NDA, Cata Profession Preview, Ruby Sanctum, Expertise/Hit, T10 4-piece

All things Cataclysm

MMO-Champion announced early today that Blizzard formally asked them to remove all leaked Cataclysm information from the website. This includes any information posted on the sites forums as well as information posted to the main news feed.

Personally I think it's a good thing Blizzard is enforcing the NDA to some extent and even though MMO-Champion is a huge site that gets a ton of traffic, I have a feeling Blizzard pays attention to as much as possible across the internet for all "unofficial" cataclysm information.

I admittedly ate up the information that was posted on the site, but I also have no issue waiting for the beta to start and the NDA to be lifted before seeing more than what Blizzard intends for the public to see.

This brings me nicely to my next topic: Relatively long blue post about cataclysm professions was released on the European forums and I'm pretty happy with most of the changes.

Engineering:

• Engineering is still being designed, but expect new unpredictable gadgets to use on yourself or enemies. Toys, explosives, and even a new vanity pet or two. Oh, and powerful mechanical bows and crossbows in addition to guns.
• In general, we want Engineering to remain a tradeskill mainly focused on creating fun or useful gadgets for the engineer, but we are exploring options for items that can be sold to other players for profit. 
  

 I'm really happy they are keeping Engineering relatively the same. Just give me a new (or keep the current) rocket boots and cloak parachute and I'll consider any other new/interesting additions as added perks!

Alchemy:

• New elixirs will be about 75% as strong as flasks. So you can get more total stat points with two elixirs, but flasks will still be the best at giving you a single offensive or defensive stat.
• New unique material used by nearly all high-level recipes will be created by alchemists on a one-day cooldown.
• New Mysterious Potion created with common materials restores health and mana in a massively random range, as well as sometimes granting the benefit of another potion. The health and mana range is from 1-20,000 and is able to crit. The minimum amount restored, however, is scaled upwards by the Alchemy skill, making it a great choice for alchemists to keep for themselves.
• All potions and elixirs now use the same basic vial type. Flasks still use a fancy vial.
• New Alchemist Stone.
  

I'll be honest I'm kind of on the fence with Alchemy right now. Everything in this preview looks promising with the exception of possibly the elixir change in the first bullet. As long as elixirs persist through death (which I highly doubt) the change is fine, but either way the rest of the alchemy preview looks promising. I really like the idea of the Mystery potion and it's added benefit to Alchemists; however, I have to admit I've been thinking of switching over to Jewelcrafting for some time now because of the added stats. And the flexibility that comes with that.

I suppose I will wait until Cataclysm releases or at least further into the alpha/beta before I make my decision, but it's something to keep watching.

Sunwell 2.0   The Gods of Zul'Aman 2.0   Obsidian Sanctum 3.0   Ruby "filler-content" Sanctum

Yes there is significant story and reason for it to be added, yes it will add some diversity to off-set/trinket slots for characters, yes it will keep people busy before cataclysm starts, but at least be a bit more creative than just adding a new boss with re-used models and popping in three fake...err excuse me.."mini-bosses".

It's never felt "epic" or mustered a sense of accomplishment, at least for me, fighting boss minions that have more health than regular trash and unique names, but cause no real threat to the success of a raid (see: Obsidian Sanctum drakes [if not doing hard-mode] & Freya tree adds [if not doing hard-mode]).

Time sink city if we have to kill a whole bunch of trash waves...yay!

Sorry for the ranting - I'm done. /hug

VoA comes through big and T10 4-piece really is THAT good

I was sitting at around 71ish frost emblems when this week started and had full intentions of picking up the T10 iLvl 251 legs from the vendor once I hit 95 emblems, but the first thing Berserk does as a guild once raid time starts on Tuesdays is head over to Wintersgrasp and knock out Toravon for some easy badges and hopefully something usef...BAM iLvl 264 feral pants drop! So now I'm sitting pretty at 105+ emblems after ICC 25 last night and I now have my 4-piece tanking set.

It's kind of funny with the current system how a couple weeks ago I was starved for emblems and had to be careful about every purchase I made and now I'm practically swimming in them so to speak.

Regardless it seems as though my expertise and hit rating woes are solved. I went ahead and picked up this beauty for 7k gold on the AH to make up for the hit I was losing by swaping from T9 pants to T10, and I'm pretty happy with my overall stats now.

And oh yeah - the T10 4-piece is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. This is something anyone who is a bear tank has probably known for at least a couple months, but the low cool down on Enrage makes this fantastic in conjunction with Barkskin.

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Hopefully some solid attempts on Arthas tonight after we get Sindragosa down in 25 man! Hopefully they let me solo tank Sindragosa and MT Arthas at least for Phase One.

Cheers.

Oxheart makes everything better (almost)

Ooooh shiny!

Last night isn't considered a set in stone raid night for our little casual 10 man ICC group, but we had most of the people on so we tried to make a push for Sindragosa. All we had was trash, free frost emblem mini-boss, then the Dreamwalker.

We tried out a couple new DPS we recruited over the weekend and they definitely held their own. We tried a new strategy for Dreamwalker and instead of two tanks and splitting DPS in half, we used our paladin tank and I switched to kitty for some rusty feral DPS. Only wiped once and it was because mob priorities weren't 100% clear.

