Mooonfire!

The place is a mess, there are posts that need fixing, the various lists on the sidebar are extremely old and you have no idea what I’m up to in-game these days. Also, I have a developing rant about what makes raiding fun.

You do not, however, get any of these things right now, because my first post back after a long, long hiatus, is about my current spec, what makes it fun, and what I might change.

You can find it by examining me on the armory, and it’s something of an odd spec- A variation of the Dreamstate healer (itself uncommon) without the classic support talent Brambles. It takes the DPS-enhancing talents intead.

So why do I like this build? Versatility.

We were in Karazhan last night. We had zero warrior tanks. Nada. We had only two healers (both druids, neither me). Majinbill, a paladin, was our main tank. Maj and I have this understanding, and we’ve now tanked, as a team, all of Karazhan (and upper Kara twice).

We started out fine. No priests, so no real CC against undead. One of the DPS face-pulled a second pull during the stables. We didn’t even notice until after the pull was down. Midnight/Attumen were cake and, coincidentally, dropped the scope schematic I’d been hoping for for a very, very long time.

Moroes? No CC. Shadow priestess, holy priestess, prot warrior, ret paladin. No real trouble. Maj held Moroes/Ret and I held Moroes/Crispin until the priests were down. Fury warriors went to work on Ret. Crispin was my buddy for the remainder of the evening. I died due to healer inattention, but then we were running with two healers where our guild traditionally takes three.

Maiden? Maj and I both put on our healing sets. He cleansed and did spot heals, I healed, one of the fury warriors tanked her (We had already determined that I could in fact hold aggro on her just fine with only my instants, but two healers was insufficient for the damage flying around).

Opera? Romulo and Julianne. What’s the problem here?

No dispel.

Lots of interrupts- no dispel. We tried it with me tanking Julianne and Maj tanking Romulo. Problem? Not enough healing. Okay, I put on the healing gear and strap one of the fury warriors back into their tanking gear, away we go.

Curator? Cake. I have a partial arcane resist set, so I soaked up bolts and pretended to be DPS while Maj took the big guy.

Aran? Double cake. I just pretended I was DPS (and took out two of the water elementals on my own).

Prince? Triple cake. Drop into the healer set and let Mr. Pally have all the fun. Once we hit phase 3 the healing requirements slackened off, but we needed DPS, so… wrath away!

So why this post? We were talking it over in the raid, and realized just how useful it is to have a raid member who can, at need, be any of the three roles.

I love my spec. It makes me all happy.

(It’s pure gravy that neither our prot paladins nor our prot warriors can hold threat against me if I decide to take the mobs away- something we used to our advantage in Karazhan last night. “Llanion, you take skull, I’ll hold the others. Burn skull, then grab one off me and keep going.”)

Is there anything I’d change? Honestly, yes- I’d like a point or three in Subtlety. My aggro is still sufficient to match a Warrior, and I would have a higher cap on my DPS in raids when I’m filling the DPS role. I’m still thinking about it.
Hopefully my next post won’t have such a long gap. Peace!

~Ll

Mad Cow Chronicles: Heroes of Underbog from Llanion on Vimeo.

It has been a month since I posted; the aforesaid post needs fixing to match reality.

I’ve been too busy to post- the dreaded R-type Life keeping me occupied. Later today- it being 3:47 AM as I type this- I may expand upon, elaborate, or even post entirely new posts. My gear lists, both recieved and desired, are out of date and need fixing.

All of this, however, pales beside the reason I am posting now. The reason glimmers in my brain.

I just Panzered Underbog. We had a member lag out right after the first boss’ guardian trash, so we four-manned that boss and most of the way to the next one before a 69 Paladin guildmate came in to help. We wiped three times in all- once on the aforementioned guardian trash, once to an insect three-pull and once to carelessness (our mage, marking things up, got a Bog Lord by mistake). I, as the tank, managed to die three additional times- once on the second boss and once on each Bog Lord- bringing them down in the process (in the case of BOTH Bog Lords, we wobbled and fell forward at the same time).

