Four Piece Set Bonuses

I logged on briefly last night to chat it up with the guild and see if any of our newer recruits needed anything, only to talk to one of my friends over whispers about an interesting topic, the four piece set bonus. Now while we had a brief discussion on the merits of the Druid tier 10 four piece set bonus versus the paladin four piece set bonus, the discussion digressed into something that sparked my interest enough to blog about it. Specifically there are some classes where the tier 9 set bonuses are far superior to the T10, and there are some classes where the tier 10 set bonus is just godly. While this shouldn’t really pose that much of a problem for almost all of the guilds in the world, we are sitting on the cusp of the new patch having killed Anub and will only have four to five weeks of kills before we phase out ToTGC and start running ICC hard modes.

Because of the fact that we will have somewhere between 10 and 20 tokens for 258 gear, it is essential that we give them to the right people, and not just the person with the highest dkp. In preparation for the great debate that will ensue over this mini loot council that will take place, I wanted to do some research into the four piece set bonuses and which one is better for each class. Now, it is important to know that the purpose of this is to evaluate the tier 10 251 item level gear with the tier 9 258 item level gear, as everyone will be swapping over by the time we have the normal instance on farm and we are accumulating a good deal of trophies. I for one will be spending my first badges on the trinket, so I am not too concerned with the fallout of not picking up 251 gear. The tanks and their set bonuses are as follows….

Paladin four piece Set bonuses:

T9 – 4 pieces: Decreases the cooldown on your Divine Protection ability and reduces the duration of Forbearance by 30 sec.

T10 – 4 pieces: When you activate Divine Plea, you gain 12% dodge for 10 sec.

Initially, my intuition says that I would love to have 12% dodge for 1/6th of the time, with my current dodge percentage I would be pushing 80% Pure avoidance. However, we all know that Chill of the Throne is coming, and as such, this set bonus is much less attractive than a reduction in our bubble wall. To me, for new content, as long as the fight is longer than five minutes, the T9 set bonus gives you more utility and survival than 12% dodge for 1/6th of the time. Now we will not know this for certain until the patch hits and we can actually see the fights, the amount of magic damage being thrown around, and the amount and frequency of melee hits that we are taking, but I believe that dodge will just not do as much as a flat damage reduction. This leads me to believe that the 258 T9 is superior to the T10 until you have the ability to pick up the 264 gear. Now that does not mean that you couldnt wear all offset gear, and in fact that will more than likely be my road, a max armor / stamina set from all of the bonus armor pieces.

Druid four piece set bonuses:

T9- 4 pieces: Reduces the cooldown on Barkskin by 12 sec and increases the critical strike chance of Rip and Ferocious Bite by 5%.

T10 – 4 pieces: Your Enrage ability no longer decreases your armor and instead decreases all damage taken by 12%, and the periodic damage done by your Rake ability can now be a critical strike.

When you look at these, you can see that there is no contest that the T10 four piece bonus is far superior to its T9 counter part. A 12% decrease in all damage taken every minute coupled with ensuring that you do not decrease your armor value during enrage is huge. This is going to be the most powerful tier 10 tanking bonus. For those of you who do not know anything about druids, and this includes myself, Enrage is on a 1 minute cooldown and has the following instant activated ability: Generates 20 rage, and then generates an additional 10 rage over 10 sec, but reduces base armor by 27% in Bear Form and 16% in Dire Bear Form. So, Druids gain a 12% damage reduction once a minute, couple this with the fact that barkskin also has a 1 minute cooldown and has the following instant activated ability: The druid’s skin becomes as tough as bark.  All damage taken is reduced by 20%.  While protected, damaging attacks will not cause spellcasting delays.  This spell is usable while stunned, frozen, incapacitated, feared or asleep.  Useable in all forms.  Lasts 12 sec. These abilities can be used in tandem with T10 four piece, and as you can see, just reducing barkskin by 12 seconds is no where near as effective.

Warrior four piece set bonuses:

T9 – 4 pieces: Decreases the cooldown on your Shield Block ability by 10 sec.

T10 – 4 pieces: Your Bloodrage ability no longer costs health to use, and now causes you to absorb damage equal to 20% of your maximum health. Lasts 10 sec.

Warriors are a bit trickier, because of their set bonuses, skills, and scaling of their ability. Shield block is very nice because of the talents that warriors have to give them the chance to critically block. Shield block Increases your chance to block and block value by 100% for 10 sec. This is a very powerful physical mitigation skill, and as it is on a one minute cool down, the T9 four piece brings that down to 1/5th up time you will be mitigating a SIGNIFICANT amount of damage. On the other hand, warriors are the only ones who have a T10 set bonus which scales with the gear. Their bonus will allow them to absorb damage, giving them a mini shield once a minute, which scales with health. This means that the more gear a warrior gets out of Icecrown Citadel, the more their ability will absorb. A typical warrior in full T9 (ilevel 258) is probably sitting at about 56k (don’t quote me), giving them an 11,200 absorb. While this absorb is a one time deal, it works on physical, magical, and bleed damage, making it a very powerful damage mitigator.

Death knight four piece set bonuses:

T9 – 4 pieces: Decreases the cooldown on your Unbreakable Armor, Vampiric Blood, and Bone Shield abilities by 10 sec.

