Naissa’s Rage

Tasmyn of The Altoholic wins the third place prize for my article writing contest. (Yeah I’m a slowpoke with posting results, deal with it! )

Here is his entry:

Travel Speed: Travel Form vs. Mount

Introduction to Mounts and Travel Form
The grind to 70 in World of Warcraft is many different things to many different people. Some people despise it, wishing only to reach the level cap to raid or PvP; others enjoy the leveling experience, taking in the sights, sounds and quests along the way. No matter what your opinion of the level grind, there is no doubt that, along the way, there are many different rewards. One of the earliest “big moments” for most players is at level 40, where, with enough gold, one can purchase the apprentice riding skill and a mount, and zoom around at 160% normal speed–a great boon when you’re travelling all over Azeroth, gathering quests, killing mobs, nabbing items, and turning around to turn them in again.

Some classes get their level 40 mount on the cheap; warlocks and paladins both train spells at that level, for about the cost of any other level 40 spell, that lets them summon a mount at the cost of mana, rather than an item taking up bag space. Druids, however, are unique in the fact that they get an instant-cast spell 10 levels earlier, at level 30, that allows them to move at 140% running speed; this spell is called Travel Form.

This spell is unique in a few ways. First of all, the spell is instant cast. When you use or summon a mount, you spend three seconds rubbing your hands together or channeling a spell before you can zip off into the sunset. Travel form changes you into a speedy cheetah instantly. Secondly, it is usable in combat, allowing the druid to get out of potentially sticky situations with relative ease.

The Dilemma
From levels 30 to 39, Travel Form is a huge boon both out and adventuring in Azeroth, and also in cities, running from the trainer to the auction house to the bank and so forth. But at level 40, there is now a choice: do I hit my instant cast travel form to move about, or do I use my mount? Travel Form has the benefit of being instant cast, but is slower; mounts are faster, but take three seconds of using/casting before I can head out. So I decided to do a little bit of research.

The Research
Everyone is pretty familiar with the different forms of travel and how fast they go (relative to normal run speed). Let’s recap just to be sure (we’re not including cat druids with Feral Swiftness):

The Math
When you get in your car, you don’t go 1000% normal run speed. You go 60 miles per hour. For the purposes of this experiment, we’re going to convert travel speed in WoW to a number of some generic units per second. If normal running speed is X unit per second, a Travel Form druid goes 1.4*X units per second. Well, I personally hate decimals. Let’s multiply everything by 10. Now, let’s change our table with percents into units per second.

So, let’s say that a druid starts running down a path in Stormwind. We can calculate at 3 seconds, she has gone 30 units (10*3=30). However, at this particular time, the druid with a mount has only just finished rubbing her hands together, and has thus far not moved at all. So if the target destination is only 30 units away, it is faster to run there than to mount up. But what about longer distances? Let’s extrapolate our data and see what we get.

As you can see, after 10 seconds have passed, the druid on the normal mount has not yet caught up with the Travel Form druid; however, the druid on the epic mount has. Exactly how long would it take for a mounted druid to catch up with a Travel Form druid? Instead of continuing our table to unknown lengths, let’s graph the data as functions of time (X):

Travel Form: f(x) = 14x
Normal Mount: f(x) = 16x - 48

When we graph the data, we can find where the two lines intersect:

You can see that the two graphs intersect at X = 24; it takes 24 seconds for a mounted druid to make up the three extra seconds that it takes to summon her mount when racing against a Travel Form druid who casts Travel Form and starts running immediately.

The Implications
While not an earth-shattering experiment, this does raise a few interesting points. For example, one can intuit that it is faster to exit the auction house in Stormwind and cast Travel Form to run to the mailbox than to summon a mount and ride there; but did you know that you can get from the mailbox to the flight master faster in Travel Form that you could if you had to summon a mount first? Any trip much farther than that is faster on a mount. Once you’re level 60 and have an epic mount, it’s practically no contest; any distance that’s farther than 10 seconds away can be reached faster by summoning your epic mount and riding it there.

All of this, of course, is made null and void once you start flying around, but even there druids have the advantage; their Flight Form is instant cast, again giving them a three-second head start on any standard mount, which can really be noticed when the druid is out farming; in the case of mining, the druid can cast Flight Form and take off again right after mining a node. Three seconds may not sound like much, but if you’re used to not having to wait, it feels much slower. Druids to have herbalism have an even bigger advantage of not even having to shift out of Flight Form to pick an herb!

Conclusion
I hope this short little paper on Travel Form was interesting, and perhaps even helpful, as was the case at a Wowhead forum . Everyone always argues about classes based on their abilities to tank, do damage, or heal, but little tidbits such as this, in my opinion, help set the classes apart in even more ways.

