For my angel:

The clearing is awash in darkness, in stillness. Stillness broken neither by footstep nor voice.

As if to spite the dark, an angel appears.

Her head is wreathed in a dancing flame, and her face is a glimpse of the divine.

I rush from my hiding place, but try as I might, she remains one step out of reach.

She is not of my world. She is a world away.

Eventually, I must return to my mundane surroundings, but I am left with a chill. A chill in my body, in my bones, in my soul.

I feel as though I have witnessed something not meant for mortal eyes. I fear I may never be the same.



You are my Inner Fire and my Hymn of Hope.
I love you, Shawna!

Daily Quests

Reposted for truth.

5.0 (Pre-Expansion Patch) Release Date

Spoiler Alert! Snape kills Dumbledore!
Er, I mean, the Horde kills Jaina.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012.

This is the pre-expansion patch, introducing account-wide pets, mounts, and achievements, and the new talent and glyph system. It may also include the Battle for Theramore event. It won't include pandas, monks, panda-land, or levels beyond 85.

The Second Singularity

This is a work of science-fiction, based off of and replying to: the Singularity, by Terry Bisson. The original work can be viewed here. I'll still have a WoW-related post on Friday this week.

New Layout

A typical reader.

Hey, everyone. New layout for the blog. I tried to keep it as similar to the old layout as I could. As you may notice, however, I failed to make it visually indistinguishable. From my experience with changes to Gmail, Youtube, etc., I know that this will be universally hated. Oh well. There were many minor things I wanted to change, and using Blogger's built-in system was simpler than learning HTML.

New Features

• Slightly grayer text background, 98% less likely to drive readers insane.
• Slightly wider main column, the first paragraphs in my posts are now golden rectangles.
• Added popular posts box on the right. 55% of you were coming here for the DPS guides anyway.

Collateral Damage

• Blog title now ugly(er).
• I will be widely hated by returning readers for the near future.
• That Blogger bar at the top now is now gray, down from blue.

Heroic Madness of Deathwing

Destroyer of Raids.

Astute readers may notice that it has been rather a long time since I wrote about H Spine. Through a combination of general apathy, summer rescheduling and Diablo III, we've been unable to field a raid until this week. Anyway, it's time to write about H Madness!

Preparing for the new Expansion

Blizzard: Pandaren to their customers.

So, I image there are a few of you out there that have never played when a new expansion hit. Even for those of us who have, there are still things to recall from last time and prepare for this time. If you're interested in racing to realm or world firsts, you'll need a very different approach than if you're taking it all at a more mellow pace.

Things to Remember

All current gear is going to be worthless by level 90. This does not mean getting gear now won't help you later, just that it won't be worth as much as if there wasn't an expansion looming. What gearing up alts to Raid Finder levels will do is speed up your leveling, and allow you to queue for leveling dungeons right away. When Cataclysm hit, chain-dungeons were much faster XP than questing, simply due to the sheer number of people who were competing for your spawns. Around level 82-83, the crowds thinned out, making questing more effecting than chain-dungeoning. Mists of Pandaria may be different, but I doubt it. Launch day crowds will likely be as thick as ever.

There will be a lot of new alts around in the weeks and months following launch. There's a new race and a new class, and many people will make one of both. This means that leveling good like bags, glyphs, profession skill-up mats, heirloom item enchants, and maybe twink gear will all see a surge in demand. Monks use leather, so expect demand for leather BoEs to remain high after launch longer than other armor types.

Dungeons and raids will be hard again, (like they are every expansion.)  Almost nobody is going to know the strategies for your leveling dungeons, and when you get to max, still nobody is going to know the strategies for your heroic dungeons. That said, if you get to cap early enough, you'll probably find yourself in excellent groups. I recall pugging into multiple 4/5 Bane of the Fallen King and the Light of Dawn groups. Expect to run into a lot of Saviours of Azeroth in pugs if you get to max in the first couple days. Despite this, dungeons will be hard because absolutely no one will over-gear them. From there, the dungeons will get worse before they get better. Just as the elite are figuring out the fight mechanics, the flood of slower levelers will show up. As you move out of dungeons and into raids, expect normal mode to be a bit of a wake-up call; it won't be nerfed by 15% like it is now, and you won't have all or most of the gear from it.

