2fps

10man guilds are often overlooked when it comes to gear discussions. After all, doesn’t everyone have access to both 10 and 25man normal mode loot?

Obviously no, not everyone does. Most people simply keep things broad and generalized to cover most audiences. Not so much the case here!

This post is a list of gear introduced in 3.3 specifically for the 10man-only raid tank. This should put all relevant gear in one convenient (hopefully) list for those who are tired of sifting through wowhead.

I won’t offer any commentary or analysis on the gear itself here in this post. For now, I just want to get the list out there.

EDIT – By request, I’ve added tanking loot that will interest both the non-DK tank and maybe those dirty Frosties too.  1/8/09

The list is broken down as follows:

• Icecrown10 Boss Items
• Crafted Items
• Emblem of Frost Items
• Tier 10 Set Items
• Ashen Verdict Reputation Ring

Icecrown10 Boss Items

Marrowgar
Marrowgar’s Scratching Choker
Citadel Enforcer’s Claymore
Bonebreaker Scepter

Lady Deathwhisper
Ghoul Commander’s Cuirass

Gunship Battle
Abomination’s Bloody Ring
Neverending Winter

Deathbringer Saurfang
Deathforged Legplates
Gargoyle Spit Bracers
Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling

Festergut
Cloak of Many Skins

Professor Putricide
Unidentifiable Organ
The Facelifter

Blood Prince Council
Spaulders of the Blood Princes

Queen Lana’thel
Veincrusher Gauntlets

Valithria Dreamwalker 
Ironrope Belt of Ymirjar
Oxheart

Sindragosa
Scourge Fanged Stompers

Crafted Items

Ashen Verdict Blacksmithing Plans
Boots of Kingly Upheaval – Materials Required
Pillars of Might – Materials Required

Emblem of Frost Items

Sentinel’s Winter Cloak – 50 Emblems
Cataclysmic Chestguard – 95 Emblems
Gauntlets of the Kraken – 60 Emblems
Verdigris Chain Belt – 60 Emblems
Corroded Skeleton Key – 60 Emblems
Sigil of the Bone Gryphon – 30 Emblems

Tier 10 Set Items

Scourgelord Pauldrons – 60 Emblems
Scourgelord Legguards – 95 Emblems
Scourgelord Faceguard – 95 Emblems
Scourgelord Handguards – 60 Emblems
Scourgelord Chestguard – 95 Emblems

Ashen Verdict Reputation Ring

Ashen Band of Courage – Requires Friendly
Ashen Band of Greater Courage – Requires Honored
Ashen Band of Unmatched Courage – Requires Revered
Ashen Band of Endless Courage – Requires Exalted

Another Look

So now that we know what’s out there, let’s break it down a bit. Here’s a glance at our slot coverage. Some slots have multiple options available, others not so much.

Head
Scourgelord Faceguard

Neck
Marrowgar’s Scratching Choker

Shoulders
Scourgelord Pauldrons
Spaulders of the Blood Princes

Back
Cloak of Many Skins
Sentinel’s Winter Cloak

Chest
Scourgelord Chestguard
Cataclysmic Chestguard
Ghoul Commander’s Cuirass

Wrist
Gargoyle Spit Bracers

Hands
Scourgelord Handguards
Gauntlets of the Kraken
Veincrusher Gauntlets

Waist
Ironrope Belt of Ymirjar
Verdigris Chain Belt

Legs
Scourgelord Legguards
Deathforged Legplates
Pillars of Might

Feet
Scourge Fanged Stompers
Boots of Kingly Upheaval

Finger
Ashen Verdict reputation ring
Abomination’s Bloody Ring

Trinket
Unidentifiable Organ
Corroded Skeleton Key

Sigil
Sigil of the Bone Gryphon

Weapon
Citadel Enforcer’s Claymore
Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling
Oxheart

Offhand/Alternate Weapon
Bonebreaker Scepter
Neverending Winter
The Facelifter

New Rule – No more Seed of Corruption

Once upon a time there was a place called Mount Hyjal. This was the place that warlocks would go when they wanted to die. They’d bring about said dying by chain casting Seed of Corruption.