T-10 4 pieces: When you activate Blood Tap, you gain 12% damage reduction from all attacks for 10 sec.

Deathknights also have a more grey distincition between their four piece bonuses. The T9 bonus is very nice in that it reduces their one of their damage mitigation cool downs by 10 seconds, however you have to take a look at these cool downs to understand what relative benefit you get. Unbreakable armor is on a 1 minute cooldown and has the following instant activated ability: Reinforces your armor with a thick coat of ice, increasing your armor by 25% and increasing your Strength by 10% for 20 sec. This can also be enhanced by a major glyph that gives you 30% increased effectiveness. While this is nice, it is a pure armor increase, meaning that it does nothing for magical damage or bleeds, but is a very powerful physical damage mitigation factor. Vampiric Blood is also on a 1 minute cool down and instantly activated, and it gives you: Temporarily grants the Death Knight 15% of maximum health and increases the amount of health generated through spells and effects by 35% for 10 sec.  After the effect expires, the health is lost. This can also be glyphed to increase its duration. Lastly Boneshield is, as we see the pattern forming here, also on a 1 minute cool down and has the following instant ability: The Death Knight is surrounded by 3 whirling bones.  While at least 1 bone remains, <he/she> takes 20% less damage from all sources and deals 2% more damage with all attacks, spells and abilities.  Each damaging attack that lands consumes 1 bone.  Lasts 5 min.

As you can see each of them are specific for a different situation, and most high end dk tanks should have a dual talent spec with two different trees so they can take advantage of these abilities. While 15% health seems to be the nicest, and it can be there for up to 15 seconds, the T10 offers something similar. Blood tap is an instant spell on a one minute cool down that offers the following: Immediately activates a Blood Rune and converts it into a Death Rune for the next 20 sec.  Death Runes count as a Blood, Frost or Unholy Rune. To me, DKs will also benefit more from the T258 gear and the 4 piece T9 if they are blood, but I am sure gravity can provide more insight into that than I can.

Conclusions

If you are faced with a similar situation as my guild and have to decide where those last few pieces of gear go, this analysis shows us that Paladins and Death knights will be wearing their T9 deeper into ICC than their Druid and Warrior counterparts. So if you have to distribute loot from Anub’arak’s cache and you have a choice between your members and who should get the trophies, Dks over druids, Paladin tanks first, and warriors, well give it to the non tanks.

Weight off my shoulders

The calm after the storm…

Last night I was a bit too tired, and a bit too excited to put  a lot of effort into a post so I thought I would just drop the screnie and the achievement completion on the blog. Now that I am rested, fully overwhelmed with work to do, and in need of a break, I thought I would comment a bit further on our epic kill and answer some of your questions. First, I am no photoshop wizard so I give you the prettier screen shot, courtesy of one of our officers:

p.s. thats me with the wings and the oversized monk on the left…

The Encounter

Over the past few days, now that we had a full raid to go into ToTGC to kill Anub’arak, were promising with respect to the attempts that we had. We were seeing progress with the modifications of our strategy from three tanks to two tanks. I had a steep learning curve when it came to picking up all four adds, and it took me a while to get everything perfect. Really the hardest part of this fight is seeing around Anub’arak’s gigantic hit box when trying to target the adds. I found that the best way to do this was literally turn your camera 90 degrees, and look at the encounter from the side. Once I figured this out, I was able to target the front to mobs and pull them with AS and Hand of Reck.

We had a mixed bag when it came to issues that caused us to wipe. The major issue that the officers knew needed to be fixed was the penetrating cold healing. Now this is not to say that our healers were screwing up or that they were not capable of doing their job. On the contrary, they were pretty pro at it. The problem was that they needed to see enough phase threes to get used to the mechanics and the fight. The past two nights of raiding did just that. We were successfully getting deep into phase three quite often and they were getting better and better at keeping people alive.

I think that one of the turning points last night in our raids performance was when our raid leader decided to start setting benchmarks. If you didn’t get to phase three this attempt, we are calling it and going to do some ToTC 25 man normal. Once that was said, we got him to 10% with out anyone screwing around on the kiting phase, or pulling aggro at the start of the encounter. After that, it was “better than 10% or we are calling it…” Unfortunately I dc’ed on that attempt as soon as we pulled. I ran in got on top of the permafrost, targeted the first add and nothing happened… I was off line.

Do-overs are ok

I got back in and we got him to 8%, not much of an improvement, but progress none the less. The very next attempt started off great, phase 1 down, and anub was especially low. Phase 2 went well, with a clutch BoP by yours truly on the second person being followed. Rinse and repeat, nothing special to see here folks, just keep plugging away. All of a sudden, phase three was upon us and it came quickly. I slammed my armor pot, picked up the first four adds, and they were dead before I knew it. Second set came and went. At this point I was getting nervous, we were doing well, most of the raid was up, and Anub’arak must have been taking enough damage to be quite low.

Third set of adds spawned and people started dying to PC. At this point the raid encounter gets a little fuzzy, and I am doing everything I can to stay alive, bubble wall, lavanthor’s talisman got activated, health stone, and all of a sudden I heard over vent, “Screw the adds, PUSH THE BOSS!” The officers had decided that if we get him to 5 percent and the adds were above 70% hp, then we were going to swap all dps to Anub and see if we could beat the spawn timer of the next set of four adds.

