Unbearably HoT

Let’s face it—not all bosses are created equally.

Although we arguably have different tanks best-suited for particular encounters (a paladin AOE tank for Felmyst, a bear mitigation tank for Brutallus or a warbot with a shield to take Illidan’s shears), you can get the most out of your toon by min/maxing different gear sets. “What!!!” you say, ready to sucker punch me and shake your lack-of-inventory in my face, “I already have a resto set, a cat set, a PVP set, a bear set, and a super awful boomkin set! Between all that, my potions, my tokens, and my pets, I don’t have room for anything else!”

While I’d firstly point you to this post, suck it up, get a mod like Outfitter to manage your accessories, and start planning—being prepared for any and all scenarios will make you a better bear. Since I just recently wrote about the importance of hit-rating and expertise rating for tanking, I’m leap-frogging into a discussion on how to incorporate gear pieces and accessories that lend themselves to more TPS (threat-per-second) generation into your standard tank set.

Nocturneus writes:

I am one of the few Bear tanks I know that actually went the route of Defense over Resilience. I like the fact that Defense gives you avoidance as well as makes you uncrittable (provided you hit the magic number.) Being able to get enough Defense at end-game Raid level was rather difficult, which is why most take the easier route of Resilience.

I am currently uncrittable, have just under 40k Armor, 42% dodge and 20k health. The problem I have is trying to squeeze Hit Rating in there somewhere. Any suggestions? Most of my gems are Agility and Stam, Agility or Stam, along with a few epic Defense gems in there from Heroics.

Firstly, the use of a program such as Rawr or a few Post-It Notes can help you keep track of how any major gear changes affect your overall mitigation stats. I can make recommendations, but it’s up to you to check up on your math. Secondly, since I don’t have any sort of armory link for Nocturneus, I’m making suggestions based on my own experience; not all items are easily attainable.

Fortunately, gearing up as a low-level druid is ridiculously easy, and there are plenty of other great bloggers out there who’ve outlined how to do that. The Heavy Clefthoof set takes care of nearly all your chance-to-be-crit issues, allowing you to socket almost anything you please, and the Earthwarden, a great entry-level tanking weapon, is the only druid weapon to date that has expertise rating on it.

Back to the question—I’m sure Nocturneus knows his numbers, but for the rest of us out there, here are some basics:

2.6% = The chance-to-crit reduction necessary to avoid being critically hit by boss mobs; you can achieve this with 415 DEF or 267.8 Resilence, assuming all points in Survival of the Fittest and base DEF of 350, or you can use a mixture of RES and DEF to reach it.
2.36 = The defense rating necessary to achieve 1 DEF skill.
39.4 = The amount of RES rating necessary to yield 1% RES.
35,880 = The amount of armor necessary to reach 75% mitigation; any more armor beyond this point does not offer substantial protection.

Quick Math:
~176 defense rating = 415 Defense Skill
~103 RES rating = 267.8 Resilence

As Nocturneus mentioned, stacking Resilence is easier, especially at high levels when DEF rating isn’t present on our regular armor pieces anymore. Generally speaking, druids tend to pick up the lion’s share of their DEF rating from accessories like necklaces, rings and trinkets or from enchantments. RES rating, however, is present on just about any piece of PVP gear you pick up—and can be fairly easy to get your paws on. Why use DEF then? Each point of DEF skill gives you 0.04% to be missed, to block, to dodge and to parry—but for the purpose of our furry selves, the Miss and Dodge are the important parts. Basically, you’ll probably have to end up using a little bit of both. Here’s why.

Because you need less RES rating than DEF rating to reach crit immunity, a little RES goes a long way and allows for a little more socket/enchant play. Nocturneus clearly has a classic mitigation tanking set—great for repelling enemy attacks and for all-around-mob-bashing, but (as he says), lacking in the hit/expertise department. More than likely, this means that even though his attacks hit for quite a bit, they’re getting dodged, parried or missed more often than they should, potentially wrecking a normal tank rotation and diminishing the amount of TPS he could be generating. Nocturneus doesn’t need to get rid of his sweet mitigation set—he just needs to build other pieces to switch in for maximum threat generation when he needs it.

