The Aftermath

It's been 12 days since the exiles left. At first, I was baffled and angry. I wasn't sure why they left, and to be honest, they were a big reason why I kept Legacy going as long as it has. I actually cancelled the next payment on my subscription, deciding that either the next three weeks would bring something that would convince me to stay, or I'd dismantle Legacy and leave Azeroth. I faced a decision to on how to handle things. I could either slam the door shut behind them, or leave access to me open, and pray that I could find the answers to my questions. I talked to some of my friends for guidance, and got a mixed bag of responses, from chalking it up to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, to possibly pointing out to a misunderstanding like when our neurotic former officer holy paladin convinced our Resto Druid to quit the guild. I drew up a post the next day, laying out the facts, and my thoughts, to give myself a little more clarity, and see if possibly some members of the blogging community had any ideas on how to best handle the situation.

After a little thought, I realized that salting the earth was easy, I could do it anytime I wanted, but it is also, unfortunately often permanent. So I decided to leave their alts in the guild, and not ban them from our vent. Some of them have popped in from time to time. A couple have seemingly spent more time on the alts in Legacy than on their horde toons. I've found at that they left to go play with some of their friends who had left Legacy and Faction Transferred when going to the dark side first became an option. The Death Knight left to go form a 3s team, which is now 2k rated. The Hunter left because she wanted to raid with the DK, and the other three just kinda followed the crowd. It's nice to have them around, but it still stings. My gut instinct tells me that they're still decent people, but my heart still reminds me of the manner of their departure. The loss of trust that was created by their leaving still colors every interaction I have with them.

Even with the answers I got, there's still some nagging questions that elude me. These are the hard questions, the things that don't fit, and the questions that I fear that if I ask, would destroy whatever goodwill I have left for these people. Why, if the Hunter wanted to raid with the Death Knight, are they in different guilds? Why, if the Shaman could barely make any raids with us, did he think transferring to a guild with pretty much the same raiding schedule, and an attendance requirement would work? How long ago did they put in their applications to those guilds, and continued to assure me that I could count on them for the push to Icecrown? I don't know if I really want to know the answers.

I threw recruiting open the moment they left, and a Fury Warrior who joined us a few months ago and worked his way onto my ten man squad began tapping his resources. He gathered several of his friends, a Warlock, Mage, Rogue, Feral Druid, Resto Shaman, and Unholy Death Knight, who were looking to get back into raiding after an extended break. They were mostly Ex-Get of Fenris members who got sick of raiding when the guild transitioned to Awaken. Heavily undergeared, but extremely skilled. We can get them gear, though, that's not an issue. The losses suffered have been quickly replenished.

Last night, something interesting happened. For the last patch, Legacy was pretty much a semi casual 25 man raiding guild with a hardcore ten man team. We'd made some attempts in ToGC 25, but people lacked focus, and couldn't handle wiping. To be honest, I still had it scheduled only because not at least making the effort would pretty much lay that sham right out in the open. But last nights raid was different, after 5 wipes, people weren't whining and weren't leaving. Each attempt made incremental progress. Finally, after 15 attempts, and two and a half hours of wiping, we had a dead yeti on our hands.

After the raid time elapsed, I rebuilt my ten man team, having 3 of the 5 exiles on my ten man team left me unsure of how successful we could be, but we breezed through ToGC 10, and after an oddball wipe due to a burrower getting stuck on an unused patch of frost in phase three, allowing him to shadow strike, my new feral druid found himself earning Call of the Grand Crusade, Tribute to Skill, and Tribute to Mad Skill all in the same night.

I still don't know what my plan is going to be with the Exiles, but I do know this, I still have work to do. This morning I sent Blizzard the next payment for my subscription.

How to go out with your dignity intact

One of my recent posts inspired a few replies from around the blogosphere, and I promised that I would put together a reply when I got my thoughts and feelings sorted out. My feelings on the situation still evade me, like some sort of greased pig on speed, but the logical part of my mind has sorted out some things that correspond directly with one of the replies.

