After 300 attempts, I can do this in a coma:

1. accept the ready check, raid leader says "let's go"
2. Countdowns starts
3. pre-pot at 2 seconds
4. combat pulses, hit berserker rage and bloodthirst at the same time
5. Battle shout, if Battle trance proc'ed then HS
6. wait about 0.5 then hit recklessness/Deathwish
7. Colossus smash
8. Bloodthirst
9. Heroic leap in between this GCD, if I haven't had any misses I should have enough rage to HS here, recklessness is still up it should proc incite.
10. Raging blow
11. Bloodthirst (CS ends)
12. Should be able to get 2nd HS here right before t12 shout buff ends
13. Pause berserker rage usage to land just as deathwish is about to fade to prevent any possible RB delay
14. Hit rallying cry right before the first melee knock back.
15. Use next CS on cooldown, making sure to pool rage a bit to ideally get 2 HS's during the CS
16. Delay 3rd CS to be used with 2nd T12 shout buff. Maintaining perfect BT discipline, Rotation for this time period is as follows: BT-Shout-BT-CS-BT&heroic leap-RB-BT.
17. Time HS uses to make sure I'm not rage capped by the melee knock back or by getting hit by traps
18. Repeat this process once more, push to transition phase shortly after CS comes off CD for the 7th time.
19. adds spawn, spam cleave/BT, use WW if 4 or more mobs are nearby. Mid way through the phase battleshout/heroic leap comes off cooldown, make sure to use them ASAP
20. transition ends, stack up on the right. use victory rush if available during a free GCD, use CS/Deathwish as they come off CD.
21. move at 1.
22. Seeds detonate, if not targeted by an elemental heroic leap/WW immediately, if not then wait for add to die, then leap. 
23. cleave the remaining elementals, but maintain BT discipline on the boss. 
24. do this while dodging engulfing, and the smash,while doing spin moves and eating a burrito.
25. Stack up on the left side, move at 2.  t12shout/CS lineup occurs while moving. 
26. hit rallying cry 3 seconds before seeds detonate. 
27. Repeat elemental strategy. 2nd round of engulfing always has the 4th tick. 
28. Stack up on the right, move at 2. Stop DPS while moving because the nerf messed up the timing of the transition. 
29. elementals spawn, start DPSing again, repeat elemental strategy.
30. shift right during engulfing, prepare for transition.
31. Heroic throw the right scion right after it get's MD'ed, if it's a left split there is time to melee it a bit to pool rage.
32. Repeat transition strat, but with more cleaving and Whirlwind'ing.
33. When one son is left up, DPS the scion that's marked, make sure it has sunders.
34. boss goes active again, swap to boss to get a sunder stack up, then back to the scion to build a stack or 2 of executioner before it dies. get a few last cleaves on the remaining scion as it's moved away. 
35. group up on the right with the other melee, dodge engulfings while doing spin moves and eating a burrito.
36. after the first engulfing ends, lust is popped, use all available cooldowns with this including DPS potion.
37. 20% should hit shortly after the 3rd set of engulfing. stack executioner while maintaining perfect BT discipline, and being perfect about GCD usage when lining up CS/t12 shout buff when stacking executioner. 
38. Push to phase 4 with 4 meteors up, watch all the retards knock the meteors in to the worst imaginable spots. proceed to wipe within 20 seconds because people freak out.
39. Release
40. Run back, listen to raid leader sigh multiple times, and do a mediocre job of calling people out, while being very loud in general.
41. If it's past 11:30, take the portal to ogrimmar, promptly log off and close ventrilo, if not past 11:30, ignore this step
42. wait for buffs and eat the feast.
43. Go to 1

I am so bored of this fight.

EY AMIGO, EL DODGE-O EL SULFRAS SMASH-O?

Ranting time.
So after 10 nights of working on heroic Ragnaros, I have learned a few things, actually scratch that I already knew this shit, but I was merely reminded of it. After I think 250 or so attempts, we finally made it to the last phase, which is when the real fight starts, so basically we made it through the pre-fight RP.

