beginning, there was Cosmos.  But Cosmos kept trashing my chat channels, and eventually, I found the nice, all-in-one CTMod, pieces of which I still run 3+ years later.  Then I decided I wanted a better set of action bars, so I tried a few different bar mods before settling on Trinity.  Then I discovered the sheer Heaven-sent high of XPerl Unit Frames.  After that, it wasn’t long before I was waking up in dark alleys after a bender of chugging BigWigs modules and mainlining Titan Bar plugins.

One of these days I’ll do a detailed “here’s my UI, you can stop laughing now dammit” post.  But here’s just a partial list of what I ran during 3.1.x, unlinked because I just can’t be arsed to link everything…

• Unitframes:  XPerl
• Bar mod:  Bartender4
• Timers/buff mods:  ElkBuffBars, DoTimer, Quartz, OmniCC, NeedToKnow
• Gear:  ItemRack, Rating Buster
• Raid and combat mods:  Grid, oRA2, Deadly Boss Mods, Scrolling Combat Text, Omen, Recount
• RP:  FlagRSP2
• Appearance mods:  Tekticles, TipTop, FuBar plus a lot of Fu stuff

You get the idea.  Now I know there’s some duplication there; I don’t really need four timer mods, probably.  I only use NeedToKnow for timers when I’m in Arms spec and need to keep Rend up on my target–and honestly, I may switch to Power Auras for that anyway, given the good stuff I’ve heard about that addon.  (See?  It just gets worse!)  But after all that tweaking and downloading, I had a fully-custom UI that was set up just the way I wanted it, with everything arranged just so…more or less.

The problem is, of course, the administrative nightmare of keeping all that drek current.  It’s hard.  Half my addons were out of date before 3.2 even dropped.  I’m slack about updating stuff like DBM that changes frequently, unless it’s obviously broken.  Now throw in a large content patch that will cause half or more of those addons to break, sometimes spectacularly, and you see why I completely write off doing any playing on the day and night of a patch release.  (Well, that and lately, Feathermoon and the Cyclone battlegroup in general have been down longer and more often than any other set of servers when Patch Day comes.)

So there I was this morning, in front of the computer at oh-dark-what-the-fuck, starting to pull down addons to get ready to raid with No Bads tonight, assuming they get some new hamsters to power the server.  I got a few unpleasant shocks, as usual, worst of which was that XPerl, my beloved, awesome unitframe, wasn’t yet updated for 3.2.  This is Not Good, friends.  My UI, like a lot of others I’ve seen, has all the frames down near the bottom, where I can see them without having to flick my eyes to the top of the screen.  (The layout is largely inspired by Anna’s UI, though it’s not nearly as cleanly laid-out.)  Moving those frames back to the top left with the Blizzard default frames…uh-uh, kids.  It would not be a good thing with me trying to tank Ulduar.

So, somewhat frantic, I grabbed the Pitbull unitframe package…and then spent 45 sleepy, sunrisey minutes beating the damn thing into submission with all sorts of virtual sledgehammers until I got it looking the way I wanted it.  I still miss my XPerl, but this’ll do for now, and who knows, it might grow on me.  That’s how I’ve tried many other addons…a patch breaks one and it’s not updated on release day, so I grab something else just to try and wind up sticking with it.

(I note that even as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, XPerl has been updated to version 3.0.4a, which is patch 3.2 compatible.  I think I’ll probably try Pitbull tonight, and then if I don’t like it, back to XPerl I go.)

I know some people who have broken their addiction to addons and have gone back to a more vanilla interface.  Blizzard is actually making it easier to do so, really, as they seem to be very attentive to the better user-written addons out there and incorporate their functionality into newer versions of the game (without breaking the ability to use the user-written versions, which is a damn nice touch).  Me, I’m too weak.  I can’t do it.  I’m too used to the crutch of having Omen dancing in one corner of my screen while my target frame sits near the bottom with pretty cast bars in between, and having six or seven nicely lined-up small 12-button bars bottom center.  To me, the default UI looks like a hideously inefficient use of space.

