That’s good, because you shouldn’t be, it’s an avoidance nerf that hits all tanks equally(in terms of raw numbers). Doesn’t matter if you have 25% parry and 25% dodge or 0% parry and 50% dodge, your total avoidance after the debuff will still be 30%.
It’s total avoidance? I swear I thought the icon just mentioned chance to dodge. (Maybe they meant chance to “dodge” rather than “Dodge.”) I guess it wouldn’t be the first time that something was vague. 
Besides, the amount of damage taken should be roughly the same. If the average tank is set up to avoid damage 50% of the time (through dodging, parrying, whatever) and the devs want a particular boss to do about 5000 DPS to the tank which the healer needs to cover, the boss needs to do about 10,000 true DPS with the expectation that half will be avoided. That means any one attack has to hit incredibly hard. In ICC, that 50% gets turned into 30%, so they just tuned the true boss DPS down to 7150, which maintains that 5000 DPS to the tank. Attacks hit more often but for less per hit.
That last sentence is the devs’ real goal and the reason for Chill of the Thone. They’ve had to have bosses do massive spike damage so that they’d still be threats to avoidance sets, but massive spike damage means you basically have to go avoidance to survive. It’s a vicious cycle. More hits with lower damage per hit allows some flexibility in tank design and prevents the pitfall of One True Spec. Expect to see more of that in Cataclysm, except gear should be balanced for it instead of them having to add hacks like CotT in.
I took the boat into Howling Fjord for the first time last night do we ever find out what the story is about the burning boats? Very atmospheric.
After a few more dungeon runs on my baby priest I have come to the conclusion that maybe some can tank as a ret pally but not many. Died at the first serious pull in SFK last night, I cast 3 heals before the wolves are attacking me, dead tank then quickly dead group, tank says ‘Fuck Off Heal’ immediately. To be fair I received support from the rest of the group but I dropped anyway. Managed to clear it at a later attempt with a group that worked superbly together, a Bear leading the way brilliantly. I also won an early Need roll for nice cloth shoulders but then passed on the next good cloth drop because I thought the other squishie should have it, does anyone else do this or would you roll Need again and take what the RNG says?
No, you read it correctly, it reduces Dodge, but since all ICC ready tanks have more than 20% dodge it affects all of them equally.
:smack: Apparently I need more caffeine this morning. Yeah, that makes sense.
The only tank I have is a druid, so I get focused. 
I’ve seen at least one high-end druid tank go really heavy heavy into stamina-gearing, so apparently that was her solution to spike damage.
It gets better even. Bears are the least affected by Chill of the Throne. Going from 55% to 35% avoidance as with your average plate tank is a bigger deal (44% more hits taken) than a bear’s drop from 35% to 15% (30% more hits taken). Bears have always been scaled around having lower avoidance, thus their health and armor bonuses.
Yeah, sounds like that guy shouldn’t have been tanking. What a jerk! When I play my bear, I always feel bad if any mobs peel off me, even if I know it’s just because some mega-DPS had the crit of the century on that mob.
I have passed on gear because I got something already, though I’m probably more likely to do that when grouping with guildies or friends. I was also in a random run where everyone was voting to shard because we actually didn’t need the gear, and I passed on the last boss because I noticed that I’d won the shards from the previous two.
Then again, on a Pit of Saron run, I rolled on the caster dagger on one boss, and the caster staff on the last one - no one else could use, and the staff was a bigger upgrade than the dagger!
- I’m spending more gold getting repaired than I am taking in, which is due mainly to:
a) Forgetting to let my health regenerate
b) Foolishly not reconoittering and getting mobbed instead of “pulling”
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Sometimes I can do that “find your own corpse” thing and sometimes I can’t, and most times I can’t. I just seem to keep bumping into mountains and shit, so if it ever takes more than 5 minutes, I’ll use “stuck character”. And if I think it’s going to be that kind of trouble, I’ll just let the healer rezz me, and go do something else online while I wait.
