Incoming Nerf

Dragon Soul is supposed to be nerfed starting this week.  It will be a 5% reduction in boss damage and health, and that number will gradually increase.  It doesn’t affect our attack power or abilities, so our damage output should stay about the same.

For rogues, this nerf has some small effect.  It means that bosses will die quicker, so you might not get to use your cooldowns as often.  This might have a small negative impact on our damage totals.  Be aggressive using your damage cooldowns.

Here’s something interesting you might try.  On Ultraxion in 10-man normal mode, the Hour of Twilight does 300,000 damage.  Presumably that will be nerfed down to 285,000.  If you hit your Feint, reducing AoE damage by 50%, that should only hit you for 142,500.  If you’re in 378/384/397 gear you probably have enough health to survive that, assuming that your healers are keeping you topped off.  If you’re feeling adventurous, see if you can live through an Hour of Twilight without hitting the Heroic Will.

Of course, if your health is below 142000, or if you time the Feint wrong you’ll die.  If you manage to survive, that’s extra dps time.  You might give your healers and raid leader a heart attack, though.

Rogue drops in Dragon Soul

Am I just incredibly unlucky?

I’ve run Dragon Soul now about 6-8 times in normal difficulty and a handful of times in LFR.  That’s a total of 40-50 boss kills split between 10-man runs and 25-man runs.

So far, I have gotten exactly three drops.  I got my first DS tier piece in LFR yesterday.

I’m not too surprised by that.  What I’m annoyed with is not that I’m being outrolled, but that I almost never even have a drop to roll on.  I’ve gone entire guild runs without ever typing /roll, and entire LFR runs without ever hitting Need or even Greed.  Its become kind of a joke.

Am I just amazingly unlucky?

Is the LFR expected or optional?

I was reading and posting in an online forum on a WoW-related topic.  In the discussion, someone spilled the beans about the ending of the Dragon Soul raid and storyline.  Another person said, “Dude, put SPOILER ALERT on that so we know not to read it if we haven’t done it yet.”

At this point, the person who had asked for the spolier alert was raked over the coals in the way that WoW trolls really know how.  They accused him of being a failure at the game because, at this point, only a total loser has not cleared the Dragon Soul in the LFR.

I stepped in to disagree, saying that I preferred to raid with my guild and so I, also, have not done the LFR raids yet.

Then the tide of opinion turned against me, saying that I should be running LFR to get gear to help with normal mode raiding.  The fact that it is super-easy was the main argument for its necessity.

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I feel like I’m part of a dying breed in WoW.  The main joy of raiding for me is playing with my long-time gaming friends.  There is no thrill in loot.  Loot lost its appeal to me back in BC when epic purple gear became more common than rare blue-level gear.  My joy comes from the shared experience of overcoming the obstacle that the devs have set before us.  For that reason, I’d much rather run the raid in normal mode, using gear I got in normal mode Firelands and by running heroics.

Basically, I see the LFR as a nice alternate path for those who want/need it.  I don’t see it as a necessary part of the gearing-up process.

Am I the minority here?

Add-On dependence

Since I’ve had trouble with Curse Client this week, its made me realize what a large number of add-ons I use.

This is not intentional.  Its just “add-on creep” – meaning that over my 6+ years of playing I have gradually added more add-ons while not removing many.

Here’s what I use right now:

• Dominos for my bars
• X-Perl for unit frames
• SexyMap to move and configure my minimap
• Elkano Buff Bars for my buffs/debuffs
• ChocolateBar (replacing FuBar) for my indicators across the top of the screen, including
• Fubar2Broker to make my FuBar add-ons functional
• MoneyFu to track my income
• PerformanceFu to monitor my game performance
• ReputationFu to track my faction reputations
• GarbageFu to automatically get rid of crap that I loot
• DurabilityFu to automate my gear repairs
• OmniCC to put a timer on my cooldowns
• Outfitter to manage my gear sets
• Arkinventory to organize my bags
• GoGoMount to use a different mount each time I mount up
• Archy for my occasional dabbles in archaeology
• FishingBuddy and FishermansFriend to make my time fishing go smoothly
• IronChef to help my cooking go faster
• SleekFreeBagSlots to show my free space on the toons that don’t use Arkinventory
• StealYourCarbon to simplify restocking of basic reagents
• SpamMeNot to block annoying goldsellers

Then there are the add-ons I use to raid.

