Heroic Ruby Sanctum: by premonition

Looks like Premonition might have the world first kill on Ruby Sanctum 25-man heroic. Their tank Xav got the trinket, too. Nice bonus.

Tankspot acquired by ZAM (wowhead)

Tankspot has “joined the ZAM network” which probably means they have been acquired. ZAM is the corporation which owns wowhead and other domains.

Firstly a warning: if you are a blogger, do not think you can automatically make money from WoW blogging. Don’t read this and think “whoa, a pot of gold, all I have to do is repeat what tankspot did”. You need seriously large amounts of traffic before you can monetise beyond a coffee or

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The buff is 10%

ICC is now at 10%.

A few topics related to this: 1. Eventually you can change gem strategy from stamina to avoidance, because you will simply have enough stamina. Wrathy has been talking about this for a little while. 2. Do you feel like its ‘easy mode’ at 10%? Will you feel ripped-off if you can’t kill a boss until 15%? Is the buff coming too fast?

At 5%, Everblue calculated the buff was worth about 4 seconds more on Putricide, which gave

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3.33 DK tank bug fixes

Bug fixes:

  • Rime: Dual wielding will no longer grant two chances to proc this effect from Obliterate.
  • Rune Strike: This ability can now proc Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade.
  • Wandering Plague: No longer damages secondary targets affected by Repentance.
  • Hysteria: The buff from this ability is now properly considered an Enrage for the purposes of warriors using such abilities as Enraged Regeneration.

That’s from the patch notes.

Rime used to ‘double dip’ its Obliterate, which contributed to DW

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The streamlined newbie experience

Unless you have rolled a L1 alt recently, you won’t realise how much Blizzard have improved the experience for new players. People completely new to WoW will really find their introduction much smoother. You’d have seen patch note changes such as  mana regen for low levels is far higher (I never went oom on my L1 through 5 warlock). I didn’t realise but they have also made the mobs neutral in the starting zone, which makes the cave-troll quest

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Updated strategies index

I’ve put some new references into my meta-guide of Icecrown boss strategies.

The new content is from bloggers Death Goddess (Hinenuitepo), Divine Plea, Children of Wrath (Renaissance Man), Wrathy, Leafhead. Included are two blog posts on the Lich King, plus one remarkably definitive 10-man guide that Leafhead referred me to.

I also want to highlight a superb post from Veneretio on consistency. It is about how you do the same thing, predictably, so your raid knows what you will

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Many interesting Blue posts

There really is quite a lot of meaning packed into these posts. What do you guys think?

Top guilds and raid encounters difficulty

Players try to play that card a lot, that skill isn’t a big deal because the mechanics are all pretty easy to understand, and therefore it’s the class mechanics that are to blame, not the player. I don’t buy it. I’ve seen the world first, or even server first kills of difficult bosses. Those

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Flask market indicates the beginning of the free epics period

First, Frost Lotus rate up 50%.

Now, Frost Lotus for free from frozen orbs. I bet every orb on your AH is already sold by profiteers ahead of the market. They vendor for 5g. I have always sold mine. News.

Now they’re worth something… lotus was 60g, 50% more of them should make them 40g, flooding from orbs should make them 10 to 20g, which means a flask will cost 15g or so and not be profitable.

Clever AH entrepreneurs will

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Patch 3.33 for DK tanks is goodness

Significant changes for DK tanks.

Probably help dps too, but I don’t write about that as much, like DW Frost dps might be viable (instead of lame).

Awesome, [Will of the Necropolis] is now an unconditional effective-health boost. Fantastic. Unless a strike leapfrogs you into death (with massive overkill) it means Blood tanks have more EH than before. It’s not possible to model it mathematically because the value of WotN is a function of the damage you incur

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Woo more stamina for us!

  • 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

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The spoon-fed era

The combination of:

  1. easy and abundant Emblems of such high iLevel,
  2. teleportation instantly to and from the instance,
  3. easy PUGs with cross-realms giving minimal waiting times and
  4. T9 raiders carrying people in random LFG groups

is creating a spoon-fed era.