Current trade mats will change to moderate prices. Very expensive items, like Essence of Destruction, Maelstrom Crystals, Rare gems and Epic gems will likely fall in price dramatically, and stay down permanently. Very cheap items that will be used to level professions through the 450-525 range will likely raise very high in value a few weeks after MoP launches - when the Monks and pandas all get to level 80 or so. After that, those items will probably settle out higher than they are now, but not by a lot. Items I expect to rise include common Cata ores, low-level inks, Cata leather, common Cata herbs, and volatiles. You may be able to turn a profit buying these cheaply now and selling them later.

Things to Prepare

If you're planning to race for a first level 90 (or your guild leadership scheduled a raid for Tuesday night >.>), remember that you won't be the only one rushing to cap. People will have planned out well in advance which quests and dungeons to do or skip on the way to 90. If you don't hop on the beta and do the same, you'll be at a disadvantage. Aside from planning your route, you should prepare your character so you won't be slowed down. Cleaning out your bags and bank now will save you time later when your time is more precious. You could also consider stocking up on flasks and buff food if you're really serious about it. On PvP servers, you can hire bodyguards to gank enemy players competing for your quest targets, and protect you from griefers.

If you're not racing to cap, there are two different things you could do to make your launch experience more pleasant. A lot of what I put in the "things to remember" section were about the massive crowds of players on the first couple days. On of the biggest things you can do to make your leveling experience more pleasant is to either get ahead of the crowd or wait a couple weeks to level to 90 and roll a panda or Monk alt instead. While I expect there to be a ton of panda alts by the end of the first week, on the first day on the other hand, I expect the newbie zones to be much emptier than the level 85-86 leveling zone. If you're not rushing to max, I strongly recommend not trying to level through the crowd of players though; it's downright unpleasant. I would however go check it out. It's quite a sight seeing swarms of players rolling across the zone like locusts, devouring all the mobs in their way.

The other philosophy I can offer to more casual players is this: now is a prime time to become filthy rich. Hardcore raiders will pay an arm and a leg for MoP enchants, food, flasks and BoE crafted gear. Hardcore traders will pay an arm and a leg for trade skill-up mats. If you can provide either of those to them, you stand to make an absurd amount of money. Consider learning two of Skinning/Mining/Herbalism on the character you'll level to 90 first. If you already have a lot of gold, you might take an interest in getting one of your crafting professions up quickly. The mats may be pricey, but if you can be the first person on your server to sell a particular gem cut, or enchant, or flask, then expect the hardcore raiders to be lining up to give you their money.

Heroic Spine of Deathwing

I've decided to stop dedicating entire posts to beta updates. It seems futile. The changes are just too frequent. I may do another full beta post in a month or two when things have settled out. For now, I'll just comment on beta changes at the start of another post like I'm doing now. All priests (not merely healing specs) got a new spell called Feathers from Heaven. It's placed like Lightwell, allies can walk through it to gain a burst of speed identical to the one from Body and Soul. Also, Shadow's spirit-to-hit conversion is back, and Vampiric Touch restores 15% max mana over its duration. This means we'll not have mana issues when multi-DoTing for a change.

---

I have been fighting this for entirely too long.

So, the guild has been stuck on H Spine of Deathwing for a few weeks now. The last remaining hurdle for us to overcome is surviving the third plate, as the bloods are spawning so quickly that they can neither be safely tanked, nor destroyed. This post is going to be a combination of tricks I've learned to help shadow priests, as well as a request for advice if anyone knows what I can improve.