• PowerAuras to tell me about important procs
• SmartBuff to remind me to rebuff or repoison
• Deadly Boss Mods for raid encounters
• Omen Threat Meter
• Nug Combo Bar to show my combo points in my field of view
• Event Horizon as a timer for my abilities
• Recount with several plug-ins for damage/healing tracking
• EnsidiaFails to see who messed up after a wipe
• BigBrother to make sure that everyone has food/flasks
• Clique and Grid on my healer characters
• Decursive on any characters than can decurse or dispel
• Tauntmaster on my tank toon
• KAHolyPower for my paladin

Then there are my auction/gold-making add-ons

• TradeSkillMaster for sheer awesomeness
• Enchantrix to automate prospecting/milling/disenchanting
• Postal to quickly send/receive my hundred of mails from the auction house.
• MillHelp to see what my herbs will mill into

Plus many of these add ons use libraries which also need to be updated.

Very few of my add-ons actually have a direct impact on my game play.  On my rogue, its basically NugComboBar and Event Horizon.  On my priest and druid healers its Grid, Clique, and Decursive.  For my paladin its KAHolyPower, TauntMaster, and EventHorizon.  And DBM, of course, on any characters in a raid.  Other than those, the vast majority of the add-ons are for convenience and to automate everyday tasks or to reorganize my UI.

To keep this up to date manually would be a huge chore.  Now that Curse is uninstalled, I have to decide what to do.  How many of these can/should I remove?  How much frustration will I feel when I have to remember to do things that used to be automated (like rebuff or repair or empty my bags of grey items)?  How annoyed will I be when I start getting goldselling spam or forget to restock my poisons?  How long would it take me to get used to a simpler, more vanilla UI?  I’m so used to these things as part of my game experience.

 

Tuning the Raids

The Dragon Soul raid has arrived.  Deathwing, the biggest and baddest foe we have fought, was defeated within hours of the patch going live.

Does that mean that Dragon Soul is too easy?  I don’t think so, personally.  It seems pretty on target to me.

In answering that question, I discount the accomplishment of the top guilds.  These guilds spend hours and hours on the PTR perfecting their strategy so that they can make short work of the raids when they go live.  The guilds that are competing for world-firsts are a different breed of player and should not be used to judge the relative difficulty of the content.

However, looking at my server (a medium population PvE server), there are six guilds that did a full clear in the first week, and a total of nineteen guilds that are at least 5/8.  To me, that indicates that the early bosses are probably not much of a challenge for the more accomplished guilds.

I think that some of this is due to the proliferation of heroic-level raid gear.  When Blizzard first offered up heroic raid difficulty as an option, it was meant as a further challenge for the guilds that wanted/needed that kind of challenge.  There was not an expectation, as I recall, that most guilds would do heroic modes.

Nowadays, it seems like the normal modes of the raid are seen as just a speed bump on the way to heroic modes.  They are considered a part of the progression path rather than an extension of the path.  When people say that they have cleared the available content, they don’t mean Ragnaros – they mean heroic Ragnaros.  That’s a big shift in attitude.  I don’t think that there was as much expectation among guilds to kill heroic Lich King back in Wrath.

As a test of this hypothesis, I arbitrarily chose the 15th-place guild on my server (as listed in GuildOx) and found the 15th-best geared person in that guild.  That means this is a character is probably not one of the top raiders in a guild which is not a top guild to begin with.  Upon armory inspection, that person had heroic Firelands gear on.

If a lot of guilds are walking into raids with heroic gear on, then how exactly is Blizzard supposed to tune the raids?  I think that normal-mode raids should be tuned assuming normal-mode gear.  In other words, the difficulty of the early Dragon Soul bosses should be such that it will be a moderate challenge to players in full or almost-full normal-mode Firelands gear.  Normal modes are supposed to be the norm.  That’s why they are called “normal”.

