Can we get some adds with a little less whirlwind

Rounding up and AoEing trash in instances and raids isn't a massive problem for rogues these days, no cooldown on Fan of Knives and a couple of slow daggers means we can easily keep up with mages and warlocks.

However there is a certain ability that warriors are fond of in PvP that several trash mobs are also keen to use. I'm talking about Whirlwind, something that will kill me 9 times out of 10, and quite frankly it's getting on my nerves.

I'm not talking about remove the ability, that would be unnecessary, but can we stop giving it to trash mobs that the tank expects to round up and be burned down at the same time.

Reasons are this:

1. When doing single target dps, Quartz will show me when whirlwind is being cast and I can run the heck away.
2. When mobs are being tanked away from each other, a mob spinning around is a good indication that it's performing whirlwind.

Problem when 4 mobs are grouped up on top of each other, and the marked skull doesn't whirlwind chances are the rogue is going to die.

This came to light the other night when we were attacking the military wing in Naxx. Our melee DPS included me and 2 death knights and unless I got lucky with evasion or the healers were on the ball I died on nearly every trash pull compared to the plate wearers who laughed it off. This slows the raid while I'm rezzed and buff up and quite frankly annoys the bejesus out of me. In the end I resorted to try and train ranged skills and this isn't fun.

I mention this now because of the Razorscale fight in Ulduar which has Iron Dwarf adds during the air phase and the highest priority one to kill does a, guess what, whirlwind attack. At least this one we should be able to run away from, but that still limits dps on a fight that relies on killing things quickly.

This is probably a personal moan, and I expect QQ comments should anyone choose to do so. But when raid trash is designed to be rounded up and killed en mass it seems slightly unfair that classes with low armor that need to stand in the middle (I'm including Arcane mages in this) can be killed very quickly because one guy decides to spin around with his big sword.

Rogue guide to achieving 'Intense Cold'

The Intense Cold achievement is done in heroic Nexus and is on the last boss Keristrasza. To do this you have to prevent the Intense Cold debuff to stacking to more than two. Normally this isn't a problem as movement will cause the debuff to be removed. However the Crystal chains which you get hit with stop you moving for 10 seconds and can be enough to ruin your attempt.

So if you need to have this on your rogue here's how I managed it in a heroic pug.

Positioning: Like pretty much all dragon bosses in game you want to stay away from the head and the tail as there are cone based attacks around this area. So stick yourself facing the ribs and you should be safe from those attacks.

Movement: A simple jump is enough to remove the debuff so that's all you need to do every time Intense Cold gets applied.

Chains: The first time this gets applied use Cloak of Shadows, the second time Vanish. After this unless you're combat spec'd with Improved Sprint you'll need to hope your dps is high enough to take the boss down before you get chained again. A sub rogue could also use Preparation to reset the necessary cool downs, but as a HfB/Mutilate rogue I was left with just the two and a lot of praying.

Don't be disheartened if you don't manage it the first time you should hopefully running this instance a few times for the chest piece and the trinket. (I have yet to see the trinket drop but the chest piece has dropped every time).

Good luck

Don't Panic!

There's another patch on the horizon which does contain some rogue changes. I'm not talking about 3.1 which is so far out there that I'm not going to comment on the changes that have snuck out so far as they'll likely change again (like with patch 3.0).

Patch 3.0.9 is due to hit this week and amongst the changes is a doozy. A 30% drop in mutilate damage against poisoned targets. On it's own this would seem like a horrendous nerf, but whilst Blizzard taketh away, they also giveth. Hunger for Blood is being buffed up to 15% damage increase from 9% and Slice'n'Dice is increasing attack speed by 40% up from 30%.

Now I haven't crunched the numbers so I can't tell you if the damage output from a mutilate rogue such as myself will be the same but I would hope that they would be given I seem to be holding my own damage wise against other dps classes in our raids.

However this could be a buff when we look at the next big raid encounter, Ulduar. The bane of the mutilate rogue has always been the poison immune mob, I'm looking at you here Curator. Now given that the current Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightening instances have contained a light smattering of poison immune mobs it's not a huge leap to assume that there might be some more in the raid instance.

