Celestial Speed

Blizzard are an intelligent lot. For all that Trade might try, the point really can't be argued: the other night they were pulling in millions of pounds via a queue numbering in the hundred-thousands, and they did it through well-considered use of ponies. To be more precise, the Celestial Steed. Other blogs have already delved into estimating the enormous profit, so I'm going to leave them to it, as there's another area of discussion much more suited to my maths-retardant brain.

Specifically: what the flying horse are thousands of people doing throwing their cash into pixels?

The mount is, essentially, purely aesthetic. Alright, it spares you the in-game cost and toil of trundling over to your friendly local mount vendor and snagging a new steed every time your riding skill escalates, but the cost is so low these days it's negligible. Defending your purchase from a standpoint of convenience alone is going to be difficult. In fact, I suspect most people who're doing this are actually just a little bit afraid of admitting something closer to the truth: they're buying it because it's really, really pretty. And there's a word people tag to you when you buy stuff because it's really, really pretty: superficial.

Superficial - RELATING TO THE SURFACE.
Relating to, affecting, or located on or near the surface of something.
A superficial wound.

As this is entirely to do with a mount skin, it's exactly the right word. The problem lies in the reams of social stigma surrounding this notion: buy something just because it's pretty and you risk being materialistic and focused only on aesthetics. Perhaps you're even a wee bit stupid because you're paying for pixels in a game.

Those that are entirely caught up on that idea need to stop and think for a moment. If you're playing World of Warcraft, I'm afraid you already are paying for pixels in a game. Even if you do it to make new friends or spend time with old ones, you witness everything going on in WoW, from chat to damage output to that nice new loot, through pixels on your screen. So be careful, least you find your argument turns in a lot of “only in some cases” or perhaps “just not in my case” because of your own monthly subscription fee.

Nevertheless, there is some weight to what these people are saying. Buying anything simply because it's pretty, be it a new shirt or a new winged horse, cannot logically be justified. The thing that several members of both sides seem to be missing is that no one is buying it simply because it's pretty. They're buying it because it's pretty and pretty is going to make them happy.

Let me go all anecdotal on you.

The night before the Celestial Steed was released, I split from my boyfriend of three years. While I had prepared myself for that – hell, I instigated it – it knocked me back a bit nevertheless. By the following evening I had a headache and that lingering nausea of recent loss. Not the stuff of violent heartbreak, but suffice to say I was on a downer. Then I found out about this horse, and my immediate reaction was I deserve cheering up. Not “it'll save me a few minutes' travel time and a handful of gold for my alts”, not “it'll boost my mount count for that achievement”, not “I'll be able to hang around Dalaran with the cool kids!” I wanted to nab me some happy and damn, what is a sparkly winged horse if not that?

My purchase has provided exactly what I wanted. I bought it, rode around on it with a mate, and just generally had fun. Not just that, but the depth of my love for shiny horses has left me gleeful every time I log on to find my character sitting on one.

To summarise, I bought something aesthetically pleasing. It made me happy. It doesn't need rationalising any further: as soon as you stop looking at superficial assets and considering them as something shiny with no additional benefits, as soon as buying pretty translates correctly to buying happy, it ceases to be something to get defensive about. It ceases to be worthy of derision.

The PuG Queue Redefined (or: I am Amused by Blizzard's Sledgehammer)

Once upon a time, a night elf rogue by the name of Sevielle squatted in Ironforge. Although she would have much rather been out questing for great justice and farmable loot, this was not an option, for Sevielle wished to do an instance, and to do an instance, she needed Ironforge general chat.

“LF3M to UBRS,” cried one persistent tank, and she recognised the name as the same fellow who had been seeking members over an hour ago. “Just need healers!” he continued, quickly explaining everything. “PST!”

Sevielle rather doubted anyone would send him that tell for at least another forty minutes. Buttering a crumpet out in the real world, she mused vaguely that if she was especially lucky she might actually gain her first member for a group to Stratholme before mister Upper Blackrock zoned into his instance.

