(WoW) Roundup
Yay! One long journey over. Saturday night, our guild finally assembled a Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest. With several of us at level 90, we were able to stomp through some group pulls that would once have been lethal and made good time through the bosses. We even had another druid get a firecat-transform staff from Staghelm. And while it felt like more, it looks like we were even able to take down Ragnaros on our third attempt of the night. Or course, our guild leader had to redo the final turn-in quest in Stormwind because the first time he was still in a raid (which prevents interaction with most quest objects), but that just means twice the pagentry with dragons over the city. And thus, we've officially "finished" Firelands.
And let us never speak of it again.
Actually, it's not that bad, though I would wish any place we spend that much time in again might be a little more diverse visually at least. And now I wonder what we'll be doing with our raid nights. I don't foresee us as ready to hit up Mogu-Shan Vaults for a while. Maybe an old raid for fun. Maybe groups running normal/heroic dungeons to gear up. It's hard to say.
Otherwise, things progress. The guild has something like 6 level 90's last I checked, and we've done some full group dungeons. Heroics are not as agonizing as they were early in the Cataclysm cycle, though they take some work at level 90 to be allowed into randoms. I've hit revered with Klaxxi, Tillers and Order of the Cloud Serpent, unlocking some valor point items when I have the points to spent and the ability to farm motes of harmony. And with hitting honored with Golden Lotus... uhh... the selection of available daily quests is getting pretty overwhelming. I'm already picking and choosing to keep up with priorities, because doing them all would be more hours than I really want to sink into the game daily.
I also hit the weekly valor point cap Sunday. To my disappointment, quests that give VP do not start giving justice points instead (which might at least be minorly useful). You do, however, get a buff that increases VP gain by alts on the same server by 50%. That may be handy later in the game, but not so much now.
Current tankadin theorists seem to be leaning toward hit/expertise caps over avoidance stats, which I will probably adopt reluctantly. It's counter to the philosophy of tanking in my mind, though the value is unarguably there because reliably hitting keeps up Shield of the Righteous, keeps holy power coming in smoothly, and all of that. Short-term, this means a fair bit of overlap between my tank and DPS gear sets, though I'm still trying to work them independently. And after seeing the death knight that helped in our raid Saturday, I'm tempted to go craft up as much of the PVP plate as I can for my Retribution set.
There's more talk about chaning reputation gains that seem to be incoming, and there was apparently some exploit over the weekend that killed off inhabitants of cities on some servers, necessitating a hotfix to patch that. Whee. It's interesting to see how things shake out. It's still early in the expansion cycle.
And let us never speak of it again.
Actually, it's not that bad, though I would wish any place we spend that much time in again might be a little more diverse visually at least. And now I wonder what we'll be doing with our raid nights. I don't foresee us as ready to hit up Mogu-Shan Vaults for a while. Maybe an old raid for fun. Maybe groups running normal/heroic dungeons to gear up. It's hard to say.
Otherwise, things progress. The guild has something like 6 level 90's last I checked, and we've done some full group dungeons. Heroics are not as agonizing as they were early in the Cataclysm cycle, though they take some work at level 90 to be allowed into randoms. I've hit revered with Klaxxi, Tillers and Order of the Cloud Serpent, unlocking some valor point items when I have the points to spent and the ability to farm motes of harmony. And with hitting honored with Golden Lotus... uhh... the selection of available daily quests is getting pretty overwhelming. I'm already picking and choosing to keep up with priorities, because doing them all would be more hours than I really want to sink into the game daily.
I also hit the weekly valor point cap Sunday. To my disappointment, quests that give VP do not start giving justice points instead (which might at least be minorly useful). You do, however, get a buff that increases VP gain by alts on the same server by 50%. That may be handy later in the game, but not so much now.
Current tankadin theorists seem to be leaning toward hit/expertise caps over avoidance stats, which I will probably adopt reluctantly. It's counter to the philosophy of tanking in my mind, though the value is unarguably there because reliably hitting keeps up Shield of the Righteous, keeps holy power coming in smoothly, and all of that. Short-term, this means a fair bit of overlap between my tank and DPS gear sets, though I'm still trying to work them independently. And after seeing the death knight that helped in our raid Saturday, I'm tempted to go craft up as much of the PVP plate as I can for my Retribution set.
There's more talk about chaning reputation gains that seem to be incoming, and there was apparently some exploit over the weekend that killed off inhabitants of cities on some servers, necessitating a hotfix to patch that. Whee. It's interesting to see how things shake out. It's still early in the expansion cycle.
Once you cap hitting consistently, then you worry about survivability, it's always been this way, neh?
ReplyDeleteNope.* Prior to the 5.0 redesign, paladin survivability was largely independent of hitting. A miss here or there might lead to slightly less holy power, but that mostly translated to less damage done by Shield of the Righteous. Keeping the block effect up wasn't really an issue, even with misses. Word of Glory self-heals were 1) not terribly effective and 2) on a long cooldown since early in Cata, making them largely a non-issue as well. Prior to the holy power design (ie. back in Wrath and earlier), misses had even less effect. Hit/expertise were threat stats, not survivability stats - important to cutting edge tanks with blazing DPS behind them, but otherwise rather beside the point. Now, that's not so much the case. The way everything interacts now, there's two schools of thought. Avoidance gearing (focusing on the previously favored stats like parry and dodge) seems to technically lead to less overall damage taken. What is deemed the "control" style, however, is the new hotness and favored by most of the tankadin bloggers/columnists I see. The control style favors hit/expertise-capping (and even haste) over parry/dodge because it leads to better block coverage with SotR and in all the various little interactions it ends up with fewer high-damage spikes. The exact theorycrafting behind why it works out that way melts my brain, though I've seen the graphs and charts. And damage spikes are the most likely point of failure in the heal/tank dynamic, the "experts" prefer gearing to end up with less of those. The result is a model where you reforge out of survival stats like parry and dodge at every opportunity and actually desire every previously-DPS stat save crit. And I just can't shake how wrong that feels to me. * At least for paladins, hit capping was a novelty reserved for the heroic over-geared elite as long as I can remember, and expertise was virtually ignored (but then we used to have a glyph that covered a lot of that for us anyway).
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