Tendon Burst

I already wrote a post over at Shadowpriest.com on this topic, but that was intended for regular Spine. On Heroic, the damage requirement is far more strict. On 10man, with the current 15% nerf, each DPS requires 900k damage over the 18sec vulnerability window (assuming standard 2/3/5 raid comp). While quite doable, it does demand that Shadowfiend, Archangel, and Bottled Wishes be used on every tendon. While the 90sec cooldown on the latter two is available without any additional effort, Shadowfiend requires some gymnastics to activate in time.

Activating Shadowfiend basically means spamming Mind Flay to the exclusion of all else until it's time for tendon burst, and hoping it's enough. I'd say this gives me about a 19/20 chance to have Shadowfiend by the time I need it. If I were missing even a single crit buff (5% on raid, 5% on target, 3% from Focus Magic) I'd have unacceptably high odds of it failing to come up. If my haste wasn't already reforged as low as it could go, I would reforge some of it into crit to try and smooth out my Shadowfiend uptime. Note that while crit is superior to haste for the actual burst phase, it's still inferior to mastery.

Preforming the burst itself is quite simple. Summon shadowfiend, during the GCD activate Archangel and Bottled Wishes, MSp x3, MB, MSp until MB comes up again, MB, MSp until time runs out, DP instant cast at the final moment. If it's the second burn on that particular tendon, try to replace MSp casts after Shadowfiend has expired with SW:D. Obviously, if you don't yet have your 4-piece, you're simply incapable of meeting the demand.

Handling Fiery Grip

By all accounts, shadow priests are ideal to handle the grip. On normal, it was a no-brainer to assign us to grip duty. On Heroic, this can jeopardize Shadowfiend uptime. Consider telling your guild to make someone else do it. Seriously. Especially if you can't get Focus Magic. That said, despite this, I've been on grip duty on all of our attempts. Because the Corruption probably should be made to die right before the tendon burst phase (so as to prevent a grip during it), you may want to assign two people to breaking grips, both so they break faster, but also because some "overkill" damage is desirable to get its health low. We have myself and an arcane mage on grip duty.

Sealing the Deal

We've made it to the 5th plate a handful of times, and made it past that once. The trouble is, it seems that our healers can't handle the sheer flood of Bloods that spawn with 5 stacks of Degradation (which both lowers the raid's HP and increases the spawn rate of the Blood.) So we've got two strategies that we're planning to try to get us over the final hump.

The simpler of the two, we use Heroism on the first tendon burn, use burst potions, long duration cooldowns, and have the tanks and healers assist on DPS. ...except we' can't do it. We tried a few times and got it to about 7%. A little bit more gear, a little bit better class stacking (warlocks, for example, seem non-viable, and yet, we're using one,) or another 5% nerf and we could do this. That would mean that the most stacks of degradation we would ever face would be four.

The other, more realistic plan we have right now, we collect two Amalgamations for the 5th and 6th plate. We get both to low health. Detonate one, burn. Detonate the other, burn. Hope we don't wipe while burning. Heroism should compensate for the fact that no one will have time to get cooldowns back in between. Unfortunately, we've never survived long enough to try this since we thought of it.

Those Fucking Debuffs

As I just mentioned, we haven't made it past the 5th plate since I came up with the two-amalgamation idea. Why? Those fucking debuffs. Guild leadership thought it was a good idea to rotate out a stellar tank and healer for some alt tanks and healers. And Blood of Deathwing keeps detonating. So on top of our common fuck-ups regarding add aggro, or rolls, or damage control, or damage output, or- well, you get the idea, we now also have about a 50% chance to wipe via instant death because the new healer can't dispel.

Since it's not stated clearly anywhere:

Approximately 10 sec after each Corruption is killed, a random raid member receives Blood Corruption: Death, a 16 second debuff, which, if it expires, wipes the raid instantly. When dispelled (it's magic) it hops to a random raid member, keeping the same remaining duration, and it has a chance (seems about 40%) to mutate into Blood Corruption: Earth, which applies 1 stack of permanent 20% damage reduction at 8 sec remaining, and when it expires. Dispelling that (also magic) makes it hop to another raid member, but it can't turn back into Blood Corruption: Death (the Dungeon Journal is a liar; it claims that it can.)

