Today’s guest poster is Tyaera, a Protection Paladin on the Dath’Remar server. Tyaera feels paladins just need a chance to prove their abilities when tanking end game bosses. Read on..

Being a paladin tank is kind of like wanting to push a square peg into a round hole. Quite often, before I joined my current guild, this is what I’d hear. “I can tank this boss!” “paladins can’t tank this boss because of X!” “[insert long diatribe about exactly why X reason is totally invalid, including an in-depth gear analysis and comparison as to why you are able to tank it]“. “….yeah ok. [warrior name], you’re tanking”.

Pretty frustrating.

I read all of the theorycrafting (well, ok, not ALL of it, there’s enough theorycrafting out there to supply a small African nation with scrap paper for about thirty six years, but I read a lot), I compared pieces of gear endlessly. While I was still buying badge gear, it wasn’t uncommon to find me sitting in front of the badge vendor for about an hour, comparing two pieces of gear, to find out which one was the best, no matter the tiny margin of difference. I put in as absolutely much effort as I could to maximize my potential.

Sorry, only warriors tank raid bosses.

Half of a paladin tank’s struggle is to learn to tank. Learn what uncrushable means. Learn what uncrittable means. Tank as much as you can so that you can become a good TANK as well as a good paladin tank. There are a lot of skills essential to being a good tank that are not paladin-specific!

The other half of the struggle is to be allowed to tank. And when I say allowed to tank, I don’t mean, brought to Zul’Aman to tank Jan’alai hawks. I don’t mean brought to Karazhan off nights to speed up the trash. I don’t mean brought to SSC to tank Tidewalker’s adds, then subbed out. I mean to be allowed to tank on an equal level to warriors.

A lot of paladins fall into the trap of talenting into Holy, “just for tonight”. Tonight turns into two nights. Then a week. Then a month. Before you know it, you’re the paladin holy class leader and you still haven’t tanked anything. You might be being tossed tanking pieces every now and then but you’re still not going to be tanking anything.

The best advice I can give is to find yourself a pocket healer. Take them on a 5man instance run. Show them how much easier and quicker an instance is with you than anyone else they’ve run with, and show them that you’re skilled. They’ll want to come again. Then you can start bringing smart DPSers. They’ll appreciate you too. By the time it comes time for raid invites, if you’re not in the group and tanking, people will start asking, hey, why doesn’t [Pallytank] ever tank anything?

A personal example is when our guild was making Leotheras the Blind attempts. Our prot warrior was having a huge amount of trouble picking up Leo after whirlwinds, and someone said “well why don’t we get Ty to tank him, he can use his shield to pick up Leo”, and everyone agreed, so I did.

They will get you accepted without you having to say a word. They’ll speak up for you.

And that’s the best kind of success.

-Tyaer


Untitled from Fake Name on Vimeo.

I don’t think I have ever looked at my UI and said, ‘Ok, now it’s done.’  Since the last time I made a UI post, I have made some changes.  The moat visible change was floating combat text.  For the longest time I used Blizzard’s floating combat text to keep track of incoming and outgoing damage and heals.  And it does a reasonable job for most classes and when I play my shadow priest, I still use it, but for a tank that is using every single GCD to do something and is getting spammed with heals and is taking damage all the time, it could get really really cluttered.  I tried to use SCT but the initial configuration wasn’t what I wanted and after messing with it for quite a while, I still hadn’t gotten it right.  After that I tried a mod called Parrot.  Right out of the box Parrot was almost perfect and with minimal messing around, I got it to show everything just how I wanted.  The big changes I made away from the initial setup were adjusting the scrolling speed so that it cleared off my screen quickly and I turned off all of the healing.  Making incoming and outgoing damage scroll quickly meant that it wasn’t cluttering up my screen at all but it was still easily discernable if I wanted to keep an eye on something.  The other change I made was to have any resists or immunities register the same way that crits do.  So when a tclap gets resisted, the “Resist” message pops up bigger than the normal scrolling text and it ‘sticks’ on the screen for a moment to make sure I don’t miss it.  It makes keeping debuffs on a mob a lot easier for me.   