Well I finally got to try out that Executioner enchant on my King’s Defender. I really like it. The extra threat is verrrrrrry nice. I’d recommend it to anyone that is thinking about it.

I tanked Heroic Magister’s Terrace and picked up [Commendation of Kael'thas] which puts me at around 16.5k health unbuffed. Its really nice. Like really really nice. I haven’t noticed the proc much because I’ve mostly been tanking Heroic MgT, which is mostly spell damage, and the proc requires a melee attack to reduce you below 35%. I also had 35 badges so I decided to pick up [Slikk's Cloak of Placation] but I’m not entirely sure I like it. Its an upgrade true enough but its just…ehhhh. I don’t know. Theres just something about it that I don’t like.

I’ve been pretty bored lately but also really cranky so I haven’t felt much like leveling Moossa. I was going through my bank and I found [Alliance Battle Standard]. That brings back memories. I can’t recall the last time I actually saw one of those used. I remembered that pre-BC when I had like 6k or 7k health (and that was a big deal back then! O.O ) I got Fort/Kings/Mark, went into AV, dropped a battle standard and popped last stand. I don’t remember exactly how much health I had, but it was around 15,000 I think and everyone was all “OMG thats awesome.”

At the time it was like the coolest thing ever to me but now with 16.5k health unbuffed it doesn’t really seem all that impressive. So I went into AV yesterday to see how high my health could get. I got Kings/Fort/Mark and I drank a fortitude elixir. I went and tanked Galv so that we got the +stamina buff. Then I dropped a battle standard and popped last stand. The end result?

So what am I up to now? Still bored. Trying to get that trinket from Heroic MgT for Azizi. Its not looking good though.

I just wanted to post and say I’m still alive and everything. I’ll try to be more active on the blog but I’ve been busy busy!

For a long time I’ve been saying that for an avoidance weapon like [The Sun Eater] should have Mongoose on it and a Threat Weapon like [King's Defender] or [Mallet of the Tides] should have Executioner on it. Some people noticed that my King’s Defender had mongoose on it though.

In my opinion getting mongoose on my King’s Defender (I had gotten it after executioner was added to the game) was a mistake (for me) and a result of my well documented impatience. When I got my King’s Defender mongoose was available immediatly but if I wanted to get Executioner I would have had to wait 3-4 days and I wanted to play with my new toy immediatly.

I will say that I think if you’re just going through Karazhan and you’re not all that geared yet and you happen to get King’s Defender that mongoose would probably be a better option. At this point I think that I’m in need of threat more than I’m in need of more avoidance. Not that theres anything wrong with my current threat, I just think that more threat is…I don’t want to say better…more important than more avoidance for what I currently do. I could be wrong though.

Anyways, last night I decided to replace my mongoose enchant that has served me well these last few months with a shiny new executioner enchant. So now I’ve got my shiny new enchant but I haven’t been able to test it out yet. I think with my new work schedule the earliest I’ll be able to test it out is tuesday. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll make a post about it then.

Yup, its time for another BA Shared Topic. Thanks to Cathmor for this one. The idea is to list your 10 best WoW Memories and why they are special memories for you. Here is my list:

My 10 Best WoW Memories (From least to greatest):

10 - Getting my Whirlwind Weapon on my warrior.

When I first got to level 30 on Naissa so long ago I got my friends to help me with my level 30 warrior quest to get my Whirlwind Weapon. Its pretty much a level 40ish weapon that you can get and use as early as level 30 if you’re not familiar with Whirlwind Weapons. This was very exciting for me because it made leveling so much easier and it was also the first in a series of awesome weapons that I would get as I leveled up. (Whirlwind Weapon -> Executioner’s Cleaver -> Colossal Great-Axe / Ice Barb Spear (Back then IBS wasn’t as easy to get.) -> Arcanite Reaper. That was the recommended order on the warrior forums. And I followed it.)

9 - Getting my first ever flying mount.

When I hit level 70 on Naissa and bought a flying mount it was pretty exciting. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but it was pretty awesome. I know that now a Snowy White Gryphon is just…Well…Nothing special, but back then it was.

8 - Getting my first ever epic ground mount.

After running around for a few months on my first character with just a level 40 mount (Verrrrrry few people had epic mounts then, at least on that server.) I bought an epic mount. Purple Skeletal Warhorse. It was awesome. I just rode around on it for like 30 minutes zooming around much faster than I ever had before. It was great, I loved it.

7 - Getting my first ever raid epic.