But take heart, default UI-users.  There’s always my wife.  She has seven level 80s, that’s three more than I do.  She raids with me on her feral druid Rashona and is consistent top-two DPS in 10-man and top-four in 25-man, cranking out 4500+ dps with ease.  And she does it with a UI that’s 100% bone-stock except for FlagRSP2 and Deadly Boss Mods.

Oh yeah…and she clicks half her abilities, too.  How’s that taste?

Patch 3.2: All Argents, all the time

Random Friday afternoon thoughts as I try to make it through my last hour and a half at work this week, laying low with the Robert Earl Keen turned up to 11…

So this week, the WoWosphere exploded with the release of the first round of release 3.2 PTR patch notes.  Now I’m not going to go over them bit by bit by bit here; everybody’s already dissected those notes like a frog in biology class.  I don’t get too bent about class changes in preliminary PTR notes like these, because they always get tweaked, at least a little, based on testing on the test realm.  I’m not even going to go into the mount changes except to say “woot!”, or the badge changes except to say “boy, the Blizzard general forums are full of tardburgers.”

No, my thoughts today are about everybody’s favorite Scourge-slaying, scrupulously-neutral, joust-loving party animals, the Argent Crusade.  More specifically, about the little place that they’ve put up on the ass end of Northrend…yup, the Argent Tournament, or as I call it sometimes, the Icecrown County Fair.

When I read the 3.1 patch description talking about the Argent Tournament, I’ll admit it, my WTFometer pegged.  Not because of anything to do with the actual game itself, mind you–even though jousting could, IMO, be done better, and I despise the “before the gate” dailies, especially the Champion version.  No, the mechanics were fine.  My bogglement at the Argent Tournament was strictly, I assure you, rooted in roleplay and lore.

Think about it.  The Argent Crusade, Horde, and Alliance are standing before the seat of the Lich King’s power.  Icecrown requires a massive cleansing that will require an immense amount of effort and the blood, sweat, and lives of thousands of heroes.  The Crusade’s job is made more complicated by escalating tensions between the Horde and Alliance in the wake of the Wrathgate (thanks ever so much, Putress and Varian), forcing the Crusade to rely more and more on the death knights of the Ebon Blade, their own smaller armies, and free agents–that’d be us, kids–and less on the elite forces of Thrall and Varian.  The financial and logistical strain is immense…the personal one, even more so.

So with this incredibly daunting task ahead of them, the leadership of the Argent Crusade decides to take their precious, limited resources…

…and build a fucking jousting tournament.  On the wrong end of the glacier from both their own base, and from Arthas’ doorstep.  Sweet jumping holy goblin Jesus on a friggin’ pogo stick, are you kidding me?

Excuse me, folks, but exactly how is this going to kick Arthas’ undead ass?  “Oh, but we’re seeing who the greatest champions of the Horde and Alliance are!”, you might respond.  Riiiiight.  Sitting on the back of a wolf or kodo or chicken, beating each other over the head with a blunt lance (that does 0.3 dps, by the way), is going to show you who’s capable of leading the charge against the Lich King.  Boy howdy, I know I’d be scared of seeing a line of Argent Jousters, pennants flying, riding their mighty war chickens toward the gates of Icecrown Citadel.

Actually, no.  I’d be laughing my ass off right before Scourge Happened and I’d have both new ghoul soldiers for my army and Kentucky Fried Hawkstrider for dinner.

OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much.  Do you see why I thought (and think) the concept of the Argent Tournament made no sense?  It’s jarring to me to put this thing in Icecrown given everything else that’s going on.  It doesn’t fit.  You’re engaged in, literally, a life and death struggle for the future of the entire world against Azeroth’s biggest home-grown evil Big Bad and his endless armies, and you’re taking time out to freaking joust?  Do you seriously think that Thrall wouldn’t take one look at this and laugh himself silly?  Tirion Fordring is really going to buy into this fluff?