I also use a mod called ClassTimer to keep track of the duration on things like tclap, sunder and demo shout.  The window for that is right next to the scrolling combat text so it is very easy to keep track of whether a debuff lands or not because it will either have the duration refreshed in the ClassTimer window or it will so “Resist” in big letters right next to that window.  ClassTimer also keeps track of self buffs in a window I put a little more out of the way.  Since the shouts have a much longer duration than my debuffs I don’t feel like I need that info to be as front and center. 

For things like the shouts I could just look at my buff bar, but in the middle of the fight when I have hots and temporary buffs coming and going constantly, it can take some time to find my shout and check the time on it which is why I like to be able to keep track of it separately from all my other buffs.   

Right at my feet I have an action bar that contains the most immediate cooldowns – revenge, shield block, shield slam, bloodrage and taunt.  Down towards the bottom of my screen I have another bar with other cooldowns that I want to keep track of but which aren’t as crucial as those 5.  Right below the action bar on top I have another bar for trinkets and consumables so I can keep track of their availability.   

Below those 2 bars is my swing timer and GCD spark, courtesy of a mod called Quartz.  I really like having those two things because they allow me to be a lot more deliberate in my button mashing.  Knowing when the GCD is going to turn over allows me to push my devastate button only once and at the right time instead of spamming it constantly.  The swing timer does the same thing for my heroic strikes.   

Directly beneath is my target of target frame.  If I want to check my HP/Rage I rarely look at my character frame on top, I almost always get that info from the target of target frame.   

Below the target of target frame is Omen but since the video is from AV, Omen doesn’t show up.  There is a setting somewhere that lets you make the new Omen look like the old Omen which in my opinion is more aesthetically pleasing and I only have it showing 4 bars because as a tank, I don’t need to know where every person in the raid is on threat, I only need to know if someone is getting close to me.  That means that my Omen window is pretty small.   

Underneath Omen is another action bar with longer/less important cooldowns on it.  I also have an action bar for switching weapons and my ‘shoot bow/shoot gun/throw’ macro tucked down there.   

To the right of that cluster is my raid frame – Grid.  Grid can do an awful lot of stuff and is really nice for healing classes but I have it running in a pretty minimal mode.  Each player in the raid has their own square with their name on it and which are colored by class.  As their health goes down the box with their name on it gets smaller.  If there is a red square in the upper left hand corner, that means they are being targeted by a mob – or in the case of AV, an enemy player – which helps me to catch who is pulling aggro.  I also have a blue square show up in the bottom left corner if someone is below 30% mana so I can watch to see if the healers are running low on mana.   

To the right of Grid is my minimap which I have moved and made square with a mod called SimpleMiniMap.  You can see some add-on buttons attached to the minimap and I can move them anywhere on the screen I want with an addon called DetachedMiniButtons.   

One of the buttons there is for an addon called GrimReaper.  It used to be a part of the X-Perl package but now it is standalone and it is really quite nice.  It basically records a combat log for everyone in the raid.  It isn’t always perfectly accurate but it is usually pretty close.  Its great for finding out why people died because you can look through their combat log and see what hit them at what time, what heals they received, what buffs or debuffs they had, etc.   

Above my minimap is my tooltip window for which I use an addon called TinyTips.  TinyTips, like Grid, can do a whole bunch of interesting things but I really just use it to move the position of the tooltips because they would otherwise show up on top of my minimap.   

Above that are my Deadly Boss Mods timers.  They are obviously pretty important for raiding.  Some people like BigWigs instead of DBM, I think it’s a toss up though and just happen to use DBM because that is what my first raiding guild used.   

Above that is my buff window and above that is my debuff window except that I don’t have any debuffs in the video so you are just going to have to trust me that it is there.  I use
Buffalo to work with my buffs.  There is a new and improved version called Buffalo2 but I tried it and couldn’t figure it out within 3 minutes so I said ‘screw it; I’m going to use the old one which is already set up just how I want it’.  I use TrinityBars for my action bars instead of TrinityBars2 for the exact same reason.   

