An Idiot's Update

So, being an idiot I left one of my power cables at home when I moved to my university accommodation this weekend just gone. Being a complete and utter idiot, I didn't leave a less important cable like my DSi charger, I left the one for my monitor. As such, I can't do the post I intended on writing because my backup option (my laptop with my PC's power cable plugged into the monitor) is an ancient piece of crud. Hoorah. In its place I guess I'll give a brief update on me, because what is a blog if not a place to be egocentric?

For me, 3.2 made early group finding into a mixed basket of hate, pity, vague hope and almost painful concentration. That is to say, some group members hated me for my comparatively tiny health pool; others recognised that gearing up a new tank has to start somewhere and were sickeningly sweet; more still saw me tanking well in sub-par equipment and added me to their friends list on the off chance that I might become useful; and I made use of every single tanking trick I know of in a desperate attempt not to die or let die. It was almost painful because I kept catching myself forgetting to blink.

Nevertheless, after an initially poor start (my first heroic was the Culling of Stratholme, in which the kitty druid took one look at my 21k health, scoffed and said "I'll tank", leaving me to put out a piddling 900DPS and acquire a painful headache) I have to say that every heroic has been an enjoyable experience. Once every group was in the instance and moving through trash at a reasonable rate they became much less critical of my tempered saronite and distinct lack of anything purple; in fact, I made a lot of friends with whom I'm still asked to instance fairly frequently. I've learned a lot and I'm eager to post in-depth about it here.

The other day, however, I found myself in my first ever VoA group. Thankfully, Moonglade's Horde population is small enough that no one insisted I have all the achievements that could possibly be linked to VoA success (unlike on Alliance side, where my priest was asked to provide Koralon 10 and 25 achievements, Epic and Got My Mind On My Money - apparently to prove that I at least had the money for enchantments at one point in time). Instead the group leader just wandered up to me in Dalaran, inspected my gear and gave me the thumbs up.

The other tank was a warrior. A much better geared warrior, in fact, sporting some awesome looking Ulduar25 loot. He was immediately awarded the post of main tank, which was something of a relief to me. The relief, sadly, did not last. The run went badly. Though we downed Koralon eventually it took a good five wipes to do so, after which the instance locked us out as no one had really been paying attention to the Wintergrasp timer. It shook my faith in my ability somewhat, to the point at which I made a post to WoW_Ladies hoping for some advice. And you know what? According to them (and hindsight) it was almost entirely the other tank's fault, not mine as I had initially expected. His threat was low, his kiting was poor, he was incredibly slow to taunt (to the point at which I found myself main tanking on a few occasions because otherwise DPS would have died horribly). Not just that, but he had an atrocious attitude. Although he barely spoke in raid chat, every time he did it was to insult someone.

I don't really understand why people act that way. My being terrified and his being terrifyingly unapproachable meant that we didn't swap notes much - I asked him once who his Vigilance target was and received no reply - and I believe that added to the number of wipes. It makes me wonder how many failures his attitude had caused in the past and whether he had even stopped to consider it. Probably not.

Later, of course, I checked Recount's breakdown of our healer's performances and noticed that the disc priest had been spamming Greater Heal on raid members, without touching Penance once. I wonder if he ever stopped to consider what he was doing wrong.

...Definitely not.

RP: Aelystriel and Jekavo

We will take the keep. Certainty is best, so we will take the keep. Speedy, crouched bodies slung low to the ground, we slither and hurry down the slope, down the muddy, slick, treacherous path of old, rotting planks dug deep into the earth: poor purchase, like cracks in ice. We do not fall; we are stealthy as cats, as hunters. We are silent. In my mind's eye we are silent, like rolling shadows surging soundless through the sleet, though rotting ears make out the steely clink of chain against the velvet hiss of winter wetness, of clicking bone and crackling tendon.

My rot. My bones and joints laid bare. My senses weak, watery like the air; crack of lightning barely noticed, so short and sharp and easily missed when truth seeps in past the eyeballs like the last stale remnants of a soon-forgotten dream. My mind's eye so sharp it cuts reality as I wish. Whether I wish. Regardless.

We reach the village and surge through the alleyway; his cloak snaps and twists like a threadbare flag, black wings from his shoulders, leather sails slapping the long curved planks of the enemy's wall. His mouth opens and words slip through the slat in the chiselled dome of his helm. Stop. Wait. Watch. Little point in explaining to him the futility of sight; little point in doing anything but what he says.