With this change hopefully we won't be at such a disadvantage as our combat and subtlety spec'd brethren. Of course there may still be a lack of damage at which point it might be time to work out a combat daggers spec or try and get hold of some swords and head back to the monotony of combat swords to have as the alternate spec.

What's important when raiding

Now this isn't a post about how tanks should tank, dps stay alive or healers conserve mana. It's about what you personally get from attending raids and down a boss with 9 or 24 other people. I'm not going to come up with a definitive list but would like to outline a few that I've spotted.

For some people it's all about the loot, what epics will the drop and what's the likelihood of winning said drop with the group you are in.

For others it's about the technical aspects of the encounters, learning how a fight works and what each person needs to do in order to get the boss down, but also to ensure the raid members stay alive and are able to get the job done.

There are those who are interested in seeing content, it doesn't matter when, just that it's nice to see the inside of certain instances and to kill the bosses, maybe for lore reasons, maybe just for the ability to say I was there and got the achievement.

Finally there are those that are there to play with friends, have a good laugh and enjoy an evenings gaming.

I would expect that the majority of players are a combination of all 4, with leanings towards a particular one.

However there are those that will have a very strong leaning towards a particular trait. While this isn't a problem in the general sense, these people will have to accept that not everyone feels the same way. If they don't then friction can arise during a raid, which means a less fun experience for all involved.

I've written this up on the basis of something that happened in the last raid I went on. I won't go into details as I don't think it's necessary but do want to leave with one thought.

Enjoy the game as you want to enjoy it, just don't do it at the expense of others.

Rogue DPS in instances

I was lucky enough to run a couple of level 80 instances with some guildies and as with most things I had recount running as a way to check how I was doing. I'm very aware that having respecced that my dps cycle is not down pat yet, the variations in combo point generation, energy regen and mob abilities mean that I'm not keeping up all buffs and debuffs that I should.

There were times that I was feeling about down about my performance, out of the five of us I was running third overall in damage done, behind a DK and slightly worrying the tank. However before running off to the forums and QQing about how rogues are broken and need x, y and z done to fix them let's look at how the pulls were being done.

Generally we would have a group of 3 or 4, the tank would mark the skull and charge in, we'd take down the skull and then pick off the rest. Given I have no real AoE dps, other than Fan of Knives which is currently on a 10secs cool down trying to get poisons and rupture up on mobs that are already below 50% health means there's little to no chance of getting those key abilities up for any meaningful time.

Ok, so my damage is nerfed, how come I'm below the tank? Well while there's 3 or 4 mobs on him he's busy using Swipe and a glyphed Maul which means he's hitting multiple mobs as is the DK who has a ghoul minion in tow.

Let's compare this to the final boss fight in Halls of Lightning. Loken requires that everyone stay close within range of each other and then run away when he starts casting the large AoE spell. This is a single target fight, and while there's movement, it's not bad enough that every debuff drops off. Checking the stats for that fight showed me well up in the number 1 spot in terms of damage done and raw dps figures.

What this shows is that rogues are still the kings of single target dps, and needs to be considered when looking at damage meters just how the damage was being dished out and how the mobs were being taken out.

Ding 80!

Some heavy questing (thanks in part to a four day Thanksgiving weekend, I'm not American but whilst working here I get the holidays) has meant that Crash has dinged 80 and now it's time to play the rest of the game without the nagging though in the back of my mind that I need to be levelling and how much XP I need to hit that next level.

Along the way I've replaced nearly all the epics I had from TBC which was a bit hard for the first few but gave way over time as it became clear they were definitely upgrades. Also with the exception of trinkets they've all been blue rewards from the end of quest chains or group quests.

I managed one afternoon of serious instance boshing doing Gun'drak, Halls of Stone, Drak'tharon Keep and the Violet Hold (twice). In all this I managed to pick up one drop, sometimes the RNG is a harsh mistress. The instances on the whole feel very good, the trash isn't horrendous and the bosses are different without being insane. My only complaint would be that too many so far have relied on switching target or some other mechanic which causes a loss of combo points or things like Slice'n'Dice fading. While it's not been a massive problem or caused a lack of damage output on my part it does seem slightly frustrating.

