Patch 4.0.6 DK Patch Notes

Here are the Death Knight patch notes for 4.0.6. I'll add my own commentary in italics, but the meat of this post is poached from the full notes that I nabbed from the Zam feed, same as in the Warlock post. There are a lot more notes here but I probably won't comment as much since I don't really min/max on my DK.

Death Knights

• Death Coil damage has been reduced by roughly 10%.
• Icebound Fortitude now breaks stuns when used, in addition to providing immunity to them. - Totally huge for PvP. Rogues beware!
  
• Necrotic Strike's absorption effect is now reduced by the target's resilience. In addition, its debuff duration has been reduced to 10 seconds, down from 15.
• The spell hit bonus previously given by Virulence (Unholy) has been rolled into the Runic Focus passive effect that all death knights possess.
• Talent Specializations
  • Blood
    • Bone Shield now has 4 charges, up from 3.
    • Crimson Scourge has been redesigned slightly. Instead of a 50/100% chance to make the next Blood Boil free when Plague Strike is used on a target with Blood Plague, the talent now gives a 5/10% chance to provide a free Blood Boil when the death knight lands any melee attack on a Blood Plagued target.
    • Heart Strike now deals 175% weapon damage plus 15% per disease, up from 120% plus 10% per disease.
    • Improved Death Strike now increases the damage of Death Strike by 30/60/90%, up from 15/30/45%.
    • If Death Strike is used while a Blood Shield is already active, the new absorb will stack with the old one instead of replacing it.
    • Scarlet Fever now applies via Blood Plague, rather than Blood Boil.
    • Will of the Necropolis no longer refunds a Blood Rune when it resets Rune Tap's cooldown. Instead it makes the next Rune Tap free while Will of the Necropolis is active.
  • Frost
    • Chilblains now also causes Chains of Ice to root the target for 1.5/3 seconds. - Another awesome change for PvP. I'll be posting my spec soon, and it revolves around slowing/rooting type of gameplay, so this is awesome for me.
      
    • Howling Blast now deals 40% less damage to all targets other than the primary target of the spell. - A bit of a nerf, but honestly I was a bit sick of pulling aggro with this by sneezing on the key.
      
    • Hungering Cold now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
    • Might of the Frozen Wastes now also increases all melee damage by 4/8/12% while wielding a two-handed weapon. - I DW, so w/e. :-)
      
  • Unholy
    • Blightcaller (Mastery) has been redesigned and renamed Dreadblade. It increases all Shadow damage by 2.5% per point of mastery.
    • Dark Transformation now increases pet damage by 80%, down from 100%.
    • Death's Advance (new talent): While both Unholy Runes are depleted, movement-impairing effects cannot reduce the death knight below 75/100% of normal movement speed.
    • Desecration is now also triggered by Necrotic Strike.
    • The ratio of runic power return from Magic Suppression has been reduced by roughly one third.
    • Rage of Rivendare now increases strike damage by 12/24/36%, down from 15/30/45%.
    • Runic Corruption procs while the aura is already active now add 3 seconds to the existing aura duration, instead of simply refreshing/overwriting the existing aura.
    • Shadow Infusion now increases pet damage by 8% per stack, down from 10%.
    • Sudden Doom is now triggered only from main-hand auto attacks, and is normalized according to weapon speed rather than having a fixed percentage chance.
    • Unholy Might (passive) has been reduced to a 5% Strength increase, down from 10%.
    • Virulence has been redesigned. It now grants 10/20/30% additional disease damage. - I can see a lot of DK's speccing into this now. I'm going to have to see what I'm doing with my points, this might trigger a respec.
      
• Glyphs
  • Glyph of Dark Succor (new glyph) raises the minimum healing done by Death Strike from 7% to 15% of maximum health, but only while in Unholy or Frost Presence.
  • Glyph of Death's Embrace no longer refunds Runic Power when self-healing via Lichborne.
• Runeforging
  • Swordbreaking and Swordshattering now reduce disarm duration by 60%, up from 50%. - I still won't be using these for DPS/bursty PvP.
    
