Rogue Tier 8 Set Bonuses

Wow. So I should do an intro, where I talk about how MMO-Champion is now posting the 2- and 4-piece set bonuses for all of the class tier 8 armor sets from Ulduar. Then I might talk about the set bonuses in order or something.

But I can't do that, because I can't think of anything on the subject beyond:

Rogue T8 4P Bonus -- The damage dealt by your Rupture can now be critical strikes.

Um. Even at my current gear level, I often approach 50% crit in raids. Rupture is already our highest damage per energy finisher before the set bonus. It accounts for a large percentage of my damage: around 8%. So unless I'm missing something, this set bonus will increase my Rupture damage by 40-50% in raids.

Compare this to the tier 7 2-piece bonus:

Increases the damage dealt by your Rupture by 10%.

I repeat: Um. There is no way that's going live as-is. If Rupture is 8% of my damage, then this set bonus alone will account for 4% of my overall damage. To put that in perspective: a full tier upgrade to a piece of gear usually only gives a fractions of a percentage point of damage. It's entirely possible that replacing those 4 tier pieces with 4 pieces from the next tier up will actually lower my dps.

Now imagine if I tailor my spec and rotation to favor Rupture: take all of the talents that improve it and modify my cycle to reach 100% uptime on Rupture if I haven't already. A bonus like this has the capacity to completely transform a playstyle. And if it goes live like this, you'll see rogues in tier 9-10 content still wearing 4-piece tier 8.

Whew. Glad that's off my chest.

The other set bonus:

Rogue T8 2P Bonus -- Your Deadly Poison causes you to gain 1 energy each time it deals damage.

I like it. It's interesting because it seeks to influence playstyle in a way most set bonuses don't. There are constantly new strategies being attempted to raise rogue dps, and some of these have not included Deadly Poison. DP is buffed on the PTR, which helps cement its place on pretty much every rogue's offhand, but this set bonus will push that further. Unlike other abilities, in the case of poisons the rogue has to make a mutually exclusive choice for the duration of the fight. If I use Wound/Wound, I can't use Deadly at all. Though other classes have set bonuses that buff particular abilities, those abilities are not so mutually exclusive from other abilities, so the set bonus doesn't have the same effect of influencing playstyle. For instance, if a priest set bonus buffs Flash Heal a bit, that won't make the priest stop casting PoM or Greater Heal or bubble. They might cast Flash Heal a bit more often, but that's it. They can still choose to use other moves throughout the fight. But a strong set bonus to a certain poison says "we expect you to use this poison", meaning that you can't use a different one on that hand without a penalty.

The Rupture set bonus seems to have a similar aim. The designers are trying to push rogues to use Rupture and DP more, as opposed than many recent strategies that go IP/IP or Wound/Wound, or forgo Rupture in favor of more Eviscerates or Envenoms. That type of thing is generally fine with me; the only time I object to this type of push is when it attempts to "force" actions that players aren't sufficiently motivated to do. For instance, these set bonuses are terrible if they warp our play style and gear choices around Rupture (which I fear the 4-piece bonus will) or if they buff a move the player wouldn't use even with the bonus buff (i.e. if DP was still inferior with the 2-piece bonus).

I'm interested to see where this goes.

As for the other classes, their set bonuses are all over the place. You may have noticed, as I did, that the new rogue set bonuses are not of much benefit in PvP. They buff poisons and abilities that are not used as frequently, and also buff the two DoTs available to rogues, rather than their burst damage abilities. My assumption was that this would be a trend across all of the classes. It seems pretty true for hunters, but completely untrue across other classes. Almost all of the dps sets have at least one bonus that increases crit chance on a burst ability. Many, such as mages and priests, get trinket-like bursty bonuses (both mage bonuses seem insanely good for pvp!). Druid set bonuses are the worst offenders, with Balance offering instant Starfires (helloooo mobile burst!) and the completely broken Restoration 4-piece bonus that gives Rejuvenation, their slowest and most efficient HoT, an instant-heal component. As though druids didn't dominate healing enough all ready, now they get Holy Shock essentially for free. For more on this, see Sydera's post at World of Matticus.

Glad this is the PTR, where they are still making changes, and not the live patch notes.

