Attunements

Attunements are an interesting topic of discussion. They are obvious "gates" to content. The benefit of attunements is that they provide a pathway to content. You do Karazhan and Gruul before Serpentshrine Cavern, you do Magtheridon before Tempest Keep.

For most of WoW, the pathway is provided by level. At level 35-40, you do Scarlet Monastery, 40-45 Uldaman, etc. But at endgame, Blizzard resorts to attunements to provide the same pathway.

There are actually several types of attunements in WoW. First are the keys, where only one person in the group needs the key in order to :

1. Upper Blackrock Spire
2. Shattered Halls
3. Shadow Labyrinth
4. Arcatraz

Second are the initial raid attunments, where you need complete a non-raid instance to attune to a raid instance.

1. Molten Core
2. Blackwing Lair
3. Karazhan

Third are the heroic instances, where you need to run a fair amount of non-heroic instances before being allowed to run heroics.

Finally, there are attunements which require you to complete raid instances.

1. Serpentshire Cavern (Removed)
2. Tempest Keep (Removed)
3. Mount Hyjal
4. Black Temple

But how many of these attunements are really necessary? The thing is that players are pretty good at figuring out what the pathways are. AQ40 had no attunement, but everyone knew you had to beat Blackwing Lair before moving on.

Would anything really change if the keys for the first set of instances didn't exist? I don't think anything would really be different, save that it would have been a lot easier to make groups for UBRS back in the day.

To be honest, out of all the attunements listed above, the only one I think is actually necessary is the Karazhan attunement. Insisting that you have successfully done several of the regular instances before moving on to Karazhan is probably a good idea, especially for guilds and players who have never raided before. Attuning for BWL is unnecessary, as most people know that MC comes first, and Razorgore will ensure that you understand this.

As well, I think the implementation of the fourth class of attunements is not done well. It's not enough to be able to attune your current raid, you need to be able to attune your entire raiding force. For example, let's say your guild successfully defeats Kael'thalas. The next day, all excited, you head for Mount Hyjal. What are the odds that you will be able to field a full raid? For most guilds, the odds are low, because you need the exact same 25 people as the previous night. But you won't get the exact same people. A couple will not be able to log on for real life reasons, and you'll need to swap other people in. Only because of the attunement, you can't. And that's just messy and saps your momentum.

In general, artificial barriers to content are not really necessary. There are already enough real barriers in terms of level, difficulty, and required gear. Keys and attunements are not going to significantly slow down the hardcore, and they just make life more annoying for the more casual players. I think that WoW would not be hurt by removing most of the attunements and keys in the game.

Picture

For some reason, Blogger is not saving the picture when I use it in the sidebar only. Hopefully adding a post with it will make it more permanent.

As an aside, why do random Kara epics look exactly like Dungeon 3 pieces? I don't mind reusing model skins, but you should never replace one item with an item that looks exactly like it. As well, collecting the entire Dungeon 3 set is an accomplishment. A player who has spent the time to get the entire set shouldn't look the same as someone who picked up a couple Kara epics.

The green-brown lawbringer looked pretty bad, but it was better than the current skins for the non-set Kara pieces.

PvP-only or PvE-only spells

Perhaps it is time that some spells and abilities got tagged as PvP-only or PvE-only. It seems a bit artificial, but it would make balancing a bit easier.

This thought is prompted by the upcoming change to Blessing of Sacrifice in patch 2.2:

Blessing of Sacrifice now has a 1-minute cooldown.

It's pretty much aimed at PvP, where Sacrifice is constantly used to break Crowd Control for paladins. However, this change makes Sacrifice useless for both PvP and PvE purposes.

Admittedly, Sacrifice doesn't get used an awful lot in PvE. But there are times when it is useful. I use it on AoE packs to keep multiple mages up. I have fond memories of almost killing myself with it in the BWL Suppression Room. (It turns out that putting Sacrifice on 8 mages/warlocks adds up to a lot of damage.) It's also useful for controlling Greater Blessings, allowing you to put Greater Blessing of Salvation on DPS warriors and "clean" it off the tanks. There are a few fights where you can use it to break Crowd Control (for example, Maiden of Virtue, or Moroes for a paladin tank). I've even used it on the tank, to mitigate damage, if I am on Salvation duty.

