Crits on tanks, get it right you noobs!

Right Slightly ashamed of my previous post so I thought I would explain something that to me seems like common sense but might be missed by some people (ie nubby pug tanks (had one tonight and he/she/it was shamefully sorry excuse for a tank)).

Right first some basics that even I understand... deffense rating lowers the chance a player will be critically hit. a tank needs 5.6% to be crit immune 5% for same level and a further 0.2% for ech lvl above that (3 levels above being boss level). What ever way you go about that either through def rating or resi that 5.6% needs to be there... let me explain why:

If i'm healing a tank (lets for a moment assume I'm not playing a drood because things get a bit complicated to explain even though the same is true), tank takes aproximatly x amount of dmg from boss ability #1 and y amount of dmg from boss ability #2. seeing as there is not someone on the boss end face rolling the keyboard these abilities come more or less at regular intervals (some of wich you can even see in super advance due to addons like deadly boss mods). As a healer I know I get a feel for the intervals and know when both x and y are going to hit a few seconds ahead of time and am able to cast a heal in time so when either x or y hit even in close proximity (even when x+y > than a tanks top health) 99 times out of 100 provided I still have mana left the tank is going to live (the likely hood of a tank dying gets smaller as you add more healers all doing the same thing (even smaller with things like reactive heals, hots, and Shields)). This is instinctive healerising and not reactionary healing, and is something that every decent healer learns very quickly (obviously when they are actually depended upon and not just carried by the other 4 healers)

However this all depends upon a tank receiving consistent predictable dmg. As soon as a tank becomes critable there is now a random element to how he/she takes dmg and makes every healer have to do more reactionary healing ("oh fuck the tank just took a big hit that I wasn't expecting, lets heal that, oh know I missed my heal for the next hit, crap the tank is dead!" (this is exaggerated normally but sooner or later most healers will have to move to reaction heals and will fuck up the instinctive heals and then the end is inevitable)).

by not being crit immune you bend your healers over, smack them round the head with a frozen kipper, suck them dry of mana due to excessive overhealing, then more or less inevitably blame them for letting you die.

So for the love of god: stop it! I know having a big health pool is great for pugs but plz, get your deff cap before doing anything else. take green "of Defense" items, I don't care so long as your crit immune!

if you don't believe me go do patchwerk in naxx and watch your getting your 30-40k crits, dying, then getting /spit from everyone in the raid for missing tanking 101.

lots of love your friendly neighbourhood healer!

GC on 25 man pugs

Heres one for you seaver I know u'll be happier!

Quote from: ghostcrawler

"Naxx 25 was puggable, this was not the intent. We do not want 25 man to be a bunch of randoms getting together to clear our content. Naxx 25 was that way, Ulduar 25 will not be pug friendly."

Naxx being puggable is fine and really inevitable. The problem was that Naxx 25 was so easy compared to 10, that 10 felt like a pointless exercise. Ulduar 25 will not be as pug friendly as Naxx. I suspect it will be pugged at some point, but it may take longer. Don't forget that many guilds already knew the Naxx encounters very well when LK shipped.

Think this is a good sign of harder content no?

Protection Paladin 3.1 Set Bonus's

So, with 3.1 bringing alot of new changes i guess it's time for me to have a write up of how i think this is going to affect the paladin as a tank!

So to start off with gear bonus's and how that will affect us.

The two piece set bonus is, Increases the damage done by your seals of Vengeance, Corruption and Righteousness by 10%. This to me can be took in two ways. it gives you the Opportunity to put out alot of burst threat in the start but then this becomes a very poor bonus after the first judgement is put down. to explain this with using Glyph of Seal of Righteousness you can drop alot of burst threat on a target with using this seal but on a long term basis it will not beat Seal of Vengeance This is because as you can see after 5 stacks you'll increase the Holy damage by 50% and that really does add up on top of the vengeance tick. So my sum up of this is that it gives a good bit of burst starting threat but after the first 10 seconds is useless

The four piece set bonus is: Shield of Righteousness now increases your shield block value by 225 for that attack and for 3 sec afterward. Shield of the Righteousness was one of my most favourite things brought in within WotLK it gave us the opportunity to really get stuck in with some single target tanking rather than AoE. This is going to give out a significant amount of single target threat for this and for Holy Shield. My plan will be to use this in conjunction with Libram of Obstruction So ill lay down my Judgement, use Shield of the Righteousness and boom. From the set bonus and that item ill have a extra 575 BV to add to my 1.3k and its a rather nice sum to keep refreshing every 3/8 seconds!

