Shadow's Edge

So my guild is awesome and very generous. By the time I logged in on Saturday night (roughly 18 hours after we killed Rotface) we had already collected and additional 10 Primordial Saronite, for a total of 19. I had enough cash and emblems to get 5, so I was sitting at 24 as we set ourselves up for Festergut.

The Hate Tank was going as his rogue, mostly to establish a baseline DPS that everyone should be beating, and we had our DK who switches as a tank. Gave it a couple tries, and things really weren't going well, and DPS was quite a bit lower than expected. The DK switched back to DPS, Hate Tank went and got his warrior, and we switched a DPS to heals. Only realized about now that we hadn't had a melee haste buff in the raid, so all the melee were lacking their normal 20% boost to white damage (and in my case, seal damage as well). The DK switching solved this, since he is DW frost for DPS, and about 2 minutes into the fight things were looking okay. None of us had expected before this attempt to down him right now, since we had 7 healers, but my time to die addon showed Fester going down within a couple seconds of the enrage timer. Given that DPS will usually get a little higher towards the end of the fight (execute-type mechanics), it seemed like a real shot. Lo and behold, the big bastard dropped and I had my second blood.

Because I am an idiot, I had to go do the little event to get Light's Vengeance (Arthas' old hammer) so the guild took a quick break and rustled up one more saronite for me. Turned the quest in, and all of a sudden I had it. As Jong (I hope he comes back to writing about Ret) would put it, I got me a new sexy time. Well actually I had to turn the quest in, hang out for a minute, pick up a new quest, and turn THAT in. Mograine took his sweet time giving me my new axe. Then we cleared some stuff, got up to about 50/1000 souls for the quest, not a bad start.

Monday night I joined a pug for ICC 10, we cleared some stuff, WFS didn't drop (and at most ONE person would have rolled against me, bah!). Got myself exalted with Ashen Verdict, finally, and got my soul count up to almost 200. Going to try and get a rep run or two in for the extra souls, but I think I should finish before we are taking Putricide down regardless. Also, I wish people in pugs knew how to listen better. If I say "Ranged MUST ALWAYS stay at range" when I am effectively raid leading because the actual RL doesn't know shit, maybe don't run in and wipe us with the Vile Gas spam? It's really not that hard a concept to grasp.

Yes, I'm Still Here

Apologies for the lack of posting, I didn't have anything to say because I ended up not playing for a few days because of real life issues. I am still around and still going to write when I have a reason to, like tonight.

Wyrmfoe has decided to go ahead and take the buff for ICC. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this in that I would like to kill things without it, but frankly I would also like to see the content and it might be a while before that happened without the buff. One thing that bears mentioning is that in many fights you will still wipe if you don't know what you're doing. If you don't know how to handle the Deformed Fanatic, he's still going to one-shot your tank, and if you don't handle Rotface's oozes right they can still kill you pretty easily. What it does do is give you a lot more breathing room for making small mistakes, and obviously it helps you with the fights that are less complicated quite a bit.

Last week with Wyrmfoe we didn't make any progress per se, and Blood Princes were still a huge hassle, but we spent a little time on Valithria so I got to see what that fight is like. Tonight (Friday) was this week's first raid and it went quite well. Cleared the Lower Spire without any problems (and I saw my first Bryntroll drop and won it as well!) and moved on to some progression stuff. Made our way to Rotface and jumped right in. A lot of us have killed him in 10 man, and the fight is easier in some ways on 25 (same number of slimes, meaning proportionally less loss of bodies to slimes) but it does have pretty significantly higher DPS requirements. Definitely took some doing and our final attempt of the night saw another guild first kill, with 3 people standing, none of whom were healers. In fact, they were Hrist (the Hate Tank), Frost (badass hunter and GM), and Ryfft (badass arcane mage). Frost and Hrist both managed to get people up with their shock cable things and rezzes went out.

Now as some of you may know, Rotface and Festergut drop the quest items you need for the first quest in the chain for Shadowmourne, the final Legendary of Wrath. Since only one person can get them at a time, killing him means its time to decide who is going to be the official guild choice for the axe. Apparently I have been showing some quality, since Hrist looted me the blood then opened trade and gave me 9 primordial saronites! So...I will apparently be making myself the counter to Frostmourne. The rest of the first quest involves collecting a total of 25 primordial saronite, which means spending money and frost emblems only on that for a while in all likelihood. Obviously the guild has helped a ton so far, and Hrist has announced a plan whereby people can essentially buy loot for saronite donations, which means I will be getting even more help.

This is actually an incredibly awesome moment for me. I have always felt like I was a good raider, but to have it validated by being given access to the best weapon I can possibly get from the expansion, and which we are not likely to have more than one or two of? It makes me feel like I am really contributing. That said, there is a long road ahead even after the saronites are collected. I have to drive the Abomination on Putricide, be the Blood-Mirror soaker guy on BQL, and some thing on Sindragosa that I can't remember. Oh yeah, and harvest a thousand souls in ICC and collect the randrom drop Shadowfrost Shards. Can't wait.

TBD Marches On

Pretty good weekend of raiding we just had. The Wyrmfoe 25 team took down the Lower Spire painlessly, then we moved on to give Festergut a few tries. As it stands we simply don't have the DPS to kill him (which could be very limiting), but its good to see the fight and our best attempt got him to 15%, so hopefully we don't have too much farther to go. The new raid buffs will obviously help as well. Saturday night we started by clearing ToC, since there are still some very desirable trinkets there, as well as a couple other upgrades here and there for various people (at this point all I want is another Trophy and Death's Verdict). After that we moved on and started work on Blood Prince Council, which I had never seen before, eventually getting the kill in a very messy way (as mentioned in my post on BM hunters). After that we went over and killed Valithria's trash for the Frost Emblem, then decided to go back and test DPS on Festergut again since we had some people who hadn't been there the night before. 11 Frost Emblems and a new kill for the guild, not bad all in all.