Not too long after Wrath launched I sadly, tearfully removed Seed of Corruption from my bars. It seemed that there was no trash in all of Naxxramas that lived long enough for me to get much use out of Seed. Rain of Fire, with its flashy new animation and its boosted damage, was all the rage because it started putting out the aoe hurt instantly and on demand. Crucial considering you had about one or two ticks before everything was dead anyway.

Yeah this was and is a pretty great ability but for the most part, you won’t ever really notice it if you take it off your bars and lob it into the trash.

…wait what, not all warlocks are destro? Does that change this? I don’t care, I spent all of BC as destro and I’ll spend all of Wrath as destro too.

New Rule – Stop going along with terrible leaders

No this isn’t anything to do with raiding. It has everything to do with Scourgelord Tirion Fordring… again. Can we just recognize this guy as a war criminal, flog him thoroughly and then get on with our lives already? The first time I saw him he was hanging out in Scourge territory supposedly living in exile after betraying Stormwind or some such thing. The next time I saw him was… with the Lich King. Then after that I saw him in Icecrown with the Scourge. Next he deliberately wasted a weapon of mass destruction that could have killed Arthas dead for good. Now he’s routinely slaughtering as many of the best and brightest from both factions as he can by using some Scourge he “captured” to help “train” people to fight against the Scourge.

What the hell people, he couldn’t be more obviously evil! At least Garrosh is just a stupid idiot of the nth degree, he’s not pure unwavering evil in his core like Fordring.

New Rule – Mage T10 has to be itemized with spell penetration

I just don’t know what I’ll do if the mage T10 gear not only looks badass but actually is badass. They’d better hurry and throw on some useless garbage spell penetration at the expense of meaningful stats like they did with T6 so I don’t start thinking this is some strange new world where mages actually get to have nice things.

Patch notes and previews are now up for 3.3.

I haven’t ever dabbled much on the PTR’s in the past because my old computer just couldn’t handle it. I did play on the PTR for 2.4 to test out Magister’s Terrace however and seeing as 3.3 is allegedly the last major content patch for this expansion and adds additional 5man instances (which was true for 2.4 as well) I think I’ll try my hand at the PTR again.

3.3 is bothering me already though. The loot from the new Icecrown 5mans is going to be the same item level as loot from 10man Coliseum and there’s going to be four new 5mans. This irritates me. Not because I don’t want people to get easy loot but because I feel like I’m having way too much loot thrown at me personally.

There are 5 badge vendors right now that offer a variety of gear. At least one epic drops in every heroic 5man. The 5man ToC drops purples in both normal and heroic modes and in such quantities that I’m surprised the (few) trash mobs don’t drop epic "green" trash loot.

Oh yeah, you can get purples from raids too.

I feel like I’m drowning and choking with epics already, and that’s before you add four more 5mans dropping all-purples-all-the-time.

It makes me sad because I don’t get to spend any time with my gear before I have to shard it to make room for new things I’ll shard next month.

In Burning Crusade you simply did not get upgrades quickly like you do now. I can still recall the names of a lot of the gear my paladin had and at what point in time I had it in Burning Crusade.

I was using my Scarab of the Infinite Cycle in Black Temple.

For tanking weapons I started with a Continuum Blade, upgraded to the Amani Punisher and then never upgraded again.

Back then, there was plenty of time to get to know your gear. Yes I said get to know your gear. Not just the stats but the item’s personality too. My scarab and I were always fighting in Karazhan and heroics because it always wanted to proc once nobody needed to be healed. I would gripe about it to my friends, equip something else for a few days and then come crawling back begging forgiveness. Eventually we made up after getting into Black Temple and there wasn’t ever a time when I wasn’t casting or when someone didn’t need healing.

Nowadays its a totally different story. I was just feeling like I was getting to be on good terms with my Stormedge but now that’s been shelved for a new Ony weapon. My gear and I are but passing strangers. I’ve only gotten to know a bare handful before losing them to obscurity.

…

I’m so not crazy, I swear.

New Rule – The guild Nocturnum has to change its name.

