Times they are a-changin’
Posted on: May 2nd, 2008 by RochelleI had finally gotten on board the Effective Health Bandwagon. Avoidance is great and all but as long as you have a balanced set of gear then you have enough avoidance already so you might as well gem and enchant for pure stamina. I still was a little queasy when I would see people eschewing balanced gear for something with nothing but stamina and some sockets but I got over it. ‘So what if they are lacking avoidance, they have enough stamina to do just fine’, I would tell myself. I was reluctant to get on the bandwagon in the first place because making gear choices simply based on which item has more stamina is boring and simply doesn’t do justice to tanking - one of the most complex roles in the raid. But, reluctant or not, I jumped on the bandwagon.
There was a thread on the R&D forums about a warrior who gemmed a second set of T6 gear with dodge gems. The guy who did it is a tank for Premonition although he might have been with Death and Taxes at the time of this thread (for anybody who doesn’t follow progression raiding, those two guilds are kind of a big deal). He did it when Sunwell was on the PTR and he successfully tanked all the bosses in this crazy avoidance gear. The R&D forum went crazy and warriors from everywhere came out saying that this guy was nuts and that he must be logging out in goofy gear just to mess with people because it could never work. But it did work. And now if you look at tanks from the top 50 guilds, they are all doing it. Before Sunwell they would all have had 15 stam gems across the board but now you see 12 defense and 10 dodge gems all over the place and tanks that are actually picking up socket bonuses.
The first thing you should do when trying to gear a tank is get enough stamina AND avoidance. If you don’t have a baseline level of each, you are going to run into trouble. The majority of raiding gear provides enough avoidance by itself so you don’t need to gem and enchant for it (ZA and badge gear is a different story) which is why most tanks always gem and enchant for pure stamina. But Sunwell has changed that with this spell http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=45769. Every boss (or at least the 5 that anyone has seen) has that buff. Basically it means that the T6 raiding gear that previously gave you enough avoidance, no longer does. So all the Sunwell tanks are realizing that 22k fully buffed is enough and are now gemming for avoidance. There are still a few die hards out there that are clinging to all stam all the time, but most have made the shift.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier. I finally get to use my socket bonuses and I get to think before numbly sticking 15 stamina in every socket. So, shortly after I hopped on the Effective Health Bandwagon, I get to hop right off again. Now my biggest challenge is to loosen the guild bank’s vice-like grip on the crimson spinel supply.
Holy mother of AoE tanking
Posted on: April 28th, 2008 by RochelleAs I write this I am listening on vent to my guild doing Felmyst. For the MT we use a druid. Felmyst doesn’t have the same you-die-now bursts like Brutallus but he doesn’t mess around on tank damage either. He is only on the ground and hitting the tank in phase 1. In phase 2 he flies up in the air the fun really starts. He targets a random person with a green beam that the person has to kite for a couple seconds and it leaves a green trail. The trail will do a boatload of damage to anyone who stands in it but it also spawns a whole bunch of skeletons. Think Nightbane on crack. He does two green beams and each one spawns about 10 skeletons that hit for 800-1000 on plate. It is basically a pally tank wet dream. But for the last two nights we have been doing it our pally tank couldn’t be online for the first hour of raid so we had me and two druids trying to pick up all the skellies. It wasn’t too bad once we got the hang of it but the learning curve was steep. So the moral of the story is that it took three non pally tanks to do the job of a single pally tank. Our pally eventually logged on tonight so me and the other druid got subbed out and we should get a kill tonight.
Edit: Got her.
“Wow, my shield is broken, I wonder when that happened”
- Our pally tank right after the boss died.
Tanking in new and exciting places
Posted on: April 18th, 2008 by RochelleSee that title there? Yeah, its got two meanings. I am tricksy like that.
I stopped raiding a while back because I was going to join the Air Force (although I have more recently decided to do Navy instead). It turns out that the application process for an officer takes a looooong time which leaves me able to raid. I knew it would look awfully shady to my old guild if I stopped raiding while we were farming BT/Hyjal ad naseum and all of a sudden now that Sunwell was out I could raid again. I also wasn’t crazy about the atmosphere in the guild, it felt stagnant and even if my coming back to raiding didn’t look shady, I would not have wanted to raid there anyway. So I started looking elsewhere. Which brought me to new and exciting place #1, a server called Moonrunner.
The last thing I wanted to do was go backward in progression so I made sure to hook up with progression raiding guild which brings me to new and exciting place #2, Sunwell Plateau (yes, I had to google ‘plateau’ to spell it correctly).
A screenshot of the fun that Sunwell brings -
For anybody keeping score at home, that is 52k damage in 2 seconds. Needless to say, I died. And here’s the rub: thats not a totally freak occurence, either me or the other tank took ridiculous bursts like that a couple times. But at the end of the day he died (second kill for the guild, first for me) and I got me a new neck piece - http://wowhead.com/?item=34178
Forums offline
Posted on: March 26th, 2008 by BizzamDue to some recent hacking attempts, I have taken the forums offline while I evaluate it’s security.
Hope to have it back up soon!
UPDATE: I have re-enabled the forums as I do not think it was the forums where the attacks were coming from. Carry on!
On the eve of patch 2.4
Posted on: March 21st, 2008 by BizzamPatch 2.4 will likely go live this coming Tuesday and if not, then most assuredly next Tuesday. Are you ready?
I went over some of the upcoming patch 2.4 changes back in February, as well as looked at a couple of the new tanking items.
About the only skill change that is coming with 2.4 that affects tanking warriors, is the change to Cleave. From the patch notes:
Cleave: This ability will no longer strike any secondary target which is under the effect of crowd-control spells that break on taking damage. i.e. Polymorph, Sap, etc.
I guess this is nice, but in my opinion it is just a dumbing down move. If you are worth your salt, you can move mobs as needed so that your Cleaves aren’t breaking CC’s anyway.
Other than that, I hope you’ve been saving up those badges for the new badge loot!