• Death Knight Bug Fixes
  • Blood of the North is no longer incorrectly increasing Blood Strike damage by 10%.
  • The tooltip for Blood Presence was giving an incorrect value and has been corrected.
  • The amount of bonus damage Blood Strike was receiving per disease was inconsistent with its tooltip and has been amended.
  • Crimson Scourge will no longer proc if Blood Plague is not present on the target.
  • Death Grip has a minimum range requirement of 8 yards against players, but this was not stated in the tooltip. The tooltip has been updated.
  • Desecration should stay in place while on the Alliance Gunship in Deepholm.
  • When a character is raised as a ghoul with Raise Ally, there is no longer a considerable pause after losing control of the ghoul before being returned to the corpse or graveyard.
  • The Scourge Strike tooltip is now correctly augmented by Rage of Rivendare.
  • The shadow portion of Scourge Strike was receiving more than 10% increased damage from Frost Presence and has been corrected.
  • The shadow portion of Scourge Strike no longer incorrectly still receives a 13% spell damage increase from Earth and Moon.
  • Glyph Fixes
    • The Chains of Ice tooltip is now correctly augmented by Glyph of Chains of Ice.
    • Glyph of Raise Ally now correctly affects the risen ally's health.
    • The Vampiric Blood tooltip became awkwardly worded after applying Glyph of Vampiric Blood. We made the words less awkward.

The Take Home
Overall, I think Blizzard is still struggling a bit with the design identity of DKs. With Cata, we've just recently been shoehorned into trees, and now we should expect to see a lot of tweaking as a result. Still, I think there was a lot of good news in this patch. Blood tanks should be a bit more hardy, Frost a bit harder to kill in PvP, and Unholy a bit stronger (along with trying to make mastery relevant for this tree). I will probably be tweaking my PvP spec again before sharing it, but like I noted in the commentary, these changes play right into my hands. The fun part for me has always been being able to slow, control large groups with HB and Chillblains, while being the bane of magic casters. These changes only reinforce that while faring me a bit better against melee stunning types (Rogues).

Good stuff, and look for me to squeeze in a PvP spec while I'm updating all my 'lock guides. I don't think I'm going to get back into tanking again (recall my exit with the demise of the DW tanking), so don't expect anything there. Frost is just what I love about my DK. 'Nuff said.

Patch 4.0.6 Warlock Patch Notes

I'm going to try to do something different and two different posts, one with the DK patch notes and one with the Warlock patch notes. I'll try to convince Fuu to do the Pally notes too. Then I'll probably also do a miscellaneous post as well. That's potentially four posts in one day, which is crazy I know, but I think it'll make things easier to read. For instance, if you only want to see the DK stuff, you can skip this article and go to the next one, and so on. We'll see how it goes and feel free to give me feedback on whether you like or hate this approach.

With that said, let's go directly to the Warlock notes. I'll add my own commentary in italics, but the meat of this post is poached from the full notes that I nabbed from the Zam feed. Big fan of that one since they RSS it out in full, unlike other news outlets.

Warlocks

• Curse of Exhaustion now reduces movement speed by 30%, down from 50%. Its range has been increased to 40 yards, up from 30. - I'm not using this, so doesn't matter to me
  
• Demon Armor and Fel Armor no longer cost mana and last until canceled. - Wahoo! No more refresh (who cares about the mana).
  
• Devour (Felhunter) cooldown has been increased to 20 seconds, up from 8. Devour is no longer able to be auto-cast. - Pup nerf... I heard this was coming. Its time to go back to the Succy anyways.
  
• Drain Mana has been removed from the game. - Dumb, but expected.
  
• Fear now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds. - Is this up or down? I don't really PvP on my 'lock enough to notice.
  
• Fel Armor has been redesigned. It now surrounds the caster with fel energy, increasing spell power and causing the warlock to be healed for 3% of any single-target spell damage he or she deals. - Awesome. I think we were all worried about how this change would flesh out with the initial proposed mana crap. Love this change, feels more warlocky even though it might be a bit of a nerf (straight healing to percentage based... hard to crunch the numbers off hand).
  
• Seduction (Succubus) now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds. - See fear change above.
  
• Talent Specializations
  • Affliction
    • Soul Swap can no longer be dispelled (the aura given to the warlock between swapping). - To me, this is almost a "bug fix" but good all the same.
      
    • Unstable Affliction's silence effect has been reduced to 4 seconds, down from 5. - Small nerf... meh.
      