First thing’s first—eliminate all DEF or RES gems. I know we often rely on that one Seaspray Emerald to throw us over the cap, but in my opinion, you’re better off modifying your gear with RES or DEF enchants. Why? You can’t enchant for melee +hit, but you can socket for it. Putting 12 DEF on your bracers, 15 RES on your chest or 12 DEF on your cloak can give you the edge you need while still allowing for a reasonable amount of STA and dodge.

Next, evaluate how much more DEF or RES you need to reach crit immunity, and bring in one or two pieces of PVP gear or a RES based cloak. The notion that you need to PVP to PVE may not be a palatable one, but it’ll help round out your armor sets. Think about it like this: even if you despise PVP, you can dick around in arena every week, take home some welfare points, and still find yourself able to pick up a T6 comparable chestpiece in a few weeks. What pieces of PVP gear will you get the most out of?

Nearly every piece of Vengeful Dragonhide armor (S3) has hit rating on it. The pieces with the highest resilience on them, however, are the legguards and chestpiece. As you can easily make the socket bonus on the chestpiece and add another +4 Critical Strike rating to your gear (nevermind enchanting the chestpiece), I consider that the best piece to incorporate into your arsenal. Previously, bracers were also an easy addition, but the new rating requirement (while still an easy grab at 1575) may be prohibitive to some players. Still, the RES rating on the bracers virtually eliminates the need for enchanting with DEF, and with another Glinting Pyrestone in the socket, you pick up the 4 RES socket bonus. I’ve offered up S3 comparisons here because they’re now cheap pick-ups free of rating requirements, but if you have the opportunity to pick up the Brutal Dragonhide Tunic (at 1600, also a fairly easy grab), go for it. Let’s quickly compare the Vengeful Gladiator’s Dragonhide Tunic and the Thunderheart Chestguard.

Ultimately, our biggest losses switching chestpieces are in the STR and AC categories—and we stand to gain an awful lot more: hit rating, armor ignore, and critical strike rating, all stats that will help increase your TPS against an enemy target. I chose Glinting Pyrestones for every socket, but I’ve also seen folks stack straight AGI, hit, or a mixture of both. Remember: the point of adding this piece of gear is to enhance your threat generation. While AGI does nothing for hit or expertise rating, it offers a buffer to your critical strike rating, your armor, and your dodge—nothing to sneeze at. With one piece of gear, you can pick up an extra 25 hit rating, the TPS stats previously mentioned, make up the AGI difference (36-31) in gems, and pick up 25 RES rating, all for the price of 23 STR and 252 AC.

Make sure you’re watching that 35,880 armor cap though, keeping in mind that raid buffs such as MotW will also affect your final tally. PVP gear can offer similar stats to tier gear but is often lower in armor and STR. If you’re someone like Nocturneus who is already above and beyond the armor cap, supplementing your gear set with one or two PVP pieces will not drop you below your cap (in Noc’s case, 40k-252 = 39,748, still way above cap) . If you do, remember that you can set up a potion macro and take Ironshield Potions whenever the cooldown comes up—when wearing my TPS gear on Brutallus, I used that particular strat.