Now we’re doing all this in a mix of quest blues, crafted epics, a little Kara gear and, in my case, PVP reward gear (one piece of Vindicator’s, and one piece of Veteran’s; a Merciless Gladiator’s and quite a lot of the blue Outland reputation PVP gear).

So why, if we have such rocking gear, did we wipe three times?

Well, be fair.

It was a Heroic.

Today’s entry is the first in what will (hopefully) be a series called “Mechanics With a Rubber Wrench”. The theme is to break down, into simple concepts and ideas, the not-so-horribly-simple and occasionally viciously-complex mechanics of World of Warcraft.

In this way, you can learn to be a better [player|raider|PVPer|Artisan Chef] without having to do the math. This is helpful if you’re not mathematically inclined, if the whole idea of ‘defense rating’ is confusing, or if you’re just lazy.

Today’s topic: The Hit Table.

If you, or someone you know, has abnormally low DPS in fights, don’t despair! You may not be an utter noob! It’s not necessarily that your weapon sucks, that your skill rotations are terrible or that your pet spent half the instance trying to do unspeakable things with the tank’s leg!

It could just come down to Hit Rating!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have an example of The Hit Table. Now here’s how attacks work in game, as far as anyone’s been able to piece together from research and Blizzardian tidbits.

When you swing your weapon or fire your bow, a /roll 10000 takes place on the server. Your attack is placed somewhere on this table based on what you rolled. Let’s assume 0 is at the top of the table and 10000 is at the bottom (though it doesn’t really matter- we just need an arbitrary method of placing a roll on the table).

Clearly, you want your htis to land on Critical Strike or Hit, and definitely do NOT want them landing on Block, Glancing Blow, Parry, Dodge or, heaven forfend, Miss. But how to ensure that this happens?

Well, imagine that there’s an endless supply of Hit ‘below’ the chart, constantly welling upwards- that is to say, any empty space on the chart will be immediately filled, because all the fields move up to fill the empty space, and the Hit segment expands as needed to make sure there’s no gaps left.

I won’t go into the math here, but the various sizes of the segments of the chart are based on many things:

• Your Level
• The mob’s level
• Your weapon skill
• Whether you are fighting from range
• Whether you are in front of or behind the mob
• Whether you are single or dual-wielding
• Your gear’s statistics (expertise, critical hit rating, agility, and hit rating)
• Whether or not the Balance-talented spell “Improved Faerie Fire” is present on the mob
• Whether you’ve eaten Spicy Hot Talbuk recently
• Probably more that I’ve missed…

Assumptions I’m going to be making include:

You are level 70; The mob is a raid boss (level 73, which the game shows as a skull); You are NOT dual-wielding; you have your weapon skill at 350; you are either fighting at range (guns, bows, crossbows or thrown) or are standing in the mob’s rear arc.

With those assumptions made, I can tell you, definitively, the following things:

1: Without some boost to your abilities, you are going to miss 9% of your attacks. Sucks to be you.

2: You will not ever get parried or dodged; those two things require a frontal-arc melee attack.

Okay, so missing 9% of your attacks… well, that’s bad! But wait a minute- let’s assume for a second that my chance to land a critical hit can be boosted insanely high- to 100%- then you’ll never miss and always crit, right?

Wrong. Critical Strike is second from the bottom and can’t expand upwards until other things “get out of the way”. (It can, however, expand downwards, meaning that you no longer land normal hits but instead all criticals. This is referred to as ‘pushing off the table’, as in ‘My crit rating is so high I’ve pushed normal hits off the table.’)

So… how to get these other things out of the way?