Sunday night was TBD's first night, and I wasn't there but they cleared out the Lower Spire then spent a little time on Festergut. Monday night they needed me, so in we went. Our first target was Festergut, who we should have killed on the first try, but one of our tanks got DC'd at a bad time and the other got a 10 stack of Gastric Bloat. Second attempt was totally clean and a kill with 45 seconds to spare. We decided to continue the Plagueworks and head over to Rotface, who the team has never seen, and who many of us haven't seen in any capacity. Our first attempt was messy, but we got him pretty low and things cleaned up as we got farther in. Second attempt was really well executed by everyone and we got him down. All of a sudden we had gotten two first kills in 45 minutes.

We decided to try Professor P. Things went poorly. That fight is definitely a lot harder than either of the other two in that wing. The abomination tank has to be very much on top of eating slime and slowing down oozes (not easy) and DPS has to make a good switch and get good burst on the oozes. We definitely had some trouble with both those parts, and generally once we had even a little trouble with one ooze it turned into a failure cascade because we fell behind and couldn't get caught up. That fight is definitely tricky for us, and it doesn't seem likely to be our next kill. Healers did an excellent job keeping people up through all the damage though. We decided to try Blood Princes next, since a lot of us had gotten experience with that on 25. It went okay, but there were definitely some parts that threw us off and we need a little more time with it.

All in all, it was a good weekend. Progression on both 10 and 25 man, some extra emblems, and I picked up a set of leather legs that I will be using if I can't pick up the T10 legs as a drop before I get to 95 emblems.

Cataclysm Stat Changes

Blizzard has released a little more info on the upcoming stat changes for Cataclysm, so like everyone else I'll go ahead and talk about them a bit. Overall it doesn't seem like all that much is going to be changing for us, but there are certainly still some unknowns and a lot might still change before 4.0 actually comes around.

AP will be going away as a stat on items, which means leather and mail for physical types will be down to 4 stats, same as plate is now. This means that you will be sticking with plate from now on, unless you somehow end up with a huge difference in item level. Moreover, they are setting up some kind of system, from the sound of it involving mastery, that gives you free stats for choosing the highest class of armor available to you. So no more taking rogue gear. What intrigues me here is how they are going to handle trinkets, since all physical DPS generally share the same ones in current content. I guess this just means they will have to make more of them that are clearly split between the agility users and the strength users.

They also are changing haste to make it more useful for melee classes by having it also increase the rate of regeneration of your resources (runes, energy, rage) in addition to its current effects. They haven't specifically discussed how they will handle this for ret paladins (or enhancement shamans), but they did mention that they will make it benefit us somehow. Hopefully they don't just have it increase mana regen, because that would be pretty useless and would likely relegate haste to being a very weak stat for us.

Armor penetration rating will be gone completely when 4.0 rolls around, which is something I think we can all be happy about. There will still be armor penetration available through talents and skills, but you will never see it on gear, which is awesome. The new stat that will be found on Cataclysm gear instead is mastery, which has different effects for different specs. Blizzard has stated that they plan to rework the talent trees pretty substantially, and we can likely expect to see talents that simply increase damage by a percent or increase crit chance across the board go away. From what they showed at Blizzcon, spending points in the ret tree will cause an increase in damage and melee crit without any specific talents doing so. The third benefit they showed, which appears to be the only one that gains from the mastery stat, was ability cooldown, which sounds very interesting. Given that paladins are limited by the cooldowns of their abilities and by the GCD more than anything else, this could make mastery a very attractive stat. Obviously, it could also end up being garbage depending on how they decide to scale it, we'll just have to wait and see.

Another big change coming up is that hit and expertise will apparently be getting much harder to cap, and will be harder to cap the higher the level of content that you are doing. As of right now, hit is the single best DPS stat before the cap, and expertise is not far below strength. Depending on how hard it really is to cap, hit could become the default gemming, which I would prefer not to see, since it feels much more satisfying putting strength in all those sockets. On the plus side, it sounds like hit is currently slated to become a blue gem, which would be awesome, since blue sockets currently suck and for them not to would be great.

Reforging is one area where more information is likely necessary to do a serious evaluation, but as of right now it seems like it may have limited benefit. If I'm reading correctly, you can turn one stat into 50% of the amount of another stat (i.e. 100 haste into 50 hit) and there are limitations, the commonly cited one being no turning stamina into strength (sadly). In order for that to be beneficial the old stat would have to be less than 50% as good as the new one. This is true in some cases now, but it sounds like you should still be looking for gear that is good without reforging as much as possible. For example, in a guild setting, I would certainly prefer a piece of gear go to someone who does not need to reforge before someone who does. Again, we'll have to see how things shake out in the months to come.

Enchants

Just a quick guide to these at a friend's request.

Head: Arcanum of Torment (Ebon Blade Revered)
Shoulders: Inscription of the Axe (Hodir Honored/Exalted)
Chest: Powerful Stats (+10 to all primary stats)
Back: Greater Speed (23 Haste) or Major Agility (22 Agility)
Wrists: Greater Assault (50 AP)
Hands: Precision (20 Hit) or Crusher (44 AP)
Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle (colorless gemslot)
Legs: Icescale Leg Armor
Boots: Icewalker (12 hit, 12 crit) or Greater Assault (32 AP)
Weapon: Berserking

If you have profession-specific enchants, use the AP version of those instead (shoulders for scribes, wrists for LW). Enchanters should use AP on their rings.