  • Demonology
    • Demonic Aegis now increases the healing effect of Fel Armor by 50/100%. - This is cool, makes the talent a bit more fun. Can't say whether it's a buff/nerf though.
      
    • Demonic Rebirth now highlights summoning spells when active. - From my limited play as demo, this is really nice. I'd always forgotten I had this ability.
      
    • Demon Soul: Imp redesigned. It now increases the critical strike chance of all non instant cast Destruction spells by 30%, rather than increasing critical strike damage. Duration reduced to 20 seconds. - Don't care. I'm not Destro.
      
    • Felstorm (Felguard) damage has been reduced by 20%. - Boo, nerf. Felguard was pretty much a beast in PvP though.
      
    • Immolation Aura damage has been reduced by roughly 30%. - Boo, nerf.
      
    • Inferno no longer increases the radius of Hellfire, but instead increases the duration of Immolate by 6 seconds in addition to its existing effect. - This should help with some of the challenge with getting your Hand of Guldan off... effectively giving you a larger window.
      
    • Master Demonologist (Mastery) benefit from mastery increased by approximately 33%. - Struggling to make mastery relevant. Also a very easy way to buff just one tree. Should see more raid parity as a result.
      
  • Destruction
    
    • Burning Embers damage has been reduced by 15%.
    • Fiery Apocalypse (Mastery) benefit from mastery increased by approximately 8%.
    • Improved Soul Fire now increases Fire and Shadow damage done by 4/8%, rather than 7/15% spell haste. In addition, this talent has been moved to tier-3 Destruction, switching places with Aftermath. - This will be the cause of much respeccing tonight. I haven't really looked at what I'm going to do yet, but so much for the ISF mechanic for Aff'locks. This will probably result in an across the board nerf.
      
    • Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.
• Warlock Bug Fixes
  • Rank 2 of Backdraft should no longer have charges consumed when casting Immolate.
  • The spell animation for Demon Circle: Summon no longer persists through death.
  • Demon Leap should no longer cause players to pass through the environment at the entrance/exit of Orgrimmar. - lol Wish I would have done this one.
    
  • Drain Life cast when under the effects of Soulburn no longer has higher damage than the normal version of Drain Life. - Well that sucks if you were trying a drain spec.
    
  • Empowered Imp can no longer proc if the warlock does not have the talent. - Ha, oops.
    
  • Hellfire will not proc the Muradin's Spyglass buff without hitting an enemy target.
  • Warlocks with the Jinx talent who have an active Curse of the Elements on a target should no longer be interrupted while eating or drinking. - This is a good thing, though never really been an issue for me.
    
  • Nether Protection should now proc properly from all associated abilities.
  • Rain of Fire now remains at the same location it was cast at while on a moving transport.
    
  • Ritual of Summoning should no longer yield graphical issues with the created portal. - Yet still flashes you in a risque manner. :-D
    
  • Casting Soulburn during the global cooldown of a Soulburn ability, and while under the effects of another self-buff, was sometimes causing Soulburn abilities to be non-functional. This has been corrected. - The wording here makes my head hurt, but okay.
    
  • The UI fly-out for a warlocks' summoning spells now updates in real time based on the warlock's available mana. - I'd never noticed this issue.
    
  • The tooltip for the armor value in the Character pane should now be showing the correct amount of armor granted to pets.
  • Glyph Fixes
    • Glyph of Voidwalker's tooltip has been updated to the new pet scaling system.

The Take Home
Warlocks escaped relatively unscathed from this patch. I think the lot of us were worried at some of the early PTR changes, but it's all good in the hood (or cowl). The Fel Armor change seems to be fun, though I can't say what the maths tell us for nerf/buff. The ISF change looks to be a pretty big nerf, but I'm hopeful that it's offset by the combination of the other things they've done here. Aff'locks are definitely going to want to switch to a Succubus if you haven't already and we're going to need to respec since I believe ISF is going to be out of our reach now. I'm hoping that our numbers stay around the same. Demo locks should see a bit of a buff with the mastery change. Check on EJ for updated Demo pawn values soon, mastery may have jumped up a bit in the stat priority. I'll be double checking on this when I get to the guides, but despite some of the AoE nerfs (demo was a bit OP when it came to AoE), I think this patch will increase raid parity as far as numbers go. As for Destro locks, I'm not the expert there, but it looks to me like they're going to be in about the same boat as Affliction, though they don't really lose ISF. Like I said, my guess is that all specs will be raiding at pretty close to the same DPS.

