For our feral-minded visitors, Geros has put together an in-depth Cat DPS guide which he intends to keep updated through Cataclysm.
Finally, Oddly put together At the Top of Your Game, an extensive commentary on methods to learn how to play your class (from the perspective of a Priest, but useful to other classes).
Lore posted this on Oct 29, 2009 - 4:36 PM
Earlier today, Daelo made the announcement on both the official Tanking and Dungeons & Raids forums that there will, in fact, be an "Icecrown Radiance":
Source: Daelo For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.
Why are we doing this?
The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.
We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.
We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.
Ciderhelm posted this on Oct 26, 2009 - 5:48 AM
Where to begin with this lengthy news post? Well, to start, let's go ahead and get one thing out of the way -- there's plenty more coming in the next couple weeks and you should keep checking back for more. With that said...
Anub'arak 25-man Hard Mode
Splug has completed his 25-man Heroic Anub'arak guide which we've appended to the Anub'arak strategy thread.
The Weekly Marmot -- Episode 1
Lore and I were discussing ways to keep the site updates on news and keep that personal touch involved that we used to have on the site with the podcasts. He came up with a brilliant idea -- let's plaster his face on our frontpage every week! With no further ado, here's Episode 1!
As a side note, we'll most likely release movies on YouTube on monday so our subscribers will receive a message by Tuesday.
Donor Recruitment Forums
We've made a few fundamental changes to our Guild Recruitment forums, including putting them in a far more visible location on the site, right beneath our raiding movies forum. The biggest change is that new recruitment threads can now only be created by Donors and Authors on the site. Additionally, threads can no longer be bumped and expire automatically, at which point authors are welcome to create them again. Note: We are not deleting any threads currently in the forum; they will expire naturally over the course of the next month.
These changes should cut down heavily on the bump spam we were seeing and should ease up a lot of the clutter in the Guild Recruitment forums. They are part of our standard Donor access to the site and will be included in any future subscriptions we create.
TankSpot & Cataclysm (Our Outlook on a Broader Community)
As most of you have figured out at this point, a lot of the new content on this site over the last year has been intended to reach different audiences. Most of the time this includes tanks, but less often than in the past does it exclusively cover tanks.
Before going further: One thing we've been quick to note is that new communities on the site (such as the larger raiding community) are brought here in addition to the core of tanks that are the foundation here. However, it's also fair to say that I've personally shifted focus towards the raiding movies and, more recently, towards administering the site. This means you don't see as much tanking news that I would have normally been posting in the past. We're actively going to fix this.
With that said, TankSpot has, in terms of traffic, become one of the major WoW destinations. Going into Cataclysm, we're fully intending to become an all-purpose site that nearly anyone playing WoW can access and find something they're looking for and would enjoy. The foundation for Healers has already been laid by Aliena, who will be organizing the Healing community on our site as we develop further in this direction. She's uploading the Discipline Priest movies as I write this! Additionally, we're expecting guides from a variety of other classes in the near future. Parts of the site will change to accomodate these new communities and we'll need to do some overall restructuring to make the site more coherent.
In Cataclysm, we're aiming to cover more subjects through videos, including leveling, instances, and a variety of other related subjects. As you see above, we'll be adding a more personal touch with Weekly Marmot videos!
Quality is important to us and we're being careful to look for authors who are in a position to act as authorities on their subjects. Just as importantly, we judge our potential authors based on how respectful they are towards players of all skill levels and backgrounds. If you've enjoyed the many movies Aliena and Splug have produced, keep this in mind -- they write and create their own movies entirely independently, without supervision or direction from Lore or myself. We expect this quality in our future authors and are vetting them the same way.
We're also planning on extending our outreach to promote blogs and communities outside of our own, so please feel free to contact us if you're from another community and interested in promoting your own awesomeness as Cataclysm approaches!
20 Million Marmots
We've reached a new milestone with 20 million combined views on our YouTube channel this morning. This is obviously a very exciting event for us and we're ecstatic that the community has followed us this far. Expect many more movies, both for raiding and in new areas such as class guides and other means of character progression -- and we'll make sure they're up to the standard you've come to expect. Also, we strongly encourage anyone with a YouTube account to Subscribe to our channel by clicking the large yellow button on our channel page or any movie page.
New Site Promotions Lore has been promoted to administrator status on the site (red name, like Satrina and mine). Penlowe is our new assistant on the site and has a corresponding purple name -- when you have questions and comments, she is the most likely person you'll be talking to! Penlowe will also be reaching out to the larger WoW community and getting in touch with site and blog authors around the web. Finally, Shortypop has been promoted to Author status for her regular, quality blog authorship on the community (check out the blogs here).
Several new authors are going to be promoted in the next few weeks as we start to collect class guides from across the WoW community. As a related side note, I've been meaning to make a post recognizing Satorri for his quality and consistency in posting for the community -- good job!
That's it for now! Stay tuned for more!
For all of those asking about Lore's UI you can jump straight to his UI thread here.
Ciderhelm posted this on Oct 24, 2009 - 7:23 AM
We haven't had too much going on in the news department recently, but we've been working behind the scenes to bring some positive changes to the site. Stay tuned to TankSpot and keep your eyes peeled to our YouTube channel in the coming days and weeks.
Ciderhelm posted this on Oct 14, 2009 - 6:25 AM
I've received an unusual number of messages from people interested in creating class guides. I need 1-2 days to respond to everyone!