Guardian Spirit Nerf

The all-knowing Google informs me that 50% of the people finding their way to my blog were searching for "guardian spirit nerf". I find this strange, because I couldn't find my own blog while searching for that... but whatever. I figure I should give the people what they want.

Now, I don't know how recently this change was applied, but I found out myself a few weeks ago when we were attempting Madness of Deathwing with a low-DPS group that Guardian Spirit doesn't quite do what the tooltip states. Originally, we had planned to single-tank the fight, using Guardian Spirit to soak the second Impale on the tank. ...and he kept inexplicably dying. Not every time, mind you, we would have known what was going on if that had been the case; just every once in a while. Most times, he'd take the hit, and not even fall below 100% HP. Other times, he'd insta-gib. Why?

According to these patch notes, Guardian Spirit was nerfed to only absorb up to a maximum of 200% of the target's max HP when it prevents a killing blow. If it would need to soak more damage than that, it prevents none instead (but still gets removed and triggers the heal).

So, long story short, no using Guardian Spirit to cheese the Impales; you'll need other cooldowns too.

When performance is less than zero.

Normally, I'm a bit more level-headed than this with regards to the Dungeon Finder "community". Normally, I disagree with common gripes that DF pugs don't know their arse from a hole in the ground. Today is not normal. Today, I actually got a group with three DPS, all of which were contributing less than nothing.

Behold, the dungeon queue is over! Your long and torturous 3-minute healer queue has completed! Zoning in... what's this? An in-progress Zul'gurub? That's not too rare. Throw some buffs, drink up, ok, let's roll.

Hmm. 1.1M damage taken on a single trash mob? I'm amazed no one died. At least the melee had the sense to run out of the poison breath, although using the cauldrons (or, the Light forbid, standing behind the mob >.>) would have been easier.

So we get to Venoxis. Someone hasn't done it before, and the fight is explained summarily: spread out, don't stand in the bad stuff, and if you get linked to someone, run away. A single tick of the maze wall will kill you. Shouldn't be too bad; the other three know what they're doing.

The pull. Tank's taking negligible damage, the ranged have spread out... Hmm, a full-duration Whispers of Hethiss on the hunter. Frigging melee. I charge up a heal for him and... he's dead? What? A hunter corpse can be seen lying under one of the maze walls. *sigh*

Looking up, I see the tank run out of a poison breath. Good, good... bad. The DPS warrior didn't. I actually got a heal on him in time, and he still dropped. From full. *sigh*

So it's just me and the mage. Bloodvenom goes out, and (surprise!) dead mage. By this point, the boss is at 80%, and both the tank and I are still on track for the achievement. *sigh*

We continue fighting alone, and my mana is stable, we could probably kill it after about 6 more phases. I call for the DPS to run back in. They arrive much later, when the boss is around 40%. I notice none of them could be assed to eat something or bandage themselves. Well, whatever. At least we'll burn away another 10% of the boss before they all die again. Whee, the cavalry is here!

Turns out, it wasn't the cavalry. They pulled the fucking turtle. And instead of dying and learning from it, (or, you know, dropping aggro) they dragged it to us in the hope that we might save them. There is a giant fucking turtle the size of the entire room meleeing the tank for 50k in a fight where being able to see the floor is more crucial than key-binding your spells.

We wiped on 35%.

We would have been more likely to complete the fight with just me and the tank than with the three DPS in our group.

When performance is less than zero.

You just lost the game.

I just lost the game.

Ghostcrawler can't shadow.

"...anything with more than 1 mob is a job for Mind Sear." -Ghostcrawler (Source, near the end of post 74)

Fail. While I trust Ghostcrawler to get things right eventually, he does need to be slapped upside the head now and again. I guess I should be glad that he's not telling people to cast it on single targets. >.>

What would you pay for?