With that in mind, it makes sense that a lot of raiders would burn through the early content if they are sporting some heroic FL gear.  They will also complain that the content is “too easy” and that Blizzard is aiming the bar too low.  In fact, it may just be that heroic modes are too commonplace and they are outgearing the tuning of the raid right from the start.

What this means is that the raid is not too easy, but rather than the players have too much gear.

Its not just heroic mode gear.  There is a player in my guild who hit 85 last week and already he almost outgears me, even though I have full Firelands (normal) gear.  Gear is plentiful and easy to obtain.  Again, this makes it tough to tune the early raid bosses because you have to make it doable by people in regular 378 gear.

I’ve just fought the first three bosses in Dragon Soul and only killed one of them.  Morchok is certainly not complicated, as is appropriate for a first boss.  The next two are a fair challenge – especially on healers in normal mode gear.  I don’t think they feel “too easy”.

My hope is that the Dragon Soul heroic modes are really challenging.  If that is the case, then the heroic-geared players will settle into heroic-mode Dragon Soul and stop complaining that the content is easy.  The rest of the players can then concentrate on working their way through normal mode Dragon Soul, and the whole discussion of “easy or not” will fade away.

 

No, you can’t stealth to Hagara. A Guide to the Rogue Legendary Dagger questline

One of the questions I have seen from other rogues (and that I asked myself) is… can you stealth through Dragon Soul to finish the first part of the legendary dagger questline?  The answer… no.

Here’s what you have to do to get the legendary daggers.  It won’t be quick.  Even the most hardcore raider will take a couple of months to get through this.  However, Blizzard has given us an easy path to get the first stage of dagger rewards, and that’s going to be the best daggers most of us can get until (if) we get the legendaries.

Step Zero: Find the Dragon Soul raid.

Before you can start the questline, you have to find the questgiver, Lord Afrasastrasz, and he is in the Dragon Soul raid.  You can’t go into the raid solo.  You have to be in a raid group.  If you’re in a raiding guild, this is no problem.  If not you’ll have to group with someone, form a raid group, and then you can go in.  The quest giver is on your right just after you enter.  Get his quest.

Step One: Proving Your Worth

Your first quest, Proving Your Worth, says to pickpocket a Cryptomancer’s Decoder Ring from Hagara, who is the 4th boss in Dragon Soul.  Unfortunately, the path to this boss does not open until the first three bosses have been defeated.

You cannot do this in a LFR raid.  You need to be in a regular group on normal or heroic difficulty.  If you’re in a raiding guild, then you’ll get there soon enough.  If not, then you’re in a jam.

The best thing you can do is either pug the raid at normal difficulty, or buy a pickpocket spot.  If a raid group is at Hagara, they can invite you to the raid, let you stealth to the boss and pickpocket, then you can drop raid.  Arrange with a raiding guild in advance so they can invite you when they get to the 4th boss.  They may ask for several thousand gold for this service.

If there is more than one rogue in the group who wants to pickpocket, here is what you do.  Stealth to the boss and pickpocket.  Then step back and drop stealth and pull the boss.  Vanish.  When the boss resets, the pickpocket timer will also be reset, and the next rogue can take a turn.

Step Two: Pay and Wait

Once you have the Decoder Ring, you get the next quest called A Hidden Message.  You bring the ring to the ethereals who have set up shop in Stomwind or Orgrimmar.  One of them will “charge” the ring for you.  He also demands 10,000 gold for this service.  When you pay, he does his thing it but it takes twelve hours for the ring to charge.  I hope you’re not impatient.

Once the ring is charged take it to Corastrasza at the Vermillion Redoubt in Twilight Highlands.

Step Three: Back to Ravenholdt

This quest is called To Ravenholdt, and its just a travel / story developing quest.  A dragon named Mostrasz will fly you to Ravenholdt.  Why?  Well, I won’t spoil the story line, but they have something the red dragonflight wants.

Step Four: Sneaking

In the quest To Catch a Thief, Mostrasz will guide you as you infiltrate the Ravenholdt compound to find… well, I won’t say.  You have to stealth, avoid guards.  If you fail you get to try again so its not difficult.

