Patch 4.1

So patch 4.1 is deemed to be coming out tomorrow and i thought i would talk about some of the stuff happening.

For druids:

Ferals are seeing a few quality of life changes and a few straight up buffs

the physical damage increase from enrage is being removed so you can now use it more often than just before a pull. This also makes it viable to get king of the jungle in a tanking spec.

The cooldown on swipe is being cut in half and thrash is no longer affected by the bug that causes its bleed to be mitigated by armor.

The bonus threat that was on FFF, lacerate, swipe, and maul have all been taken away and converted to damage. This change changes the scaling on our abilities so that we should now be using thrash and FFF during our single target. This means that you can take the two points out of feral aggression for the instant lacerate 3 stack and the extra point that most people put into stampede into king of the jungle.

For our resto brethren we are seeing a buff to effloresence (spelling?) and the removal of the pushback while casting tranq. This means no more having to save barkskin if you want a full tranq to go off when you are taking damage, nice buff for everyone.

The new content coming out that you no doubt already know about is the new ZA and ZG raids being made into 5 mans. The new instances have retarded amount of new gear and you are now able to get full epics for a feral set from those instances i think.

There has been a conversion of VP to CP at 1:1 in lots of 250 which will allow all non pvp inclined ferals to now get their BIS tanking relic from the PvP vendor. For DPS its still the golganoth relic for you but for tanking the vicious is the best relic you can get. (if you want me to go over that in more detail i can)

But obviously the biggest thing getting attention all around the forums and blogosphere is the introduction of the Call to Arms feature in the RDF. This is the feature intended to increase tanks and to a smaller extent healers in the RDF and decrease queue times for DPS. I want to do a write up on this but i want to see the guaranteed rewards first and do a couple as a dps to see how big a dif it is making with tank quality being a factor.

Also i want to get a video out quickly of the new instances and their associated boss strategies for those people who want a runthrough of those but i will probably have to wait a day or two to get it recorded cause i would prefer a guild group, or mostly guild.

hello

It seems that even though i have not posted in 2 months that people are still coming to the site so i will give a quick update of myself.

First off, im still here. I have been really busy with school and other life things and that is why i have dropped off the face of the planet until now. I have decided to start doing those strat videos that i promised a long time ago and so i will try to get one up within a week, i just have to find the time and drive to do it.

Next, Berserk is now 11/12 on normal with nef left to kill although we may start trying H halfus just for kicks but we shall see.

my tanking movement guide on the forums (the one i posted here) is now a sticky on the tanking forums and i am pretty proud of that.

I have leveled my PvP character (my hunter) up to 85 and have put together a decent PvP set (around 1800 resil) that i am still working on improving.

I just redid my UI on my druid and i want to do a post on that but i will need some screenshots for that first.

Now, a question for you. Do you prefer a minimalist UI or do you like to have everything that you will ever possibly need on your screen at the same time? Me? i prefer a minimalist UI.

My Surgery

I have been wanting to post this for a while now, but i was like "no, they dont want to read about that." But then i realized that it is pretty interesting and that this is my blog and i can do w/e i want with it and so i am going to write a little about it. Maybe i will add pictures.

I just want to start off by saying that i'm sorry i havent done anything with the blog in a few days, but i am really busy with school right now.

So i am getting a major reconstructive jaw surgery on Dec 15th in order to fix a major over-bite and to close the gap in my teeth. As it stands, i can not eat tomato slices unless they are in large sandwiches, pizza without the toppings all sliding off, or pretty much anything that is remotely flat. I am getting both upper and lower jaw surgery, or maxillary and mandibular osteotomies. Basically they are going to lengthen my bottom jaw and shorten, and move my top jaw. Now because i am bored i am going to do some MS paint pictures (or i would have if it didnt make me look like a rat, lets try something else).

So this is essentially what it will look like after it is done i believe. keep in mind that i am no surgeon and that this is all information i have gleaned from appointments i have been to.

Top Jaw:
The surgery for the top jaw entails cutting a small wedge out in order to make the jaw shorter. After they will move the detached top jaw put it against the remainder of the top jaw, and then slide it forward slightly and then pin it in place.

Bottom Jaw:
For the bottom jaw surgery they will have to make a cut to each side of the mandible. There will be a cut in the same place on each jaw. The cut will be vertical and will start near the back of the mandible. They will cut outwards till they are about halfway through my jaw, then they will switch directions and cut down the length of my jaw and finally they will switch directions and continue to cut out wards. once they complete that cut the jaw will be in 3 pieces and they will slide the lower portion forward and then pin it in place with a metal plate. This is the more interesting part in my opinion.