While I realize that most of the people who read this and actually play wow will probably disagree with me, I'm used to that.

The point of the matter is that it's no longer a hard fight. Seriously, the fight is really really simple. The whole fight merely consists of a bunch of "stand here" and "move here"  mechanics. With mechanics of this nature, there are only three possible things that make them difficult mechanics.

1. Not knowing were to stand/move
2. Not knowing when to stand/move
3. other mechanics that make standing/moving less ideal.

Now, on Ragnaros, there aren't any meaningful mechanics that fit in to option 3. and more importantly, on any fight, the moment you figure out when and where to stand/move, that mechanic becomes a non-issue. Unfortunately, not only do people learn at different rates, people are also inherently stupid, so not only do they continue to suck at simple mechanics that already have a working solution, but they also pretend that those mechanics are magically still difficult.
To paraphrase, once you figure out a solution to a mechanic, that mechanic is no longer difficult.

Now to be clear, just because a mechanic is unforgiving, that does NOT mean that it's a difficult mechanic.

Paragon said Heroic Ragnaros was the hardest fight ever created, and they are the best guild in the world.So why believe me?

There are two things that people commonly forget about how raiding in a world class guild is different than raiding in a regular guild.
The first, and most important difference, is information.
When a guild like paragon gets to a new fight, there are no boss strategy guides for them to watch, there are no boss mods to tell them when a certain ability is going to happen. They do everything from scratch. Hands down the most difficult thing to do in raiding is to create a strategy, as opposed to copying one from someone else. Don't believe me? Try to get your guild to do a fight without any person ever watching a single kill video or strategy guide for it. see how long it takes you to get a first kill.

The second difference is gear at the time of the first kill.
The thing about raiding in a world class guild, is you are playing with some of the best players in the world (who would have thought?). Every character has a DPS limit, meaning that for that characters given gear, there is a theoretical maximum to how much DPS that person can do. as gear improves that DPS limit increases. People who are good at WoW will almost always be able to be at 90% of that limit, or higher. Therefore, there is a Raid DPS limit, where if every single person in that raid was DPSing at their personal limit, the raid DPS would be X. Where the hell am I going with this? A guild that kills a boss two weeks before another guild, had to do it with two weeks LESS gear. meaning that their play had to be closer to perfection  in terms of DPS in order to achieve the same raid DPS as the other guild. as time goes by, gear gets better, making it easier to reach the required DPS, which could also be met by simply not being awful, which has nothing to do with encounter design.


Heroic Ragnaros has been available for a long time now, every guild working on him has way better gear than paragon did when they got the first kill, I promise you.

Working on heroic Ragnaros is no longer about learning the fight, it's about learning how to not fuck up the fight, and learning how to not suck at DPS while not fucking up. These are pretty straightforward things to do, the only issue is that if you fuck up, you are probably going to wipe. The fight is extremely unforgiving, I will not argue against that. You fuck up moving from seeds you die, you fuck up AoEing the elementals you die, you pop a trap at the wrong time you wipe, you fuck up world in flames you die. There are a lot of little things that will cause a wipe. But that doesn't make the fight hard, each individual piece of the puzzle has a very obvious spot for you to put it in, but if you don't put it there the puzzle can't be completed.

Unforgiving ≠ Difficult

As an analogy, difficult mechanics are squares, and unforgiving mechanics are rectangles. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. if you had 30 seconds to get away from every one in the raid, and failure resulted in a wipe, that wouldn't be hard. Now what if you had 5 seconds? That seems to be a bit more difficult to accomplish huh?

/rant

Planning is Everything (part 1)

Taking a break from talking about encounter specific stuff, this time I'll be talking about gearing, itemization, and other info that can be worked on outside of combat.

Before you try to set a record on any encounter, you should first figure out a few aspects of the encounter as it can greatly affect how you gear/glyph/spec/etc.

Things to consider:

• How much actual tanking will you be doing?
• Will there be lots of AoE?
• Will you be spending more time AoE'ing than doing single target DPS
• Will your vigilance target be taking lots of damage? 