In the top right corner I have my MT windows for which I have a mod called MainAssist.  My guild doesn’t normally have MT windows but I personally can’t raid without them so I found a mod that would let me set up my own windows.  To the left of the MT windows is where the enemy cast bar shows up.  There are a lot of spells that need to be interrupted or reflected or stance danced, etc. and I have found that it makes life a lot easier to have a super huge impossible to miss enemy cast bar.   

On the bottom left are my two chat windows.  The one on top has the tank channel and any whispers I get and any other custom channels I join and the window below has guild chat, raid chat and general chat.  I use Prat to handle my chat windows and like Grid, it can do an awful lot of stuff but I use it to just make the windows a little cleaner. 

The unit frames are done by a mod called Pitbull.  My favorite part about Pitbull is that it has a healing monitor.  In the video there is only one druid healing me and he is only using hots so you can’t see it in action.  The way it works is that it takes not of anyone in the raid casting a heal on anyone else and based on the rank of the heal it will estimate how much health it will restore and tacks that onto my health bar as a green bar.  Basically, it lets me know how much healing to expect.  So if I dip low all of a sudden I can check my health bar and if there is a lot of green then I know I have a bunch of heals that will land in the very near future and I don’t have to worry.  If I dip and I don’t see green, then I know I have to pop a cooldown.  If I am not tanking currently tanking something then I can keep an eye on the current tank’s HP and incoming heals through the target of target frame and Intervene if the tank dips. 

I think that covers just about everything going on in my UI.  Let me know if I missed anything or if anyone has questions.  

With the friends and family alpha of WotLK there have been a bunch of ‘leaks’ for new talents and spells.  The exact same thing happened before TBC and has happened before a couple major content patches.  It is possible that these aren’t fake.  It is also possible that I am Abraham Lincoln and Robocop 3 didn’t suck.  Its the internet, you can never know for sure.  But the safe money is that I am not Abraham Lincoln, Robocop 3 sucked and these WotLK leaks are fake.

But speculation is fun and I have a perfectly good soap box so I am gonna preach.

Here are the supposedly new warrior talents: (http://wotlk.wikidot.com/)

• Titan’s Grip – Allows you to equip two-handed axes, maces and swords in one hand, but you attack 28/26/24/22/20% slower then normal (fury)
• Strength of Arms – Increases your Strength and total health by 1/2/3/4/5%. (arms)
• Shockwave – “Sends a wave of force in front of the warrior, causing ${$m3/100*$AP} damage (based on attack power) and stunning all enemy targets within 10 yards in a frontal cone for 4 sec. This ability causes a high amount of threat.” [20 rage, 45 sec cooldown] (prot)
• Sword and Board – When your Devastate and Shield Slam abilities deal damage they have a 2/4/6/8/10% chance of refreshing the cooldown of your Shield Slam ability and reducing its cost by 100% for 5 sec. (prot)
• Safeguard – ,”Reduces damage taken by the target of your Intervene ability by 20/40/60% for 6 sec. In addition, your Charge, Intercept and Intervene abilities have a 33%/66%/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when used.” (prot)
• Trauma – “Your normal melee critical strikes increase the effectiveness of Bleed effects on the target by 15/30% for 15 sec.”
• _Bladestorm – Instantly Whirlwind all nearby targets and for the next 4.5 sec you will perform a whirlwind attack every 1.5 seconds. While under the effects of Bladestorm, you can move but cannot perform any other attacks or abilities but you do not feel pity or remorse or fear and you cannot be stopped unless killed. [25 rage, cooldown: 90 sec] (arms)
• Stalwart Protector – You gain 1/2 rage every time you parry or dodge an attack.
• Furious Resolve – Reduces threat caused by attacks in Battle and Berserker Stance by 4/7/10% and increases your total Stamina by 1/3/5%. (fury)
• Bull Rush – Increases the duration of the Stun effect of your Charge and Intercept abilities by .4/.7/1 seconds. (arms)
• Unrelenting Assault – Reduces the cooldown of your Overpower and Revenge abilities by 1/2/3 seconds. (arms)
• Bloodsurge – Your Bloodthirst critical hits have a 33/66/100% chance of reducing the swing time of your next Slam by 100% for 5 sec. (fury)
• Critical Block – Your successful blocks have a 10/20/30% chance to block double the normal amount. (prot)
• Shield Break (Level 75, 15 rage, 1m cooldown) – Break down the enemy’s defenses, disarming any shield they have equipped or reducing the chance the enemy will block by 3% for 10 sec.