10 Easy Tips for Setting Up Your Own Awesome Naxx 25 PuG: Part 1

Every weekend for the past month, my tight 10-man raiding guild (we literally have 12 members, by choice) has been hosting Naxx 25 pugs on our server on Saturdays and Sundays. We start with whoever we can get from our own guild (usually around 6-8 people), add in some from a friendly 10-man guild that shot off from the same big guild we came from, then pug the rest through friends lists, trade chat, and the LFG system.

We've been wildly successful. On our first night, we cleared 3 wings. On the 2nd and 3rd weeks we cleared the entire instance over 2 nights. On the 4th and 5th week we cleared the entire place in one night, without even wiping on Thaddius. We got Malygos down to about 15% in only 3 tries last week, and we downed him this weekend after 4 more tries (all Wrath bosses cleared!). All with at least half the people starting out as totally blind pugs.

After every pug, we hear on vent, in raid chat, and in whispers that this is the best raiding experience many of the puggers have ever had. At least 3 new people ask me if they can join our guild after every run (we are closed at the moment, but many join our allied guild).

I'm not saying this to brag, but to let you know how well things can go for you if you follow my 10 easy (well some aren't that easy) steps. I ended up with a lot of meat here, so I only managed to get to the first one today. But it's very important:


1. Loot: sadly, this is one of the first items you need to focus on. People care about loot. All of them do. That doesn't make them "loot whores". If you screw loot up, you could end up souring the whole thing. Let me give you a real-life example:

Back in the early weeks of Wrath raiding, when killing Sapph was still exciting and few had been able to down KT 25, my small guild joined a pug Naxx25 run by another, larger guild. They gave out their loot based on a random roll. But once you got an item, you could no longer win anything over someone who hadn't gotten anything yet.

They had the right idea: spread the loot out by giving priority to those who have not yet won. If you don't put in such a restriction, you will lose good players when they see the same person get lucky on rolls and win multiple items in a row over people who haven't gotten anything. But they made one simple, but key, mistake: when a new person was added to the raid (because someone left), that person automatically won an item over the people who had been there the entire run. In my case, I cleared 3 wings, winning boots in one of the early wings. Then we kill 4 horsemen, and a DK that was added just for that fight gets the tier chest token over me (even though I outrolled him) because he hadn't won anything yet. The loot system became a joke. Every time someone left, all of us groaned because we knew our chance at loot was going right out the window. And since this run was largely pugs, we tended to lose a few people every other fight that needed to be replaced with new loot sponges. The fun was sucked right out of the raid because everyone felt like they were getting screwed.

So I'd recommend modifying that system: have new people who join later in the raid roll against those who have won one thing already. That way, if you were there the entire run and didn't get anything, you automatically win even if someone else just joined the raid on this boss. If everyone who has put in the time already got something, then they all get to roll against the new person. So the new person still has a good chance of getting loot, but doesn't automatically win over people who put in the effort to clear previous bosses.

Offspecs: Once all main specs pass on an item, let anyone who couldn't use it for main spec roll on it for offspec. Give it to them for "free": i.e. it doesn't count as one of their epics on the loot list. Don't let anyone abuse this to get main spec upgrades, or you're done. I actually caught a DK doing it this weekend, because there was no competition on the item. So he claimed it was "offspec" and equipped it, then I went "wait...how is a dps neck 'offspec' for a dps DK?" He was replacing a blue. Don't let people in your raid confuse "competition" with "their one mainspec item". Just because you are the only healing paladin and get auto-looted plate spell power gear doesn't mean those pieces don't count toward your "main spec" total!

You can also minimize drama by announcing some things ahead of time:

Armor class priority: cloth gets first dibs on cloth, leather on leather, etc. For instance, Paladins and Shaman can only roll on healing leather after all the druids have passed.

Role priority: dps casters get priority on dps caster gear, tanks on tank gear, etc, based on your announced main spec. DPS gets first dibs on a caster item with +hit on it. Healers get first dibs on KT's healing mace while dps gets first dibs on the dps caster sword off KT. [Don't say this to your puggers this way but: mage/warlock, I don't care if that healer piece is an upgrade for you because you're still wearing a level 72 quest green and this has more spellpower. It's going to a healer.]. Don't go overboard with this, though: no need to categorize every single item. Just know what some of the more contentious items will be, such as KT's weapons. In fact, the only time this decisions is difficult is with weapons and trinkets. So do some research and know which naxx 25 weapons and trinkets are best-in-slot of each class and role. In fact, that would make a good follow-up post for me to do on this blog...