Other useful hit rating items include:

Brooch of Deftness = 21 expertise rating, 22 hit rating; badge reward
Pendant of Titans = 20 hit rating; drops off the Reliquary of Souls
Thunderheart Waistguard = 23 hit rating and 1 red socket (potential for 5-10 hit rating); token drops off Brutallus

Now, expertise. As I mentioned in “I want you to Hit me as hard as you can,” the only expertise we druids gain from set pieces is on the Thunderheart Treads. If we want any more than that, we have to look toward items such as trinkets, necklaces, and cloaks. I pointedly exclude rings from that list, because rings are usually items that carry a significant portion of our armor and DEF rating—generally, substituting one of those puts us at a much bigger loss than substituting say, a trinket. The three most easily attainable items that can net you expertise rating for tanking (there are other leather expertise items that are suitable for DPS) are:

Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve = 18 expertise rating; SSO rep item
Brooch of Deftness = 21 expertise rating, 22 hit rating; badge reward
Shard of Contempt = 44 expertise rating; drops in heroic MgT

Slightly more difficult to obtain:

Collar of the Pit Lord = 29 expertise rating; drops off Brutallus
Thunderheart Treads = 20 expertise rating; token drop from Felmyst
Crimson Paragon’s Cover = 28 expertise rating; drop off the Eredar Twins

If you mouseover the tooltips for each of the necklaces (a gear slot where expertise seems to be stacked), there are reasonably clear trade-offs for each one: some have defense rating (a bonus to be sure), high STA, or dodge rating—I happen to have all four for different occasions, but I generally default to the Collar of the Pit Lord for the DEF rating, expertise and 68 STA. Additionally, the proc on the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve is reportedly more useful (for tanking) if you’re a Scryer; an expertise capped warrior, for example, can apparently become “unparriable” for the buff’s duration.
Recap
To allow for getting the most out of your gear’s sockets while remaining crit immune, utilize PVE and PVP gear that combine DEF rating and RES rating—without gemming for it. The sockets you free up can be used for AGI/HIT gems, and the addition of one or two pieces of arena gear will net you itemized hit rating and a plethora of other TPS boosting equip stats. Finally, keeping a myriad array of accessories such as different necklaces, trinkets, rings, and cloaks can allow you to customize your gear on the fly and better equip yourself for different encounters. Keep track of all your new armor-sets using an equip mod such as Outfitter, and make sure you remain crit immune and at your armor cap with a good ol’ pen and paper or a program such as Rawr.

Before I start making any frenzied posts detailing why I worry about feral tanks in WotLK, let’s take a step back and address the now.

Just about any melee DPS class fully invested in damage will explain that +hit and expertise is invaluable—or at least important. Four thousand spell damage or eight million attack power can be rendered useless in a raiding environment unless you can actually connect with the mob you’re targeting. The same situation can apply to a PVP scenario as well: pesky cyclone or root resists can cost you an arena match. A simple armory search can pull up gear-listings for many high-end Restoration druids, and if you take a good look, many of them stack those lovely +10 spell-hit gems, along with Spell Penetration on their cloaks.

But +hit and expertise rating isn’t just for damage classes—the more you connect with the target(s) you’re tanking, the more TPS (threat-per-second) you’re generating. I might even add that it’s even more important for bears than our cat counterparts. I can sit around in front of Brutallus wearing every piece of my super don’t-die-gear, but I guarantee that I’ll miss maybe 2 out of every 3 mangles or have my Lacerates dodged or parried—you get the idea. If the specials with the highest threat multipliers aren’t landing, DPS will be perilously riding your ass.

Let’s clearly outline what we’re talking about here:

According to WoWWiki, “hit” can be defined as “the physical damage that occurs as a result of an attack made with a melee or ranged weapon. The chance to hit increases by 1% per 15.77 hit rating points at level 70.”

For druids (single-wielding, mind you), you need approximately 142 hit rating to increase your chance to hit a level 73 mob by 9%—this is your “hit cap”. When I reference a “cap”, it’s the generally accepted limit at which adding any more of a certain stat doesn’t actually help you. Exceeding 9% to hit won’t help counter dodges or parries (that’s expertise) or even misses; in my opinion, you’re actually better sitting just below the hit cap and chewing on some Spicy Talbuk Steak to bring you up to par rather than over-gearing or over-socketing (when you could be stacking more AGI or AP, etc.). Additionally, you can plan to take off a piece of gear with lots of hit on it and exchange it for a piece with more AGI if you know you’re going to have a Draenei in your party (passively increasing your chance to hit by 1%). While there never seem to be “absolutes” with Blizzard, a 9% chance to hit virtually guarantees zero misses against a target of level 73 or below.