Eliminating Dodge and Parry:

Stand away from the mob and fight at range; or; attack from behind. Attacks from behind cannot be dodged nor parried. Similarly, ranged attacks cannot be dodged or parried. Those two chances will be reduced to 0; those entries can be entirely taken out of the table (not pushed off, but actually removed completely). The second way of doing this is with Expertise Rating, which I am not going to go into in-depth today; Let it suffice to say that with sufficient Expertise Rating, you can attack from in front and still allow zero chance to be parried or dodged.

Eliminating Glancing Blows:

Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t do this, and though I hate to agree with conventional wisdom I’ve yet to see a scrap of proof that says there’s a way to reduce the chance of these things happening. Sorry.

Eliminating Blocks:

See above, ‘Glancing Blows’.

Eliminating Missed Attacks:

Here we come to the meat of the subject. It is not only possible but actually simple to reduce the chance that you will miss to zero.

Attain a hit rating of at least 142 points.

Hit ‘rating’ and hit ‘chance’ are not, of course, the same thing. And again, there’s lots of complex math but, take it from me, the 9% miss chance vs. a level-Skull mob is removed with 142 hit rating. This is referred to as ‘the hit cap’ for hunters and melee classes that single-wield (anyone using the classic ’sword-and-board’ combo, anyone using a two-handed weapon and, of course, feral druids). At this level of hit rating, you will never actually miss.

There are of course ways to lower that number- various classes have talents that increase chance to hit (generally by 3%, reducing their hit cap by 47); a draenei Paladin, Warrior or Hunter’s racial aura reduces the hit cap of their party by 15.77 by their mere presence (1% chance to hit) and, of course, a druid tagging the mob with a three-point Improved Faerie Fire allows another 3% (47-point) reduction for anyone attacking that mob physically.

But How?

As noted above- be Draenei of the appropriate class, talent for it, beg a Balance druid to come along. There’s also hit rating on gear; ranged users (almost always hunters) can pick up ranged-only hit rating via the [Biznick’s] (but good luck finding an engineer who has the schematic, these days). Finally there are gems, a [glyph], the Surefooted enchant and even [food] that can be used to top yourself out. (Hunters can also get an improving leg or head armor kit via Zul’Gurub, but that place is rarely run these days).

Now you know how the hit table (theoretically, anyway) works! This should allow you (and your raidmates, feel free to point them here) to up their DPS much faster than simply stacking crit chance or attack power. It also makes for more predictable damage, which makes your tanks very, very happy.

Go forth and conquer! (and, seriously, if your raidmates keep complaining about their miss numbers, send them here…)

When I first zoned into Quel’Danas, I thought it was a great idea. And the atmosphere, the lovely, somewhat chaotic, help-help-we-are-under-attack atmosphere, was, to my way of thinking, lovely. Compelling even. But

Magister’s Terrace. I DON’T like it. There’s only so much “You must be perfect” that I can handle, and that instance not only tops me off but overflows me, in that regard.

Then there’s the dailies. Oh, the dailies. I pretty much have to do them every day to stay abreast of my expenses (more on this in a minute) but… There’s only so many times I can do the same things over and over and over and over and over again until I start to hate them. I tell you what, Blizzard- let me do the Distraction at the Dead Scar, I.E. My Favorite, once for each of the daily quests otherwise available? Please?

I am enjoying the fishing dailies, though, and to some extent the cooking ones (though since I’ve finally tracked down both of the blue recipes from there, those, a little less).

So what does this mean?

Simple-

The new content added in 2.4 is already stale for me.

New badge rewards? That’s… nice I guess? The problem is that my guild isn’t stymied through lack of gear (for the most part). We’re geared fine. We just don’t have the manpower to make the jump out of Karazhan.

Gee, I guess that means that Sunwell Plateau isn’t going to hold my interest very much, is it?

The new dailies? As I’ve heard it said- “Twelve bear asses, go!”

And again.
And again.
And again.
And again until you want to scream.

So, apropos of screaming, what am I doing in game these days?