I did a random LFG PUG and found myself zoning into Oculus. I like the new loading screens that came with 3.3. I was reflecting on the quality of graphic designers when the loading finished, and I’m

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What I like about 3.3

I think 3.3 is a great patch, not just the new content we’ll see but the major changes to the systems. Beyond the new raid and 5-mans, Blizzard have really improved some fundamental areas of the game.

I got to do two heroics last night with the new LFG cross-realm system. I wonder how fast PUGs will form once the initial excitement of 3.3 has lulled. Even if it’s 10 or 15 minutes, I’d still prefer it to the system we had in 3.22. I did see lots of /trade raid advertising still, even though the global LFG channel is back; old habits die hard. I smiled about the ‘disenchant’ option for loot, knowing I brought it to the party.

(I noted Infinite Dust and enchants are selling quickly again as people re-enchant their gear.)

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Rune strike is soooo threatening!

Oh yes, I’m absolutely grinning. I’m flushed.

PTR 3.3 notes:

Rune Strike: Threat generated by this ability increased by approximately 17%.

That’s just what we need in Icecrown to make up for the loss of threat from lower avoidance, it’s what we need to scale our threat better for progression tanks.

Calculations I did yesterday were showing 7% loss of threat in Icecrown due to lower avoidance. Rune Strike is about 40% of a DK’s total threat, so 40%

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Theckhd, maths guru, delivers Icecrown answers

My gratitude to Honors for tweeting this. Theckhd is a serious maths guru. He worked out the avoidance value of expertise. He has now looked at the -20% dodge aura and I’m basically going to adopt his findings as Fact, because (a) I can’t fault it, and (b) if it’s wrong, he’s humble enough to correct himself (he did this in the expertise analysis) pretty rapidly.

Theckhd’s post is on maintankadin (scroll down to near the bottom of the thread). I’ll copy here most of his key statements.

I won’t go on about what I said the other day and where I was right or wrong. Who cares. Here’s the current state. I have mixed in below Theckhd’s points with mine; he’s indented in colour. » continue reading

Icecrown pwns you for 20%, and healing in Cataclysm

Icecrown is going to nerf your dodge by 20%, with an aura similar to Sunwell.

Daelos' post on it:»

For tank gemming, you are basically just dealing with your discretionary gem slot and enchants, maybe you can choose one ring or trinket over another too. Probably you can vary your character by +/- 5% avoidance and +/- 337 stamina (those two ranges have similar item budgets).

So, just stack stamina. Don’t gem for avoidance. At such low levels of avoidance, the relative gain from avoidance isn’t great (at high levels it gets excellent, even with diminishing returns).

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Why are we doing this?

The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more ’spiky’ than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn’t avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.

We’ve been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There’s a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we?ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again. Source.

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New LFG is win

I really like the upcoming changes for LFG. It shows a well-thought out solution, which understands the problems it’s trying to solve too.

For example, having the system teleport you to and from the dungeon is an amazing change. That alone will create usage of the LFG system, because of the time it saves travelling; and allows people to keep doing their daily quests or whatever until the full team is assembled.

So often, the time-sink in a group

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Mucho news

There really is a lot going on right now. Let me show you the posts which have got my attention over the last week whilst I’ve been stupid busy at work, then enjoying a long weekend away. I use RSS feeds for the sites frequented; much better than bookmarking them in a browser.

3.3 on PTR with raid testing, snippets of encounters coming out including Matticus’ attempt on a boss who makes you vomit, Festergut. Rotface sounds good

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Turbulent times for unholy DKs

Unholy has gone back and forth so much.

  1. Recently, its threat sucked.
  2. Then it was Unholy Obliterate spec for deeps
  3. That got nerfed away.
  4. Today it’s no-reaping Unholy with no-epidemic
  5. and on 3.3 that’s being changed again.
  6. plus bone shield’s duration in patch 3.3 is now 5 minutes (for DPSers) but cooldown is 1 min (tanks). Nice.

On live, SS is a shadow-damage attack so it has scaled with different raid buffs.

Scourge Strike on the PTR has

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Frost is for dual-wield tanking in 3.3

New patch notes.