(Now this hasn’t stopped me from getting Linedan involved, because hey, excellence in combat–any kind–is what the Panzercow is about, so he’s a Champion of Thunder Bluff and is currently working on Silvermoon.  If I ever ratchet up any more interest in the daily grind-a-thon, he’ll eventually be an Exalted Champion or whatever the title is for five Champions and all factions exalted.)

Enter patch 3.2.  The Icecrown County Fairgrounds expand with a new big arena, and I somehow think it’s not going to be used to hold L70ETC concerts.  All the new content in this patch centers around the Tournament.  A new 5-man instance.  A new raid instance involving the Colosseum–or as Anna called it, “Onyxia v4.0.”  New dailies.  A Cult of the Damned camp attacking the Tournament (took ‘em long enough).  The return of the Black Knight!  (Uh…woo.)  Other than defensive operations against the Cult of the Damned, I haven’t yet seen anything to indicate that any of this content actually involves…wait for it…a substantive fight against the Scourge.

Please note that as far as we know, the war against the Lich King hasn’t moved forward much at all.  Arthas sits inviolate in the Citadel.  He’s still holding us off at Corp’rethar.  The forges at Malykriss are still producing.  The Vrykul still hold Ymirheim and new slaves trickle into the saronite mines, no matter how many we free.  The only real success you see as you proceed through Icecrown’s questlines, after the establishment of Crusader’s Pinnacle, are the opening of the Shadow Vault and the destruction of the Fleshwerks…and both of those were courtesy of the Ebon Blade, who seem to be out doing the actual dirty work while the Argent Crusade goes into the fourth month of their little Ren Faire on the north coast.

Maybe it’s me.  I dunno.  But from a lore standpoint, the whole Argent Tournament concept just doesn’t fit, and dumping all this extra content into it for patch 3.2 makes it even worse.  It may well be because I only have one character who, from a roleplay standpoint, gives a damn about the Tournament.  Beltar, my dwarf, has not done a single AT quest and may never; he’s old, he’s crotchety, and he would much prefer blowing a jouster’s head off at thirty paces than running the risk of getting unseated from a ram.  Illithanis would be offended that they won’t let her use her wasp pet, and Moktor’s never met a fair fight in her entire life and subsequent unlife.

Maybe my sense of lore and roleplay is offended.  Or it could be that it’s 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and DAMMIT I WANT HOMETIEMS NAO.  I dunno.

Discuss among yourselves.  Peace out.

What I think of healers

He'd probably let me die to the boss, but at least there'd be Vicodin afterward.

The folks over at Blog Azeroth have an interesting shared topic this week:  What do non-healers think of healers?  It’s a thought-provoking subject that’s spawned some great thoughts, but it’s one that I’m not sure I’m qualified to blog upon.

You see, I have a dirty little secret.  I’ve never played a healer.  Never.

I have three healing-capable alts, a 70 druid, a 69 shaman, and a 32ish paladin.  They have never for one second of their lives been resto, resto, or holy respectively.  They’re feral, enhancement, and lolret.  I’ve never offspec healed an instance with any of them. 

What’s worse, the even dirtier part of my dirty little secret is that basically, I’m a DPS whore.  Yes, I have a prot warrior as my main, and I have no plans to change that aside from continuing to develop Linedan’s arms offspec so he can contribute more on one-tank raid fights.  But my other high-level alts–two hunters, one blood DK, one feral druid, and one enhancement shaman–are all about various ways of bringing the pain.  The thought of trying to heal even a weak normal instance, on any class/spec combination, scares me far worse than tanking any heroic raid encounter in the game.

So this leaves me in a quandary.  How can I possibly discuss “what a non-healer thinks of healers” when I’ve never played a healer and have only the vaguest idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the various classes and specs?