Click this to see the basic cookie cutter spec


There are literally hundreds of possible gear/glyph/spec setups you could use, so I won't be covering all of them, and instead will be explaining how I approach a few different generalized encounter styles over the course of the next few days/weeks/centuries.


Today's Scenario: 
Spending the entire fight tanking, no Adds, no AoE, Vigilance target takes little/no damage.

On any fight where you are going to have a high amount of shield slam usage, you should be wearing two pieces of the tier 12 tanking set for the bonus damage to shield slam. The ideal pieces to wear are the shoulders and gloves, as they have a lower overall impact on your stat pool than the other pieces.

Any time vigilance doesn't do a whole lot in terms of overall gain in vengeance, it's not a bad idea to just drop vigilance/concussion blow in your spec.

Expertise past 26 is a pretty good idea, but remember it's fairly devalued since it will only affect your chance to be parried, so don't go too crazy stacking it.

Itemize for 8% hit, this should be fairly obvious, but just in case it isn't, now you know!

If the boss has a slow swing timer, or at least anything longer than 2 seconds, I would set up a macro to swap you in to berserker stance, then use Colossus Smash, then switch back to defensive stance. Note that you should time using this macro so that a melee hit doesn't land during the time you are in berserker stance.
The macro should look like this:

#showtooltip Colossus Smash
/cast [stance:3] Colossus Smash; Berserker Stance
/cast defensive stance

Possible spec/glyph setup:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/tool/talent-calculator#Zc02!kaY!ag!PSkZbedggQ!ZbYcfRjNp

Perfecting Majordomo Staghelm

Yes, that's almost 10k more DPS than the #2 ranked parse.

I hope you like cheese, because ranking on this fight is the epitome of doing what you aren't supposed to do.

The basics:

• You won't be tanking ever.
• Wear 100% DPS gear plus 2pc T12 tanking gear for the Shield Slam DoT
• Keep vigilance on the tank. you won't be getting much vengeance from it though.

Specific tricks:

• When ever there are cats active you should be using shockwave on cooldown, though don't worry about swapping to defensive stance to rend/TC unless there are a lot of cats active (Read: at least 3+ domo)
• One way to get a tiny bit of extra vengeance at the start is to intervene the tank right before the pull occurs, though this should only be done if you are using a strat that results in the tank getting melee's almost immediately, as you don't want to delay the damage buff ramp up.
• One nice thing about being prot is that you cannot be targeted with searing seeds. 
• you should be able to get 2 full cooldown burst sets (by this I mean being able to line up all of your DPS cooldowns, including recklessness) you should use your strength pot when you get the second cooldown lineup. 

This fight is boringly straightforward in terms of ranking, one thing to be concious though is that my DPS on this fight as prot is about half of what I do as fury, so if you are already getting kills dangerously close to the enrage timer, I wouldn't suggest attempting this.

                                                                                                                                      
In other news, in the near future I will be sort of expanding this blog a bit, I intend to have sections specifically for prot oriented posts, as well as for fury, and other miscellaneous stuff. If I get even more ambitious I'll start frapsing some of my record attempts and posting them on my youtube channel, though I still haven't decided about this yet.

Perfecting Ryolith

Ryolith is the AoE fight of all AoE fights for prot warriors. there is a lot that you can do to maximize DPS, and there is also a lot you can screw up. Hopefully, the following post will help you screw up less.

Gearing:

• Wear all DPS gear. If your guild has you tanking both the fragments AND the spark, then wear a bit of tanking gear, also get a new guild.
• Any expertise past 26 is almost completely wasted as the fragments are level 85 mobs.
• Wearing 2pc t12 tank set is not advised because you aren't going to be doing a lot of shield slams

Basic Premise:

• Kill the fragments, then find the biggest group of liquid obsidians you can and kill those until a new round of fragments, once boss pushes over to p2, spam execute.
• keep vigilance on the spark/ryolith tank the whole fight. 

