LFM Gruul’s Lair

So last night i had finished with my dailies and ground out a fair amount of aldor rep (killing demons in Shadowmoon Valley) and was heading back to Shatt to log when i saw a curious thing in trade chat: “LFM Gruul’s Lair raid.”  Now normally i would have scoffed at this since i have been in my fair share of bad PUG’s (That’s Pick Up Group for those of you just joining us… or group of people you dont know).  However the person in trade chat was someone i knew and had been guilded with and had raided with. So i thought what the heck.  This might be good for a laugh.  So i joined and immediately saw a few familiar faces including one of the officers in the guild i am in.  So slowly but surely the raid filled up and we zoned in.  So… can a PUG of 25 people do 25 man raiding content?  Well my shiney new Netherblade Breeches say yes… yes they can.  The group ranged from fresh 70’s in a few pieces of kara gear to a couple of T6 “Leet” people.  But for the most part knew what they were doing and did their jobs very well.

Here’s a couple of 25 man PUG tips:

• Dont be “that guy”
  • Dont speak on vent unless you absolutely have to
  • Dont complain about anything in raid
  • Do you job
• Have a support system (while running this myself and the 2 other officers from my guild vented in officer’s chat about how much complaining some of the others were doing.  Like the holy pally who was whining that she was out of mana 1/3 of the way into the high king fight and dead on the second ground slam for Gruul)
• Have Fun… (it’s a game remember)

Now i have only ever done Gruul’s layer as a healer, so doing it as a melee DPS was a bit different…First off Gruul is Fracking HUGE!  I had a tough time know which was the front and which was the back (since he’s on all fours for most of the time).  It was also weird having to change positions every little bit to avoid the slew of cave-ins.  But all and all it was a fun fight.  I really liked being able to pop cloak of shadows every time he did ground slam… it made avoiding others a lot easier than on my healer.

So the moral of the story is that yes you can PUG a 25 man instance… assuming that the group you get is decent 🙂

Blue: The State of the Rogue

I saw this interesting post on blutracker this morning and thought i’d share it with other rogues out there.

Potential rogue buffs / Dev Q&A
In terms of the big raid buffs, the ones we consider rogues bringing are Expose Armor, Wound Poison and Mind Numbing Poison. There are plenty of others more along the lines of Kick and Sap that are harder to quantify. (Source)

With that in mind can you tell us any plans that you have to better close this PvE to PvP gap that we’re seeing with certain trees? How do you plan to make all three trees viable across the board?
Yes, this is definitely a priority. It is a lot harder with classes in which all specs are still focused mostly on dps. We understand that some specs are just going to be better for 5-mans, for PvP or for raiding. We’re trying to equalize as much as possible, but we’re also trying to be realistic about our chances. (Source)

How do you plan to deal with talents which ware still considered all too needed by rogues, particularly in the case of Relentless Strikes? Is there any possibility of making Relentless Strikes a core class ability we can all train?
Mandatory talents are tricky. There are certainly plenty of them in every tree. Every warrior spec without Cruelty is pretty experimental, as is every druid spec without Omen of Clarity. Part of the problem is we keep offering new character levels along with new talents, so each expansion ends up constraining you more and more to one tree. The real red flag, for me at least, is when a spec has so many truly mandatory talents (which is a funny thing to say, since it’s still a little subjective) that they don’t have any optional talents. Instead of a cookie-cutter build being something like 20 plus your choice, they become you must get these 24 talents. If that makes sense.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to create anything but carbon copies of abilities in each of the 3 trees and not have SOME variance. If you want the highest DPS there will ALWAYS be a max DPS…even if by 1 or 2% one spec will ALWAYS be better.
I think it is very likely there will be a theoretical max dps build. However:

• It will probably vary from boss to boss.
• It might depend a lot on the skill of the player.
• Because there are so many variables (by design) it may be really hard to “solve the equation” for which actually is the highest dps build.
• For 90% of players (maybe more) that kind of damage difference is in the noise. Very few players can do 2500 dps one night and then 2525 dps another night (a 1% difference). Usually the delta is much larger than that because of random elements including things as non-gamey as Internet lag, how tired you are and just bad luck. If taking the most optimal build can’t gaurantee you dps higher than the random element in the equation, it may very well not be worth taking. Now if the dps gain is significant by taking the best build, then I agree with you.

Talent tree balancing
Rogue talents are hard because the class is ultimately very mathy. Without a finite resource like mana, it’s easy to analyze every possible move for its cost efficiency and ultimate damage delivery. This is coupled with the fact that it’s really easy for a rogue to move among trees. By contrast, before the advent of Frostfire Bolt a fire mage could mostly ignore frost. A shadow priest wants almost nothing in Holy. But having an emphais on poisons or stealth in a rogue tree doesn’t make a tree unattractive to a Combat rogue. I’m not trying to make excuses, but perhaps more than any other class, I find that rogues can evaluate a talent’s utility pretty easily. It’s a cool thing about the class, but it makes talent design challenging.

I think I mentioned this in another thread, but our team has a really amazing rogue theorycrafter who stays really in touch with the community (anonymously). We have a surprising number of really good players on the team in general, but I always feel really safe about his conclusions on rogues. But that has also meant fewer blue posts than you deserve, so I’m trying to make up for that.

[…] I started a bit of a tempest in the warrior forms when I suggested Protection might get new talents that would let it be more PvP viable. But you know, they actually have some things they can do now…. Hopefully we can get 3 rogue trees there too.

Not really sure what the future will hold for us… but it’s nice to know that the folks at blizzard want to help us be the best we can be 🙂

Update: Gear, Gear, Gear

So this past weekend was a good one for gear.  First up we did our weekly Karazhan clear.  During which i received: Girdle of Treachery, Bracers of Maliciousness, and Netherblade Gloves.  The Drape of the Dark Reavers also dropped but i lost the roll by 1. (ce’st la vie).  While running Heroic Slave Pens i also won Midnight Legguards.  And finally i spent the majority of the weekend maxing out my leatherworking and bought the pattern and made some Swiftstrike Shoulders.  (Which are absolutely amazing.) I’m also closing in on being exalted with the SSO (hopefully this week) so i can get my Shattered Sun Pendant of Might (Aldor).