I’d Rather Be Wowing!

We have been thinking of forming another group to run Kara for some alts and newer 70 that want to have a more permanent raiding spot. Yesterday was our first run. We had to mix and match a bit so that not all of us were undergeared. Val was the main tank with Corro off-tanking as an arms warrior. In addition to that, we have 1 holy pally, 1 resto druid, 1 holy priest, 1 ret paly, 1 hunter, 2 warlocks, and just temporarily, 1 mage (may be changed with another hunter). One thing to notice, yes, we have a lot of pallies. Without switching people around, at first we ended up 5 pallies. And that’s a lot of blessings

So, I’ve off-tanked Kara before. But main tanking as prot pally is just so much funner. At first we did some CC, but as the run progresses and the healers got comfortable to heal Val, we use less and less, even resorting Corro to do dps instead off tanking. I love the fact that I don’t have to drink so often, although there were too many close calls to my liking. Being an MT for the first time though, I have a newfound respect to our RL/MT. With so many things going on at the same time, I’m impressed that he could tank really well and yet still be able to call out and organize things. It was just way too taxing for me. He was in the run with his priest, and it was really helpful to have him managing the pull. Unfortunately, he wont’ be on the 2nd group regularly, so I have to start getting used to tanking and leading the raid at the same time.

Positive:

- Successfully tanked Maiden for the first time ever. I had to ask the DPS to give me tons of head start, hectically smashed my buttons, but it went extremely well. It was the highlight of the run for me.
- Tanking Prince for the first time (see negative about this too).
- Upgrade to glove: Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden and boots: Battlescar Boots.

Negative:
- Messy pull on Moroes. We recovered quite nicely, but that’s due to soulstones. I didn’t use my AS because I was afraid all the adds would overwhelm me. I should have more faith on my healers and my off tanks.
- Pulls before the Curator were just not very prot pally friendly. The mana worms just suck my mana dry and when the big guy blinks and changes aggro, I didn’t have any mana to do any taunting.
- Not being able to down Prince. I’m still horrible in maintaining my holy shield, and I got crushed 2 times for both tries. The first try, it killed me. The 2nd try, things went well until the beginning of phase 2 where the hunter just ripped aggro off me. I noticed from my WWS parser that somehow Prince missed my consencrate (just 5 to 10 ticks recorded for each fight) even when I thought I was in melee range with him. After reading a bunch of post in the forums, it turned out that it could happen if the boss had a huge hit box. I was supposed to take a couple steps forward, drop the consecrate, and step backward so I don’t get thrown off by the holy nova blast. I guess that must have gimped my tps for a bit. Note to self: watch the combat text a bit more so these kind of things can be detected earlier.

All in all, it went much better than we expected. I don’t know how long these 2 Kara runs are going to work, raiding 4-5 times a week is a bit too much for me. And back-to-back Kara would get boring pretty soon. But what can I say, the badges are just too good to pass up.

Silly really, getting worked up over a piece of gear, that exists only in the game, that nobody else, except you, probably cares that you have it.

But that what happens to me yesterday. I’ve expressed my frustration on not yet having the T4 helmet. What you may not have known is that the entire guild, even the newer fresher 70s, and sometimes people from other guild that run with us occassionally have now possess their own T4 helmet. All, except me.

Yesterday, one of the regular healer’s alt run with us. Guess what drops? Yes, token for Warlock, just what he wants. Can I just say that the loot guardian of WoW hates me? Completely and utterly hates me! How else can I describe my luck with this game?

After long and grueling sessions of PVP and Arena, Val finally picked up Gladiator’s Gavel and Merciless Gladiator’s Shield Wall. They are supposedly replacing the Crystalforged Sword (that Val has had forever) and Sunward Crest (for serious and hard hitting bosses). The problem is, the new gears would make Val crushable…again. I guess Val has to wait until she can pick up new gears, with more defense and avoidance stats, before she can wear her new toys. It’s really sad

On the other hand, E finally took the plunge and got herself Pantaloons of Arcane Annihilation. Yes, I’m playing with haste rating now even if it is not actually recommended at the spell damage level that E has right now. With the off-hand, E has 72 spell haste rating, which translates to 3% casting time reduction according to the tool tip (but MB has 1.44 sec casting - which is actually a 4% reduction, not sure). So far, Dr. Boom’s test seems to favor the new gear, although I can’t tell that my casting is actually faster.

