On State of the Blog Speeches:

Yup. I did exactly what every other blogger out there did, once Cataclysm came out. I started playing, and didn't stop until I hit a wall.

Oh come on, like blogging would be the first thing on YOUR mind with a new expansion out there dangling in front of you!

So, one... two? Two months in now? And I've made some impressions.

I am not pleased with the state of Bear.

In Wrath, Druids were THE tank to beat. Oh, go on, say what you will about Paladins and Warriors. Druids had the spammable AoE snap threat, massive HP pools, and more avoidance and mitigation than you could shake a stick at. I tell you the truth, there is no way that my guild would have downed Sindragosa with a disconnected MT if I was anything other than a druid, putting my fuzzy butt on the line there. 22 stacks of Mystic Buffet, I held her, and was able to properly hand her off to the MT as soon as she reconnected. Had I been able to do it one second earlier, I would have been behind the ice block, been able to drop stacks, and return to the fight.

Now, not so much. Bears are fantastic in single-target fights, just as Warriors are. A Bear's Mangle is analogous to the Warrior's Shield Slam. Both hit like a truck and a half, and fancy mechanics affect it in some way, shape or form, like Shield Block boosting its damage, or Berserk letting us spam a cleaving Mangle for 15-20 seconds. We're great there. No problems with threat whatsoever. But the AoE threat game is dominated by the Death Knights and the Paladins. Now, obviously, I don't expect a tank to be absolutely phenomenal at everything. The last thing we need is Wrath 2.0 to roll back around again. But Bear tanking worries me somewhat, especially given how much of a hell it is to juggle Thrash uptime, three stacks of Lacerate, Demo Roar, Pulverize, watching your rage for Maul, and Berserk proccing mangles.

It's no secret that Bears take the most about of damage when tanking multiple mobs, compared to the other tanks. As far as survival is concerned, Warriors are seen gearing straight Block, to get themselves as close to a passive 30% physical damage reduction as possible. Death Knights, are stupidly hard to kill, what with that one DK Ragewyn soloing Marrowgar. And Paladins, well. You know what I say. Paladins are the cockroaches of Azeroth. Savage Defense sucks compared to Blood Shield + Death Strike. Savage Defense only stops one hit then disappears, regardless of whether it was 1 million damage, or 1 damage. Savage Defense sucks compared to Paladins and Warriors. Their mitigation mechanics are entirely passive, whereas Savage Defense requires continued, active damage output. And it only has one charge. We smack a mob, put up a shield, his buddy taps us for 1/5th of the shield's strength, pops it, and until we get to attack again, we're taking damage. I would like to see Savage Defense be turned into an absorption shield, a la Death Knights, where if the damage doesn't total up to the bubble, it doesn't pop.

I'm also concerned about some fairly large nerfs on the horizon:

• Skull Bash (Cat) / Skull Bash (Bear) now prevents spell from that school from being cast for 4 sec, down from 5 sec.
• Maul now scales from 24% of Attack Power, down from 30%.
• Lacerate now scales from 7.66% of Attack Power, down from 9.58%. Now makes enemies bleed for 35 + 2.56% of Attack Power, down from 35 + 3.2% of Attack Power.
• (Mangle) Mangle (Bear) now deals 235% normal damage plus 681, down from 300% plus 870.
• Pulverize now deals 80% weapon damage, down from 100%. Additional damage reduced by 20% as well, from 450 to 360.

Also, Berserk doesn't break Fears anymore, and shifting doesn't break roots. I confess to not having tanked as much as I would have liked. I resolved to not tank myself until I had learned every dungeon as a DPS. I still mess up here and there, but I am mostly able to keep the rising sense of dread in check.

Cat State of the Blog comes next.

-BTC

On Karsh Steelbender's easy mode:

I was taught how to do Karsh Steelbender by a bunch of people in an RDF they other day. (Whodathunk? Learning from an RDF group!)

The method that was taught was sufficiently awesome that it just completely blows everything that anyone else is doing out of the water. Here's the skinny.