People were dropping, and army of dead was taunting the crap out of the adds. Then it happened, screams. The boss was dead, and I was one happy pally. It was so nice to know that I did not have to tank another attempt of that fight, because its quite stressful as the off tank, tricks of the trade and MDs aside, you still have to do everything in your power to get that initial aggro, and I continued to switch mobs the entire time that they were up so that the mages would not pull off me. Combine the constant tab targeting with the interrupt that had to go off every 30 seconds, and you have one stressful job.

To the victor goes the spoils

As soon as he was dead, I didn’t really know what to do, I usually check the loot on the bosses and see if there are any upgrades for me (yeah I know, I am a loot whore, but only so I can perfect my gearsets). This time, I didnt know what to do, I took a deep breath, and got up to stretch. When I got back to my computer, I checked the loot, and there was nothing on his body that I could use, Plate DPS boots, a melee dps cloak, the pole arm, and the caster mace. No go there, but wait, I am the last tank standing in the guild with priority on loot, maybe there were some juicy items in the cache. Alas, double vanquisher. Well, better luck next week for me, and for our happy DK and ret pally, who snatched up two pieces each, nice upgrades to already overpowered dps. Our dk pulled 11k dps overall on the Anub fight, while our mages were fast on his heels with 10k a piece.

Interesting side notes

The highlight of the night was deffinately the kill, however there was a close second that left us all with a unique story to tell for a while to come. We had been getting a few applicants to the guild here and there, but nothing to crazy. Two nights ago, a mage approached a few of our members and said he was interested in joining our guild. Now normally I do not get excited about mages, as we have two excellent mages that push their dps quite well. However, this particular individual has been on our server since the days I was a warrior who loved to PvP (aka a LONG TIME AGO), and he has always had a reputation to be an excellent player. I regularly remember charging at him with my Hand of Rag and hoping that I got some lucky burst before his POM pyro macro toasted me. He was online on Wednesday night, and we had talked to him about joining our guild. He said that he wanted to run a “trial” run to see how our raid atmosphere was, as the guild he was currently in was not his style.

We made room for him in our raid and took him on a trial run to Anub’arak hard mode. Most initiates would not get this type of chance, but he was part of the first alliance guild to implode who was in the top 100, and had many attempts on anub in the past. Having him in the raid gave us a bit of a twist to our great kill of anub’arak, as he was still a member of his former guild (also known as Titans of Industry, the guild that was competing for top horde spot on the server). The minute we killed Anub’arak, his guild got a nice little spam that said:

Snufyy has completed [Call of the Grand Crusade (25 player)]

He was promptly gkicked from his guild, and we invited him to ours to make him feel welcome in his new home. Now you have to understand that our guild prides itself on letting our actions talk for itself. We dont post on the general forums or spam trade or general chat when we kill bosses, we prefer our competition to find it our for themselves on the progression sites or wow armory. However, with this new development, the entire horde side of the server knew what we did by the time we got back to Dalaran, and I got no less than 10 whispers of congratulations in the first 10 minutes after the kill. That was a new feeling. Now, all that is left is my title and some loot, GIMME!

The only good bug is a Dead Bug!

Anub is down, finally after a really long and difficult road, and I dont mean the attempts. I would estimate that we used no more than 100 to 115 attempts to get him down in total, but the attendance issues were very frustrating.

Call of the Grand Crusader!

And the Screenie… Gratz Crypt Friends

Blizzard revisits old encounter mechanics

As if the hard mode version of the Anub’arak encounter was not challenging enough, we seemed to run into even more problems over the past few nights of attempts. We finally got a raid together to get back into ToTGC. For the past three to four weeks, we have just let Anub’arak fester with more 48-50 attempts left on the counter, and people were getting frustrated. Attendance seemed to be at a new low for wrath of the lich king standards, and even though multiple guilds disbanded for similar reasons over the past month, recruitment was spotty at best. Then, we finally got the people online, in the raid and ready to go, and it seemed like blizzard started patching 3.3 a bit early.

The return of a brutallus mechanic

For those of you that never had the pleasure of fighting Brutallus pre nerf, it was quite an encounter, healing was extremely stressful, and dps has to be at the very top of their game, and tanks dropped like flies. Most guilds’ first kills were after the enrage timer, ours was with all of our holy pally’s bubbled and taunt bouncing him with RD. As if Sunwell was not already perfectly tuned for the top end guilds, which I believe it was, Blizzard introduced a new mechanic to the game.

Brutal PWN – Brutallus targets multiple raid members and instantly severs their connections to the blizzard servers, causing them to disconnect.

The last two nights of Anub’arak attempts were littered with this mechanic, most prevalently by one of our disc priests mid phase three and our main tank in the phase 1 to phase 2 transitions. Every attempt at some point during the encounter, our tank would disconnect. And, every attempt with in the first minute of the phase three transition our disc priest would disconnect. The tank disconnects were painful but we could recover from them with tricks, salvs, and pro grips of extra permafrost when anub burrowed right on top of the patch where the add were being tanked by yours truly. It was quite a bit harder to survive the encounter when one of your two disc priests disappears when he is needed the most.

