We Assign Tank Jobs In A Very Diplomatic Manner

Okay guys, we've got a job request from an old friend of ours.  Apparently he's started running some raids with the Alliance and he wants to hire a tank. I know everyone's excited about Tyria and leaving Azeroth behind, but since we don't have a concrete move date, I can't really tell him no. That means that someone gets to take a trip and do some Alliance work until we're ready to go.

So who wants to volunt- Not it!

Not it!

Not it!

Not... damnit!

We've got a full house (of tanks)

A couple days ago our resident druid Grunzford finally hit 80. The last couple of days have been us trying to set him up with whatever crafted and AH gear we could acquire for him. Not the easiest task since apparently the only leather anyone sells these days has spell power on it, but we managed to pick him up enough gear for a starter tanking set.

He did get the opportunity to tank his first heroic yesterday though. A buddy of mine was looking for a quick heroic run and I volunteered the druid. In retrospect, it may have been a bit much to have his first real tanking experience be in Utgarde Pinnacle, but hey - no wipe, no foul. Besides that's how I learned how to tank in 40-mans ("You guys gonna take it easy on me?" "Hell no, get to work.")

It's a little too early to go making any concrete judgments from that small of a sample of experience, but from what he was telling me, it sounded pretty similar to warrior tanking in that it was a priority list. Mangle's sorta their version of our Shield Slam with Maul being the bear Heroic Strike, so it's "hit Mangle when it's up and use Maul when rage allows". After that it's keeping a stack of five Lacerates up (used only as often as necessary to keep the stack up), Feral Faerie Fire when it's up, and Swipe as their filler strike like Devastate is for us.

There are some slight differences, like how our filler strike is what keeps our five-stack up for us instead being a "use every 13.5 seconds" ability, but the main difference is that they don't have proc-related conditions for their priority list. For warriors, we're always watching out for a Sword and Board proc or for Revenge to come up, but bears appear to stick with their basic priority list. They technically have a proc in the form of Omen of Clarity, but that's just a free hit of any kind rather than a specific ability. Since they've got something to press every cooldown and they all take about the same amount of rage, it essentially just becomes a free Maul in the end.

I'm hoping that in the near future, I'll be able to line him up with some more heroic work or perhaps a raid or two to get some better info on how their abilities work. Most of the raid work that comes our way tends to have "send Solannis" in the notes, but we'll see. If I can find work for the lock, then I can find work for a tank.

Solannis, Me, and Death Knight Makes Three

Yesterday our resident death knight, Mordigg, became the third person on the team to finish their training in Northrend. After he finished picking up his new abilities from the trainer, we sat down and put together a new tanking spec for him. It still needs field testing, but in theory it should work fine. Before we could do any sort of testing though, it was time to put together some starter tank gear for him.

Most of the gear we had was stuff I had smithed ahead of time: Tempered Titansteel Helm, Tempered Saronite Bracers, Daunting Handguards, Daunting Legplates, and most important of all, a Titansteel Destroyer. All he needed to do was slap a Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle on that and he was all set... well, except for one small detail. Apparently in all of his running around Outland and Northrend, Mordigg had neglected to go and actually train in the use of maces. He certainly couldn't go off and tank with a weapon skill of 1, but leveling that skill would take ages. A solution to this problem came from a priest friend of mine.

There's an island off the western coast of Icecrown that's crawling with Scarlet Onslaught soldiers. I'm sure most people are aware of how excitable and rather violent those folks are. This combined with the fact that they're quite easy to group up, not to mention seem to carry a fair amount of Frostweave and minor magical items, makes this a prime area to go with someone that has AoE attacks. Solannis went out here for AoE tanking practice with his 9-6-9 rotation, so it would work fine for Mordigg's training.

According to Mordigg, the basic rotation seemed simple enough (once his weapon skill got high enough that he could actually hit something other than air). Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Death and Decay, and Pestilence for the opening rotation with Frost Strike until runes came back up. Howling Blast with the first pair of runes to return, then repeating Death and Decay and Howling Blast whenever possible. When diseases started to fall, redo the opening rotation. Some additional practice will be needed since most of the monsters in dungeons are a bit tougher than your average Scarlet soldier, but this is a good starting point. By the time they wrapped up for the night, Mordigg's defense skill was capped at 400 and his two-handed mace skill was 399. That last point of maces will come soon enough, so now to look at his gear again.

