Armilus

I played wow during vanilla retail and my guild only made it through spider wing, first boss of plague, first boss of death knight and up to thaddius in abom. Then TBC was coming soon and nobody wanted to bother raiding anymore. It really really REALLY sucked that I didn't get to finish naxx and when it was re-released in WOTLK my guild was speed clearing it the first week which almost made things worse. I've been playing on private servers for about 5 years now exclusively because I wanted to do AQ40 and Naxx again. When I finally got the chance to do AQ40 again I lasted 3-4 clears of the instance before I had to quit raiding. Why? Because I would have to quit my job in order to farm 2 flasks a week, all the protection pots, rage pots, free action pots, etc. in addition to logging in an hour before raiding (I'm 2 hours behind EST so that means getting to work an hour early on raid days so I can leave early). It's easy for people to say "Sounds like you are in the wrong guild" but that's not the point. It's not about the guild, I have 0 interest in doing shit half assed. I have 0 interest wasting hours wiping because half the people I'm playing with are paying more attention to the TV than the raid they are in. I don't have fun carry slackers on my back and I don't have fun being carried on the back of those putting in more effort. Period. I'm also not the only one. I guarantee you will find many people with the same sentiment at any 'tier' of guild. If flasks were nerfed or made easier to farm I would probably still be raiding. (Exactly what blizzard did for TBC) If consumes were nerfed so you can only use 1 or 2 at a time I would probably still be raiding. (Exactly what blizzard did for TBC) If world buffs were permanently disabled I would probably still be raiding. (Exactly what blizzard did for TBC) I know that none of these things are blizzlike in vanilla but in vanilla the vast majority of guilds did not flask every raid member until they started to get stuck on bosses in naxx. My guild didn't flask DPS until patchwerk (which was a more common blocker than 4H in retail (most guilds didn't get to 4H)). Most guilds also didn't stack world buffs or use every possible consume available, just the ones with the biggest impact. The only guilds that did use all these things to the limit are the guilds that were pushing for world first boss kills and when you look at a raid video it's most likely from one of these guilds in the vast minority. For the record, my guild used to get in flame wars on the blizzard forums with "stupid casuals". By today's standards we would have been a straight up shit-tier ultra casual guild but back then we were considered 'hardcore' by most players. I'm 100% confident that if consumes, flasks and world buffs were as widely used in retail MC through BWL as they are on private servers, blizzard would have nerfed them all well before AQ40 came out, never mind naxx. The problem in vanilla wow is that these things make bosses easier (aka the fun part of the game) but don't cause you to have to put in less time to kill those bosses. Instead you just shift time from working on technique and learning boss mechanics to time farming consumables and running around the world chasing buffs (aka the not fun parts of the game). For many people, this makes it impossible to play the game anymore. I would literally have to quit my job to keep up with my guild mates. This is in a large part due to simply being in a time zone 2 hours earlier than most of them. That's a really shitty reason to make a game inaccessible. I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who has quit playing since AQ came out due to this exact problem. Yes vanilla wow was great because it was hard but people played the game differently back in retail and it wasn't as time consume as it is on private servers. You can make the game exactly blizzlike in mechanics but this isn't a single player game, it's a social game and WE changed. We are keeping the game from being blizzlike. Having world buffs disabled is the closest this game has felt like to retail since I started playing on private servers (my guild raided on the weekend when naxx was released and I had a chance to join them for a few bosses). Am I saying they should remove flasks? No. Am I saying they should remove world buffs forever? No. Why the hell did I bother posting this then? Just to give another perspective and maybe something to think about. TBC solves most of these problems and apparently it's coming eventually. I'll just wait for that.

Given the amoral behavior of this project I've decided to remove my tanking guide from these forums since it seems to be linked all over the place. Please update your links to point to my tanking guide on the Nostalrius forums. I will post on the official forums when classic is closer to release.