Needless to say, last night was riddled with painful wipes deep into phase three. While we have plenty of attempts remaining for the rest of the week to get him down, it seems as though blizzard has decided that this will not happen. our best hunter, our best druid and one of our best priests seemed to downgrade their computers and internet connections with in the past few weeks, and we have been suffering as a result.

Coming up next…

I know that I was suppose to work on gear comparisons for all of the Icecrown loot that is going to drop in the next few weeks, but I got side tracked by the EH calculator and raiding. Really I think that calculator will provide all of the answers that are needed with respect to the bonus armor versus set pieces debate. We shall see where today takes me…

The Effective Health Headache, part II

I’m back! After a long vacation and a subsequent holiday, I am back to blogging full time. Although I got one blog in on the couch while my parents watched some football, I really have not had much time for my blog. Well with the holidays gone, and the next one 24 days away, I have a few weeks of solid posts regarding my favorite flavors of the month. The Christmas Tree is up, I am back to work, and I am back to blogging! I wanted to talk a bit about a spreadsheet I have been developing.

Creating a user friendly interface

After breaking down all of the information that went into Theck’s new formula, it is now time to deal with real world application, sure the calculations and derivations that it took to get to those last three formulas, with all of the variables defined are interesting, however most of us do not see the Matrix as code, we just want something simple and easy to work with to understand if we should swap out a gear set in between fights. This is where I come in. I have begun to create a spreadsheet that the greater community can use to evaluate gear choices, and I wanted to discus it in further detail here so that people know what it is about and have the opportunity to provide feedback before its grand unveiling.

This is my first draft of the UI. It is a basic excel spreadsheet with the formulas already built in. It provides descriptions for all of the fields that you need to fill in and will export the final values to specific fields with in the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is color coded to allow for a “gear evaluations for dummies” type feel. The pink (because we are paladins) is all of the information that you should get from both your character screen during a raid, as well as WWS, WOL, etc parses. The green cells are values that you must input in order to give you the calculation’s results, and the yellow cells are constants that MAY be changed but are pretty standard for normal gearing, raid buffs, and consumables. It is also important to note that I kept the yellow cells visible so that other tank classes could alter those values based on their talents, racial abilities, etc and still use the tool.

I just want to also provide the disclaimer that I am by no means an excel genius. In fact, I am no where near the expert levels of the program, however I do use spreadsheets on a daily basis at my job and I like them to be formatted, user friendly, and overall specific to the task at hand. So please be gentle when critiquing the simplistic nature of the sheet, as it only provides relative information for quick evaluation in between pulls and nothing more.

How to use the spreadsheet

There are three specific things that this spreadsheet can tell you, and all of them require a bit more interpretation once you have gotten the information that it provides. I would like to go over each of these important pieces of information one by one and tell you what they are and what we can do with our new found information.

Definitions up front:
X – Percent of total damage taken which was from Bleed Damage
Y – Percent of total damage taken which was from Magic Damage
H – Your total raid buffed health value
A – Your total raid buffed armor
Ma – Your total raid buffed reduction in incoming damage from Armor

Effective Health Calculator

The first and foremost thing that this spreadsheet gives you is an absolute value for your effective health which accounts for physical, bleed, and magic damage. This number is relative to the gear you are wearing, the encounter you are tanking, and all of the talents, consumables, and buffs that you have. When you input all of the values that are required by the spreadsheet, H, A, X, Y, and Ma, you will get a number at the bottom. This is your effective health. This value alone does not really give you much information, but what it does give you is a starting point.

What you should do with this information is compare it with different gear choices, armor and stamina values, as well as resistances to establish mathematically which gear set is the best set for a given encounter. Which ever set gives you the highest effective health value is the one that you should be wearing for a given encounter with set X and Y values. As each encounter has different X and Y values, your evaluations have to be done on a boss by boss basis.

Change in Stamina and Change in Armor Calcuators

The second thing that the spreadsheet will calculate for you is a change in stamina. We all know that the general rule for the stamina to armor ratio is that 1 stamina is roughly equal to 11.7 armor. However how do we evaluate this ratio with the new understanding of relative X and Y values during a given fight. The relative benefit we see from armor changes as X and Y increase, and this calculator will tell you what change in armor is required to give you the same effective health benefit as a similar change in Stamina. Specifically, if you know the relative X and Y values for a fight, and you want to compare pieces, you can plug in the change in Stamina and Armor of a given slot into the spreadsheet and it will give you relative values of the counter part which would provide the same amount of effective health.

To provide you with an example, If you wanted to check to see if a bonus armor piece of gear was as good as that piece with 15 more stamina, you would input your relative values of X and Y into the spread sheet and then type 15 into the dS (or change in Stamina) cell on the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet would output the relative amount of armor required to equal 15 stamina with respect to effective health. This is a powerful tool when assembling gear sets for progression content, where surviving burst is your most important job.

The third thing that the spreadsheet does is the exact mirror of the evaluation above. It will calculate a change in armor and give you its relative stamina value for any given fight, provided that you input X and Y values. So, you can see how much stamina a given piece of gear has to have to eclipse the bonus armor that you have on another piece.