Step Five: Gilneas

The next quest, called Our Man in Gilneas,  sends you to the Ruins of Gilneas.  You’re going to meet up with someone in an instanced version of the Ruins of Gilneas.  He’s going to give you a mission…

Step Six: A Man’s Got to Die

We’re rogues, right?  Killin’s what we do.  The next quest is to solo kill a mob in Gilneas City.  First you have to stealth to him through more guards.  I haven’t done it yet, but I hear its pretty tough.  Distract and Sap are key.

Once you get to him you have to solo kill him, and he has a two minute enrage timer with about 1.8 million health.  That means that you need to maintain around 15k dps while also keeping Recuperate up, as well as being quick on your other abilities.  Cloak of Shadows, Evasion/Combat Readiness, Blind, Gouge, Disarm, healing potions and bandages are all going to be useful in this fight.  It might take a few tries, and you’ll need some fairly good gear, but it seems doable.  This is the tough step for the first questline.

You can’t have help because your version of the area is phased.  The only way you can get help is to go with another rogue who is on the same step of the questline.  In that case, it becomes fairly easy with multiple stuns and interrupts on the target.

Step Seven: Profit!

Once he is dead, you return to Ravenholdt and get your reward.  This questline earns you the pair of daggers Fear (main hand) and Vengeance (off hand).  These are great daggers, even if they aren’t the legendaries that we’re after.

The nice thing here is that you don’t have to be a hardcore raider to do that quest chain.  YOu do need access to the 4th boss of Dragon Soul, but that’s it.  After that its just a rogue solo, using rogue abilities.  The next chain, however, requires a LOT of time in raids.  If you’re not in a raiding guild, then you can basically stop reading here because this is as far as you go.  Raiders can continue on to…

Step Eight: Collecting

You’ll get a quest called Cluster Clutch.  This asks you to do the expected gathering (just like the legendaries from Ulduar, ICC, and Firelands).  You have to collect 333 Shadowy Gems.  It seems that you can get 5-6 from each boss in Dragon Soul (not on LFR difficulty), so that means you’ll need 60-70 boss kills to complete this step.  For top guilds that is about eight weeks.  For most of us its several months.

Steps Nine through Thirteen

No one has done these yet so mot much is known.  You will have to kill a dragon in Karazhan and then you get the next level of epic daggers - The Sleeper and The Dreamer.  You’ll need to collect more stuff from bosses in Dragon Soul.  For the last step you will need to defeat Deathwing, and then you’ll get your legendaries – Golad, Twilight of the Aspects and Tiriosh, Nightmare of Ages.

Then, you’re Batman.  Not the hero Azeroth wants, but the one they deserve.

Good luck!

I’m OK with the Firelands nerfs

As the fallout from the nerfs trickles through the blogosphere, and I read about how trivial the content is now and how terrible it is that the nerf bat came so quickly, I am going to weigh in here on the side of support for Blizzard.  These nerfs are good for my guild, and I think that my guild is fairly average in the wide spectrum of WoW guilds that raid.  If its good for my guild, it must also be good for a lot of other guilds.

We’ve stalled in T12.  It sounds like I’m making excuses, but these fights play to our weaknesses.  My guild has always had trouble with highly technical fights, going back to Thaddius and Heigen in Naxxramas, Rotface in ICC, and the Double Dragons in BoT.  In past raids, for every technical “stand here then here then move here” kind of fight, there were also some fights that just measured throughput or skill at using your class abilities.  We excelled at some and struggled with others.  Firelands mostly seems to have “dance” fights with lots of target switching and little room for error.  Its not our strong suit.

As a result we’re stalled at 3/7 in there.   Some weeks we only get Shannox and are blocked by Beth’tilac and Rhyolith.

We’ve stalled in previous raid tiers as well.  However, Firelands feels… different.  In the past when we would stall, there was the feeling that if we all just got one more gear upgrade, or maybe just got one good break to fall our way, then we’d find success.  That expectation of success being just out of reach would keep us coming back and back and back.  For example, we wiped on the Lich King over 60 times, and it never got old or boring.