It's a neat little spell with a lot of uses. It's not a spell you use all the time, but comes in handy on occasion. However, this cooldown pretty much makes the spell useless for my purposes.

The annoying part is that yes, Sacrifice is probably overpowered in PvP. Virtual immunity to crowd control is overpowered, even if you can purge/dispel it. But adding the cooldown removes it from both PvP and PvE.

Maybe it would be better if Sacrifice was tagged "PvE-only" and you could not use it in Arenas. There are already several spells that are effectively PvE-only: Lay on Hands, Righteous Defense, Taunt, Blessing of Salvation, etc.

There are probably several other spells that could benefit from the same treatment. And maybe Blizzard could introduce PvP-only spells, which could only be used in arenas.

PvP and PvE are very different creatures. Is it really ideal to attempt to balance for both simultaneously?

Gruul Dead!

We finally killed Gruul the Dragon-Slayer. For some reason, Gruul has stymied us for longer than any other boss so far. Tonight everyone stepped up and we got him down in 13 growths.

The best thing about this is that we can finally start on the full 25-man content, and not worry about 10-man raids.

+Hit Caps for Bosses

Note: This page used to have all the hit caps for level 70. Because it was still getting linked and visitors, I have deleted all the data from the page, as it is now obsolete.

DoTs, Resilience, and Cleanse

One of the upcoming changes in the new patch is that Damage-Over-Time spells will now have their damage reduced by resilience. Some DoT classes see this as unfair, because resilience is a stat targeting critical hits, and DoTs cannot crit.

I think the reason DoTs need to be reined in a bit is that their normal counters are much less effective these days. Traditionally, the downside to DoTs is that they can be Cleansed or Dispelled. But Cleanse is no longer as powerful as it once was, due to three new factors in TBC.

First, Unstable Affliction punishes you for Cleansing. It does a significant amount of damage, and the Silence effect is a killer. It is a superb guard for the other DoTs.

Second, there are several new talents which increase the chance of resisting the Cleanse.

Finally, many classes are able to apply 2 magic debuffs per global cooldown(GCD). While Cleanse only removes 1 magic debuff per GCD. Shadow priests in particular are insanely annoying for this, as all their spells add an extra Shadow Weaving debuff. This means the Cleanser is always falling behind. Affliction Warlocks use Shadow Embrace to accomplish the same thing.

As well, Cleanse is an entirely defensive action, and that means that the attacker has tempo, or is controlling the fight while the defender is Cleansing. While you Cleanse you can't use special attacks or heal. In general, because of tempo, defense needs to be more powerful than offense to be a viable tactic.

These three factors have conspired to significantly reduce the power of Cleanse. Thus DoTs need to be reigned in using another method, which is Resilience in this case.

Team Healing

I responded to this thread on the WoW Guild Relations Forums. In it, a paladin is complaining that he used to partner up with a shaman, and the two of them healed well together. However, a new priest was brought in, and now the healing in his raid has problems.

As I responded, it struck me how very different raid healing is from other areas of the game. For a tank, the game boils down to the mob and you. You need the healers, but it's not something you can really affect. Other tanks don't really interact with you, unless you need to hand off the mob in a tank rotation. You rely on the healers, but you don't really affect them. You just have to have faith that they will somehow keep you up.

DPS meanwhile is again alone, each person working on their optimal rotation. In the great scheme of things you work as a team, but when it comes down to doing your chunk of damage, you are alone.

Raid healing, on the other hand, is very much a team endeavour. You need to work with the other healers, and your healing style needs to mesh with theirs. As well, an individual healer's duties expand and contract with changes in the fight. If a healer goes down, the remaining healers need to pick up her duties. A good healer also needs to know how the other healers heal, so she can judge if it's appropriate to toss a heal or if it's better to wait for a Heal-over-Time to tick or a large heal to finish casting.

It's a curious mix of aggressiveness and trust. If you aren't healing aggressively, the other healers will take up the slack. But this will cause problems as they stretch too thin. Yet at the same time, if you heal too aggressively, you invalidate their heals, leading to large amounts of overhealing, and stretch yourself too thin.

Sometimes I think the hardest thing about raid healing is learning to NOT cast the heal, to trust that your fellow healers have the situation in hand.