My first ever raid epic was Nightslayer Gloves, also on my first character ever. (Naissa’s first raid epic was Flameguard Gauntlets) This was before they upgraded the stats and gave nightslayer a unique look. (I’ve been playing WAY too long.) At the time, Devilsaur Gauntlets were considered better, even without the set bonus.

6 - My first ever raid.

My first ever raid was…The first ever horde raid of MC on that server. (That server was really slow getting on its feet.) We had 40 people in Molten Core and we had no idea what to expect, no idea what to do. It was totally different from anything I had experienced in WoW up to that point. It was amazing. 40 people all playing together (and wiping..repeatedly) and it was just so fun.

5. Seeing Duskwood for the first time.

Being horde at first I never got to go through Duskwood. The only reason I even knew it existed was because I would fly over it on the way to Badlands. I had no idea what it was and my map wasn’t entirely filled out at the time. No idea how to get there. So one day after flying over it several times by that point I decided to go there. To find it. With what I know now I could have gotten there a lot easier. The only other landmark I found was the Stonewrought Dam (I think thats what its called) and that was another place I wanted to go. For some reason I always wanted to jump off of there. So I set out to find both places and eventually did.

Stepping into Duskwood for the first time was fun and exciting. It, to me, looked better than any zone I had ever seen before. I loved how it looked, I loved the atmosphere, I loved the giant abomination walking on the road. Thats still my favorite non-instance zone I think. When I leveled Naissa up I spent a LOT of time in duskwood. I did every quest I could find and even when I was out of quests I stayed there a bit and just killed mobs for experience.

4. PvP for the first time.

I was maybe level 28 or so at the time on my undead rogue. I was standing at the zepplin outside of undercity and suddenly a bunch of alliance came off the zepplin. Red names everywhere. Nobody higher than level 30. We had great fun fighting each other and when things looked grim for the poor little hordies, the first level 40+ person on the server showed up with his giant kodo (Which we all Oooh’d and Aaahhh’d Over) and helped us out. This was also the first time that I saw a weapon enchant. (Minor Beastslaying) I so wanted that enchant. I wanted shiny red Swords. Yeah we all know beastslaying sucks now, but at the time it seemed awesome to everyone. Glowing weapons!

3. Getting my Quel’Serrar.

The level 60 Warrior/Paladin epic quest. It was a really “epic” experience. Going to Onyxia’s Lair with the unforged sword, sticking it in the ground in just the right place so she’d breathe on it. Waiting patiently for her to die so that we could loot the sword from the ground and poke her with it. Then running back to Dire Maul as quickly as possible to get our shiny new sword. It was such a great experience, even if it was a terribly common sword at that point, the lore behind it was great, the quest text was interesting and wasn’t something you’d want to skip.

The fight with Onyxia was fun but also stressful because I’d never done it before and I was freaking out and hoping I didn’t drop my sword in the wrong place, hoping she would breathe on the sword (Sometimes she didn’t, or so thottbot had told me. Heh..Thottbot)

The first thing I did after I got it was put together a group for Dire Maul so I could test it out.

2. Killing Ragnaros for the first time.

What can I say about this? It was just epic. Killing that giant firelord for the first time and seeing what treasure he dropped for us. Everyone was trying their hardest to kill him, doing their best, doing everything they could possibly do to kill him and when we finally did it was just…Great. There hasn’t been a boss kill since then that I’ve been so excited about.

1. Getting my ZG Tiger.

Why is this rated above Rag/Quel’Serrar/All the others? Because it keeps being special. Quel’Serrar is long outdated, nobody cares about rag anymore, the game changes rapidly. The Swift Zulian Tiger still catches eyes. I still get tells about it on a daily basis and while you CAN do the ZG tiger boss with 3 people now, not many people bother trying. I’m sure in wotlk it will be even easier to do, but the ZG Tiger is incredibly rare. I haven’t ever seen another one alliance side on my server and I’ve seen maybe 2 horde ones. Its special, and its mine, and I like it.

When it dropped we decided to do a random roll for it. Well, the raid leader did /random 20. And I had thought that I didn’t win but I had counted wrong. Our raid leader said “Naissa wins, do you want it?” I think I almost died. I was just like “No way did I just win that.” I couldn’t type “Yes. Please” fast enough in raid chat. I watched as it got master looted to me and then once I found it in my bags I got on it for the first time ever. Still not believing that I had just got a Zulian Tiger. Then they made me run around on it while they took screenshots. Fun times.

As you can see (If you click for the full size image.) I’ve stolen Ambi’s hippy damage font. Not sure if anyone remembers Ambi. She’s been MIA for awhile now.

(This started out as a story about me tanking something and ended up being all educational and informative. Bleh!)