Tengen posted a reply that was built around the the concept of the etiquette of leaving a guild. In my time as GM of Legacy, I've had a lot of people come and go. People of varying skill, personality, and tenure have left, and they've left via different means. We've had people leave after ninjaing anything they could get there hands on. We've had people leave spewing hate across gchat and forums. We've had people slip off in the middle of the night. We've had our fair share of people who joined up just to use our tag as an resume builder for the further progressed guild that they left for in less than a week. People have left for a variety of reasons, and I remember the majority of them. However, the people that left with the most goodwill from me had two things in common, communication and honesty.

The one player who probably made the best exit from Legacy, despite depriving us of his leadership, 6k DPS, and all of the tailoring patterns the guild had drop, was a warlock who had been an officer in the guild for about 4 months. He was part of my ten man squad. However, he had some friends in Awaken, the top PvE guild on the server, and decided to apply to them. He explained to me that he had put in an application, explained to me his motivations for his choice, and offered to leave the guild immediately if that was what I wanted. I let him stay in the guild, and raid with us until the disposition of his application became clear. He let me know when his application was approved, and left the guild graciously. He went on to earn a Death's Demise title when Awaken dropped Yogg+0, and still came back to hang out with us from time to time.

What can someone learn from that example is how to graciously make an exit. Be discreet, but not hidden. The fact that you're applying to other guilds isn't something that you want to broadcast to the guild at large until you're sure you've got somewhere to land. But at the same time, if you don't tell the guild leader, and they find out, then it just makes you look like a shady bastard trying to hedge your bets. So the key to this situation is communication with your leadership through the proper discreet channels. This might be through whispers, in game mail, e-mail, vent, the website, or any one of a number of ways to get in contact with your GM. Explain what you're doing, and why you're following this particular course of action. Then give the GM's response a fair listen, and work with him to decide what your future with these people will be.

You also need to be prepared for the consequences. Depending on your GM and your guild's current needs, you might find your raid spot given to someone else, or find yourself removed from the guild. But you're gonna lose those things anyways if your application goes through, and if it doesn't, but wind of it gets back to your current guild, you might find yourself out on the street without anywhere to go. But most GMs I've talked with tend to look more favorably upon honesty than negatively about desire to leave.

Now, all of this is still dependent upon the situation being you leaving one guild because you think the other guild would be a better situation. However, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to leave a guild because your situation has become untenable, then most of the rules still apply. Honesty and communication are still of paramount importance, but in this situation, where reaching the limbo between guilds would be an improvement over your current situation, then leaving is more important than where you're going. You still owe it to your leadership to inform them of why you're leaving. You can do this through an in game mail if they aren't online, or some other discreet method of communication. Once you've done that, then you can leave with your obligations discharged.

Through honest communication, you can avoid a lot of the bad blood that comes with leaving a guild, and possibly be the cause for major improvement within the guild that you left. Burning your bridges through either spite or negligence helps no one.

The Audacity of Armor

There's a few blog posts out there that I intend to reply to, but I'm going to hold off for the moment until I have a better handle on my thoughts and feelings on the matter in question. So in the interim, I'm gonna post this response to a new topic that cropped up on maintankadin, and has taken protadin bloggers by storm.

Theck, the bringer of numbers, posted another of his patented analysis threads based on armor, and in particular, inspired by the Glyph of Indomitability. Some readers will remember that I recommended the Glyph to newer tanks in my post on Chill of the Throne. However, I made a caveat.

However, the glyph is absolutely useless on fights where the majority of the
damage is magical in nature.

Wrathy, Rhidach, and Honors have all posted their thoughts on the meaning of Theck's analysis with regards to dogmatic protection paladin theory. This post has kind of turned the ideas behind the predominant effective health formulas on its ear.