I've switched back to Mutilate and wow, it's just fantastic now. Mobs die within a stunlock if I cheap shot them or if I'm not in stealth then they don't have long to hit me before being stunned and finished off. I thought losing blade flurry would hurt more when I had two or more mobs on me but due to the speed at which things die it hasn't been a problem.

For weapons a friendly blacksmith made me a couple of Saronite Shivs which are so loaded with goodness that I don't see them getting replaced quickly and the speed means that poisons are nearly always up, which is handy for using Envenom to refresh Slice and Dice. I'm just about getting a skills rotation down but the fights and spec means it's not as cookie cutter as combat swords was at 70 so expect a write up soon(ish) on what I do and the spec I'm going to use for raiding. Currently my spec is more suited for solo questing so when duel specs finally come in it may be worth switching between the two rather than anything else.

Right, time to decide which faction to champion first :)

Hitting the heroics

Having got used to the new druid spec, keybound all the new abilities to something useful and checked out the changes to armour etc. I felt that if there were enough willing volunteers in the guild it was time to hit up some instances for fun (and achievements).

Fortunately the normal and heroic instance of the day was Black Morass so there were a few takers so in we went. Once the group was formed and I was given lead to mark up I duly set the difficulty to heroic and in we went and cleared the beasties the patrol around. I started the event by running towards Medivh and then swiftly moved onto the first portal. The group consisted of feral druid, enh and resto shaman, ret pally (seriously how my damage are these guys doing at the moment) and a shadow priest. So I tanked the big elite next to the portal and the pally used consecrate to pick up all the adds allowing me to swipe for more aggro.

After the 3rd portal went down with no real problem, questions were asked as to whether we were truely running this on heroic mode (in fact I had to check the settings in the difficulty menu). Everything said we were doing the right thing so we pushed on to the first boss who promptly died, saved us to the instance and dropped a badge confirming what everything else was telling us. The rest of the instance went just as smoothly and again Medivh was able to bring the Orcs to Azeroth whilst we were able to complete the quests for extra badges.

Buoyed by our success we decided to go for another one with the same group and decided on Shattered Halls. If I'd been nervous about doing BM as a heroic, I was very nervous about Shattered Halls, especially given the amount of crowd control the group didn't have. Oh yeah, roots works in doors now, and is a great way to initiate a pull providing you pick the right add. Also the change to feral faeire fire to act as a DoT (which can crit) means that you can easily break crowd control from range (our Pally was using Repentance as another form of cc) whilst mopping up the adds.

There were a few deaths along the way (including mine) but at times we were just taking the whole pulls of 5 or 6, marking the skull and then just taking down all the rest having swiped for England to keep the rest off the healer or the dps. We even managed to take down all the bosses in time for the timed event for the Trial of the Naruu.

Other than the changes for swipe, faeire fire and swipe there are some other fun things in the feral druid arsenal.
Survival Instincts - Health boost for those 'Oh S***' moments handy for trying to survive those extra few seconds should you end up with more than you can handle or the healer gets incapacitated.
Beserk - Wow, just wow. Mangle hits 3 mobs at once and has no cooldown other than the global one. Unfortunately didn't make me immune to the Death Coil of one of the bosses but does provide a chance for a massive threat lead if you use it at the start of a fight.

There's still plenty of things to get used to and remember, potions and the herbalism heal being the main ones but there's some more finesse required to the tanking in the game now and more judgement calls. Currently the fights and instances might seem a little easy but once we start hitting Northrend and the fights our new abilities are tuned for it's going to be a whole new ball game. Can't wait :)

Well this is getting silly

The Headless Horseman is once again tearing up Brill and setting fires so as a responsible level 70 rogue it's time to head into the Graveyard in the Scarlet Monastery to break the curse.

The first time we tried this we had a full group of healer, tank, 2 warlocks and my sneaky self. The fight was over before I'd fully remembered what was going on. One member had to drop out so with one less warlock and a shaman healer instead of the priest we decided to try it 4man given no one else in guild was available. Whilst not as quick as the first time, there didn't seem to be any major problems so we carried on with the rest of our summons.

At the start of a subsequent fight our warlock dc'd so we effectively three manned it. Again the time taken was longer but the boss died and there was loot to be shared around.