Another mistake I've seen is overdoing it with matching gear to roles. This weekend I brought my alt to a pug where the raid leader insisted that every single cloth piece without hit rating on it was a healer-only piece. Look at the loot list for Naxx 25: almost every caster item has some spirit or mp5 on it. I think there are only 11 possible drops in there total with hit rating on them. So caster dps were only allowed to roll on a tiny fraction of the drops, while great caster dps upgrades that happened to have mp5 on them were given only to healers. This got really egregious when one druid in the raid got 6 items with mp5 (mp5 sucks for resto druids!) while casters who had not won anything were not allowed to roll on these dps upgrades because they happened to have mp5 on them.

Under this rule, generally "main spec" is what role the player is performing in your raid. It's OK to make occasional exceptions for someone who respecced to help you with healing, but wants to roll on dps loot as main spec instead. But if you make it a habit, trust me: it will cause resentment amongst the poeple he/she is rolling against. Make it an exception, not the rule.


Announce loot rules at the beginning of the raid. It's best to set up a few easy macros that announce the entire thing as a raid warning (/rw). Announce in vent that "loot rules are going up". Give people a chance to object before you start, so they don't get saved to a run they don't want to stay on. Here's a sample of our macros:

Macro 1:

/rw Loot Rules: /roll if interested. One MAIN SPEC epic (including set tokens) per person, but you can win more pieces if no one wants it who hasn't won anything yet.

Macro 2:

/rw: Armor class gets priority, ie cloth goes to cloth first, etc. If no one wants for main spec, we'll roll for Off Spec, which does NOT count toward your total.


To simplify things, wait to announce the "new joiners are counted as having already won one thing" rule until you are about to replace someone. Also, we tend to wait to talk about the Maly key until after we kill Sapph. We say "we'd like to give the key to someone in our guild since we organized and led the run. If anybody has any strong objections to that, please say so, because we want to remain as fair as possible." Most people enthusiastically respond that they want us to have it, and think it's fair.


Track all of this in a spreadsheet. I make a simple Excel spreadsheet with 3 columns: character name, item slot, boss it dropped from. For instance, an entry might be: Hatch|belt|anub or Xxsefrothhxx|mace|Sapph. That way I can easily reference and sort it by name to make subsequent loot decisions. Make sure you are diligent and accurate about filling this out. I find it easier to have someone else master loot while I handle just recording it on the spreadsheet and referencing the spreadsheet for loot decisions.

I also find the spreadsheet very helpful for organizing future raids by tracking who we want to invite back and who we *don't*, and why. Trust me, it's well worth the extra work.

Friday Laziness: I shouldn't have eaten all those Thin Mints edition

I'm supposedly a grown-up. But today I ate candy until I felt ill. It was awesome.

Until about 45 mins later when my brain almost completely shut down from the sugar crash.

It really cut into my ability to post.

....zzzzzSNORT what? Oh, hey, fell asleep there for a moment.

Anyway, here's a link to the best new website I've found since failblog:

http://fmylife.com

Trust me you'll enjoy your weekend much more if you click that link.

Happy Lazy Friday!

Legendaries: 10-manz can haz dem?

The lolcats have spoken, and they demand Legendaries for 10-man raids!

If you don't find kittens sufficiently authoritative (you fascist!), then you're just going to have to settle for me.

I love it when healers are rewarded. I think they should get first dibs on all the gear they want, free enchants, gems and consumables, free repair bills, and sexual favors from the guild leader on a regular basis. So imagine my joy when I found out that healers would finally be getting their very own Legendary (the word must be capitalized!) mace (sorry rogues, we had our day with the Warglaives): Val'anyr, the Gavel of Ancient Kings. Much like Medivh's staff Atiesh, raiders need to gather fragments of the Legendary titan weapon from raid bosses. Once they have enough pieces, they must literally hurl them into the brain of a god, then kill that god. I don't see how hurling fragments into a god's brain would result in them being reassembled into a working weapon, but whatever. Stranger things have happened in this game. I mean, I've seen a post 3.0 ret paladin lose a one-on-one pvp fight. Just kidding! That is way too crazy to consider.

My first reaction was: "Cool! A fun questline full of lore that leads to healers getting a best-in-slot item for this tier after a lot of hard work and successful kills of the bosses."

Then my second reaction was "Crap. My guild's healers will never get to experience it."

The cynical side of me assumes that the questline and the reward will be reserved only for 25 man raids.

