An Aside Concerning Parries

So, after some encouraging comments by Askevar at You Yank It, You Tank It, I healed my first dual-wielding death knight tank the other day. He was no more difficult to heal than he had been while using a two-hander.

What does this have to do with warriors? Well.

As a healer, I was most concerned that my death knight fellow would be more prone to the dreaded parry gib (in which a boss parries an attack, speeding up the next swing, and smacks the tank in the face) or at least take more damage from parry-hasted strikes. This did not prove to be the case, which got me thinking: is a death knight tank the one who needs to worry about parried strikes the most?

Although I have yet to acquire any numbers to back this up, I think the answer is no. Why?

Well, it's because I think we warriors actually hit faster, meaning more frequent strikes and more potential parries. I come to this conclusion for two reasons. The first is that the bouncy thing to the right is, in fact, what my character looks like while tanking, with the odd pause for Shield Slam's animation (although the yellow numbers never slow in their scrolling). When tanking a boss we don't massively outgear we have the rage to attack on every global cooldown, with further attacks occurring every melee swing (be that white damage, Heroic Strike or cleave, they can all be parried). That's a lot of potential parries.

Of course, the death knight is swinging fairly frantically themselves as one-handed tanking weapons are naturally quick and these guys are using two. Like the warrior, they have a melee-swing replacing attack - Rune Strike - but we differ in that skills such as Death and Decay, Icy Touch and the frost tank's Howling Blast are spells. Spells cannot be parried. While I definitely do not mean to suggest that all of a death knight's skills are spells - they're not - I do believe there may be enough of a difference between the number of a death knight's GCDs spent on physical attacks and the number a warrior uses to mean parrying is definitely not a DWing death knight-specific concern.

That said, I haven't found it too problematic for my warrior. Seems boss parries just aren't that consequential anymore, mayhap.

Drivers

This really isn't warrior-specific advice but I think it important enough a reminder to muscle its way in here. Everyone: remember to regularly update your drivers. If you don't, you risk reducing the effectiveness of (or even rendering useless) parts of your computer. Why do I mention this now? Well...

I made brief mention of my terrible connection in my last post. I have two ways of connecting to the internet wirelessly: through my ZyXEL wireless network card and through a Belkin USB stick. Although the card recognised my network it just wouldn't connect so it seemed I was stuck using the stick, which gives a deceptively normal ms of roughly 100-200 but also adds in the odd 2-3 second burst of lag (as extra flavour). Frankly, it sucked. I was still a passable tank thanks to gear and begging Tricks and Misdirection off friendly DPS, but I just felt incredibly bog-standard. I couldn't do any fun tricks charging between mobs and whatnot and my TPS was mediocre at best.

Being single-minded and remembering issues with thick walls blocking signal in the past, I tried moving my computer to the corner of my room closest to the router downstairs. My card did notice the improvement in signal, but it only changed the little "your signal is x strong" and nothing useful. So my mind turned to buying a new network card or router. Frankly, I'm glad I'm a penniless student, or else I would have one or the other by now.

Vista saved me. My computer crashed for the first time ever while being shut down last night, and this morning Vista gave me a handy little dialogue box. "This computer has suffered from an unexpected shutdown. This is a serious error." It gave me a list of things to check. And there at the very top? "Check your wireless network adapter drivers." I did. And the little properties box... told me that my network card was working on drivers from 2007.

Admittedly, my card was made by an obscure company and I remember searching for and failing to find drivers for it in the past, but I persevered this time and located them. And yes, they appear to have fixed my problem!

In summary: treat your hardware and relative drivers like your own children. They require love, attention and, importantly, not being left to look after themselves since 2007.

Oh, and as I rarely get to say this I really must add: I love you, Vista.

An Extremely Important Note

Aspect of the Hare just made me aware of something awesome in this post here. Wowhead's tooltip code allows you to show tooltips for characters too! LOOK: I am Aelystriel, I used to play Talista but healing is not as cool as being smacked in the face by dragons. I tried tanking as a death knight with Jadwiga but it just wasn't as much fun.

I am in love with this.

On another, less important note, I finally got to tank Maly yesterday! I've been trying to PuG a group there for some time (by some time, I mean a week and a half) when out of the blue I get an invite from my guild leader... and it's a full Eye of Eternity group. I had far too much fun strafe-tanking him around and feeling slick, and at the end of it all he dropped the Barricade of Eternity. An excellent night all around, even if my new internet connection is doing its best to drive me mad.