Some eighteen months later, Sevielle had inexplicably morphed into Miriah the Forsaken shadowpriest and was idly flying from the Undercity to Arathi to poke the PvP vendor there. Text gushed across her chatbox in the bottom left of her screen.

“Tank LFG SM Cath!”
“WTS [Righteous Orb]!”
“TRADE in TRADE, idiot.”
“Stop spam.”
“When you say stop spam, you're spamming, duh.”

World-wide LFG had been born and already Miriah's brain had learned to compensate by only reacting to certain combinations of letters, namely MC, Strath, Scholo and LBRS. Nevertheless, some subconscious part of her brain couldn't help but twitch at the escalating idiocy the world-wide channel apparently provided, and deduce that the added convenience of being able to travel while seeking an instance group just wasn't worth it. She would later roll her eyes and tut “I told you so” when Blizzard apparently came to the same conclusion and world-wide LFG was no more.

More time passed, and Miriah became Aelystriel the Forsaken warrior, scratching her head as she worked out defence scores, checked AtlasLoot and chose instances from drop-down boxes. Irritatingly, she could only queue specifically for three instances at a time, but it didn't take long for her to realise that, once queued for anything at all, she could click the LFM tab and search through every single heroic instance for a group or group-like gathering of un-grouped people.

First, she chanced across a group of two paladins, a druid and a priest for heroic Steam Vaults. Brilliant, she thought, and sent the leader a quick tell.

“May I join as tank or DPS?”

A long pause. She wondered vaguely if the group leader was trying to find her and inspect her, as they were both in Shattrath. Another player asked her to come tank for him in heroic Mechanar, but as she'd already asked the other group she felt bad about potentially having to let the first fellow down and said no.

“Need healer or DPS,” came the reply at length, and she noticed that he was indeed standing right next to her.

“Brilliant,” she replied immediately, “I'd love to DPS.”

“You are prot,” he stated simply.

“Well, yes, I'll respec.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No time.”

“It really won't take that long.”

“Respec takes time.”

“But surely you already have one member who's volunteered to respec if you need 'healer or DPS'.”

“Full now.”

Aelystriel sat in Shattrath and practised facedesking. As if whispering strangers wasn't irritating enough without exchanges like that. Time passed and she metamorphosed from warrior to rogue to warlock to disc priest to blood death knight to frost death knight to druid to warrior to paladin to mage, and over the course of it all she slowly ceased whispering group leaders and potential group members altogether. Her little comment in the LFG tool said all she needed to say, so frankly those other people could whisper her and save her quite a bit of effort. Occasionally, when she had come home late and tipsy, she would log on and wax lyrical to close friends about the slow degradation of human contact within the game. She remembered a time, oh yes, when she had to sit and talk in a chat channel to get a group! Oh, she thought, easily skimming over the hours wasted in Ironforge, those were the days. To have to speak to people again...!

It was around this point when she changed again into Daelythir the dual-wielding frost death knight. Although she might have been perplexed by her new gender, this was all easily overruled by such a huge change she wasn't quite sure what to make of it: cross-server LFG.

Cross-server LFG came complete with ticky boxes, which the she-male inspected while hovering over the Stadium in Hellfire Peninsula, waiting for unsuspecting Alliance to kill for Marks of Thrallmar. Tick one to queue as DPS, tick the next to state she was quite willing to tank, select “Queue for random dungeon” from the dropdown box and then hit the button marked queue. Within minutes she had a group, the result of a painless process that required no effort on her part. No cries of “LFG!” in a chat-channel, no humble whispers to an irritable party leader, no rejection and no endless clicking through instances to find a group for a heroic, any heroic, only for every party to lack a helpful comment announcing what they needed.

Oh yes, thought Daelythir as his/her Howling Blast stuck a magnificent triple pull of nine mobs to him like Taffy to the roof of one's mouth, Blizzard had done it this time, hadn't they. Mindlessly easy group formation. And all it took was to remove human interaction from the process. Funny, that.

3.3

So, it's big patch day and I'm scanning the notes when I see the real point of this update.

The existing /welcome emote now greets/welcomes targets (character says "hello"), while the new /yw is for saying "you're welcome."

