I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been leading a raid on Karazhan called Time Travelers. We’ve been raiding together for a few months now and have started to progress past Kara. We’ve downed every boss in the instance with the exception of Nightbane, and there’s not too much interest in working to down him. We’re currently taking a break from raiding for the holidays but when we return, we’re looking to move on to greener pastures. We’ve got several ideas on the table, all of them include starting up a 25-man raid.

Idea #1
We raid as much of Kara as possible on Sunday night, most likely get up through Prince and down either Netherspite or Illhoof. Monday night, we would add 15 members to our drunken stupor and head into Gruul’s lair with the ultimate goal being downing Gruul, moving on to Magtheridon and cleaning up our Kara run afterward.

Idea #2
We drop Kara altogether and swap it for Zul’Aman. ZA gets raided on Sunday night and Monday is Gruul/Mag looking forward to Void Reaver.

Ideas #3+
Any combination of ideas #1 and #2.

Now, since these ideas all include some sort of 25-man raiding, I’ve got a bit of work to do. I’ve never lead a raid bigger than a 10-man (including pre-tbc) but I have been through Gruul and Mag and set foot into TK (VR and Solarian) and SSC (Hydross, Lurker, Morogrim) so I’ve experienced TBC 25-mans and have a little bit of an idea what to expect.

I’ve been thinking about class makeup the last couple of days and here’s what I’d like to bring:

Tanks
2 Feral Druids — Furikuri + 1
2 Warriors (Prot and either Arms or Fury) — Arar + 1

Melee DPS
3 Rogues

Ranged DPS
2 Hunters — Beermonster, Cemex
3 Mages — Amaging + 2
2 Warlocks — Geblah + 1
1 Druid (Balance) — Rootette
2 Priests (Shadow)

Healers
2 Druids (Resto) — Maral + 2
2 Paladins (Holy) — Arf + 1
2 Priests (Holy) — Rhynoe + 1
1 Shaman (Resto)

The list includes the current Time Travelers and where they should fit into the new runs. The only change might be that Arf would be a Ret Pally instead of a Holy Pally, but that’s something that will need to be worked out.

I don’t need anything from Mulgar, Gruul or Magtheridon, but I’m happy to lead a raid into the dungeons to help get some people geared up. Would I want to also lead SSC/TK raids? I don’t know. It depends on how Time Traveler’s first foray into 25-man raiding works out.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Post again soon.

So I haven’t written in a long time, and I intend to start writing more now that work has slowed down considerably.

When I started this log, I wanted it to be a place to chronicle my experiences in Azeroth, but after I started it, I ran out of time to write. Now that things in my life have calmed down considerably, I will be able to write again.

Let me give you a quick update on what’s been happening in my azerothian life:

• I have hit 70 on Rootette, Rootusair is sitting happily at 67, Shermn is chillin’ at 50
• I am now a Bartender (officer) in <Disciples of Divx>
• I’ve raided SSC, TK, Kara, ZA, Gruul and Mag and currently lead the Time Travelers Kara run
• I’ve specced everywhere from full resto, to full balance, to dreamstate, to my current balance/feral

That’s about it for a synopsis. I’ll be updating the look of this site as well as the information on the other pages soon.

-root

This video is awesome. Put together by someone in the <Disciples of Divx> named Giuseppi. He just joined us again this week after transferring away for a few months.

Druids are definitely the kings (or queens) of dancing.

Note to Blizzard — Don’t nerf Druid dances. kthxbai

Well, the inevitable has become reality. Blizzard recently posted Public Test Realm Patch 2.0.10 notes and, as with each patch, there were some nerfs, some buffs, so fixes, etc. As you can imagine, the nerfs and buffs cause the biggest stir in the community.

Classes feeling the nerf bat are Warlocks, Feral Druids and Shadow Priests. The Warlock nerf is minor, so I won’t talk about it. The Shadow Priest nerf is pretty major, but I don’t play a priest, so I won’t try to talk about it. I will, however, talk about Druids.

Classes welcoming buffs are — Warriors and Balance Druids. The Warrior buff is quite substantial whereas the Balance Druid buff is quite minor.

We’ll start with Druids.