Karsh Steelbender is a fight that is exactly identical between both Normal and Heroic modes, save the increased damage output. It may be worthwhile just to practice this method in normal before you do Heroic.

At no point in time will you ever "soak" Karsh in the forge. Ever. This places too heavy a burden on the healer with the reflected AoE that pulses with each stack of debuff he gains, and can quickly obliterate a group. Instead, the tank should "dip" or perhaps even just "clip" him into the forge every time his debuff gets down to about five seconds or so, by kiting him through the edge, only adding one or two stacks of the debuff each time. To visualize, think of a circle, then draw a pentagon, that is just a little bit too small for the circle to fit into. The sides of the pentagon are the path that the tank should kite along. If by 12 or 13 stacks, Karsh does not look like he will be dead within the next application of debuff, allow the debuff to drop, kite the adds out into the grates surrounding the forge area, and kill them there, before repeating.

This method:

Eliminates the need to manage adds when the debuff drops off.
Makes incoming damage manageable by spacing out the pulses of AoE damage caused by the application of the debuff, allowing your healer time to top everybody back up.
Eliminates the need to worry about group members standing in the "Ring of Fire" that erupts when the debuff is dropped until the very end.
Allows DPS to conserve their cooldowns until Karsh has seven or eight stacks, and not have the usable uptime be wasted by the debuff dropping.

I've posted this to Wowhead, just because it *needs* to be seen by everyone. Hopefully it'll be up there soon.

Here's an explanatory image, whipped up in GIMP:

-BTC

On a finalized tanking rotation and spec:

So it's coming close to Cataclysm, and my usual druid tanking forecasting annoyances aside, I think we can finally put together some kind of tanking priority list.

Since I generally tend to do The Hybrid Thing, here's the spec I've been throwing around lately: 0/31/9 with one floater.

I think it, as well as some of my glyph choices, could be tweaked significantly, especially since switching glyphs back and forth will be much easier. The fact of the matter remains though, that there is really no good 3rd bear tanking glyph, which is what I usually will be doing. Lemme break it down row by row:

T1 Feral: Of the three talents, only Predatory Strikes is not hybrid, so we don't take it. The other two are both useful to us, and we need five points to get to T2, so we grab them all. The five-point requirement aside, maxing Furor will save us headaches down the line when we make our initial charges, as we will likely be using the redesigned Thorns spell on ourselves just before we shift to Bear and charge in. Since word is that it's not castable while in Bear or Cat form, we don't care about the glyph as a result, but it will definitely be used just before pulling despite its steep mana cost. Yes, 3/3 Furor is also wasted on a cat, since between the GCD afterward and haste increasing our energy regeneration, we likely will shoot from 66 to 90 or 95 energy before we can even do anything, but having to shift back and forth to get the rage required to Feral Charge will save some sanity. Feral Swiftness, free 4% dodge, 30% extra movespeed. Yaaaaaay.

T2: Oh how I hate this tier so much.

Infected Wounds is necessary as a tank. Primal Fury is necessary whether you tank or DPS. Fury Swipes is purely a DPS increase, but math right now says it's more useful to Cats because of their inherently faster swing timer. Feral Aggression is also valuable to both tanking and DPS. Since we're hybrid, we put points into everything except Fury Swipes.

But why Feral Aggression? And why 2/2? Unlike Warriors, we are going to have to juggle both Lacerate and Feral Faerie Fire stacks on our tanking targets. We also don't have a Devastate to apply stacks of Faerie Fire/Sunder Armor for us as well. And given that it only stacks to three instead of five, I figure it's better to eat the extra talent point in Feral Aggression to save the many, many extra GCDs needed to apply that ONE last stack of Faerie Fire. As a result, in for a penny, in for a pound. This may pan out differently, though, since more classes are getting the major armor debuff, it may not be imperative for just us to handle it. No word on whether any one will overwrite the other, though. It would totally suck if you slapped a stack on a boss, only to have someone accidentally hit the wrong button and wipe it out, making you start over.

T3: Get everything.