Conclusions…

As you can see, all of these calculations are relative, and they do not provide absolute answers, but guidelines. You can not type a few values into the spreadsheet and get out a best in slot, time to live gear set. This is a very specific tool for a very specific, however powerful, purpose. It will allow you to compare gear sets for given fights to tell you which one will provide you with the most effective health for surviving burst. It will also provide you with modified Stamina to Armor ratios for any fight, accounting for all magical and bleed damage that you take. And it will give you everything you need to understand if you can survive the burst that just killed you by swapping gear.

However, it is important to understand that if you provide the wrong data for the specific required fields, it will provide you with the wrong answer. You must evaluate where you want to obtain X and Y from the parses, and use the correct situations and values in order to get the proper outcome. If you do this, it will help you immensely in your struggles to get past tank checks, but only if you select the correct values.

Breaking down Theck’s newest headache

I briefly touched on Theck’s new formula  a few posts ago, and Rhidach and Honors have done the same, but I wanted to discuss its benefits in the near future a bit more. Currently there is probably only one encounter that you would use this on, and that is the encounter you are wiping on. The problem with this current situation is that there are plenty of smart tanks that are easily available who have cleared the content and can help you with your gear questions. There are no fewer than 5 to 10 posts a day in the Gear Questions and Advice forum on MainTankadin, and these do not include the daily whispers that most top Tankadins get on a daily basis regarding strategy, gearing, and philosophy.

The formula courtesy of Theck, bringer of numbers and pounding headaches…

I don’t know about the rest of you, but just looking at that formula gives me a headache, so why have we been giving this so much attention over the past few days? The values of X and Y in that formula are very easy to obtain via World of Logs or WWS or what ever parse application you use, and they provide for some very powerful information. What we can do with this formula is calculate our effective health for any given death situation. Some of the variables are defined below by Theck, and these account for our specific gear sets, making this formula universal.

The formula uses the following mitigation factors:
Ma is the mitigation due to armor, defined as M is in section I.
Mt is the mitigation applied to physical damage due to talents
Mg is the mitigation applied to magical damage due to talents
Mr is the mitigation applied to magical damage due to resistances

Here X is the percentage of our damage intake that’s from bleed effects, Y is the amount of damage taken from magical sources, and 1-X-Y is the “leftover” amount due to regular physical damage.

Why do you ask is this an important thing to understand? Well as you very well know, I am a fanatic when it comes to gear discussion and theory, and It is where most of my expertise lies when it comes to theorycraft. And, this formula gives us a direct insight into our gearing choices and whether we should be altering our progression gear set for a specific encounter. For those of you who have the same level of math savvy that I do, the following breakdown clears somethings up for us:

The take-home message of these formulas is that armor loses effectiveness linearly with the percentage of “regular” physical damage intake for a given fight. In other words, for a fight with only 50% non-bleed physical damage, armor is reduced in effectiveness by 50%. If an armor trinket is worth 100 stamina on a purely “regular” physical fight, it will only be worth 60 stamina on a fight with 15% bleed damage and 25% magic damage (60% “regular” physical). – Theck

This gives us some insight into whether or not we should be wearing those juicy bonus armor pieces from Icecrown Citadel when fighting progression encounters with in that instance. We have all come to the consensus that bonus armor is a great weapon, and even more over, the armor trinkets that most tanks refuse to wear will have their day in the sun, however, they will be few and far between. The armor trinkets that we have access to through the badge vendors in this tier, and even the upgraded armor trinket with a stamina stacking proc in the next tier, will have specific times to shine, as our block rating gear has on Anub’arak.

It is important to understand though, that the use of these trinkets will be purely situational and most likely in a gimmick set, and not as part of our progression main tanking set. For that set, we will have the Scarab/Juggernaut trinket and the 228 stamina from the badge vendor in ICC. Once again, I give you Theck:

Stam is better in general, because it works everywhere. It’s the VISA of EH.

Armor is American Express. More exclusive, but very powerful in the few places it should be used.

This wasn’t intended to imply that Armor needs to be reworked. I think that Blizz is better off leaving armor as-is. But we need to be able to make intelligent gearing decisions as tanks, and knowing when to use or not use armor trinkets helps us do that.

Is this going to benefit the Greater community, or just the number crunchers?

The true power of this equation is that it will help both sides of the community. First and foremost, this is a better evaluation of the formula and theory of Effective Health. This does not, in any way, change our view on effective health, or how it is achieved. What this does is show us the tipping points in certain encounters where the magic damage or bleed damage has become great enough that armor is no longer as powerful as stamina at a 11.7:1 ratio.

For the number crunchers, we can analyze our death logs and evaluate our X and Y values to see if we need to modify our gear set to include more or less armor versus stamina, and we can do so in real time with irrefutable data. For those of you that do not do that, but still want to be prepared for the fights to come, The gear gurus of the community are beginning to work together to compile a list of damage sources which result in “spike” damage. What I mean by this is, we are starting to comb through our parses and get the damage numbers for our spike damage events for each applicable fight, and we will, when confident that we have a large enough sample size, publish the X and Y values for each encounter.