Here are the notes:
Druids
* When the duration of “Cyclone” ends, area buffs such as “Leader of the Pack”, “Tree of Life”, and “Moonkin” will now be correctly resumed.
* “Bear Form” now grants 25% increased stamina instead of 25% increased health.
* “Dire Bear Form” now grants 25% increased stamina instead of 25% increased health. In addition, the armor bonus has been reduced from 450% to 400%.
* The multiplier on base weapon damage for “Mangle (Bear)” ability has been changed from 130% to 100%. In addition, the bonus damage has been reduced by the same ratio.
* “Savage Fury” no longer affects “Mangle (Bear)”.
* “Savage Fury” no longer applies to “Maul” or “Swipe”.
* The critical damage bonus on “Predatory Instincts” reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10%.
* “Improved Leader of the Pack” can no longer get critical heals.
* The armor bonus from “Moonkin Form” has been increased from 360% to 400% (to match Dire Bear Form).
* The rage normalization equation has been adjusted to grant more rage.

Instead of summarizing what is in the notes, I’m going to discuss some “big picture” implications of the notes. For example, the viability of Bear tanks. With the nerfs to bear form, bear tanks are less viable in instances. Granted, they can still off-tank pretty well, but the main tank role is shifting back to the warrior. As for PvP, this is a bigger nerf. Damage mitigation for bears and the DPS they could put out were so high that they were virtually impossible to kill.

As for the minor buff to balance, a moonkin (or boomkin as some have been calling them) is now able to mitigate more damage in return for not being able to crowd control multiple targets (i.e. Frost Nova, Polymorph, Fear, etc.).

Overall, Druids are reverting back to the “Jack of all trades, master of none” role from the “master of all trades” role that they currently fill.

On to Warriors.

Again, with the notes:
Warrior
* The rage normalization equation has been adjusted to grant more rage. The typical warrior should see an increase of 15% to 20% in their rage generation.
* All warriors had their critical strike chance adjusted upward slightly (about 1%).
* “Thunder Clap” is now useable in Defensive Stance. In addition, the tooltip has been adjusted to indicate it causes additional threat.
* The cooldown on “Victory Rush” has been removed, and it can now be used up to 20 seconds after killing an enemy.
* “Unbridled Wrath” has been modified so that rather than a fixed chance to grant rage, it has an increased chance when using slower weapons.
* Increased the health bonus from “Commanding Shout” by 50%.
* “Improved Battle Shout” talent renamed to “Commanding Presence” and now increases the health bonus from “Commanding Shout” in addition to increasing the melee attack power from “Battle Shout”.

The one point that makes me happiest as a Warrior is the third one. Being able to Thunder Clap in Defensive stance is HUGE. Extra damage mitigation as well as AoE threat is great for a tank. Other valuable points are the increased rage generation, increased critical strike chance, removed cooldown for victory rush buff warriors across the board. There are also some fury buffs in there that will help in moving DPS Warriors back to the Platerogue status they once held.

Overall, I think the changes being made will help balance the game in both PvP and PvE (although some might disagree). As with all game changes, there will be a lot of QQing, but I say “Less QQ, more pew pew.” Warriors received a much needed buff while Feral Druids received an inevitable nerf. With these buffs, it appears that the perceived “emergence of hybrid classes in BC” is reverting back to a traditional model of Warriors tanking, Holy Priests healing, Rogue/Warlock/Mage DPSing and Paladin/Druid/Shaman supporting.

Who knows, maybe I’ll start playing Rootusair again as my main (but that won’t be until I get Rootette to 70 :)).

root

So in TBC, I’ve decided to keep Rootusair and Rootette at approximately the same level. That way I can offer a tank or a healer/face-melter to groups in need. I started playing Rootusair seriously again a couple nights ago and boy did I get frustrated.

The first night, I chalked my bad experience up to getting ganked by some jerk horde on a flying mount as well as not really remembering that I can’t massively heal myself in mid-battle. That and I didn’t have any food and the only bandages I had were just Runecloth bandages.

