Archive for October 13th, 2008:
Addon Corner: Ampere
Now that 3.0 is almost here, it’s time to start this new project here, introducing addons.
I am starting with one of my favorite addons that will be incredibly useful tomorrow, when it comes to getting all the other addons to work: Ampere. Basically, what it does is that in the default Interface menu while in-game you will be able to access the Addons menu that you usually only have available at the Character Screen. Without having to log off, you can disable addons, enable them, get Load on Demand addons loaded, and then reload the UI to get all the changes. Back in the day when one of my addons broke I would have to log off a million times, Ampere fixes that issue for me.
There’s a similar addon called ACP, but I am a Tekkub fangirl, and he writes addons that are teeny-tiny, integrate seamlessly, don’t need hours to set up and are frequently updated.
As special, extra feature I am tossing you this link, as overview which addons should work and which won’t. Good luck! I wish I had gotten a chance at trying the latest Autobar build, but the PTR is down already. It’s coming, it’s really happening! 
Yes, it’s finally happened, my curse has been lifted, my crocodile tears were worth it, the loot gods were gentle with me. In a way. The beauty gods laugh at my foolishness as I am permanently forced to /chicken now.
But let’s start at the beginning of my weekend tale. Saturday we set out to mess with the animal bosses and get the first timer. At my side as off-tank was my partner, who so far had only warlocked it up in there. She’s an excellent tank though. We started plodding through trash, pulls were alright, but mobs took a long time to die. I grumbled about lack of focus fire, which is like group play 101. We had 7 minutes left on the timer when we pulled Nalorakk. However, big problem. I had assumed the other half had been here often enough to know how tanking this works, but I guess you don’t look at the specifics when your job is to pew-pew hard. So from the get-go we had positioning problems. When we finally stood correctly on top of each other, he did his first charge. Unfortunately, that was about the time he started charging someone in the raid. Not remembering that part of the fight, the druid feral charged after him, I flailed about trying to get back to them, and in all that moving around, threat wasn’t built as fast as we normally do. Long story, short end: DPS aggros Nalorakk, he one-shots a mage and a rogue, and we 8-man him for the rest of the fight. Which made this our slowest ever Nalorakk kill and no chest for us. Imagine colorful cussing. Nothing ticks me off like DPS not looking at their threatmeter or ignoring it. Gah.
Akil’zon went better than the last time, but Halazzi was problematic. We had no hunter, so the Frenzy usually ate me alive. We replaced the mage who had never recovered from her Nalorakk booboo, and got a hunter instead. I died just about the same time as Halazzi did, but that’s alright.
Afterwards we went on to Jan’alai. The soft enrage was a bit rough on our druid who is not quite at my gear level, though not bad. We decided to have me tank Jan’alai, which was a first. It’s certainly not the adrenaline pumping frustration of a pre-3.0 dragonhawk tank. I don’t know how they did it, but the two platforms were cleared in no time, despite the other half telling me she ran around like an idiot chasing dragonhawks and not really tanking much. Whatever, it worked.
This took a long time for us, all in all, DPS is really still an issue. We have a raid DPS of 3500 according to WWS, which is not that much for ZA. We called it, to continue with Hex-Lord and ZJ the next day.
Hex-Lord we needed a couple of tries. It seems impossible to keep the ogre sheeped, so we had three adds killed again (ogre, wight, dragon) and then killed Hex-Lord. I was pretty excited that he dropped my Battleworn Tuskguard. It’s so ridiculous looking, yet has such wonderful stats. I really liked the T4 hat, which I used to switch out for Eternium Greathelm for mitigation, but the Tuskguard will cover both nicely, methinks. 
This time I barely managed to remember in time to take picture proof of the kill. The rest of the day was spent wiping on Zul’jin at 46%. This seems to be the magic mark for us, by that time most people are dead. Frustrating. 