You can feel it though, when you get into that rhythm. When your heals match up with your fellow healers. When you are healing steadily, but not getting stretched or falling behind. I find that the meters usually reflect this state. Lower overheal across the board, and a very even division of healing.

Seal of Vengeance

I was playing around with the damage meter mod Recount today. It's pretty slick actually, and even has pie charts.

In any case, I fired up Seal of Vengeance while working on the quest "Banish the Demons" in Ogri'la. I was comparing the newly fixed SoV with Seal of Righteousness. I have to say that I really don't understand SoV. It seems to be doing far less damage than SoR. According to the meters, I averaged around 215 DPS when using SoV, and 290 DPS with SoR. That's a huge difference!

The Horde seal, Seal of Blood, at least fills a different niche than any other damage Seal. It provides consistent damage based on Attack Power. Seal of Command provides burst damage based on Attack Power, while SoV and SoR both seem to provide consistent damage based on Spell Power.

SoV and SoR both occupy the same niche. As such, I don't really see any case where you would use SoV over SoR. And because my weapon was fast, SoV was inconsistent in its application, and would sometimes even just drop off the target, even when I was just auto-attacking.

I'm sure that SoV could be buffed to be better than SoR, but even then that creates a problem. SoV is either better or worse than SoR. You only ever need to use one Seal.

Quite honestly, I think Blizzard should just drop Seal of Vengeance and give all paladins Seal of Blood. SoR already fills SoV's niche, and Seal of Blood would give all paladins another weapon in their arsenal.

Bowing to the Inevitable

I like heal. I like to melee. Hence I rolled a paladin.

It seemed so simple back then. But now, if I go Holy, I heal but I never melee. If I go Retribution or Protection, I melee but never heal. I've spent the last few months bouncing from spec to spec, trying to find something that captured a happy medium.

That medium does not exist anymore. So I need to choose: heal, tank, or dps?

The plain truth is that I am not willing to put in the effort to get the gear required to make Protection or Retribution good enough. I'm still crushable in my tanking set, despite it being half epics. My Retribution gear is terrible, and I'm doing as much damage as the tanks (though, admittedly, that's because I can't stop myself from throwing heals).

And I'm not willing to run instance after instance to get the gear necessary to bring these two specs up to the level of an average tank or dps.

Quite honestly, I'm a liability to my guild when I am Protection or Retribution. They won't care that much, but I care. So I've respecced back to Holy (my preferred 47/14/0), and I'm planning on staying Holy unless significant changes are made to Protection/Retribution.

Ah well. Healing is boring, but it's necessary, and I'm pretty good at it. On the plus side, I completed my set of T4 Gloves (I have all 3 different T4 Gloves), so I have 2/5 Holy T4 now.

Avoidance Macro

For a paladin tank interested in raid tanking, the overriding question is "Am I uncrushable?" It's usually a lot of work to calculate it, especially if you want to factor in buffs. Luckily, Raymond of Nazjatar has come up with a nifty macro that calculates your current avoidance for you:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Need 102.4 combined avoidance. Currently at:",0.8,0.8,1)
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(GetDodgeChance()+GetBlockChance() + GetParryChance() +5+(GetCombatRatingBonus(CR_DEFENSE_SKILL) + 20)*0.04,1,0.5,0)

It's very useful when trying to build a gear set when raid tanking. The only thing to note is that in the line:

(GetCombatRatingBonus(CR_DEFENSE_SKILL) + 20)

The + 20 assumes you have 5/5 Anticipation. If you don't, you have to change this line to reflect how much defense you are getting from Anticipation (0 - 20).

(Snagged from the WoW Paladin forums. Stuff like this makes wading through all the Ret/Holy sniping worthwhile.)

Edit: Added some spaces so the macro will wrap properly in Firefox. You may have to remove some spaces if it is over the macro character limit.

Edit: Changed GetCombatRating call to GetCombatRatingBonus call. Shortens the macro slightly.

Edit: Also, you have to activate Holy Shield before using this to get results with Holy Shield. Otherwise you'll look 30-35% worse than you really are.

Example of Prot Gear Problem

Here's an example of the problem I have with paladin tanking gear, and what actually prompted me to make my last post.

I have two tanking boots: [Flesh Beast's Metal Greaves], from Mana Tombs; and [Boots of Righteous Fortitude], from Heroic Sethekk Halls.

