Heroic Lich King

So someone in our group roped us into deciding we wanted to try out Heroic Lich King.

I personally couldn't make it to last weeks attempts- Oh darn. As much as I don't mind wiping I'm pseudo glad I haven't had to commit myself to this yet as I really hate leaving anything open and with Cata shipping next week it doesn't seem very smart to commit to a new task like this.

That being said apparently it looks as if they should be able to possibly get this fight down next week. Another thing I'm thankful for- I missed day 1 of wipes which allows the rest of the group to spend some time learning each aspect of the fight. True, I may slow them up in an attempt or two, but most of the time I learn at about 25% the time necessary than most of my raiders. Usually from watching a video once I can lead attempts on bosses that people in the raid have already killed and I generally get most of it right.

My schedule is up in the air and I just really don't know if I truly want to be able to go to the wiping this week or not. Time will tell.

The post in which I revised our 10man group

Found out our Fulltime Tree healer isn't going to be able to commit 100% of the time for our group setup. This saddens me greatly. He is one of my favorite people ever to raid with. Truly one of those people if I'd meet IRL who I'd buy a beer.

As problems present themselves, as do solutions- A few weeks back we had two friends who wanted to join in our group who I apologetically had to inform we were already all full up. Turns out they are ok with splitting up and raiding separately as one of them will have ample time to raid while the other not so much. This also means I can take one and not have to worry about taking the other. So, he's willingly offered to be the "first backup" for our tree (he is also a tree, but also a totem-totaller, and a faith bearing priest... so he's given us the first choice for them).

His reason for this decision being that he believes our group to be the most professional and highest in skill on the server. This is probably true up to maybe a tpo 5 standpoint- either way, we rock and people know it. There is not much more gratifying for a game that is essentially rewarding you with digital achievements and pixels than for another person to give you mad props.

Anyway, someone convinced me it'd be a good idea to try out H LK before cata ships- so that's going to be my Sunday. Not exactly excited for it tbh, as I have not heard good things. But I'll figure out how much of a chance we stand about 2 pulls in.

Enjoy your Turkey.

People Hate Me

As the title suggests, I have many people on my server who are not my biggest fan. I have repeatedly made tanks leave randoms (I usually only start criticizing when I'm on my ret pally and know the healer, so if the tank leaves mid-pull I am able to finish tanking the fights... and I'm actually 4-0 for successful transitions after tanks try to screw us over). I generally do this by asking why a tank with a GS of over 6k with a healer in over 6k is single pulling each mob, and losing aggro to me even after I give him significant time to build a threat lead. On my hunter I find it hilarious when tanks want me to die because I pulled an extra pack or two for them with Misdirects... but they seem to forget that hunters don't die-we feign.

Now, I used to tank a LOT for randoms and such, and I have no personal issue at all with other people pulling stuff for me. My job is to tank, if people try to pull aggro I'm going to try to take it back. If they are really trying to kill themselves, they will. If they are pulling aggro and they know they can take a punch or two- it'll be fine. I just never understood the whole "IF YOU WANT TO PULL, WHY DON'T YOU TANK THEN???? RAGEEEEEE." (Also- If I pull aggro as a dpser and I die, I understand why I died. I'm ok with it even. Action--> Reaction. That's how it works)

All this being said, I used to care what people thought of me in game personally and of my guild's name. Over time I realized that I'm an awesome guy, and a great player. I like raiding and I don't mind being in the average pug. I look back at the reactions I get from our guild tag and I realized that our performance is what got us there, not how we treated people. This all being said, I do generally treat people well I just don't go out of my way like I used to, and I have found myself in situations where people telling me that me leaving a fail pug is making me look bad, it doesn't stop me anymore.

This also translates into our raids, as I no longer feel bad about not calling people out for their mishaps. I have failed at certain things as well, I usually try to call myself out (If someone doesn't beat me to it) and I want to fix what I have done wrong. If we don't call each other out, we can't get better. We have to realize as a group that we have a single goal to achieve and it is not personal when we try to fix the mistakes we make. If we have a weak link-it must get stronger or the chain will break.