I'll be updating specs and guides as the week progresses, so stay tuned. Also, this is just my first glance, gut reactions here. I encourage anyone to comment on things I may have misunderstood or misread... discussion is always good. Otherwise, if they didn't refund my talents... meet y'all at the trainer tonight for a respec! :-)

Random Reflections: Monday Edition

Don't have much today. Except that Tam and Chas are done blogging. What?! Yeppers, donezo. Read all about it here. And Tam, if you feel the urge to guest post somewhere, my email inbox is always open (and usually quite barren).

Drop a nice line over there will ya? Righteous Orbs has been a great little outlet in the community for a while now. Sad to see them go, but when you don't have time, you don't have time. Better to go out on a high note right?

In other news, I hit 85 on my DK. Dark Simulacrum is underwhelming so far. Just very hard to use I think. We'll see if I get used to it. I need to post the spec I'm running with. I think it represents the ultimate in slowing people down. Now I just need to start gearing so that I can survive. I'm so squishy right now. That, and I don't know what I'm doing in any of the new BGs. Thus, I'll probably be lurking over at Cynwise's blog for the next few weeks. For those interested, I'm still doing Frost DW DPS. I was top Killing Blows on several BGs, which amazed me because people seem to take so much longer to kill, and I'm sporting all crappy quest greens (terrible, terrible gear).

My 'lock is pretty much geared for raiding now. I don't really have anything left to buy with JP and I've hit exalted with everyone of note (except for Baradin's Wardens... that hit trinket is my lone remaining gear goal).

Patch seems to be on the horizon still (perhaps tomorrow?). I'll probably be updating my guides accordingly. Depends on what actually makes it live. Thus, more to come...

Finally, I've added a "mobile friendly" feature up on the top there. Blogger doesn't have (as far as I know) a nice plug in for mobile devices like Wordpress does. Thus, I found a clever suggestion where you basically link to your own feed, which allows google reader to render the "no BS" page for a mobile device. Gets rid of the fluff and makes it easier to navigate on a small screen. Hence, I added that option up top. You'll have to click on it/bookmark it to get that to load (won't auto-sense), but there you have it. I removed the "Comments RSS" option because the header only worked well with four items. If anyone uses/needs that, shoot me an email and I'll add it on the left someone. Tbh, I'm not all that sure that it's useful for the type of blog I'm running anyway. Removing it shouldn't muck with any current subscriptions or anything, but I'm just sayin' let me know if anyone comes across any issues with the changes to the guts. Otherwise, I'm sure I'm boring you now. Go pester Tam for one last time.

Da dada Da...

Decedereful found herself surrounded by henchmen clad in bulky garments that were a variety of earthy tones. They were quite ugly and unflattering on the similarly ugly and unflattering men. She wouldn't admit that she'd grown used to the more flattering type of men, but there it was. And now she found herself out in the desert, alone, facing down a firing squad. Excuse me, firink sqvad.

Where the hell is Jonesy, she thought, not for the first time. He sends me off on all these fool errands and then shows up at the most dramatic... A familiar tune interrupted the thought.

Off behind a group of tents, Decedereful glimpsed a familiar figure. Brown leather jacket, khaki pants, and signature brown fedora made up his identity as much as the lined face and piercing blue eyes. Jonesy was a bit old for her tastes, but she had to admit there was still something quite attractive about the royal historian. Perhaps it was the smile. Always made her feel like a spoiled princess or something. That, or perhaps she was just enamored with the promise of adventure. What about "historian" screamed "adventurer," she couldn't say, but wasn't that the whole point?

She watched helplessly as the old man crept with a litheness that belied his age. When he reached the corner of the tent that housed a convenient supply of explosives, he finally met her eyes. Holding up one finger, he motioned for her to be quite. Like she was going to yell and alert the dozen men holding her a gun point. Gee, thanks for the tip, Jonesy.

"Just vhat did you zink you vhere doink here?" one of the apparently cloned men wanted to know.