This will provide a great wealth of information which will empirically define what gear sets you should wear for your progression encounter. If you are dying on Northrend Beasts to Gormok’s impale, then you can come look at those relative X an Y values and see if you need to shed or gain some armor for stamina. What is important to understand though, is that this formula is used to provide insight into those burst damage situations, not overall damage mitigation throughout the fight. Meloree and Brekkie brought this up half way through our discussion and they were spot on with their assessment, it is important to understand the following:

People hear the term EH and they think “that number = my survivability”. In the way you are modeling EH, that is not strictly the case. Tanks gear for EH-contributing stats for progression, this is true, but the ultimate goal is not to maximize your absolute EH. It is to maximize your chance of survival against the primary “tank-killer” scenario of the current fight.- Brekkie

Conclusions and a path forward?

The formula gives us a very logical source of theorycraft from which we can make gearing decisions. It requires a bit of manipulation and data gathering, however when that is complete, we can effectively make on the fly decisions during progression encounters about our gearing choices. Where most great tanks do this already using the trial and error method, coupled with a vast amount of knowledge and gut feeling, we can empirically answer the question with a mathematical formula that should be fairly easy to do in between wipes.

For now, We can go back to Trial of the Grand Crusader and analyze the parses for values of X and Y. As a community we will more than likely come up with an acceptable sample size and get some great values for effective health with respect to the gear we wear. Going forward, I would like to create a spreadsheet for dummies (read myself when I say dummies), which uses simple excel formulas to mimick Theck’s equation and allow anyone to plug in their values to give you your outputs. If the work is on the back end, you can easily create a format where you can plug in your mitigation factors, values for X and Y, and you will have your effective health. Tweaking those mitigation factors will give you a good idea on whether or not you want to stack more armor, more stamina, or even consider a resistance flask.

Epiphany and Dilemma

A Digression from the plan

I know that I said that I was going to go over each of the options for our tier pieces and the off set gear so that we can better understand how we want to spend our emblems of frost, but I came to the realization this morning that I have indirectly had a hand in something that I am not happy about. I will have to admit somethings that you may or may not care to hear in order to tell this story, so I apologize in advance if you get any bad images in your head.

Morning Reading…

As I said yesterday, I have had quite a few emails and blogs to read over the past few days, since my return home, and I just finished catching up this morning. I was spending some leisure time at work in the john reading everyones blogs over the past week, when I came across one by Tengen. He was outlining the proper etiquette one should hold themselves to when leaving their guild for “greener pastures.” It initially got me to thinking about my guild and the times that I have wanted to move on so that I would not have to deal with the poor attendance.

To be honest, I am pretty sure that I would quit the game before I would leave my guild, however there are always unforeseen forces in the future which can change things. However, I digress. When I was reading Tengen’s blog, he mentioned another fellow blogger, which was the source of inspiration for his blog topic. Dämmerung of The Children of Wrath had a post on the subject that I must of originally skipped over in my reader, because if I would have read it, this would have been my topic of discussion yesterday. Tengen was talking about the methods and stories of different people as the leave their guilds.

After I finished reading Tengen’s blog, I had to get back to work and I didn’t give it another thought for a few hours. Then, out of no where, I realized that the blog was about people defecting and going to another guild. I also realized that Dämmerung is the GM of a guild called Legacy. Like dominoes, all the pieces started falling together, and I stopped working on what ever it was that I was working on and opened up Children of Wrath to find this topic that Tengen spoke of, and found what I was hoping was not the story.

From the epiphany comes a dilemma

As I read the opening line of the blog, I already knew the story, with out needing to see my guilds name half way down the page.

We recently lost a group of five players to faction transfer.

As you may remember, I was talking about some attendance issues that our guild was having. Really in the long run, we were doing fine, we cleared all available content save Anub 25 man Hard mode in one and a half raid nights, but the progression fights were hurting. Well, while I was on vacation over the past week and a half, my guild picked up five faction transfers from a guild called…Legacy.

I normally don’t give a second thought to the previous places that our new recruits came from, and I only focus on the future of working them into a raid, understanding their needs and their motivations, and over all seeing if they are a good fit for our guild. However, today I am faced with both sides of the story. I feel as though our blogging community is a small guild of its own. We share similar interests and we talk amongst ourselves regularly. Knowing that I am the result of some unwanted stress and pain is not how I wanted to end my day. Even more so, the question has crept into my mind, do I really want people like that in my guild?

Apologies and Considerations…

Mr. Renaissance Man, I feel for the first time, regret and empathy for the guild and the leader which some of our applicants left to join us. It is an interesting coincidence that the source of your frustration and my own guild and raiding team are one and the same tangled web. With that being said, I have to figure out what I should do about these new recruits. Originally, I was going to treat them as I do any other member of our guild, but I feel that I should be wary of their actions prior to leaving their previous guild.

I guess with every end, there is a new beginning…

What a difference a week makes

I’m Back!

After around 550 emails from work and 75 blog entries to read, not to mention guild and MainTankadin forums, I am no where near caught up from my trip. It seems as though the Icecrown Citadel has fueled most blogs in the past few weeks, and I am ready to jump into the fray so to speak. As I began to peruse the MainTankadin forums, I already felt out of place. When you have a forum community that is that massive, if you do not keep up on a daily basis, you fall behind and have to start all over again. I was always thankful that MT was better than EJ in the sense that there was more than one 100 page long thread to find your information, but it is still a vast amount of information and once you are more than a few pages behind, its a daunting task to catch back up.

