The return of the Warrior

I have been playing a Paladin tank since pre-BC. Things have not always been good for the Paladin tank, but I have always enjoyed playing it and doing things that people said that we couldn't do. I also have a 70 druid that I have tanked some 5-mans with.

Having read just about everything that is available to read at Tankspot.com (and other warrior blogs), I have recently become very interested in Warrior tanking. It seemed like a completely different style of tanking than the Paladin and I have thought for a while about trying it out.

Enter Patch 3.0. I decided on patch day (after running a couple of heroics on my Paladin) to roll a warrior. Blackwulfe is his name. I am aiming at getting him to 70 before WotLK drops, but I am not sure if I will make it, as I still have a life outside of WoW and am going on vacation for a week (no WoW!) at the end of October.

So far, I have to say that I love the way the warrior class is built. It is just all around fun. I am levelling with a prot build and am tanking instances along the way. I have to say that it has been a blast, but also a real learning experience. As it stands right now, I can't wait to get to level 40 so that I can start using Sheild Slam. That just seems fun. (Originally posted on Tankspot.com 10-21-2008)

I wrote this in mid-October of 2008. How have things evolved since then? Well, I only got my warrior up to 67 by the time WotLK hit. Then I found myself being completely sucked into the gameplay of the expansion. So he sat at 67 neglected for weeks. Once I got Gathorc to 80, then I started working on my druid. Once I got my druid to 80 I started working on my priest. It seems that the warrior got lost somewhere in the mix.

So a couple of weeks ago, I logged onto my warrior for the first time since WotLK released. I got him from 67 to 72 and remembered what it was I liked about him so much. Tools.

Prot warriors seem to have a tool for every situation. As a matter of fact, I am still struggling with how to best keybind all of those tools so that I have quick access to them when I need them. A prot warrior’s mobility in combat is second to none. I use this awesome one key macro (care of Veneretio@TankingTips.com) for Charge, Intercept, and Intervene. It is my “zoom” key.

In comparison to the paladin, the prot warrior just feels so much more involved and interactive. I can do the “969” rotation with my paladin in my sleep. With my warrior, I have to stay on my toes at all times. Is revenge lit up? Has Sword and Board proc’d? Shouts? Thunderclap? It just seems like there is so much stuff going on. Like there are never enough global cooldowns to do everything you need to do. It is a challenge. And I like a challenge.

I figure that I will have my warrior up to 80 within a week or two.

Anyone on Eitrigg up for a PUG Naxx/Ulduar?

A great night, a great week

Coming off of our guild first kill of Anub’arak in 25-man Coliseum (on Tuesday), and after 3 months and 70+ attempts, Nerd Rage finally downed Yogg Saron last night. I would like to take a moment to thank the academy, and the fans…..errr, wrong speech.

Last week we suffered a heart-breaking 3% wipe on Yogg. What made it worse was that one of our best DPS’ers was not in raid because his account got hacked. We knew that had he been there, we would have downed Yogg that night.

But this night started much differently. We were actually just minutes from calling raid altogether, because an hour after start time we still didn’t have 25 people online. People were restless in vent. I know I was joking around trying to keep everyone loose (let’s just say the conversation revolved around Canadians and bacon, while being laced with plenty of healthy sexual innuendo). It just didn’t seem to bode well.

We finally get a raid put together. We pull. We pop an extra Guardian right at the beginning to help us get through Phase 1 faster. It wasn’t our cleanest phase 1, but it was good enough. Phase 2 really was a thing of beauty. We actually found ourselves with nothing to kill on occasion. We would down the crusher, kill corrupter, and stand around until the brain phase ended for more tentacles to spawn. Phase 3 started, and no one had gone insane, and all 25 were still alive. I knew right then that we had a chance. Phase 3 is among the most hectic settings I have ever tanked in. With Guardians, that will one shot a non-tank, spawning every 10 seconds or so (thankfully Hand of Reckoning has an 8 sec cooldown). All I could think about was just keeping up with the guardian spawn rate. Consecrate, hammer, taunt, shield, judge, taunt, holy shield, hammer, taunt, etc... I heard someone ask on vent what his health was at…2 million. Then 1.5 million. Then 1 million. Then suddenly the mad rush ended. Two achievements popped up on my screen. It was over. We had done it!