However, the conclusions were something that I already had a good idea of, and I'm fairly certain that any of the more cerebral tanks in the game already had a pretty good idea of too. What Theck's analysis has done is empirically prove what we've known all along. That currently slavish dedication to a single ideal of effective health is the wrong way of going about things. Variations in encounter design and damage sources creates variables that the old 11 armor=1 stam effective health equation simply does not accurately map.

In order to determine the best gearing philosophy, it has to be done on an encounter by encounter basis. It also requires an understanding of the limitations of each form of survivability, and their impact on encounter mechanics. A tank has several forms of survivability.

Flat damage mitigation: This is typically involves talents and cooldowns. This is advantageous because it works on all forms of damage. However, it cannot mitigate damage in its entirety, you will be hit through this, and some fight mechanics, which are predicated upon you taking damage, will still remain dangerous regardless of how much flat damage mitigation you have.

Avoidance: Dodge, Parry, and Miss. Each has certain advantages with regards to itemization, however, with the exception of miss, none of these work on non physical attacks. The benefits of avoidance is that it occasionally provides 100% mitigation from melee attacks, which are often the biggest source of incoming damage on most fights. This means that any debuffs associated with melee hits won't land either. However, this suffers from a lack of predictability, leading to healer panic attacks, and straight up ineffectiveness against many different mechanics.

Expertise: Expertise is usually considered a threat stat, and it certainly is, however, against many mobs, it works almost as well as dodge in regards to reducing incoming damage. Once again, Theck brought the numbers. It's kinda like the anti-dodge. Whereas dodge makes the mob attack and not hit you, expertise simply makes the mob not swing at you. However, this has all the limitations of dodge, and another big one. Against certain mobs, Gormak the Impaler and Patchwerk being among the more famous, they don't parry haste at all. In those encounters, expertise does absolutely nothing to improve survivability.

Armor: Armor is flat damage reduction that only works against physical damage. It has all the strengths and weaknesses of flat DR, but also becomes absolutely useless in the face of magic damage.

Stamina: Stamina works by directly increasing a tank health pool. It works equally against magic and physical damage, does not suffer diminishing returns, and scales blessing of kings. It sounds like a delicious panacea, and in some regards, it is. However, it is a statistic that is subject to "magic numbers". The point of stam that lets you go from being two shot to three shot is so much more important than any point since the one that let you stop being one shot by the boss. What the majority of the points in between do is simply make for smaller overkill numbers. It does help with healer strain, but different itemization theory can sometimes be a smarter way to go when you find yourself in the wasteland between those magic numbers. However, while the situations where more stam is actually detrimental are very few and far between, they do exist. Fights with mechanics that scale off health can create a harder healing load. The most prominent example is Anub'Arak's leeching swarm.

Resistances: Resistances are a much more difficult thing to decide upon. If stacked, the right resistances can almost completely mitigate some of the hardest hitting magic abilities in the game. However, it does nothing against anything else. It's also on very specialized gear which asks you to make severe sacrifices in exchange for that resistance.

One finds the optimal balance of stats for an encounter by looking at the mechanics of the fight. You have to look for what kind of sources of damage there are, which ones can be avoided, which can be mitigated by armor, which will require cooldown coordination. One of the most important things to affect your gearing decision is the choke point of the fight, the point at which you are at your most vulnerable. For example, Gormak the Impaler is the choke point for tanks from an itemization standpoint. You need to ensure you can survive the impale DoT melee combo, and while phase two and phase three contain a good amount of magic damage, armor is still a strong choice for itemization due to the fact that Gormak is the biggest threat, and all the magic mitigation in the world doesn't save you when gormak punches you in the chops.

I suppose that someone with far more time and inclination than myself could analyze the parses of those encounters, and determine the choke points in the fights. Then they could theoretically refine that information into an effective health formula that takes into account all forms of survivability weighted by usefulness. The coefficients would change based on each encounter, and give us a valid mathematical setup for the gear set.

However, that's beyond something I feel like doing, so until then, all I can suggest is that instead of mindlessly adhering to the EH formula, do your own research on the encounter, and make educated decisions. Don't be the tank shunning avoidance for Deathbringer.