We picked up a few more pieces off the auction house to fill in some holes in Mordigg's gear: Tattered Castle Drape (upgrade even with the worthless block value and only 30g), Crusader's Square Pauldrons (a steal at 40g), and Waistguard of the Risen Knight (very nice piece for 60g). After a couple of quick gem cuts from Sol and a belt buckle from me, he's sitting at 516 defense - 24 short of raid uncrittable.

Now there's still plenty of room for improvement here, even outside of stepping into a dungeon. Neither of Mordigg's rings is tank-oriented. Both of his trinkets are damage-focused and kind of old. His boots are still from his DPS days, though that one's easy enough to replace with a quick trip to Shadow Vault for some reputation gear; there's more useless block value, but for starter boots, they'll do until he gets some dungeon gear or I get enough Titansteel to make him a new pair.

With a few days worth of jewelcrafting dailies, or a chunk out of the team's funds, Mordigg could get a Titanium Earthguard Ring. It would be a significant upgrade that would last quite a while and Sol already has that recipe; it'll just take time or money, neither of which I'm fond of spending when I want him out there working to pay off his epic mount now. For trinkets, he'll pretty much be stuck with what he's got until something drops in an instance, barring picking up a new trade skill (more on that later). I could probably send him off to do a normal Halls of Lightning with what he's got now. Loken doesn't hit all that hard and his Seal of the Pantheon would put a nice dent into the Defense rating Mordigg needs for uncrittable.

That just leaves us with the matter of his trade skills, but I'll save that for the next post. The arguments we came up with for changing his profession(s) ended up being longer than the rest of this post, so for the sake of readability we'll leave it at "To be continued..."

Solannis: First Non-Holy Raid

I raided a fair amount back in our Outland days, but it was always as a healer. As such, all of my experience in groups of that size has been from the back of the group. Ever since I switched over to tanking, I've been looking forward to trying my hand at raid tanking. I've listened to Ragar describe the job and noted what seemed pertinent, but it's one of those jobs that you can't just read about. The gap between theory and application may seem small, but it's littered with the bodies of dead raiders. Originally the plan was that I would swap in for Ragar on his next trip to Obsidian Sanctum. He said something to the effect of, "Think of it as your Onyxia." This seemed like a reasonable enough idea - starting off with just one boss to get my feet wet in terms of threat generation and proper movement/positioning. Of course, this was all thrown out the window when I was volunteered to go to Naxxramas.

Apparently the group that Ragar went there with a while ago was taking another trip, but one of their tanks was incapacitated. They had asked Ragar to come, but instead he volunteered to send me in his place, citing that I could use the gear/experience more than him. I think he just wanted to stay home with his keg, but that's beside the point. What matters is that I'd been drafted into my first raid tanking role. It was an off-tanking position, but a tank nonetheless.

I asked Ragar going in what the off-tank was supposed to do. He didn't have a whole lot to add since he's always been the main tank, but he did have a few pointers to begin with: "Just grab anything loose, help the MT on hard-hitting pulls by grabbing a few off of him, and listen to him on boss fights." Not the most useful advice, but I'll take what I can get. I was summoned by the group to Naxxramas soon after. We buffed up and started in on the spider wing.

Before we even made it to the first boss, I received an upgrade: Minion Bracers. Fairly large step up from my old Tempered Saronite Bracers, I'd say. We then went into Anub'Rekhan's lair. Ragar said he hadn't seen this place since before the Dark Portal opened, so I listened to the main tank and just kept an eye out for any extra bugs. After Anub'Rekhan went down, the rest of the spider wing went fairly quickly (even got the Arachnophobia achievement). I'll have to give Ragar my notes later for whenever he comes back in here.

Next up was the plague quarter. Ragar had some comments for me on most of this quarter, except for the first boss, Noth the Plaguebringer. It was pretty simple though (honestly Consecration caught most of the skeletons for me), so that wasn't a problem. With Heigan the Unclean, I had Ragar's notes, but the group had another idea: rather than doing the lava dancing, they positioned the ranged on the wall in one specific spot while the melee beat on Heigan on his platform. For phase 2, we'd run over to the ranged and wait until he finished, then head back to the platform. This method seemed a bit off compared to what I'd read, but it was efficient and efficiency trumps all. We continued on to Loatheb who went down without much of a fight, then it was off to the death knight wing.