Dual-wield frost tanking with a runeforge is coming. My guide is helpful here.

Also the change to IT Glyph is very interesting and will have consequences in frost and unholy builds.

Notable changes:

  • Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: There is now a 1-handed version of this rune in addition to the current 2-handed rune.
  • Glyph of Icy Touch: Instead of granting additional runic power, this glyph now causes Frost Fever to deal 20% additional damage.
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Installer patch notes 3.2.2

I have downloaded the patch 3.2.2 now. Here are the notes for your interest while servers are being maintained and until MMO or someone produces a nicely formatted version.

Boubou wins, here’s his version with all changes.

Related to DKs, the patch notes are detailed below: » continue reading

PTR 3.22 unbreakable armour

Currently, PTR 3.22 unbreakable armour gives +25% armour and the glyph takes it to +30% (tooltip on glyph is a bit confusing).

If you compare that to bone shield at 15 seconds, giving a flat 20% reduction on top of your normal tank armour, I find that bone shield is ahead on total damage reduction. I modelled this in a google spreadsheet.

I used example armour of 25123 unbuffed and 27858 buffed.

Unbuffed, UA leaves you taking 32.66% of the

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Patch 3.22

This index post helps readers find my posts on the 3.22 changes for DK tanking. I had it stickied to front page for a while.

  • Death knight tank builds for unholy, frost and blood
  • new: highest threat no-epidemic Unholy DK tank build
  • dual-wield tanking in 3.22 (DW DK tanking)
  • initial commentary on the 3.22 changes. Patch notes 3.22 from the downloader.
  • Find everything else on pwnwear through my new index

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    DK 3.22 talent changes

    3.22 is now live, check my index post.

    My tank builds and levelling specs have been updated.

    These changes mean:

    • Unholy dps will go back to using Scourge Strike (instead of Unholy Obliterate, because of the glyph, subversion and dirge changing).
    • Frost tanks will be awesome again, with Unbreakable Armour actually being worth using (the new glyph only gives 5% of your base armour, so that’s around 1200)
    • Blood will not be the overarching dominant tank spec it is now because its vampiric blood has been balanced to 15s glyphed, bone shield is back to one minute and frost is fixed
      • heart strike’s cleave got nerfed but it’s still good, and not changed on a single-target
    • plus… dual-wield tanking is back on the agenda with RS threat fixed in DW specs. Basically, you just need 30 expertise to use two fast tank weapons and you’re only going to be parrygibbed as much as a warrior (ie. if they’re ok, you’re ok). Read the whole article.
    • But to make up for it the T9 set bonus will be 10s not 20s reduction.

    Sept 12 update:

    • unholy bone shield reduced to 3 charges, and its glyph to +1. This is them completing the change from 2min to 1 min; vampiric blood was tweaked in one patch to 1 min with 15s uptime. Blizzard push patches in bits, so this is their complete patch for the talent now (as opposed to an afterthought).
    • My paladin colleagues will be sad about this “Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.”
    • Warrior tanks might like this odd buff “Critical Block: This talent now grants a 20/40/60% chance to block double the normal amount instead of 10/20/30%.” Source.

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    Anub’arak, Koralon and Vezax hard-mode video

    Update Sept 7: Paragon have killed Anub’arak in 25-man heroic (ie. ‘hard mode’). Loot and details.

    Original post: A greatly respected member of the deathknight.info community, Splug, has published a Tankspot Marmot video on hard-mode Vezax.

    I’ve updated my handy Coliseum strategy page.

    Lore has done Anub’arak on normal mode is up now.

    Koralon video is also available now. Save yourself some wipes.

    Expect reports of good progress into the Heroic version of

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    News

    Some news that got my attention.

    Part two of the detailed and long Eurogamer interview on WoW. Thanks for the link Kadomi.

    wowenomics linked to this short interview with production director Jay Wilson.

    WoWraid will publish soon a great overview of Cataclysm news which organises all the information into tabbed sections. (I saw preview).

    I commented on levelling in battlegrounds as giving me 22k xp in 14 mins. I’m levelling a DK tank on an Aussie realm, and used AV

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