1. A clever nerd wrote an addon which checks if the boss you’re fighting has been parry-hasted. 2. Another clever geek wrote a script which parses logs to determine if parry-haste was seen. 3. Combined conclusion so far is that the only boss in Icecrown with parry-haste turned on is Deathwhisper, and possibly Saurfang. Read the thread discussing it and download the addon from links within. If you’ve got matlab you can also get the code to parse your own logs. (Nerds ftw). Data so far suggests that Icecrown raid bosses have parry-haste turned off. It is not conclusive yet. 4. We know expertise reduces parry-haste which is important if Icecrown bosses parried. How much it helps was useful information last week, because I didn’t have the knowledge that mostly ICC bosses don’t parry-haste, yet now the data suggests parry-haste is truly a thing of the past. 5. Theck finalised his analysis on expertise. It was to work out the avoidance value of expertise as a benefit of it reducing parry-haste. Likely, it isn’t important anymore and expertise has returned to only being a threat stat in Icecrown. ThereforeThe significance of the change for Icecrown raiders is that expertise should be seen as a threat stat (again), so it is not as valuable over the 6.5% cap as I thought last week, which in turn might have implications to your gear choices and gemming in the hard-modes. That said, the findings have not been fully corroborated yet, but are compelling enough to consider them a basis for decisions now. Dual-wield If parrygib is irrelevant you can dual-wield with any level of expertise you want. It’s just a threat issue. Sure, Unholy’s fairly weak for tanking, but does it matter? The usual argument I hear, a flawed one at that, is “you pay your $15, you choose your spec”. That is true in a solo game. In a raid, no, you should pick a good spec that works, or you impact the other 9 or 24 people’s ability to progress. If you want to pick a useless spec, go play solo. That said, Unholy tank is not useless. It isn’t a fail-tank spec. It is not as good as Blood or Frost, but it is good enough for many raiders outside hard-modes. (I still wouldn’t use it.) However Vigan and CSPenn like Unholy tanking. They’re not retards. In fact, Chris is a Professor. If they were in guilds doing hard-modes, they’d have to respec into Blood or Frost. If their raid was wiping on normal modes because of tank-death events or healer throughput/mana issues (ie. not enough damage reduction talents), they’d have to respec. I think those kinds of signs would be in your face pretty fast, and a smart person would consider a respec. I’ve long hoped that Unholy would be viable, I like it, but I’m letting go of that attachment because now I cannot see it as good enough for me. My guild really does our best, in our limited raid time, to progress as best we can. I do not want to give any edge to Blizzard’s AI if I can tilt the game in my favour instead. Fail specs are: You can fail in other ways that are more catastrophic, like allowing mobs to hit you up the ass (you should always face the enemy), or tanking in unholy presence (oops, most of us have done that once after a wipe run). You could raid with dps who cannot target switch quickly enough, etc. Point is, if you personally love Unholy, why not use it? Whilst I’d not recommend Unholy in ICC, there is a question of finding the balance between enjoying yourself and success. Sometimes you have to make personal compromises in order to succeed. If Unholy is not causing failure conditions, and you love it, then keep that bone shield spinning. For others like me, who optimise just for the sake of optimisation: Frost or Blood. A writer on EJ did enough tests to confirm the length of [Bone Shield] internal cooldown, for each charge to be used up: 2 seconds. It might be slightly lower than that, in fact, but its certainly no longer. He got 40 mobs to attack him and looked at the time between bone shield activation and it fading. Bone shield is not 2.5 or 3 seconds, as often quoted around the internet. It’s a measly 2 seconds, maybe slightly less. Since the first charge is used up at time zero, the last is used up 3 charges later, at six seconds. So in Icecrown with fast boss attack speeds versus four bone shield charges when glyphed, we believe the least uptime you can get is 6 seconds. You could get more uptime if your avoidance RNG is in your favour. That’s horribly bad compared to [Unbreakable Armor] which is always 20 seconds. I’m not counting uptime when you are out of combat, of course, not counting time when you’re not taking damage that uses charges. Bone shield does scale with avoidance, but you have a lot less of it Icecrown, and bosses hit faster. I would not main tank with Unholy in Icecrown raids. Merit? Where bone shield appears to have merit is whilst kiting oozes on Rotface, since its uptime is great when you’re not being hit. It doesn’t help as soak tank on Blood Queen since (I believe this is right), none of that damage can be mitigated (ie. stamina is your solution). It suits any fight where you’re not actually the main target or where the boss hits slowly or have a role where you run around without bone shield charges being used up (I don’t think any of the Icecrown raids are in that category). Looking over