Now don't get me wrong: unlike with Naxx, I think that Ulduar 25 guilds should get better rewards than Ulduar 10 guilds (totally separate progression tracks, Ulduar 25 assumes better gear, etc). I'm saying that if the devs view 10-man raiding as a viable alternative path, and not some ghetto reserved for "scrub casuals", then it would be smarter for them to include some version of the Val'anyr questline. The questline is just too cool, and the idea of offering an alternative path to a nice weapon via a long questline is also very cool. Plus it's great for morale and keeping people subscribing to your game. If a ten-man raider thinks he can get some version of Val'anyr, he/she will keep playing and thus paying Blizzard money longer than they would otherwise.

No, they don't need it. But 25-man raiders don't deserve or need it any more than 10-man raiders. Sorry. [note: actually I'm not]. Frankly, getting gear that is higher tier and prettier is enough extra reward for 25-man raiding over 10-man raiding, in my opinion. Should they also get other perks piled on? That's a matter of opinion, and in my opinion it's not necessary. Also, keep in mind that though this Legendary will be best-in-slot now, it's going to become obsolete as soon as the next tier of raiding is unleashed. So if you "let" a 10-man raider have the weapon, it's not like it's permanent.

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


So here are a few ways of implementing the Val'anyr questline for 10-mans. The drop rate of the shards is not yet known, but let's assume for the sake of simplicity that every 25-man boss has a 50% chance to drop one shard of Val'anyr on regular mode, and is guaranteed to drop a shard on the hardest mode for that boss. I don't think my arguments change materially if this turns out to not be the case, it just gives us a relative framework to look at other numbers.

1. Simplest solution: allow 10-man raiders to complete the same quest for the exact same item, it just takes them a lot longer (I'm talking months) to get it done. In 10-man, have the shards drop only from hard-mode bosses, and even then at a 50% drop rate. The idea is that a 25-man guild will have 2-3 members with Val'anyr before the first 10-man Val'anyr wielder appears on the server, and only the best 10-man guilds have even one. This also gives an incentive for 25-man guilds to run 10-man Ulduar hard modes on off-nights. Meanwhile, a super-casual scrub 10-man guild that can only clear Ulduar on regular never sees a single shard.
2. If you really can't stomach 10-man raiders having even a single item that's equal to 25-man raiders, then simply give the 10-man raiders a separate quest and drop the stats on that version of the weapon a tier. You can either keep the item Legendary, or call it "the imperfect Gavel of Ancient Kings" or whatever and make it simply epic. Pretend Yogg-Saron's brain screwed up a little when putting the thing back together for you. This way you retain the fun and lore of the questline. The 10-man version of the mace wouldn't have the cool effects of the 25-man version.
3. Mix-and-match the two. Have a separate 10-man version, and only have the shards drop in 10-man hard modes, or any other permutation of the above.

In the end, it's all a matter of degree. You can land anywhere between denying 10-man raiders this questline completely, all the way to giving them the same item at a slightly lower droprate.

I think the BEST solution is to give 10-man raiders a separate but similar questline for the lore, and give them a Legendary item at the end. Lower the stats a tier from the 25-man version, and only allow the pieces to be gathered from 10-man hard-mode bosses. At the same time, allow the 25-man pieces a chance to drop from normal-mode 25-man bosses. This way, a decent 25-man guild can get a few of these Legendaries in a reasonable amount of time, while it takes a 10-man group much longer to earn a Legendary (a statistically and visually inferior one), and they can only do it if they are 1337 enough to clear a lot of hard-modes.

I'm not gonna make a big deal and QQ and throw a fit if 10-man raiders don't get a shot at this. But I do think it's smarter and more fair to do it this way, so why pass up the chance, Blizz?

A HAT for a day: Honor Among Thieves

I wasted a good ten minutes trying to come up with a good "hat" pun. No dice.

I normally raid as Combat on my rogue, but this weekend I spent an evening trying out a "HAT" build: a Subtlety raiding build centered around spamming Eviscerate with the combo points generated by the talent Honor Among Thieves.

Having run out of 10-man content to fill even a 3-day raid week (1 night in Naxx, 1 night of dragons), my 12-person guild started hosting our own pug Naxx 25 runs. Despite some sputters starting up, they've been shockingly successful. In fact, maybe I'll write a guide about how to run a successful Naxx 25 pug. The first week we cleared 3 wings in one night. The second, cleared all of Naxx in 2 nights with nary a wipe. We just completed week 4, where we one-shotted Thaddius and cleared all but KT in one night. So yesterday we came back, killed KT, and went on to learn Malygos (first time for most puggers) and got him down to 15% on our third attempt before calling it.

