Over this year it’s amazing the things I’ve learned. Mainly I have taught myself alot about HTML and how to implement it. I use wordpress for my selfhosted blog but do most of my posts on my iPhone. Which means I don’t have access to most of the tools wordpress provides.

I’ve also learned alot about video editing. I currently use fraps for in game video and corel videostudio pro x3 for all of my editing. This is a great thing since I am now making some videos for the guild. I also hope to have a pretty good understanding of making videos in order to capture some of the guild firsts going into Cataclysm.

I’ve learned the importance of social features such as twitter and YouTube for keeping up with news and getting information out to subscribers. This is cliche but the blog has definitely made me a better player. This blog makes me keep up with current specs. It makes me learn new strats on doing things. It makes me know when and where the best place to use an ability is.

Thanks to everyone who has commented, subscribed, linked or even just dropped by. Thanks to the people who have offered tips or expanded on my posts to add more relevant info. It’s great to hear about new readers and what they think about the blog whether it was good, bad or indifferent. At this time I am having fun in game and don’t plan on leaving anytime soon but as for the blog I think it’s about time I retired it.

Thank You All!

Here’s a link to the video;
Cocytus vs. Lich King p1/2

Combat logs have always been a great place that I’ve learned many things from. Seeing our video visually really opened my eyes to a couple things. Things I learned from the videos.

1) I am super overly hesitant when it comes to a boss that I’ve never downed before. Thinking that if I am out of position RNG will surely screw me and in turn, the raid group

2) My mutilate was not macroed like it should’ve been. I had always noticed that my auto attack was a little slow to get started. At 6 minutes into the second video it is blatantly apparent that a change needed to be made, enter mutilate macro;

3) Phase 3 is the fight. Grouping up for Valks, downing Valks and then spreading out for Defile. Get this down and you are gold. We only saw phase five 3 times in our numerous attempts on the Lich King. On the third time we downed it.

4) My dependency on clicking in a high movement fight hinders me ridiculously. I’m going to work hard on getting movement with a mouse down pat so that I can actually use my abilities in a timely manner. I’ve heard that playing a FPS on the computer can really help when dealing with “the clickies”. Maybe I’ll give that a shot.

The guild and I have downed 7 of 12 ten man hardmodes already, so now we will have to focus on getting the other 5 down in order to finish off our 10 man progression.

When is Cataclysm going to be released? Everyone has there own way of figuring this stuff out. 99% of us are not right. However I decided to go back and look at some notes from previous expansions to try and pinpoint a week for the Cataclysm release.

I want to start off with patches and beta announcements to see how each expansions final patch release is in relation to the release date of the next expansion. Vanilla WOW’s final patch was patch 1.12.1 and it was released on 9/26/06. This date is one month from the beta announcement Oct 13th 2006 and about 4 months from the actual release date of BC, 1/16/07.

The Burning Crusades final patch was 2.4.3 and it was released on 7/15/08, a mere 3 days before the beta of Wotlk was announced. Wrath of the Lich King was then released on November 13th, 4 months after the final patch was released.

What does all this mean going into Cataclysm? Might not mean much considering all of the gameplay and new content Blizzard has to test before the release of Cataclysm. But for the sake of this post Wrath of the Lich Kings final patch, 3.3.5, was released on 6/22/2010. The beta was then released 8 days later on 6/30/2010. By this logic that would put the release date of Cataclysm on…

Drumroll please….

NOVEMBER 2nd!!

I chose this date because it is a full two weeks after Blizzcon is over. It also lines up with the 4 month intervals of the final patch in the last two expansions. I think the actual announcement for the new expansion will come sometime in early September. This is only a guess so take it with a grain of salt.

What kind of guesses does everyone else have on the expansion?

My Druid Mandelbaum is finally 80. He went kitty for the simple fact that I figured playing another melée class would limit my learning curve for a new character and that the play seemed similar to a Rogue.

I was dead wrong…

Combo Points. And that’s where the similarities end.

No interrupt.
No threat redirection.
No threat dump.
A raid buff.
Innervate.
Battle Rez.

Learning to play this kitty has been tough. I’m having to watch threat. I’m having to keep up with dead raid members. I’m having to watch for low mana healers. O yea and I’m having to keep up with 4 debuffs as opposed to my combo point mashing 1-1-1-2 Rogue.

If you’re interested in learning more about one of the toughest melee specs in the game to play, check out these videos by Coldbear.
Guide How to Feral DPS part One
Guide How to Feral DPS part Two

Now the rewards for this spec. High dps with a skilled knowledgeable player behind the toon. Unfortunately I am neither, so I am slowly but surely learning the class as best I can. It doesn’t hurt that currently melee is broken and by far the class of the field in Wrath. Tons of raid utility in the form of Innervate and Battle Rezs.

