I really grappled with how to approach this week’s blog (and yes, I’m aware I’m a week late but I took a much needed mental break). A rather important event in world history took place, something I wasn’t entirely certain I felt comfortable commenting on. No, it wasn’t the fact that I solo’ed the last boss of ZA from 25% or that the single mob I killed at a dig site dropped a Hyacinth Macaw. It wasn’t even the astoundingly cute girl who has taken a bit more than a slight passing interest in me. These are all important instances obviously, but in all seriousness there was a rather significant piece of news. It was the death of Osama bin Laden, scourge of America for more a decade, that has left me beside myself. I found my own reaction to be both appropriate and deeply unnerving at the same time.

What exactly do I mean by this? As many of you probably were, I was jubilant. I wanted to join those flash mobs outside the White House and the Ground Zero site. I wanted to join in the celebration of what was not a resounding victory over fear but was at least a devastating blow in our crusade against it. This man helped define my generation. I remember being a scared child, barely into 7^th grade was I watched the Twin Towers collapse. We all lost something that day, many of us much more than others. Now, 10 years later, it’s not exactly closure. Our loved ones, our innocence will never be returned to us. The joy brought back with it the pain and the grief.

So what was it that rattled me? There was nothing wrong with feeling that way over the death of this monster. But some self-reflection told me something felt off, something deep inside me shuddered with revulsion. I realized it rather quickly: I was celebrating the death of a man. Never mind that he was a disgusting excuse for a human being, that I could feel pleasure from the death of another is what troubles me. This event is something many of us never thought would occur, so most of us were blindsided by it. For my own part, I thought I would have felt some bitter satisfaction. There really isn’t anything wrong in being happy over this, especially given the circumstances. Just remember, the reasons we hated this man were because of his callous disregard for life. The minute we start continually taking personal pleasure from the deaths of our enemies is when we start losing our grip on humanity. I don’t want to go down that road. As always, leave me a comment (which you should be able to do right at the bottom now), and I promise next week will not be as much of a buzz-kill. This was my catharsis.

Liberi Fatali News

-You may have noticed the site looks different. That is your brain malfunctioning. Dae has spent a lot of effort to convince your feeble mind that the site has been revamped. But seriously, check out the new functions. They’re awesome.

-Group 2 is currently undergoing a bit of restructuring. Contact an officer if you wish to help group 2 get back to full strength and we offer our thanks to those who have been helping.

-We finally have our fish feasts! Thanks to Dae, Mins, Gralic, and Xdeath for helping get this done.

-Light again on the progression front. Group 1 is trying a modified strategy on Cho’gall this week that we hope will pay off.

-Rated BGs are being put together on the weekends, no set times as of yet. Contact Tif for approximate times, and remember these are for fun, if you want a competitive group, this may not be for you.

Hachi’s List

-This segment is basically where people can request help for various things (such as crafted goods, achievements, and dungeon runs) and I will post things the guild, as a whole, should pitch in towards.

-Now that we have fish feasts, how bout farming me Poseidus?

-DR is looking for more bodies to throw at Heroic Halion. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak!

-Recruiting a ranged DPS, with preference for the cloth variety. Please forward any potential recruits to an officer or to our shiny new apply now button at the top of the page!

-Looking for more people with FRAPS and video and photo-editing skills. Mins has a picture I need photoshopped out of existence.

Hachi’s Cup of Tea: Aggro is a Complicated Concept, Loosely Translated, It Means The Priest Dies: Or How to Not Turn Your Tank Into a Basket Case

The above video is a classic reminder of what you can do to your tank if you’re not watching it (or in this case, raid leader). All it takes is one bad hunter misdirecting to a terrible healer on the wrong day, like when he is dealing with all this stress at work and all he wants to do is tank a heroic for some points but this douche-bag hunter is just screwing it up and HOLD IT TOGETHER HACHI. I’m not covering common-sense things like don’t DPS the wrong target or don’t break CC here. I’m covering something slightly more esoteric: threat.

After having heard some people talk about threat, I realized there was a rather severe misunderstanding of how this basic (but complicated) concept works. To put it simply, threat is a number. That number does not dictate how likely you are to become squashed Lubu at any given time, it ONLY will tell you who will be attacked at any given moment. Forget threat generation, forget threat modifiers. All you need to know to understand the basic concepts of threat that are relevant to most players is who is the mob currently attacking. This is NOT the same as who is on top of the threat meter. A player in melee range can be up to 109% of the current target’s threat before pulling, a ranged 129%. This means that a player can pull either 10% or 30% more threat ABOVE the tank before pulling off him. Some people have been hemming and hawing over getting even a single point of threat above the tank; that is not how it works. Basically, the longer a fight goes, the harder it becomes to pull threat off the tank, as the amount necessary to pull is growing proportionately larger. If you’re only using the standard Blizzard threat meter, it tells you how much threat you have relative to the person being attacked. If that sad person is you, it tells you how much you have over the next person.

Threat generation is another concept that confuses a lot of people. I’ll break it down so that it doesn’t seem like such a magical thing. To strip it down to its most basic functions, threat generation is basically another way of measuring DPS (or HPS for healers). It will increase with increased DPS or HPS and your total threat at any given time is like your damage or healing done. Many classes have ways of either temporarily dropping themselves off the threat meter or wiping it completely (I am jealous of the latter). For however long this effect lasts, you are basically starting the fight over for yourself. Your damage or healing done to that point becomes irrelevant to the mob.

Most people at this point are aware at this point what generates threat, but maybe not how much or why. This is where threat modifiers come into play. A DPS will generate threat on every target it attacks at a rate proportional to its DPS. For the sake of explanation, a DPS has no threat modifier. Classes like rogues and hunters used to have threat modifiers (negative and positive respectively) but Cata removed all of those. A healer will generate on EVERY target it is currently in combat with a healer has a negative threat modifier to compensate. Let me clarify, because negative threat modifier is a term about as helpful as Mograin giving romance advice. Simply put, it means that instead of generating 100% of your heals as threat, you generate something like 60% (not exact numbers by any stretch of the imagination). Keep in mind, healer damage does not have a negative modifier. In most cases, this means the greatest danger to a healer in pulling threat is at the beginning of a fight or when new adds come onto the field like drunken Manchester United fans. Tank threat is also no more mystical than the others. Tank threat has a 300% modifier (and that IS an exact number). Simply put, threat is not a big scary number with lots of variables floating around that can change the entire fight in an instant. It is a very predictable, very CONTROLLABLE number. Next week I will cover advanced threat techniques, and if that ends up being too short on its own, I’ll cover something else as well. Leave meh comments!