I am pretty sure that Titan’s Grip was supposed to be a TBC talent, it looks really familiar.  That said, if this turns out to be real it could be pretty cool.  It seems to me that you would probably get the most bang for your buck putting just one talent point in there and spending the other 4 elsewhere.  I have never been accused of being good at dps theorycraft but 8% attack speed increase doesn’t seem all that great and you could probably get a better bonus somewhere else. 

The strength increase from Strength of Arms seems believable but the health increase seems fishy to me considering that there was a blue post specifically saying that there won’t be a huge HP bump going from TBC to WotLK like there was when we went from Vanilla to TBC.

 Shockwave looks like a prot pvp talent and therefore, quite stupid.  I guarantee that all bosses would be immune to the stun so all you are getting is a another threat move on a 45 second cooldown.  Color me unimpressed.  Which I think is something close to chartreuse.

Sword and Board could be great.  But if Blizzard keeps the Sunwell trend going of really hard hitting bosses and tanks with lowish levels of avoidance, then the only thing that restrains threat generation is the global cooldown, not rage generation so that part of the talent would essentially be wasted.  Resetting the CD of Shield Slam would be nice except on similar talents like Preparation for rogues, Readiness for hunters and Cold Snap for mages, the wording is different, Blizzard usually says that the cooldowns will be ‘immediately finished’ not ‘refreshed’.

Safeguard looks like another prot pvp talent.  Yeah…

Trauma is like Super Improved Rend.  Seriously, I supposed it could be a nice boost to rogue damage.  I almost said it would be a nice boost to feral dps but I couldn’t do it with a straight face.  Feral dps… lol.

Bladestorm is in the arms tree which means it is probably supposed to be a pvp talent.  I suppose its a nice damage burst, but since you can’t do anything else while Bladestorming, you might as well think of it like a 4.5 second cast time spell.  You know how often people use 4.5 second casts in pvp?  Zero.  None.  It never happens.  This spell is stupid.

Stalwart Protector would be awesome.  Many tanks, myself included, have been asking for something like this for a really long time.  The single biggest problem with gearing for avoidance is rage starvation.

Furious Resolve’s threat component is something Blizzard already did like 3 patches ago.  And the stamina increase seems dubious for the reason I mentioned earlier.

Bull Rush would be good for pvp.  Not knock your socks of and steal your wallet good, but desirable nonetheless.

The reduction of the revenge cooldown would be nice for tanking, but since the talent is supposed to be deep in the arms tree, its the overpower component that would be important.  The only time you EVER would want or need a reduced cooldown on overpower is when fighting a rogue with evasion up.  So here we have a tier 9 talent that is really only usable it the rarest of situations.

Bloodsurge is almost stupider than the prot pvp talents.  Everyone complains that Blizzard doesn’t understand X class because of Y some talent or mechanic but I think deep down everyone knows that Blizzard knows what they are doing.  Doing DPS as a Slam warrior is probably one of the harder DPS roles in the game.  I would guess its probably up there managing shot rotations on a hunter.  I expect that anyone who has never played a warrior, and a 2h Slam warrior at that, would have no concept of how Slam mechanics work and would therefore think Bloodsurge would be a good idea.  I may be naive but I have to think that someone somewhere at Blizzard knows enough about warriors to see how dumb this talent would be.  Then again, we do have Improved Rend…

Critical Block has potential to be really nice.  If it were something like “Your successful blocks have a 10/20/30% chance to double your block value for 2/4/6 seconds”  Then it would be really nice since you would great some nice spike threat from monster shield slams.  But with the way it currently exists, its just a mediocre mitigation talent.

Shield Break looks like Bull Rush to me.  Would be kinda nice for pvp but far from outstanding.

And that’s my quick review of fake talents.  I only did a cursory review of the other classes and focused on the warrior stuff.  My conclusion is that whoever wrote these has a bit of an idea of what warriors like/want but not a very firm grasp on warrior mechanics.

