This is mostly about some problems I have with the way pally tanks are set up right now. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love the position we're in and really don't want to get nerfed so this isn't about us being on a bad position class balance wise. This is about gear.
As many of you know, our best gear options is basically any piece of str plate without crit. I love having more gearing options even though I'm not thrilled with haste so good. This is a lot better than the previous models where it's "stack mastery and ignore the rest." That said, I have a few issues that I'd like to bring up.
1 - Haste gear isn't tagged for prot in LFR/world bosses/bonus rolls. This means that should I want to use my bonus roll on something like heroic Gara'jal (which hopefully we'll have down tonight or tomorrow) I'm only hoping for the boots. This is really frustrating since if I want either of those pieces I have to queue for LFR as ret (which I'm not very good with nor do I have gear for it) which introduces the problem of me getting gear with crit on it.
2 - I really don't want to take gear away from dps classes. I'm fine if our gear is intended to be the same and we're supposed to compete for gear but right now I just feel terrible for rolling on things like the hit/haste gloves from Elegon. This really only bothers me because it feels similar to the old warriors taking leather gear with ArP. I have access to a lot more gear than they do for tanking but because the haste is better I am ignoring gear that is "for me" in favour of gear that is "for them."
3 - Tier gear. Our 4p is incredibly good. This means we want to take sub-optimal gear in exchange for that 4p, which I feel is somewhat the intended design for set bonuses instead of "decide which four pieces you want because the 4p is that good all the time." That being said we are probably going to seriously look at the ret set bonuses every tier because if the 2p is good, we're more than likely to take that instead of our own 4p. Imagine something like, hitting CS or Judgement gives you some haste buff. That's something I'd take if ret gear was better than prot. Putting this into perspective, I want the ret gear more than the prot gear right now.
The complaining aside, I really do like having more compelling gear choices. My qualms mainly remains with not having the game support the value of haste to us.
Last thing I wanted to mention was looking at enchants. Tanking enchants are somewhat interesting this time around, and I do have some problems with them. I'm going to post what EJ says for prot pally enchants since it somewhat echos my own feelings:
Dancing Steel > River's Song >> Windsong >>> Colossus.
I hate Colossus just as much as the guys over at EJ do. Over the course of an entire Will of the Emperor fight I got a total of 250k absorbed. Sure that means it proced maybe 40+ times, but the shield size is awful. 7k shield just doesn't cut it. To put this into perspective, on will of the emperors, a single dodged or parried attack due to DS or RS will be the same. Sure you can't garuntee and the nature of avoidance from str-parry and dodge but it's more about hedging the bets against you than making a large difference.
The problem I have here is that the dps enchant is better than the tanking enchant. I'd be fine if it was some crazy secondary stat buff but it's a stat that means next to nothing for us. It increases dps (marginally since most of our ap comes from vengeance anyways) and gives us some parry.
Sure rivers song has an official twice the proc rate when compared to dancing steel so you'll have more uptime but there's two reasons that's not really relevant. First is that str-parry conversion doesn't suffer from DR. It's str to parry % not str to parry rating. Secondly the duration on DS is 12s, the duration on RS is only 7.
They are also not on the RPPM system as of yet, contrary to what you might read on the internet the blizzard post doesn't say anything but windsong and elemental blast or whatever are using the new system.
That's mostly what I had to rant about tonight, we've got gara sub 10%. Don't forgot to complain on the forums in a civilized manner, use theck and EJ for sources.
25 October, 2012
15 October, 2012
MV is amazing
I'm finding it's really hard to find time to write these days, especially with all the farming that I have to do. I've actually got 3 characters (should be more but I've been lazy) all farming for mats while getting some friends to fish for me.
I don't like dailies, I don't like the intense time investment outside of raid. I'm ok with a little, like planting your farm every day for food (which would have been a wonderful idea if not for the extra 5 hours of fishing/killing turtles I have to do for every raid night). I like the idea of making the feasts a smaller stat gain than personal food, this seems like a fine idea. The problem I have is that to get the extra 25 stats for non-stam food takes a completely absurd amount of time to farm. It's probably not worth it.