This one was slightly taller and more malicious looking that the others. Same figure, just with a sprinkle of authority added in. He was obviously a Captain or something. These troops were all so horribly cliche. It was like they were all made by the same machine, then photographed and cataloged by "amount of menace." Such a measure was then used to assign rank and promotional potential. Heaven forbid you were the baby-faced of the litter, forever destined to be placed on guard duty in the poorly constructed guard shack and fed a steady dose of turkey with red wine. Or did they just skip straight to sleeping pills?

Decedereful didn't answer the man right away. Instead, she lifted her shoulders and tried her best to look innocent. Just a girl out for a stroll, she thought. Nevermind the bodies over there. Her hands were held unthreateningly above her head, one hand clutching a bulging sack of various items. The items Jonesy had sent her out to steal in the first place.

"Vhell, you might vhant to come up vhith an explanation," the man continued. "Othervhise vhe vhill be shootink you."

Her rescuer was coming back out of the tent now, a long fuse dangling from his hand. He pointed once to the fuse and then purposefully to a torch nearby. Yeah, I get it Jonesy, you're gonna blow the place up, she thought. Isn't that what we always do? Instead of whining, she simply nodded her head slowly.

"Well, you're just going to shoot me then," Decedereful announced boldly. "But pretty please can we do it over there," she cocked her head. "I'd like to look out over Uldum one last time."

The big man looked confused for a moment, but then slowly nodded. "Fine. Turn around and vhalk. Keep your hands vhere I can see them. Mach schnell!"

Decedereful let loose a deep sigh for show, then turned slowly. From the corner of her eye, she could see Jonesy light the fuse and run like fel. Casually, with as much innocent femininity as she could muster, she took two steps and fell flat on her face.

"Get up!" the man hollered. "Just vhat do you zink-"

The rest of his words were lost in a massive explosion that ripped through the camp. Decedereful pushed her face into the sand and tried her best to imitate a stone. She felt a wave of heat rush over her, but her ice-caked armor afforded her adequate protection. The same couldn't be said for henchmen. She could hear the body parts falling around her like a meteor shower.

After a moment, she raised her head. Carnage was everywhere. Where was Jonesy?

"Dr. Jones! Dr. Jones!" she called frantically.

"Right behind ya, kid," came the smooth reply.

Decedereful turned to face that signature roguish smile. "You nearly killed me!" she exclaimed, pushing him halfheartedly.

His eyes merely twinkled in response.

Baradin's Hold: Cliffnotes Version

In keeping with the recent trend of "Ful finally experiencing raiding," I weaseled my way into a BH group the other day. I mentioned that I'd been mucking around in TB, and it amazed me to zone in and see that we had won they day and were finally on the defending side. Of course, we were successful in our defense, which led to an outbreak of BH groups forming. Good times.

Now, my gearscore is not the highest (I'm just raid ready, I think at like 349 average ilevel or something... most of the other folks were announcing 350+ numbers. Edit: Fixed thanks to a helpful comment from Goodmongo... I got the last two digits right, but the first one seems not to stick for me.), and I don't have the achievement, so that puts me at an immediate disadvantage for being invited along. Flash back to days spent in the schoolyard being the last one picked for kickball teams. (That's not true, I had a helluva leg, so I generally got picked early. Still, there were days when you were persona non grata for whatever reason and left 'till last just for spite. Kids are mean like that.)

So I wandered around doing the dailies, halfheartedly keeping an eye on general and throwing up the ubiquitous "Lock lfg BH." I couldn't add cool things like "insane DPS," unless they're really interested in my state of mental health. You see, I find myself somewhat behind the gear curve of the general BH pugging crowd. Thus, when a random Warrior called out "LF2M any DPS, pst," I jumped on it and an invite soon followed. He didn't even require me to link the achievement that I didn't have. My first thought was: surely this must be a fail group.

I hunkered down, expecting an arduous run. I pulled up the strat on my other screen and read through it whilst the group was congregating. I plopped down cookies and readied a soul stone. In short, I did everything a good 'lock should.

The run began... and ended a short 30 minutes later with a one-shot on the big guy. Color me pleasantly surprised. Loot was distributed fairly after rolls. People were generally nice and friendly. No one got called out for sub-par DPS (though someone did link the recount). I'm happy to say that in our 10-man group, I was 4th (out of 6) on the DPS meter pulling in a solid 12k. Sure, I'd like to be higher, but given my gear level, I think that was pretty solid.