There was a moment of silence before vent just exploded. I actually had goosebumps. Not only had we just downed Yogg, we one-shot him! What an awesome encounter. Thank you Blizzard.

We were on a high. Then we ran into a quandary. What to do with the rest of the night. We had already cleared the Coliseum on Tuesday night, so we decided to go and do three Drakes since we had never done it either. We one shot that too.

So now let the hard modes begin. We had been extending our raid locks since 3.2 hit and focusing on killing that no-eyed, old god since long before that. The guild leadership was steadfast in its position that no hard modes would even be attempted until we got Yogg down. I agreed entirely, and I have to say kudos to our raid leaders for standing strong on that position when people were crying for hard modes.

But we can worry about hard modes another night because…Last night was a great night.

The Crusaders’ Coliseum

I meant to post this blog like a month ago, but here it is anyway.

Wow….the prospect of a trashless raid instance was something that I was interested in seeing. Nobody likes killing trash, but Blizzard is correct in stating that it is one way to “Pace” an instance. Facing a raid instance with no trash at all, just feels a little strange, and definitely less EPIC.

At least to me.

Northrend Beasts

Gormok was easy-sauce (one-shot). On a side note, why is it that BigWigs can give me an alert of the debuffs on the other tanks, but DBM will not? I find myself running both BigWigs and DBM because I like features of both but neither one will do everything I want it to. Can someone in charge address this please?

The Two Jormungars was a bit tougher. It took us a few tries to beat these worms. Mostly because it took a little while to get people used to the mechanics of the different debuffs you see in that fight and how to address them. If Dreadscale is mobile, you will get paralytic poison and the only way to clear it is to get close to the person with burning bile (the Dreadscale tank). If Acidmaw is mobile, you will get Burning Bile, and you will need to go clear the person with Paralytic poison (the Acidmaw tank). It boils down to one simple phrase…If you get a debuff (regardless of which one it is), run to the tank of the mobile worm. I was on Acidmaw and our DK was on Dreadscale (why doesn’t Stoneform clear that paralytic poison again?). Despite our early troubles, on our first kill we did get the Not One, But Two Jormungars achievement.

Icehowl was tougher still. We actually didn’t down Icehowl until our second night of raiding in the coliseum, due mostly to people getting hung up on walls and whatnot when trying to avoid the charge. I don’t have much else to say about this fight, except that when Icehowl enrages, he hits REALLY hard.

Lord Jarraxus

Easy-sauce, one shot. Kill adds, heal people, kill boss. Simple.

Faction Champions

I will stand by my statement that this is actually the hardest fight in the whole instance. I am not the biggest fan of PVP, but I have done quite a bit of it. Everyone likes to say that this fight is just like PVP. I disagree. I have NEVER PVP’ed against anyone that had over 2 million health. Be that as it may, kill the healers first, using all of your possible interrupts along the way. CC is not so great in this fight (mostly because of its unreliability), but interrupts are king.

Twin Valkyries

I found this fight just engaging enough to be really fun, but not so complex as to be frustrating.

Anub’arak

The big bug is back. And this time, he’s pissed! (LAWL)

Fun fight with a pretty tight DPS requirement. Healers, for god’s sake, don’t try to keep everyone at full health in phase three. No one in the raid (other than the tanks) should ever be above 50% health once Phase three has started. The more health your raid has, the more Anub heals, and the longer it takes to kill him.

All in all, the Crusader’s Coliseum is a fun (if fast) raid instance.

On Confidence

For my inaugural blog, I am going to tackle something that I think every good tank must have. Confidence.

You can study all the best theorycrafting, and you can have all the talent in the world. These will make you a good tank. But when you add confidence, you become a great tank. You see, if you are unsure about yourself, you will doubt your decision making skills, which will inevitably delay your making a decision on a course of action and executing it.