Second, flasks. I understand that the wrath model with frozen lotus was a decent one. I also understand that the economy on some servers is really really bad. That said, the guild has to drop 60k every week to get it's raiders flasked, minus alchemists and their double long flasks. We could change to elixirs, which sometimes come out on top anyways but there's two major problems there.
1. Alchemists still benefit more from flasks since the double duration applies while death completely negates that part of mixology. This means that for alchemists elixirs are even more expensive than flasks.
2. There are only 2 guardian elixirs. Dodge and Armour. This means that only tanks will get the benefit of using two elixirs and the stat gain from a flask once again beats out the elixir gain.
Sure you can buy golden lotus with motes of harmony, and you can farm motes with your farm. Assuming you only spend so much time in raids a week, it shouldn't be too bad. 1.6 spirits * 7 days in the week = 11.2 spirits exclusively from farming in a given week. 3 lotus per spirit means basically 33 flasks per week. So for the non-alchemists this means 33 hours of raiding per week is covered by you spending your entire farm on harmony...This isn't too bad, but try to get everyone on the raid team using their farm for motes for the guild. I highly doubt the average player will spend 33 hours a week raiding and flasked the whole time. Since I forgot to add alts, you can multiply it by the number of characters at revered or higher. 1.2 for a revered character, 1.6 for an exalted one. Things get pretty easy for flasks at that point. Ultimately you can provide golden lotus for yourself once you hit revered with 1.2 spirits per day, ignoring any lucky picks or immediately ripe plants. That takes care of flasks, but oh wait how the hell are you planning on dealing with food now.
This is sort of the conundrum. Not only do you have to deal with your farm, but as a serious raider you have to get all your dailies done to get the rep to even be able to spend your valour points. This also applies to your justice points. This means that your time investment per day is somewhere in the realm of 2-3 hours after farming for raid mats and getting your dailies done. That has just turned my 12 hour raid week into nearly a 30hr "raid" week. This is ridiculous.
Thankfully, blizzard has provided us raiders with what I think has been one of the best raid instances I have seen. The lore may not be flowing out of the walls, but the mobs and encounter design are. I have no felt this good about raiding in a really really long time. I think sinestra was the last time I was actually excited about a boss kill and didn't just think "It's about [expletive] time." Spine came closest but in the end it the feeling there was more one of finishing a marathon and collapsing to the ground just happy to be finished. Sinestra felt like something we worked hard for an accomplished. Not until doing stone guard on heroic (Yes, I'm only 1/6 H right now, we are having some issues with feng) did I really feel happy about killing a boss. We managed about world 150 25m, US 70ish. This is the best I have ever done while raiding and I feel like this time it was really about being good at the game and working really hard in the raid instance.
All the fights I feel are extremely well designed and, at least on 25m, extremely well tuned. Elegon is a perfect example of getting things just right. Our first 25m kill of that we were within 10-20s of the enrage after having a couple 2-5% wipes. It was what I remembered of raiding back in the black temple or the first time we got kael'thas down, or especially lady vashj. This raid instance is phenomenal, and has really raised the bar on encounter design. I also think, judging by completion rates, that there has been a much better job trying to keep the 10 and 25 raids relatively equal. I don't want to get into that debate because I do have opinions and people will get upset but the reality is they are different raid sizes and require different things out of not only the raiders themselves but out of those who organize the raids.
Thank you blizzard for making me remember why I absolutely love to raid. I can't believe you made an encounter that is almost exclusively about spreading and stacking at the right times, and managed to make it truly difficult in the appropriate gear. I can't wait until heart of fear and terrace get launched, I doubt we'll get all of MV down before it launches but we can try.
Lastly I wanted to remind all of the prot pallies out there that you're not OP. Competing on the healing charts and damage charts while tanking is how we're supposed to be. Keep on being awesome guys.
I don't like dailies, I don't like the intense time investment outside of raid. I'm ok with a little, like planting your farm every day for food (which would have been a wonderful idea if not for the extra 5 hours of fishing/killing turtles I have to do for every raid night). I like the idea of making the feasts a smaller stat gain than personal food, this seems like a fine idea. The problem I have is that to get the extra 25 stats for non-stam food takes a completely absurd amount of time to farm. It's probably not worth it.