The sleet pounds down and the liquid in my head swirls like water in a bowl. My back against his side, my neck craning, my dumb eyes peering through the night, I look out at homes and workshops, stood in rows like gravestones, their peaked roofs stretched tall and sharp like the spires of towering cathedrals. Mausoleums. Unarmed men and women and children curled up asleep within, perfect to ambush, perfect to kill.

Redemption so far off now. Soul held far from the light, caged behind black protruding ribs like prison bars. Blood runs in my mind's eye, seeps through bedsheets from tears in flesh and wells and rolls on dusty wooden floors, through gaps 'tween boards and down to crushed earth. Colour and taste elude me, but my toes tingle in my boots. Blood rippling up against my feet: it gives a hollow, dying howl and grasps weakly at my ankles; it gasps and chokes; it begs. I smile with lifeless lips.

He jerks my elbow, scowls, blue eyes flashing with lightning or anger, hard to be sure, but he doubtless saw my glee and knows just what thought I relish. The drawing down of dark, rain-slicked brows, the tightness in his neck beneath his mail, the disgust in his voice. For god's sake, come. He knows and he hates and we run together like ink once again through puddles across the square, around a dead and blackened pyre, over a wooden bridge that shifts the pounding of our feet into the pounding of fists on doors: let us in, our advance must not falter, your gates shall soon fall.

Hiding, now, in a shallow alcove in stone walls, the leering mask of Utgarde rearing high overhead, towers invisible in the darkness past the guttering torchlight from a bracket not far from us, we hunker down. A guard patrols nearby, his hefty vyrkul face turned mask by the black shadows carving out his eyes and sunken cheeks. We do not fear him, though I imagine his harsh breath steaming through cold air right past our very throats. He is so close and yet so blind, too focused to see the foe crouched right under his nose in bright firelight.

The torches move in the distance and the guard cares only for them, and the guard's peers care only for them as they charge past us to the thundering bellow of the keep's great horn. Still, silent, splattered with the mud from their massive clunking greaves, not needing even to breathe, only to watch and wait and win, we see Ymiron's army pass us by in angry, somnolent single-mindedness. They go to kill our allies. They go to cost the Horde fifty excellent men.

We wait for them, then slip around the corner and through the arched gateway, into the vast, empty hallways beyond. We move, undetected, into the enemy's precious bastion with steel and apathy and hate and gunpowder. We advance upon the king himself and I think of blood and destruction and anything beyond my own rotting self with the bubbling glee of enforced ignorance. I think of what I can do, of what I will do.

We will take the keep.

____________
Written and posted at one in the morning, this entry isn't quite what I wanted. I shall probably edit it in future so that it isn't quite so... pretentious. Eheh.

3.2: The Aftermath

Frequently referred to as “the wellfare patch”, 3.2 caused Emblems of Conquest to drop here, there and everywhere rather than confining them to Ulduar25. On my priest, I heard plenty of complaints about how it was cheapening gear and undermining raiders but you know what? Me and my army of alts were happy to hear of it.

Gearing to a high level is now possible to do without raiding and without relying on luck with drops. All you do is gather little piles of Emblems of Conquest, hand them over to a vendor and receive item level 226 loot. As new tanks we should be cheering about this, right?

Well, yes. But as tanks we also happen to suffer from the new system too.

It's all down to player mindsets. When my brother's prot warrior first hit eighty, roughly three weeks after Wrath's release, he had 18k health and was considered a god amongst PuGers. After all, they had no one else to go to. Gear was secondary to simply filling a party slot. Now that we're months into Wrath, this obviously isn't the case; tanks have been gathering gear for a while so there are alternatives to the new eighty in his silly saronite cap.

3.2 takes this a step further: now the tank that reached eighty a week before you is also sporting 30k health as opposed to your 19k. And it doesn't stop there: your damage dealers are sitting around in epics too, which means 21k health for your plate wearers. Anyone who has ever witnessed the choosing of the main tank in VoA will probably already know exactly what this means.

Oh yes. Respect? You're going to have to dig for it.

There are a few ways to deal with those people who can't resist the chance to complain. First is simply to make your health look as impressive as possible. Keep Commanding Shout active even when you're sitting in a city waiting for the final member. Consider buying buff food too - shelling out for the good stuff is great if you have the cash, but otherwise there's a particular sort of buff food I've grown to love: the Pickled Fangtooth. A stack of twenty fangtooth usually goes for five gold on my server for one reason: no one actually uses mp5 food so there's no demand for it. However useless to casters it may be, however, that 40 stamina is a great boost for a new tank wanting to stave off nasty remarks and help out their healer.