Theck strikes again…

Theck has a very interesting and insightful post up on MT which mathematically outlines the effectiveness of armor in fights where magical damage is a percentage of your total damage taken. As we all know there are very few fights where you are sure that you will only take physical damage. The encounters now a days are throwing both boss melee swings in with aoe magic damage, and special physical or magic damage. The real game application of armor’s contribution to effective health is less than what we see on the tooltip. Theck sums it up…

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth. – Theck

Icecrown Gear and You…

Icecrown gear has a lot of bonus armor on it, and while it is never something you should pass up on, the question remains: With theck’s analysis under our belts, do we want to use off set pieces over four piece T10?

I had every intention when I was on vacation to start writing about icecrown gear and encounters, as I have beaten Anub’arak and ToTGC to death on this blog. The data mining has provided us with more juicy pixilated morsels on MMO-champion, and we can start to gain a better understanding of our gearing options going forward. Now while we are being subjected to Chill of the Throne as well as our red headed step child of a four piece bonus, Theck’s work has thrown us a curveball when it comes to deciding what type of gear we should select going forward in ICC. It is important to remember that all of Theck’s conclusions were comparing stamina to armor, so that is the only thing that matters when comparing gear based on his assessments, I will weigh in on the other stats myself.

While we will all walk into ICC with the same general ratio of statistics with respect to Stamina, Armor, and Avoidance, where your guild is in progression will dictate what exact pieces you are wearing. For some of us, that will be full 258. For most of the people it will be a mix of gear. Either way, every piece that drops from ICC is an item level upgrade. So, how do you chose what you should be gearing towards and when you should equip it.

An initial look at our Tier Gear versus Off Set Gear

This is going to be a long journey for us when it comes to gear selection. We have three chests to choose from in the iLevel 264 category, our T10 chest, the Blightborne Warplate, and the Cataclysmic Chestguard. All three of these have unique strengths and weaknesses which make them powerful pieces for compiling full sets, but as individual pieces, we can compare the relative gains and losses of wearing each piece. Each off set piece has a net gain of 23 defense from the tier piece, while there is some room for debate on whether or not stacking defense is still of benefit to us, it is still raw avoidance that you are gaining. Let’s take a look at each of these pieces and analyze their strengths and weaknesses…

This beauty looks great from a holistic point of view. all of the chest pieces have over 200 stamina on them, this one has three sockets, defense, dodge and hit! While I am currently very excited about this hit rating, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Part of the reason that hit seems so attractive to me is the fact that I have less than 50 hit rating currently. What this piece offers us are sound defensive stats and hit rating for threat. To me, this is the perfect chest for our threat set.

This chest SCREAMS effective health, but then again I did just read Thecks post about armor and it’s reality in boss encounters that offer up more than 20% of their total damage as magical damage. This chest has the same base stamina, same number of sockets for 30 stam gems, and it has a 1176 bonus armor. With the expertise trade off for hit rating and the same amount of defense, you are trading 108 dodge rating for A LOT of armor. On the surface that seems like a pretty good trade off if you are not a hit junkie.

Finally, Tier 10…. While the base stamina is 12 more than the off set pieces, you lose a socket bonus in the process, netting you a negative 18 in stamina. You are also losing 23 defense rating. While this is not a huge loss, as we will be well above the defense minimum of 540, defense is still pure avoidance, which I have always liked. This chest is the pure balance that I dreamed of until the day that Ghostcrawler came along and crushed my dreams with a zone wide debuf called Chill of the Throne. With out Chill, this is my favorite piece, because you can get more overall avoidance out of it, however with the advent of a 20% reduction in dodge, this piece has earned the bottom of the list. The only way I will wear this chest is if the Helm, Legs, Shoulders, or Gloves are worse.

Conclusions?

I will be picking up all three chest pieces for the sake of my gear sets, however as long as I am not threat capping my dps, I will be wearing the Cataclysmic Chestguard for progression. While I do not know where these things drop, my best bet is that they are off some of the latter bosses. If I have to pick up the Tier gear to get my stats up, I will, however if not, I will be spending my badges on other gear prior to picking up the T10 chest. Over the next few days, I will be looking at some more of the pieces, namely gloves, legs, shoulders, and helm, to compare what they have to offer us. From the pattern I am seeing, Icecrown will offer us three pieces for each slot, and each of those pieces is specifically tooled for a job. The itemization is a soggy wet dream come true for a gear set lover like myself. There is something for each of my gear sets, EH, Threat, and Balance.

Out of the Office

I know it’s been some time since I have posted, so I wanted to drop by and let everyone know that I am alive, kicking, and on vacation. I’ll be out of the office, so to speak, until next week. I have gotten a chance, in the small amount of unrestricted internet I have had, to check out some of the Icecrown loot, and I have a good deal of writing material when I get home. Until then, keep on tankin’

Quality over Quantity, a theory on Raid Management

…and another one bites the dust

I am going to purposely neglect reading the previous posts that I have had on this subject ahead of time to see if my point of view has changed over the past few months on this subject. Over the course of the weekend, in addition to getting a nasty virus that kept me in bed for a few days (but not away from raiding, psh lets be honest, you can raid when you are sick), another guild bit the dust, and then another one (and another one). Well not the third one, but it seemed to fit the song title well. When I logged back into wow a few days ago, one of our main raiders whispered me and asked if we could talk in vent. After the pleasantries were exchanged, he got down to what he wanted to talk about.