Today a group was put together and cleared it for each of the one summons, under the threat of a server restart our warrior tank realized he had another chance to summon and promptly did. Our healer and one dps had already left the instance, so knowing I could Vanish should it all go wrong I stuck in. A hunter ran back and between us we took him down, I was amazed and slightly shocked to see that recount had me at over 1000dps with just a Mark of the Wild buff and a couple of poisons.

Gotta love the new talents and abilities that have come in the last patch but I think it shows just how tough the new bad guys we're going to have to face in the frozen north.

Oh yeah it does that...

When putting together the previous post I initially was going to state that druids didn't have any interrupts. Fortunately I was asked to tank Arcatraz (all the way through which was a novelty) for one of our mages who was keen to get his Sha'tar rep to revered for the glyph.

Whilst tanking Dalliah the Doomsayer our plan was just to dps through the heal due to lack of rogue/shaman. As I got out of Whirlwind range the dps did the best thing whilst the boss isn't being actively tanked, and continued nuking. So to get back in quickly I used Feral Charge hoping to either keep the stack of lacerates up, or get it back quickly enough. The mechanics of the fight mean that she always casts heal straight after the whirlwind, and as I shot back in faster than the average bear I noticed the heal fail to complete.

D'oh, /facepalm, time to cut up my tanking licence, I forgot about the interrupt component of the charge, mostly because of the amount of times I charge at something that isn't casting, or is immune to the effects. I'm sure there's been others, and it's probably only going to get worse as the next expansion (and probably the following ones) introduce new abilities.

Knowing your (threat) limits

So if you've done much instancing or raiding you'll have a threat meter installed and running. If you don't go install Omen, don't worry we'll wait for you to come back.

Ok, so now we've got it installed there's some very funky configuration you can do to help stop pulling aggro without having to stare at the bars. Opening up the configuration we can go to the options for 'Single Target Mode' and under that we see a set of options for 'Warnings'.

The tick boxes should be fairly self explanatory, so turn on as much as you need to ensure you know when you're getting close to aggro. Personally I have a sound played (war drums), flash the screen and stick a warning message out. The warning message also hooks into Scrolling Combat Text if you use that for information whilst destroying the enemy.

So the final thing to consider is when one of these warnings should go off. In the options is a slider which ranges from 60 to 130. Before we go picking which number is best, let's remind ourselves of the threat mechanics for pulling aggro. If you are in melee range then you need to exceed 110% of the threat the current player the mob is targetting before it will attack you. If you are at range then you'll need to exceed 130%. The value you set the slider to means that when you hit that percentage of the tanks threat the warning will go off as you've configured them.

I personally have the slider set to 90, and I'll explain why. While I'm not going to pull aggro till 110% it's always worth being careful of the nasty situations, such as the tank gets a string of misses/parries and you get a string of crits. By leaving a bigger gap you can just use white attacks for a bit without relying on any threat dumps which use energy or have a large cooldown. As a ranged dps player you may want to set it higher but that's my recommendation for melee people (which is the target audience for this blog).

As a final word please don't be swayed by those chasing the dps meters who suggest leaving the warning to the last possible moment, stealing aggro from the tank isn't big or clever and can cause problems for the rest of the raid. If you want a fun game see how many times you can trigger your warning during the boss fight, which means you're right on your limit but not causing issues for everyone else.

Gathering the karazhan key fragments

Now while patch 2.4 removed the need to hold The Master's Key in order to enter Karazhan our guild still has a rule that any character that wants to go raiding should have gone through the atunement quests, partially to open up the other quests for the nice reputation reward rings, and to ensure that people have had at least some experience of playing that character in a group, which is important given that it's now very easy to level to 70 without stepping foot into an instance.

So now that Medrare is 70 and getting some tanking experience under his belt, the key fragments needed to be collected from the various arcane containers. The first step was to head into the Shadow Labyrinth and required the full clear.

Our group did fairly well considering, the first boss didn't cause any major headaches, the time for fun guy killed a few people but we got him down before he got all of us or incited enough chaos for us to kill each other. Grandmaster Vorpil gave us a couple of scares, once for not getting out of Hellfire, and the other when a rogue skeleton popped up and took out our healer. The third time was the charm and we moved on and stood face to face with the essence of sound Murmur.