Since a HAT build is so dependent on group makeup - notice that the combo points are generated by crits by *party* members, not *raid* members - I never seriously considered using it in my 10-man runs. A big 25-man seemed like the perfect time to take it out for a spin. Word on the street is that rogue damage is a little low, with Combat being the weakest, but supposedly HAT builds do enough damage to actually compete with other dpsers in the right group. I also just so happened to have the right weapons for it. So I thought I'd check it out, see if I could raise my dps.


Group Makeup: the key to HAT

I had to tailor my group carefully, which is quite easy to do when you are the one forming the raid and arranging the groups. The real trick is that you get combo points from pets separately from their masters: i.e. though the tooltip says "this effect cannot occur more than once every second", you could get 2 separate combo points from a pet ability crit and a hunter ability crit. If you were in a group with 4 hunters, it's entirely possible to get 8 combo points in 1 second! (though obviously at least 3 of those would go to waste)

So clearly hunters are the best choice because they and their pets both crit often. Unholy Death Knights are the next best choice, because they have a ghoul pet permanently up who just spams one attack that can crit. After that, enhancement shaman and other DKs. Warlocks and feral druids depend a bit too much on dots to be top-tier, though felguard warlocks are pretty good choices. Fire mages and other rogues are OK, but really you should be able to fill your group with hunters, DKs, and perhaps an enhancement shaman. It also helps greatly if you have a feral druid or fury warrior in the raid for the 5% melee crit buff. I ended up with 2 hunters and 2 DKs (one unholy, one frost). Not ideal, but the best I could do with what we had.

The spec:

I did a lot of research, primarily relying on the Elitist Jerks HAT thread, among other sources. Here's what I settled on:

8/20/43


This is not the only way to set up a HAT spec. There is a debate over the effectiveness of Rupture for this spec, as well as a disagreement over whether the optimal main hand weapon is Webbed Death or Calamity's Grasp. Since I have one of each, (both enchanted with berserking) and no second WD for the mainhand, I went with a CG mainhand WD offhand setup. I lose a bit of potential poison damage, but gain some white dps and stronger Hemos when I need one. Note: this will change when 3.1 hits, as poisons will go to a PPM model and a slow mainhand will be clearly more favorable.

There are a few viable variations on the HAT build, but I went with the one that focused every point on buffing Eviscerate and your ability to generate more combo points for more Eviscerates. Other builds could pick up blood spatter to add Rupture to the rotation, or shift some points to pick up Blade Flurry in combat or Shadowstep in Subtlety. Since I was so focused on Evis, I elected against the pure white damage boost of BF, and though I love having Shadowstep, it isn't as much of a dps increase as other places I could put my points, so I went without it.

Setup:

All HAT builds should:

-Use Wound Poison on both weapons
-Max out Expertise to 6.5% (even one dodged Evis can be devastating)
-Otherwise, gem for Agility

Glyphs:

Glyph of Eviscerate
Glyph of Slice and Dice

Third glyph isn't that important. I went with Garrote, but Hemo is an OK choice too.

I chose to go with the Evis-heavy variation. Builds with Rupture boosts or Blade Flurry will glyph differently, but all builds should take the Glyph of Eviscerate. I like the SnD Glyph and talent because the less often you have to refresh it, the more often you can use those combo points on an Evis.

Playstyle:

As I opted to focus on Eviscerate and neglect Rupture, my build quite literally just spams Eviscerate every time I have 3 or more combo points, refreshing SnD with 5 CPs whenever it is about to expire. Seriously, that's it. Enjoy hitting that button. If you built your group right, and everyone is alive and decently geared, you should be able to hit Evis almost every global cooldown.

If a global goes by and you only have 1 combo point and high energy, use a Hemo to get a few points, then Evis. Keep in mind that you gain combo points through HAT from your own crits, not just those of your group-mates. This includes Eviscerate crits. That's right, it's possible for your own Evis, if it crits, to give you back up to 2 combo points immediately (1 for the crit, and 1 for Ruthlessness). Hemo also has the potential to give you two. This is why gemming for agility is best for this spec (you end up getting more value from agility than crit rating, trust me).