Mind-controlling the student for Instructor Razuvious went off without a hitch, since it's just going off timers: Bone Barrier then Taunt, call the other tank after 15 seconds, wait for him to call then Bone Barrier/Taunt, release control and renew it after the other tank's taunted off you twice. Other than that, all I did was use Blood Strike to add damage and threat while I waited for taunts. Next up was Gothik the Harvester, with me tanking on the living side. It's a good thing the undead side was keeping up with us, because all of the waves that popped up on our side tended to fall rather quickly. Gothik himself went down shortly after, so it was off to the Four Horsemen. No real difference here from Ragar's notes: just switching off melee horsemen and corners of the room whenever we got three stacks of a mark, then dealing with the ranged horsemen once the melee were down. After the fight was over, I was given the Chestguard of the Lost Conquerer which would allow me to pick up my Heroes' Redemption Breastplate - a sizeable upgrade from my Breastplate of the Solemn Council, not to mention saving me 80 Emblems of Heroism that could go towards other tanking pieces. Picking up any new pieces would have to wait though, since we still had the construct wing left.

The first boss in this wing was Patchwerk, a rather large abomination, and it was decided that I would be tanking him since our MT had more health for the Hateful Strikes. Fights like this make me realize why Ragar says that he rarely looks at his health while tanking if he can help it - that number spends an awful lot of time being low and the healer in me was going, "Gah! Heal! Where's my Holy Light?!" On the plus side though, I was never low on mana. After the large unpleasant undead was dealth with and I was patched up, we moved on to the rest of the construct wing.

Grobbulus was rather uneventful, except that I kept getting hit with that Mutating Injection attack of his. That wasn't a problem per se, but it did delay me a bit on picking up the slimes that popped up. He went down easily enough though, so it was off to Gluth. Simple fight from the tanks' perspectives - I taunted off the MT when he got three stacks of that debuff, then he'd pick it back up once they fell off. The raid finished taking Gluth down quickly enough, so it was time for Thaddius and the two constructs before him. No difficulty here, and unlike Ragar, I did not feel compelled to say something asinine every time we were thrown into the air. (Editor's note: It's not my fault you have no sense of humor and don't see why "Fancy meeting you here" and high-fiving the other tank as we passed isn't funny. - Rags) After they went down, the main tank grabbed Thaddius and we proceeded to burn him down. At this point, some of the members of the group moved to call it for the night and reconvene on Sapphiron's Lair after a brief respite.

The Emblems from that run, and the two dungeons I was pulled into after we finished, gave me enough to get the gauntlets to accompany my new chest as well as the Waistguard of Living Iron to replace the Tempered Saronite Belt I'd been using. I still have quite a few pieces left to replace, but tonight definitely helped in that regard.

I still need to do quite a bit more raiding to get a better feel for the nuances of paladin tanking, but I do have some observations. From what I've seen, I'm more than equipped enough to tank these instances, but there are some non-gear aspects of my tanking that could use some work:

1. A more precise taunt would be useful so I don't accidentally grab the wrong attackers when peeling something off the main tank. I believe this one is coming, so I'm not real concerned about it.
2. Be quicker about switching to Seal of Wisdom for easy trash. For light-hitting trash, the MT would grab everything. This is fine, but it does kill my mana regeneration. As such, I should switch to Wisdom when I see stuff like that to cut down on my need to drink, especially since we were chain-pulling the entire time.
3. Remember to use Avenging Wrath. I'm so used to ignoring this from my Outland healing days, not to mention the fact that it puts up Forbearance so I'm paranoid about being unable to use Divine Protection. The Forbearance issue is apparently being dealt with by the paladin trainers, so it'll just be a matter of training myself to use it.
4. Stop sending all of my cooking materials to Ragar. He's not the only chef on staff and since I'm spending nearly as much time on the front lines as he is, I have an equal right to the food. (Ed.: That's fine, but you can get your own fish. I spend enough time out on the ice as is.)
5. Quit defaulting to Judgement as an opener if Avenger's Shield is down. If I was using another Seal, this would be fine, but since Seal of Corruption is stack-dependant for Judgement damage, this is inefficient as an opening move.

There's probably a great deal of other corrections I missed, but that's what practice is for. I'd also like to discuss some of the other differences in tanking style with Captain "I just Shoot or Charge", but I need more experience before a valid comparison can be made. I will close with this though: having both healed and tanked in raids, it would take nothing short of "you heal or we can't go" to make me go Holy again. It's not that I don't like healing, mind you. This is just more fun.