Do you need 9% to hit for trash mobs? No. It rather goes without saying that you need less chance to hit when the level of the mob decreases and the gap between your weapon skill and its defense skill closes. Therefore, if you want to be a super dr00d (or rogue, or whatever), you can actually itemize two different DPS gear-sets: one hit-capped set (9%) for the boss, and one set (~5% for level 70s) that stacks more AGI for trash mobs.

What about expertise?

Expertise is a combat rating that decreases the chance your attack will be parried or dodged. Because druids don’t have any special racial talents (human sword/mace specialization, for example) or class talents (i.e. rogues) that increases expertise (this is changing in the expansion, however), we can calculate the amount of expertise needed to negate dodge as follows:

Boss mob’s base dodge = 6.5%
1% Expertise = 15.77 Expertise Rating
6.5 * 15.77 = 102.505

So realistically, you’d want approximately 103 Expertise Rating to completely negate a boss mob’s ability to dodge your attacks. If you’re melee DPS, you should theoretically be standing behind a target anyway, which theoretically eliminates parries.

Capping hit and expertise sounds like it makes a lot of sense, right? Connecting with your target generates more damage and more threat. The problem is getting there. It’s hard to bitch about getting hit capped when a dual wielder like a rogue needs twice as much as we do, but Blizzard doesn’t itemize hit and expertise for druids. Not specifically, anyway. If you look at the entire Thunderheart Harness, Sunwell items included, we net 50 hit rating (3.17% to hit) and 20 expertise rating. For the record, that’s pretty miserable, especially since 23 of that hit rating is on the belt, which is arguably inferior for tanking to the Belt of Natural Power, a T5 crafted item. Thus, if I’m wearing my “TPS” set for tanking (which is, by the way, beneath the armor cap), I have approximately 4.5% chance to hit and 4.62% dodge/parry reduction.

Lycentia, in his tanking gear picked up from similar raid instances, has approximately 6.34% to hit and can reduce the boss’s chance to dodge or parry an attack by 15.75%. We have to remember that Lycentia is a human wielding a sword and is also receiving the human sword specialization bonus, but that’s considerably more chances to connect with the boss and thus generate more threat per second. Even though druid threat is largely generated by high damage, if you’re not able to cause that damage, you might have a problem. Add Windfury to that equation, and now you’re looking at a chance to proc an additional attack that will, more than likely, connect as well. I’m a little jealous, and I’m looking forward to receiving the bonus from Windfury Totems (so long as I don’t have to give up Gift of Air).

My point is that druid tanking itemization is currently flawed, and that it should be a little bit easier to maximize your chance to hit and chance to reduce parry and dodge without sacrificing our bread and butter stats of AGI and STA. It’s that important. The more damage you, as a tank, put out, the more damage your raid can produce without worrying about pulling aggro. By not pulling your own weight, you’re threat capping your raid’s DPS and severely limiting the speed at which you can destroy a boss. If you can afford to wear a Shard of Contempt and a necklace such as the Brooch of Deftness, Pendant of Titans, Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve, or Collar of the Pit Lord, I recommend it. To remain above your DEF cap, you can supplement your armor with the S3 chestpiece and socket with the AGI/HIT gems. This will likely drop you below the 35,880 armor cap, but if you set up a clever potion macro, you can join the ranks of warbots and slam down Ironshields with the best of them.