Second, flasks. I understand that the wrath model with frozen lotus was a decent one. I also understand that the economy on some servers is really really bad. That said, the guild has to drop 60k every week to get it's raiders flasked, minus alchemists and their double long flasks. We could change to elixirs, which sometimes come out on top anyways but there's two major problems there.
1. Alchemists still benefit more from flasks since the double duration applies while death completely negates that part of mixology. This means that for alchemists elixirs are even more expensive than flasks.
2. There are only 2 guardian elixirs. Dodge and Armour. This means that only tanks will get the benefit of using two elixirs and the stat gain from a flask once again beats out the elixir gain.
Sure you can buy golden lotus with motes of harmony, and you can farm motes with your farm. Assuming you only spend so much time in raids a week, it shouldn't be too bad. 1.6 spirits * 7 days in the week = 11.2 spirits exclusively from farming in a given week. 3 lotus per spirit means basically 33 flasks per week. So for the non-alchemists this means 33 hours of raiding per week is covered by you spending your entire farm on harmony...This isn't too bad, but try to get everyone on the raid team using their farm for motes for the guild. I highly doubt the average player will spend 33 hours a week raiding and flasked the whole time. Since I forgot to add alts, you can multiply it by the number of characters at revered or higher. 1.2 for a revered character, 1.6 for an exalted one. Things get pretty easy for flasks at that point. Ultimately you can provide golden lotus for yourself once you hit revered with 1.2 spirits per day, ignoring any lucky picks or immediately ripe plants. That takes care of flasks, but oh wait how the hell are you planning on dealing with food now.
This is sort of the conundrum. Not only do you have to deal with your farm, but as a serious raider you have to get all your dailies done to get the rep to even be able to spend your valour points. This also applies to your justice points. This means that your time investment per day is somewhere in the realm of 2-3 hours after farming for raid mats and getting your dailies done. That has just turned my 12 hour raid week into nearly a 30hr "raid" week. This is ridiculous.
Thankfully, blizzard has provided us raiders with what I think has been one of the best raid instances I have seen. The lore may not be flowing out of the walls, but the mobs and encounter design are. I have no felt this good about raiding in a really really long time. I think sinestra was the last time I was actually excited about a boss kill and didn't just think "It's about [expletive] time." Spine came closest but in the end it the feeling there was more one of finishing a marathon and collapsing to the ground just happy to be finished. Sinestra felt like something we worked hard for an accomplished. Not until doing stone guard on heroic (Yes, I'm only 1/6 H right now, we are having some issues with feng) did I really feel happy about killing a boss. We managed about world 150 25m, US 70ish. This is the best I have ever done while raiding and I feel like this time it was really about being good at the game and working really hard in the raid instance.
All the fights I feel are extremely well designed and, at least on 25m, extremely well tuned. Elegon is a perfect example of getting things just right. Our first 25m kill of that we were within 10-20s of the enrage after having a couple 2-5% wipes. It was what I remembered of raiding back in the black temple or the first time we got kael'thas down, or especially lady vashj. This raid instance is phenomenal, and has really raised the bar on encounter design. I also think, judging by completion rates, that there has been a much better job trying to keep the 10 and 25 raids relatively equal. I don't want to get into that debate because I do have opinions and people will get upset but the reality is they are different raid sizes and require different things out of not only the raiders themselves but out of those who organize the raids.
Thank you blizzard for making me remember why I absolutely love to raid. I can't believe you made an encounter that is almost exclusively about spreading and stacking at the right times, and managed to make it truly difficult in the appropriate gear. I can't wait until heart of fear and terrace get launched, I doubt we'll get all of MV down before it launches but we can try.
Lastly I wanted to remind all of the prot pallies out there that you're not OP. Competing on the healing charts and damage charts while tanking is how we're supposed to be. Keep on being awesome guys.
10 October, 2012
Vengeance is stupid
First week of raids are done (and then some) and I have a lot to say about them. I didn't get to do elegon since I was out of town for the past weekend, I also missed most of spirit kings. Aside from that I returned in time for will of the emperor and we did clear up to garaj'al before I had to leave.
So instead I'm going to talk about some mechanics and problems with the current state of affairs for tanks. Braces yourselves.