[Boots of Righteous Fortitude] are gorgeous tanking boots, and above all they are paladin tanking boots. Yet if I was going to tank Karazhan, I'd wear [Flesh Beast's Metal Greaves] because they bring me much closer to uncrushability.

This seems wrong to me. Game mechanics should not make me choose an almost total downgrade. If the mechanics do so, the mechanics are flawed.

You can see the same problem with Righteous Armor. It's actually a really good tanking set, except that it fails the uncrushability test. If paladins didn't need to become uncrushable, there's a decent argument that Righteous Armor would be the paladin tanking set of choice for a raider just starting Karazhan.

(Well, there might be better pieces overall, but people wouldn't laugh at you for trying to tank in it. Unless you're in the Raid and Dungeons Forums. Then you'd get laughed at for not having epics.)

Protection Tree Tweaks

Here's a stab at some tweaks that I think would improve the Protection Tree and tanking for paladins:

http://talents.unleashedgaming.net/?p=vt&i=24738

In my opinion the need and effort involved in getting to an uncrushable state warps the class in many ways. For example, you simply cannot evaluate a lot of paladin tank gear as you would not wear it solely because of uncrushability.

We don't really know how a paladin raid tank would perform in true paladin tank gear. This is because if she was in true paladin tank gear, she would be crushable, and thus pointless. Similarly, a talent such as Redoubt is useless after uncrushability is achieved.

So I solve the problem Gordian-Knot-style, and simply fold uncrushability into Shield Specialization (additionally reduces chance of crushing blow by 5/10/15%).

Additionally, Blessing of Sanctuary is removed, and Kings moved into its position. With the smaller raid size, there are not really enough paladins to put all required blessings up, and Sanctuary is usually dropped. Kings is a good blessing, but not necessary in 10-man content, and only one paladin in 25-man content needs it.

I added a Fear Immunity, Blessing of Courage, into the 11-point slot, making it reasonably accessible to all specs. It's a short duration blessing, modelled after Blessing of Freedom.

The final change was to swap Weapon Expertise for a talent that returns mana when blocking. Because we are paladins, it is extended to return mana to the entire party. Seems in theme, but makes us different than warriors, as a paladin tank would more likely be put in a caster group.

We retain our strengths of being really good on fast attack or AoE fights, but we still have our weaknesses of lower health and damage mitigation than warriors.

We also get a lot more freedom to gear up. Basically, I'm tired of wearing warrior tanking gear, and would really like to wear paladin tanking gear.

Edit: Hmm. It appears that the talent tree site is down. Hopefully the description above is enough for people get the idea.

/roll Loot Rules

On Skywall, the standard loot rules for Bind-on-Pickup items is pass when the loot roll comes up, and then manually use /roll to determine who gets the item afterwards. This seems a little odd at first. Why pass if you're just going to manually use the same process afterwards?

I think the reason we do this is that the standard loot roll does't really correspond to how we think of items. The standard Need/Greed basically has two options:

1. I need the item.
2. I don't need the item.

I don't think this correctly matches our thinking about loot, and as such, we ignore the automated system and manually roll afterwards.

In reality, I think there are 3 basic reactions to loot, not 2:

1. I will use the item all the time.
2. I will use the item some of the time.
3. I will not use the item.

We don't explicitly say so, but when we manually roll afterwards, we take the all/some of the time division into account.

For example, say [Hourglass of the Unraveller] dropped in Black Morass. It's a really nice trinket for my Retribution gear, and I wouldn't mind having it. But I don't really want to take the item from a rogue. So I pass, and wait to see if the rogue expresses interest before rolling.

(If I was an active Retribution paladin, this would be different, and I would roll against a rogue for it. I'm talking as a Holy Paladin who may or may not spec Retribution one day.)

Under Need/Greed, no option really fits. If I Need, and I win it over the rogue, that's a bad result. If I Greed, and a mage wins it, that's a bad result too. So we pass and roll it out manually.

Under the three option system, it's much more obvious. Rogue picks the first option (use all the time), I pick the second option (use some of the time), and mage picks the third option (never use it). So the rogue gets it, but I get it if he doesn't need it.

Knowing that this more closely matches how we think about loot rules, I think there are a couple changes that could be made to speed up loot distribution. For example, rather than manually doing need/greed rolls, you could use three steps, rather than making people guess if the "all the time" people will roll.

