Tank Hard!

See 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

Due 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!

Patch 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!

Sorry for my unannounced hiatus, but the last few weeks have been a bit hectic and I’ve been in and out of town quite a bit due to good ole ‘real life’ involvement!  At any rate, I’m back and time to get rolling on the blog again!

First a little post about me and my guild’s current progression.  It’s been a while since I made a progression post, but back in January I posted we had downed Hydross. Since that post, we have moved on to off Morogrimm, Karathress and Leotheras, and have had several attempts on Vashj, but haven’t managed to down her yet.  We’ve gotten her into phase 3 a couple of times, but haven’t closed the deal yet.

It seems the hardest part for us in the Vashj encounter are the random elements.  The spawning of the Elite Naga and the Striders have been problematic.  We can’t seem to be consistent in picking them up before they manage to walk over and one shot a healer.

We are working on remedying this though by having more than one designated strider kiter and having a paladin healer near a tank drawing heal aggro for the Naga to pull them into a predefined location.

Our goal is to down Vashj before 2.4 goes live, but I don’t know if that will happen or not.  2.4 is right around the corner, possibly as soon as this Tuesday so who knows if we will manage it or not.

If your guild has no trouble with Vashj, care to give any pointers on how you manage the spawns to make sure they don’t go whack someone?

I quit my job two weeks ago. Tomorrow is my last day. I am moving back home and then joining the Air Force (or maybe the Army, I haven’t decided yet). I will probably be playing a lot less once I get home (or maybe a lot more if I am particularly bored) and then not at all while I do basic training and then officer candidate school. My tanking career is definately on hold for a while and may be over for good. I was unceremoniously dumped down to Legacy status in my guild which basically means that I got put into the raiding retirement home.

I was starting to get pretty bored with raiding anyway so its not a bad thing. I never really raided for the loot (although it is pretty nice), I did it to see new content and be challenged. But we have been farming T6 content since Decemeber and it has become pretty monotonous. I can’t imagine what it might be like for the really elite guilds who have been doing the exact same content since last summer.

I found lately that I really hate everything in WoW except arena and raiding. Doing daily quests is physically painful for me. I go crazy flying around looking for mining nodes. I am terribly overgeared to do heroics or regular 5 mans and I am accustomed to a high level of play from those around me so pugs make blood shoot out of my eyeballs. Alliance in my battlegroup just turns off their brain when they enter a battleground and sometimes it seems like they are actively working against their team. I have run Karazhan approximately 122394512341 times. I never liked ZA. I kinda like leveling characters so I might get a few of my mid level characters up to 70 over the next few weeks.

I just noticed that there is no as to who is making which posts. Maybe it is because I am logged in as an admin or something. Regardless, this is Rochelle