Last night, I was running Hellfire Ramparts with a couple different groups. The first was made up of me, a level 61 warlock, a level 64 paladin, a level 62 moonkin druid and a hunter. The paladin was our main healer and I was tanking. This group starts in on Ramparts and the warlock and I die on the first pull — ok, learning how to balance ourselves as a group, etc. (and at this point I haven’t tanked since my AQ20 days when people knew how to manage aggro). We keep moving, doing pretty well until our hunter decides to multi-shot a group of four casters with a two dog/one warrior pat nearby… Well, the group whipes again. Now, normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, I would have Challenging Shouted and pulled all the mobs to me, dropped a couple other shouts (Piercing Howl, Demoralizing Shout), some Cleaves and a Whirlwind or two to gain aggro on the whole group pretty quickly, but no, I had to blow my Challenging Shout earlier because our hunter and our warlock apparently don’t know how to play their classes (damn you eBay). Needless to say, we didn’t make it to the first boss because I was so frustrated that I left the group and repaired myself for a mere 15 gold…

Second group, best one of the night and my first time grouping with shamen since TBC came out. Me tanking, level 61 paladin healing, two level 60 shamen and a level 60 hunter. This group was able to do some amazing things and I was almost able to hold aggro off the shamen. We were pretty successful throughout the instance. I was the first one to die all the time (a sign that the tank is doing his job well), we never over-pulled, etc. On the hardest pull in the instance (up the ramp after the first boss) we almost wiped. We downed one of the mobs, I had the other three on me and died. One of the shamen took up the “tanking” and another mob fell (by this time the hunter had died) and the shaman tank died almost immediately afterward. Two mobs left and I’m thinking “this is a wipe,” but I was wrong. The paladin and shaman (both nearly out of mana) were able to down another mob pretty quickly and while at less than 100 mana each and about 700 health, they were able to pass aggro back and forth (because of divine shield, or whatever the paladin bubble is called) and keep each other alive while picking the mob to death. they both ended the encounter with absolutely no mana and less than 50 health each. It was amazing. We continued on through the instance without much trouble until the demon boss. We wiped three times on this guy before finally downing him.

Throughout the night, it was extremely difficult for me to hold aggro off people. I was doing my usual tanking thing — pull, sunder, sunder, revenge, sunder, taunt, sunder, sunder, sunder, sunder, taunt, sunder, sunder, revenge, sunder, taunt, revenge, sunder, revenge, taunt, etc. — but I wasn’t able to hold aggro worth a shit.

Why?

I chalk it up to the Blizzard of warrior nerfing that has happened since I stopped playing Rootusair regularly. Pre-Before the Storm, I was able to hold aggro as a fury warrior pretty well, but post-Before the Storm… that’s a different story. I never noticed it until now because all I did after 2.0 on Rootusair was PvP Battlegrounds. I never had to function as a tank, until now.

Before I actually played my warrior, I would tell other warriors, “Stop QQ’ing and lrn2play. The nerfs aren’t that bad. They don’t have too much of an impact on the class,” but now I’m having second thoughts. I loathe tanking with my druid (hence the balance/resto spec), but at this point, I’d rather do that than tank with my warrior.

Maybe it’s something to do with the spec, maybe it’s something to do with the groups I was in… Only time will tell, but for now, I’m joining the QQ’ing warriors in their crusade against Blizzard…

Who knows, maybe some day warriors will be brought back to their glory days…

…then again, probably not…

root

My name is Discrete, and I stab people for money.

ogues are a lightly armored melee class capable of dealing massive damage to their enemies in a flurry of attacks. They are masters of stealth and assassination, passing by enemies unseen and striking from the shadows, then escaping from combat in the blink of an eye. Rogues can also craft poisons that damage or cripple their enemies, reducing their effectiveness in battle. Groups will find rogues valuable, for not only do they deal massive damage, but they can open locked doors or chests, and disarm hidden traps as well.

There’s no right or wrong way to play my class. As with any MMO your choices in talents and play style are yours alone. However, the limitations of the class speak louder in some players more than others. I’ve always thought of a rogue as a sort of “martial arts” type class. With abilities like gouge, kick, eviscerate, vanish, and kidney shot, the rogues spell book looks more like a ninja hand-book. How to be invisible. How to strike another player without warning. Using the environment to your advantage. And of course, everyone’s favorite, “Stealth and sit down in the middle of the road while you make a sandwich and get another beer.”

I’ve leveled and played a couple different ways with Disc. I think I’ve given most builds a chance, usually trying to play off of the gear I have available. I’ve been a member of Disciples of Divx since February of 2006, and during that time, I’ve witnessed much. I’ve seen people over the top addicted to Warcraft, and people who put little to no value into the game itself. I’ve seen players struggle with their class and build, gripe about their gear, and pick meaningless fights over both of those things. Friendships made and lost. Guild members come and go. Gear obtained, and epic, previously insurmountable goals accomplished with ease and grace.