1: Arenas.
I’m not going in expecting to be the top the best near the best good poor acceptable at this game, but I am having fun with my young lady and a friend of ours who is an almost-identical troll hunterette to match Maliata. This means that I have to rely on my raid frames to tell who’s taking damage, since all I can tell in the field is “The hunter’s getting attack!”

And they both have scorpid pets. Identical scorpid pets.

Arenas leads well into the second thing, which is

2: Panzerkin (AKA The Mad Cow Chronicles)
I tanked my first (as a caster) five-man last week and I’m going to continue burbling about it until I get the video posted, which could take quite a while. Durnholde may be a 66-68 instance but I did it in blues/scattered badge rewards/bg rewards for the most part, which I figure means I didn’t outgear it too harshly. The challenge will be to pull the same trick with, oh, Steamvaults or Arcatraz or something.

I’m finding this fun, but the only real upgrades are via arenas, and there’s a static limit on how fast I can gain arena points.

3: Prismspec work
This is one of my other ideas. I want one, single, solitary spec that is adequate, if not brilliant, for my druiding needs. I think what I’m using now is just about it, though I’m still debating between Furor (for the rare times I AM in a feral form) and Imp Mark (normally useless except when you really NEED that extra bonus, heh).

4: Soloing Older Content
I can do up to (but not including) Baron Rivendare on Undead Strat. By myself. As a non-feral. I can do up to (but not including) the final boss on the Scarlet Side as well, though that’s harder (bloody healer caster four-pulls melee interrupting rassin’ frassin’…).

To be fair, I’ve wiped (twice) on Rivendare, and never actually tried the final Scarlet boss. I also skipped the Cannon-master- bad druid!

My best time so far is engaging Rammstein with 20 seconds to go on the ultimatum timer- though, to be fair, I managed to accidentally kill myself earlier in the instance. Remove that little timer foible (and figure out a way to handle the 5x Elite pull that comes after Rammstein) and I may be able to actually attempt Rivendare with some time left on the clock.

For those who are curious, my problems with him were based on not being able to do AoE damage four times per minute to take his skeleton assistants down, but I’m fairly sure I’ve come up with a way to handle that. I’ll let you know.

This entire activity is exempt from “Must Be Perfect” syndrome because, if I wipe, I have not wasted anyone else’s time.

5: Old-School Tuesdays.

I tried to start this when I was in my last guild, but the chronic lack-of-interest problem stopped me. I tried it again in KMM, and was immediately taken up by three people, with the same number again going “That’s cool, but I can’t usually make Tuesday nights. :(”

We’ve spent the last months or so working on our Onyxia attunements (SUCH a pain for Horde players- contrast one instance run and three raid runs plus four elite world bosses to kill starting at level 55 vs something like two instance runs, one world boss and three fed-ex quests starting at level 48 for Alliance). Tonight, we get a third player his Onyxia key (half a dozen of us also picked up Blackwing Lair attunement).

Tonight, we hope, we’re going to go in and see what she’s got that’s so exciting. We hope.

If we win, that’s 50g each and an eighteen-slot bag for one of us, so…

6: Enchanting

I dropped mining and have been levelling enchanting. It’s been pleasant.

7: Old Content (Rep and attunements)
I’m actually in higher standing with the Argent Dawn at the moment than I am with the Shattered Sun. Go figure. The Strat runs are providing me with extreme amounts of reputation. I’m going to be running Blackrock Depths next to get enchanting mats, and that should help me level my AD rep further via the Dark Iron turnins.

I’m also a key-and-attunement fanatic. Thus far in the list of ‘keys not often picked up’-

Blackwing Lair attuned
Onyxia Key
UBRS key
Anzu Key
Key to Stratholme
Master Key to the City of Stratholme

I’m working on my Molten Core and naturally my Naxxramas attunements.

So, I’m keeping busy and regard the new daily quests as a boring, but necessary evil to keep me financially solvent through all of this (ever tried to gem, enchant and keep in good repair five sets of gear? It ain’t pretty).

