A follow up on 969

Wow. Just want to thank Honorshammer at Honor's Code for the link to my post. Didn't think that was going to happen especially when I talked with another Tankadin in my guild who basically said, "Well, duh." when I mentioned this.

Next to address some of the comments on the last post.

Argon, the rotation that you are using has a lag in it. Even with a fully spec'd Judgment giving you an 8 second cooldown on it you will have to wait to use it again (by this time your Shield of Righteousness would be usable however). Since everything is an instant cast (in theory) you look at the GCD of 1.5 seconds per spell. With this in mind you need to cast 6 spells before you can use the same 9 ability (6 * 1.5 = 9) and 4 spells before you can use the same 6 ability (4 * 1.5 = 6). You're only casting 4 spells between your 9s.

Lanashara, I used these two

Nines

/castsequence reset=9
Judgement of Wisdom, Consecration, Holy Shield

Sixes

/castsequence reset=6 Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous

Alternate between them and you'll have the 969 rotation. The reset=# is just there so that it'll start from the beginning when you pull the next group.

Kaziel, I haven't tested this recently but if I'm reading what you're saying correctly you'd have each ability on it's own /cast command. Afaik if a macro hits a /cast command it can't cast that triggers the GCD it will stop the macro. I've always used /castsequence though, so I could be wrong about that.

Femtifire's link is exactly like I'm saying and pre-dates mine by quite a bit. (Guess I'm slow to the game) Here's that link again: http://sacredduty.com/?p=5.

And finally with a few days under my belt using the macros as stated above...it doesn't feel right. I knew that I would lose flexibility to react (mostly at the beginning stages since everything *should* be on cooldown when you're doing this right). I noticed a lot of times that I'd do a 9669 on accident starting out because of misfiring of the macro. The next few days I'm going to work on using each ability on it's own keybind till I find something I'm comfortable with. I've already tried the key set I stated in my last post, but switching between Q and E was troublesome for me.

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).