Tank Itemization Finally Comes Around.

Tarsus has a pretty good writeup on the datamined tanking gear coming in patch 3.3. What struck me about this particular tier of gear is how the itemization was done. I now know for a fact that I will be carrying at least two sets of tanking gear for Icecrown, possibly as many as 4. My bags cry out for mercy.

I will probably be building a heavy EH set to deal with fights like Rotface and Marrowgar, where large amounts of physical damage is the primary issue. This will be constructed out of badge and crafted gear. There's almost an entire plus armor set available. The chest, gloves, belt, and cloak from badges, and crafted pants. The chestpiece alone has more armor than any of the mages in my guild. Think about that, the mitigation you'll get from these pieces is the equivalent of having whole clothies strapped to you for protection. The gear, however, is not without its flaws. The high stam/high armor gear has almost no avoidance on it, and most of it is parry, which hits diminishing returns like Manny Pacquiao, hard and fast. It will be helpful on some fights, but in others, it will become a liability.

Then there's the T10 set. It's well balanced with regards to dodge and parry, and is possessed with a DR free boost to avoidance in the four piece set. This will be particularly powerful in the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter, where higher avoidance can allow the raid to avoid high amounts of damage late in the encounter when Marks begin to overwhelm the raid.

I'm also considering the usefulness of a Hodir style Frost Resist set for Sindragosa, however, I'm unsure of how much damage the tank will actually take from frost, as opposed to the melee. There's also the possibility of an Anub style block set for Lady Deathwhisper and Ogrim's Hammer, but the gap in the attack table due to Chill might make that untenable. Throw in a ret set of gear, and I have no bag space left... :(

All in all, my general progression set will probably be a combination of T10, along with Off set +armor pieces, along with dual stamina trinkets. But the diversity of the pieces allows us to customize our gear set for the encounters we struggle with, and this is a welcome change from previous tiers.

Thanksgiving

Alright, enough with the touchy feely bullshit for now. Time to man up, shove my emotions back into that compartment that's slowly causing me liver damage, and talk about something that affects all of us.

The Turkinator. As you know, there's a new holiday around, and the most difficult achievement for the meta is to gain Turkey Triumph. You earn this by gaining 40 stacks of turkey tracker. How do you gain turkey tracker? By killing wild turkeys in Elwynn Forest of course!

Now the difficulty lies in the fact that you have to kill at least one turkey every 30 seconds, or turkey tracker falls off. Combine that with massive amounts of competition for said fowl, and you've got this holiday's "dammit" achievement.

There are several tricks that will aid you in your quest for a new pet and mount.

• Eat Tracker Snacks. These allow you to track beasts on your minimap, and turkey's are beastly in this game. Unfortunately, so are every wolf, bear, and boar that covers the forest. Use this for guidance, but reliance.
• Use instant cast ranged nukes. Hand of Reckoning is ridiculously overpowered here, as is icy touch. Low cooldown, low cost, instant cast spells allow you to kill turkeys with maximum efficiency.
• Use your mount as soon as you leave combat. Use crusader aura, or unholy presence, or anything that make your mount move faster, because every second counts.
• Most importantly, be one step ahead. By the time you kill a turkey, you should know where the next kill is, and be looking for the one after that.

If you follow these guidelines you should find yourself with a thick Austrian accent, and a new pet and title very soon.

This One Hurt

We recently lost a group of five players to faction transfer. An enhance shaman, a resto druid, a rogue, an unholy DK, and a hunter. From a roster standpoint, it wasn't as bad of a loss as some previous players leaving was. The shaman's work schedule was so convoluted that he only made one 25 man raid per month. We've got DKs, Hunters, and Rogues falling out of every orifice, so to be honest, all their leaving does is open the door for someone else to step up, and should allow us to diversify our raiding comp. I've already got a mage to replace the hunter, and a feral druid to replace the rogue. I could probably force one of our other DPS DKs to go unholy for Ebon Plaguebringer, and use the freed roster spot to bring in an arms warrior for trauma. The resto druid is the biggest loss, as she was our only currently raiding resto druid. But hopefully the tree who's raiding spot she took will get his computer back from the shop soon, and would nullify that issue.