In what could be described as a somewhat controversial move, (by which I mean the entire blogosphere is on fire because of it,) Blizzard recently made a mount that functions like the Headless Horesman's Mount available for $25. It scales to your riding skill, will upgrade to 310% if you own another 310% mount, and applies to your entire account. So why would you want to shell out that much for the sparklepony? Well, personally, I wouldn't. That image there might look cool, but if you see it ingame, the animations are a little messed up, and it just looks off if you see it with Shadowform. So it doesn't even look cool. The main reason I see for wanting it is that you won't need to spend gold on mounts for your alts. The total savings is 161g per alt (1g for regular, 10g for epic, 50g for flying, 100g for epic flying.) That said, that's only a small portion of the cost of riding; you still pay 7110g for the riding training.

But that topic has been discussed to death. I'm here to consider what they could actually offer that I might pay for. So, let's list some criteria that must be met for me to value something:

• It needs to save me time or gold.
• It needs to do so without cheapening the existing game experience.
• It needs to accomplish the above without harming other players if someone has it.

So basically, the second two mean that gear upgrades, or really anything that grants a competitive advantage are off the list. I'm also not going to waste much time on things they already have available that fit the list (like server transfers, for example.)

Bigger Backpacks. Arguably, this makes me a more powerful character than someone without it, but we get by just fine with the currently-available bags. A 32-slot backpack for all your alts isn't going to be a game-breaker for someone else. In fact, in all probability, no one will know who has one and who doesn't. I'd pay $5 to give +16 backpack slots to my whole account.

BoA Flight Paths. I like how the "you need to visit the destination first" mechanic of the flight path system made me explore the world on my first few characters. When I'm levelling my umpteenth alt, however, it's pretty annoying to find out that I need to hike to Tanaris or something. (Actually, I recently got around that problem by taking the Caverns of Time portal from Dalaran.) If they sold an account upgrade that made it so all of your characters had all of the flight paths that any of your characters had, I'd be down with that. I'd pay $2 for this feature.

Hard-Mode BoA Items. I'd pay for a BoA trinket or an item for some other mostly-harmless gear slot that granted a -25% damage/health/healing/absorbtion in exchange for a +35% XP from kills and +5% XP from quests. Normally I find leveling an alt fairly fun, but not as fun as raiding, because it's not challenging enough. These would help with both things I dislike about the leveling experience: it's too long, and it's too easy. I'd pay $10 if I could get one for every one of my alts, or like $4 if I had to be bothered mailing it around between my characters. Add $2 if it increased out-of-combat health and mana regen to something fast enough to make my downtime about equal to the time it takes to run to the next mob.

On Expansions

I just read a post by Tobold (yes, I realize I'm behind the times,) about the difficulty of balancing Cataclysm. His central argument it that, in order to "future-proof" the level 81-85 zones, they need to be tuned so that someone who just turned level 80 a year from now, someone in greens and blues with little raiding experience, can handle the world and normal-mode 5man mobs. Trouble is, most of the players right now are in at least 4 piece t9, and have appreciably more skill than a fresh 80, even if I think that amount of skill is a pittance. So we have the challenge of trying to set Cata up to be enjoyed immediately by a group ranging from fresh 80s to 11k-DPS beasts, and later to still be enjoyable by mostly fresh 80s, or even fresh 78s if Cata is to follow the tradition.




So what do we do? Here's my take on some of the options.

-----------------------

Option 1: ...and I jizz in my pants.

Cataclysm follows ICC in difficulty and progression; world level 81 mobs have ~60k HP and deal about 2.5k DPS on cloth.

The reason for even considering this option is because it appeals to me personally. With my about 5k DPS when alone against a low-HP mob, fights would run about 12 seconds per mob, as they do now for a fresh 80 against level 80 world mobs. At 2.5k DPS for 12 seconds, I'd be taking a net 750 DPS (after self-healing, armor and other survival-oriented class abilities) from the first mob, and about 1750 for each thereafter, putting me at risk of dying to a two-mob pull, in need of CC for a three-mob pull, and funtionally dead as soon as the fourth aggros. Add in minor mob gimmicks/avoidable attacks, and the world mobs become a solo raid. For players not at the top-end of current content, 2-3man grouping would render such fights doable to the current average player, and a common 5man team of fresh and unskilled 80s could handle these as well. Personally, this option has my seal of approval; It would be like I just ate a grape.