Okay, so maybe it's not that cut and dry. King of the Jungle is necessary to DPS with, although whether or not we can get by with just 2/3 or 1/3 remains to be seen. Feral Charge is absolutely necessary, no contest. Thick Hide is necessary for tanking. But IFC/Stampede... well. The increased melee haste after a Bear Charge is interesting enough. It's not increasing haste rating, otherwise, you'd never see a Cat Charge ever again, but the way things are set up right now, I would say is a bit of a tossup. If you were a full-on Cat, I could see you Bear Charging in to take advantage of the immobilize and increased melee haste to throw out more white hits and proc more Fury Swipes. It's a LONG buff, relatively speaking, too. The damage on Ravage still needs to be shaken out, a bit though. If this becomes more attractive to Cats than Cat Charge + Ravage, something probably needs to be tweaked. As it stands, Stampede isn't *explicitly* necessary? But it's certainly very tasty. If you choose not to put points here, hold onto them until T5.

T4: Leader of the Pack got it's Improved effect rolled right in, grab it. Brutal Impact is necessary as a tank, grab it. (We have a ranged interrupt now! Yay!) Nurturing Instinct is one of those spells that only helps if you have the time to shift out of form to take advantage of, (i.e., emergency Cat Tranquility) but since we're tanking most of the time, no-go.

T5: Primal Madness: I don't see this as explicitly necessary for tanking or DPS. It's just one of those talents that boosts the top end damage. Survival Instincts is necessary as our Shield Wall. Natural Reaction is required as a tank. If you didn't take 2/2 Stampede earlier, you can grab 2/2 Endless Carnage here, which pads out the Rake, SR and Pulverize durations. Since physical bleeds aren't affected by haste, (no, you read that right. Bleeds aren't affected by haste.) this will primarily just make the rotation less tight.

T6: Blood in the Water: Damn you for changing the name, Blizzard. ;_; Cat-only talent, also dead to us. Dead to us, I say! Rend and Tear gets maxed, as before. Pulverize.... I wish we didn't need to take Pulverize. I wish it were more like Devastate, were it refreshes instead of consumes. But alas, it is not to be. Necessary tanking tool, take it.

T7: Berserk: Take it.

Resto T1: Blessing of the Grove no longer buffs Rake damage, so that's one less thing we have to take. Naturalist is useless to us. Heart of the Wild is only three points, so what's left? Natural Shapeshifter. I'm not thrilled to have to take it, but since Thorns has a very steep mana cost, (35% of base) it helps take the sting away. On the plus side, it makes Master Shapeshifter (just one point) available, so.

Resto T2: Hooray for Perseverance. 6% less spell damage will stack with the Effulgent Skyflare Diamond, bring that passive spell damage resist up to 8% Are we still going to be of the "we handle spell damage by having massive health pools" school? Probably not, since we now have a Shield Wall equivalent, so it remains to be seen how important it is. But less damage taken is always a good thing, so 3/3 that sucker. Drop a point into Master Shapeshifter while you're at it.

-BTC

On REAL ID's fallout, a post-mortem:

(...although really, calling it a "post-mortem" is like saying "Dracula is dead". He always comes back. =T)

All in all, though, I'm not happy with Blizzard. Or Activision. Or any one of a giant nebulous "them".

It's kind of hard for me to *not* hold everyone at Blizzard as accountable for this whole fiasco, partly because of the lack of information on what happened behind the scenes, and partly because all the CSRs, whether forum or phone-based, were all told to hold the company line.

I'm not happy with Blizzard anymore. I mentioned in a previous post that I regarded Blizzard as the gold standard for a video game developer. It's cliche, but the magic is gone. It's like a studio exec deciding to axe Firefly. It's like LeBron leaving Cleveland for Florida. It's like Garrosh being a dick and pissing off people in Cataclysm. It's any semblence of "cool" that Blizzard might have once had has now evaporated. Just look at my Achievement points over to the right. I have invested a great deal of time and money into WoW. I was ready to keep telling Blizzard, "take my money, please" all the way through Cataclysm, as long as they kept giving me a great game to play every time that I logged in.