Don't overuse Hemo. Believe it or not: a 2 point Eviscerate does more damage than a Hemo! You should ONLY be using Hemo if a global goes by with only 1 combo point! If that third point doesn't seem to be coming, just pop a 2-point Evis.

One cool thing about this spec is that you should never run out of energy. Thanks to Relentless Strikes, Slice and Dice is *free* and each 5-point Evis only costs 10 energy. You regen 15 every global cooldown, leaving you room to Evis at fewer combo points, or even throw a Hemo (rarely!) without running dry. Remember, running out of energy means you will be letting combo points go to waste!

That's also why you Evis at 3 or more combo points (or 2 if you hit an RNG drought): if you wait until 5, there is potential that more points will go to waste. If you have 3, it's entirely possible for 3 or more combo points to be generated by your party in the next second, so Evis before that happens! You want to avoid letting any of them going to waste.


Opener: Open each fight from stealth. Cast Tricks of the Trade on your tank before the fight starts (so you can regen the 15 energy out of combat), then open with Premed (2 combo points) and Garrote (1 or 2 combo points). The reason I went with Garrote instead of Ambush is that I was committed to using a fist mainhand. Garrote also has the advantage of costing less energy. If you have a dagger mainhand, feel free to substitute Ambush for a chance at a 4th or 5th combo point, but keep in mind that point may go to waste depending on how fast your group is to start critting. Immediately Evis and then Evis again as soon as you get 3 more combo points (Hemo if this takes more than a second). Once you garrote, you have a 6 second window where your damage is boosted by Master of Subtlety. You want to get off as many Eviscerates as you can during that window. As soon as it wears off, use SnD then continue as normal.

If you want to get fancy, you can use Vanish during the fight to take advantage of the 6-second boost again. This is another area where HAT users disagree. Some think it is not worth the loss of a few swings of white damage as you vanish, some think good use of this move is what separates good HAT players from great ones. I heard from a few sources that Vanish does not reset your swing timer, meaning if you use a macro to immediately cancel it, you don't lose any white swings. I chose to try it out.

Here's the macro:

#showtooltip Vanish
/cast Vanish
/startattack

Just jam that macro a few times to make sure it takes.

If you use it, you have to do it right. Make sure you have enough energy to get an Evis off immediately, and that you already have a few combo points but not 5, as you don't want any to go to waste during the second between when you vanish and when you Evis. And try to time it in tandem with your trinket/enchant procs and short-term raid dps buffs (like Bloodlust) for maximum effect.


Results:

Well, I came, I spammed Eviscerate, I said "meh". My dps was roughly the same as it had been as Combat, maybe a little bit higher on bosses when I got things right.

Keep in mind that I usually play Combat nearly-flawlessly (years of practice) while I screwed up my HAT rotation a lot due to inexperience. I also didn't have the optimal group. In the end, I found HAT fun to play and effective. If raiding as deep subtlety gets you excited, then by all means go for it. I've already switched back to combat. Though practice would likely net me more dps in 25-mans as HAT, overall I think Combat is a better choice, especially given the heavy buff it has incoming in 3.1. Here's why:

HAT Cons:
-I lost the raid-wide physical damage buff Combat gives. Mut builds also give a raid-wide buff, but HAT does not
-HAT causes headaches with group makeup that combat does not
- The spec sucks if your group members die. This makes it a raid farming spec not suitable for learning content, in my opinion.
-No cooldowns for on-demand burst: when I've got a double-spark on Maly or KT just summoned adds, I want to be able to push my dps up a notch. Combat has lots of cooldowns to do just that, while HAT has pretty much nothing.

HAT Pros:
-Easy rotation, and little need to watch cooldown timers compared to other specs
-High damage potential with RNG luck
-Many Subtlety talents for more survivability and some PvP toys
-A bit less dependent on your weapons than other specs

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I'm very happy that all 3 trees have fully viable raid dps specs. It sucks that HAT gives up pretty much all of the fun parts of the Subtlety tree for sustained dps, but at least the option is there. A good spec for a raid leader, as you can set up groups to your liking and make sure they don't get split up (like on Thaddius or Gothik) and the cycle is so simple that you can concentrate a bit more on raid leading. I wouldn't recommend it until you and your raid are quite well geared, though, and I definitely wouldn't bother in a 10-man. The spec *requires* full raid buffs and a large pool of raid members to draw from to be effective.


