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Top posts are now listed to the right. =)

Toravon, ICC10, and assorted ramblings.

Ahh, news.

School’s still keeping me pretty busy, but not so busy that I haven’t had a chance to check out new content. Got a chance to run Toravon a few times on various characters – not the DK – and I have to admit, it’s a really fun encounter. My only big problem with it is that the stacking debuff means I can’t solo-tank it yet, lol. So far, though, the most fun I’ve had on that fight was healing it on the druid. A nice combination of spike damage (from Frostbite, Frozen Orb spawns, etc) and sustained damage from tank melee hits and tank dots. Lots of fun, and kept me on my toes.

Just got an ICC 10 done on the mage, and that was a lot of fun. I was actually the only cloth caster in the group, which was pretty funny; a couple nice pieces dropped for me too, so I’m up and geared on that again. It’s actually pretty amazing; I managed to do a VOA -25 , and rocked with almost 8k DPS on Koralon. It’s good to know I can still top meters on that character. Working on my cooldown management and awareness too!

The paladin finally got the bracers from 10-ICC to drop last night – the ones with bonus armor – so I’m over 30k armor now, which is AWESOME. I’m loving this new bonus armor on the tier pieces; getting my 2 with bonus armor in the next couple weeks as I get the badges.

Blood Prince Council…argh. Got ‘em to 12.7% last night, and they totally shoulda died…but someone D/C’d, and wasn’t able to get back on, so sadly they’ll have to wait ’til next week. I’m excited to see them go down in 10 though, there shouldn’t be any problems – especially since we apparently only need two tanks.

In Soviet Russia, update post YOU!!

Yeah, this is gonna be a pretty generic updatey post. Merrr. Busy!

WoW’s coming along pretty well. Paladin got 2/5 T10, and Pillars of Might crafted, so doing very nicely for myself there. I’ve respecced my second spec from Holy to Retribution, which is nice too – melee DPS is still tough for me (as it is on the DK), but it’s a nice challenge.

Toravon is a lot of fun…I have to two-tank him though, which is really too bad. (as opposed to Koralon/Emalon which I routinely solo-tank).

Over the last couple of weeks, I finally learned how to Resto Druid, which is nice. Being able to effectively heal in ICC 10-man stuff is a big plus.

Just saw the Ensidia ban. What do you guys think about that? IMO, they’ve exploited encounters in the past, and if it took them 10 attempts to down LK, one would think they would figure out why the throne was rebuilding. Yes, Blizzard QA let this one slide through, but Ensidia took advantage of it, and deserves to be banned.

Other news! College is keeping me busy, so I haven’t been able to work on a blog much – this is just kind of filler until I’m able to get a proper post going. Hopefully gonna get a chance to work on the mage a little more soon, I feel like I’m falling behind gear-wise a little bit. Still alive, at least!

Merrily tweeting away

For those of you who haven’t noticed at the top of my page, or who get my blog through RSS, I’m now on Twitter! For those who want to know every mundane detail of my life, now’s your chance.

A Tribute to Skill!

Last week, I was frustrated by Anub 10 heroic. We got him to 7% a couple times, but couldn’t finish him off before we ran out of attempts.

Tonight was a different story.

The night started out well, almost 40 online to raid, so we hit up Icecrown. Two-shot Marrowgar, and then one-shot the next two bosses, neither of which we had downed before last week. Off to Saurfang we went – and lo and behold, a two-shot. On a progression boss. That’s really saying something. Not to mention, when we downed him – it was a no-death clear.

After raid, I specifically selected a group of guildies that I thought had the best chance of success in TOGC10, something that we had never downed completely – and something that we hadn’t gotten Twins down in until last week. We started out extremely well, putting together flawless Beasts and Jaraxxus attempts. Literally flawless – no deaths, no wipes. Sitting at Faction Champs with Tribute to Dedicated Insanity still intact was excellent.

Faction Champs rocked us pretty hard, though. The last time I was in TOGC was about a month ago, not counting the Anub attempts, and our progression down was done by killing one healer and then killing their DPS before killing the last healer due to excessive burst. We couldn’t manage that this time, people kept dying – so we killed both healers, and managed to get the DPS down afterwards – but not after losing 6 attempts.

So, with 44 attempts remaining, onwards to Twins! We had a small problem on our first attempt, people were taking damage, but we had a near-flawless second attempt, got them down easily, and almost hit the speed kill.

We took a short break, repaired, and headed down to Anub. On the second attempt, we managed to get him down to 7% again – but we couldn’t come close for the next 7 attempts. People were getting tired, we were sitting at 34 attempts and no progress. I decided it would be best to just call the raid after one more attempt, people were just getting too tired.