For example…Let’s say you and another tank are off-tanking in a boss fight (say tanking constructs on Ignis). Suddenly, your other offtank drops. You gotta grab that construct before he goes and one-shots a healer. It is now up to you to tank multiple constructs at once. Without confidence, you will hesitate, leaving a pissed construct running toward your healer. That will, most likely, spell your healer’s demise. If your healer dies, then there is undue stress put on the other healers to pickup healing on you (especially since you’re most likely tanking two constructs at a time now), which means that they are not healing others as much. Now DPS’ers start dying to AOE because they are not getting heals (you are getting their heals instead). With the DPS’ers dying, the whole fight lasts longer than it would have with all 25 (or 10) people up because the boss lives longer, hence further taxing the limited mana pools of the healers.

You get the point…it’s all bad.

Now Success breeds confidence. Example…last night, we got to Kologarn-25 when the main tank (a Prot warrior) and myself realized that we didn’t have a third tank for the adds. Bad news, right? We have always use three tanks on Kologarn-25. So we had to improvise. We just had me start on Kolo until I got 2xCrush, then the warrior taunted off of me. At that moment, I ran under the arm just in time to lay a consecrate for the rubble to spawn in. I tanked them until they were dead, and then ran over and taunted Kolo off of the warrior just as he got to 2xCrush himself. Rinse. Repeat three or four times (I don’t remember now) and you got a dead Kolo. 2 months ago, I would not have been able to handle this kind of demand on my attention, but now, it’s not a problem (and was actually kinda fun!). Mostly because of the confidence that I have gained by stepping into a 25-man raiding guild and being able to contribute (even though I was severely under geared for Ulduar).
I am by no means trying to say that I am a great tank. I think I am adequate. Maybe even good. But not great. I have seen a great tank in action, and it is something to behold, let me tell you.

If success breeds confidence then failure breeds un-confidence (is that even a word?). But, even worse than that is the fact that un-confidence (there’s that non-word again) breeds failure. So you can see how someone could get caught in a spiraling circle of failure and un-confidence (hey…if un-birthday works for Disney, then un-confidence can work for me). So if you are not confident in your abilities, you will tend to fail more, and the more you fail, the less confident you are in your abilities. Sucks, doesn’t it?

So how can we break this endless circle of fail?

First, research the boss fights inside and out. If any of you haven’t heard of (or haven’t been to) www.tankspot.com, then you are missing out on one of the greatest resources for a raiding tank in this game. One of the things I find the most helpful to my confidence is knowing that I will not be surprised in a boss fight. Once you are comfortable with the fight and its mechanics, you are free to relax a little bit and get into the “zone”.

Second, take a step back and honestly analyze your strengths and weaknesses as a tank. Make a short questionnaire and have some trusted guildies fill it out (as well as filling it out yourself). See how you rank in their eyes versus where you think you are. I know, that I am my own worst critic. Everyone tells me that I am better than I think I am (not just in WoW, but in lots of stuff). If you’re not sure what weaknesses you have, then go pug a Heroic. There is nothing like running an instance with four complete strangers to bring out your weaknesses (and strengths for that matter). The fact of the matter is, that your guildies (or whomever you run with regularly) will compensate for your weaknesses (whether you or they realize it or not).

Once you’ve gotten your weaknesses identified, go into a heroic or Naxx and purposely put yourself in situations that force you to deal with your weaknesses. Practice really does make perfect. As Veneretio said in his blog a while back…” Once you’re comfortable, Overwhelm yourself”.

Well…I think I have rambled on enough for one day.

Introduction

So…I suppose introductions are in order.

I am Gathorc. I am a Tank. I have been prot all of my WoW life (yes, even in vanilla). Sure, I have healed from time to time, and I like to Ret-it-up with the best of them, but tanking is where my heart lies. I have more alts than I know what to do with, but my favorites are my Feral Druid and my Prot Warrior (I told you I LOVED tanking, right?). I am a former Raid leader (in my last guild), and now just a protection paladin for the guild Nerd Rage on the Eitrigg-US server. I have only been in the guild for a little over a month now, but since I joined I have participated in 25-man progression kills on Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya, Freya, Hodir, & Thorim (here we come Mimiron!) as well as a server first of the Quick Shave(Heroic) achievement. In this blog I will be ruminating on things that happen to me in WoW (and sometimes things that happen outside of WoW) as well as anything else I feel like writing about. I am new to this whole blogging thing, so I have no idea how often I will post a blog at this point. This blog is really for nobody’s benefit but my own, but if you feel like reading it, don’t say I didn’t warn you.