So you can see why i may be out of it for a while. I will be spending at least one night in the hospital, probably two nights before i can go home. My mouth will be tied shut with extremely strong elastics for 6-8 weeks and I will be on an entirely liquid diet for that time (Maybe ill make a list of Jeys fav. liquid meals for you all). The recovery time is about 3 months before i am allowed to do anything physical and then who knows how long after that.

I am extremely excited for it but i am just starting to realize how big of a undertaking this surgery is. I am curious to see how it changes my appearance (hopefully for the better). So there you have it. If you have any questions i will be happy to answer them to the best of my knowledge and i will be doing more WoW related posts and hopefully a low level feral leveling guide when i have more time, which will probably have to wait till after my surgery. So there you go, now when i make a vague reference to my surgery you will know what i am talking about.

On the Wings of Death

A busy schedule has been kind of reducing my output a little but I am going to try and get this off in between two of my classes.

First off anyone at Blizzcon I hope that you are having fun and I totally wish I was there. A student’s budget does not make for a very whimsical traveler.

So after a little hard work I would just like to report that Jey, Guardian of Cenarius is now the proud owner of a Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher. I can’t post pictures right now because I don’t have any access to wow but I will try and get some up within a few days. Overall I found that the ICC Meta achievement was pretty fun to work towards. Some of the achieves became a lot easier after the patch so I would say to anyone that is looking to get their drake to go for it and not wait till Cata.

Generally we have been doing pretty well but we did have about a month where we were losing to the pre-expansion attendance boss so I would say that about 4 months worth of time to get us our drake doing at most 9 hours a week, usually about 6, was pretty credible. We have finally, within the last 3 or so weeks, gotten 10 people who are reliable and good players *crosses fingers* and if they all stay for Cata I think we should be a force to be reckoned with when 10 and 25 are on par for difficulty.

As for our plans for the rest of the expansion...well if you know what is involved in the Meta achievement then you know what the only thing left is. That’s right, it is time to smash our face against the wall that is Heroic Lich King and hopefully get our “Bane of the Fallen King” titles. And if we do get them, you can bet that I will make a post about it.

One last thing. I am planning on doing a post about crowd control that should pretty long like my basics posts but I have yet to start on it, as well as, if I am quick about it, a general walkthrough of the Meta for 10 man. So stay tuned for those (if there is anyone tuned in anyway).

4.0.1 Tanking First Impressions

So patch 4.0.1 went live yesterday and I took some time to play around on my druid and run some heroics so I am going to share my observations with you. Keep in mind that I haven’t done any raiding yet so I don’t have any real idea of how much damage I am taking relative to before but today I should be raiding so I will do a second post to follow up.

First just a little about my character so you know the perspective I have. I have just over a 6k GS. Unbuffed I have about 40% crit chance and 50% dodge with about 5000 attack power. As of yesterday I am hit capped and am about 2.2% off of the expertise hard cap (parry cap).

Rotation:

Fiddling around on the target dummy I had enough rage to do a full rotation so this is pretty accurate. The rotation has moved more towards a priority like the cat system.

You want to try and keep lacerate up (even one stack) so that you can benefit from berserk procs for more mangles. You want to mangle as soon as it comes off CD. You want to use pulverize on a 3 stack of lacerate to maintain the buff but get up lacerate up very soon after so that you can still get the berserk proc. Pulverize is not worth hitting just because. Try and maul when you proc OOC. Use FF when you are low on rage (which should not be very often) and maul when you are high on rage. Hitting maul at the wrong time now actually sucks. Lacerate is now your main filler ability however swipe is a little better so use it if you remember. And one note about lacerate is that the bleed sucks, most of the threat is front end loaded and the bleed is just there to proc berserk. Not looking good for the current manifestation of the T11 set bonuses but that will probably change.

I am noticing that my threat seems to have increased in live.

AoE tanking really sucks right now because they put the CD on swipe w/o giving us thrash and the threat that is on swipe is reported to be half of the threat of live on the beta. I have a feeling that we might see the swipe threat stay the same until cata when we will be able to get thrash to supplement our aoe threat. That being said however, if you just warm up that tab button and throw out 3 lacerates/mangles on your targets in between each swipe it is not that bad, just remember to spread them around. You may choose to let the other tank do the plague wing trash but we are doing fine.

Gear:

Stam is more important that armor now whereas there used to be a decent trade-off before. In T10 before you had a lot of arm pen which was rather weak as a stat. Now that arm pen is haste which is also weak as a stat. I have been reading some ideas on what to reforge that haste into and it seems like a lot of people are saying crit or mastery are the good choices. I think a little different though. Right now my dodge and the SD bubble are quite high with my dodge being much higher in ICC due to the dodge reduction being removed.