Easiest way to handle the adds that we saw is:

Suppressors (Hunter kite Blistering Zombies) > Blazing Skeletons > Gluttonous Abominations > Risen Archmages

After the second attempt, she went down with no deaths, easy and clean kill. So next we had the good old...spi

OH YEAH! [Oxheart] dropped! It kind of caught me off guard, but its become almost a perfect solution to my hit/expertise woes. The weapon of course has a boat load of expertise which allowed me to swap out my neck for this. So now I'm sitting at 11.5% expertise and 7.53% hit which is awesome! I'm using the wrathful neck and bracers which is making my threat stats suffer a little bit, but I haven't had any issues whatsoever with TPS so I guess Oxheart really does make everything better!

der room. Luckily someone in guild chat was nice enough to mention that you don't just stand in the middle of the room until the end of eternity killing wave after wave of spiders. We made our way to the other side of the room and once the gate (door?) opened we happily stepped out onto the Frost Queen's terrace.

Let me just take this opportunity to complain about the two 3.2M HP mini-boss dragons you have to kill before you engage Sindragosa. I'm guessing it's a lore thing which I don't mind, but 3.2 million HP each...ugh!

Anyways, we took sometime explaining the strategy and everyone seemed to understand. Honestly we probably could have killed her sooner, but we were trying to handle frost tombs in the middle of the room, and the frost bombs kept spawning practically right underneath the tombs making them nearly impossible to LoS. Per suggestion of a friend in a different guild that was hanging out in vent, we moved the frost tombs to the stairs that lead out onto the terrace and I have to say it really simplified the frost bombs. Our priest kept having computer issues and between having to wait for him to reboot and since it was already pass 10:30, we gave it a couple more attempts (one of which we saw phase 3 and the boss to 21%), we called it.

I'm fully expecting this new reset to make a run for Arthas and start putting in attempts there. Go go Kingslayer incoming!

Expertise is a helluva drug!

I've been thinking a lot recently about how much I value expertise as a bear.

Like 100 years ago at the beginning of Ulduar I put it above everything else and I shot for the expertise hard-cap of 14%.

The weird thing about shooting for a hard-cap with me is I pretty much know I'm not going to actually reach the cap; however, shooting for it allows me to prioritize it correctly when making gear decisions. So like I was saying, in Ulduar I wasn't happy unless I was above let's say 11.5%. I don't feel like I know much more about the benefit I'm gaining from expertise compared to what I knew when Ulduar was top tier, but I do know that now that I have less choices when it comes to gear that is available to me it's becoming more of a nuisance to feed that expertise hunger.

There are a couple of things expertise does for you as a bear (and any tank for that matter), but the number one thing that always pulls me in for whatever reason is TPS. Do I have threat issues? No. Do I require Tricks and Misdirects? Sometimes, but it depends on the fight and of course how geared the DPS I'm running with are and honestly I'd lean towards no most of the time. So what's wrong with me? I'm trying to break this habit of refusing to change out a piece of gear because I lose some expertise.

As a quick side note of sorts - it took me a surprisingly long time to give up my bad habits of gemming for bad socket bonuses. I'm not going to dwell on this or bring it up again because it was foolish, but I've learned my lesson and I feel the benefits I have now because of my health pool.

Anyways besides threat, expertise helps with those annoying parries. Now obvious you don't want to parry because once again, you don't get much threat when you parry, but the other reason you don't want to parry is because if you parry on a boss the boss basically gets a free attack (Technically I believe it resets the boss's swing timer, so say the boss hits you, then 1/2 a second later you parry, then instead of 2 seconds after your parry you get hit, you get hit immediately. Meaning the boss just hit you twice in a 1/2 second span instead of a 2 1/2 second span). Now here's the thing with parry haste - some bosses do some bosses do not. One inconsistency that is kind of annoying, but in some cases practically required. If the boss is a tank gear check and hits exceptionally hard *cough cough...Festergut* you really can't afford to get parry hasted so naturally that just so happens to be a boss that has parry haste disabled. So here is the kicker and Festergut is a great example of this - after 5% your attacks won't be dodged by the boss, and although you will probably parry quite a bit if you are low (around 5%) on expertise so your threat will suffer, you get a stacking debuff that increases your damage on Festergut. Not to mention tricks and misdirect and it's starting to sound like expertise is kind of useless on Festergut. Well..not useless but it certainly diminishes in value.

I don't have the luxury of swapping out gear for less expertise and more survival stats just for a given boss, so how many people do?

This is all culminating into a simple conclusion. Parry is important, very important even, but not as important as I once thought it was or more correctly still think it is. Currently Ampzilla has 43 expertise rating (including Primal Precision) or 10.75%, I'm happy with it and don't want to go any lower, but if I have to now that I've thought about it a bit more, I'm going to.

I think the best part is the experimentation. I'm probably going to follow up this post with a specific issue I'm having with making gear decisions that largely effect my expertise and hit rating, but a smaller example of where I'm struggling it with my neck piece.

Currently I'm using this. It's actually pretty good still, but its one of my last iLvl 226 pieces and since GS is king (sadly) it's cramp'n my style. So what are MY choices?

First thing I checked out was PvP gear and I might end up going this route for a temporary fix - [Pick] [your] [flavor]. Or this beauty from 25 man Onyxia. The last two options are [Legionnaire's Gorget] from ToC 25 or hope Rotface drops [Bile-Encrusted Medallion].

Needless to say I have options, and while I'd like to get the Onyxia neck to keep my expertise in the 10% club, I'd settle for just about any upgrade now.


I also want to say before calling it quits - GF came up with a fantastic beginnings to a header for the blog so all I/we need to do is pick a nice background and it should be up in no time!

Thanks!