The fact is, I really don’t care how a healer keeps me standing, only that they do.  You can use big heals, medium heals, little heals, pew-pew heals, bubbles, shields, HOTs, bandages, duct tape, spackle, grout, little cartoon Thrall Band-Aids, Red Bull, medkits from Half-Life 2, Class II controlled substances…I.  Don’t.  Care.  Just keep me alive to keep the mobs off you, and I’ll let you worry about the mechanics of how you do it.  You don’t tell me how to tank, I don’t tell you how to heal, and together, we will rule the galaxy as…uh…tank and squishy or something.

I trust my healer(s) implicitly when I tank.  I picked up a bad habit in vanilla WoW that’s carried through Burning Crusade and into Wrath, and while I’ve gotten better about it, I’ve yet to completely shake it.  I don’t pay as much attention to my own health as I should.  This came about because when I was learning to tank, at level 60, I had to focus every one of my few remaining brain cells on gaining and holding agro on multiple mobs…while tanking for one of the highest-DPS rogues on the entire server.  (This was, of course, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and warriors’ multiple-target tanking required a hell of a lot of work.  And I could barely stay ahead of this guy on a single boss target, much less multiples.)  Combine that with the fact that we had a couple of really solid healers in the crew, and I tended to just forget about my health, put it in their hands, and focused everything forward on the mobs.

I still do it, more than I should.  I dutifully get a healthstone at the start of every raid, and every raid, no matter how many times I die, I still have it when I log out.  I accumulate redonkulous amounts of healing potions.  I still lug around a single Nightmare Seed that I haven’t used in months.  I just have a simple faith that no matter how deep the kimchi gets, if I’m doing my job and intelligently using my cooldowns like Shield Wall and Shield Block, and if I’m not standing in Bad Stuff, the healer or healers that I’ve got behind me are always going to save my ass.  Period.  And the best part is, 99.9% of the time, I’m right.

I have a lot of respect for healers.  It’s not nearly as much fun as DPS and just as, maybe more, stressful than tanking.  The players who are hardcore dedicated to the art of green glowy whack-a-mole or shiny golden PEWPEWPEW have my undying lessthanthree and my eternal gratitude.

But if you want to know whether I think a holy paladin or a disc priest is better for healing me?  Brother, I have no damn idea.  I love you all equally.

Of unicorns and other imaginary things

See that right there?  That, my friends, is the Commendation of Kael’thas.  Back during the last part of Burning Crusade, this little trinket was the shizzle if you were a tank that, like me, had no real hope of seeing Sunwell or even much of Black Temple.  +57 stamina?  Awesome.  And look at all that automatic emergency ass-saving dodge!  I literally can’t count how many times this thing kept me alive when things went pear-shaped.

I got that on my first run into heroic Magister’s Terrace, believe it or not.  (Yes, that’s it, drink the tasty Haterade, peeps.)  And it was my constant tanky companion through Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep.  It was awesome to be rocking one of these back then.

When you’re offtanking Ulduar 25-man?  Not.  So.  Freaking.  Much.

My wife knows that if she wants to hear me rant, all she’s got to do is mention the words “tank trinket” and then dive behind the sofa.  Trinkets for raid-geared plate tanks are hard as hell to find.  There’s the Seal of the Pantheon from Halls of Lightning, of course, which is generally considered to be a necessary “entry-level” trinket just because of the massive +65 defense rating (Lin’s still wearing one, because stacking +defense is actually quite effective).  But getting into Naxx, well, there isn’t much.  There’s the Repelling Charge from Thaddius on 10-man…assuming you’re in a 10-man that can get to Thaddius, which I wasn’t for quite a while, and that it drops, which I’ve only seen once in 4+ months.  There’s the Defender’s Code, which is more of a druid trinket with the static +850 armor and the on-demand hefty +dodge, but doesn’t have any +stamina.  The badge trinket, the Valor Medal of the First War…again, all +dodge, and no stamina.

Which is why, weeks into Ulduar 25, with every other piece of Linedan’s gear at ilevel 200 or higher, he was running around with a damned item level 115 level 70 trinket still firmly glued into his first trinket slot.  Because tank trinket upgrades, like unicorns, leprechauns, and politicians that actually want to cut government spending, don’t really exist.  They’re just imaginary figures.