One of his friends was looking for a new guild, as his was on the rocks and in the process of imploding. When we first started to talk about this, I was unaware that the guild that was imploding was one of our main competitors on the horde side for progression firsts. Shortly after that, another one of my guildies approached me with a similar request. This time it was a bit more devastating to the previously not to be mentioned guild. He was in contact with some of their officers, and a large portion of the guilds officer corps was looking for a new home with our guild. This would vacate not only the vast majority of the guilds leadership, but one of their main tanks, main healers, and their best dps.

While some guild politics prohibited the immediate acquisition of any of these players, It got me to thinking about stability, our server, and why so many guilds are failing. While some guilds were set up to fail, based on leadership inadequacies, player base, mass recruitment, or the end all of some high end progression guilds, the Attempts Remaining counter, Crypt Friends has endured. Now I ask myself, as we are running into raiding attendance problems of our own (take three), what do we do differently, and how do we set ourselves up for success over failure.

Two guilds, one result

In addition to our main competition guild having attendance issues to the point where they are looking elsewhere to get their shiny purples, the best alliance guild on the server imploded due to a handful of officers server transferring. While I don’t understand the logistics of why they would do such a thing, both from the perspective that they just got 25 man Mad Skill, an the fact that it was the officers that left, I have to ask myself what we do differently. With two more guilds down, we have unofficially moved into the ranks of number one guild on the server for 25 man progression, a few days after our guilds fourth birthday.

Since I was not a member of either of these guilds, I am left to speculate some of the reasons behind their demise. For the horde guild, I have run pugs with their members, and from the perspective of a main tank, their strategies, execution, and abilities are not up to the caliber of the progression they have achieved. This tells me that they are a brute force guild. What I mean by brute force is the fact that in Ulduar, they raided 5 nights a week to achieve the same level of progression as our guild achieves in two nights. I believe that the Attempts Remaining counter has devastated a lot of top tier guilds who were all about quantity over quality of time spent in an instance.

I can understand that their people who have seen nothing but 5 day raiding schedules would have a hard time with the paradigm shift of quality over quantity. It is just the way that things are. If you want to progress fast and hard, you have to put a LOT of time in. I am confident in my opinion that this is a complete fallacy. While I am not a member of a top 100 guild, we are pretty close, and we are doing it on a little over 1 night of raiding progression a week. We have been a guild that has always had something on farm once it was killed the first time. From my early days of raiding in SSC/TK, to the difficult encounters of Sunwell, up through the Hard Modes in ToTGC, once something is dead, It dies with out more than 1 wipe every week after. We are consistently getting to Anub’arak with 48-50 attempts remaining and have been since the week after we killed Twins. Once again, Quality over Quantity is the paradigm shift in top end guilds right now.

Should we change our Raid Management

I called a guild meeting last night to discuss with our raiders the possibility of open recruitment and stricter competition between our members to earn their raid spots. Even though we are a quality over quantity guild, we are still having attendance issues on our second and third raid nights. Tuesday is always bright with possibilities, and we kill everything in ToTC and ToTGC save anub’arak hard mode. We are basically done with raiding for the week. Our second raid night brings promise of a great night of learning and progress on Anub’arak, for which we have made a lot of in the past few weeks, however we do not have the numbers to do such an encounter.

How is it that a guild with such a relaxed raiding schedule and such success in killing bosses cannot get 25 people together two nights in a row? We are plagued with the casual hardcore raiders, and as a result, the brick wall progression fights are very difficult to fill. Our dilemma as officers and leaders of our guild is as follows:

Do we alter our dkp and attendance policies to better reflect the issues that we are having, rewarding our “SUP sunday raiders” as one of our warlocks loves to say to the 15 of us that show up 100% of the time, or do we recruit to fill those spots and alienate the people that have built this guild into the quality over quantity powerhouse that it has been for as long as I have been privileged to be a member.

As an individual in the guild, and a main tank with 100% attendance, I would love to invite 10 new top end raiders and make our current raiders fight for their raid spots once again, as we did in sunwell. I want to see bosses drop dead, and I want to know that when I log on during the week, that I will have the opportunity to push progression. However, as a leader and an officer, I feel that it is my duty to preserve what we have created in our guild; tolerance for sub par attendance, settling for less raiding days because we get to keep the quality and caliber of raider that we have built over the years, and ensure that our guild makes it to it’s fifth birthday.

Solutions are not black and white

I believe that in the end, the solution to our problem will be a mixture of both options. We will have to recruit if we want to continue to progress. We are going to lose people to real life, or the next spawn of top end raiding guild that appears out of the ashes of the two guilds that are dissolving before our eyes. However, we are, as officers, obligated to keep the environment and tolerance that we have built and which our raiders enjoy so much. To maintain the balance is the true challenge that our officers are faced with on a daily basis. There are some people in our raid that should be replaced, and if we can entice some newly guildless players with the talent to join our guild, then we will be better off than we were. However, we must balance new recruitment with tradition and a mindful understanding of the core of our guild, the players that define us and ensure that we do not go the way of the last four guilds which died.