But those are (mostly) set pieces. As a cat, you’re probably wearing two pieces of T4 at least, and if you’re lucky, two pieces of T6 as well. Since most of the DPS gear we pick up is rogueish in nature, climbing to 142 hit rating isn’t too difficult at all. This is important because a successful cat DPS rotation relies on heavy crit for combo points and bleed debuffs; if one doesn’t “stick” or “hit”, you’re essentially blowing your whole cycle. A simplified DPS rotation (assuming high crit and ignoring powershifting for the moment) might go as follows:

1. Mangle
2. Shred
3. Shred
4. Shred
5. Rip

Because Mangle amplifies Shred damage and bleed effects, you will not want to Shred or Rip unless your Mangle debuff is up on your target. If you miss your Mangle or your Mangle is dodged, you’re a step behind in your rotation. If you miss it twice, you’re two steps behind and now you’re just wasting energy.

In Cat Form, I’m hit capped but not expertise capped. Some of this is based on the item slots I’ve chosen to use for my two piece T4 and T6 bonuses, but it’s also not quite as easy to get without sacrificing a lot of high-end stats. Often, I only run with the Shard of Contempt, which reduces a mob’s chance to dodge my attacks by 2.79%—not too stellar, but nearly 3% is much better than 0. If you’re not quite as worried about set bonuses or exchanging a high level item without expertise for a lower level item with, here are some easy expertise grabs:

Shard of Contempt (Heroic MgT): 44 expertise rating
Shapeshifter’s Signet (Lower City Reputation): 20 expertise rating
Grips of Deftness (Karazhan Trash): 15 expertise rating
Total: 5.00% dodge reduction

Slightly more difficult to obtain:

Shoulderpads of the Stranger (Hydross): 10 expertise rating
Belt of One Hundred Deaths (Lady Vashj): 25 expertise rating
Gloves of the Searing Grip (A’lar): 18 expertise rating
Total: 3.36% dodge reduction

Total with the best items combined: 7.41% dodge reduction, effectively negating a boss mob’s chance to dodge (6.5%) your attacks. You could even take a piece or two off.

Playing any hybrid class requires a veritable balancing act of trying to make the best of subpar itemization, but while you’re min/maxing for DPS and TPS, remember that you’re gimping yourself if you’re ignoring your hit and expertise ratings.

For a discussion about spell hit and spell damage for moonkin, visit Gray Matter.

It happens. Guilds are halfheartedly disbanding as raid numbers dwindle, leaving longtime home-realms to reroll elsewhere or igniting at that one, final flashpoint and exploding. Why? Maybe folks have seen what they want to see, and have moved on. Perhaps other games have lured people away. Maybe the gap between the BT/Hyjal release and the opening of the Sunwell may have tired early T6 farmers, that guilds farming BT/Hyjal may not have been prepared for Sunwell’s ramped up difficulty, that general summer ennui set in as vacations and finals rolled through, and that with Wrath of the Lich King looming on the horizon, many would rather just sit back and start preparing for the storm. I’m not the first to write about this, and I won’t be the last.


And I’ve had it. It takes a lot more than minor discontent to burn-out someone who’s been progression raiding for over two years. I waited a little while for the dust to settle, take care of some real life concerns and, you know, get my rogue to 60, but here, in list format, is why I quit Singularity and took a break from progression raiding.


Loss of Core Raiders and Attendance Issues
Over the past few months, we had (not entirely out of the ordinary) moments of great shame, and moments of great triumph. We freed Kalecgos, destroyed Brutallus, survived Felmyst and even managed to start in on some rather discouraging Twins attempts. Meanwhile, we were practically bleeding raiders. Geared, competent apps were growing fewer and farther between, and with a sudden explosion of real life issues (marriage, familial difficulties, school), we lost a solid portion of our officer core as well.


In my opinion, some of those folks were the people who really pulled everyone together and focused our efforts to the knife-point necessary to dissect encounters. They were incredibly vocal, critical people, and more importantly, they had the officer tag that allowed them to enforce what they said. The final loss of our raid leader and GM (who actually re-rolled to play with Juggernaut) nearly nailed the coffin-lid shut—on both the guild and my desire to raid. People can’t just be given the officer tag and be expected to lead—authority and trust are two essential qualities that have to be developed over time. Rapidly attempting to metamorphose raiders into new officers didn’t quite work as I had hoped, and my outlook on the situation grew progressively bleaker.