With the achievement now under my belt, I thought I'd give this cliffnotes thing another try. Yesterday's boss fight didn't really lend itself well to a short summary, but BH is exactly that. It's meant to be pugged, just like VoA was, and so the mechanics are pretty simple. As a DPS you want to be aware of three things:

1. Stack on your assigned tank. The RL should designate two groups, each with a tank, and you need to stack with everyone else. This allows you to share the damage of one of the abilities (meteor strike I believe).
   
2. Avoid the Fel Fire. At 66% and 33%, he'll start dropping flames on the ground that will cause the group to scatter. Simply stay out of the bad. Move just a step or two to the side to conserve space. They're not very big patches.
3. Watch your threat. This is a DPS race with tank swapping. If you're undergeared like I am, threat shouldn't be a problem. However, any time there is movement and tank swapping, you need to be aware of your threat.

That's it. Only three things to keep in mind. Otherwise, DPS your little heart out because he has a 5 minute enrage timer. We had about 1 minute to spare. The RL should indicate where each group is standing, but if not just follow the crowd. Basically one will be to the right and one to the left. Be sure you know where you're supposed to be (if it's not been made clear... ask!). Our RL made great use of the new raid color spotlights and even assigned marks to them. It was well done.

I would suggest running it a few times, as it's a great fight to tune a rotation on. There is just enough movement that you have to be moderately aware of your surroundings, but it's calm enough that you can focus in on button presses and what's coming next. I blew all my shards, didn't overlap any with heroism, and even pulled out my Doomguard. I can't say that always happens on all fights, because a lot of the time other things become more important (or I just fail to realize that someone has popped heroism). I also got to DI a S-priest, which was funny because we had a little whisper fest before the raid that went something like this:

Me: Mr. Priest, are you rolling as shadow on this fine day?
Priest: Yay! A 'lock! OMG. /flail
Me: I'll take that as a yes?
Priest: Most definitely, good sir.
Me: Wahoo. For pwny! /cast DI
Priest: Indeed.
/pwnface

Shadowpriests are swiftly becoming my new best friends.

Conclave of Wind: 'Lock Cliffnotes

On Monday our guild took its first hesitant steps into Cataclysm raiding. We decided to tackle Throne of the Four Winds first because, well, we just did. It seems to me like everyone else is doing the Magmaw thing, so maybe we're rebels. Or just dumb. I really haven't done my research yet.

We didn't win. Oh hell no we didn't win. This is not your Wrath's Naxx. That probably should be expected in Cataclysm, but still, remember how easy it was to start in Naxx? Ah, those were the days. Wait, wait. No they weren't. We hated that place. So perhaps this is a good thing.

In any case, I'm going to pass along my cliffnotes from a very 'lockcentric point of view. I'll try to give you a pulled back overview of the fight as well as what I was specifically doing. This is by no means what to read if you're looking for in depth tanking maneuvers.

Overview
The Conclave consists of a trio of bosses that surround a large dude in the center. The large dude is for the second fight and not a part of the initial Conclave encounter. I know we got several questions: "What's up with that big guy?" Forget about him for now. He's just hanging out, shootin' the breeze (h'yuck). Here are the three of import:

• Anshal - Referred to as the "Nature guy." His attacks are nature based, he has a green swirly skirt and is to your left when you enter the arena.
• Nezir - Referred to as the "Ice guy." He's way in the back and you can't really see him when you enter. He may or may not be responsible for the current storm slamming into my house.
• Rohash - Referred to as the "Wind guy" or "Hash pipe" or "that frackin' dude that just blew me off the ledge". He's to your right and is the delicious color of poop.

The group make up for this fight needs to include three healers, two tanks, and the rest DPS. The three healer requirement kinda sucks, but our third healer was a shadow priest that just healed as needed. We found for this fight that the Affliction Warlock self-heals pair well with a Shadow Priest, so they sent the two of us off to the right to face the wind guy. Healing was never a problem. Staying out of the tornadoes and not getting blasted off was. More on that in a moment though.

There are two key things to keep in mind on this fight. First, there must be a person on each of these dudes' platforms at all times, or the raid will be wiped by an unpreventable ability (varies on the guy, but all are catastrophic). Second, there is a global energy bar that these guys share that will fill up for a mega attack, lovingly referred to as the ULTIMATE. Wahoo, right?