One of the reasons this particular loss hurt more than most was what these five did outside of raids. When I felt like running BGs to crush the horde, they were the first to jump in. When I wanted to run BWL so I could grab the elementium to finish the sceptre of the shifting sands quest line, they were the ones who followed me into Nefarian's Lair. When we downed Algalon and 1 light, they were the first players I boosted to get their drakes and titles. Several of them took the time to hunt me down on facebook which was something that only the other officers in the guild took the time to do.

If that weren't enough, their actions the last few days before their departure kind of rubbed salt in the wound. When I was talking to guild members about how we were going to handle the upcoming Icecrown raid, 3 of them assured me that they would be there for us. Less than 24 hours later they were gone. With a couple of them already accepted into endgame raiding guilds hordeside, Great Men in History and Crypt Friends, I know that that was something they had to have been planning in advance. I don't like being jerked around like that. 3 of them took ilevel 245 weapons from guild runs, less than 48 hours before they left. The rogue in particular, was frantically burning through his DKP during the last raid, and in hindsight, that looked pretty suspicious. One of them even had the gall to clean out everything his rank would allow him to take from the gbank.

I've dealt with some rough times in Azeroth. I've had two guilds collapse on me and leave me out on my own. Legacy very nearly did, until I decided to take the reigns. I've fought my way up from pugs that couldn't clear Noth in Naxx ten, all the way up to an Algalon kill and Tribute to Insanity. I've dealt with far more important raiders leaving than this group, but for some reason this one just cut deeper than the others. I feel taken advantage of.

Normally in a situation like this, I just kick the person, kick their alts, ban them from vent, and blacklist them from guild activities, and recruit their replacement. But this time, I'm kinda at a loss for what I should do. This isn't the neurotic holy paladin that we all knew would snap someday, it's not the mouthy warlock who's only tolerated because he pulls 5k DPS, or the mage who always seems like he'd rather be playing arenas. These were some of the closest people I had in Azeroth to friends. I trusted them, and this whole ordeal not only calls into question their actions, but it calls into question myself for having such trust in them.

I'm truly at a loss for how I should deal with this. Should I go scorched earth, and ruin any chance that the last week was a misunderstanding? Or should I leave them access, and possibly just let a frustrating wound fester?

What's in a Name?

Gravity, of Pwnwear, asked his readers what was the name of their characters, and why did they choose that name. I've only got two relevant characters, my Paladin, and my DK.

Dämmerung is my first character ever, and my main character. Prot spec since day one. His name is German, it means Twilight. I pulled the name from the fourth act of Richard Wagner's epic 15 hour opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, Götterdämmerung. One of the reasons I choose the name was the duality of it. In addition to twilight, Dämmerung is also the german word for dawn. The beginning and the end, just as the tank is the first one in the fight, and the last one to leave. That, and I kind of hear Ride of the Valkyries playing in my head whenever I pull. One of the fortuitous things about my choice of name and class is that most of the endgame titles suit it very well, Of the Nightfall, Starcaller, Argent Defender, Crusader, Argent Champion, Wrath is a good time to be a paladin with a name related to the night sky.

Czernobög started out as my token DK, because well, everyone has a token DK. He's evolved from a glorified bank alt, into an unstoppable blood spec killing machine, and a comical unholy tank for the occasional heroic on the side. The name is derived from a character in Neil Gaiman's novel, American Gods. In it, Czernobog was the Slavic deity of blood, darkness, and winter. Blood, Unholy, and Frost, the parallels seemed obvious. I threw in a gratuitous umlaut, as I do in most of my character names, in order to throw off the annoying gold spam and phishing whispers that plague my server.