I've got bad memories of this fight on Crash who managed to die on every attempt due to getting hit by Sonic Boom. However this time no such problems, Quartz made it a doddle to know when to run out and Feral Charge means that you're always on the very edge of the hit box when it's time to head back in there. Down he went and after defeating the guardian the first fragment was retrieved.

Lessons learnt: Having important information up front and centre in my UI makes things so much easier in terms of keeping aware. Once I've sorted out the full tanking setup I'll post some screenshots along with Crash's dps version.

The 2nd and 3rd fragments require trips into Steamvaults and Arcatraz and whilst not a full clear enough to warrant a full group and some team effort.

Doing things a bit backwards we went into Arcatraz first, and seeing how we went past the first boss we took a chance and had a go. Our boomkin died quite soon in and our healer succumbed quite close to the end. Unfortunately I died just as the boss did so whilst not a complete wipe, the two mages left standing meant that it was a runflight back from the graveyard. After that we cleared the rest of the necessary trash and the third fragment was secured.

Lessons learnt: Trying to spot void circles on the floor, whilst tanking a boss with your butt against the wall is impossible, and moving out of line of sight of the healers can cause greater problems than just your health going down.

Finally we went into Steamvaults, a place I will learn to love if the Earthwarden is to be mine. The was a slight hiccup when I managed to pull two groups but other than that things went well and we managed to down the first boss again even if it did require the mages to go nuclear on the elementals.

Lessons learnt: Just because every other pull has been flawless doesn't mean you can be any less careful about the next one.

Just Black Morass remains to get the key blessed by Medivh and I can go test my tanking skills in Karazhan against some of those nasty raid bosses.

Playing outside the box

Having spoken about our attempts in ZA and trying to beat the gauntlet, Cynra from Airee.net commented on the problem when people are only prepared to run certain instances with a Paladin tank (Shattered Halls) or a Warlock (Mechanar) or some other must have class.

At the same time however there are players out there that go out of their way to try things that go against conventional wisdom. These include the rogue who geared themselves unhittable and then went on to tank Illidan and the druid who soloed Onyxia (allowing for a backup to take care for respawning patrols) and best of all the 10 druids who took on Karazhan.

This got me thinking, what's the most unusual way you've beaten an encounter in game and do you get any extra sense of enjoyment from the challenge that comes from going up against an encounter in a way that differs from the accepted norm.

For mine I think I have to go back to the first time we killed Lord Ahune for the Midsummer Fire Festival quest. Accepted wisdom was to take a tank, 2 ranged dps and a good burst melee dps along with the healer, and if there was some AoE then live was good and free epics were yours. However our group was 3 tanks (2 feral druids, 1 prot paladin), a BM hunter and resto shaman.

I'm not going to claim it was an easy fight, and again accepted wisdom was that if you didn't get him down in 2-3 waves you weren't going to get him down. Well the one time we managed it was after 5 waves (which you really didn't want to see) and required nearly every cooldown every class had (possibly more than once).

Whilst we only managed to complete the event once out of the five summons from the group it made a great practice ground for learning what your class can do and trying/having to do different things from what would be considered a standard ability rotation.

So that's my little example, are there any others out there which show there's no one right way to play the game?

Thrall saved by random PuG

So there I was, finishing up some quests in Terrorkar to try and ding honored with Sha'tar for the shoulders BBB recommended for entry Kara tanking when a random tanking whisper arrives.

While it didn't necessarily match my suggestions it was for an instance I wanted/needed to do; Old Hillsbrad in the Caverns of Time. The group consisted of two druids (one feral, one resto), two hunters and a warlock. I wouldn't say it was the smoothest run in the world and marking, cc and patrols tended to make things interesting. We however took out all the bosses without any major hassles, and there was only one death when we were taking out the waves of dragonkin before the final boss. Not sure why but it's likely that one got away from me and Thrall and wasn't trapped. Not a major problem, combat rez from the resto druid and he's back in the fight.

Annoyingly the nice tanking ring didn't drop but it was a smooth run and means that I'm all set up to do Black Morass once I've got all the key fragments for Kadger.

As a final plea, if you're going to put yourself into LFG for Old Hillsbrad please have done the walkaround quest, it can seriously wind up the rest of the group if we're having to wait whilst you get the guided tour.