I’ve read the arguments on how with a constantly moving fight, spell haste is worst than pure damage. I’ll be comparing the dps on E’s incoming Kara’s run.

We went to ZA yesterday and we had an awesome druid tank to sub our regular druid tank. We killed 3 bosses: bear, eagle, and lynx. Nalorakk was one shotted within time limit. We could have done the same with Akil’zon except the gauntlet bugged on our first try (got reset-ed when Tempest is only 25%). It took us 3 tries for Halazzi. We got stuck on the gauntlet toward the dragonhawk boss on the 2 fire mage pulls (and we weren’t fast enough to move forward). All in all, it was not a bad run.

The WWS report however reveal that I am always 3-4 on the damage list, and even in the eagle boss encounter, I was lower than the dps and ret pally (although not by much). Ouch! I don’t think I’m at the stage of progression where other dps-ers are supposed to out-dps me, isn’t it? There must be something wrong with what I did.

The regular mistakes:

1. Not enough MB. Thinking of putting 5/5 in MB, but with about 1200 buffed, is that really a good idea?
2. Applying SW:P and VT too soon (losing a tick). How do you check how often you did this through WWS? I know that SW:P applies debuff on the boss. On that fight, there were 4 SW:P debuff on the boss while there were 75 dots reported. If SW:P ticks for 8 times per application, then should be only 32 dots. I must have clipped a lot of times. Then again, I probably messed up in how to calculate this?

Digressing from the topic, I wish there’s a feature in WWS where I can look for another shadow priest, with roughly the same spell damage, on the same boss encounter that I can use as a benchmark.

1. Maiden. The first two times Val went to off tank, all she did were dispelling and off-healing. The last try, Val couldn’t smash the button fast enough and got the aggro stolen from under her nose. The party wiped, and she went back to dispelling duty. Val need another chance to redeem is tanking capability.

2. Nightbane. The only two times Val tanked Nightbane, she went down like a sack of potato. Granted that on the 2nd try, she last probably 10 seconds longer. G said that his tanking gears weren’t so much different than Val when he tanked it the first time. Although she wasn’t crushed or critted, she still get hit 3-4 k each. So maybe more avoidance is needed so that she can parry and dodge more attacks?

3. Prince. Never tried this before, but reading how tankadin can keep the threats without attacking during phase 2, which just sounds so awesome, Val definitely wants to give it a try. So, please?

If you are an avid user to WWS, you probably would have aware of the problem in uploading your reports to the WWS server. It appears as well that there’s no ETA on when this problem would be fixed. While we wait until the developers of WWS are able to address this issue, luckily one kind poster have linked to another parser program called Stasiscl that we can use to generate some static html pages. It requires some manual setting up before you can get the program up and running. But I think that the developers did a good job in providing easy to understand step-by-step directions of how to set it up. And since it generates static pages, you have to host the reports yourself, which I found to be a benefit (but yes, it’s more work on your side).

This program is obviously not as polished as WWS. For example, it doesn’t show, or has a way to show, how many of your hits/spell hits were resisted or missed. It also doesn’t allow you to compare between players of the same class. But it does provide you with a basic information of damage, healing, buffs and debuffs, and the break down of your abilities. And one additional feature that I like from it, is that it shows to which players are the harming abilities are done. For example in Gruul’s fight, it actually tells us who have received the hurtful strikes and who were hurt by “our” shatter.