In terms of me and Phood hopefully i should be easier to heal due to the gear level increase and the fact that ill be mitigating more with the extra block value of the set bonus. It will be interesting to see how this will show for him and if he'll actually be paying enough attention to notice :P

Seaver

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Seaver just gave me a "blocking 101", now how I understand it 50-odd% of the time he will be hit and block an extra 225 damage, if he gets hit 100 times (ballpark figure for a 10 min fight) in a fight and 50 of those are block mitigated, 60-odd% of that will have this buff up so lets say 30 hits,then that's 6k extra healing I don't have to do. with ~20-30% over-healing that's ~9k or a regrowth or one of my other faceroll spells that I'm not going to have to throw and can either save me mana or be used else where. So yay (I think)! As to Glyphed of Seal of Righteousness I'm not even going to pretend to understand the subtleties of that, but one thing that pops into mind is wave tanking and it maybe being a benefit there.

Restokin?

This is my new pet project. PvE spec is so blatantly obvious for Tree's at the moment it's boring (14/0/57 seems pretty much universal for most decent trees, the 57 goes in different optionals but it's all the same spec really). However Blizzard has presented us PvE trees with an awesome challenge. Playing a spell based drood at the mo I would argue is difficult to balance your spec relatively against most classes. For instance if I go to arena or a BG with a 14/0/57 with no natural perfection, yeah I can pump the healing but ultimately I get killed alot when against more than one opponent, but if you go 0/40/31 for universal survivability you have your arena m8's dying, then ultimately dying your self.

With 3/3 natural perfection, and imp tree form (for the armour (reduces an extra 20-30% physical damage I think)) you get the imba healing with a tanking form for those nasty warriors and rogues. unfortunately as far as I'm concerned if there is no one else around you might hold out for 30secs-1min against maybe 1-3 opponents before you inevitably run out of mana and/or cooldowns and eventually die. In terms of arena with this spec I found I was either eventually getting beat by the silly burst damage + stuns + silences or (normally against healer-dps teams (2v2)) running out of mana. Mages ='d death

So I went grass roots and went for feral charge + leader of the pack + nurturing instinct , mixed some feral gear with some resto at roughly 0/40/30. quickly abandoned that spec due to Seaver whining about dying or something in 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 (healing output was balls, dmg was minimal and frankly just got confused with what I was doing).

This then lead me to drood- aff lock and I went 30/0/41 (dreamstate with tree form), losing GOTEM was a shock that I hated with the feral spec and it continued with dreamstate. Being used to casting 3 LB in the same time that I was able to cast one and wait for the CD was to say the least pretty fucking annoying. one thing that I loved though was insect swarm and balance of power combo to reduce a targets hit rating by 7% effective (about 3% over required yellows for most straight dps and way over for hybrids). I have seen a mage do a dual arcane barrage against me and having all but one miss me... awesome... sodding mages.

anyway this allowed me to pick off 1v1 rogues, mages, warriors, and warriors (maybe). Against healers it was a dead heat and eventually against a full healer I would oom first, against hunters, DK's, shammys, shadow priests (or holy priests (stupid mana burn (NERF NERF NERF most OP spell in the game as far as I'm concerned))), I was fucked unless I was able to LoS or run very far away.

Recently I thought sod it and went for boomkin over tree form (you get the choice with 3x/0/4x), basically just for the silly numbers of armours to get away from warriors, rogues etc. also quite nice to scare the crap out of DK's.

anyway what I think I'm happiest with at the moment is 31/0/40, still a bit lost with celestrial focus/vengeance trash (gone 2/3 1/5 respectively) and yet to try it with my cali (2v2 partner affi lock) but also been thinking about a caster/cc'er like ele shammy or frost mage. spec details here

heres a screeny of some fun I was having today:


anyway for anyone not messing around with hybridising a drood for pvp this might not be that relevant and in a few weeks it's all going to change again, but if your having similar problems to me give 31/0/40 ago cos it's awesome. just remember if they can't hit you (with daggers, axes, swords etc) you have the edge (provided you out last the first 10secs or so)

Complaining!

Right, so first post and i guess this isn't going to be the most positive of posts to start off with. After playing my paladin as a tank for the last year and a half to two years. Sticking with it after the "If you want to be a tank, play a Warrior" comments and grinding through the hard points within this class now i can finally say.

