Altitis

For 2 years, paladins wanting to tank (hah! As if anyone’d let us) could body pull.

For 2 more years, paladins could body pull or use Avenger’s shield to pull 3 targets. Blood knights even had a racial ranged pull for casters.

For 3 months, paladins could body pull, use Avenger’s shield to pull 3 targets OR use a glyph to make it single target, with all the downsides.

For 4 years and 3 months, the only other, trusty pulling tool for a tankadin was a little trinket, reward from a long quest chain in Un’Goro, Linken’s Boomerang.

Oh, once you got Avenger’s Shield, it had already become a bit obsolete, but I had kept it in my bank ever since, just in case, you never know, come sunshine and come rain, through respecs to holy and then ret.

Tomorrow, when the patch hits live, the trinket will definitely have outlived any practical usefulness, no longer an almost required complement to the serious tankadin’s arsenal, only a memory of bleaker times, when tanking meant walking 10 miles in the snow, uphill both ways and barefoot, soon to be unknown by new players and forgotten.

But today, still, it is time to pay a last hommage to this constant companion I have treasured since my mid-50ies and always kept handy FINALLY CELEBRATE THE LIBERATION OF ONE BANK SLOT AND GET RID OF THE BLOODY BOOMERANG!!!ONE!!!

Of course, you can’t really throw a boomerang away, or so they say. It keeps returning…

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As you’ve heard already, Blizzard plans to bring an option to switch between two specs at the drop of a hat (probably out of combat) including switching your gliph selection in the process. A neat feature on the surface, right? In particular for all tanks and healers.

See, when you’re actually not needed in your main function for a specific fight, you can switch specs and gear and take a second role instead of being either nigh-useless (and thus a liability to the raid) or even switched out.

It is a very exciting prospect, but it also carries an inherent risk. Until 3.1 hits and the system supposedly goes live, Blizzard has to at least pay lip service into improving solo viability and possibly fun for the tanks and healers out there. After that? Not so much.

If there is currently fear that healadins switch to Ret in droves because dealing DPS is more fun than healing in Holy’s present shape, Blizzard will at least have to consider the issue (their knee-jerk reaction right now is exactly the same as last time Ret was fun to play, which takes us back to patch 2.0.1 before TBC went live: oh noes, Ret does damage, nurf quick). With dual specs, though, the standard answer risks to simply become dual spec Ret for soloing, and be a brave little one-trick FoL-bot if you want to raid.

I think the risk to see this happen as very real, and it will be supported and sustained by the droves of players who can’t just say “I experience things differently and find healing fun myself” but have to post, ad nauseam, that since they actually find something you loathe fun you must either find it fun too or be severely brain-damaged. You can find examples of this attitude in any of the o-boards’ healing class forums. Never mind that these players shoot their class in their collective foot, though, we all know that the most vocal individuals on the o-boards aren’t usually the brightest crayons in the box.

With 3.1, we will need more than ever to be vigilant about Dual Specs as an excuse. Never, ever should “just spec DPS on your second spec” become admissible as answer to issues within one specific talent tree. And players should really avoid at all costs to resort to “Spec X is fine, dual Spec Y if you don’t like it”. We cannot afford to leave Blizzard off that particular hook, at the risk of ending with a constant downward spiral in terms of gameplay quality.

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Patch 3.0.2 is upon us. With it come goodies like new talent trees (bye bye holy, hello Ret on my paladin), inscriptions, the barber shops and more.

The patch will also bring Stormwind Harbor. And a ferry between Auberdine and Stormwind.

Think about that one for a while.

Until now, a young nelfie born in Darnassus or a space goat who wanted to reconnect with the rest of the alliance, to, say, visit far-away weapon masters, had to go through a rite of passage. An adventurer’s courage, skill and cunning could be measured by the level at which he undertook the dangerous voyage to far-away Ironforge, which involved braving the swampy, crocolisk-infested marshes of the Wetlands. The younger the braver was the saying.

The conforts of modern life however are now robbing the Alliance of yet another test of skill and courage, softening up an already weak youth even more, by providing mass transportation allowing the weakling long-ears and big-horns to completely bypass otherwise valuable lessons in aggro management and, let’s name it, running for their lives.

And they call THAT progress?

/snort.

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I finally managed to take the time and add Gravatar support to Altitis. So if you want to have an image appear next to your name when you comment, hope over to gravatar.com, sign up and add a little picture of your choice. Note that this is tied to the e-mail addy you use when commenting.

On a related matter, let me briefly talk about the NoFollowFree Plugin, which I’m using here as well.

The No Follow attribute is basically a switch you can assign to hyperlinks which was initially added to help combat comment spam. What it does, in practice, is prevent Google and MSN from indexing any URLs added in comment sections.