The basic flow of the fight goes like this. You send two ranged lambs to the right to occupy wind man, a tank/healer combo goes to the back for ice guy, and the rest feel the call of nature. It's important to note that you can and should travel to each of the platforms before engaging the bosses. Make sure your groups are in position so you can avoid starting out in the grips of a wiping effect.

On each platform, different things will be happening but basically you're trying to live, do damage, and avoid the bad. Nature dude has adds to deal with, but otherwise it's a game of avoid the bad and DPS as much as possible. When the energy gauge gets to about 80%, you'll get a DBM warning and need to congregate on the Ice guy's platform. The tank combos will swap to reset a stacking debuff, and one poor bastard will remain alone with the wind guy (thus keeping up our person per platform requirement). Everyone else should be whacking the ice guy.

When the ultimate finishes after like 10 second, all the DPS gets back to where they were before. Rinse repeat as needed. The tank combos alternate bosses every ultimate. We left our healer alone with the wind guy as he just basically throws you up in the air, allowing you to still heal somewhat, but it does a decent amount of damage on top of falling damage. Your mileage may vary.

As a Warlock, I was sent with our S-priest to Mr. Wind. My job was to try to keep his attention and just DPS the piss out of him. Our priest kept me alive if needed and DPS'ed when not needed. The wind guy has two major abilities to watch out for: Crazy Tornadoes and Big Wall o' Wind (Wind Gust). If your default DBM is like mine, you'll want to go in and check the button for "Wind Gust" warning, otherwise you won't get the memo.

The tornadoes are obvious, just avoid them. I'm still trying to figure out this Wind Gust though. He appears to just do it in a random direct and then just spins clockwise. If you get hit by it, you'll be thrown off the platform. Sometimes you get to rejoin, other times you just plummet to death. Best of luck. What we've found works best is if we each stand directly in line with the air jumps so that if we get blown off, we're blown directly into one of those and usually live. We don't want to stay apart so that one of us at least remains on the platform.

The real danger is if he randomly ends up facing you when he starts. I've think I've gotten better at anticipating this, but it can be hard to see until... whoops, off the platform. Hence standing in front of the wind-veyor. Otherwise, just don't let him sweep into you. Being closer will help, and there's no downside to being near him.

He only does one wind gust per "ultimate" so after you survive the one, you're good until you've swapped to ice and back. Occasionally, he'll do one just as Ultimate ends. It sucks if you conveyor back into it, but such is life. If he does that, he's still got another up his sleeve, so don't slack off. Otherwise, you just gotta keep on your toes, DPS your heart out, and hope that lady RNG doesn't take a crap on you (sometimes it seemed the three giant tornadoes called up the wall o' death and pre-planned on how to corner me).

Your 'lock portal can be useful if you find yourself in the Ultimate (to avoid falling damage), but you get blown off too fast to make use of it otherwise. Though, maybe if you have quicker fingers than me, it might work. When you're on the ice guy, avoid the patches on the ground too. Duh. Also, make sure you give yourself plenty of time to use the air-veyors; they disappear during the Ultimate and if you're in the air... splatola.

Once you get one of the three to kick the bucket, you have a minute to finish off the rest, so you'll want to keep your DPS reasonably balanced. You can always order a DPS to shuffle around if you're way unbalanced after a couple rounds. We've yet to survive past around 50% though, so I don't have much other advice to offer about it.

Maybe these were less of cliffnotes and more of a rambly wall. Sorry. To make up for it, I'll stick a graphic in here. This is poached from the WoWWiki entry, but I think it's helpful. Fwiw, I was the teal box (despite how they've labeled it for their strat).

Removing the Toll of Tol Barad

There has been a lot of complaint levied against Tol Barad since it showed up on our virtual doorsteps. I think it's clear that most of the worry has been well founded. Blizzard even responded with some quick fixes, though the first hacks seemed to cause as many problems as they solved. If you've been reading around here for a while, you know that I don't like to complain unless I can offer some constructive advice to go along with it. I think I have some for Tol Barad.

First, though, what is the problem? I think, very simply put, Tol Barad (the PvP encounter) feels like a waste of time. That is coupled with the fact that Tol Barad (the location) is unpleasant to traverse. I think those are two mostly unrelated problems, but neither one screams "fun."