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I have found that sending items to be auctioned to my mule and letting him have them repaired is cheaper than me repairing them before I send them. :smack:
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As long as they’re in your “neighborhood” and about the same level, people generally don’t mind helping with a quest, but when they level up and move to a different realm, they usually don’t come back, even if they say “just mark me as a friend, and holler if you need help”.
Can’t say as I blame them for that, but it wouldn’t be that way with me.
There may be others, but those are the ones I can think of right off the bat,
Q
Crappiness abounds. One of our oldest officers abruptly left the guild without any warning or explanation, not even to the GM who was closer friends with him than I. Nice friend. So we had the inevitable trickle of other players decamping as well. This was the day before our guild’s 1 year anniversary, too. Great timing. 
Another officer and I are going to be spending more time recruiting and trying to rebuild.
On the other hand, I finally took the plunge and dual-specced MM last night. Gonna be spending some quality time with a target dummy and the shot rotation until it becomes as much muscle memory as BM.
Last night, the guild headed to Ulduar to pick up some more Fragments for the next healer’s legendary mace (not sure how many we currently have–at least one but no more than three) and work on Mimiron hard mode to (a) finish the Algalon25 key and (b) practice movement and awareness for Putricide.
With the fabulous end results:
1.) I finally got credit for the whole Antechamber (I’d never killed IC before on 25-man).
2.) I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning (25-man Vez hardmode).
3.) Firefighter (25-man Mimi HM)!!!omg11!!11
4.) Two decent two-handers dropped that no one else needed (Worldcarver, which is actually perfect for my current Expertise needs, and, awesomely, Voldrethar, Dark Blade of Oblivion), so I can finally try out Fury. The downside: massive regemming from ArP to Strength. The further downside: the Warrior from my old guild whose little guide I used just told me today that his guide is a bit outdated and I might need to mix it up with some ArP after all, or something. Still waiting to hear back.
Either that’s some weird achievement lag, or I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Leave it to the German boy to post a picture in the hat you can pull booze out of… 
1.) The Dungeon Matcher can’t tell what gear is what. It can just tell the general level of all gear you have. Otherwise, someone who queued up to tank or heal when they don’t have the spec or gear wouldn’t ever get assigned to a group.
2.) I had one of these last night. A guildie was stuck in CoS without a tank, so I hopped over. Four of us had gear scores (per the addon) of 5k or higher… and then there was the one poor DK with like 3k. Which is not bad–certainly more than acceptable for Heroics–but the guy was really embarassed about the fact that the rest of the group was going to be pretty much dragging him along for the ride. Fortunately, we didn’t have any OMG Gear Score Is Serious Business people, so it went just fine.
This is called “being a bad raider.” I’d have been tempted to drag my heels just to spite him, especially since he’s an (easily replaced) DPS.
Unless you’re in one of the ICC 5-mans, no one should be giving anybody shit for anything 1.5k or higher. My tank routinely does quite a bit more damage than anyone else in the group, and often is one of the top DPSers. And as long as stuff keeps dying, you’ll never hear me complain about it.
Roll on what you can use. It will all even out in the end.
Everybody gears for EH (Effective Health) these days. Everybody. So much damage is either (a) magic or otherwise unavoidable or (b) physical but huge that focusing on avoidance stats will get you very quickly dead. That’s why Feral Druids are great, and why back in the beginning of Wrath they and DKs were pretty much the only tanks to use for Sarth3D–most of their setup is balanced around lots of armor and a giant HP pool to soak damage that other tanks would avoid or mitigate.
Note that items will sell *to vendors *for the same amount whether they’re at 100% durability or 0% durability. **If **it’s an item you want to sell on the Auction House, you have to repair it, but otherwise, save your money and just sell it damaged.
Transit can take a looooooong time. It’s one of those love/hate things about WoW. It’s great, because it gives you a real sense of scale, place, and movement, but it blows, because you can spend a quarter-hour on a taxi and still have another ten minutes of running to do when you land.
ETA:
lizardling: 
I hope it was at least just (at least externally) abrupt and not actively drama-ish. Sometimes just plain leaving is the best option for somebody.