Firelands hasn’t given that feeling.  Wipes on Rhyolith don’t usually feel like we’re teetering on the cusp of success.  It doesn’t feel like one more upgrade or one good break would make the difference.  We just get annoyed at the fight mechanics.  Its much like Heigan back in the Naxx days, when people would wipe doing the dance, and no amount of gear could fix that.  So it is with the current content.  It has become frustrating.

For guilds like mine, this nerf will bring a fresh feeling to the raid.  Perhaps you don’t insta-die from every misstep.  Perhaps if one dps misses his spot and is killed, the raid can still pull out the victory.

Does that make it easy-mode?  Perhaps.  Does it diminish our accomplishments?  In some eyes, certainly.  However, given the choice between killing the nerfed bosses, or gradually having our raid team lose interest due to frustration, I’ll take the nerfs.

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Edit: I will admit that I am puzzled as to why Blizzard doesn’t implement a more gradual nerf the way they did in ICC.

Rogue legendary… meh

Big news from patch 4.3 is the upcoming legendary dagger set for rogues.

As a long-time rogue player and blogger, I guess this is where I am supposed to gush on and on about how cool it is.

Meh.

Let me tell you the most important thing I know about legendaries.  I don’t have one.  Six years of playing with hundreds of days of /played time and I haven’t even sniffed one.

Presumably the legendary will be obtained in a manner along the lines of the Ulduar, Icecrown Citadel, and Firelands legendaries.  In these, there was a long questline followed by collecting a series of drops from raid bosses.

Even though we completed the content when it was current, my guild never got close to completing either the Ulduar or ICC legendaries.  We’re not close to getting the Firelands one, either.

On top of that, I’ve run Black Temple and Sunwell a number of times and have not seen the drop-chance legendaries, either.

So if you ask me if I am excited about the legendary daggers, I’ll say no.  Legendaries aren’t for casual players.  Unless the method of acquisition is very different than expected, 95% of the playerbase has no real chance at getting a legendary dagger.  I’m not complaining – that’s how you keep a legendary weapon rare and special.  I’m just saying that I’m not part of the small group of players that can get it.

Maybe I’ll see one in Stormwind sometime.

The Loot Gods are Toying With Me

Last week we killed Shannox and I was lucky enough to score Feeding Frenzy, which was a nice upgrade to my main hand dagger.

This week we killed Shannox again.  He dropped Avool’s Incendiary Shanker… another slow main hand dagger.

What?  Two slow daggers from the same boss?

It turns out that Feeding Frenzy is a Shannox drop, while Avool’s is a shared drop from any of the bosses in Firelands.

So now I have two nearly identical slow daggers.  I’ll end up dropping a few thousand gold on a Landslide enchant for my Shanker and reforging my gear to squeeze out maybe a 20 dps theoretical improvement (essentially no change).  Maybe I’ll find a place where weapon-swapping is useful again.

I could complain about poor loot distribution by the designers, but it just happens that my guild has only one raiding rogue so I ended up with both daggers.  Its weird to gripe about getting raid loot.  I got two drops in two weeks, but it feels like the loot gods are taunting me.

A Rogue in Firelands – Shannox

This post describes rogue tactics for a boss fight in the Firelands raid. The focus is on the 10-man version of the fights, since that’s what most people will be running. If you have suggestions for alternate strategies, or if I say something that you disagree with, please put it in the comments.

This is not meant to be a full raid strategy guide. It are written to describe the role of rogues (or other melee dps) during the encounters. For full strategy guides refer to Raid Boss Strategies or WoWpedia.

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This is the first boss in the Firelands raid.  You’ll need to clear a lot of trash to get him to spawn.  As you clear trash, you’ll get alerts that his horn is sounding.  When he actually spawns, he yells an emote letting you know that he is near.  He will path around the road in the central trash area, and he moves pretty quickly.

There is a bit of target-switching in this fight, which is inconvenient for rogues when trying to keep our various abilities up.  You get enough single-target- focus time that its not too terribly frustrating.  And there are traps! (but you probably won’t disarm them)
Shannox is a hunter and he has two hellhounds with him, imaginatively named Riplimb and Rageface (probably named by Shannox’ 5-year old demonic kid).  There are various strategies for the dps order, so pay close attention to your raid leader’s instructions.