Tying back to the beginning, I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I learned to not care about what people's perception of me is I enjoyed my game experience better and we found so much more success as a group. I don't want to become The Prince entirely but there are some effective things to learn from it.

The 5 minute Ret Guide 4.0.1

To be honest, as we're not pushing content and I'm not extremely interested in staying cutting edge at the moment, I stopped using epic gems, stopped min/maxing my gear to the T, and more or less set up a gearset that makes sense but isn't complicated at all. This conversation also brings itself into a full realization of our priority rotation as well.

Here's how I'm gearing for Ret:

Hit to cap(8%), Expertise to cap (which is actually 23, NOT 26-this was confirmed by a blue and you can google "ret expertise cap 4.0.1" to find ample evidence) STR, Haste to a flowing rotation (More on this later), Crit (this is about equal with haste, with the flowing haste in mind), mastery (mastery does not compare to anything else and can cause problems).

That's really about it. I find it much easier to keep these guidelines in mind when I'm reforging all my gear and gemming is still pretty much +STR (following the guidelines above). Enchanting is still the exact same as before and isn't hard to logically reason out.

The discussion of haste flow- The goal of haste currently is to get (the amount changes depending on your lag, if you are playing with a larger amount of lag you'll need less haste) your CS to time itself with every other ability. You want to be able to hit CS after everything else you hit. This allows you to maximize your HoPo gains while never having downtime in your rotation. If you are adding an extra ability between CS and something else, it means you are missing out on HoPo gains and will be able to TV less during a fight (which means less overall dmg). If you have too much haste and your CS is coming off CD while the GCD is running from your "off-CS" ability then you just wasted the time when you could be gaining HoPo (less TV, less dmg, less crits, less big recount numbers, less epeen).

I usually play with ~100-200ms in lag. This is apparently much better than most people get, and may explain why I don't find many movement fights difficult at all... But that's a different story. I currently can't get enough haste to even this out- yet. I end up waiting about .25-.4 seconds waiting for my CS to come off CD (which is still a DPS gain than not using it). Granted, this is an ideal rotation, and one I don't see a whole ton of (with the exception of fights like Marrow p1, LK p1... etc), and if you are waiting for your CS to come off CD, but have a moving enemy or you have limited time left, you are better off putting in an extra ability than nothing (I usually would save an Exo proc and Judge for sindy so when she took off on flight phases to tag her with both for the extra dmg).

Anyway, ~100ms, my 700 haste isn't enough. I'll update this with the true total, but I believe I'm looking at like 1100 as my exact number, while if you are playing with more lag you will need less haste.

EDIT: My current haste is 704.

Paladin Guides and such

I just wanted to point out real quick that I'll probably never lose the inner healer in me and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop thinking "like a healer." (Note: This is a good thing in terms of raiding.)

That being said I have been complimented many times over from friends and apprentices of all sorts of specs for being able to analyze and theorycraft, then break it down in layman's terms for the common folk (you).

When I took Statistics in college, I had a professor who most people didn't like because he would move through topics with extreme pace. He would basically start a class by showing all the information behind calculating certain stats but would tell us not to write much down in what he was doing. He would then, after showing us how the calculations are working and what effects they have on end results finish by showing us the "shortcut" way of calculating these same results. The things most Math teachers tried to hide from you- Now, this teacher I believe thought that we were smart enough to handle the shortcuts and if we needed to gain a further understanding, we would do so on our own. I was in love with this method, so I try to apply it myself.

My outlook on theorycraft is as follows: Every good raider needs to UNDERSTAND what the math is doing behind the theory. If you don't know WHY you gear a certain way, you are just a mindless follower and will never be able to be cutting edge and leading the way. BUT, you don't always have to be the one hashing out the math itself. I don't think it is lazy to consider other things more important in life than re-doing what other people have already done and made available.