In other words, I’ve been occupying my time with fighting the Scourge threat and hunting dragons- What are you doing to keep yourself interested in the game?

I figure it’s important to put something up here so you know I’m not dead (beyond “I’ll do a real post later, I promise”).

So here you are.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing! I’ve been working on the stuff referred to in the video, either in-game or out.

I have a nice long panzerkin post for you later. For now, I would merely like to note that I was actually on Quel’danas when Arathor took the Armory. It was disappointing- there was no fanfare, no epic battle to take the building. It was just a zone-wide yell of “The armory is ours!” or words to that effect, and the NPCs spawned in (and were mobbed by players).

Sort of anticlimatic.

This one runs long. If you get bored or are shocked and dismayed at any point, roll it on down to the bottom of the post where you get a TL;DR explanation.

So the time has come to announce it.

I did, of course, briefly dabble in a Balance-weighted healer build, before switching out due to mana inefficiency. In a spec-tacular blunder (I’m sorry, the puns are worth it) I managed to completely lose sight of the fact that I’d just swapped specs right before 2.4 and an insane boost to my mana efficiency via more MP5 and cheaper Regrowths. The point, however, is that the druid community has a nickname for this sort of build- we call it a ‘Restokin’.

We have names for our other builds too, of course. A build with at least 31 points in Balance, assuming the Moonkin Form talent is taken, is referred to as a ‘Boomkin’, or sometimes a ‘Doomkin’ or, if you really feel like having a feathery fist embedded in your teeth, an ‘oomkin’.

A druid with at least 41 points in Restoration (again, assuming Tree of Life is taken) is usually known simply as a tree druid.

A druid with a 31/30 or 30/31 Feral/Restoration split is known as a lunatic. Sorry, sorry, bad joke, but I can’t find a way that build can be viable. I’ve run it. It’s not so good for me. The opinions of Mooonfire are not those of Blizzard Entertainment and we do not necessarily in any way represent the pure mathematical truth of the matter. If you can make a 30/31 or 31/30 split work for you, by all means go ahead with my blessing. Druids are meant for exploring the mechanics of the game and for pulling crazy ideas out of nowhere.

But there’s one more spec that has acquired a nickname. It’s a monster whispered about in dark corners. Respectable druids don’t even think about them. Even the ‘edgier’ druids who might try speccing Restokin, the druidic equivalent of the guy with all the facial piercings, don’t dare use this spec. Even the guy with “DIAF Staghelm” tattooed on his forehead turned white and muttered about having an appointment to skin some furbolgs when this spec was brought up in conversation.

The reaction of the WoW community at large is to scream about what idiots these folks are. Of course, given that that’s the reaction the WoW Forums will give you if you say you like raspberry jam more than peach jelly, that’s nothing new.

But even other druids shy away from this spec. “I wouldn’t do that,” is the most common response (though this becomes the second-place finisher if you count “You’re joking, right?” as a formal response). Others are harsher. “No. Just no.” “It can’t be done.” “You off your meds?”

Druids comprise only about 10% of the game’s active players.  Within that, a disproportionately large number are Arena Resto druids and presumably will fall out of favor once Arena Resto stops being the flavor of the month.

It falls to a very few players- perhaps less than a couple hundred in the ten million players of this game, perhaps as many as a couple thousand, to take this nightmare spec.

If you spec this way, you can expect a complete and utter lack of PUGs. You may have trouble even getting guild runs. And so it is with some trepidation that I write this post. Phaelia will probably call for my druid license to be revoked. Bell might just set me on fire. Leafy will call for me to be turned into steak. Wara won’t hurt me, but that’s presumably because he’s a fellow Murlock and not because he doesn’t have a sense of the proprieties.

This nightmare spec I have been so obliquely referring to is called a Panzerkin.

Assuming my server software has not rebelled at having to display that nightmare word, I’ll continue to explain. It uses a couple dynamics of the Druid class to turn us into a leather-wearing tank.