All in all it’s been a big change from my Rogue but I am really enjoying it so far. I’ve also been able to use the gear I’m replacing as tank gear. Since the stats don’t change it’s super easy to get a decent tanking set by just upgrading your current gear.

***Currently Reading***
Big Bear Butt Blog
Feral Aggression Blog

Is it too early to speculate on a Cataclysm raid spec? Probably. Are these trees finalized yet? Probably Not. Is Blizzard going to care what I think they should do to change these new Cataclysm trees? Nope. Am I going to write this post anyways? Yep

Take a look at the initial Rogue talent tree and mastery bonuses here; Wowhead Talent Calculator.

***I have a couple specs linked in this post. They are currently not working on the wowhead site. Some talents look like they’ve change since this was posted.***

Right off the bat you’re going to notice one thing about the assassination tree. Out of the first 5 talent points you use, 2 are completely wasted. For end game raiding neither Improved Eviscerate or Deadly Momentum have any use, damage or survivability. Unless by some kind of crazy turn of events Eviscerate becomes the new finisher for Mutilate. Combat on the other-hand will definitely use the assassination tree to there advantage by speccing possibly 7 talent points deep as they gain big buffs from the tree.

What we lose from the current end game spec. 51/18/2
Lightning Reflexes. Too far into the combat tree to get too. Less haste meaning less white damage and energy regeneration.
Dual Wield Specialization. Mastery bonus for combat.
Quick Recovery. As of right now we lose the energy refund from missed attacks on this ability. Not sure why, but I don’t think this is OPed and hopefully will be added back.
Hunger for Blood. This has been replaced by Vendetta and adds another cooldown to the Mutilate rotation.

What we gain.
Vendetta is the replacement for Hunger for Blood.
Quick Recovery and Fleet Footed are now in the same talent, Quickening, so we get them both and no longer have to choose. This adds some great survivability to rogues.
Camouflage. Not sure if this one will make the cut but it’s another speed buff and let’s us get to the boss faster stealthed in order to maximize Overkill. It’s also the only viable place to spend talent points, in the Subtlety tree, to get to Opportunity with a mutilate build.
Opportunity. Just a straight 10% damage buff, per talent point(max 3) to Mutilate. This talent was used in the old Mutilate with Rupture spec.
Coldblood. Now also grants 20 energy and makes this CD much more useful then its Wrath counterpart.

These trees will change as the beta moves along. I do believe that the first row of talents for assassination will be changed to help end game a little more by adding a new talent or adding an additional benefit to one of the current choices. Moving Improved Eviscerate to the Combat tree would be the most effective. Trading this with Precision would be awesome!

The next thing that jumps out at me is the lack of good places to spend talent points in the combat tree after the first tier. It would seem that as of right now to maximize dps your ideal spec would be 31/2/8. Bad thing about this is we take a hit in our hit. Only providing 4% hit instead of 6%. Blizzard has stated that they would like to make things such as the hit cap harder to get too. If this is the case the 6% may end up being more important, and so the spec may be more 31/3/7.

Last thing I want to talk about is Improved Expose Armor. What an awesome talent. Is it warranted to spec into? If your guild is into some hardcore progression, every deep counts and you have no warrior then yes this talent becomes pretty important. The other good thing is you wouldn’t sacrifice good dps talents from the tree to get it. Instead you would probably trade Quickening for it.

It would appear that Blizz has figured out a way to accomplish the goal of having talent points that are movable and up to the discretion of each individual player. This will end up being a great tool for players to utilize depending on what content they’re working on, what the raid makeup looks like and personal preference. It’s a surprisingly refreshing change from the “you have to spec this way to do max dps”. Zarhym made it perfectly clear that some trees and classes still needed some work. He said Assassination Rogues were one of them. Not sure how big the changes will be but as of right now I love the look of it. Like I mentioned earlier the only thing I would like to see changed is the removal of Improved Eviscerate from the Assassination tree.

That’s right boys and girls, get out your stuns, anesthetic poison and cloak of shadows. It’s time for Ruby Sanctum!!

First off caster trash mobs have annoying knockback aoe abilities so use your stuns as much as possible on these guys.

First Mini Boss, Baltharus the Warborn, to your left as you enter. Nothing to crazy here. Boss throws out a debuff to all melée. Spread out until debuff clears and then continue deeps. At 50% this boss splits in two, remain on first boss and let the off tank grab the second one. These guys have a big cleave so leave aggro to the tanks. Tricks and Vanish may be needed on this fight.

Mini Boss #2, Saviana Ragefire, is a dragon on the right of the instance as you enter. Unless you’re running with a hunter, throw some anesthetic poison on and lawl at Saviana’s enrage mechanic. This boss is easy enough so just treat it like any other dragon and watch for flame breaths.