In our last two tries, we got to Lynx phase, in our best try we had him at 36%. Which is progress! However, we had so much healer death in the Eagle phase, I don’t see how we could possibly survive Lynx phase with a healer down. We tried having the druid roll lifeblooms on the healers, which worked a lot better, but eventually the druid bit it. As melee, it’s super frustrating. I dual-wielded and kept sunders up for the feral druid, rogue and hunter, but you just fly around a lot, despite trying to stay away from tornadoes coming to the center. I will be happy to see this phase a lot shorter after the patch.
I had two embarrassing tank moments: first time we actually got to Lynx phase, I was just slapping the board back on, but Lynx just decided to hit me for 7.5k while I was doing so, one-shotting me as I hadn’t been at full health in the first place. The second embarrassing moment is that I was so exhausted on the last try of the day that I didn’t look at my own threat, neither did the other half who was in bear form to avoid dying from the whirlwind in phase 1, and bam, she stole aggro, and I never gained it back in that phase. So much for being proud of building threat fast. Bah!
And that’s it. I keep dreaming the dream that ZJ will be dead before Nov 13, arrrr.
Countdown continued: tomorrow!
Well, guys, weekends are usually crunch raid time for me, so I didn’t get around to continuing my series of posts for a while there, but I am finding time now for my final installment. Tomorrow we’re facing 12 hours maintenance on the US and Oceanic realms, likely meaning I won’t actually see this patch live tomorrow, and my European readers will face similar downtime Wednesday morning.
Yesterday I had our last raid day pre-patch, a last shot at bosses before the big change. Post-patch, everything will change. Us protection warriors, we got some amazing new stuff, as I posted about many times. Other classes got major overhauls like that as well. Raid DPS in general will go up as people get new specs. I have three DPS characters that I tested on the PTR, and all of their DPS as tested on the level 70 dummies pretty much went through the roof. With every single of the DPS classes I tested comes a new skill rotation, a completely different way to work on rotations. Most classes seem to have the mechanics that using a specific ability will refresh buff or debuff duration. As example I will name Cut to the Chase that refreshes the duration of Slice and Dice for Assassination rogues or Haunt for Affliction warlocks which refreshes Corruption on a target. So instead of using combo points to refresh SnD, you refresh SnD by using a burst damage finisher (they have been pimped as well) and affliction locks will refresh their Corruption by using a shadow damage spell that can crit. Most classes have received changes like that. Raid DPS will undeniably go up.
I think healers will likely face the biggest change in playstyle. More heals, bigger heals. Fun stuff like Bacon of Light. 
And yet, common healer habits have to die. The death of downranking means healers can no longer use lower rank heals to keep people up. I think stopcasting will be pretty elemental, if a target doesn’t really need that big heal you’re trying to cast. Mana conversation will be huge, as potion sickness is introduced to reduce the impact of consumables. Our chain-potting priests will have to break the habit, as soon as they can.
We have three flavors of tanks until WotLK, and all of them should be doing great on threat. DPS gets lots of fun new toys but they also have to learn how to get the biggest bang for their buck aka mana if they’re casters. Healers get new challenges to see if the lack of downranking and potions is something they’ll overcome. We get more raid-wide buffs for everyone. It’ll be a new game for all of us.
To assist with the changes, Blizzard is nerfing all raid mobs, bosses and trash alike. All of them will have 30% less health and deal 30% less physical damage. Spell damage will remain unchanged. Crushing blows are no more. This should go a long way to assist raids to still being able to kill stuff despite all the changes. Is it a real nerf? We’ll see. I have heard reports that some content can be easily 5-manned now (as in Kara) but also heard reports stating that the nerf isn’t really one but necessary for us to continue raiding until WotLK rolls around in a month.
To adjust raid planning to all the new synergies and changes RaidComp seems like an awesome tool. I’ll certainly use it.
Of course I forgot to add the most epic change of them all: your new haircut and haircolor will make all the difference, I am sure. All our undead raiders will have to have pigtails, to send raid mobs screaming!
Wishing y’all a merry patchday, not too many borked addons, and have fun exploring your new specs.
See also:
