Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory!

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related.
Okay, so I completely blew the call last week on druids getting some extra healing spells. Whoops! Now that the paladin changes have been released this week, the healing community has had a chance to digest the new direction we're going in. Actually, come to think of it, it appears that all healing classes are approaching the same direction. A few players quipped if the four healing classes would eventually become clones of each other in the sixth expansion of WoW. The parity is there, no doubt about it. At the same time, I still think that there are enough differences to render each healing style unique. Obviously there is going to be some overlap, but that's mainly to help make life easy for players.
Wait until you listen to this story I have ...
Stop me if you've heard this one before. You might have experienced it or have known someone who has been on the receiving end.
The other day, I'm relaxing on my priest in Dalaran. I made a few changes to my spec and I wanted to try some things out in a raid setting. Coincidentally enough, someone in trade chat pipes up saying that they're looking for a raid healer in Trial of the Crusader (for 25). I message the guy and inform him that I'm a 6,000+ GearScore discipline priest looking to join a raid. Turns out it was partially cleared and that a healer dropped out after they took down faction champions. I show him my achievements and stuff. (And hey, I don't agree with all that GearScore stuff, but sometimes you just have to speak the language.)
Inconceivably, I get shot down. It was a fairly crushing blow to my ego. How often does a 6,000+ Gearscore, Val'anyr-wielding healer get denied from a pickup raid that is looking for healers? All because of the fact that I was a discipline healer and obviously could not raid heal at all. The irony here is that the Val'kyr Twins encounter heavily favors a discipline priest due to the constant damage that the raid takes.
What's the point?
That right there is my story. Did you see the point I was trying to make? I didn't get turned down because of lack of gear or lack of experience. I simply wasn't the "right healer" for the right job. The current conceptions about healers is that there are two kinds: tank healers and raid healers. Tank healers excel at keeping one or two tank targets alive no matter the cost. Raid healers tend to specialize in keeping as many people alive. With Cataclysm steadily creeping up on us, the healing landscape will change so that all healers will have the tools to effectively raid heal or tank heal. I won't deny that we're getting closer to each other in terms of similarity. I personally view it as a positive thing.
Healing parity?
I know a number of healers who have stated that once Cataclysm is live, they're either going to quit the game or quit healing. Why? Well, because the class that will be released then will not be the class they started playing. For example, I know there are druids who play druids simply because they could look like a tree due to the Tree of Life ability. We're supposed to be unique in our own ways! We have our own little healing niches that we fill! This is an attack on the identity of who we are. We're slowly losing the essence of our class. How long will it be before we become carbon copies of each other, right?
I was never one for the slippery slope argument, myself. I can see where the skeptics are coming from. I do think it is blown way too far out of proportion, though.
Could you conceivably have a raid with six holy paladins healing? Well, yes, you could. It would be far from optimal, of course. Gearing them all would be a horrendous undertaking as well. When it comes down to it, we need three things to be successful at healing. We need healing spells that can hit multiple players simultaneously. We need spells that are fast, efficient or really efficient. We need tools to keep players alive through certain situations. It doesn't matter how that is done so long as it is done. What separates us from each other should be the tools we use. For raid healing, discipline priests are gaining Power Word: Barrier. Shamans get Healing Rain. Paladins are also getting additional AoE healing treatment with Healing Hands. Notice that the spells conceptually differ from each other but all accomplish the same goal: protecting or healing multiple players.
We're reaching a point where each healing class should be reasonably equipped to cover some healing role. We shouldn't be reduced to being only good at one thing. Again, this sounds like an increased emphasis of the "bring the player, not the class" philosophy. It just means that each healer will have the theoretical abilities to tank heal or raid heal. Now it boils down to the player itself to see if they have the player skills to make use of their skills. In other words, if your pickup raid needs a raid healer, you won't have to turn down paladins or discipline priests. You have the freedom to pick and choose. Player class won't play that big of a role in your raid composition, since each class can adequately fulfill that role.
Hopefully I won't get shot down the next time I want to heal something because I'm the wrong class for the job. I should be shot down because I'm either:
badly geared just plain bad I have no problems with being denied raiding due to lack of player skill or lack of gear. That's the way it should be.
Still not convinced?
At least wait a bit longer. There is still a long time to go before the expansion. Some abilities might make the cut and others might not. We still have the beta process to go through. The various encounters will also play a role in how we play ours. Give Blizzard time to flesh out and execute their ideas before throwing in the towel.

