In keeping with our theme from yesterday

The video for lord Rhyolith still hasn't had a successful upload. I'll get it one of these nights! It would probably help if I got the size down a bit more though - I'm amazed at how large video files are.

Also apropos to the theme from yesterday, I've got a couple short stories from the RDF and even a tiny one from trade. The first story is from Selinah, my gathering alt and tank. The further we progress into the Firelands, the easier it is to cap my main on VP, so I get a chance to heal or tank every so often. Last night after work, I thought it might be fun to pick up a satchel especially because tanks get instant queues.

I zoned in to a fresh ZA and we started up. Someone facepulled the little group of mobs right before the start of the gauntlet just as I ran up to the scout, so I got to tank a few extra adds and what have you, but it went fine. One of the DPS died on Akil'zon, but I didn't see where it happened and assumed that they'd stood in the lightning storm.

Then, as I was preparing to head off in the direction of Nalorakk, the healer says "Tank. You take too much damage."

I was pretty flabbergasted - it's not as if Akil'zon does a lot of tank damage, he's one of the party damage bosses. Further, I've tanked ZA and ZG several times, occasionally with somewhat undergeared healers. I use my cooldowns and debuff the bosses, and unless I stand in fire or something, I'm never really the point of failure.

There's this funny thing that happens in RDF parties though, where whoever first calls someone else bad tends to get others to agree with them. So if I'd called the healer a bad for letting someone die - even if that person had stood in the lightning storm - things probably would have gone differently.

I suggested that maybe if tank damage was an issue for him, he should consider using healing touch, but he was adamant that lifebloom should be able to heal 100% of the damage in an encounter.

Now for reference, here's the armory of the healer in question: Tankshifter of Silvermoon.

What happened last night was that, still flabbergasted, I said "uh, I've tanked this entire place multiple times and my gear is obviously sufficient. Maybe you should cast HT. But if you're TOTALLY CONVINCED of yourself, votekick me I guess?" And they did. And the healer apparently got some sort of tank to carry him, and probably lied about how I was bad.

In retrospect, I wish I'd been bitchier.

I wish I'd inspected him and said "oh look, someone with unenchanted pvp gear and welfare epix wants to get carried by an overgeared tank."

To the DPS that chimed in with him, I wish I'd said "maybe if your DPS wasn't so hilariously awful, Akil'zon wouldn't have taken so long and run our terrible healer OOM."

I wish I'd said "I'm obviously wearing enough gear for the content and I use my cooldowns, which means that if you can't heal me you're just bad."

I wish I'd said that healing through Nefarian after he'd been nerfed six feet under the ground didn't mean you were anything better than mediocre.

The group still would have kicked me, probably, and the healer especially would still have thought he was right... but I'd've felt better.

That said, my re-queue got me into a ZG group which ended up being fun. We got two DPS that had never been to the instance before, so I gave them quick tips on everything. The first couple healers saw that we had two new DPS and bailed, but the third healer, who was wearing T12 (Paladin T12 hat + shoulders look SO COOL) and was clearly only there for VP, stuck with us, even killing some of the quest mobs.

All of the DPS - all of them - died on the Zanzil encounter, chewed up by the berserker that I'd told them to kill (even melee, DPS in general was loooow and there was no way we'd be zerging Zanzil down without killing the zerker), and the healer and myself whittled down the last 40% or so of Zanzil's health ourselves.

I used all my cooldowns multiple times, used darkflight three times and intervene even more often to keep myself away from the berserker, and the paladin used holy's perpetual sprints to keep away from it. It was glorious.

We had to reset Jin'do once because I guess they thought I was kidding when I said "stand in the green on phase 1", but the second pull was successful (if hilarious). We actually broke the shields on all three chains before the first chain had died. I had never seen that happen before - a platform full of twisted spirits, none of the chains shielded, and no berserker up nor any reason to have one. So I spent a lot of time stunning and killing spirits and generally keeping them off of the healer and DPS. It was probably the longest Jin'do encounter I've ever seen, just like Man'dokir with that group was the longest I've seen it go on and actually result in a kill.

At the end of it, though, I'd had a lot of fun. More fun than I've had in any of a number of fast and smooth yet mute RDF runs.

