My mind just exploded.

I kid you not. What follows is an epiphany I recently had while reading about 969 rotation for Pally Tanks.

I've not been having as much fun on my Pally tank and much of that has been due to frustration with threat (i.e. making me feel like a horrible tank). I admit that I do not currently use the 969 rotation that many believe is optimal threat in most situations. This is because I couldn't wrap my head around it. It's just too long of a rotation for me to memorize.

Then it happened. I was fishing around for what the 969 rotation was (since I had forgotten it) and finally found it at Raider101. But it wasn't complete. Here's the important part of that page:

# Judge(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Judge(9)

The last Judge loops to the first Judge and you should be able to start the rotation over. But SoR won't be up because you just used it. So you have to switch to HotR instead and continue on. The complete loopable rotation is actually this:

# Judge(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Judge(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Judge(9)

Which is the rotation I remember reading about.

Ok, so what?
Here's the epiphany. You can separate the 9 and 6 parts of the rotation. I'm going to assign what I will use as keybinds to the abilities so as to abbreviate.

The 9s
1- Judgement
2- Consecrate
3- Holy Shield

The 6s
Q- Shield of Righteousness
E- Hammer of the Righteous

The above rotation becomes this:
1Q2E3Q1E2Q3E1

Notice how the numbers and the letters have a mini rotation relative to themselves.

Here's a more pronounced version
1-2-3-1-2-3-1
-Q-E-Q-E-Q-E-

Short version - This is a new way of looking at the 969 rotation that may be easier for some people to wrap their heads around. I know personally remembering 1-2-3, Q-E is going to be much easier to remember than the longer sequence.

Corollary - With this in mind two macros could be developed, namely a 9s rotation and a 6s rotation that you would then alternate, simplifying the overall rotation to 1-2-1-2. As with all macros, you will lose flexibility by doing this.

3.2.2 Shaman Changes

First thing first. I'm still with the same guild, but I've been playing my Elemental Shaman more than my Tankadin.

With that out of the way, I was browsing MM0-Champion and noticed the new additions to the 3.2.2 patch changes.

*Flame Shock: The duration of all ranks has been increased by 6 seconds.

*Lava Burst: This ability no longer ever consumes a Flame Shock debuff off of the target.

*Glyph of Flame Shock: Redesigned. This glyph now makes Flame Shock periodic damage able to be critical strikes.

So they're basically making the current Glyph of Flame Shock baseline and changing the glyph to give us our Tier 8 two piece.

What happens to our T8 two piece then? Is it getting changed, or will it be redundant to have T82P and Flame Shock Glyph?

EDIT: Hey look, Wowhead tooltips!

DPS again

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm leveling a Horde Mage. I'm liking it so far (only 22ish though). The barrens is as long as I remember it from my old days of Horde, but the mounts at 20 is helping alot. I've also taken a note from a friend of mine and taken herbalism in order to make gold since I don't have a high level character feeding me money. I'm sitting on 20g at my level and I've already bought my regular mount (5g). I might even be able to afford a glyph or two soon.

My Bad

So I may have over reacted when I talked about 3.2 changes. Apparently in addition to the Earth Shock change they also changed Wind Shock into Wind Shear. This new spell works like Wind Shock in that it lowers your threat but it has some added benefits.

1. It's off the GCD. You can cast it whenever you want without worrying about your rotation (for the most part).
2. It's an interrupt. Which negates my whole thing about the Earth Shock change. I never cast Earth Shock except as an interrupt and the damage was a bonus.

Just wanted to clear that up.


In other "news"...I'm thinking of switching guilds, and even more so, switching factions. And I think I'm going to shed my Tanking role and go back to my DPS roots. There's more feedback (i.e. quantitative numbers) with a DPS class (which also means it's more visible to other people, for better or worse).

** Originally this was going to be a "tangent", but as I type it up I find myself wanting to go into more detail than a "tangent" should have.

Rant, among other things

Rant first. I dislike people who dislike the Draenei because they are "Space Goats." Yes, Draenei come from a different world and escaped it's destruction in a space ship. But did you know that this same world is the origins of the Orcs? So it's ok that the Orcs traveled from their home world to Azeroth through the Dark Portal, but it's not ok that the Draenei traveled from that same world to Azeroth in a spaceship? That's kind of hypocritical.