Confusion begone. The /welcome emote had perplexed and irritated me for years; I have to admit seeing it, of all things, being fixed made me grin 'til my cheeks hurt. Huzzah Blizzard, huzzah!

Alright, alright. They've changed Taunt's diminishing returns too. Specifically, mobs no longer become immune to Taunt until five Taunts have landed, and the duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each Taunt landed. Somewhat vaguely, we're also told that "most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all." I presume this means mobs outside of instances and perhaps instance trash; this last part is a tad useless if that's the case, as the only mobs to regularly be Taunted back and forth between tanks are bosses.

That said, I've been musing over why they would make Taunt easier and safer to use, and it makes me wonder if perhaps it hints at more fights like Gormok the Impaler being added in future. The process of letting one tank hold the boss until a certain debuff is applied/stacks to a certain number is one I quite enjoy, as it keeps both tanks entertained and keeps the healers attentive as well. A boss fight that starts with multiple mobs and then narrows down to just one can be particularly boring in the final phase for an off tank if his or her only role is to apply any debuffs and wait for the main tank to make a mistake, after all.

As per usual, though, the patch includes something annoying. It wouldn't be right otherwise, no?

Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc.

Okay, so this isn't exactly crippling. A fight would have to be riddled with fear, stun and polymorph to make me even consider equipping my PvP trinket while tanking, but damn it, haven't they nerfed WotF enough? With these changes to it, Arcane Torrent is becoming the clear winner when comparing the two for PvP. Pfft. And once upon a time we Forsaken were the unchallenged rulers of the PvP racial...

Ahem. Anyway. Warriors, you must be loving our corner of the patch notes.

Warriors
Victory Rush: This ability is now trainable at level six.
Talents: Protection: Damage Shield: This ability will no longer trigger any chance-on-hit effects from the warrior or the opponent it damages.

Stop and take a few deep breaths. I know it's a lot to take in, especially for those of us at level eighty. Sheesh.

In all seriousness, though, the Damage Shield change makes sense and adding Victory Rush to our low level move pool is definitely coherent with all the other changes to make levelling less painful. To a low level warrior, rage starved and struggling to kill things with rubbish weaponry, Victory Rush will be a godsend. Yes, it won't effect those of us who've already levelled in the slightest, but let there be love for our newly-rolled warrior amigos. Besides, the lack of changes can mean one of two things: they think we're fine, or they're working on something bigger and more ground-breaking. I can't really see a reason to complain about either!

Happy patch day, at any rate. Best of luck to those set to raid Icecrown, and grats on all those incoming upgrades to those ready to grind some more heroics for new emblems!

An Aside Concerning Parries

So, after some encouraging comments by Askevar at You Yank It, You Tank It, I healed my first dual-wielding death knight tank the other day. He was no more difficult to heal than he had been while using a two-hander.

What does this have to do with warriors? Well.

As a healer, I was most concerned that my death knight fellow would be more prone to the dreaded parry gib (in which a boss parries an attack, speeding up the next swing, and smacks the tank in the face) or at least take more damage from parry-hasted strikes. This did not prove to be the case, which got me thinking: is a death knight tank the one who needs to worry about parried strikes the most?

Although I have yet to acquire any numbers to back this up, I think the answer is no. Why?

Well, it's because I think we warriors actually hit faster, meaning more frequent strikes and more potential parries. I come to this conclusion for two reasons. The first is that the bouncy thing to the right is, in fact, what my character looks like while tanking, with the odd pause for Shield Slam's animation (although the yellow numbers never slow in their scrolling). When tanking a boss we don't massively outgear we have the rage to attack on every global cooldown, with further attacks occurring every melee swing (be that white damage, Heroic Strike or cleave, they can all be parried). That's a lot of potential parries.

Of course, the death knight is swinging fairly frantically themselves as one-handed tanking weapons are naturally quick and these guys are using two. Like the warrior, they have a melee-swing replacing attack - Rune Strike - but we differ in that skills such as Death and Decay, Icy Touch and the frost tank's Howling Blast are spells. Spells cannot be parried. While I definitely do not mean to suggest that all of a death knight's skills are spells - they're not - I do believe there may be enough of a difference between the number of a death knight's GCDs spent on physical attacks and the number a warrior uses to mean parrying is definitely not a DWing death knight-specific concern.