The actually "useful" information:

• Start the fight in berserker stance, do your standard non tanking DPS rotation and what not, but don't blow heavy bust cooldowns, shortly before the first fragments spawn swap to defensive stance and put a rend up, then thunderclap to spread it to the other leg. time this so TC is back up by the time the fragments spawn.
• When the first fragments spawn, immideately heroic leap on them, if they are already near the elg then TC, if not then rend/TC, after this shockwave, spam TC/Revenge/Cleave until they die, make sure you are close enough for the legs to get hit by TC. DO NOT Blow any Burst CD's yet, most of the people AoEing will still have trinket procs up so they will melt and waste your cooldowns.
• By the time the fragments die, there should be some Liquid obsidian running around, Go get rends ticking on as many as possible, but don't use your shockwave on them.
• More or less rinse and repeat, since the nerfs you are only going to get 1 recklessness/retaliation during the fight, so use it when most appropriate, Retaliation can be used pretty much whenever, but recklessness should be used when there are also a lot of liquids near ryolith. try and set it up so you can also use a heroic leap during recklessness.Also use your strength pot during recklessness.
• As always harass your druids until they give you thorns

Next time it's going to get cheesy, cause I'm going to be discussing domo. 

Perfecting Beth'tilac

While for most of you (meaning probably none of you), you won't be able to fully copy how my guild does beth'tilac, but you can still use the information.

How I do Beth'tilac:
My job on this fight is strictly taunting spinners, I keep vigilance on the take that is going up in p1, this refreshes my taunt cooldown every 2 seconds or so, allowing me to quickly get all the spinners down before they rape the shit out of the raid. Because of the fact I do no actual tanking, I wear 100% DPS gear for this fight, except for 2pc T12 from my tanking set. While taunting spinners my goal is to piss off the ranged DPS and make it hard for them to kill the spinners on the ground, allowing me to spend more time DPSing them, you should be more or less spamming TC on cooldown to keep the spinners on you (obviously have a rend up too for BnT). once all the spinners are dead I switch to berserker stance and begin DPSing drones. stacking as many burst cooldowns together when ever possible.

if you are using this exact strategy:

• try and call for thorns when ever spinners are alive. 
• try to make AoEing the spinners inconvenient for your range DPS, they should be killing the drone anyway. 
• you can get 1 heroic leap off per round of spinners, don't forget about it.
• after the first round of spinners are dead use a full burst rotation, including recklessness, it will be up for hero/lust.
• in p2 every time a tank swap occurs switch your vigilance to the current tank, doing this should allow you to sit at ~75-80% vengeance for the entirety of the phase.
• spam execute sub 20% unless you have under 30 rage, then SS. 

If you are actually going to be tanking drones/beth'tilac:

• still get thorns as much as possible
• the more spinners you can get on you the better, doing as much AoE damage in p1 as possible is they key to high DPS. 
• any time you are not tanking beth'tilac, swap to berserker stance and DPS. 

Next blog will be about Ryolith. look for that shortly after you are admitted to a nursing home because i like to procrastinate.

How to be good at something everyone is bad at

Probably the most important part of achieving high DPS as a prot warrior is to stop worrying about tanking.

• you are going to hold agro, especially since the threat hotfix.
• you are going to survive, your healers will keep you alive, if they don't then you die and will probably wipe so they get to try to not fuck up again. yes, you should be using your survival cooldowns when needed but that should be second nature to you.

your goal needs to be doing as much damage as you possibly can.

• Warriors have an incredible amount of utilities available for maximizing your DPS, and while most of them get neglected, knowing when to use them will make a huge difference. 
• even on a single target fight heroic leap should be used on cooldown. you should practice leaping mid charge at the start of the fight to get the benefit of the rage from charge and the damage from the leap. 
• cycling colossus smashes immediately after a shield block will help you maximize SS damage for that block uptime. 
•  Vigilance should always be on the target taking the most damage, getting the max amount of vengeance possible is vital.

over the next few days/weeks/decades I'll be making posts regarding encounter specific tricks for maximizing your DPS while prot.