However, this would make the 78-85 range all but impossible for a truly casual player. Even a good casual would only be doing ~2k DPS when they arrived at level 80, and forced grouping, either in the form of raiding to get up to speed, or grouping in order to finish "solo" quests, would mean progression and remaining casual are mutually exclusive. R.I.P. Option 1.

Option 2: WoW, so easy a retard can do it.

Business as usual, tuned for bad fresh 80s. World mobs have ~14k HP and deal maybe 400 DPS on cloth. No gimmicks, mobs all virtually reskinned clones of eachother (like in WotLK.)

This option is fairly likely; Blizzard's current policy seems to be "Hardmode raids are for the hardcore, Raids are for almost everyone, and world mobs should be soloable three-at-a-time by a retard." If we take a bad fresh 80, we'd find ~600 DPS, possibly lower armor types than normal, and no item enhancements. At this rate, fights last 23 seconds per mob, and the mobs deal about 170 DPS for the first mob, and 320 for each beyond the first. At this rate, this bad fresh 80 can take two at a time from full health, and might even manage three or four if they use crowd-control, heals or kiting.

If this sounds rediculously easy to you... well, I point you to current level 80 world mobs. They have 12800 HP and deal ~250 DPS on cloth; they're even easier. I accidentally oneshotted one of them when I went to go check that data. On my crappy Mage alt. So clearly it's neither too easy for Blizzard nor too easy for the 'tards. But I suppose that's OK; everyone says the game starts at level cap anyway. It could, however, be better than this.

Option 3: Operation Vanilla WoW

Tune for the average player now (t9, 20k HP, 3k DPS,) nerf it later. Mobs would have about 25k HP and deal 900 DPS on cloth.

This was how the old world was handled. Once upon a time you'd have elites wandering around outside every instance, sometimes before you even got to the meeting stone. Places like Moonbrook had mages with a gigantic aggro radius that could pyroblast you for half your health from accross the subzone. Then they buffed players. Then they buffed them again. Then they nerfed the old-world mobs. Then they buffed players again. Then they nerfed the mobs again. And here we stand, with an old world that's so easy a retard could do it.

I actually don't prefer this option to option 2; it's still no challenge to me, and people will whine when they go to nerf it later. In the mean time, some bad casuals may quit because they can't handle it, reducing the amount of money spend on improving the endgame for the rest of us.

Option 4: The only serious one.

Tune the world mobs for the bads, tune the "group" quests for the good casuals, tune the 5mans for the ICC raiders, nerf 5mans later.

This is the "something for everyone" approach, and the approach which has made WoW the massive success that it is. Up until now, they've done it as "world mobs for morons, group quests for morons with friends, 5mans for three morons a tank and a healer, and raids for everyone else," and that's how I expect them to handle Cata. If, however, we can get some of the levelling game tuned for the high-end players, then the game needn't "begin at level cap" and we might go back to enjoying levelling, rather than trying to get it done as fast as possible.

The tank is not a tank.

"Did I mention the tank is a tank?"

"Sold!"

But seriously, for those who may have been chain running Heroics to gear up their alts, nothing is more annoying than the 5-10% or so of "tanks" that are not tanks. I'm not talking about bad or new tanks, I'm talking about the really crappy DPS that queue as Tank for a shorter wait and then hope someone either: drops group so they can requeue as DPS, but be in a group of 3-4 and so get in sooner anyway, or takes over tanking with their offspec. Do not do this. Wait until you can kick them, and do so. Taking over for them and not kicking them is exactly what they want, and dropping out of the group (if you're not the healer) is a really close second. Don't give them what they want and they'll stop doing it.

This can only lead to WIN

Taken from the new tutorials on the 3.3 PTR for great justice.