Or you could use the automatic Need/Greed loot window. Need if you will use all the time, Greed if you will use some of the time, and Pass if you never use it. If everyone passes, an enchanter scoops up the item and shards are passed out at the end of the run.

This could easily be adapted to any instance where you use /roll, such as Karazhan. You could even implement a 1 upgrade per run rule by saying that once you win something, you can only hit Greed from then on, ensuring that someone who hasn't won something can hit Need and guarantee a win.

Crafting

Crafting in WoW is good for:

1. Making decent gear for your main character to supplement quests and drops. Personally, I like wearing gear that my toon has crafted.
2. Making good gear for alts.
3. Making specific valued pieces for friends and guildmates.
4. Making consumables to buff you.
5. Having something to do other than quest and kill. Collecting recipes and advancing your crafting skill is fun.

Crafting in WoW is not good for:

1. Making money by selling crafted gear to other people.

I think a lot of the people who have problems with the crafting in WoW had visions of, say, becoming an weaponsmith, and selling the weapons for large amounts of profit. But the simple truth is that crafting gear is not a good path to riches.

And the reason for this is straight supply and demand. It is very easy to become a crafter, and thus are a lot of crafters in WoW. Almost everyone has at least one crafting profession. This quickly forces the margin for crafting to a very low point. If I have materials for something, and you charge 100g to combine them, I can very easily find someone who will do it for much cheaper.

As well, you can get gear from quests and instances, so crafting isn't specifically necessary. Also gear doesn't degrade, so there's never any repeat business. If player X buys a Sword of Doom, she's never going to buy another Sword of Doom, only a Sword of Greater Doom.

Realistically, the only way you can make good money from a crafting profession is to have an extremely rare recipe that is highly valued. In the old days, this would include epics like the Lionheart Helm.

Blizzard has tried to build a little bit of margin into crafting in TBC, most notably with Primal Nethers. Primal Nethers are bind-on-pickup, so if you want an item that needs one, you need to find a crafter with the recipe AND a nether she is willing to part with. That imposed scarcity allows the crafter to increase her margins on crafted goods.

If you want to earn money using professions, the best thing to do is focus on items that are used up. This includes consumables and raw materials used in crafting. After all, if everyone is a crafter, everyone is going to need materials. Supply and demand.

Now, is this situation good? Would it be better to make it so fewer people are able to craft, allowing them to actually make money from their profession?

Personally, I like the existing system of crafting. It's very solo friendly--until you hit the Primal Nether stage--and I like being able to make gear to supplement my quest gear. I can live with not being able to make a profit via crafting.

Rating Karazhan, Part III

(See Part I, Part II.)

Ahh, Nightbane. Hmm, I thought Blizzard said that Fear was going to be less important in TBC. Quite honestly, I don't really understand Blizzard and Fear. As far as I know, you need a warrior tank, or a dwarf/draenai priest, or two shaman to even have a reasonable chance of beating this fight. I just don't understand that logic. Sometimes I wonder if there's some other way of dealing with Fear that Blizzard thinks we should use.

Personally, I think boss Fears should work more like Intimidation: everyone except the main tank gets feared. That would make Fear-based fights much easier to deal with without raid-stacking, and make non-warrior tanks/non-dwarf priests more viable.

Aside from that, Nightbane is an okay fight. There's nothing really interesting in the fight, it's all about the tank breaking Fears, picking up Nightbane when he lands, and being topped off before Fear. In many ways, it's a very tank-healer-centric, old-school fight.

Final Grade - Nightbane: C+

In general, Karazhan is a pretty good instance, with a nice mixture of fights and bosses, along with some superb voice-acting. I'd say that it was better than Molten Core or AQ20, on par with Zul'Gurub, but worse than Blackwing Lair. (This being the extent of my pre-TBC raid experience.) However, it does suffer from three significant flaws.

First off, the instance is rather large, and thus the trash is excessive. Just running from the side door to Aran's room takes forever, and that's after you've killed all the trash. The entire instance pretty much needs to be thinned out.

Second, a lot of the fights are very biased toward ranged groups. Maiden, Curator, Prince, and Nightbane for example. In particular, I really wish that Blizzard would stop using chaining spells that do more damage to people near each other. Those alone make melee even more difficult than it already is.