So you may have figured out by the picture of me attacking Prince’s feet and the title (Tanking PUG Karazhan) that I tanked Karazhan last night for a group of people I don’t know. I had just finished doing my arena matches for the night (1650ish in 5s. Woo! Yeah ok I’m still a scrub.) when one of my guildies mentioned he was having problems tanking prince. He said that he was tanking Prince Malchezaar and that getting crushing blows and he wanted to know why.

This is a pretty common question. When you click on Defense in your skill tab it says

Higher Defense improves your chance to dodge, parry, and block attacks, makes you harder to hit, and makes monsters less likely to land a critical strike against you.

and according Tankspot/Evil Empire and personal experience, Defense from gear/anticipation does not reduce your chance to take crushing blows. When you block an attack it can’t be a crit or a crushing blow and since you probably already have a high chance to block and you’ll be keeping Shield Block up as much as possible (read: Every time its off cooldown. Every. Single. Time.) you won’t be seeing crushing blows all that often. Prince WILL crush you though. While he’s dual-wielding he attacks extremely fast and eats through your shield block charges quickly, which leaves you open to crushing blows.

A couple of my guildies asked me if I could come and tank Prince for them. I figured that they made it to Prince so how bad could the pug be? (Famous last words right?) So I went and did a quick Respec to Protection and then got summoned out to Karazhan. Being a PUG I was worried about the healing but I have to say the healing was great and the prince fight went without incident. Well ok a hunter died and the other warrior died. Paladin/Rogue/Shaman T4, Healing Ring (I think), and the “Rogue” Dagger dropped.

I figured my job was done and was about to hearth out when they said they wanted to go do Nightbane. Uh-oh. So we all ran down to Nightbane’s area and they summoned him. We lost 2 mages and a Priest somehow during that fight. The mages died during the air phase and I’m not entirely sure what happened to the priest. When he was about to land the second time there was someone standing right next to me and I was so worried that they were going to get cleaved and die but somehow they managed to live. I almost died a couple times but potions, Last Stand, and Shield Wall and good healers saved me. With the loss of the two mages the DPS slowed down a lot so I think that coupled with the loss of the one priest made the healing a lot harder and by the end there they were running low on Mana which is probably why I almost died.

I had fun and I got to try out my new boots (They rock!) which made me happy. I’d definitely do that again and I hope that they ask me to come and do that again because it was pretty fun. Its so weird that people PUG that place now because I remember when we first got to Prince we had so many issues with him.

Yesterday I picked up the pattern for [Red Havoc Boots] and made them on Naissa. Prior to this I was using [Battlescar Boots]. For those playing the home game, I traded in 3 stamina, 18 str and 27 parry rating for 9 defense, 25 block rating, 30 block value and 108 armor. Was it worth it? I think so. I’m happy with my new boots and I intend to try them out today but I think the daily heroic is SV and I reallllllllly don’t like heroic SV. It’s not that it is a hard instance, I just don’t like it.

Azizi also got some new boots. Azizi picked up [Vindicator's Dreadweave Stalkers] and got a shiny Boar’s Speed (9 StaMana / Minor Run Speed Increase) enchant on them. I went for the dreadweave over the silk ones because I read somewhere once that the “pros” (read: people much better than me) prefer the extra stamina/spell damage/resilience to the extra crit on the Silk boots. Thats good enough for me. Plus I really do need all the resilience I can get at this point. Its pretty cool that I can “tank” rogues and warriors in S2 gear now. The full S3 warrior I dueled yesterday said I”m “still squishy” but I didn’t get completely flattened in 2 seconds so that is also good enough for me for now.

That is this week’s loot report. =P

  I saw this Shared Topic on Blog Azeroth and decided to give it a go. I’m looking forward to WotLK a lot less than I was looking forward to Burning Crusade.

  I guess since killing off Vashj/Kael/Illidan/Archimonde(Even though that was Archimonde who was in the past and died anyway)/Kil’Jaeden there’s not really all that much left that’s got that “epic” feel to it. At least in my opinion but that could just be because I’ve been a warcraft fan since before WoW. I guess if you’re not a warcraft fan from before WoW it wouldn’t really seem this way to you. It’s just that all the awesome characters and villains from WC3 are dead now except for Arthas/The Lich King. The older WC characters like Kargath Bladefist and Rend Blackhand and Zuluhed would make awesome bosses I think but the former two got killed off in a 5 man and a 10 man and Zuluhed is killed off in a quest in SMV. I guess I’m just wondering “What’s left?” but I’m sure Blizzard will come up with something entertaining. They always do. But this is off topic so…

  The main thing I’m doing to prepare for Wrath of the Lich King is trying to get my characters I enjoy the most a bit nicer gear so that leveling is smoother. Azizi is picking up some PvP gear at a somewhat slow pace but I’m having fun doing it because I’m running with a premade. Naissa’s gear is as good as it’s going to get unless I drop 200 badges or so on fist weapons and I don’t think I’m ready to dual wield rainbow peacocks yet. I’m getting the cow up to level 70 and I will try to get her as close to Naissa in terms of gear as I can before the expansion comes out.