I mean, quite literally, I was just about ready to give Blizzard my $55 dollars to transfer an old 80 from another server and faction change it. I had planned this out months ago, working up all the things I would need, by liquidating my now-abandoned guild's vault, and buying things in anticipation of reselling them Hordeside on Kirin Tor. Oh, and the things I bought. I picked up a Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets for 900 gold. I found an Eye of Shadow. I bought cheapish ICC BoEs. I bought every single ToC recipe, most of the Ulduar recipes, gobs of Alliance-only pets (most of which consisted of White Kittens), every single Alliance-only Cooking recipe, stacks and stacks of Hakkari Bijou, and Coins, Sunfury Signets to turn in for Scryer's rep, Dreadfang Venom Sacs to change to Aldor, and Marks of Kil'jaden and Sargeras to pump that up quickly. I bought out Books of Glyph Mastery, flasks, fish, gems, both cut and uncut, enchanting materials, and just before this whole thing blew up, I was starting to stockpile Primordial Saronites. Basically, if it could be sold for a profit Kirin Tor-H, I was buying it in spades. And now all I'm left with is wasted effort, and goods that now sit in my bank and bags, rapidly depreciating in value.

I don't want to reward Blizzard's stupidity on this issue. Again, there I go blaming the entire company again when it was probably just the work of a relatively small group of people.

But man, I want to have *someone* to blame, and cast out.

-BTC

On ....ARE YOU FREAKING SERIOUS?!:

I think I'll let the headline do all the heavy lifting here:

 ESRB unintentionally exposes email addresses of people who filed complaints over Blizzard's Real ID system

ARE YOU GUYS FREAKING KIDDING ME?!

I mean, seriously, now. I'm just glad that I filed my complaint using an email from mailinator.com

-BTC

On retractions:

Today, Blizzard co-founder Michael Morhaime walked Real ID back.

Great, right?

....not really. There are still too many things *wrong* with what they're doing. Like they're putting the cart in front of the horse.

I wrote up a forum post in the same thread, maybe you've seen it, maybe not, but I'll cross-post it here, because I don't think I can explain my position any better than I did.

Thank you for your letter Mr. Morhaime. I feel that you've done right by the Battle.net community by putting the kibosh on things, even if the decision is only "at this time".

That being said, I'm still very disappointed with what did happen. Blizzard was the gold standard to which I held other video game companies, always thoughtful, never impatient, and always listening to their playerbase. I can't help but feel betrayed when it seems that the first two of those were thrown out with the bathwater.

I don't mind a greater Battle.net community. Community is good. But community doesn't happen when some force from the top brings down stone tablets with fifteen! *crash* Ten Commandments! and commands us that we have to be closer to each other. It just doesn't work that way. Community is the funny chatter in a PUG Heroic that leads to "Hey, can I friend you?". Community is the camaraderie that you get when your random PUG raid turns into a weekly ritual. Community is your guild, the people you can whine to when you go through four or five healers and tanks in a row in a H:HoR wipefest.

So I'm thankful that you've taken our collective voice, and listened to it.

Please listen again to what I, and others have to say.

Real ID isn't the way forward. There are too many intrinsically *wrong* things about it. There *are* people that we know, cross-server and cross-game, that we know only by a screenname. We are good friends with those people. We might know the names of their cats, we might know that they live in their parents' basement, we might know that they raid better drunk than sober, or that they eat pizza with everything on it, and by god, I mean everything, and if you forget the anchovies again, there will be hell to pay. But in the end, we only know them by screenname, and that's all we want to share with them. We just want the ability to friend people, cross-server, cross-game, what-have-you, without having to share one's One True Name. (And that's not a joke, either. In the age of Google and Howmanyofme.com, and readily available background checking sites galore, having one's real name *does* give them power.) Given the rapidity with which poor Bashiok had his information found and collated, and I can understand if the official line is to deny that is his personal information, because it is a real danger, and a real risk.

A community is frequently compared to a web, and the depth of the community is often compared to how strong that web is. Now, there *are* two ways to make a web, or community stronger. You can make the threads linking people together stronger, or you can let people make more connections with more people. And wouldn't you know it, the way nature takes its course, nature tends to favor the latter solution instead, making ever more intricate webs, and letting the individual people make their bonds together stronger as they see fit.