Until last night.

I’d like to thank Captain Crotchpocket, aka Ignis the Furnace Master, for supplying me with this lovely little item, the Heart of Iron.  Yep, that’s right, kids, that’s not a misprint…one hundred and sixty-two points of tasty, tasty stamina.  1717 health off one trinket, and some emergency dodge thrown in. 

Linedan now has almost 32,000 unbuffed health, and with full 25-man raid buffs is up over 41,000, competitive with our other two raid tanks.  And y’know, it still doesn’t feel like enough on some fights.  I’m beginning to wonder if Ulduar is harkening back to the Burning Crusade days where if you were a warrior, there was only one gem you ever put in your gem slots unless you had to activate a meta–stamina uber alles.  It seems that Ulduar is all about BIG NUMBERS…even the trash routinely spanks a pimped-out tank for well into five digits per hit.

Lin’s now one belt away from the Epic achievement.

It felt good to see the Anvil get back out of the ditch and put the hammer down last night.  Loot Leviathan, Razorscale, Ignis, XT, and Kologarn all went down without too much fuss.  Now we’re working on Auriaya, the Crazy Cat Lady.  And all I have to say about that fight is, now I think I know what a yarn ball feels like.

When it all goes horribly wrong

Not long ago, I wrote a post on the Tao of the Click…”the Click” being that magical moment when, after working on a raid encounter for a while, suddenly everything “clicks” into place and you not just beat it, but beat it smoothly and convincingly.  It’s one of the best feelings you can have in raiding.

But as the ancient philosophers of the East have taught us, for every yin there is a yang.  If there is a Tao of the Click, then as Bhelgast over at Tales of the Aggronaut put it, there must be a Tao of the Clunk.  Sooner or later, you’re going to have one of those headache-inducing, wipe-filled disasters that leave you sitting in front of your keyboard shaking your head and wondering why you didn’t take up something less stressful like open-heart surgery or less painful like javelin catching.

We got ours out of the way last week.

The Anvil’s Thursday night foray into Ulduar started off well.  We had solid one-shots on Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, and Ignis.  Our kill of XT-002 wasn’t anything to write home about (anytime you’re battle-rezzing your MT, that’s not good) and would have been a pre-nerf wipe, but we hung in there, stayed with it, and ended up getting him with over half the raid dead due to a bad combination of a too-close gravity bomb and a tantrum.

And then there was Kologarn.  We’ve killed Kologarn twice before, so we set up for the fight figuring we’d get him in one or two tries, and move on to the challenge of Auriaya, aka Crazy Cat Lady.

We wiped eight times on Kologarn.  And on none of those fights did we even get him to 50% health.

One time, I had trouble hanging on to the rubble that spawns when his right arm dies (I was designated rubble tank, our warrior MT and DK tank traded off on Kologarn proper).  Sometimes, the tanks died fast.  Eyebeams were constantly tearing us up.  Healers were disconnecting.  The relative smoothness of the Razorscale and Ignis kills was replaced with missteps, mistakes, and wipes.  The banter on Ventrilo fell away, replaced by silence after each wipe.  The whole thing was probably best summed up by one of our officers after about the fifth or sixth wipe:  “OK, guys, talk to me.  We’ve done this before, we know we can do it, so what’s going wrong?“

It wasn’t a situation where you could point at a person and say, “this person is causing issues.”  (Unlike, say, the week before, when my problems holding rubble caused a fair bit of difficulty before we finally got Kologarn down.  I did a lot better on it last week.)  The fail was spread far and wide, and it was feeding off itself.  Eventually, after eight wipes, we hit our hard stop time of midnight Eastern, and that was that.  We’d have to try again the next night, Friday.

Now Friday nights have not been kind to us recently.  Two weeks ago, the premiere of Star Trek cost us so many people that we could only field 19, and ended up trying to get the sub-21-man achievement in Naxx (and failing, due to problems on Gluth).  Last week, at start time, we only had 23 people.  But 23, we figured, was close enough to 25, and in we went.