I never got around to picking up a T6 helm.  At first it was a better upgrade for the hunters and shaman than it would have been for me so I passed on it.  Then it stopped dropping altogether.  Then I got the helm from Illidan so I really didn’t need the T6 helm and I passed on it to other people for offspec.  But now I have gotten the other T6 stuff out of Sunwell and I feel incomplete since I only have 7/8 T6 now.  But here is the real problem: Hyjal sucks.  Its a terrible instance and I hope I never go back to it again.  It is fun the first couple times you do it, but after 3-4 times, it goes downhill fast.  And now they buffed the hell out of the Archimonde encounter.  For the life of me I don’t know why.  A guild that has been killing him for months will still occasionally go in there and wipe over and over and over because the fight is totally unforgiving and it has the super-fun randomness that comes with AoE fear. (Super-fun randomness is not actually super-fun).

The Archimonde encounter has gone through a bunch of revisions.  I think the current version is the 3rd distinctly different version of the fight.  Before I go into what is different and why it sucks, I will run through the basic mechanics of the fight.  There is an ability called Doomfire and Archimonde uses it liberally.  A spot of fire spawns on the ground and picks someone at random and chase them until they make an abrupt turn at which point it will pick a new random person.  If the Doomfire touches anyone they get a DoT on them that deals ridiculous amounts of fire damage over 45 seconds.  The strategy for Doomfire is to run in a straight line away from the boss when it is targetting you and just keep running until the fire stops.  What you don’t want to have happen is the fire to target a new person and loop all over the place cutting people off and running through the tank/melee.  If done perfectly there will be a bunch of straight lines of fire running radially away from the boss which makes them a lot easier to avoid.  There is also an ability called Grip of the Legion which is a curse that Archimonde puts on people that does ridiculous amounts of shadow damage and needs to be decursed.  Air Burst is a super fun mechanic that targets one person and hits everyone within a couple yards of that person and shoots them up and back.  Like way up and maybe 30-40 yards back.  The only way to survive the fall is to click on an item that you get before the encounter starts that acts like a mage’s slowfall but only lasts for 3 seconds so you need to time it just right.  There is also an AOE fear which hits everyone and it can make you run straight through a Doomfire.

So, between Doomfire and Grip of the Legion, there is a lot of burst raid damage and with AoE fear it can sometimes be very hard for healers to keep up with the damage and/or be in range to heal a person.  And here is the rub: everytime someone dies, Archimonde gains an ability called Soul Charge.  Depending on the class of the person who died, Soul Charge acts differently, it can be a DoT, a silence or increases damage taken by the raid by 50% and all three different version of Soul Charge have a direct damage component when they are first applied.  When your raid is new to the encounter, a single person dying usually leads to a chain reaction of Soul Charges killing people and you wipe.  When you are comfortably farming the encounter, a Soul Charge is probably 50/50 for causing a chain reaction and wiping the raid.  In short, having a single person die has a pretty good chance of leading to a wipe.

There were a couple of things that made the encounter manageable.  The Doomfire targetting people meant that you could run it away from the raid.  That meant that it would act relatively predictable and it would be relatively easy to stay far away from so you wouldn’t go into it during a fear.  But they took that away.  Now it will just be completely random in where it goes.  There was a deadzone around the boss where fire wouldn’t spawn which meant that melee would never get terribly screwed by Doomfire appearing directly on top of them.  They took away the deadzone, now melee are screwed.  And you used to be able to do the fight with relatively stable positioning.  The range people would be running all over the place avoiding Doomfire, but the tank would never have to move.  But now, the tank is targettable by Air Burst which means that it is entirely possible for the tank to be getting knocked around map forcing the entire raid to reset its positioning.

Basically, Blizzard took one of the most random and difficult encounters in the game and made it harder and more random.  And to boot, it is at the end of a poorly designed and entirely unfun instance.  So I sit here, with 7/8 T6 and I don’t think I will ever go back and get the helm.  Hyjal, and especially Archimonde, are so bad that even my obsessive compulsive desire to be complete won’t overcome it.