This is pretty much a given on many blogging platforms nowadays – default behaviour on WordPress for instance, fixed setting on Blogger. But the thing is, keeping a discussion alive between several blogs is part of what makes up a blogging conversation, at least in my eyes. Using a blanket No Follow goes against this philosophy – if you comment and refer to your blog, your blog forms a generic background to your comment, the broader context of the conversation. And doubly so, of course, when you link to a more elaborate answer from a comment.

No Follow is a crutch which actually breaks conversation in terms of search engine indexation (not to mention that Yahoo and Ask don’t honour it anyway, and in practice Google follows it but doesn’t count the link), and there are other, better tools to combat spam available anyway.

I’ve implemented the NoFollowFree Plugin about a month ago. What it does is selectively remove the No Follow attribute from commenters based on a certain set of rules, among which a threshold on the amount of comments you posted. What threshold? This is something I’m not telling. Just do know that commenting will now tie your blog into the conversation in terms of search engine management for the returning visitors.

What effect did adding this plugin have? Well, user registrations have increased massively since I activated the plugin, since there’s an option to set a different threshold for registered users. Most of them appeared bogus, though, so I’ve closed site registrations and kicked them. If you were a legitimate (and human) reader, my apologies. If you have a technically valid reason to be a registered user on Altitis, drop me a mail.

My Akismet stats have exploded, but at the same time, Patch 2.4 brought several thousand visitors looking for damage meter information to the blog, so there might be a relation between both. At any rate, there has been one single spam which made it through the filters since I activated the plugin. Which means the experience is mature enough for me to keep it alive, and talk about it. And that’s now a done thing.

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Numbers, numbers, numbers. That’s all Damage Meter addons are about. Getting those as close to what your server knows you have dealt is the big challenge, and the Eldorado promised by patch 2.4 is getting closer by the day.

To wit: I logged onto the Paladin to do some Shattered Sun dailies. On a whim, seeing I had both Violation and Recount active, I also turned on Loggerhead, and recorded my session.

As long as I kept bombing the dead scar, all three measurement tools fully agreed with each other. However, when my little loladin went back to do ground-based demon cleansing, differences started to appear.

Here are the relevant screenies with the numbers:

Recount: 1’631’418

Violation: 1’638’861

WWS: 1’632’022

One thing to note regarding WWS, it appears to be counting the self-inflicted damage of my seal / judgement of blood as part of my total damage output:

Compare this to Recount’s damage records for Seal / Judgement of Blood:

Now the interesting part is that if you add the self-inflicted portion of Blood to Recount’s total damage dealt, you end up with 1’638’810, a mere 51 points off Violation numbers, and that, IMO, explains the differences. Violation, too, counts self-inflicted Blood damage as part of your personal damage output.

But wait, it gets better. If we manually add up every line in the WWS detail report, the total actually reads 1’639’465. If you look at that breakdown, you’ll notice one oddity right at the bottom: 604 damage attributed to Mana Tap. That’s a fluke, mana Tap doesn’t deal damage, it drains mana. Remove this fluke and total damage dealt, including self-inflicted, according to WWS is… 1’638’861.

In summary:

• WWS and Violation gather the exact same numbers
• WWS currently needs some manual tweaking in order to exclude flukes
• Recount is only off the other two by a blood elf’s hair

All three surveyed metering methods really do end up very close to each other. If we remove the bombing run from the numbers, after tweaking, Recount records 137’342 damage, WWS and Violation 137’393. The discrepancy is 0.03%. That’s tiny, and a testimonial to the huge amount of work put up by the three dev teams on patch 2.4 data.

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So between diapers and stuff, I logged some playtime to see the Sunwell action, and tried to join in. But with a protadin, it isn’t exactly fast, to say the least.

Since there’s no chance I can log enough consecutive playtime to try a MT run, I decided to respec to Retribution. Hopped to the AH, grabbed a Crystalforged War Axe, and off I went to lolDPS (in my case there’s no other description for what I was doing)… only to remember I hadn’t used a 2H weapon since switching to prot for levelling at 35.

So back to skilling up, and there’s still the old conundrum: I have an almost uncrittable prot set (in fact, with a bit of resilience mixed in, 0.4% crittable), a PvP-oriented healing set with +1400 healing… and none of these pieces foster Ret play in the least. Back to the AH, and there’s little in way of useful yet affordable armor.

Several hours later, I logged onto my alliance guild, and based on guild chat, I finally managed to put two and two together. It so happens that there’s a cheap solution to my gear problem. A couple of visits to rep vendors later and I now have a workable Ret kit with 95 resilience, made of 5 pieces of the brand new blue Rep PvP set.

I suspect gemming the thing is going to end up twice as expensive as buying it, though. Still, less than 100g for 5 pieces of blue gear is very nice, and should give me more room to explore the solo content with the Sunwell (and tie some other lose ends which neither healadin nor protadin made bearable to solo).

That alone, the ease to gear up for some offspecs for a hybrid, makes patch 2.4, on live, a winner in my book.

300 2H axes skill and counting, BTW

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