Around the middle of the summer, I was promoted to the officer position of Bartender, and I’ve upheld the responsibilities associated with it enthusiastically, though the game itself can become a burden. While I was at work, I would browse websites like ShadowPanther.net, Thottbot.com, Allakhazam.com, CTProfiles.net as well as a number of UI community sites, most of which are listed in the side bar. I would modify my profile, adding and subtracting gear available in whatever instance DoD was planning on running in the near future. Should I roll on this particular item, or pass it off to one of my rogue partners, or even off to our Hunter and Warrior brothers and sisters. This provided me with a lot of entertainment during long and otherwise uneventful work shifts, and allowed me to survey the builds of other players, weighing the costs and benefits of each talent speciality.

In my future posts, I’ll expound upon these talent builds and what they mean to you, the target.

Well, the long awaited and much anticipated expansion pack to World of Warcraft arrived on my doorstep last evening delivered with little ceremony by the local UPS man. As soon as I sat down with the box, I whipped out my knife and opened the package o’ fun up. After nearly an hour of installing and patching, I was ready to play on my laptop. It took about 45 minutes more to patch and be ready to play on my desktop machine.

My first impression — well, not much. I was only able to turn in some quests I had been saving to give myself a jump start on experience on the climb to 70 (60 to 61 alone requires 494,000 experience), hop on a griffon and fly to Nethergrade Keep. Once there, I ran into the Dark Portal, followed by some horde who decided to leave me alone (surprise surprise — especially for a member of the PAA on Dark Iron).

When I zoned, there was a HUGE demon fighting some NPCs on the steps. I watched for a while, then found my way to the Griffon Master to fly me to Honor Hold. On the flight over, I was so excited I was panning my camera non-stop trying to see all that I could see. When I landed, the lag/low frame rate took over. I found a few quests to do, started working on a couple and decided that the lag was just too much. I wanted to explore the map, find my way to Shattarath City and set it as my hearth and so on and so forth. Sadly I didn’t have enough time to get that done, but hopefully I will this evening.

As for my overall experience, it’s about what I expected. I’m really excited to start hardcore exploring and questing, but I don’t think I’ll have much time in the next few weeks.

I like everyone being a n00b again, it’s quite fun.

-root

I was reading a post titled The Balance Issue from another WoW blog, Tales of a WoW Addict and it made me start thinking…

A lot of this post came from what I had written in the comment field on Tales of a WoW Addict but decided to save the large comment and just make a post and track back instead.

As an up and coming balance druid, I’ve noticed what is discussed in the article a bit. Rootette is a 59 balance/resto (31/0/19) spec NE druid. While we do cause a bit of aggro while playing the “battlemage” role, we do have a 360% armor contribution from Moonkin Form. While that’s not as high a contribution as Dire Bear Form (450%), it’s quite substantial.

Why do we have such a high contribution? That’s a question that has been on my mind as I level.

Follow my thinking for a little bit:

1. We get a 360% armor increase.
2. We give all casters a +5% to crit with our Moonkin Aura (healers included).
3. Our Balance Talents can make us generate a lot of threat from casting and damage alone (chain 1200+ Moonfire crits).
4. With enough Balance talents, we can summon three treants to attack what is attacking us.
5. We can heal ourselves if things go poorly.
6. We can get a 450% armor contribution (Dire Bear Form) if need be.

Put all of that together and my logic says I should be trying to make mobs hit me rather than hitting the other casters in our group.

I’ve been running a lot of groups with multiple druids lately and I’ve been doing both caster DPS and/or healing depending on the group make-up. I’ve been noticing that outside of another bear druid, the armor contribution for a moonkin druid makes them a decent off-tank (as long as the healer is aware of this). Granted, that’s not the usual role of a caster, but usual casters (mages and warlocks) are made of cloth and can’t take being hit by a mob for more than a few blows. Right now in Moonkin form, I have nearly 5000 armor. I know that’s still just a little bit, but I’m still dawning some greens from lower levels, mostly because I leveled so fast.

A Balance spec druid can sit there, take hits, and chain cast Wrath into the face of whoever is trying to smash in their’s. It’s better to have a mob smash the face of a Moonkin rather than a mage or warlock. It also makes sense that a Moonkin should be trying to steal aggro from one of these squishie classes.