ULTRA HYPER BONUS!!
A super-neat macro I found while researching this post, courtesty of Erishkagal of the Hydraxis server:

left click button to apply poision to main hand, right click for offhand hold down shift for wound poison ctrl for deadly alt for crip and nothing for instant
#showtooltip
/use [mod:shift] Wound Poison V; [mod:ctrl] Deadly Poison VI; [mod:alt] Crippling Poison II; Instant Poison VII
/use [btn:2] 17; 16

Sixth Screenshot

I've been tagged by Ixo to go into my WoW screenshot folder and post the 6th screenshot in there. A few weeks ago I cleared up some hard drive space by moving my old screenshots to my external drive, so there wasn't much in there. Here's #6 (names edited out to protect the innocent):



That's my female Tauren DK with hunter, mage and warlock guildies downing good 'ole Attunmen in Karazhan for a shot at the mount. We did it with 4 people and no healer. I guess we looked like level skull to him.

That evening was a blast, just messing around and tearing through the old content. We added a druid healer and went and killed Nightbane to clear out someone's quest log. In order to get up there, we had to aoe down Moroes (lol!), who started out as such a cockblock back in the day in our level 70 greens/blues.

Ixo's post on memories from screenshots prompted me to post a few more of my own favorite shots.

In direct response to Ixo's 100 roll on DST:



I swear to god I made those edits in red text back when I first got the screenshot, before I saw Ixo's screenie. This is a shot of the one single Amani War Bear mount my guild earned for completing the ZA timed run. After weeks of practice, we did it at the last possible second: right before patch 3.0 hit and removed the mount reward. This is my proudest moment in TBC because we did it without anyone in the raid wearing a single piece of tier 6 gear that drops from BT or Hyjal. At this point, the only tier 6 our guild had done was 1 kill of the first boss in MH. We barely even had tier 5 gear. Basically just Kara, ZA, and badge gear, and we actually completed the timed run, a feat normally reserved for guilds in full tier 6. It was a great moment for us, made better by "R", our main healer, winning the roll with a 100. Also note: someone else rolled a 99. Ouch.



And this final picture is a more recent memory of the most hilarious achievement I've ever achieved. As you can see below, we downed KT and go the achievement Just Can't Get Enough (kil 18 Aboms during KT fight) with only 3 people (all DPS, btw) left alive at the end of the fight. We could not stop laughing in vent for a good 10 minutes.


We had the worst possible luck with ice blocks. I had brought in my DK alt to tank because our MT kept disconnecting. Just after I picked up the adds, I was ice blocked. Being undergeared and under heavy attack, I died in the ice block. The adds destroyed 2 healers and a dps before they were taunted off by the main tank, who was now tanking all 3 mobs with only one healer remaining. The healer was so taxed that we lost another dps to aoe. Then, the one remaining person in the raid with healing spells got ice blocked and died. The tank held on a few more seconds, buying the remaining 3 dps enough time to finish him off.



So yeah, for me, screenshots from WoW can be just as full of real memories of times with real people as any photograph.

Also, though I assume you don't read my blog (I'll leave a message in your comments), I tag Coriel of Blessing of Kings for being one of my favorite WoW blogs, and for coming from my old server, Skylawl.

Battlestar Galactica's Ending: Get Ready to Be "Soprano'd"

SPOILER ALERT: I'll be discussing herein the finale of the Sopranos (aired 2 years ago) as well as all aired episodes of Battlestar Galactica. However, I have no knowledge of future episodes, so there are no real "spoilers" here if you up-to-date on BSG.

Is it a coincidence that Battlestar Creator Ron Moore's final SciFi Channel blog post praises the (in)famously ambiguous ending of The Sopranos? You know, the one where the screen faded to white just before the climactic moment?

Is it a coincidence that it was posted almost 2 years ago, around the time that the BSG writing staff were likely breaking what would become the final season of the show?

I'm afraid it might not be a coincidence.

But much like recent BSG episodes: before I explain anything, I have to get you up-to-speed.