Also I won the barrel from Gub and it was full of Sagefish. Yay!

Finally, this afternoon when I was on briefly before work to take care of some stuff and check auctions, trade chat had a little series of questions. There was one guy that was asking if the int heirlooms were for casters and the agi ones were for phys DPS. And it wasn't even that he was asking that general question, but he would link each individual set and then go "is this for casters?"

And, you know, yes. It is. But once that you've established that int is for casters, why do you need to ask individually for the cloth, leather, and mail heirlooms?

Another person had a very basic question about how to play their spec, and I remarked that the official forums typically have a well-maintained stickied guide thread for any given spec, and it would be faster and less prone to error to read that.

Some people in trade thought I was being rude, but I really don't think I was. I wasn't being insulting or mean about it - just letting people know that there are easier resources than asking trade, which often has 32 different flavors of the wrong answer for any given question due to a combination of people being mistaken and being trolls.

Sadly, even those people that make it to the forums don't necessarily read the stickies. Most days, there are 2-3 new threads posted to the hunter forum that say "how do I play Marksmanship?"

Now, I'm all for people asking that question and coming to the forums for help with it. But there stickied threads right at the top of the forum that are clearly guides for how to play MM and SV post-4.1.

I'd be fine with someone posting a thread that said "I read the stickies and didn't understand this particular part..." or "So in the sticky it said this thing about 4.1, but is that still true in 4.2?" or "the guide doesn't make any recommendations for how to do a fight like Beth'tilac, can anyone give me advice on that boss?" But no one does that! They show up in the forum, don't read the stickies, and then want people to re-type all of it just for them.

Why does this happen? I don't get it.

The painful sting of the nerfbat

Well, they're just nerfing everybody everywhere with 4.06, it seems. Heroics are getting nerfed, which I'll talk about in a bit, but oh my god the Survival nerfs are painful to see:

• Black Arrow damage has been reduced by 25%.
• Explosive Shot damage has been reduced by 25%.
• Hunter vs. Wild has been increased to 5/10/15% Stamina, up from 4/8/12%.
• Serpent Spread can now only affect up to 4 targets per Multi-Shot, down from unlimited

Oh god. It's like some hateful Guido with a backwards ballcap, gold necklace, and shoulders swarming with steroids and beer just took an aluminum baseball bat to my gut. Ok, not really, but those are some serious, serious nerfs. Explosive Shot is our most damaging ability and Black Arrow tends to be my third most damaging ability when kept on cooldown on a boss. That BA nerf is in fact so severe that I'm afraid that optimal Survival DPS is going to revert to using explosive trap for LnL procs on stationary bosses, which I really don't like doing. I hope the math doesn't end up in that direction, but I'm afraid it may.

On the other hand, they're theoretically buffing MM and BM, so maybe I'll be able to swap over to one of those if I don't like where Survival ends up. I'm still really surprised at the scale of the nerf to explosive shot, though. 25% nerfs to our top and third damaging abilities are just really, really severe. That's going to work out to somewhere between a 10-15% reduction in total damage done on an average boss fight. Or in less abstract terms, I'm going to be doing 1,200-1,800 less DPS, depending on boss fight. Raiding hunters are going to see an even bigger number, in absolute terms, lopped off of their damage. Brutal. Really brutal.

In general, I think the people working on class balance for WoW have proven themselves to be pretty smart, so maybe this is warranted. I suppose that it's worse to have something taken away from you than to have never had it at all. Even that only goes so far, though: if they nerf BA to the point where it's not worth using, that's a mistake (and incidentally, that's a mistake they've made before). I should also remind myself that these changes are just on the PTR, though, and they won't necessarily make it to live in their current form. It seems like the nerf to into the wilderness alone probably would have been sufficient, so hopefully they'll back off on the destruction of the spec's two signature abilities.