This. It's not a gold sink and the AH price does not reflect supply and demand. There is no actual 'lotus mafia' but there are a LOT of players who hoard lotus and artificially inflate the price. It's not an organized thing but it has the exact same effect. Increasing the availability won't do anything. When they added herbs to AV on nost that massively increased the black lotus supply yet the prices didn't change at all. Increasing the supply would just cause black lotus to be the new currency instead of gold. What they need is a black lotus sink. Make a quest or something where you can turn in 2 black lotus and get 1-3 random flasks + a high chance for a level 40-60 BOE epic and guaranteed blue or something. Just anything to make it worth turning in the piles of black lotus people have. Even if they just started posting the number of black lotus collected vs consumed and the number sitting in player banks every week it would probably fix a lot of the problem.

Scuba Cops has raided a few times with fire mages now and we have always used PI extensively. I don't believe we've ever managed to accidentally trigger this bug. Maybe we are just really lucky but from our experience it's not something you can do by accident. I would be interested to hear if Dreamstate and Coalition have similar experience.

Now that we finally have some common ground, perhaps we can become the best of friends?

Team blue carries the raid. Fuck team yellow, those guys are assholes. At least team green knows their place.

Scuba Cops is now hosting Alt/PUG MC runs every Monday at 8PM EST (2AM Server time). Loot is +1, main spec over off spec with a reset at Domo. Recipes, legendaries and non-set BOE's are reserved. We start forming at 8PM EST in IF and require at least mostly BiS pre-raid gear. /poke Fervent or Armilus on the IF bridge for gear inspection. Please try to bring an Aqual Quintessence if possible. We've hosted a few pug MC's already and all of been quick, smooth runs.

Going again on Monday! Bring your game face!

Clearing MC in about 2 hours. We're going again on Monday, February 20th!

Depends on the situation really. When you are fully buffed it's more like 7-8k HP so it's closer to an extra 400HP. Still nothing crazy but if your guild doesn't have the best DPS or healers, it's more useful than anything else. On the other hand, if your guild has crazy min/max DPS you might want an orc MT using an axe for the extra weapon skill. In the end, gear and skill are more important than race for tanking but if you do want the best race for the not-dying aspect of tanking, then ya tauren is technically the best for horde.

Technically it's 5.6% for yellow attacks and 8.6% for white attacks on raid bosses when you are NOT dual wielding. If you ARE dual wielding then it's 8.6% for yellow attacks and like 20%+ for white attacks (I don't bother remembering because it is not worth obtaining white hit cap when dual wielding). I believe ranged attacks are different. For many things I would dig up sources to prove this to you but in this case it's such common knowledge and it's extremely easy to test. If you really don't want to believe me or anyone else that's been playing vanilla wow for the last 4 years, download the recap addon and test it yourself. If you want some more to think about, consider this: you have a 40% chance to get a glancing blow on your white attacks vs bosses. Weapon skill does not reduce this chance, it only increases the damage of a glancing blow. What happens when you have a 40% chance to glance, a 5.6% chance to be dodged, a 24% chance to miss and a 35% chance to crit?

You only need 5% hit to prevent your yellow attacks from missing. 8% is for white attacks. Also the way that PPM works for enchant procs in vanilla is a bit different than in TBC. The PPM is only used to set the proc chance based on weapon speed. AKA, there is no internal cooldown, you can get two procs in a row, unlike in TBC where PPM also has an internal cooldown component. Keep in mind that warriors were getting a ridiculous amount of rage from raid bosses. It's not like we are going from JUST enough rage to <50% of what we need. You won't be able to spam heroic strike anymore, which is a big hit to threat output, BUT you should still be able to spam sunder, revenge and shield slam on raid bosses. As long as you have enough rage for that, you don't have to go crazy looking for a weapon that will generate maximum rage because that small increase isn't going to be enough to suddenly let you spam heroic strike. I would put it like this: - If you don't have enough rage to spam shield slam/revenge/sunder, then crusader is probably best because it will increase your rage generation - If you have enough rage to spam shield slam/revenge/sunder, then cruader isn't nearly as beneficial, I'd look at 15 agi or maybe lifestealing over crusader If anyone likes theorycrafting, you should look into 1.3 speed dagger with flurry spec. Spam heroic strike, use revenge and just enough sunder to keep up a 5 stack (or have another warrior do that). I haven't done the math on it, but that might actually be viable. Edit: Napkin math says heroic strike spam + revenge uses ~12.8 rage per second for at best about 500 threat per second and generates no rage from auto attacks. Shield slam/revenge/sunder uses ~9.8 rage per second for ~417 threat per second + rage generation from auto attacks that can be used for heroic strikes. I'm confident that heroic strike with 1.3 dagger is never going to be viable for MT again BUT, you can spec 31 points into fury and still be a solid off tank http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#LhZVVuV0xoVoxfzox Not something I would bother messing around with but maybe it appeals to somebody out there. Would be decent for a warrior that spends half the raid tanking and half on DPS but in that case you should probably be spamming hamstring with nightfall.