The rogue class will be like in Cataclysm

As we've been expecting, we now have the first glimpse of what the rogue class will be like in Cataclysm. These changes are straight from Blizzard, and they provide great insight into where the designers want to take things. Please remember that these changes are for the beta and will very likely be modified as the expansion nears release.
Some of the major highlights:
Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue's current target, helping to ensure combo points aren't wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. Combat Readiness (level 83): Combat Readiness is a new ability that we intend rogues to trigger defensively. While this ability is active, whenever the rogue is struck by a melee or ranged attack, he or she will gain a stacking buff called Combat Insight that results in a 10% reduction in damage taken. Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

Tanking stat changes in Cataclysm

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown.
Since paladins are last on the list for the upcoming Cataclysm class previews due to how Blizzard ended up doing the development schedule, we've got another week and a half to wait for our details. I'm not picky as long as it gets done, so there's no reason to really grumble other than having to wait an extra week. However, I thought I'd go over some of the things we do know about Cataclysm for tanking.
Blizzard has mentioned that they're going to rethink tanking cooldowns and has previously asked for feedback on some of the abilities we currently have -- but to what end, we're unsure at this time. What they have told us about thus far is how some of the avoidance stats will be working in the coming expansion. Essentially, the only avoidance stat that isn't changing is dodge, with the others either being overhauled or removed. Let's take a look.
Reaching uncrittable in Cataclysm
First off, your defense rating stat is going away completely. That means the annoyance of trying to balance gear, gems and enchants to reach that magical 6% critical strike reduction (currently, 690 defense rating [edit: which is 540 defense skill and yes, 689 defense rating is tossed around as the number, but according to some theorycrafters, you really need 689 and change which means you have an absurdly small chance of being critically hit at just 689 which is why I said 690]) also goes away.
While things aren't completely finalized, Blizzard has said that they will likely just make it so that having Righteous Fury up will automatically make you ready for tanking both dungeons and raids, as far as crits are concerned. Each of the other tanking classes will have a similar, simple mechanic for this. Druids will have it baked into Dire Bear Form instead of the current talent Survival of the Fittest, warriors will likely have it tacked onto Defensive Stance, and death knights will add it into Frost Presence.
Higher health, lower damage, more hits
As far as stat scaling goes for the coming expansion, Ghostcrawler has been letting everyone know that health pools should be a bit higher than expected. That's nice, because bosses are going to hit for less but hit more often, much like some of the bosses in Icecrown Citadel. Oh, and your avoidance stats will be in the toilet compared to what they currently are, to avoid what happened in both Sunwell and Icecrown Citadel.
You'll be doing fewer dodges, parries and blocks than you currently are, as Blizzard has more or less stated that tanking avoidance stats have probably started out too high for the past two expansions. So instead of staying block-capped most of the time, you'll be sitting at a lot less than 102.4% avoidance for most of the expansion. How much less? We're still not sure, as Blizzard has only been hinting at the details of that.
All in all, you'll probably spend more time around 50% health while tanking than you currently are, due to healing's also being reduced drastically. However, you'll be in much less danger of being instantly killed while in that scenario, due to the less-potent boss damage. All in all, it should make things a little more interesting and less of a twitch-gaming scenario.

Cataclysm preview

We're doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we'd go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.
In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.
We'll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change. Cataclysm: Blood will be the only Death Knight tanking tree
In a complete about-face, Ghostcrawler just announced that there will be a dedicated tanking tree in Cataclysm for Death Knights: Blood. Rather than having all three trees try to be good at both DPS and tanking, Blizzard will be taking the tanking talents from the other two trees and adding them with some other changes to the Blood tree. They announced this today, knowing that this news will overshadow the rest of the DK class preview.The complete text is after the break.
Why the about face? We actually thought the "tri tank" experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a "best" tanking tree, because that's the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees. A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it's safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).
It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn't focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, "I look at the Protection tree and I'm jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents." Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.
In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.
This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