Attitude
I have always considered myself a valuable asset to any raid group: I’m punctual, I’m prepared, I’m a superior player with quick reflexes, and I add a certain, wildly inappropriate something to a raid group. Let’s call it “levity”. As any leader knows, there’s a time and a place for goofing off, and there’s a lot to be said for boosting morale. Generally speaking, I have a knack for doing and knowing just that. It’s not exactly a designated job, but when I’d returned to raiding after my week off, I got a surprising flurry of tells from folks asserting that things had been “boring” without me around. That’s cool. That’s my goal, so to speak.


Unfortunately, not everyone else has this same mentality. If there’s something to complain about, it’ll be complained about, and if they can show up late and play like a half-assed retard, they’ll do that as well. If they can get away with it. Certainly this doesn’t apply to everyone, and perhaps the people who did fall into that pattern had some kind of real life issue to work out. But when that sort of behavior largely goes unnoticed or unpunished in a situation where 24 other people are counting on you, it’s unacceptable. It generates resentment, both toward the leadership and toward your fellow players, spreading like a disease cloud of malcontent.


So when someone like me, who just a few months ago attempted to drive morale and progression with a massive consumable gathering expedition, suddenly finds herself bitter and frustrated and dreading logging on to a veritable shitstorm of ill-geared apps and people who seemingly don’t care anymore, what happens? It dragged on me. I got angry. I found fewer reasons to justify the mental exhaustion from raiding 10:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. on work nights. I unwittingly allowed my own irritation to bleed over in-game, and that, in my opinion, was also unacceptable and needed to change.


Raid Role
Many folks have periodically written about why tanks have such a high burn-out rate. While you can say the same thing about almost any class role, tanking isn’t easy. Let me rephrase that—effective tanking isn’t easy. There is a very high reliance on proper rotations, optimizing TPS output, utilizations of life-saving cooldowns, gear, quick-decision making, and…everyone else. I won’t digress into a tanking discussion here, but whether or not you have an official raid leading role, as the tank, you are often situated there. You lead, quite literally. You often pull. You manage mobs and their respective positions to the raid. You save all the people who mismanage aggro and the healers keeping you alive. And best of all, you’re in a prime position to screw up, repeatedly, and have everyone watch you do it.


That being said, other than watching your own damage output scale directly with TPS, doing everything correctly as a tank still doesn’t guarantee success. As Lycentia loves to say, “Tanking is watching everyone else fail around you.” While the amount of tanks necessary for any given encounter varies, most guilds have a much smaller pool of tanks than they do healers or DPS. Fewer tanks means stricter attendance and a heavier reliance on a small group of people: if a rogue can’t make it one night, you sub in more DPS. If one of your only FR tanks for Illidan can’t make it, you’re in trouble. A lot of time and effort goes into training and gearing tanks, and a lot of people take that for granted. It is, arguably, the most stressful non-officer position in a raid, and even considering leaving saddled me with some rather impressive guilt. A friend actually told me:

If you didn’t want to put up with everyone’s bullshit, you shouldn’t have rolled a tank. Leaving kind of bones everyone.

Relatively shocked, I responded with:

So by virtue of me playing a tank, I am thus held to some invisible higher standard than every other class? That I should continue to play even when I’m not having fun anymore just because I happen to be a tank?

Needless to say, the conversation ended there when both of us realized how dumb it sounded. But those expectations do exist, and I steadily grew tired of them.


Conclusion
That’s essentially the lion’s share of my reasoning for stepping back for awhile and focusing on general makeouts and high fives. I harbor no ill-will toward Singularity at all, especially since many of my friends still play there, and I have no intentions of transferring. Doomhammer is “it”, but it is currently my intention to prepare for competitive 10-man progression raiding in WotLK. With that in mind, myself and the other two tanks who left (along with a few friends) have created a new guild, with a new “charter”, so to speak, to move toward that goal.