You are right that 5% HP is rarely needed, however; with a free 5% HP you can change your gear a bit to have less stamina and more hit/crit/dodge/parry/armor/defense.

Thanks!

Interesting topics about threat and various weapons / procs. Converting Proc Chance to Threat Vanilla wow does not have a PPM system for weapon procs, this means there is no cooldown, you can get two procs, two hits in a row. In order to compare various weapon procs we can't look at just the threat caused per proc, we also need to account for the proc chance. I prefer this method although it is wildly inaccurate for short fights, at least it gives us a basis for comparison. We have 2 types of attacks that can trigger a weapon proc, auto attacks / heroic strikes and instant attacks on the global cooldown, which are sunder armor and revenge. These two sets of attacks do not interact with each other so let's add together the total number of attacks from each source over a set time frame. Let's start with attacks from our instant abilities. These attacks are on the global cooldown so they occur every 1.5 seconds BUT we are also using some attacks on the gcd that can't proc TF, mainly shield slam. Assuming we use a rotation that is something like this: 0.0s Shield Slam -> 1.5s Revenge -> 3.0s Sunder -> 4.5s Sunder -> 6.0s Shield Slam. We can see that we are getting in 3 attacks that can proc every 6 seconds, then the rotation restarts. This makes 6 seconds an excellent time frame, we can easily add in the attacks every 6 seconds from our weapon speed by dividing 6s by our weapon speed. For example, if we are looking at Ironfoe, 6 / 2.4 = 2.5 attacks every 6s. Now we can add the attacks per 6s together and divide by the 6s to get our attacks per second, 2.5 + 3 / 6 = 0.9166 We can now multiply the threat per proc by the proc chance and by our attacks per second to get a normalized TPS value for the proc. The formula ends up being: <threat per proc> x <proc chance> x [(6 / <weapon speed>) + 3] / 6 = TPS Calculating TPS of a Weapon When trying to calculate the TPS of a weapon with a proc I see a lot of people making the calculations a LOT more complicated than they need to be. For some reason most people try to include the threat from the weapons auto attack in the proc calculation. You don't need to do this and it makes the calculation a lot more complicated. Here's why: 1) If you include the threat from the auto attack in the threat from the proc, you CAN'T multiply the proc threat by the proc chance. Why? Because the threat from the auto attack is going to happen whether you get a proc or not. 2) If you can't multiple the threat from the proc by the proc chance, how can you compare the threat of two procs with a different proc chance? 3) It is SUPER easy to calculate the difference in threat from auto attacks between two different weapons (take the difference in DPS listed on the item tooltips, multiple by 0.9 for defensive stance damage reduction, multiple by 1.3 for defensive stance threat increase and by 1.15 for defiance talent) For procs that can generate an extra attack it is a lot harder to calculate threat per proc because we have to account for all of the gear a character is wearing, miss chance, dodge chance, parry chance and crit chance. We also have to account for the extra rage generated and what it can be used for. Ultimately, the only reliable way to compare items that grant extra attack procs is with a full-fledged spreadsheet that takes into account all gear that you are wearing, calculates rage generation and simulates an attack rotation. Thunderfury - Proc only Applying the above formula to TF looks like this. First get the threat per proc, 300 Nature damage, primary target -> Reduced by 10% in defensive stance, 270 base threat Attack speed debuff, primary target -> ~90 base threat NR debuff, all targets hit -> ~145 base threat In total that's 505 base threat on the primary target per proc. Multiplied by defensive stance + defiance -> 505 * 1.3 * 1.15 = 754.975 threat per proc. Now we need the proc chance, for now let's assume it is 25% (which was correct for 1.12 in retail). Put that in our formula and we get, 754.975 x 0.25 x [(6 / 1.9) + 3] / 6 = 193.71 TPS If you are horde and have access to windfury, then thunderfury is even better as it can occur on your extra attacks but this is too complicated to calculate in a forum post and is dependent on what other gear the tank is wearing. It shouldn't need to be said but thunderfury is the absolute king when it comes to tanking multiple mobs. The NR debuff adds threat to every target hit by it and each hit by your cleave/WW should be able to proc individually. Work in progress, will add lifestealing enchant and crusader later. I'm going to avoid adding things with extra attack procs until we see if they fix rage generation and if they do how bad it is for tanks. If tanks aren't getting enough rage to keep up their normal shield slam / sunder / revenge rotation then extra attacks are huge because they generate extra rage.