Most recent level 80

To celebrate my most recent level 80, a protection warrior, I was going to use a screenshot of it in the header of today's edition of The Queue. Unfortunately, I'm writing this on my laptop and when I play WoW on this thing the character models... well, let's just say they mutate a little bit. It's not pretty. So instead, I'm using a screenshot of one of Matt Rossi's warriors and we're all going to pretend it's a white-haired female draenei. Sound good? Great. Now let's move on.
Kar On E asked...
"If you could trade out one of the new race/class combinations coming to us in Cataclysm for one that will not be there, which would you trade out? Which would you instead trade in? Why?"
Can I pick a worgen combination? Because if I can, I'd drop one of the worgen caster classes so we could have worgen paladins. Playing a huge badass werewolf that stands behind a bush throwing icicles at his enemies just seems wrong. While a werewolf retribution paladin pummeling his foes with an enormous axe seems so right.
I would also drop tauren paladin and take troll paladins instead. I have no good lore explanation for this, but come on. Troll paladins would be awesome.
Tim asked...
"How does the random name generator work? I know the simple answer is it give you a random name, but the main issue is many of the names are taken. You click random name, then click enter world and boom name taken. Weird right? Seems like this feature is broken. I tested it about 6-7 times. Maybe I was unlucky or something. Thoughts?"
It's not broken, it just has a very limited set of names it offers. The list isn't stored on Blizzard's servers. The random name generator pulls from a list that is in your game files. It won't know something is taken until you try to submit it. In other words, it's working as intended.
It's safe to say every single name on that list is probably taken on your server. Use it as inspiration instead if you're looking for help picking a name. Hit random until you find something that sounds neat, and tinker with it until it's unique. I don't mean just add Zs and Xs to the end, but if it recommends Spartacus then pick out what part of the name you like. If you liked the last syllable, break it off from the rest and use that syllable in a new name.
@evolsoulx asked...
"Has anyone ever attempted to seriously kill Flame Leviathan without vehicles? Any success possible ever?"
Well, Flame Leviathan on his easiest level of difficulty has 23 million health. 70 million on his highest difficulty. The Lich King has less than that. That's an incredibly long time to need to weather Flame Vents, Missile Barrage, and any melee abilities you weren't able to kite from being slow on foot. I think it might be totally impossible without finding some way to cheat it.
@Ndiayne asked...
"Do you think gnomes and goblins will ever merge engineering technologies and end up exploding Azeroth?"
The two races are doing pretty good on their own, I don't think they need to merge. Keep in mind that it was goblins that riveted metal plates to Deathwing to keep him from being torn apart under his own power. And with what's happening in Cataclysm... yeah, the goblins are basically doing it without the gnomes. No merger necessary. Blame them when Azeroth gets torn apart later this year.
Tokkar asked...
"When is the Armory going to work again?"
Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and the armory breaks.

In case you missed it

In case you missed it, a few of the staff here at WoW.com are having you choose our adventures. We'll report next week on what we have done so far, but now it's time for you to choose where we will quest next. Many readers have suggested that we should stick to zones that will be changing when Cataclysm comes out. So after consulting what we know so far, I have only listed zones that we think will undergo at least a light change. If we don't think the zone will be touched, it isn't in the poll. This is rather limiting for the Horde, as that leaves out the easy-mode blood elf areas.
Level 8 is an awkward age It's high enough to want to change scenery but too low to quest efficiently in the next zone. So we have two polls for next week's adventuring: one for before level 10, and one for when we graduate to the next zone. Elizabeth Harper and I will also be choosing our talents according to what tree you pick. And Michael Gray wants you to choose his first pet. When voting, think about what fun adventures you would like to hear retold here, rather than how to have us level speedily.