Would Curator really be that much harder if the Astral Flares did a straight lightning bolt instead of a chain lightning? The melee dps already have to chase them down, and this would make having an extra rogue/shaman/paladin/warrior much less hurtful.

Third, the instance really lacks a solid epic capstone fight. MC was a very weak instance, but the presentation of Ragnaros was superb. Summoning him for the first time was awesome, and truly felt epic. Ossiran the Unscarred, Hakkar the Soulflayer, and Nefarian were all awesome end boss fights that finished off the instance with a bang.

I don't even know who the end boss of Karazhan is. It's possibly Prince Malchezzar, even though I have no idea what he's doing in Kara. Maybe it's Nightbane, given that it is a dragon fight, which is only accessible after a questline. Compounding the issue is that my guild beat Prince first, then Nightbane, and finally Netherspite.

Karazhan starts out really strong, but it ends in a whimper. However, overall it is a decent raid instance, and the individual boss fights are fairly strong. It's more the connections between bosses which are missing. Regardless, I'm really looking forward to the next raid instance.

Final Grade - Karazhan: B

Ranking of Boss Fights (best to worst):

A+: Moroes
A: Shade of Aran, Chess Event
B+: Curator, Prince Malchezzar
B: Attumen the Huntsman, Opera, Netherspite
B-: Terestian Illhoof
C+: Nightbane
C: Maiden of Virtue

Rating Karazhan, Part II

(See Part I.)

Terestian Illhoof is a decent fight. About the only knock against it is that the Demonic Chains do a bit too much damage. If your raid runs a little dps-light, and one of your dps gets sacrificed, it's a bit dicey as to if the person will survive. As well, it's fairly hard to get a heal off in time to keep the sacrificed person up. To be honest, it might be better if the Demonic Chains had more health, but did less DPS. It would make that portion of the fight a little more forgiving.

Final Grade - Terestian Illhoof: B-

Shade of Aran is a crazy fight. Fights where you can go all out are always fun. The silence around him is a bit annoying for paladins, as it means you cannot melee-heal. However, the new Blizzard mechanic is great. It's amusing to make the ranged people run around like the melee people normally have to do.

The voice-acting in this fight is superb, and adds a great deal to the atmosphere for this fight.

The only problem with Shade is that the ending part with the elementals can get too chaotic, especially if you don't have a warlock. But that's a small quibble for such a unique and engaging fight. It's a hard fight, mind you, but lots of fun.

Final Grade - Shade of Aran: A

The Chess event is a very nice breather. It's fun, and relatively easy, and provides a great change of pace. For some reason, I like controlling the pawns.

I'm gravely disappointed that Medivh cheats, though. What's the world coming to when you can't trust an evil undead wizard to play fair in a game of chess?

Final Grade - Chess Event: A

Netherspite is also a very interesting fight. The portals and beams are an interesting mechanic. I haven't actually been in on a kill for Netherspite yet, but from what I've seen it's a good fight.

Edit: Killed Netherspite tonight. I think my rating stands.

Final Grade - Netherspite: B

Prince Malchezzar (and the legions he commands) is a complicated fight to grade. On the one hand, it's a well done fight with interesting mechanics. In particular, the random element of infernals makes the strategy for this fight more dynamic than most.

The problem with this fight is that I don't think raiders deal with randomness very well. In the ideal case, when you lose a fight, it should have been because you made a mistake, or did not execute correctly, and you should know that you did not execute correctly. In contrast, when you wipe on Prince, the most common phrase you will hear is that the raid had bad luck.

Which is not true. It is not bad luck, but failure of strategy that leads to most Prince wipes. However, the link between failure of strategy and the wipe itself is hard to see. Most people only see the proximate cause of the wipe ("We wiped because an infernal landed on us"), and don't see the underlying strategic flaw ("We didn't move the raid to a safer position early").

This disconnect often shows up in DPS fights which lack a timer to make the lack of DPS obvious. Instead, the proximate cause of the wipe is healers running out of mana, and so that's where the blame falls.

The inability of the Prince fight to make clear the true reason the raid wiped is its deepest flaw. Which is a pity, because in a lot of other respects it is a very well designed fight.

Final Grade - Prince Malchezzar: B+

Still to come: Nightbane, and the overall grade for Karazhan.