I mean, we give them a higher change to have a spell critical, so shouldn’t we be able to protect them from accidental aggro gain?

I haven’t done this yet, but I think it would be fun for me to try to tank some instance as a Moonkin. Get a healer that’s up for it, a feral druid to bail me out of I get into a tanking dilemma and I’m down.

Anyway, just a few things to think about considering in the expansion Blizzard is putting more emphasis on hybrid classes, or so it would seem.

-root

So yesterday, the Dark Portal Opening event occurred. I, for one, took part in the killing of demons and hordies who decided to be near the portal. When I got off work, I immediately downloaded the patch, installed it, respecced Rootette and went to the Blasted Lands where the madness was taking place.

The Blasted Lands, a usually peaceful location, was transformed to an area of intense fighting and PvP and it may still be that way. Riding up to the Dark Portal I started getting excited because of all the skeletons of formerly dead players were littering the red soil. At the Portal itself, the Alliance and Horde forces of the Argent Dawn had set up a base-camp with their siege weapons pointed right at the portal. The red soil wasn’t visible through the layers upon layers of skeletons.

When I arrived, a group of Horde had momentarily claimed the portal area for their own, making it hard to tap a demon to kill it in order to complete the opening quest. A call was made in general chat as well as PAA chat for reinforcements so the alliance could retake the area. Once the area was secured once again, the killing commenced.

I had my quest done in no time since everyone there was trying to kill these demons, so if you tapped one, or someone in your group did, everyone in the area helped kill it. Let’s just say I got a decent amount of experience and such just from healing my party, making sure they stayed alive.

All in all, it was a lot of dying and a lot of corpse-hopping, but in the end it was a good time. I didn’t get any screen shots, but there have already been some posted on sites like curse

…and all I got was this stupid tabard…

-root

Tanking is fun and is quite rewarding at times… I bet you can already tell where this article is going.

Over the last year my main character was Rootusair, a Night Elf Warrior. I was called upon to tank for every thing I ever did in the game; quests, instances, whatever. At first, it was seen as an obligation, a sweet dependence and feeling of invincibility. I was the group’s meat-shield, if things weren’t hitting me, other people were dying. It felt great when the group was successful. I didn’t want to be a groups DPS, I didn’t want to be their off-tank, I wanted to main tank, I wanted to be the highest on the damage taken meter and second lowest on damage. I started to spec protection as soon as I got talent points. It became increasingly hard for me to grind solo and extremely hard to cause enough damage to successfully PvP.

Around level 40, under pressure from some of my guild-mates, I re-speced Rootus to being an Arms warrior. One-handed Mortal Strike was awesome! This spec got me through to 60 and coupled with a little fury ended up being fun to play. Although I didn’t have any protection in my talent build, I could still tank, so I was still called upon to tank in every group I was part of.

When I hit 60, I started light raiding with <DoD> through Zul’Grub and The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj. Good times were had by all and lots of phat lootz were earned. It was about this time that I started focusing my gear on DPS first and less on tanking. A warrior in the guild named Ivence was who I modeled my play style after. His gear made him a true “platerogue” or a warrior that can DPS as much as a rogue. Tanking lost it’s appeal and I found myself playing Rootette more and more.

This was when I realized that I was getting burned out on tanking. I was enjoying playing Rootette more and more, mostly because of the versatility of a druid — being able to pick a play style that benefits a certain situation rather than being stuck in one style is a lot of fun. I found it much easier to find a group with a druid, especially one built with some restoration talents, because of the fact that they can fill any role in a group — they can tank, dps cast, dps melee or heal. My experience tanking levels 1 - 60 made it easy for me to adopt to bear tanking (although I find myself more frustrated with bear tanking than it’s worth). I had already tanked every boss encounter in the game through AQ20 so I knew what to expect. Granted, I don’t have, and don’t ever plan on having any feral talents, but that didn’t really matter until I got to level 50.

Now, as you can tell by the status of both Rootusair and Rootette, Rootette has become my main toon and Rootusair has been shelved except for PvP encounters. He’s built completely fury right now, giving an interesting prospective to PvP. Every now and then I’ll log him to help out a long-time guild mate out with a quest or something, but very rarely does he see much extended playing time.

I guess the point of this post is that I made a slight error when I created my first character. I should have picked a hybrid class like paladin, shaman or druid at the very beginning. At least then I wouldn’t have suffered from tanking burnout.

-root