We couldn’t get past the trash leading to Kologarn.

Let me repeat that, because reading it, even I don’t believe I had to type it:  We couldn’t get past the trash leading to Kologarn.

Now yes, Antechamber of Ulduar trash can be tricky.  They actually remind me a lot of those three bitchy six-pulls in the entrance hallway of Tempest Keep–not hard if you have good crowd control, but nightmarish if you don’t.  Thursday night, we were blessed with four mages in the group, so keeping the stuff crowd-controlled while we smacked it down two at a time was trivial.  Friday night, we still had two mages, a hunter, three tanks, enough druids to start a small zoo…yeah, you’d think, we got this.  Or not.

Honestly, I couldn’t tell what kept happening.  I tend to bear down and focus on my job instead of looking at Big Pictures, and my job was to grab what I was told to grab and go tank it in a corner so it wouldn’t eat squishy fase.  And I did.  And then I’d look up and my Grid was mostly covered in “DEAD.”

After the second wipe, things started getting snippy, just a bit, on Ventrilo.  The snippy quotient got much higher after the third wipe.  After the fourth wipe, I could just tell that things were about to go bad in a big way.  I could hear it in peoples’ voices as a bit of an argument started up.  One person actually just left the raid and the Vent channel.  And that was when mercifully, one of our Chief Cat Herders, the beloved Dorritow, came back over from the officer channel and sent us home for the evening.  It was a good call.  The atmosphere was getting so poisonous and tense that we weren’t going to be good for anything else but more wipes.

Now as I’ve stated before, The Anvil is no Ensidia.  We’re no server-first guild even on Feathermoon, which is firmly mid-pack in terms of raiding (not bad for an RP server, actually).  But we’re a solid raid with a core that’s been together since the days when Gehennas and Baron Geddon were progression content.  We just don’t crash and burn like we did last week…and yet we did.

It’s a sobering experience, and it’s also a reminder that killing a boss a few times doesn’t necessarily make it “farm” content.  (And also, that even “farm” content can occasionally reach out and trip you badly.)  It’s something of a call for each person in the raid to focus on what they’re assigned to do, stay aware of what’s going on around them, and know what to do in every possible situation, otherwise known as “don’t stand in shit.”

So here’s the discussion topic, dear readers.  Have you ever had this happen in your raid?  (If you answer “no,” by the way, I’m pretty sure you’re lying.)  I’m not just talking an “off night.”  I’m talking a night so bad, so chock full of caramel-covered fail, so utterly under your normal performance standards that it leaves you scratching your head as to how it could have possibly happened.  It’s not one or two people repeatedly making mistakes, though that may happen.  It’s a situation where everybody, or nearly everybody, is just not “on,” and it builds on itself until the whole raid’s performance falls apart like a Yugo.  How do you handle it, as a raidleader, as an officer, as just a grunt like me?  When do you keep trying and when do you just throw in the towel and send everybody home?  What do you do?  What can you do?

But hey.  Tomorrow night, we’re going to go back into Ulduar.  And this time, we’re going to pwn Kologarn in the face, boyyyyy and take his itamz.  Because we are resilient, and because we’re not going to let one bad week define who we are.  So we’ll walk right up to the “grumpy old troll who lives under the bridge” (a little Dora the Explorer reference for all you parents up in this heezy), do a /flex, and say:

“Ve are da Anvil, und ve are heah to fuck *clap* you up!“

This ain’t your mama’s raid anymore, son

I’m glad I read this before I started writing my own thoughts on the same subject, because Elleiras over at Fel Fire just saved me a whole lot of typing:  The problem with Ulduar is Naxxramas.

So, no, the problem isn’t Ulduar itself.

The problem is that Naxxramas was so easy by comparison to the raids that preceded it that we actually forgot what it was like to progress through new content.  Once upon a tier, we congratulated ourselves when it “only” took a week or two of raiding to defeat a new boss.  Now, we feel like we’ve failed if it takes more than two or three attempts, let alone nights.