Moving on, the numerous nerfs to heroics are both surprising and not surprising in light of this blog post by Ghostcrawler. Surprising because the meat of the post is a spirited defense of the current difficulty of heroics, and largely I agree with him. I've been having a lot of fun with the Cataclysm heroics, and the guild has gotten to the point where we can reliably clear all but the longest instance in 45 minutes, and the longer ones in just about an hour. I'm personally at 11/28 of the achievements for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero, and our Wednesday/Thursday instance times are obviously today and tomorrow, so we should be able to make a bunch more progress there. I think the trash is a little easier than BC heroics, but the boss design has been worlds better, with the exception of Grand Vizier Ertan, who is dumb and boring. "This boss has two phases. In phase 1 you damage him. In phase two, melee stands around pointlessly but ranged still damages him. The party is zapped with a lot of lightning it can do nothing about." Um, ok. But like, Altairus? Slabhide? Azil? Barim? There are a lot of cool, involved boss mechanics in the Cataclysm heroics, the sort of fun and engaging stuff you don't generally get to see until you're raiding, and there was honestly very little that cool happening in the BC heroics.

I suppose the guy in Mechanar that gave you positive/negative charges was mildly interesting. And mini-Kael from heroic MgT was awesome. But the Black Stalker, Kalithresh, and... those other guys. I dunno. I just don't remember the bosses being all that entertaining really until you made it to Netherspite or the other dragon (Nightbane? I don't even remember) in Kara. And then the dragonhawk boss and Zul'jin in ZA were both pretty cool, Vashj and real Kael were awesome, etc.

So yeah, the nerfs to heroics are a little sad for me. On the other hand, I certainly can't argue with the sentence at the end of his post: they definitely have historically nerfed content once it's been out for a bit. Not necessarily because they think it was overtuned - indeed, the people that clear it pre-nerf have always worn that as a badge of pride. I never even raided sunwell, but I've talked with steely-eyed veterans on messageboards who stand a little straighter when they get to mention they killed M'uru before it got nerfed. But those people already have their volcanic stone drakes and are working on heroic Omnotron. They want more people getting heroics cleared. So I understand why they're doing it, and hey, I got my Cataclysm Dungeon Hero achievement before they did.

85 and a shiny thing

Well, Pradzha has made it to 85. She actually dinged on like the second or third turn-in for the new arena in Twilight Highlands. On the way to 85, she utterly cleared out Vashj'ir, Ul'dum, and Deepholm and just scratched the surface of the Highlands. She's going to have to do a little more questing there at some point, just to activate the portal from Stormwind and back, but that's not very time sensitive.

I've now tried one 85 normal pug on her, a random which went to Grim Batol. The tank got itself killed on a trash pull, so I offered to CC and mark. The first boss is pretty straightforward (think Icehowl), yet somehow I was the only person in the party to move out of his charge. He dropped non-heroic Skardyn's Grace and I won the roll, which is absolutely unheard of. I used my Darkmoon Card: Greatness literally throughout the entirety of Wrath and I used the Hourglass of the Unraveller throughout BC. I'm serious: Illidan had to face the unmitigated fury of that trinket's proc. The danger here is that I'll be working on Deathwing in a year's time and still using the trinket I got yesterday.

Anyway, the second boss in Grim Batol pats and the tank let it walk into him without especially noticing. Even then it needn't have been a wipe, but when the yellow messsage flashed across the screen saying "THE BOSS HAS EQUIPPED A REALLY BIG HEAVY WEAPON IT IS SO BIG IT MADE HIM WALK SLOWER," the tank didn't think to kite and was of course squashed to paste. Not even my frantically typing into party chat "kite the boss kite kite kite" seemed to help. Although why I'd think he'd notice that and not the 93-point font in startling yellow in the middle of his screen I'm not sure.

On the run back we explained things and - I'm serious here! - no one was rude. It was all very understanding, this is a new expansion, here's the mechanic in play, let's kill the boss, shake it off etc. This somehow prompted the tank to run in, pull that same second boss again, and then drop group in an attempt to wipe us.

Sometimes the behavior of my fellow primates is just a mystery to me.

I'm hoping to convince guildies to play in some heroics this week, as I think skill and teamwork will be more than sufficient to compensate for not being utterly dripping with 333 blooz. Pradzha, for example, can CC two things at a time and has been anywhere from two to five thousand DPS ahead of pugs on any given boss. Some guildies have been neck and neck with her, but for the most part I'm averaging 40% of party damage done. Which is why I'm thinking that a party of people similarly shifted off to the right side of the bell curve shouldn't have too much of an issue running heroics even before we're totally geared up from normals.