This is where EJ comes in, one of my favorite websites ever. They more or less have the same outlook and say "Hey, if you want to post, contribute. If you don't want to contribute, we'll just let you read." Which is fine by me. I contribute to theory from time to time, but I'd consider myself more of a reader than writer there. My gift is translating the pages upon pages of goodly information into more sensible writings for the common person. (You)

That being said I plan on giving my own synopsis of ret and holy in their current form for 4.0, while continuing on with hunter information as well with brief overviews of at least Surv and Marx (Idk why I am so inclined to hate BM so). Along with this I could possibly throw in a quick this and that about priesting of all 3 specs because I do love me some priesting as well. I'd say "hey, want to know about DKs?" Because I could probably do a decent writeup on Frost at least, but to be frank- I hate my DK.

So yes, more to come.

Setup for the 'clysm

Calling things Cata still reminds me of an STD. I just think it's something you'd mock your friend for getting- "HAHA! You just got CATA!!!! HAHA!"

Hell, I guess "The 'clysm" does too...

Business time; Our setup is (was set in stone, then just changed out of nowhere**) put in writing on the wall right now and looks like this:

Tanks:
1. Warrior (new to the group)
2. Warrior

Melee:
1. Combat rogue (apparently he hates Mut)
2. DK (He's game with going either frost or UH, depending on what we need)
3. Ret Pally (formerly on his druid tank**)

Ranged:
1. Hunter (The king of bling himself- yours truly)
2. Mage (Formerly on a warrior in our last setup, and he had a problem with dying... maybe being in cloth will teach him...?)

Heals:
1. Druid
2. Priest (Holy/Disc depending on the fight)

Swing Heal:
1. Druid (He's a boomkin/healer, depending on what we need, which means some progression is 3 heals, some is 2)

As far as buffs go (because the only ones we need are for physical damage ofc-now that I use them that is) we're missing either 5% crit or 30% bleed damage (which only matter to the rogue and me-if I'm MM) so I'll probably have to go get like 3 wolves so I can swap in different colors for different fights. As for the spell buffs, we're just missing spell crit I believe, if our mage goes fire and gives the 10% spellpower buff.

So, we're not sitting horribly all things considered it'll still be the strongest raid I'll have ever been at the helm for in my raiding career.

**The ret pally was originally going to be Holy and we'd have the second druid be full-time boomer, thus keeping up boomer buffs 100% and we'd get the 3% all damage from the mage as Arcane. Then I was informed that he no longer desired to heal and that he wanted to dps as ret- forever shattering my hopes and dreams (not to mention the reason why I went to the hunter in the first place) for a raid group that had consistently more ranged than melee, because we ALWAYS have too much melee.

The hunted have become the hunter

So I posted about 3 months ago I came back. True story.

Since then we decided we'd mess around and maybe get a drake, who knew? I played the end of the xpac out as MS Ret, OS holy. It was actually very fun getting used to running with some people from time to time again even though ICC isn't the most challenging of all raids (with 30% buff ofc). We got our drake, but because it was more or less 5 of us showing up each week and we'd fill in the final 5 spots (meaning we could either be FoF-Full of Fail- of very strong) I felt like our healers had to try to heal through stupid and that was our biggest obstacle.

When we'd get a decent 5 set to show up with us we'd clear Heroic ICC10 in under 3 Hours (11/12) with a reg LK Kill, then head to RS to wipe on trash and lol at not using CC or even kill orders.

Long story short I'm ready for the new xpac, I'm very pumped for it actually-

Oh, and I'm playing my hunter in our raid group. I decided this a long time ago and I can't not. I love my hunter so much... I'll begin posting here quite a bit I'm sure, but yeah- My main raiding toon will be a hunter. That being said I know too much about all 3 specs (and can't seem to NOT pay attention to stat weights/talent builds/patch changes) for all things paladin to not consider myself a solid resource in that area. So, if you ever have a question about paladin-ing I can help ya out.