Its bad enough your guild’s name is only a two letter variation from ours, do I really have to answer your phones too? I’ve had a handful of whispers recently about people wanting into the guild or asking why I let their friend in the guild but not them. I tell them we haven’t inguilded anyone in weeks and they insist I’m wrong despite me being the guild leader and looking at the logs as I talk to them. It goes on for a while before they finally figure out that they’re not talking with the right guild at all. Some of them get particularly gutsy and say that our name is too close to the other guild’s name.

No. We’ve been here since the launch of Wrath. Change your name unless you’re cool with having a portion of your potential members redirected to us because you couldn’t be arsed to see if there was a guild with a similar name on the server.

New Rule – You have to at least try to get some level 80 gear before trying to get into pug raids.

Your character may be magic but you most certainly aren’t. You can’t channel any spell in real life that’s going to take your fresh 80 and make it do respectable raid dps without bothering to replace your level 70 questing greens. There’s a lot of gear out there that you can get without having to run a single instance, before you raise your hand and volunteer to do Emalon maybe you should go get that gear.

I’m not saying you’re a scrub or a leech, I’m not. I know groups for heroics can be exceedingly rare sometimes. But really, is wiping for an hour and a half on Emalon and then having to call the raid worth the time of 25 people when some simple tuneups to your gear are all that’s needed to make a difference between success and failure?

New Rule – I have to stop answering to my character’s name.

The other day someone called out the name Shay to get someone’s attention. I immediately turned around to see who was calling for me without thinking for one second that that wasn’t really my name. Now if someone who did actually play WoW with me called me Shay I wouldn’t think twice about it but in public, with strangers, its slightly different. It confuses people and leads to overly long explanations of why I’m answering to a name that is not my own.

I actually don’t have a problem with being called Shay or any of the other names I’ve taken from characters I’ve played over the years. One or two people I’m still in contact with still call me Angaril and I haven’t played the game that that character comes from for years and years. That’s fine with me.

But maybe, like I said before, in public with strangers its best to keep things simple.

Getting right to the point, we’re talking about sockets on your gear and why you should be ignoring the socket bonus.

This may be one of the hardest habits you’ll ever have to break in WoW.

I can be pretty compulsive with some of my habits and it took me a long time to get over this one in particular. I know there are a lot of other people out there (even Pike!) who struggle with this too. So let’s take a deep breath and say it together:

I don’t have to match the colour of the sockets on my gear.

I generally shouldn’t match the colour of the sockets on my gear.

Ok. Good.

What is the point of putting gems in your gear that match the socket colours?

To get the socket bonus!

Right. The other big reason is to make the socket bonus text appear in a regular white font, not the faded grey that drives us mad. That reason is the one we just have to learn to live with unfortunately.

Generally speaking, the socket bonus is terrible and you don’t want to go out of your way to get it. This is almost universally true. There are very few exceptions to this. Let’s look at an example.

Here we have the T8 Shadow Priest robe. Lovely idn’t it? We have here a blue socket and a yellow socket and the socket bonus is 6 critical strike rating.

Judging by what we know about caster dps generally and Shadow Priests in particular we know we generally want as much spellpower as we can get. We love our Runed Scarlets but darn, no red sockets here so we can’t use them right? So very much wrong.

Let’s take a look at the current stat weights for Shadow Priests as posted by Mearis on the Elitist Jerks forums. Stat weights are a handy list of the relative worth of all of the dps stats we can have on our gear.








If we wanted to get the socket bonus we’d have to use a Purified Twilight Opal and a Potent Monarch Topaz (assuming hitcapped). That would net us 18 spell power, .30% spell crit and 8 spirit.

Or we could socket two Runed Scarlet Rubies and get a fat 38 spellpower.

It comes down to whether or not we want to trade 20 spellpower for a third of a percent of crit. This is not a difficult decision to make.

So do you never want the socket bonus?

There are times when you may want the bonus. For caster dps this is almost always when the socket bonus is spellpower. That doesn’t mean you should match sockets every time the bonus is spellpower however. A spellpower socket bonus is just an opportunity for you to see if that piece of gear is a good place to put one of your two blue gems that you need to activate your meta.