That said, I haven't found it too problematic for my warrior. Seems boss parries just aren't that consequential anymore, mayhap.

An Extremely Important Note

Aspect of the Hare just made me aware of something awesome in this post here. Wowhead's tooltip code allows you to show tooltips for characters too! LOOK: I am Aelystriel, I used to play Talista but healing is not as cool as being smacked in the face by dragons. I tried tanking as a death knight with Jadwiga but it just wasn't as much fun.

I am in love with this.

On another, less important note, I finally got to tank Maly yesterday! I've been trying to PuG a group there for some time (by some time, I mean a week and a half) when out of the blue I get an invite from my guild leader... and it's a full Eye of Eternity group. I had far too much fun strafe-tanking him around and feeling slick, and at the end of it all he dropped the Barricade of Eternity. An excellent night all around, even if my new internet connection is doing its best to drive me mad.

3.2: The Aftermath

Frequently referred to as “the wellfare patch”, 3.2 caused Emblems of Conquest to drop here, there and everywhere rather than confining them to Ulduar25. On my priest, I heard plenty of complaints about how it was cheapening gear and undermining raiders but you know what? Me and my army of alts were happy to hear of it.

Gearing to a high level is now possible to do without raiding and without relying on luck with drops. All you do is gather little piles of Emblems of Conquest, hand them over to a vendor and receive item level 226 loot. As new tanks we should be cheering about this, right?

Well, yes. But as tanks we also happen to suffer from the new system too.

It's all down to player mindsets. When my brother's prot warrior first hit eighty, roughly three weeks after Wrath's release, he had 18k health and was considered a god amongst PuGers. After all, they had no one else to go to. Gear was secondary to simply filling a party slot. Now that we're months into Wrath, this obviously isn't the case; tanks have been gathering gear for a while so there are alternatives to the new eighty in his silly saronite cap.

3.2 takes this a step further: now the tank that reached eighty a week before you is also sporting 30k health as opposed to your 19k. And it doesn't stop there: your damage dealers are sitting around in epics too, which means 21k health for your plate wearers. Anyone who has ever witnessed the choosing of the main tank in VoA will probably already know exactly what this means.

Oh yes. Respect? You're going to have to dig for it.

There are a few ways to deal with those people who can't resist the chance to complain. First is simply to make your health look as impressive as possible. Keep Commanding Shout active even when you're sitting in a city waiting for the final member. Consider buying buff food too - shelling out for the good stuff is great if you have the cash, but otherwise there's a particular sort of buff food I've grown to love: the Pickled Fangtooth. A stack of twenty fangtooth usually goes for five gold on my server for one reason: no one actually uses mp5 food so there's no demand for it. However useless to casters it may be, however, that 40 stamina is a great boost for a new tank wanting to stave off nasty remarks and help out their healer.

The other tactic, of course, is to simply ignore them. If someone wants to be an ass about your perfectly heroic-viable 20k health, fine. Mentally brand them with the idiot stick and set out to prove them wrong. What you should never do is lie: if someone asks if you're in your DPS gear when you're actually in your tank gear, tell them the truth and be confident about it. Any other reply only makes it sound as if you don't feel you're ready, whilst simultaneously leading the healer on to expect an easier run than he's going to get.

Quite simply, be aware that people are used to better gear than yours and be excited at the chance to try and overcome the difference through pure skill. If your trinkets have an on-use effect, use them on cooldown. Throw Vigilance on whichever party member has the highest threat. Use Shield Block and Shield Wall, Spell Reflect and Enraged Regeneration. Try to limit incoming damage with Concussion Blow and Disarm. Treat each pull like a boss fight in its own right, not through constant ready checking but through intelligent application of your skills. It might make you feel a tad silly for taking trash seriously but I assure you, using all your skills will help you to learn their keybinds properly... while convincing your group that you can still hold your own without all that purple.