I see that a ton, really. I try to guild-run randoms when possible (OK, mostly just when I’m being a tank or a healer, because that’s more stressful), but when using the Dungeon Finder it’s like you get the lower-geared one to even out the average score or something.
I skim over people’s gear score (via the addon) as an idea of where they’re at and a general concept of what I could expect from a half-decent player with that gear. Once when I was playing my priest (high 4700s per GS addon), I think we were in H Nexus, and we had a DPS who told the group “please go easy on me, I just turned 80 yesterday.” She did fine, I made sure to slip in a “no problem” right after she mentioned that, too, to hold off any judgemental types.
My boomkin has a gearscore around… 3700 per the addon? She’s got a few blue pieces, the rest purple (OK, her Idol is crap, but still). She could show up in Naxx10 and no one would blink. She’s more than fine for Heroic UPinnacle. But some jerk with a gear score over 5000 says “do more dps” and I’m supposed to magically pull more firepower out of her befeathered butt?
Besides, it’s not like the lower-geared people are intentionally horning in on the fun of the “big kids”. I said I’d expected to be paired with people of similar-level gear and nope, never worked out that way.
Yeah, I’ve been out of the tanking “business” for a while, and Elitist Jerks doesn’t have a new “this is how to gear your feral druid” thread, so I’m behind the times. I picked up more combined-with-stamina gem patterns last night.
This particular druid also gemmed the crap out of Armor Penetration when she wasn’t gemming for Stamina - did I miss that memo too?
My husband ran into her in a random - the group told him “the healer left soon after we entered the dungeon, we don’t know why.” He checked out this tank and said something like, “Maybe he was scared at the thought of trying to ever heal up this tank from low health?” in an obviously joking fashion - she was somewhere around 50k, IIRC. Everyone laughed. 
[quote=“Shot_From_Guns, post:8411, topic:488294”]
Last night, the guild headed to Ulduar to pick up some more Fragments for the next healer’s legendary mace (not sure how many we currently have–at least one but no more than three) and work on Mimiron hard mode to (a) finish the Algalon25 key and (b) practice movement and awareness for Putricide.
With the fabulous end results:
1.) I finally got credit for the whole Antechamber (I’d never killed IC before on 25-man).
2.) I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning (25-man Vez hardmode).
3.) Firefighter (25-man Mimi HM)!!!omg11!!11
4.) Two decent two-handers dropped that no one else needed (Worldcarver, which is actually perfect for my current Expertise needs, and, awesomely, Voldrethar, Dark Blade of Oblivion), so I can finally try out Fury. The downside: massive regemming from ArP to Strength. The further downside: the Warrior from my old guild whose little guide I used just told me today that his guide is a bit outdated and I might need to mix it up with some ArP after all, or something. Still waiting to hear back.
Leave it to the German boy to post a picture in the hat you can pull booze out of…
First off, well-deserved GRATZ to our/my guru SFG for those fab accomplishments!
Secondly, I like it when you call me that! Makes me think of home and all my friends there! sigh
BTw, although we kept the hat in our bags, we went back to the helm. Had Silka’s feelings to consider, dontcha know?:rolleyes: Such a regal looking gryph carrying what amounts to a pimp on her back? She says, “I don’t think so, Dad!”
Thanks for the advice on the auctioning! Given what a trainwreck me and da Wolk’ can be, though, auctions are a great money-maker for us! 
I DO sell back to the vendor if something doesn’t auction, so I guess I’m defeating the purpose, right?
Also I have learned to let the auctions go for 48 hours instead of 24…
Transit can take a looooooong time. It’s one of those love/hate things about WoW. It’s great, because it gives you a real sense of scale, place, and movement, but it blows, because you can spend a quarter-hour on a taxi and still have another ten minutes of running to do when you land.
Was the above directed at me, or someone else?
You had referred to a part of my post where I wrote that people would help if they were near one’s level or in the same realm…?
Anyway, thanks for what you do for me and everyone, SFG!