God damn ain't i overpowered!!

From looking at the class, seeing the numbers and playing with it. It makes me wonder where my challenge will be as a tank. I look at Ulduar and with the ease of current content i can say that I'm unsure if it will be what i need to really bring me back into WoW as a tank. At the moment I'm in a Pre-Tbc guild going through Aq-20, Molten Core and Zul-Gurub as a healer, to me it is how I'm enjoying the game as the current content seems rather boring as a whole. Sarth 3d being the one encounter that is hard and 30 min to fill up a week isn't really what i want to see in this game and i pretty much stopped before we took that down due to the shear boredom of playing my pala.

I can go on about the " Ah but you need to do achievements" comments and that just makes me wonder if its people trying to fill the gaps to not see the point that there isn't half as much content as when TBC was released. Yes i came into TBC as a raider about 6 months in so it had already been established but i remember how we worked at some bosses in Kara. Spending time in there was fun and i felt like i had to think. People are saying that this is the first level of raid content and its going to be as easy as Kara but in this game has there ever been a raid instance that has been defined as too easy from the outset?!? It really does make me wonder where this game will be going. In the future and if it is attempting to be aimed at the bad players.

Rant off,
Mark/Seaver

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Oh No you got to make the first post (grumbles)! Now let me start off by saying... yes Naxx is easy... and yes Kara did seem harder, however we are looking at kara as hard due to the months we spent farming it waiting for 25 people with TPG.

The challenge is coming I think hopefully in ulduar. Healer mana Regen is getting nerfed spell costs are going up and I think I have seen somewhere that Blizzard wants to make more burst damage and also a lot more spell damage. At the moment pretty much any healer can just face roll the key board put everything on everyone and just /dance the rest of the instance (I exaggerate, however I think this still rings true). healing is not going to be as consistent anymore, so tanks are really going to have to be on their toes.The only really thing that mattered in naxx was a tanks health pool and not pulling silly things (and getting out of the fire things). Tanks roles are soon going to have to include a lot more damage avoidance rather than just straight up mitigation. Anyway that's what I hope.

Introducing...

Hello! Welcome Welcome to our blog of wonder, before Seaver beat me to it I was going to make the first post, explain a little about what this blog should be about (hopefully), and also introduce our selves.

Basically the way I see this blog is that it is a combined postings of a healer and a tank. We are both mainly PvE players, and are currently raiding together more or less. Although the intended focus was going to be about how healers and tanks interact and how stupid DPS are, I doubt very much if that is what is actually going to appear here.

Anyway that's about as far as we have planned this so far!

So let me introduce my self:
I'm currently playing a level 80 Nelf Tree (it's female, you'll have to forgive me, but as far as I'm concerned when I spend silly amounts of time staring at an arse, it better god damn be a female one) called Phood. I'm on Doomhammer EU and in a guild called Jotunheim, who have in the current patch (3.0.9 I think), cleared all content including 3 drakes (Although I wasn't there (Sigh)), and are currently achievement hunting.

I joined Wow about maybe 2.5 years ago, leveled a rogue to 60 got bored, leveled a priest to 70, fell in love with raid healing, got bored of the priest, rolled the tree, WOTLK hit, and we killed everything.

I currently spend alot of time pvping as 3x/0/4x, and am planning to get better at arena.

anyway that's just a lets-get-everyone-on-the-same-page kinda post and hopefully seaver will introduce him self also once he gets out of Molten Core

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Right, time for me to put some information about myself in!
Well I started of playing this game by playing a Warrior as a Dps which i think Phood will back me up on. I sucked at. I rerolled to my paladin and then it was the perfect roll for me, I've been through quite alot with my paladin and I'd like to think I'm competent at the roll i play. I've played on Doomhammer EU from day one and met Phood about 2 years ago. Being playing with him pretty much since!
Nowadays I play my paladin as Retribution till Ulduar is released and then I'll be having a look at tanking again!

Tree Form Armour

This is just really to test out blizz quotes.. but still yay! now tree form has some sort of equality with boomkin in PvP!

Quote from: Blizzard staff

Tree of Life: Now receives 240% increased armor. You can now use Nature's Grasp and Thorns while within this form. In addition, the discount on heal-over-time spells from this talent is now active at all times, whether or not the druid is in Tree of Life form. Mana cost reduced to match the cost of Travel Form.

I have reordered the posts so hopefully this should be last (or first whatever way you want to look at it)