I present to you:

DREAD LOBSTER


Recruiting will actually happen soon. Extensive class knowledge, tolerance for multisyllabic words and deliberately unreasonable requests a must. If this is something you’re seriously interested in, talk to me.

Focusing on progression is admittedly tiresome. As long as you keep farming, keep pushing and make measurable headway on new content, you can let yourself get sucked into the whole process without feeling too strained. Unfortunately, everyone stumbles. It’s been a long time since I felt considerably frustrated on any particular raid-boss and had to resign myself to the fact that this could take…awhile. Not since C’thun.


Sunwell can be particularly unforgiving about making mistakes. Screwing up a portal rotation or standing too close to someone else when one spawns can spell disaster. Losing any particular player on Brutallus might mean you’re too short on damage or healing and won’t make the enrage. Failing to Mass Dispel or run away from an Encapsulate victim during the Felmyst encounter…you get the idea. But they’re still easy in comparison to the challenge the Eredar Twins has presented.


Does it help we’re running with too much melee and too few healers? No, not at all. I even had the remarkably unpleasant experience of respeccing Resto the other night for a gangbang wipefest on the Twins. I haven’t been resto since before 2.4 and found things working…a little differently than I remembered. That, coupled with gear that was suddenly sub-par, woefully unenchanted and ungemmed, made for a teeth grindingly good time. And by good time, I mean I went to bed in a dour mood with a massive headache. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for learning, but when we’re running with spur-of-the-moment healers and trying to make progress, it’s hard to expect much.


So we’re cockblocked, well and truly. While we at one point had eight million and twelve mages and warlocks, we now have too-few casters and flurry of assorted melee. The casters are being Shadow Furied into oblivion, piss-poor reaction times to the Conflagration debuff wipe us in seconds and no one seems to be watching their threat at all. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone’s paying attention. I’m sick of everyone discussing the fucking hockey playoffs when everyone is trying to focus, and thus I’m going to pretend that they’re not trying hard enough rather than assume everyone is mentally retarded.


The best I can do is fine-tune my own approach and attitude, and hope that sets some sort of example. HAHAHAHAHA. But right now, it seems like Conflagration is reliably targeting whoever is third on aggro, so we’re hotfixing our approach by using three tanks on Sacrolash as an attempt to control the burn (so to speak). I anticipate better attempts tonight. Since I’m not tanking as of yet on that encounter and (let’s be honest) a rogue or fury warrior better fills my DPS role, I’ll probably be sitting for awhile or going back to healing until we can muscle our way though the tough spots. The catch? I’ll probably be healing on my badge-pimped paladin, Dorkasaurus.


Thus, in the near future, I might be scooping up T6 epics that’d otherwise be sharded for the millionth time in BT and Hyjal and switching back and forth between the healer and tank perspective. In the meantime, I’m busily rearranging and resocketing my various sets of tank gear for maximum soak, dodge and threat generation (fashion show coming soon to a theater near you) and starting to rework my UI for a more efficient healing set up (because healing with Perfect Raid was a nightmare), and any and all suggestions are welcome—I’m even thinking of trying out the Grid/Clique combo.


That’s all I’ve got right now—I’m preoccupied by those Eredar ho’s and our current inability to coordinate well enough to kill them. And remember:

Don’t forget to check out the 5-7-5 Haiku Contest!

If you read this blog every once in awhile or maybe even glanced through the About or Why sections, you probably know what sort of guild I’m in. If you don’t, here’s the quick and dirty overview:


Singularity is a relatively lenient progression guild on Doomhammer (US-PVE) with a long Pre BC history, currently dedicated to pushing progression on Sunwell Plateau. We kill internet dragons Sunday through Thursday, from 10 PM EST to 1:30 AM EST (server is MST). As of right now, we’re ranked second on the server for Alliance progression and third overall. We’re currently being cockblocked on the Eredar Twins, largely because we’re missing a few things. What?