Basic Positioning: Trash

So, now that I have power cables for my computer and my monitor...

Trash can be overlooked when you're first getting ready to take the plunge into heroics. How many people could honestly say that when a group to heroic Gun'drak dropped them an invite their minds immediately leapt to the horrors of tanking groups of trolls rather than dodging Poison Nova and being beaten on by Moorabi's mammoth form? There's (rightfully) a lot of focus on having enough defence to tank bosses and enough avoidance and health to survive the beatings they dish out when we're first preparing to tank heroics, but it's wise to remember that while trash may not drop emblems or require so much defence, it still makes up the bulk of the instance.

So, what should be considered when approaching a trash pack? For this post, I'm going to focus on positioning. There are several elements to keep in mind when moving mobs around:

1. How easy will it be to move them? Some mobs are casters or ranged and hence unwilling to run up to you like their more compliant melee counterparts. With Gag Order in our toolbox, prot warriors have two silences to hand to help them move casters around. While Heroic Throw makes things easiest as you don't even need to get too close to the caster to silence it, Shield Bash is perfectly viable, especially when teamed with one of your charge skills. Ranged mobs (spear throwers and hunters, usually) are somewhat more annoying: your best bet is to run right up to them and move them back slowly. Both forms of ranged mobs fall victim to the line of sight pull: attract the pack's attention and leg it behind a corner so they have to turn it to hit you.

2. Are there patrolling mobs in the area I need to avoid? Tanking in the path of a patrol is generally inadvisable. Figure out a safer place to hold your pack and shift them over there pronto.

3. Is this pack particularly close to another? If yes, you may want to pull your pack back a bit to avoid accidentally body-pulling the next. Even if you think you'll be fine tanking on the next group's doorstep do consider the fact that your meleers are going to want to attack the mobs from behind and may well blunder too close to the next group if you don't make sure they have space. A good method of pulling back is to use a ranged technique to grab their attention, run back a few paces and then charge when you have them roughly where you want them.

4. Do these mobs have frontal cone/cleave effects? You should be turning most mobs away from your group anyway, but if a mob has an attack liable to flatten non-tanks in front of them that's just an extra incentive to do it and do it fast. If you don't have room to turn them all away around, at least turn them to the side.

5. Can these mobs fear? While you may be able to break out of fear sharpish or even pre-emptively with Berserker Rage, most of your party members are unlikely to be capable of the same. Try to move fearing mobs away from other groups, and also consider the possibility that your healer might be feared around a corner and out of line of sight from you.

With all this considered, you should have a pretty good idea of where to tank your packs and how to move them as you like. Threat can be generated on the run with Thunderclap and Demoralising Shout, and if you're used to strafing you can even Cleave, Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam over your shoulder. The king of multi-target tanking, however, is undoubtedly Shockwave.

Shockwave comes into positioning for two reasons: you need to position mobs for it to hit as many as possible and it makes positioning yourself relative to the mobs infinitely easier. As any tank is liable to know, mobs can be stupid sometimes: if you twitch to the side some of them may take this as an opportunity to sneak in behind you. Therefore I find it best to use Shockwave as soon as possible, preferably when the mobs are still running at me. For this to work, I need them all running at me from the same direction, so Shockwave tends to dictate which mob I want to charge into. As my screenshot key tends to lock up my game for a second, here are some out-of-instance-where-I-could-kill-people mobs as an example group:

If I charged a middle mob I'd have the rest collapse in from the sides. While I could handle this by taking a few steps backwards after charging, then Shockwaving, the simpler solution is to charge one of the mobs on the end. If I did this from my current angle I would have to then swing around to face the rest of them. The stun from Charge should keep my target in place but there's always a chance that I lag for a second or the mob resists Charge's stun, so it's somewhat safer to change the angle of my attack so that I don't need to move at all for every mob to be in Shockwave's cone area of effect. Something like this:


Once Shockwave is off you have a few seconds of group-wide stun in which to get to whichever side of the pack you want. It's the perfect instant to turn them away from your party.

Of course, most mob packs don't come in handy straight lines. Nevertheless, there's usually a "corner" mob that gives you a good position from which to hit the others, and if you need some initial threat while you move around a bit before Shockwaving there's always Thunderclap. Good places to practice this include the shoveltusk packs in Howling Fjord or the mammoths running around in the Storm Peaks. It's definitely worth experimenting with there, as the AoE-happy nature of WotLK DPS demands solid AoE tanking, which in turn demands a good grasp of Shockwave.