The other tactic, of course, is to simply ignore them. If someone wants to be an ass about your perfectly heroic-viable 20k health, fine. Mentally brand them with the idiot stick and set out to prove them wrong. What you should never do is lie: if someone asks if you're in your DPS gear when you're actually in your tank gear, tell them the truth and be confident about it. Any other reply only makes it sound as if you don't feel you're ready, whilst simultaneously leading the healer on to expect an easier run than he's going to get.

Quite simply, be aware that people are used to better gear than yours and be excited at the chance to try and overcome the difference through pure skill. If your trinkets have an on-use effect, use them on cooldown. Throw Vigilance on whichever party member has the highest threat. Use Shield Block and Shield Wall, Spell Reflect and Enraged Regeneration. Try to limit incoming damage with Concussion Blow and Disarm. Treat each pull like a boss fight in its own right, not through constant ready checking but through intelligent application of your skills. It might make you feel a tad silly for taking trash seriously but I assure you, using all your skills will help you to learn their keybinds properly... while convincing your group that you can still hold your own without all that purple.

New Eighty: Gear

Well known fact: the defence cap for raiding is 540.

Lesser known fact: the defence cap for heroics is 535.

I make mention of this because the Quest for 540 Defence seems to be a pretty common affliction for new tanks simply because 540 is thrust down our throats by every resource as "the magic number". And it is, when you get to raiding but for now? Screw it.

Alright, so. Even if you've picked up all the dungeon tanking rewards as you've been leveling up you are not going to be defence capped or, indeed, particularly close to it. When you look at the gear that made you a successful tank pre-80 and realise that you're missing a massive amount of defence it can be somewhat daunting, but never fear: Blizzard has provided for us in the form of the crafted armour Aelystriel is modelling to the left there.

These pieces are the Tempered Saronite Helm, Shoulders, Breastplate, Belt, Bracers and Boots with the Daunting Legplates and Handguards. They provide absolutely gigantic lumps of defence rating and stamina at the expense of, well, everything else. There is enough strength on them to ensure your warrior doesn't become a limp noodle, but mostly you're just going to have to accept the single-mindedness of them so that bosses don't splatter you on sight. Alternatives include The Crusader's Resolution from the Crusader's Pinnacle quest chain in Icecrown and any pieces from normal instances you might be sporting, such as the Void Sentry Legplates. I only advocate buying a replacement for a good blue piece you picked up from questing or an instance if you're still below the defence cap - although the crafted pieces listed above are great as boosters they aren't worth picking up just for the higher item level.

Other easily-obtainable upgrades include the Dream Signet, created by jewelcrafters. The correct sort (of the champion) will provide 28 defence. If your gear is anything like mine was, this will be an increase of 28 defence and very useful. Jewelcrafters themselves can create the Monarch Crab figurine which will last you a long time indeed. Tattered Castle Drape is usually on the auction house for a fair price, while the rich amongst us can always pay out for a Durable Nerubhide Cape. Good weaponry can be obtained through the Wanted: Ragemane's Flipper quest in Zul'Drak.

But I don't want to get too tied up in specifics. When I finally finished making myself heroic-ready, my gear was as shown here and if you really want an exhaustive list there's always the one set up by Kaliban. What's more important than the individual pieces, however, is how they add up: health values, defence rating. I would say that, to tank your lower level heroics like Nexus and Culling of Stratholme, you should be aiming for at least 18.5k health, meaning near to 20k with Commanding Shout active. Much less and your health pool is not going to be sufficient to survive more than a few boss swings, even when defence capped. In the harder heroics like Utgarde Pinnacle and Azjol-Nerub you want something closer to 21k. Trial of the Champion demands that much for normal mode, never mind heroic.

So, how can you quickly boost your health? Heavy Borean Armour Kits. You can stick them just about anywhere and the eighteen stamina each one provides will stack up quickly. Alternatively, there are plenty of enchanting options for you to choose from: stamina on your shield, health on your chest et cetera. It really depends on how much you're willing to spend on gear you'll be replacing as soon as possible, but consider the importance of wealth compared to the importance of making a good impression on people you group with before you go with the cheapest option. After all, if you do well and befriend a leatherworker... you have patches for life.