I was thinking about this last week as I made my first foray into Ulduar-25 (our raid’s second week).  The Anvil had killed Flame Leviathan the week before but nothing else, mainly due to the instability of the server.  So on Thursday we headed in, one-shotted Flame Leviathan, then after several wipes got Razorscale, then ran out of time before we could get XT-002, though we got the little (ok, big) brat to 3%.  Friday night, we dropped XT-002, then slammed our hands in the car door known as Ignis for about two hours before admitting defeat (best attempt, 55%).  So right now, we’ve done three bosses and are still working out what we need to do for Mister Crotchpocket.

I could tell people were getting snippy and stressed both nights.  Ventrilo on Friday night was awesome because our main tank was wasted at the start of the run–he tanks better drunk, seriously.  But after a few wipes on XT-002, and then never getting Ignis below about 55%, the good humor was gone and things were quiet and a bit tense.

How soon we forget, huh?  I remember wiping on Vashj for six weeks before we finally got her, and it may have been more than that, come to think of it, but that’s all I was there for.  We tried Kael’thas for over two months and never did get him before 3.0 dropped and turned that fight from nightmare to easymode.  Just mention the words “Leotheras the Blind” around me and I’m liable to turn around and deck you, that’s how much I despised wiping on that fight again and again and again.  And please note, The Anvil is not a “fail raid”; we’re no server first on anything, but considering that we raid just two nights a week for three hours a night, we do well.  When we come, we come correct, dawg.

The fact is, folks, yes, Ulduar is a gigantic difficulty leap up from Naxxramas.  Flame Leviathan isn’t very hard on “easy” mode, but from there, it gets much more difficult quickly–and I haven’t even seen the bosses in the second and third “wings” yet.  But you know what?  It’s not harder than Burning Crusade content.  It just isn’t.  None of the first four fights in Ulduar even begin to approach the sheer bloody chaos of Lady Vashj or Kael’thas, much less the massive gear checks of Sunwell.  Hell, M’uru literally broke some of the best raiding guilds on Feathermoon.

What Ulduar is, is a Monday after a long weekend of Naxxramas.  It’s a 4:30 am wakeup call.  It’s a splash of ice water to the face.  It’s a reminder that no, it’s not really normal for a 25-man pickup raid to be able to clear an instance in four hours, or a 10-man starter raid to get seven bosses in their very first night.  It is a clarion call that successful raiding requires coordination, effort, and patience.  It’s your indication that playtime is over, school is in session, and that now it’s time to start taking a hard look at your raid preparation.  What gear do I need, for both my primary spec and dual spec if any?  Are my enchants and gems what they need to be for my role(s)?  Can I get a hold of the correct potions, food, and other buffs?  Am I doing what my raid officers ask, reading up on strats if they want me to, paying attention during the fights?  Do I know what I’m supposed to do for this boss?  And of course, the most important question:  Am I standing in shit?

What Ulduar isn’t is some new frontier of ZOMGHARD.  Maybe the “hard modes” are brutal, we haven’t gotten there yet.  But the next time you start to get frustrated wiping in there, and watching your repair bills mount, remember back to Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep and Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, and Sunwell Plateau if you were fortunate enough to go.  There were no “hard” and “easy” modes in those raids.  You slammed your head against the wall in any of those instances for weeks at a time, with some exceptions, and just accepted it.

But boy, did your head feel good when that wall finally crumbled, right?

I can’t go, Coach

I love my raid.  Notice I didn’t say I love raiding…my interest in raiding, and WoW in general, waxes and wanes with time.  But even if I’m not playing WoW every night and indulging in other timesinks, I still love my raid.  We’ve had the same core of good people together for almost three years now, and honestly, it’s been really good to me from every standpoint I can see–it’s made me a better player, gotten me lots of phat virtual loot, let me see and experience things in the game that I never thought I would, and given me some awesome memories.