Rating Karazhan, Part I

I think it's a good time to take a look back at Karazhan and evaluate it. I've done almost all of the fights inside (haven't been in on a Netherspite kill yet). I'm not going to describe the fights here, but you can take a look at the WoWWiki Karazhan page for full descriptions if you want.

First, let's look at the trash. I'm not a fan of the trash in Karazhan. I think respawns are silly, and there's too much trash in general. In particular, the trash from Curator to Shade of Aran really needs to be thinned out. For the most part, the trash is at a reasonable difficulty level. The major exceptions are the spell shade packs. Maybe my raid hasn't discovered the secret to dealing with them, but we get absolutely wrecked by them every week.

Final Grade - Trash: D

Attumen the Huntsman is a solid introductory fight. It's a relatively simple tank-and-spank fight that has a couple of phases and is a good length. It's a very good first raid fight that serves as a check to see if your guild is ready for rading.

Final Grade - Attumen the Huntsman: B

Moroes is one of my favorite fights. It is the first complex fight, and is a solid test of your guild's coordination. About the only negatives is that it can be hard if you don't have a priest, hunter or paladin to crowd control, and it gets a lot easier with 2 priests. But it's still doable with stunlocking, kiting, or even just tanking everything.

It's a fight where a lot of different strategies can work, but in the end just comes down to the skill of your raid. As for difficulty, I think it is well placed, especially with the vanishes to give your raid a breather, and allow healers to catch up.

Downing Moroes for the first time feels like a significant accomplishment arising from skillful execution, which is what the best raid fights do.

Final Grade - Moroes: A+

Maiden of Virtue is a decent fight. The layout of the fight with the pillars is well done, and the fight is very different. It seems to be much easier if you have a paladin in the group, and does require you to be quick with cleanses. However, I'm a fan of Blessing of Sacrifice, and I always enjoy fights where I get to use it.

The big knock against this fight is that--like several fights in Karazhan--it is biased against melee-heavy raids. It's still doable, but realistically if you have more than 3 melee, it's painful.

As well, I think that Maiden does slightly too much damage. For some reason, I die an awful lot on this fight, which is odd for its placement in the zone. Like tonight I took a Holy Fire, cleansed it, then got hit by Repentance and died before I had a chance to heal. Maybe we aren't using Dampen Magic enough. I do think that the Holy Fire damage could be toned down slightly.

Final Grade - Maiden of Virtue: C

The opera events are really well done. All the fights are reasonably interesting and amusing. After the difficulty of Romulo and Julianne was brought in line with the other two fights, all three fights are roughly the same quality.

Running around as Little Red Riding Hood, and being chased by the Big Bad Wolf is hilarious. I'm not really too sure what else to say. The fights are tuned well, and I look forward to Opera when we do Karazhan. At the same time, there's nothing amazing about any of the fights either. Solid raiding fare.

Final Grade - Opera Events: B

The Curator is another very good fight. It's the first real test of your DPS, and one of the best places to make them step and be accountable. To be quite honest, in a lot of pre-TBC content, tanks and healers carried the DPS. I'm very happy to see TBC making the DPS visibly responsible for wipes.

As with Maiden, this fight punishes melee-heavy groups. It's still doable, but puts extra stress on your healers. That's really about the only negative for this fight.

I love the voice acting for Curator, as well. It's very different from your typical raid fight, and is a nice change of pace.

Final Grade - The Curator: B+

I'll cover the remaining bosses next post. One thing about Karazhan I've noticed is that it really likes a balanced raid. One of each class plus a DPS off-tank is pretty much the ideal setup for going through Kara from start to end. In fact, the more your raid deviates from this setup, the harder many fights in Kara become.

The Negative Effects of Durability

In most games, durability is an advantage. Items with a high durability last longer than items with lower durability, and thus are more valuable. This makes intuitive sense.

In WoW, however, high durability is actually a disadvantage. It seems counter-intuitive, but looking at game mechanics quickly shows why. The most common form of item damage is the 10% durability loss from death. However, the cost to repair an item is based on per point of durability lost. An item with higher durability loses more points for each death, and thus costs more to repair for each death.