Finally, some of my favorite people from our Wrath raiding team have returned, so I am super psyched to resume raiding on February second.

New fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiives

Last night we cleared Blackrock Caverns, Throne of the Tides, and Stonecore. It was totally fun! Especially since we didn't have to mess with randoms from the pool of RDF moon-people. Just five like-minded people having fun exploring the new instances.

Blackrock Caverns (possibly to be jargonized as "BRC" in the future?) was pretty straightforward, but almost every boss had something you had to take note of. You had to pop the chains the first ogre put on you, you had to play Netherspite beam-blocker with Corla, Steelbender had to get dunked in the fire, and Obsidius' friends had to get kited. Those guys actually were something of a problem for us, since we went in thinking they were CCable when in fact they were not. That meant that I had to try to start kiting them even though my super-easy kiting ability, frost trap, was on cooldown because a freezing trap had just been wasted on an immune target. Woops. We still killed him without a wipe, but it'll be a lot smoother next time. I'm not sure what heroic groups without a competent kiter are going to do, though.

Throne of the Tides ("TotT"?) was almost certainly my favorite in terms of visual design. The wobbly and gelatinous water-forcefield walls mobs were jumping in through were very cool, and the architectural aesthetic living somewhere between high elf and earthen was exactly perfect. The bosses here were pretty straightforward, too. I was honestly pretty surprised to see Lady Naz'jar: I was expecting her to at least be living in a raid somewhere, instead of dispatched in a five-person dungeon. I suppose we killed Loken in a dungeon, though, and he was just as prominent in the Storm Peaks questlines.

I was going to wowhead and reading the boss abilities before each boss we pulled, but that did not necessarily mean I understood things correctly. For example, I was thinking we'd have to interrupt Ms. Naz'jar's "waterspout" ability, so it was a surprise when she instead summoned in some adds. In retrospect I should have realized that spell probably meant adds, but enh! We did alright. The tank picked up the melee one, while our ranged pointed the chain-lightning casters away from the party (as well as had everyone spread out). I'm not sure if having the casters on non-tanks will work in heroic, but as I'm writing this it occurs to me that there's almost certainly no reason not to trap or sheep one of them.

We also screwed up on the mind control boss a little bit. I'm used to CCing raid members that get MCed, but it turns out you just have to damage them to 50% without killing them. I'm sure the last clause in that sentence is going to result in numerous wipes ("way to kill the healer, guys"), but other than that it's not too tough. Oh yeah, and the tank has to tank the octopus. Neptulon does not look quite as ridiculous as his name would imply, which is all I have to say about him.

Stonecore was the one instance where we did a lot of crowd controlling of trash, especially in the corridor leading up to Ozruk. I think it's a pretty hilarious commentary on Wrath that I had no idea that freezing trap lasts an entire minute now. Holy god! I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for traps to break and they just... never did. They are infinite now. Survival hunters are now insane monsters of crowd control. Wyvern sting sleeps a target for thirty seconds and freezing trap can keep a mob locked up infinitely without even the miniscule chance of damage taken that we lived with in BC. And we can purge the enrage off of things that enrage! Just absolutely nuts.

High Priestess Azil was our one wipe of the night. I think we were all surprised by the sheer volume of adds, and we just mis-managed them to the extent that my boyfriend's little holydin was cut down by religious fanatics. Isn't that how it always is? We ran back and changed the way we positioned the boss and the party and had a much easier time of it, as most of the fanatics ran right into the little black holes. Whee!

Tonight we'll start with Vortex Pinnacle, the only one of the initial dungeons we didn't run last night, then see which ones people want to repeat. You can definitely tell, running these low-level non-heroics, that there's going to be an accountin' once people are running heroics. All the sinners that have spent the past couple years just ignorin' everything the bosses been doin', they'll be all burnt up to ashes and scattered on the wind 'till they mend their sinful ways. Make sure you can count yourself amongst the righteous now and you won't have to share their torment with them.

Up next on the blog, probably later today: the Cataclysm pre-raid gear list! Every nerd has to have a spreadsheet for something, and for me it's my endlessly updated and tweaked gear wishlists.