I think I'll try to get a threat value for no +spell damage, then get a TPS value per +spell damage. At some point in vanilla they stopped proc's from triggering off other procs, not sure if it was ever possible to proc off a proc on nost. I believe it was considered a bug in retail and never intended.

New thread is up with a few updates. This one can be locked. https://forum.elysium-project.org/index.php?showtopic=24163

I am only comparing the threat of the heroic strike ability in that example. The point is to keep it simple and explain one concept at a time. In addition, you can't include threat from the auto attack portion of the ability. It doesn't matter if you use heroic strike or not, the difference in threat due to damage between bloodlord's defender and alcor's is exactly the same. Only weapon speed effects the TPS of the heroic strike ability. Differences in damage affect auto attack only because heroic strike damage increase is not multiplicative, the damage increase is additive. I changed the weapon names to reduce confusion.

Actually yes, Def cap is massively over rated; however, you can still be crit because shield block only has 2 charges (with 1 talent point). If a boss has a physical damage instant attack ability, you are tanking more than 1 mob or a level 1 rat is attacking you because of thunderfury or whatever, then you can run out of blocks before you can refresh it. Up until at least nefarian, Def cap is not a bit deal. That said, defense is a great stat even after you are crit immune, it adds dodge, parry and increases the enemies chance to miss. 1% parry or dodge is equivalent to 7-8 defense as far as mitigation goes. I've seen warriors drop a bunch of stamina, armor and dodge/parry for the last 5-10 points of defense that they need to be at the cap, most of the time that's a pretty stupid decision in my opinion. Edit: Oh and don't some bosses attack faster while enraged? I think chromag does, or is it just more damage? Anyway, even with faster attack from enrage shield block should still be enough.

Where the hell is this misinformation coming from? It's very clear in the nost shutdown announcement that it was NOT a C&D letter, it was a lawsuite, as in, hire a lawyer and show up to court or be found guilty in absentia. Pretty sure one of the admins even said they got C&D letters for years and always ignored them.

Damage increase from attack power is normalized on instant attacks but weapon damage is NOT normalized. (Which is correct, this is how it should work) This means that if you subtract you weapon damage from your instant attacks you will have the exact same damage with any speed of weapon. Slow weapons are still better if you have instant attacks like mortal strike and sinister strike because slow weapons have higher damage per hit. This means that weapon speed doesn't actually matter. What really matters is the min/max damage of the weapon. Prior to normalization a weapon that did 100-150 damage with a 3.8 speed was better than a weapon that does 110-160 damage with a 2.0 speed. After normalization the weapon with the highest damage is better but with two weapons of the same item level the slower weapon will have higher min/max damage. I hope that clears things up a bit... slow weapons are not inherently better after normalization. The reason that many people like vanilla wow over retail is because you can't just pick up any purple item useable by your class and be better. You have to understand the game mechanics and put effort into looking up the best items for your class. In short, the game is a LOT more involved because of things like this.

Oh hey, it's Slippery doing what Slippery does. I love how the same people show up at every vanilla wow project and eventually get banned from every single one. How long will it take this time?? (Oh wait, he's probably banned from the server already)

Yup. It was mostly working by the time players obtained it. The only thing that was broken was the elemental damage. Either it was completely missing and they upped the normal damage to compensate or it was there but treated as physical damage. I'm pretty excited to finally see a completely working TF!

Sounds good. I'll do some time this weekend.

Oh hey, how's it going?