Blood tanking basics

Welcome to blog, your weekly peek at the world of the death knight. This week, Matt Rossi fills in to talk about tanking on a blood death knight. This is not a 101 post, but an even more basic look.
I run heroics and 10 man raids on my death knight. There's simply only so much time in the day and I already raid pretty heavily on my warrior, so when I began seriously leveling a death knight I knew I would probably want to play something I felt very comfortable with. And so my flirtation with blood was born. While frost has seen some love in the most recent patch, I'm still not much for the DW DK style, and I've never really like the pet management of unholy, so I currently have two blood specs on my DK, a DPS spec and a tanking spec.
What I've always loved about blood is its strong self-healing and physical damage based nature. As a blood tank, you end up taking advantage of these aspects of the tree, which provides strong single target threat, good AoE threat and solid cooldowns and survivability. While it doesn't have the snap AoE threat of a Howling Blast or unholy's strong group threat, Blood can still tank a group quite effectively with diseases and Heart Strike, while the recent patch 3.3.3 has greatly buffed single target threat for all DK tanks and made Will of the Necropolis far more attractive for the Blood DK tank.
First off, let's talk spec. There are quite a few options for any DK tank, although most usually get the 5/5/5 triefecta of baseline talents in each spec. The spec I'm currently playing around is this, a spec that goes deeper into unholy than this spec that Daniel recommended in a previous column. You'll also notice that I chose to take talents like Scent of Blood and Rune Tap over Sudden Doom - you could easily move the points around to fit your comfort zone The strength of Blood as a tanking spec is that it has a variety of options to either increase survivability or threat depending on what you feel like you're most in need of.
Talents I really enjoy as a DK tank:
Blade Barrier - I like this ability because it rewards you for being proactive and using your runes. Bladed Armor - You're going to have high armor anyway. Might as well get some threat out of it. Scent of Blood - Some DK tanks feel like they already have plenty of runic power, but for a tanking DK I don't think you can ever really have too much, and Scent of Blood is a nice, reliable way to fill up the gas tank for that Rune Strike spam you know you'll be doing. Death Rune Mastery - Helping free a DK tank from the tyranny of frost and unholy runes, this ability makes rune management (which is a big part of the threat cap for a blood DK tank) much less onerous. Rune Tap - Kind of pricy at the cost of a blood rune, but that's what Death Rune Mastery is for, and 10% health every minute is pretty hot. Spell Deflection - I'm at 20% parry without doing more than getting it on gear, which means I have 20% chance of taking almost half as much damage from direct damage spells. I'm okay with this, even though too many bosses get around it in my opinion. Sudden Doom - If you find yourself absolutely fine on runic power, these free Death Coils generate you threat without costing you anything, and trigger off of abilities you'll be using anyway. Veteran of the Third War - Strength (threat and avoidance), Stamina (health) and Expertise (threat). Pretty cheap, too. Abomination's Might - It's an aura now, but I don't really care about that (although the DPS probably does) - I take it for 2% strength, which is parry and threat. Win/win. Vampiric Blood - This is one of my favorite tanking cooldowns, hands down. Increases health by 15% and increases healing taken by 30%? On a one minute cooldown? Are you seeing a bad side here? Because I'm not. Improved Death Strike - One of the most attractive aspects of blood tanking is the incremental self healing a blood tank can do to make healer's lives easier (we're long past our glory days on Vezax, of course, but it's still pretty good) and Imp DS makes the self heal strike heal for 50& more. It also boosts the damage of the move by 30% and increases its crit strike chance by 6%, increasing its threat, which is pretty necessary for a move that uses up two runes. (Which is one reason why we take Death Rune Mastery, of course.) Heart Strike - Pretty much necessary for any blood DK, but especially useful for AoE tanking. Willl of the Necropolis - Especially now that this ability no longer has an internal cooldown and can be more easily activated, it's very nice. DK's generally have a slight issue with spike damage (it's a common complaint from those healing us) and having the ability to reliably reduce it as we get into the danger zone is pretty bloody nice all told. As mentioned before a blood DK doesn't have the AoE burst threat of a frost DK or the large amount of AoE an unholy tank can spawn. But with Death and Decay, Pestilence, Blood Boil and the proper spread of diseases blood multi-target threat is pretty solid and reliable (especially when using Heart Strike properly) - I personally prefer a D&D pull on groups, followed by an Icy Touch - Plague Strike - Pestilence combo to get diseases ticking on every target. (With the boost to IT threat in 3.3.3, as long as the DPS is being even moderately careful that initial target should stay locked down.) If you're feeling particularly insecure about threat you can use Blood Boil immediately (using either Empower Rune Weapon or more likely, Blood Tap) and by this point should have threat fairly well locked down. Heart Strike, cheap at 1 blood rune, can also really be of great help in these situations.
The biggest issue with blood tanking is making sure to manage your runes. In the example above, D&D is the most expensive ability to use with a three rune cost, which means that if you throw it down, use IT and Plague Strike, and then use Pestilence to spread your diseases on an AoE pull you will have put all your runes on cooldown. This is why I mentioned Emp Rune Weapon/Blood Tap, as they will free up a rune for an immediate Blood Boil. It's important to monitor your runes and to use abilities like Rune Strike and Death Coil to bleed runic power when your runes are on cooldown when tanking as blood.
Single target tanking you'll most likely use IT - Plague Strike and either Heart or Death Strike. Rune Strike you'll use to burn runic power when it lights up just like any other DK tank, no changes there. For single target/boss tanking D&D probably isn't worth it, and Heart Strike is cheaper than Death so you'll only use DS when you expect to take a lot of damage. Remember that you can potentially have Rune Tap, Vampiric Blood and Icebound Fortitude as your cooldowns, giving you a lot of options to reduce or heal incoming damage.
Okay, this covers the most basic basics of blood tanking. It's a fun and powerful tanking tree, so go out and have fun tweaking it for your own use.