Also, BTW? QModem (Horde) is a Blood Elf not a Tauren. Anyway that’s what I clicked when I made him a Death Knight.
Also, while we’re on the subject of QModem (DK), I need some help as to what I’m supposed to do inside that damn bubble that I’m in floating over the cities I’m supposed to be investigating? I see a red arrow and when I make the bubble go down, I get my ass shot at… Wassup widdat?
Thanks and see y’all on Cairne!
Q
Honestly, at 3700, I’m sure you could even do Ulduar. IMO and IME, anyone who’s that obsessed over other people’s performance in a Heroic, just because the group isn’t moving fast enough for their liking (or their poor planning), isn’t nearly as good as they think they are.
Besides, it’s not like the lower-geared people are intentionally horning in on the fun of the “big kids”. I said I’d expected to be paired with people of similar-level gear and nope, never worked out that way.
If your tank has enough Stam to feel comfortable with their HP pool, ArP would be a good threat stat.
How very odd. If you look at this Armory link, which lists Qmodem, level 55 DK, in Burning Dog Legion, it shows him as a Tauren. Must be a new-Armory glitch!
The addon’s own guidelines recommend 3k for Naxx10, 3.5k for Naxx25 and 2.6k for heroics. But to be honest, even a freshly dinged character should be able to get close to 3k before even setting foot inside a heroic if they put som effort into it.
Stacking ArP is kind of king for physical dpsers once they reach a certain gear level.
Meh, I was going Expertise. I’m so glad I have my own 450 Jewelcrafter/450 Enchanter. And my own 450 Alchemist to transmute those lower gems into epic ones!
Thank you!
Current troubles aside, I know you’ll get things back in order sooner or later, and be visiting there again before you know it.
Well, most items have a deposit price on them, that you don’t get back if the item doesn’t sell. So it’s definitely important to know when to cut your losses, if it doesn’t sell.
Personally, I list most of mine for 24. Of course, I frequently relist items when they don’t sell, so having a medium time span gives me enough time to get good bids in, but still be short enough to relist for a different price if the market shifts. (E.g., I list Item X for 100g, then some jerk comes along and lists a bunch for 75g. The shorter my auction, the sooner I can undercut him by reposting mine for 74g99s99c. :D)
Yup. You’d mentioned that they wouldn’t always come back when they moved on to other areas, and I was commenting on the fact that it can be really hard to do so. Taking half an hour or more round-trip to help someone else for five minutes in an area that won’t give you experience anymore, when you might only have an hour or so to play… Well, it can be more of a time commitment than most people can afford.
Figures you’d go with the prettyboy!
Welcome to The Wonderful World of Vehicles. If you look at the controls on your bubble-floating-eye-thing, you’ll see that you have several abilities. Here’s what you want to do.
1.) Look for one of the locations with the red arrow above it.
2.) Look at your new abilities. There’s one that lets you summon ghouls. There’s also one that collects information about a location.
3.) Get close down over the location with the arrow.
4.) Click (or press the key for) the ability to summon ghouls. This will bring up a green targeting circle, like for the bombing quests. Click again to summon a bunch of ghouls to that location. The ghouls will attack the people who are attacking you, distracting them.
5.) Click (or press the key for) the ability to gather information.
6.) You should finish getting the information right around the time your last ghoul is gone. Quickly hold down your spacebar to get altitude and break combat.
7.) Lather, rinse, repeat for the other locations. When you’re done, look for the ability that returns you to Acherus, and click it or hit its key.
ETA:
Expertise is good, too–up to cap, anyway. I’m not familiar enough with bears to tell you whether Exp or ArP would give you more bang for your (stat budget) buck, though.
Oh, you need that too, but the expertise cap is pretty low, just 217 rating or so(for dps at least, when you’re tanking you’ve got parry to worry about too).
Gotta be a glitch winterhawk11! I saw it too, but when you wrote what you did previously? I went back and DELETED QModem and re-entered him as a Blood Elf and that’s the way he shows up for me…
Thanks
Q