New Eighty: Spec

As any warrior tank who's done even the slightest bit of research will notice, our class is unique in that we have two distinct paths to go down when speccing to tank: threat or survival. The highest threat builds will go deep enough into the arms tree to pick up Deep Wounds while survival builds keep the majority of their points in protection. The benefits of both have been discussed at length across the interwebs where raiding is concerned but what about for the new, poorly geared tank?

My belief is that you should spec for survival. A tank sporting crafted blues is going to have to work hard to maintain threat, yes, but look at it this way: a tank sporting crafted blues is also going to be particularly flimsy. Your threat can be boosted by the party with Misdirection or Tricks of the Trade. Threat-related issues can also be reduced through careful aggro management on the part of your damage dealers. Your survival, however, is entirely down to you and the healer, and while a well played, well geared healing character may be able to keep you up through some frantic spamming, even the best healer cannot outdo their global cooldown. By this I mean that as long as you aren't utterly incompetent, low threat can be dealt with. Dead tank cannot.

With this in mind, my first spec shaped up like this: 5/10/56.

While some of the choices - such as Deflection, Anticipation and Toughness - need no explanation as to why they help to bolster a tank's survivability, some of the others only occurred to me as I was peering through my potential talents.

The first is Improved Thunder Clap. This should really be taken in any build as the rage cost reduction and increased damage are brilliant for AoE tanking and boss fights alike. From a pure survivability point of view, however, it reduces the damage you take by improving the debuff your Thunder Clap applies to enemies around you instead of buffing your mitigation directly. The slower attack speed obviously reduces how many times a mob will hit you before your damage dealers take them out and also provides a sliver of extra time for a heal to reach you between swings.

Similarly, Booming Voice and Improved Demoralizing Shout reduce damage done to you by lessening just how hard mobs are hitting when Demoralizing Shout is up. While Booming Voice is more about reducing how frequently you have to refresh Demo Shout, I found it usually meant I only had to use the skill once per trash pull, allowing me to focus entirely on my threat and positioning.

Gag Order, meanwhile, reduces caster mobs to melee swings thanks to the silencing effect. It also makes it easier to cluster mobs correctly when a caster might have made it more difficult, hence reducing any time in which your back would have been turned.

For the most part, when speccing a new eighty prot warrior you need to consider which skills will come in handy most often in a heroic instance. While Improved Revenge, for instance, might provide some manner of threat boost when fighting a raid boss, in a heroic a lot of your work is in moving groups of mobs around. An uncontrolled stun proc can actually make this more difficult for you. Improved Spell Reflection, on the other hand, lets you protect party members from randomly targeted spells like Novos' Frostbolt in Drak'Tharon Keep or Paletress's Smite in Trial of the Champion, while also providing protection if a caster stands in Grauf's breath while you're doing Skadi's gauntlet event. A lot of what you can find on raid-centric sites does still apply to speccing for heroics, I just feel it's worth keeping content in mind when making decisions between extraneous talents.

An Introduction

Recently, a discipline priest tired of green-bar whackamole looked across servers to her old warrior alt, a dusty Forsaken sitting just below the level cap in Karazhan epics and a shoddy Riot Shield. Thinking of faction transfers and tanking fun, the discipline priest did transfer that warrior alt over to Moonglade-EU, where she began her Ravasaur dailies and the grinding of Horde tournament pets in preparation for the big faction swap. The warrior alt reached 80 through dailies and the discipline priest did rub her hands together in anticipation of faction transfer's release onto the EU realms.

The release has come. The warrior remains Forsaken.

Horde-side has endeared itself to me. Moonglade is a low population server at the best of times, but with a 2:1 faction ratio in favour of the Alliance, the Horde really have it small. What you do in PuGs has lasting repercussions. This means people are far less inclined to be asshats, making it a remarkably cushy place to make all the mistakes one does when first learning. That said, I've still run into a few classist, gearist idiots: the sort that left me well alone when I was first doing heroics as my priest but are suddenly far more vicious when my health isn't a comfortable 30k.

The result of all this, anyway, is a desire to write about my experiences getting into tanking post-3.2. The warrior blogosphere is already blessed with Tankingtips.com and Tank Like a Girl, but both of those are written from the perspective of a veteran warrior. I hope to provide a different viewpoint on it all, complete with adequate confusion where necessary. ;)