I think that if you are going to be reforging haste you should try and get to the hit cap and then start getting expertise. These two stats are going to give you a lot more rage than crit and are going to cause a lot more threat to keep up with the dps that have recently received a dps buff that is reported to be as large as 30% more in some cases. If I am wrong however I will eat my words and rereforge my haste to be mastery.

That is really all I have to say for now and I will update this as I experiment more and do a little bit of raiding and see what my threat and damage taken are like. My assessment so far...we are in a good spot.

What's up now Jey?

So i have not posted as i said i would but here is to starting. I have a lot of big ideas about blog posts to right that would be really good but in the end i find i just cant get myself to start writing them so this is all you get for now... a quick update.

As I said in my last post, i went back to Heartless Knights for the interim while i waited for my schedule to become stable (curse you part-time work) so i could commit to a raiding schedule. Well about a month and a half or two months ago my old guild leader asked me if he started another guild if i would join, it is a predominantly 10 man guild that is basically just building a player base before Cata hits. I casually said that I would once my schedule stabilized but that i couldn't commit to anything now. Well about a 3 weeks ago i got a job full-time for the summer and let him know w/o really thinking too much about it because i thought he was gonna wait longer anyway. One week later I log in to a GMotD saying that my old guild leader had created this guild and that they want the small split off to be as painless as possible. I'm really good friends with the guys in Heartless Knights and left some of my alts in the guild but decided to duck out with my druid to join Berserk.

Well if your good at math you will have realized that we have been formed for 2 weeks now. In the first week we cleared up to sindra with 4/12 heroic done and knocked out a Halion kill which I had not done yet. This week however we stomped through the instance going 7/12 heroic and killing Lich king (getting me and 8 others their kingslayer). Now I know this can't last forever and I know we have a massive buff but I'm pretty pumped that in 2 weeks we killed LK. If this keeps up we will be in good shape for Cata when 10's and 25's will be the same.

A Bit About Me

So i had this up before but i have recently decided to try and put more effort into trying to get the ball rolling so i deleted my old posts and im starting fresh. My name is Jey and the following is about me so far.

I started playing WoW slightly before the Release of the Burning Crusades as an undead warlock which I only leveled up to level 20 or so. I then decided to go for a different mana using class and opted for a Human Mage which got me up to level 46 and into a good guild. I played as a mage through those 46 levels but found that staring at a screen that was constantly turning grey (yay squishie class) was not something that I overly enjoyed. I then decided to go back to playing a warlock but decided that I wanted to stay with my guild and ended up rolling a gnome warlock on the same server. The Burning Crusades was released as I was leveling my warlock and so I had the drive to get to 70 so that I could start doing some instances. I did end up reaching max level on this character and was starting to get into instance runs when some of my friends wanted to all make characters on the same server.

I decided that it would be fun to play a druid because another guy I knew had one and he made it sound like a lot of fun. However I ended up playing three different druids on three different servers before deciding that I wasnt gonna have anymore level 30 druids and decided to stay on Darkspear US server where I currently play.

It was on this server where I made my Druid Jey and decided that I was going to tank even if I had grind out a long time for gear. One of the guys I had transfered with told me that I was doomed to offtank but I politely told him to shut up and proceeded merily on my way leveling up my feral druid. I leveled up my Druid to 70 and then proceeded the long grind for clefthoof leather only to find myself constantly below defence cap and as such stuck to regular instances and not heroics.

Then WotLK dropped and I took off. I was the 8th person in my guild to hit 80 and within 4 days we were running 10 naxx and I was MT'ing due to all the awesome changes made to feral druids and mostly their tanking ( because Kitty dps was lol l2tank in my opinion). After the first night I decided that I needed better gear so grinded out for my crafted gear and we went back and things started dropping. We then proceeded with Naxx 25 and then into ulduar 10 and ulduar 10 hardmodes. We tried running 25 man ulduar but it was very hit and miss due to attendance and then when 3.2 hit and ToC came out we started loosing people including one of our tanks and it was at that point that I decided to duck out and ended up joining Dauntlëss so that I could do ToC 25. We pushed through ToC and were 4/5 in ToGC when icecrown dropped and got to 10/12 in ICC 25.

Quite Recently Dauntlëss broke up when our GM went away (it was a legit reason, none of that im taking a break crap). And so i moved back to heartless knights for the interm while i sort out some things in my real life. My plan is to hop into more aggressive raiding in cata but for the time being im content with an occasional raid with my old guildies.

And thats it about me and everything up right now. One thing I would like to note is that I am not a hardcore theorycrafter and anything I do will pretty much be napkin math and speculation however my speculations have been pretty much bang on since Wrath dropped so you can listen to me if you want. One last thing to note is that if you see an error on any of my posts just let me know so that i can change it, dont be a loser and start flamming cause i messed up a bit, we are all in this together.