Activating your meta gem is almost the only reason for using non-red gems as dps of any kind. At the end of the day you’ll almost always be better off socketing pure red gems be they Bold, Delicate or Runed depending on who you are.

Early on in the WotLK beta it was said once or twice that Death Knight pvp was a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ style. That seems to be the style Blizzard is using to finetune (read: nerf) Death Knight tanking.

The PTR patch notes (which you can find here and here) have been updated again. This patch so far has made me think that the “Call of the Crusade” was the Argent Crusade calling for Death Knights to receive public beatings.

…stupid jealous paladins.

So recapping the changes so far for me personally as a Blood Death Knight tank we have:

• Icebound Fortitude cooldown increased to 2 minutes, up from 1.
• Veteran of the third War’s 2/4/6% stamina bonus reduced to a 1/2/3% bonus.
• Frost Presence gives 6% bonus stamina instead of 10% health, a net loss of a couple thousand health for me.
• Toughness gives up to a 10% armor bonus, down from 15% armor bonus.
• The amount of agility/dodge rating required to get 1% dodge increased by 15% making dodge more on par with parry before diminishing returns.

The last one is the newest one and doesn’t do anything but cut my chance to dodge. Its not going to make parry rating more attractive to me when gearing because Death Knights already have pretty wicked diminishing returns on parry thanks to Forceful Deflection.

Thank you sir may I have another!

I’ve touched on this briefly before but I keep seeing this argument pop up everywhere I go.

They don’t even need the gear!

The bad news is that this is about the emblem issue again.
The good news is that I had enough Cookie Crisp to last me through the end of this work week.

Delve into the insanity…

Read the rest of this entry »

“You can just farm heroics and Naxx and get decked out in conquest gear!”

There’s a lot of knee-jerk reactionary posts being written up of late. I’m going to assume that anyone reading this already knows the details of the emblem changes listed in the 3.2 PTR patch notes and pick up from there.

A lot of people seem quite unhappy about the idea that you’ll be able to farm the hell out of heroics and purchase Emblem of Conquest (hereafter shortened to EoC) gear without ever having to be in a raid. Personally, this bodes well for my Putress-in-training warlock but that’s not the point!

I think the angst over this particular detail is more or less irrelevant. Further, I think the angst is coming from the memory of Smith Hauthaa. At the end of Burning Crusade this lovely lady dished out jaw-droppingly good quality gear for a sizeable, but manageable, sum of badges. It was very much possible to go from Imbued Netherweave Pants to Legwraps of Sweltering Flame; from the Demonblood Eviscerator to Vanir’s Right Fist of Brutality. If you wanted to take your Kara-geared rogue to Black Temple or Hyjal you could pick up a Main hand, Off hand, Ranged weapon, a good belt, great legs, excellent chest and an amazing ring and be ready to go (more or less).

That isn’t the case in WotLK, at least not yet.

But no one will want to push hardmodes in Ulduar if they can just farm Naxx for conquest gear!

Stop. Think. What weapons are you going to buy from the EoC vendor that compare to the ones you get from Hard modes in Ulduar?

But weapons aren’t that important if you have all that other Conquest gear!

Uh huh. Moving on…

I’ll use myself as an example now. Here is the armory link to my main character. Let’s look at the EoC vendor and do some windowshopping. Shard of the Crystal Forest has exactly the same stats as the EoH neck I’m wearing now, just more of them. That’s a clear upgrade so we’ll put that in our cart.

The tier helm is another clear upgrade over what I’ve got now and the 10man tier helm that I’ll be getting off Mimiron soon. Its not the most stellar upgrade in the world however. Solid for sure but its not on the top of my shopping list and it is in fact something I could do without entirely.

The tier chest piece is another clear upgrade but this one is very appealing to me. My guild hasn’t killed Yogg-Saron yet… or Vezax, Mimiron or Freya for that matter. I could get this piece relatively soon and not have to worry about when we’ll kill these bosses to get my tier chestpiece. We’ll definitely add this to the cart.

The Gauntlets of the Royal Watch are fairly ok but the particular stats may not be very attractive to me. The tier helm provides a lot of hit and I’m getting more hit in several other pieces I’m planning to get. What I’d like is some expertise, which the tier gloves have. So while nice, I’ll skip these gloves in favor of the tier gloves and if I end up in a VoA25 and get the tier 8.5 gloves then all the better.