the other fights in ICC, I don’t see any jumping out as having mechanics that suit bone shield or AMZ either. It’s one remaining selling-point is that if you do not have an Unholy DPS DK, it might be worth the tank going Unholy just to spread the debuff, if your gear is good enough to compensate for not really having a useful cooldown. The two-piece bonus [Item - Death Knight T10 Tank 2P Bonus] does not suddenly make Unholy tank spec particularly shining, instead it’s more useful to think of it as fixing Bloods’ crappy AOE. Whilst you could conceivably do a D&D-based single-target rotation for quite high threat, it doesn’t suit mobility fights and it’d pull agro on Saurfang’s adds, and your bone shield is still crap. Source on EJ. Credit for ooze idea. Unless someone comes up with a list of surprise uses for unholy tanking, I think Unholy is pretty much dead for use in Icecrown raids. I wouldn’t even use it as an offspec for AOE; would go with Frost instead since UA is much better to mitigate rushed incoming damage from AOE tanking. (that grey stuff was my caveat  ) Blood Legion, on their Lich King kill announcement, said: We’d like to mention that this kill wouldn’t have been possible without the near-zero latency voice chat of a newly-discovered Ventrillo alternative that we just started using, called Mumble. We encourage players to try out this new software!
That’s a very high accolade. It’s not an off-hand comment. I hadn’t even heard of Mumble. It’s an open source, very low latency voice comms system. Here’s their home page. It’s been around for years, apparently, and there are commercial host providers. I found two with a quick google search. You could also self-host since it’s free software. It’s also got a Mac client, which is important since TeamSpeak has a really bad Mac client, and Ventrilo requires a particular codec to work at all. But it’s the very low latency that sounds particularly good to me. Anyone using it? In any case, I thought it important enough to highlight to everyone. The Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a remarkable theoretical and proven phenomena. I didn’t know they’d proven it: is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their competence.
Basically, people are so stupid they don’t even realise they’re stupid. Read a lot more here, where I came across it. I don’t think I need to say a lot more, it’s got sooo many implications and is really thought-provoking. - Frost Presence now provides 8% Stamina, up from 6% Stamina.
- Icebound Fortitude now provides 30% base damage reduction, up from 20% damage reduction. For a geared tank with high defense, this translates to 50% damage reduction, up from 40%.
It’s important to note that we aren’t trying to single out paladins here. We like the tank balance of warriors and druids at the moment, and we have a larger sample size of warrior tanks that we can compare. Another solution would have been to buff warriors, death knights and druids and then increase boss damage accordingly. Obviously, that would have been a much larger change with greater risks and a longer delay. Though Ardent Defender is always a possible target for changes, we like that this talent provides such a distinction between warriors and paladins. Rather than have all the tanks have the same health, armor, avoidance and cooldowns, we’d rather have four unique tanking classes rather than just superficial or artistic differences. Yes, that design is harder to balance, but we think class distinction is ultimately more interesting, which is better for the long term health of the game. The goal remains to have all four tanks be viable for any encounter, assuming sufficient gear and skill, and any differences in performance on individual encounters to be minor. “Minor” is obviously a subjective term. Please note that the death knight change will result in a small survivability increase in PvP, which we think is appropriate. We chose it partially with that in mind. Source. I didn’t know they are instant cast (were is more precise; Blizzard removed them for the moment) and are used in a normal high-end rogue rotation. That’s a pretty cool way to get more dps. I wonder if they generate personal threat and could be used by tanks. MMO Champion’s commentary is particularly good, showing that the grenades truly are a normal part of how their rogue did his job. The question is whether it was obvious to Ensidia that something was askew. This encounter was not on the PTR, so they wouldn’t have known what it was supposed to be like. They didn’t have a comparison. Sure, these platforms rebuilding might appear like an unintended mechanic, but when you only have limited attempts and have never seen it before… perhaps it looked like a deliberate encounter feature. They would have had no idea the grenades were causing it. However, that’s the question: is there something we don’t know, that Blizzard do, about Ensidia having some way to know without any doubt they were exploiting the encounter. I think they are innocent, very clever cheats, and I’m curious to see how it pans out. Update: the logic is too compelling, they knew it was an exploit. Also see Psy’s comments below on the access world top guilds have to Blizzard. | | |
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