Let's look at the location issues first, as I believe this is the lesser of two evils. After all, the biggest complaints seem to center around two things. One: that you can't fly. This is very unlikely to change. Two: that the respawn rate of mobs is too fast. This, on the other hand, is likely to change. In fact, having been out there a few times recently, I think it may have already been changed a bit. Before things would pop as soon as you killed them. Now it seems to take a bit longer. Either way, this is an easy thing to tweak on Blizz's end, so I don't expect it to be a problem forever.

I think they do need to work out some of the more minor things that I keep hearing about like glitches and the like. I've never really experienced any of them personally, but there do seem to be some odd things happening with zoning and travel that are probably not intended. I'm sure that kind of thing will be fixed eventually as well. Otherwise, are these dailies really that much worse than the Shattered Sun Offensive? I think the one thing I wish is that the quests were a bit more localized. I suppose I just felt like with the SSO dailies there was a nice, quick route that nailed them all and there is no such thing out in TB. A big part of that might be do to the nature of the "Kill this single guy" quests, where there can be a line. I think for dailies, this sort of quest is dumb and should be scrapped. They're tolerable in leveling zones because they can really add to a sense of story, but having to do them over and over again really grates on me.

But what about the PvP encounter? That seems to be the big thing on people's minds with regards to TB. After all, dailies will be dailies. Plus, despite it's faults, I think we generally enjoyed Wintergrasp. TB has not filled those big shoes. WG was something to look forward to. TB is quickly growing as something to dread. And why? Well, even Blizz admits there are some heavy balancing issues between attacking and defending. This, coupled with low motivation through rewards, really sets the stage for a frustrating encounter.

Let's be honest, this was an idea that probably looked good on paper, but has completely fallen flat in execution. I don't bash Blizz about this. I mean I don't envy them the task of trying to design for us. Gamers, in general, excel at thinking outside the box. That means the planned encounter that you sketch out in your mad design lab will almost never play out as anticipated. We've constantly surprised Blizz over the years, and TB is a shining example of that. They thought they had something cool in a three base attack environment. Yet what they found was that the way we play it breaks their best intentions. Don't get me wrong, I'm not absolving them of anything. As the developer, it's their job to fix this mistake, and I think they will. I just can feel for the lead designer who probably cried in his cornflakes after we destroyed his baby. There are plenty of ideas that look great on paper and then preform poorly under extreme stress. It happens.

But what can we do to fix it? Well, they tried increasing honor gains. That didn't work. Next, they're going to try finagling some buffs. That might help, but it still seems to me like a small band-aid on a bigger problem. In Cata, I think what Blizz fails to understand as evidenced by both Heroics and Tol Barad is that players want to feel like they're getting somewhere, even when they're failing. It doesn't have to be "fast", we don't mind time sinks (though we'll sometimes complain). No, what really grinds our gears is feeling like something was a complete waste of time.

So how can we make TB feel less like a waste? I have an easy solution: add a couple more quests. Remember in WG when we had the "kill 10 of the opposing faction" and "protect the siege things?" Later they even added "assault the towers." These were all on top of "gain victory." Why do we not have those in TB? WHY?! That is the simplest solution that I can see, that is easy to implement, that relieves a TON of the feeling that we're wasting time.

Imagine, you lose but you have three daily quests to turn in that also net you some badges and/or rep with the faction you're working on (BW for alliance). How much better would you feel after a frustrating loss having completed those? I mean, it sucks to lose and we'd rather hold the other set of dailies, but at least you got something done. At least you have something to show. It gives you a reason to try struggle that isn't totally dependent on the completely unbalanced outcome. Tie it to some objectives. Tie it to actually killing other players.

I guess I just feel like tweaking buffs isn't going to do it. Blizz should have learned by now that the players will exploit any minor unbalance in a BG. Unless they get it perfectly fair, it's going to have small issues, and it's nearly impossible to hit that gold standard and yet retain something that is interesting and presents choices. Instead, look at the BGs that have succeeded and yet still been slightly unbalanced (Look at WG!). You need to both minimize unbalance and add a commensurate reward. Just doing one or the other isn't going to cut it. In TB, why not just add a few quests? It seems so simple that even a cave man could do it!