I compared using an old combat log, the reports from WWS and from Stasiscl. I do find some discrepancy to the numbers of damage/healing and dps/hps. The difference in the reported damage, however, is very rare though, it probably happens to 2 out of the 25 players. And I’m not entirely sure who’s more accurate in this case. For example, WWS didn’t report damage of my shadowfiend on some fight while Stasis does. The dps calculation, however, are completely different, although not by much. This is mainly due to the difference in the reported dps time. Again, it’s hard to decide which one is more accurate. If you don’t really care about these, then Stasiscl is perfect for you.

It’s been more than a week since the last post. I’ve been busy taking care of the migration to the new hosting site. But enough about the move and let’s get started with a more wow-related subject.

New items

The Darkmoon faire finally hits the town. E and Val both got a nice trinket upgrades: Darkmoon Card: Vengeance and Darkmoon Card: Crusade respectively. After playing around with each of the trinket yesterday, I have to say that it’s gold well spent. I absolutely love them. E used to have Bangle of Endless Blessings and I was weary to swap it due to mana issue that E has been having. I had to get some innervates and pop some of mana pots, but I am happy to say that I didn’t miss it in a slightest bit.

Val is finally revered to SSO and KoT factions, and both of the head glyphs are available for her to use. I use the SSO’s Glyph of the Gladiator for her 5-men gear set and KoT’s Glyph of the Defender for pure mitigation set.

The gem vendor over at the Isle of QD also opened up at our server yesterday. After 1.2k g, E is a happy owner of all the epic gems recipes. And even a happier news, this progress caused a drop in the epic gem prices to almost 50%. I love it since now they are more affordable, and I don’t have to spend my precious badges to get them.

E is still drooling over her T4 helm and the hunter/mage/warlock tokens dropped twice in the row. But all is not lost, after so many Kara runs, the Ring of Recurrence finally dropped. This is the 2nd time E ever seen this item drop after her first run to Kara, where she passed it on to a pally healer (I know…stupid) because she had already picked up an item. After that, the item has been eluding her, until now. Ast actually won the roll, but seeing how excited E was, Ast relented her roll. I think E was being selfish, but it’s really hard to pass on an item that you have been waiting forever for it. It turned out that it was E’s lucky day. On a quick run to the bear boss in ZA, Fury of the Ursine dropped. And the generosity of the group was beyond E’s understanding, they actually let E picked it up.

Progression

Last Sunday, we finally got Gruul again after 3 tries. We had a very nice dps going on and the healers were on top of their game. That’s mostly due to the effort of the raid leader to personally talk to the raiders and see how they can maximize the dps. This was the move prompted by the recent awareness of the raid leader of WWS, something that our Kara group has been using but we only shared with the other groups recently. We should have done this a long time ago.

As mentioned earlier, we went to ZA again yesterday. We did much better in the pull. E had much more MC duty but it worked out so well. We had 6 minutes before the pull…but…our off tank suddenly went offline. We had to kiss completing the timed event goodbye. It was a pity too since we one shotted him just a bit over 5 minutes. We had it in our grasp.

More drama

It has been a bit like a roller coaster ride in term of our raiding alliance goes. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where we stand at this moment. Our alliance group was formed from 3 guilds. It’s more obvious now than ever that the three guilds sit in different range of spectrum with respect to the raiding attitude. A member from the other guild has hinted to me a sign of conflict although our GL has been mum about it. This member is expecting the worst is about to happen, although Ast with her calm minds simply said that they are dealing with the difficult issues so that we don’t have to worry about it. I am just not too eager for my “raiding fate” to be determined without me having any say about it.

Also, our raid attendance so far have been organized by the respective guild leaders, still in adherence with the approval of the raid leader. So far, we have a core group that shows up week per week. But now, we are moving to a sign up based attendance due to more members that wish to participate in the raid. I understand where the raid leader is coming from and the headache that he must have faced to satisfy all sides. But on the other hand, I couldn’t help saddened by the fact that good performance and the continuous effort to improve your gears is going to be meaningless. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic. I’m crossing my fingers for the best.