We got in, buffed up, and got ready. I turned Fraps on, popped Divine Plea, and for good measure used an Indestructible Potion on the pull. Initial positioning went well, got the adds down  and started in on the boss…and we got him down to 53% before he submerged. Things were going well, but I wasn’t going to jinx it now.

Aspect of the Wild went up in submerge phase for any stacks of acid-drenched mandibles, and we single-targeted the scarabs down with ease. When Anub came back up, we had only one or two scarabs left to deal with.

Got the adds down, and the next set didn’t come out until after Phase 3 started. I took a risk, and called for staying on the boss. Our healer went down early, at 17% or so. One DPS died, then another…Anub was at 10%, and the new adds were about 15 seconds away. A third DPS died. I popped Avenging Wrath at 7%, figuring this was it, needed everything we could get. 5%…4%…3%…2%…and we got him. 34 attempts left.

What a great feeling.

Checked the loot after the kill, and saw BOTH Ardent Guard and Aegis of the Coliseum, as well as the 1-handed DPS weapon. Didn’t get really excited, figured maybe I could split the sword and shield with our other tank…and then I strolled over to the tribute chest…and lo and behold, Blood and Glory.

That’s right, BOTH tanking weapons as well as the heroic-mode shield.

I asked the other tank – also our GM – which weapon he wanted, and he took Ardent Guard. I grabbed Blood and Glory, and then won the roll for Aegis – which is, IMO, a brilliantly itemized shield. Mostly straight full-mitigation stats and a socket for stam. Having a new, unenchanted shield gave me a compelling reason to switch from defense to stamina enchant on my shield, so I took advantage of the opportunity.

The only downside of the night? I’m stuck leveling mace skill. 49 all the way up to 370 so far, but I gotta get to 400 before raid tomorrow.

Tanking enchants

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

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

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

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

News from the front

Happy 2010, everybody! I had a lovely holiday; hope yours was as nice!

I’ve started work on yet another alt, and so far my shaman is at level 70 and moving quickly. As Resto, it’s really easy to find instance groups – and each instance is worth a good 10-15% of a level for me. Not bad at all.

Also got back in touch with Cloudy Day’s old guild leader, who I’ve missed – it was great to chat with him again as well as run some dungeons.

My level 80 alts have been doing pretty well, too. Got my druid some raiding experience in ICC 10 last night, downing the first three bosses. My heals weren’t great, but I was pulling my weight most of the time. The mage has cleared the first 4 bosses of ICC 10 as well, including the achievement off of the last boss – pretty awesome stuff. Haven’t managed to get the DK in there yet, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.

My paladin’s doing pretty well, too. Despite major lag the last couple days, I finally managed to nab the Twilight Vanquisher title – months late, but meh, still definitely usable. In addition, I’ve got some achievements out of ICC – the first boss’s bone spikes and Saurfang’s marks, to be specific. Still no Bonebreaker Scepter, though – 5 weeks now, I think, and I still haven’t seen it once.

Only 4/7 in ICC 10 right now, but we spent a LOT of time wiping on Rotface. A friend of mine told me that Festergut was a lot easier, though, so I think we’ll be trying him next week or, hopefully, later this week.

I was looking at the blog stats, and it looks like a lot of people are checking out my mage theorycraft post. I’ll be doing another post similar to that one soon, dealing with tanking enchants – and maybe adding an optimal enchant list to the mage post.

I’m also looking for a new tagline for my blog. The last one made little to no sense, and I feel that things could be better. Any suggestions?

Max badges!!

I got my death knight to 80, finally – only a few months behind everyone else. The class seems okay, nothing special, and my rotation is easy and boring. Literally all I do is “keep diseases up, Heart Strike and Death Strike as necessary”.

Ah well. It’s my fourth 80, and I got him geared enough to do the weekly raid quest this week. I’ve been doing a heroic a day on every character in addition to weekly raid quests on all characters and ICC 10 on my paladin, so I’m pulling in something like 84 badges a week. It’s great, especially since I’m working on getting the mats together for my paladin’s new boots from the ICC pattern, which would be an upgrade from 10-ToC boots.

I’ve also been working some more on my UI; my latest addition is Skada, which looks like it’s going to replace both Omen and Recount. Yay!

Holiday achievement mania

Although I’ve been busy avoiding Merrymaker as much as I can, I have been working on a few other achievements. This week’s weekly raid was Patchwerk, so I was able to get the timed kill on all three characters this week. Nice to get those out of the way; my paladin is now only 2 achievements away from Glory of the Hero (10 Player). A bit late, but hey – it’s good to get those knocked out.

My mage also managed to do his first 3d Sarth 10 this week, so that was nice to finish as well. At this point, though, I’m torn between using the Undying and Champion of the Naaru titles on that character. Which one sounds cooler to you?