For example, take two items: blue boots with 50 durability, and epic boots with 100 durability. Let's say it costs 10 silver to repair one point of durability. After one death, the blue boots lose 5 points of durability, and the epic boots lose 10. It costs 50 silver to repair the blue boots, and 1 gold to repair the epic boots. Having lower durability was actually an advantage for the blue boots, which just does not seem right.

And this has a startling amount of ramifications, especially in the endgame.

First, gear with higher item levels tends to have higher durability. That means that as your gear gets better and better, your repair costs increase. Because the raid dungeons do not drop increased amounts of cash, it means that the amount of gold needed to support raiding increases as gear gets better.

This is a big problem for healers and tanks. As a character levels, the rate of gold farmed continues to increase, allowing them to keep pace with their increased costs. At 70, though, this changes.

For DPS, the rate of gold farmed continues to increase as new gear is gained, allowing the DPS to match the increase in repair costs. However, for healers and tanks, the new gear does not help increase the rate of gold farmed, meaning that they have to farm for longer periods of time to keep up with the increasing durability on their gear.

Secondly, the increasing repair costs leads to higher cost of death, which leads to more risk-averse behaviour. When a single wipe costs 5g or more, a healer or tank is less likely to engage in risky actions like joining pick-up groups. This is bad for the game as a whole, as it works best when people are actually willing to do things, to take the risk of dying.

The solution is to change the repair mechanic. Rather than repairing on a per-durability-point basis, repair costs should be done on a fixed percentage base (by level). It should always cost the same for a level 70 to repair from 0% to 100%.

To return to the above example, if costs 5 gold to repair from 0% to 100%, both the blue boots and the epic boots cost 50 silver. So for a healer or tank, it takes them the same amount of time to farm for gold to support their new gear.

(The DPS ends up with more free time, and possibly more money as a result, but I don't really see that as game-breaking. At least not as game-breaking as forcing the healers/tanks to farm for continously longer periods of time. Besides, the rogues and hunters already avoid half the wipes anyways.)

This way there is symmetry between the percentage loss when dying, and the percentage gain when repairing. Costs are now fixed, and no longer require increased farming time. Durability is once again an advantage as--not counting deaths--an item with high durability will last longer and not cost as much to repair.

Rogue Joke

From Cephas of Twisting Nether:

Jesus: "I can offer you eternal Salvation."
Disciples: "Can I get Might or Kings instead?"

Retribution Respec

After the last post about making money, I tried out Auctioneer and Enchantrix. Talk about information overload! I quickly gave up on AH trading and instead respecced to Retribution (20/0/41).

Retribution is a lot of fun! Four digit crits are awesome. Probably not that amazing to any DPS readers, but as a paladin, it's funny to see. As well, Retribution is very gratifying on a visceral level. Your charcter does special attack animation, giant numbers pop up, your hands start glowing white, and there's sound effects. I was gleefully killing stuff all over Blade's Edge at first.

It is a lot more mana-intensive than I expected. I've always viewed Retribution as fairly mana-efficient, but it can be very mana-hungry. However, this is mostly judging Command. In fact, if you use Seal of Command (Rank 1) and don't judge, you can get 95% of the damage and greatly reduce your mana usage. I'm contemplating macroing SoC so I can left-click for Rank 1, and right-click for max rank.

I also totally understand the comments about threat now. I only went on one instance run as Retribution, but I had to be very careful about threat, even with one of our main Kara tanks tanking.

(It was a pretty weird run. Normal Shattered Halls with Prot Warrior, Feral Druid in bear, Retribution Paladin, Rogue, and Priest. We didn't really use crowd control but just tanked and killed everything. We probably outgear the instance at this point.)

I wasn't even doing that much damage. I was hovering at about 70% of the rogue's damage, though that was with tossing a few heals here and there. But I'd start attacking and then I hit a 2K Crusader Strike crit, 2K white damage crit, and 2K SoC crit--all at the same time--and the mob would be attacking me. Good thing I wear plate.

Between Retribution and selling off a lot of the enchanting materials and primals I had accumulated, I managed to increase my gold levels substantially. I'm still a long way off from the epic flying mount, but I'm in a much better position than before the weekend.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to stay Retribution. My healing is okay, but I'm missing Blessing of Kings. I would like to try out in a raid, just to see how things work. Quite honestly, for a 25-man raid, having at least one Retribution Paladin is probably a good idea. For a 10-man, though, I'm not really sure.