Because of all this, I’m loyal to them.  I want to be there for every raid that I can possibly make, real life permitting.  (We have a very strict “real life first” policy…missing raids due to RL scheduling interference is understood and expected.)  Admittedly, part of my pushing for 100% attendance is because I have that lovely little phenomenon known as Performance Issues…even after all this time, I can’t quite shut up that annoying little voice at the back of my head that says “if you aren’t there, they’ll figure out they do better without you and you’ll never get invited again…”  It’s BS, and rationally I know it’s wrong, but rationality is not always the Panzercow’s strong suit.

So at 8:00 Eastern last night, I faithfully answered the call for whispers, and was at Naxx well before 9:00 for first pull.  This, despite the fact that I felt like, to dredge up a term from my old Star Wars fan days, bantha poodoo.

See, sometimes I get headaches.  Nasty headaches.  Not the classic migraine where you get incredibly photosensitive and have to lie down in a dark and quiet room.  Just slowly building headaches that get worse and worse until nausea kicks in and sometimes I throw up.  I used to get them more when I was a kid, but I grew out of them; nowadays they’re exceedingly rare.  This was the first one in a couple of years or more.  I know that if I don’t nip these things in the bud and take some painkiller–just a couple of Advil work fine–early on, and I let them go, they get ugly.  Problem was, we had nothing in the house but some Tylenol PM, and I’m not taking sleepytime medicine before a raid.

So I figured I’d tough it out.  And at first I didn’t feel too bad, but I could tell I was definitely off.  The pain wasn’t intense, but it was enough that I was out of it, a tick slow here and there.  That all culminated 30 minutes into the raid where I got assigned to tank the frontside of Four Horsemen…and made a massive cock-up on a target handoff that wiped the raid.  (Protip:  If you’re tanking Rivendare and supposed to switch to Korthazz with the other tank, mis-targeting and taunting Rivendare again is counter-productive.)

Now I screw up a lot, more than I should.  I’m hard on my own performance.  But rarely do I epic fail so hard that I actually, demonstrably, wipe the snecking raid.  If my headache wasn’t bad before, it sure as hell got worse on that long quiet run back from the entrance.

The second time through 4H, I bore down, concentrated, and did my job right that time.  And indeed, we went on to have one of our better Naxx runs ever.  We cleared all four downstairs wings in 2 hours and 54 minutes, a first.  I tanked Loatheb, Gluth, and Anub’rekhan without difficulty, nobody died on Patchwerk, we even got a couple of achievements along the way.  I picked up a couple of nice pieces of loot, and in general the raid was steamrolling everything in our path.  It was a good raid night.

And I was miserable the whole way.  It was taking a massive effort to keep focused and do my job while railroad spikes pounded into my left temple and I wondered if that Quiznos sub I had for dinner was going to come back up and visit me.  I hung on by my thumbnails, and when we dropped Maexxna at three minutes to midnight, I was grabbing my emblem and hitting my hearthstone before her legs stopped twitching.  I didn’t do any of my usual post-raid ritual of repairing, selling, checking Recount and post-morteming things with my wife.  I landed in Dalaran, logged off, took two Tylenol PM, laid down in bed, and spent an unpleasant hour waiting for the acetaminophen and sleep aid to kick in.

Now, I don’t tell this story to show that I’m some kind of studmuffin.  I’m not.  Ask my wife, I’m a freaking miserable SOB when I get sick.  I tell it to illustrate a point–I probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.  As much as I love my raid and want to give 100% for it every time I’m there, I might’ve been more of a liability than an asset in the shape I was in.

And that’s the topic for discussion, Gentle Readers.  Most of us want to be there for our friends and raidmates, and we want to do our best even if we aren’t at our best.  At what point do you go to your raid officers and say, “Sorry, guys, I feel like crap tonight, you might be better off taking somebody else?”  To use the sports analogy, when do you bench yourself?  Pro athletes almost never do it…but for them, it’s a livelihood.  For us, it’s a diversion.  The rules are a little different.

Discuss among yourselves!