Shieldwarder Girdle is right out. Instead, I’ll be picking up a few handfuls of Runed Orbs and having an Indestructible Plate Girdle and Spiked Deathdealers made. 12 Runed Orbs take care of both items. I’d be saving up money to buy the Orbs off the AH regardless so this really is a moot point.

That’s it for our shopping trip, let’s see what we have in the cart.

A necklace and a tier chestpiece.

If we really want to go nuts we can throw in the tier helm and the offset gloves as well.

Two items for sure, two more items if I’m drowning in emblems. Four items total.

So the outburst now looks like this:

“You can just farm heroics and Naxx and get decked out in a new neck and chest!“

But hey, if that really upsets you then carry on.

If all you do is heroics then you don’t need conquest gear and you shouldn’t get it!

What? We’re using the word “need” in this context now? Do this: when your guild kills Arthas for the first time, stop raiding. You’ve proven you don’t need any more or better gear to clear the zone so stop at that. If you do continue raiding, shard everything that drops. Sound silly enough? “Need” is extremely subjective in this context and really shouldn’t have a place in the emblem debate going on now.

“Hard modes are just the same bosses with added gimmicks.”

There’s a disconnect between the raiding community and Blizzard. I think the fault lies primarily on the raiding community. Blizzard’s idea for raid content and design this expansion seemingly centered on the idea that anyone would be able to see the basic content but there would be additional difficulty levels for those who wanted more of a challenge.

A certain subsection of raiders, commonly referred to as “hardcore” (though we’ll get to the problems with that later), aren’t satisfied with the way this expansion’s raids are designed. The common complaint is that hard modes are just gimmicks added on to bosses they’ve already killed to keep guild’s busy until the next raid is released. They want new content and by that its generally understood that they want new bosses and/or a whole new raid.

I think this problem comes from using outdated ways of thinking about raiding and progression. In the past you measured progression by counting how many bosses your guild had killed. You could say you were a 4/5 Hyjal, 8/9 BT guild and that was enough to convey a sense of how well your guild was progressing.

That way of thinking is largely irrelevant in terms of WotLK’s raids. The best guilds of the world can claim to be 14/14 in Ulduar in terms of boss kills and that won’t necessarily distinguish them from a random part-time raiding guild who might not be nearly as skilled or competitive.

You know that awesome feeling you got when you finally saw that boss who had been wiping you for weeks take his last breath and keel over? That doesn’t matter anymore. Downing a boss does not matter in and of itself if you’re thinking in terms of clearing or completing a raid. If you’re concerned about being one of the top guilds in the world then you don’t get to say you’ve cleared Ulduar if all you’ve done is seen the death animations for all the bosses.

But downing bosses is the point of raiding!

Stop that. You’re thinking like you’re still in Sunwell. You never cared about people beating easy encounters before, why do you care so much now?

Really, the bulk of the blame for the current state of things lies with you, players. You 25man-focused guilds will run Ulduar10 to “learn” the fights and shore up any weak spots in your gear with drops from those bosses. You’ll skip the hard modes until after you’ve farmed the whole zone for the rest of the gear you want.

Yeah I think Najentus (I know, I know!) probably would have been a bit easier to manage if you skipped ahead and got your tier pieces and a variety of other stuff before tackling him.

Would you have thought Kael’thas was as much of an epic roadblock in Burning Crusade if guilds had had the option of running a 10man version that awarded gear of only slightly lower item level in preparation of running the full blown 25man version?

Would Vashj have been as brutal if you could have practiced on a version that only required you to recover two cores to get through phase 2 and have the overall health and damage of every npc involved in the fight reduced by 25 to 50% before you stepped up to tackle the real deal?

The rules of the game have changed and people now have significantly more choices to make about how they raid. What we’ve seen is that people haven’t been able to adjust to these rules very well and they’re all too quick to pass the blame and responsibility.

Blizzard isn’t without stain in this situation by any means but let’s not pretend that players are sinless either.