The Sound of Drums

One of the nice things about being a leatherworker are the rather nifty raid consumables that you can produce in the shape of drums. There are four recipes which can all be bought from vendors either at the right rep or from the leatherworker trainer.

Drums of Battle - Simply the best drum there is, haste rating and spell haste rating for your group for a whopping 30secs. I use this on Crash whenever heavy burst damage is required or on fights like Aran where threat isn't an issue. Pick this recipe up from the Sha'tar once you've ground your way to honored.
Drums of Panic - Pretend you're a warlock/spriest and have your enemies running around in fear. Ideal for battlegrounds if you need a few seconds with people off your back or just getting that warlock in trouble in a raid. Available at honored rep with Keepers of Time and a great recipe for getting those last skill points up to 375.
Drums of Restoration - A group wide potion effect for mana and health which doesn't share a cooldown with any of the other goodies such as potions or health stones. Available at honoured reputation from your faction representative in Nagrand.
Drums of Speed - Sprint in musical form, again this is a nice PvP buff esp if you've been brave enough to venture into WSG. Again you can pick this up from your faction rep in Nagrand once you're honored.
Drums of War - The first recipe you'll pick up from the leatherworker trainer and provides a nice AP buff which stacks with any other buff you can get your hands on. Crash uses this in preference to the haste rating on the Prince fight, when melee haste on our tank might cause an extra parry or two which can lead to a bit of a mess.

A brief outline but hopefully enough to encourage everyone that can to make and carry these whilst instancing/raiding or running a battle ground.

Shared Topic: Preparing for Wrath of the Lich King

This is a response to a Blog Azeroth shared topic.

The original plan once I knew the expansion was more than just vapourware was to level my new druid alt to 70 and get him geared to act as a tank. While the levelling is done there is still gear and practice to be done and it would be really nice to get him into Kara to at least try out against the early raid bosses, plus the possibilities of some extra shiny tanking gear. My primary professions are maxed on both characters and a couple of the secondary ones are there as well. A few mats will be horded to try and kick start with the new recipes and I'm hoping that the current plan where a lot of the good leather tanking gear is BoE.

The changes to raiding with a proper 10-man progression through all the raid instances looks to be a great change. Our guild only really has enough balance to run 10 man raids and having nearly cleared Karazhan and spotting just how tricky Zul'Aman can be (given that it's more T5 level content rather than direct progression) is making things tricky in terms of what to do. Having tried a couple of 25man raids I tend to find them too pressured and am less able to have fun and a laugh with people while playing a game. Having fun is quite a key thing, especially when I'm trying to explain tactics and ensure everyone is in the right place during a fight. Also getting to see some of the key lore items in the expansion (and possibly Arthas himself) really adds to the excitement.

Finally having levelled both characters almost exclusively by questing and having missed out on most of the instances on the way, it'll be good to get some instance runs in at the right level and as part of the aventuring in that zone.

Regardless of when the expansion comes out there's still plenty to do and with the inevitable class changes that will come along there'll still be plenty to talk about on this blog.

/salute
/vanish

Careless Whispers

Well this has probably been blogged about before, but as it's still happening (and more importantly to me) here's my view.

So just recently I'll be questing away in a zone when out of nowhere I'll get a whisper along the lines of "r u feral". That's it, no hello, no explanation, just a question of how I've spent my talent points. Generally I assume it's because someone is trying to put an instance run together and are looking for a tank (or healer).

Now it's not that I mind being asked to help out, heck I might even be tempted if I was going to be online for a bit and bored, but interrupting my play time without so much as a hi/hello isn't likely to get a favorable response from me. This also happened when I was levelling up Crash, but that just tended to be the abbreviation of the instance being PUG'd.

Right, so now we know what won't work as a way of getting my attention, what might. Well here's a 3 point plan

1. Be polite - you don't know what I'm doing and will most likely be in the middle of something when you send that whisper.
2. Use proper words - if you take the time to write a proper question, I may well take the time to right a proper response.
3. Be original - You won't be the first person to send a request so make yours stand out from the crowd.

Finally an apology, if you've done all that and still not got a response please don't take it personally, I may well have missed the whisper in amongst guild chat, officer chat and other spaff. Good luck with your adventures and remember not to break the cc