“Uh. Llanion? Druids have a tank build. You might have heard of it. It’s called the entire Feral talent tree.”

*busily checks this off his checklist of responses expected to be seen*
Yes, the Feral tree makes for amazing tanks and vicious close-quarters DPS. I should know, I levelled that way. And it’s true, they get a tasty stamina boost.

“Llan, they get an armor boost too!”

Yup. So do Moonkins. An identical one, in fact.

“Bears get a talent to reduce the likelihood of incoming crits!”

I currently am, due to a combination of resilience and defense, uncrittable by any mob below level 72. Oh, and I figure a couple more pieces of PVP gear will put me at completely uncrittable even by raid bosses. Did I mention that the PVP Wyrmhide pieces are heavily focused on intellect and stamina, both statistics critical to Moonkins? As it turns out, of the three specs, Moonkins have the easiest time using PVP gear in PVE.

Oh, and the Wyrmhide’s high on armor, which plays in well to the armor boost in deathchicken form.

“Buh… mana pool!”

About 7k at the moment, planning to drive that up.

“That won’t hold you through any lo-”

Innervate. Melee to regenerate mana when I have a decent threat lead. The Blue Dragon if I have any spirit left, which I doubt. Sporefish, Distilled Wisdom+Dreamstate and oh, yes, Rejuvenation and Mana potions. Plus, Shadow Priests.

“You expect a non-tank to hold threat against a Shadow Priest?”

I’m just going to laugh here. Have you ever run with a deep Balance druid? Balance druids scramble for the normally-pointless 26/2 Meta and slap down a subtle cloak. Quite a few of them also have 5/5 Subtlety and they’re always happy with Salvation. Even with all four of these, a string of ‘lucky’ crits can bring the mobs away from the tank and running towards the Balance druid faster than a level 19 night elf Warsong rogue runs for Crusader/Fiery duals.

“Um… how are you going to handle a two-pull?”

With crowd control, exactly like a warrior would.

“All your crowd control’s used up and you have to tank two mobs-”

All right. We’ll designate them MT and OT, main target and off-target. We’ll even assume I’m slack enough to have a half-second of dead air between spellcasts. Time zero is when the first spell hits and the mobs start running.

0: Starfire hits OT

.5: Moonfire hits MT

2.5: Wrath hits MT

3: Moonfire hits OT

Then it’s just a juggle- Wrathspamming the main target while keeping Insect Swarm and Moonfire on the off-target to keep it off the healers.

“The off-target breaks away and”

Gets Moonfired.

“He’s still running towards the healers so-”

I cyclone him and we finish up on the MT.

“And… then… he… uh…”

Hates me even more when I time a Starfire to hit him coming away from his Cyclone.

“Your health pool is too low for this!”

That’s actually true, at the moment. However, PVP gear is heavy on stamina and I intend to enchant for yet more of the same. I’m hoping to top out to 9k at least, 10k if I’m lucky.

“So you’re mentioning this because…”

I thought it might interest some folks. Also, if you look on my sidebar below ‘/grabby hands’, I have ‘/kaboom’. ‘/kaboom’ tracks my goals (and exploits!) as a Panzerkin. There will eventually be movies, naturally.

Now, it’s off to grind for more gear!

Waiting in the queue for Arathi Basin at the moment, for my first bit of 2.4 PVP.

I picked up 4/5 blue Faction PVP gear, so I’m toting a decent level of resilience for the first time. Picked it up in Moonkin flavor, in fact, since I’m trying to construct a Panzerkin.

In other news, I switched back to 19/42 Tree build. I didn’t have the mana longevity I wanted. Of course, that was in 2.3, much to my disgust when I realized I’d respecced early. Well, I’m breaking in a new raid healer and the aura helps, so we’ll give it a couple weeks to let the respec cost drop before I swap back and try the Boomhealer again.