It seems that everyone in the world knows that tank damage is broken except for blizzard. They *buffed* monk aoe damage recently. We had a trash pull where our monk tank was doing over 200k dps while the next closest people were doing in the 120ish range if they were lucky. They nerfed pally tanks damage significantly particularly through censure, but that just made us switch to seal of insight which almost triples our healing done and actually lets me compete with both healing and damage and damage taken (low side on that is ideal).
I honestly think this is the expression of vengeance. They took the cap away so being able to tank incredible incoming damage means you can do obscene outgoing damage. In the case of a pally, our heals also scale with vengeance which means we get to do crazy things. But vengeance really is the problem. There is no cap, it scales with damage on you, though thankfully unimitgated, which means you want to stand in bad stuff for more vengeance. Sure avoiding damage counts for vengeance now but does avoiding pools on the ground count? It does not. We're still encouraged to take extra sources of damage to try and push out increasingly large numbers. For example, several nights ago while working on will of the emperor I managed to get #1 on the damage charts, yet only ranked 100ish for all pally tanks. I was 6th on feng earlier in the week, first on stone guard and yet my rankings on both are relatively low.
As much as I enjoy kicking the crap out of our dps, I think it's wrong. I'm not doing anything to be a stellar tank when it comes to damage, I think I'm doing very well when it comes to damage taken but my damage is almost entirely out of my control. It's also out of control in general. I don't mind doing competative damage. I'm ok with being at the bottom of the chart but not by much. The problem comes in when I'm now gearing for haste because it's not only a relatively strong tanking stat but it's an extremely strong dps stat for me. I don't mind it, don't get me wrong, but the fact that dodge and parry are basically wasted ilvls means that I would like some other stats to go through with.
I've already discussed alternatives to vengeance and so have many many other sources. Vengeance is a problem and I don't think blizzard is ready to do anything about it right now, especially since they missed the best opportunity to do so.
That's all for now really, busy life keeps these short. I'll probably have more on the weekend. Enjoy the tier, I feel it's pretty awesome so far.
So instead I'm going to talk about some mechanics and problems with the current state of affairs for tanks. Braces yourselves.
It seems that everyone in the world knows that tank damage is broken except for blizzard. They *buffed* monk aoe damage recently. We had a trash pull where our monk tank was doing over 200k dps while the next closest people were doing in the 120ish range if they were lucky. They nerfed pally tanks damage significantly particularly through censure, but that just made us switch to seal of insight which almost triples our healing done and actually lets me compete with both healing and damage and damage taken (low side on that is ideal).
I honestly think this is the expression of vengeance. They took the cap away so being able to tank incredible incoming damage means you can do obscene outgoing damage. In the case of a pally, our heals also scale with vengeance which means we get to do crazy things. But vengeance really is the problem. There is no cap, it scales with damage on you, though thankfully unimitgated, which means you want to stand in bad stuff for more vengeance. Sure avoiding damage counts for vengeance now but does avoiding pools on the ground count? It does not. We're still encouraged to take extra sources of damage to try and push out increasingly large numbers. For example, several nights ago while working on will of the emperor I managed to get #1 on the damage charts, yet only ranked 100ish for all pally tanks. I was 6th on feng earlier in the week, first on stone guard and yet my rankings on both are relatively low.
As much as I enjoy kicking the crap out of our dps, I think it's wrong. I'm not doing anything to be a stellar tank when it comes to damage, I think I'm doing very well when it comes to damage taken but my damage is almost entirely out of my control. It's also out of control in general. I don't mind doing competative damage. I'm ok with being at the bottom of the chart but not by much. The problem comes in when I'm now gearing for haste because it's not only a relatively strong tanking stat but it's an extremely strong dps stat for me. I don't mind it, don't get me wrong, but the fact that dodge and parry are basically wasted ilvls means that I would like some other stats to go through with.
I've already discussed alternatives to vengeance and so have many many other sources. Vengeance is a problem and I don't think blizzard is ready to do anything about it right now, especially since they missed the best opportunity to do so.
That's all for now really, busy life keeps these short. I'll probably have more on the weekend. Enjoy the tier, I feel it's pretty awesome so far.
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