Mini Boss #3, General Zarithrian, is located on the far end of the instance and has a couple of abilities that while manageable do add some chaos. Zarith can be disarmed so use it early and often to save the tank a little bit of damage. Basically they’re two phases to this fight which will repeat over and over. Phase one is a simple tank and spank. After a few seconds he will fear the entire raid and summon two adds at opposite ends of the area. We put some CC on one mob and had the off tank grab the other one while we focus them down one at a time. There are some tank switches here so save your Tricks for the tanks and help them build some aggro on the spawned mobs. I’m pretty sure it’s possible to Zerg this one without worrying about the adds but am not completely sure on the logistics and if the tanks still need to switch.

Once these three mini bosses have been defeated Halion will appear in the middle of the room.

Halion. ProTip – This is a dragon, normal rules apply. Never find yourself at the head or tail of this boss. Always try to park yourself in a rear quadrant of the boss. Blizz seems to have fell in love with their defile/shadow trap mechanic as in all phases of this fight you’re dealing with something very similar. Halion throws out a debuff on one raid member which will, when dispelled, drop a ring on the ground. Fiery Combustion in the physical realm and Soul Consumption in the twilight realm. The longer this debuff remains on a player the bigger the ring on the ground. One person in the raid should be your designated dispeller. If for some reason you run your debuff out of the group and get out of range of the dispeller just pop your cloak and drop it. Be careful though, dropping this debuff in the first phase causes a knockback to all players inside the ring. Where as in phase two dropping this on a raid member causes a suck in effect and pulls everyone in the area to the middle of it. Make sure you are out of the raid before being dispelled or cloaking it.

Now that you understand that mechanic the rest of the fight goes pretty smoothly.

Phase one in the physical realm. Halion targets one raid member and drops a meteor strike on that person causing damage to anyone in the area and spawning fire in four different directions from the target. This fire is unpredictable so just keep your eyes open and stay out of it.

At 75% Halion opens a portal to the Twilight realm. All members enter this portal by clicking on it. Here you need to pay attention to the orbs floating on the outside of the room. Halion will emote that the orbs begin pulsating with energy. Make sure at that point you are not in between them as they will connect to each other with what I like to call a beam of death. Your tank should be slowly kiting the boss in a stationary circle. The goal is just for everyone to stay out of the beam as it will one shot any player. A tank may be able to take two ticks of damage but the basics behind this is it hurts.

At 50% Halion opens a new portal to the outside. At this point your group should have designated which tank, healer and DPSers will be going out and which will be staying in. We found that leaving melée in the twilight realm was the best because we could easily dps while moving from the beam. All of the abilities from the first two phases are still happening so you may need to cloak off a debuff if your raid gets a little scattered. The goal here is to put even deeps on both sides of the portal. More deeps in the twilight realm means that Halion becomes stronger in the physical realm and vice versa.

Kill and Collect Epicz. Ruby Sanctum Loot Tables

Annnnnd that’s your final raid boss for Wrath of the Lich King. With guilds downing this thing on heroic in the first night it’s not a super hard fight but one that requires quite a bit of coordination from all raid members. Which may make this pug unfriendly for a month or so.

**The video above is from “Flight of the Conchords”.**

Title pretty much says it. The guild and I ventured into ICC 10 last night and put our best attempts on some heroic modes. These are not guides. It’s more of some points that Rogues may need to worry about.

All in all it was amazing night. We had only seen three heroic mode fights before this. Marrowgar, Gunship and Rotface. Marrowgar actually gave us a little trouble. But we got it down. It is actually one of the tougher hard modes. Cold Flame. It moves faster, it stays longer and does damage to a wider area. All of which are openings for an individual to screw up. BOOOOOOOONEEEEE STOOOOOOOOOOORMMMMMMMMMMMMMM! must also be taken very serious as he hits hard in Heroic mode.

Next up Deathwhisper. 2 shotted. Ghosts hurt. Watch out for them and you will win. Frostbolts hurt. Interupt them and you will win.

Lootship. ‘Nuff said.

Saurfang, still a fairly easy fight. Adds hurt which is why blood beasts must be focused down while one is slowed or trapped. One shotted!!

Rotface is probably the second easiest heroic mode fight next to gunship. Basically you want to stay away from your ranged friends when running out to the tank to drop off Mutated Infection. If your caught holding hands with a ranged while running out then you’re rolling the dice that you may begin a chain of vile gas. Downed this one before so it was no trouble.