Some raiders, obviously. A few folks with crushingly bad attitudes have moved on to things like Age of Conan (which admittedly, I still want to try) or casual raiding, and a few others have had to leave due to a number of highly understandable real life concerns. While we’re not crippled by any means, we don’t have an awful lot of leeway if someone can’t show up on a particular night , and badge gear on our alts only goes so far. THUS—Singularity has opened up for recruiting again to hopefully pick up some dedicated, skilled players to fill rank.


We want:

• 1 Holy Priest and 1 Shadow Priest
• 1 Holy Paladin
• 1 Warlock (possibly; not high need)
• 1 Enhancement Shaman
• 1 Rogue (maybe, if you rule at life)

What we expect:


From all of our apps, we expect near 100% raid attendance and insane performance. It isn’t enough to sit there and spam Shadowbolt or Chain Heal—we expect that you know your class inside and out and consistently work to better your play and better your part in the raid. Your gear must be of T6 quality or equivalent, or you have to be so radtacular that we want to gear you up.


What does equivalent gear mean? As an example—I’m not concerned with whether or not you have 3k plus heal or 12,000 mana; if you have shit for mana regen and less than 10k health raid buffed, don’t bother applying. If you’re a rogue with less than 300 +HIT? Resocket or go home. The difference between T6 gear and everything below it generally has to do with stats like STA, SPI, INT and the like. You have more of it, which is what we want. Stability. Survivability. If you don’t know how long you can spam Circle of Healing without potting, being innervated or anything like that before you go out of mana, try picking up a mod like Dr. Damage that’ll tell you.


Additionally, although exceptions can always be made, we prefer players who are 18+. We’re definitely an R-rated (if not NC-17) environment, and we don’t want to be babysitting or waiting on other kinds of obligations that young people should have—you know, like lots of makeouts, homework, school and serving your parents. It’s also pertinent to note that we’re all highly vocal and critical people, and if you can’t speak on Ventrilo, can’t deal with that kind of attitude or follow simple instructions, Singularity might not be the place for you.


But if you like rocking out, farming T6 content, pushing for Kil’jaedan and hanging with some wildly inappropriate cats, drop us a line at our website:


www.singguild.com


Feel free to comment with any questions, concerns, etc. here or talk to Runyarusco in game. As further incentive, I hear there might be some “twins” action if we take down those Eredar bitches. Man, those druids are crazy.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who took interest in my “State of the Raid Address”—I didn’t quite realize just how pertinent the topic of burnout-rate was right about now. The traffic that came through Unbearably HoT last night and this morning more than quadrupled the average and generated more discourse in more places than I could have hoped for.


Secondly, I don’t write for Girls Don’t Game anymore. After an apparent series of miscommunications, stylistic differences and being ninja removed from the community without any explanation, it was made more than clear that I was neither welcome nor appreciated there. Your support was, as always, fabulous, and my general gaming articles will have a new home soon.


Thirdly, I received a question in my inbox last week that I haven’t yet had the time to address asking what sort of add-ons I use and why—most notably, wondering what the name of the add-on was that set up my raid frames as a bar graph on the left hand side of my screen in the Brutallus video. Since I haven’t yet made the obligatory “What mods do I use, lol!!!” post, I’ll give it a shot before I delve back into raid mechanics and Hit v. Expertise.


To be honest, I’ve always been a little behind the wagon when it comes to installing add-ons: when Phaelia saw a screenshot of my UI, I think she almost died. I don’t want anything that’s going to turn into a resource hog, make things more difficult, clutter my UI even more than it already is, require me to hunt around excessively in order to update it or perform one stupid function and nothing else (like Oneway’s infamous Clam Opening mod). Regardless, I’m willing to concede that there are some add-ons out there that make my job a lot easier, and I have thus divided them into three categories for your viewing pleasure: SUCKS BUT I TOLERATE IT, PRETTY NEAT and BONERS.
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