  Once the expansion hits I’m planning to level my Cow Warrior to level 80 first and I’m toying with the idea of doing most of the leveling in instances as protection spec. Will I actually do that? Probably not. I’ll probably try to level to 80 as fast as I possibly can and THEN go protection spec. After that I’ll probably level Azizi and keep PvPing with her. I’d like to do more raiding in WotLK than I did in Burning Crusade but I have no idea if that will actually happen. I’ll try though.

  A lot of people that I’ve talked to say that the thing they’re looking forward to the most are the buffs/changes that their class is getting. What I’m looking forward to the most is having a tauren warrior to play with, which is something that I’ve always wanted but just never got to do until now. If I had to pick something from the expansion that I’m most looking forward to though I would say “New 5 man instances” because the 5 man instances have always been my favorite part of WoW. My favorite thing to do pre-BC was to run Dire Maul. I’d get my friends together and we’d get the materials for a tribute run and head out there. It would keep us entertained and it was easy to organize. I think the closest thing we have to Dire Maul right now is Black Morass.

But Naissa…Black Morass is NOTHING like Dire Maul?

   It’s really not. What I mean is, it’s something you can do if you don’t have a whole lot of time, the loot is nice (Hourglass, Scarab), it’s a fun experience and it doesn’t take long. I like it. I have to tank normal mode half naked now but it’s still a great instance. I had a guildie tell me that they’ve never ran Black Morass (I blame the removal of the Kara attunement! There…There’s my obligatory slam against the attunement removal.) And so I invited him to a group, got a couple more people and off we went. I look for excuses to do that instance. Sometimes I pug it. Yes…I pug it. Sad, huh? I’m just hoping there is something of DM/Black Morass quality in WotLK, but how can they not be? Blizzard hasn’t failed me yet in that department.

  Speaking of guilds and guildies, a lot of people I know have been saying that their guild’s raid attendance has been falling because of the expansion coming “soon.” but with my guild I think it’s the opposite because they want to see how far they can get in Hyjal/BT before the expansion comes out and I wish them the best of luck with that. Go go, kick Illidan’s butt!

  So really in Preparation for WotLK, I’m just going to keep on doing what I’m doing and hope for the best. Unless WAR or some other game is absolutely amazing, I’ll still be here because even if WoW frustrates me so much sometimes, there’s just nothing better yet. I don’t see WotLK changing Naissa’s Rage much, just means I’ll have to update my guides. And the image at the top, that’s going to need to be changed!

I’m alive and well. I’ve been PvPing on Azizi and still leveling the cow. Love the cow. Expect a bigger update later tonight btw.

Cow leveling is going great. Still having lots of fun with that. I’m a little bit behind schedule now but thats alright. ‘Lock PvP is also going great. Having lots of fun doing battlegrounds with a premade. Today I did some dailies and made [Dimensional Ripper - Area 52] so that I can get turned into a tauren warlock and melt faces. ^.^

Did a pug the other day and the tank was whining about how Intervene sucks because he has to target the target of the mob and then use intervene and by then its too late. This is NOT true. You can intervene with the mob targetted and it WILL intervene the person that the mob is going after.

Right, BBQ time now! Update later.

Edit: Contest decision making thingy is going along well and expect the winners to be announced this week. Lots of great submissions and its hard to choose!

Naissa’s Guide to Instance Tanking.

There are a lot of tanking guides out there but a lot of them work off of the assumption that you’ll be in ideal conditions. Most of the time you won’t be. I’m not the world’s greatest tank but I do know my stuff and I’m going to share some information with you that might help to avoid or reduce the headaches that I experienced while tanking.

(Pictures coming as soon as I can get them)

This is really a work in progress but I wanted to get it out there as soon as it was readable and in some kind of order. I’ll add pictures and videos and a lot more to it as I get the time to do so.

Read more…

Her name is Kat. She’s probably one of the most artistic people I know. Look what she did:

Seriously, how cool is that? Its my cow…But with tier 6 and lightning! Lightning cow ftw. You can check our more stuff she’s made here but Lightning Cow is her best work imo. Ok I’m just saying that because its a tauren.