Festergut. Two words. INFORMATION OVERLOAD. This is the most I have ever struggled with keeping up with where I was suppose to be and what’s happening next. In the heroic mode you’re not only watching for spores, but now you also have to keep an eye out for malleable goo which Putricide throws from a balcony above the room. We try to ignore the mechanic by switching feet on Festergut during every goo regardless of whether it was coming to melée or not. This one took a couple trys just for the simple fact that Festergut hits the tanks super hard. Downed him right at enrage. Close one. This is how this fight went to me. Total utter chaos. “Stare at the bosses ass. malleable goo, move to other foot. Two spores in melée run out to ranged. Get back inside before vile gas. malleable goo Move. WTF foot am I suppose to be on. Spore on tank move up make sure you get spore, malleable goo move to other foot but stay close to tank to get a spore. Omg we still have to dps. 30secs to enrage pop cooldowns. malleable goo move to other foot. DPS!”

We put some attempts on Blood Princes in heroic but wasn’t able to get them down. The only difference in this other then increased damage, a debuff, Shadow Prison is applied to a player every time they move. It has got to be the most annoying debuff I have ever seen. Especially since this is the most movement heavy fight in the Instance. But I have no doubts we can get it down next week.

After seeing these 7 heroic mode fights, I am still amazed about how the difficulty of these don’t compare to the Lich King. But we are making progress.

New Raid Lockout Mechanics Announced

The link above is to the announcement of the RAIDid changes and I am excited about them. In some guilds there are nights where some of your core raiders can’t raid. Because of this currently you may have them in a 25 man run one night and a 10 man run another night. Bascially you’re only getting two nights and four or five hours split between two different raids. Well not anymore. You now have another option. Run 25 man one night get as far as you can and then if you struggle getting everyone back in group, split the ID. Genius!!

Not only that, but how about if you get saved to a fail PuG run? Right now you twiddle your thumbs until the next week. In cataclysm you’ll be able to pug or join a guild run as long as the group is past the boss you’d previously downed. So if this week you are left out of the core group, fail in a pug. Then later if and when the guild picks up their raid again you may be able to jump in.

Alot of people were asking for this and it looks like blizzard was listening.

On a side note I have found myself caught up in the end of expansion lull I spoke about in my last post. My Rogue has been taking a back seat to my Druid who is o so close to 80. Currently sitting at 77 I’m excited to get him to 80 and get to work on my feral dps spec. Which I hear is one of the most challenging specs to master. I figure I already know most of the melée raid mechanics why not just transfer that knowledge to a new toon instead of having to learn an entirely new, to me, ranged mechanics. Plus melée is currently super OPed in the end game.

I have been gone for a couple weeks now, it’s not that there hasn’t been anything to talk about it’s just that most of my thoughts and ideas for posts just haven’t been put into written form yet, and believe me there are a ton of ideas running around in my head with the new raid Ruby Sanctum about to drop and plenty of Cataclysm info rolling in everyday there is plenty to look forward to!

[Raves] to the Blizzard team on Starcraft 2. This game is simply amazing and it’s hard to believe it’s only in the beta phase. I’m happy that the game kept alot of it’s original mechanics. It’s always tough to take a successful game, completely change it and then keep it popular. Basically Starcraft 2 is just the original with a shiny new box and a couple new toys to play with. I simply love it. This combined with the efforts Battle.net is making to streamline all of their games into one big social experiment, it’s a great time to be a Blizzard gamer!

For a Mutilate Rogue the goal is to keep your envenom buff up 100% of the time. Since this goal is downright impossible, your next goal is to keep it up for as long as you can. The idea is after you Envenom and then get 4 or 5 combo points, you check to see if your Envenom buff is still active. If it’s not your just going to hit Envenom when available. If there is time left on it you should wait until it is about to drop or has just dropped to Envenom again. By doing this you are also passively energy pooling. Saving your energy so during your next Envenom buff you can get your CP’s up as soon as possible with a couple quick mutilates. If you get in a good cycle with this you can keep the buff up for a good long while.

I posted a video that was my first true attempt at this idea. Watch closely my Combo Points and Energy Bar directly above my action bar. Also keep an eye on my RoguePowerBars on the right side of the screen for the Envenom buff. Old habits kept creeping in throughout the fight as I still clipped my envenom buff multiple times. But a couple of times I was really able to get some good sequences off where I was able to keep the envenom buff for about 20secs with minimal clipping.

I wasn’t able to get a log on this fight. But I did get a combat log on Festergut directly after this one. In an attempt last week my envenom buff was up 34% of the fight. After this concept I was hitting 54% on the envenom buff. Which means that I had 20% of extra time where Instant Poison had an improved proccing rate.

If you search for this topic on google, your going to find lots of forum posts that try to argue that this is just not worth it. IMO since auto attacks and Instant poison are your main two damage dealers why would you not want to use the Envenom buff to your advantage instead of hindering it?

On a side note, If you have never seen World of Logs it is an amazing site. Anyone from your group with an account and knowledge of how to do it can post combat logs. I have no idea how to do this but another person in guild posts them for us. If no one in your guild posts logs I suggest going and checking another guilds logs just to see the insane amount of imformation collected from these combat logs.