As of the airing of Friday's episode "Someone to Watch Over Me", there are only 3 episodes (a total of 4 hours of TV with the 2-hour finale) left. And ever since the end of the mutiny and the infodump of Final Five backstory, almost nothing has happened to get us any closer to a discernible resolution of the story. Don't get me wrong, events have occurred. It's just that, rather than approaching some type of stable state that gives closure to the story, we are running out of story time without getting any closer to finding a new home planet or setting up any permanent arrangement for the remaining humans/cylons. The Galactica, one of Bill Adama's two ailing Old Girls, is on the brink of collapse, while his other Old Girl, Rosslyn, has literally collapsed (via Deus Ex Angina). Pretty soon they are going to run out of ships to put the people on, and supplies to feed them with, and there don't seem to be any habitable planets in sight. And we can all agree it would come off as pretty contrived (and a disservice to the previous accomplishments of the show) if Galactica's last desperate jump just so happens to land them in orbit around a pretty green and blue sphere embraced by an oxygen-rich aura.

That's why these last two episodes since the backstory infodump have been so frustrating. They don't seem to be bringing us any closer to the end. This show has earned enough faith from me that I can tolerate having the carrot of the mythology withheld. I believe the writers when they say that these two episodes are basically key set-ups to give emotional resonance to the upcoming action and big reveals. I'm just holding my breath to see the ending, so I can view this season and the show as a whole, and go back and actually try to appreciate them for the character-focused, emotionally-driven pieces of drama that they are clearly meant to be. Right now I can't evaluate them fairly, because I want them all to seem a little more . . . climactic. I mean, we have someone on the ship (Ellen) who knows a lot of stuff that I as a viewer would desperately like to know, and I'd imagine everyone in the fleet would be dying to know. And yet she hasn't explained a thing beyond what was revealed a few episodes back. Her mumness seems contrived, as though it's a failure on the part of the writers to construct the story in such a way that she doesn't need to keep secrets.

But the reason I'm geniunely concerned about the slow pace of recent episodes, and the lack of any new "real answers", is that I'm starting to get the feeling that we aren't going to really get the answers.

As I've said in the past, I suspect that Daniel, the "missing" Cylon model, has been pulling the strings behind the scenes, even beyond Caville's level, from the Final Five's ship The Colony. He's been creating seemingly coincidental and miraculous events and manipulating people via the "Head Chip Angels" (such as the Six Baltar has been hallucinating since the beginning).

But putting together the lack of reveals in recent episodes along with Moore's love of ambiguity and shades of grey (which has served this show well in the past), I start to think that we aren't going to find out for sure if Daniel was pulling the strings. I think we'll find out what strings were pulled and when, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Moore is going to want to leave it up to us to decide who we think was pulling them. Was it some neatly explanable physical entity? Or was it some omnipotent One True God. I don't think he's going to tell us the answer.

I see further support in the seemingly ham-fisted way that the "reveal" at the end of the most recent episode was handled, when Starbuck realizes that the man she is playing the piano with is nothing but her own imagined/projected representation of her father. Ever since Daniel's existence was revealed in "No Exit" everyone's suspected that he's Starbuck's father. We really didn't need more clues, like that her father's name starts with D or that he apparently wrote (or at least taught her) "All Along the Watchtower", the song that re-awakened the Final Four at the end of last season. It makes me think that such a big deal was made out of these clues because they are the only clues we are ever going to get. Moore and Co. are going to leave us with enough clues to form our own answers, or, if we prefer, we can choose to think that it was all "gods doing" or whatever. We are never going to formally meet Daniel, and never have anyone sit down like they did in "No Exit" and just explain to us what the frak is going on. We'll be expected to infer from this past episode that Daniel is her father (or not) without ever being explicitly told by the show.

That doesn't mean I think we'll be left fully in limbo, or even without a satisfying resolution and completion to the series. I'm 100% positive every character will be given a weighty emotional conclusion to this part of their stories (though the survivors will be left to continue the rest of the story of their lives, this chapter of their lives will at least be wrapped up in an emotionally satisfying way). I think we'll get a good idea of what their futures will look like, whether they be on a new planet, on an integrated Basestar, or with the final destruction of the human race (only living on in the Hera line of hybrids). And we'll get a resolution to the core conflicts of the show, with some sort of decisive confrontation with Caville and his faction of remaining Cylons and some sort of explanation of the unexplained loose ends, such as where the Head Chip Angels come from, etc. But we might not get the full reveal we are looking for, because the writers want to leave the themes open to interpretation by the viewer.

I sincerely hope this is not the case because I'm so eager to get fully fleshed-out explanations of the "lore". But at the same time, maybe I'm the one who's wrong . . . so far the embrace of ambiguity has been key to elevating this show above the Stargates and Treks of the world.

We'll know in just 3 weeks.