What I'm trying to say is that Real ID is too binary. There's an "On" position, which lets you friend everyone, and tells EVERYONE who you are, and an "Off" position, which tells nobody who you are, but also traps you to your own server or game. There needs to be a middle ground, one where you can friend that funny person on another server, or your younger sister that's off at college, and the only time you ever see her online is on Bnet. I can't imagine the community at large getting angry with these kinds of greater community bonding.

And the most important thing is, is that it's not Blizzard's choice to reveal our personal information.

So give us the ability to use a unique "Gamertag". Link that gamertag to all our other profiles. Link it to all our WoW characters, even the ones under level 10. Make it so that no matter what we do, the rest of the community can see past any the disguises used by trolls, make them traceable to the community at large.

Again, I want to thank you for listening, and for stepping in and walking things back. My relationship with Blizzard, one that I've had for a very long time, has taken a hit, a very severe one.

Sincerely,

Paona
Kirin Tor-US-H

PS: One more thing, and I feel that I should still get this off my chest. I am still *very* disappointed with the Real ID announcement. I meant it when I said that I felt Blizzard was the gold standard in the video game industry.

You can be sure that I will never take anything that Blizzard says at simple face value again, nor should anyone else. With such a drastic move with such blatant disregard for privacy, I feel that my intelligence has been insulted, that someone at either Activision or Blizzard said, "Oh, they'll think this is a GREAT idea!"

For now, I'll trust you again, but not until after I've verified.

Maybe not even until *after* I've verified

-BTC

On Real ID, and why what Blizzard is doing is a bad idea:

The first rule of internet safety is to never use your real name.

That's it. That's all I have to say about the new Real ID changes.

This is the rule that was first drilled into me when I first started using the internet. When the heck did we stop teaching kids this?

Oh wait, I know. It's because of social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook.

But that's not why I'm really mad. If Battle.net were supposed to be a social networking gaming site, then yes, I wouldn't be as... angry? No, too strong a word. Annoyed? Not strong enough...

Let's settle with a facepalm and an "Oy." and go from here.

The reason why I throw out Yiddish colloquialisms is because I didn't enter into an agreement with Blizzard, about this being a social networking site. If I'm going to sign up for a Facebook, I understand what I'm getting into, because I expressly desire to put my real name out there for people to find and communicate with me. But when I bought my Blizzard games and got a Battle.net account, I had no such intention. Whatever my original intention, the decision to sign up for a social networking site, has been taken out of my hands entirely.

And for the record, I *hate* social networking. I think it's stupid and idiotic to plaster your name all over the internet. For pete's sake, potential employers do not need to find out that you frequent furry forums or see your spring break photos of you drinking shots out of some girl's cleavage.

Let me tell you guys a hypothetical story.

Let's say that at one point in time, a person who we will refer to as "A" did a presentation for one of their college courses. And let's say that during this presentation, this person asked for people to volunteer their names so that "A" could demonstrate the kinds of things that they could find on the internet from just using Google and their first and last name, and filling in information as they go. "A" would start with the name, and then include information like the college they were attending. "A" happened to find a mention in an article in the college's newspaper, as they were being interviewed, mentioning their high school. "A" might have gone on to find an old profile on a forum somewhere, finding not only their interests based on the contents of the forum, but also an email that matched several other places where that email address was used. And "A" might have also found different distinct usernames that were attatched to the email address, which in turn also led to more usernames, all the while taking note of this person's hobbies and personal information. "A" started culling bits and pieces of information from innocent blurbs on blog comments, and forum posts, starting to move on from hobbies, age, and location to more specific information. Where they lived. Who they lived with. What cell phone provider they had. Who they were going out with. Where they were going to be next Friday, and who should bring the beer.

This information got more and more specific with each search, until this person demanded that "A" stop what they were doing, which "A" complied with and closed everything down.

"A" recieved an A for their presentation

 That person just disappeared from school.

I'll say it again. The first rule of being safe on the internet is to never use your real name.

-BTC