By an amazing coincidence today, I logged in my mage right next to the last book that he needed for Higher Learning, so I got that one done too – had all but two books read for months, and finally got the last two knocked out. Working towards 7k achievement points now, haven’t been doing too badly especially considering that that character’s an alt now.

Christmas, Christmas time is here, time for toys and time for…cheer?

Two posts in two days? Vel, you must be crazy! You haven’t done this since you started! Calm it down a bit!

After the break: me whining.

Movie review: Avatar

HAHAHAHA AND HERE YOU WERE EXPECTING A CONTENT POST

HOW SILLY COULD YOU BE

I MEAN SERIOUSLY GUYS

Honestly though! I don’t intend to make this a regular thing – in fact, this should be the only movie review I do – but HOLY COW was this movie amazing. More after the break.

And down goes the Deathbringer.

Downed Deathbringer Saurfang on Thursday, and even got the extra achievement for having less than 3 people with the mark thing. We were trying a one-tank strategy to start out, but we just didn’t quite have the dps to down him – so we switched to two tanks, which negated any healing he might have had from Mark of Blood – and voila, one-shot.

All that’s left for my guild’s 10-mans is to down the last 2 bosses in H 10 ToC and then some Ulduar hardmodes – all in all, we’ve had some pretty successful 10-man progression so far. Can’t wait till the next wing of ICC is released!

My first 3.3 raid

Well, I was a little bit behind everyone in getting into Icecrown, but we did indeed make our way in there last night. On 25-man, we came pretty close to downing Marrowgar – our best attempt was 1.2% – but we just couldn’t quite keep up with the massive tank damage. Ah well, perhaps next time.

We did go into 10-man after that, though – and we ended up downing the first 3 bosses. Tons of fun. The gunship battle wasn’t as awkward and clunky as I thought it was going to be; I actually had a blast doing it. The other two fights that we finished were pretty fun as well, I think we two-shot everything except Deathbringer.

Speaking of Deathbringer, WOW. That is a well-tuned fight. Marrowgar felt a little easy (as, surprisingly, did Deathwhisper), but Deathbringer really challenged our raid. On our last attempt of the night, we got him to 17%, but we couldn’t quite get him down. The mechanics of that fight are absolutely a blast.

Icecrown’s shaping up to be a great raid. I’m really impressed with how well done the encounters are, and also with the difficulty of the raid. The encounters are hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard as to be impossible – kinda like the stuff from BC. The 5-mans are really good too, bringing challenge (used here as a relative term) back into heroics. I actually had to turn my brain on for some of the fights.

The rest of the stuff in 3.3 is awesome too, but I’ll get into the Dungeon Finder, Emblems of Frost, and so forth, in my next post.

Getting back into things

Yay, I return.

ToGC 10 has been frustrating for me recently. When there isn’t low attendance, the people that come to the run are screwing up on stuff that’s mentioned time and time again. Most recently, one of our healers had unbelievable trouble with finding the fire projectiles and pre-moving on NRB phase 1 – as in, he died every time save one, where he wasn’t ever targeted.

What makes it more frustrating is that we’ve been through it before, killed the first three bosses as a guild and put in attempts in Twins, plus I got to see Anub as well in a different run – so I know that we should be able to get this content, but it just seems to elude us. Has anyone else been in this kind of situation, and what did you do when it came up?

Other news, other news…hmm. I hear 3.3’s coming out next week, so that’s pretty exciting. Probably the coolest fight that I’ve seen in there from videos so far has been Sindragosa – looks like a nice blend of awareness/positioning and DPS-check. Hopefully, I’ll see it one day.

Gonna keep this post short, there really isn’t much to say right now. I’ll probably have something more to say soon, but right now not so much.

3.2.2 Arcane: Optimizing for ToC with Incanter’s Absorption

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wacky tanking feats, and a short break.

Hello again, friends.

I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last post; I’ve been having some login issues recently with WordPress. It seems to be somewhat solved now, so onwards!

I’ve been doing some rather silly things tanking recently. Just tonight, I managed to take down Emalon as a solo tank, on 25-man difficulty – rather fun stuff, not gonna lie. Just hit 50k health raid buffed on my paladin, too, which has really helped as my guild has started working on 10-man Trial of the Grand Crusader. All sorts of fun.

All fun and games aside, though, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to step back and reassess my priorities right now. This, for me, entails a hiatus from WoW, and, by extension, from blogging. I fully expect to be back, but right now a break is needed.

Cheers.

(Before I leave, I’ll post a link to my mage’s new Arcane spec – some really cool new stuff in it that I’ll explain!)