Maybe it's because Orcs are more of a staple in the Warcraft world than the Draenei, having been in the Warcraft games. I have not played the RTS Warcraft games, so I don't know if the Draenei are mentioned there at all. I have read the Warcraft novels though and the Draenei are definitely mentioned in them. These books were published in 2001, six years before the Burning Crusade expansion came out.

While for many people the Draenei may have come out of left field, I'd like to give Blizzard more credit than that even if their brief mention in the Novels was never fleshed out. The simple fact that they remembered the Draenei and used them means either a good memory on Blizzard's part or they were on the table for awhile waiting to be used.

/rant off

In other news, apparently Blizzard named a gun after BRK. You can read about it on his new blog site (since he has stopped actually playing). If you enjoyed BRK's WoW blog (or you've never read him and you have a sense of humor), I recommend switching gears and reading his personal blog.

3.2 is coming

Another post in the same day! Insanity!

Well, 3.2 is suppose to hit today and I was going over class changes for the Paladin and the Shaman again. Overall I like the changes (especially the Totem Bar change...been waiting for that for awhile), but one of the Shaman changes caught my eye today:

Earth Shock: Redesigned. This spell no longer interrupts spell casting

I fear (purely speculation) that this is a PvP change since Earth Shock has a relatively short CD and perhaps it was deemed too powerful in PvP. From a PvE standpoint, I used Earth Shock a lot to interrupt spells, specifically the Eye Beams on that gauntlet after Heigan in Naxx and also on the Watchers during Razorscale. It was my way of helping reduce damage to the raid during those fights, and I will miss it dearly.

Even so, I still think 3.2 will be a good patch and we all will learn to adjust to changes that have been made. And maybe, just maybe, I can keep my Shaman Hit capped without using that JC Hit trinket that gives an insane 96 Hit (with Two Hit Dragon's Eyes).

Ulduar Raiding

Another long spell of not posting. And again I'll say that it's just how I am :(. I get topics I want to write about sometimes, but it's never on a consistent basis. This time around it's raiding.

Our guild does a weekly Ulduar 10man raid. It has been going on for about 16 weeks. In that time we have managed to kill 5 bosses: Flame Leviathan, XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, and Auriaya (but only once). It's my personal opinion that we aren't doing well in here. This is how our progression went.

Flame Leviathan is a joke. I'm fairly sure we killed him the first time we stepped into Ulduar (after a wipe or two as we got the vehicle controls down).

Our next target was XT, skipping the two optional bosses. This was the "original" or at the least harder version of XT with the lower enrage timer. We just couldn't put out the DPS to down him under the enrage timer (but to be fair, we were getting close). We were making it to the enrage timer though. Our problem was a mix of tactics and raw DPS output. We were positioning XT at the stairs, meaning all four trash piles had adds streaming from them. That left one DPS on the heart (along with the tank, who would be me). Shockingly enough, we actually downed XT with this tactic after the enrage timer was lengthened. Now we tank him to the side and only get two trash piles spawning allowing more DPS to focus on the heart. XT is not a problem for us now (if we have our regular healers).

After XT, we hit up Kologarn. I don't remember exactly, but I'm *fairly* sure we one shot him our first try. After XT (the way we were doing him), Kologarn was easy. These days, Kologarn is our stopping point however. We wipe a few times before downing him every week. Someone dies from the Eye Beams, either a healer or a DPS. If it's a healer, then we have a healing issue and people start dying when they're grabbed by the Right Arm, or I go down as the main tank because healing becomes too thin. If it's a DPSer that goes down, we don't have enough DPS left to free the person grabbed by the Right Arm meaning we get picked off one at a time till we wipe.

Of all the bosses (other than FL) I think Razorscale is our easiest kill. I know when I'm tanking I don't feel the pressure of enrage timers like I do on other bosses. The stacking thing that Razorscale does doesn't seem to do much, since we've never had to worry about it even when our DPS has been low. The only way we wipe on this boss is if an overzealous DPS dies in the Mole Phase, and even then we can sometimes make a comeback.

The details of our only Auriaya kill are fuzzy to me. I do know that we didn't directly kill the Defender, since the Void Zone he drops is what was killing us every time on other attempts. Other than that we just pulled out the DPS and healing that week.

And that's it, that's all we've done in Ulduar. Some of the problem is that we only go into Ulduar once a week and by the time we kill the bosses we can, we don't have time to try any of the others. We basically need a flawless kill on each of the bosses to even be able to attempt Auriaya. I'm hoping with 3.2 we can get better gear elsewhere and dive deeper into Ulduar, but from what I'm hearing the fights aren't all about the gear.