Rageface

Rageface repeatedly wipes his aggro table and cannot be tanked.  He will jump around the raid, alternately attacking various people.  He doesn’t hit terribly hard.  If he attacks you (his regular attack, not his special attack) then you can use Evasion to avoid much of the damage.

Periodically he uses his special attack, called Face Rage.  When he does that, he leaps and pins someone down and does a flurry of attacks on that person.  If its you, then you are stunned and can’t do anything, so Vanish and Evasion won’t help you unless you can somehow pop one of them preemptively (not sure if that can be done).

If he is going all Rage-Face on someone else, they only way to make him stop is to hit him with a single attack of over 30k damage.  For any rogue spec at this gear level, a 5-point Eviscerate or Envenom crit should do the trick. Mutilate rogues can pop their Cold Blood to assure a crit, especially if he’s raging on a healer.
Tip: You’ll want to check your Recount/Skada logs after the fight.  Look to make sure that your finisher crits are exceeding 30k.  If not, then you could use some more gear or enchants or something.

My raid burned down Rageface first because he is a nuisance.  When he dies, Shannox gets a damage buff, but its not unhealable.

Shannox, Traps, and Flaming Spears

While this is going on, Shannox is throwing traps around (stupid hunters).  Some are immolation traps, which do fire damage and put a fire DoT and increase fire damage.  The DoT and damage increase debuff can be Cloaked if you happen to step on one.  The best course, obviously, is to maneuver around the traps and avoid them.  Its not too hard.

He also places Crystal Prison trap.  These encase you in a prison that has to be dps’ed down to break a player out.  And they have a lot of health, so its no small task to break one.  Make extra sure that you don’t step on these, and prioritize breaking a healer out if they get trapped.

Now, any good rogue is currently saying to himself, “Traps? Can I disarm them?”  The answer is yes.  However, that’s time that you are not doing any damage, or maintaining any of your buffs/debuffs on your target.  I don’t think there is a good reason to spend time disarming traps rather than attacking.

The dogs can step on the traps, too.  This is a useful strategy if you can maneuver them.

In addition, Shannox throws his spear frequently during the fight.  Where it lands, it makes a spirally pattern of fire around itself.  You should step out of the fire eruptions, or Cloak if you cannot get out.  They won’t kill you, but they will do enough damage that you’re susceptible to quick death from a trap or Face Rage.

Riplimb

The other dog is Riplimb.  He gets off-tanked.  He will run and fetch Shannox’s spear whenever it is thrown.  This time is crucial, because both tanks can drop their debuffs while Riplimb is playing fetch.  Its important that Riplimb take as long as possible to run back and forth.  You can help with that by putting Crippling Poison on your thrown weapon and hitting Riplimb with a FoK as he goes by (or use DP with Deadly Brew).

If your raid has enough ranged dps, then you might not get assigned to dps Riplimb.  If you do have to attack him, its a hassle because he runs back and forth a lot playing fetch with Shannox’s spear.  During that time its hard to keep on target.  Also, while you are chasing him you have to avoid the traps which are littering the ground.  Other than that, he’s simple to dps.

Both dogs need to die before Shannox reaches 30% health.  Typically, strategies call for one dog to be killed (usually Rageface) and the health of the other dog and Shannox balanced so that the second dog (usually Riplimb) dies when Shannox is very close to 30%.

Final Push

When the second dog dies, its all-out dps on Shannox for his final 30%.  There will be traps thrown everywhere and the tank will be kiting the boss around to avoid them.  If you’re following behind the boss its hard to see the traps, so I like to stand off to his side as he is moved around the area.  Note that Shannox is untauntable, so if you pull aggro you’re in trouble.  I’ve heard that Vanish is not dropping threat like its supposed to, so be careful.

If you manage to take him down, assassination rogues are looking for Feeding Frenzy as their new main hand dagger.  Others are hoping for the Gloves of Dissolving Smoke (with a load of mastery, so also preferred by assassination rogues).