Socialising, Paladins and the Skinny Alt

Recovering from nearly a month offline has proved a bit difficult for me. While I still love Aelys and the warrior class, the radio silence on Moonglade whenever I log in has been depressing. And yes, yes, when I first got back to her I was new to the Horde side of the server and happy to hurl myself into things, but now I have epics and they feel hollow without the people who helped me gain them beside me.

Yes, I openly admit it. I'm a sentimental nutcase. I would be happier with my current situation on Moonglade if I had shitty blues and was fighting for respect once more. Thus is the mind of the raving madwoman.

Actually, I'm probably being a little hard on myself. See, while I enjoy the gameplay in WoW and I appreciate the pretty little details in Northrend and the interesting questlines and the overarching lore of the whole shibang, I mostly play to have fun with other people. People geographically distant, with a spread of ethnicities and hobbies I'm hard pressed to match IRL, even now that I'm back at uni and rocking with a whole load of nifty students. I like making friends I know I wouldn't meet if not for the game, and logging onto a whole list of alts made by people who transferred to other servers in my absence, knowing I may as well just remove the whole lot, makes me melancholy.

Again, yes, sentimental nutcase.

Well.

It just so happens the WoW Ladies were in the midst of starting up a new version of Daughters of the Horde on the European servers when I was getting back, and naturally this caught my attention. “Why not?” thought I. “I can roll a new character and hang out with them, and if it seems to be going well, I can transfer Aelys over and hey presto, new home.”

I rolled an orc shaman to start out with, because orcs are hot and I've never levelled a shaman past forty. She, uh, didn't stick. A stick, however, did. Oh yes, my new alt is a blood elf. A blood elf paladin.

The immediate response to this from a fellow warrior tank was "I now class you as scum", which wasn't very nice. I reassured him it was all in the name of research, to which he said "I now class you as lab-coat-wearing scum." He is lovely like that.

Nevertheless, I do count little Allévansis as something of an experiment even now that she's sitting at 60, a high level for an alt of mine. I find that, in gameplay terms, I enjoy playing her for the opposite reason I enjoy playing Aelys: it is incredibly easy to be a very solid player as a paladin without really knowing a great deal about the class.

I have not researched my role as retridin like I did with warrior, but I cleanly top the charts in every instance - and that's not including trash, where Consecration and Seal of Command cleave things into oblivion. I've had to tank a lot in instances while levelling up, as well, which has proved very easy. As a retridin I hold aggro even when I forget to use Righteous Fury, so god alone knows what threat generation must be like for someone actually specced to tank, complete with shield of pwnage. There is little challenge in survival and threat generation, so I can focus most of my efforts on the little things. Speedy marking, snagging patrols, seamless pulling, my healer's mana and, of course, idle banter. For someone used to mashing Heroic Strike every second and generally being rendered mute during combat, it's all relaxing and refreshing.

Obviously this is all low-level stuff. I have not played paladin at eighty, let alone tanked a raid as one, so I really can't comment on end game at all, yet the difference between off-spec tanking as a paladin and off-spec tanking as a warrior while levelling up is extremely clear. Paladin is just effortlessly better; a warrior would have to be very skilled indeed to compete.

This doesn't make me resentful, however. Yes, a paladin can have one tanking spec that covers both high threat talents and high survivability talents; yes, they're more durable than us at the moment; yes, they can be decent tanks even in the hands of the foolish and noobish; and yes, they're fun. But the differences between their static, glowing variation of tanking and our active, gritty one don't undermine or cheapen either side. I believe we complement one another nicely, and am simply glad to have the choice of going either way when I log in nowadays.

Anyway, I'm aware I've gone through tangents like Simon Cowel through tooth-whitening treatments. My main points are:

1. I'm still alive.
2. Other people are cool.
3. Aelys should soon have a new home and I will be posting about her again.
4. Interclass orgies are go.

Much love, thine recently absent skinny tank,

Circle of Tanks

I'm still getting back on track with my next post (originally it was just going to be a strategy post for ToC5 but it's so late on now I doubt there's a great deal of point, even for new tanks) so here's a handy filler post!

Tagged by Askevar of You Yank it, You Tank it.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?
Aelystriel, warrior, survival prot.

What is your primary tanking environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
As my guild disbanded in my absence, I'm sticking to 5 mans and VoA PuGs at the moment. Used to be 10man.

What is your favourite tanking spell for your class and why?
CHARGE. Alright, alright, it's not specifically a tanking move, but there's still nothing like yelling "Rawr!" and zooming into a group of mobs. As for tanking skills, it's a tie between Shockwave and Shield Slam. Shockwave is a brilliant move: masses of threat and a good long pause in which to position yourself without the mobs hopping on your back. Shield Slam, on the other hand, gets my love because it means part of my rotation is also a dispel. Tanking Jeraxxus' adds is especially fun when I dart over and smack Nether Protection back to whence it came before turning back to my target.

What tanking spell do you use least for your class and why?
Challenging Shout. I feel I could make much better use of it than I do; at the moment it's just an "oh shit!" button for me, whereas I feel it would be quite useful used more frequently. The only fight where I'm sure to use it is Onyxia (but frankly, the whelps count as an "oh shit!" moment for me as my dodgy connection is big on buggering up as soon as they spawn).

As for why I don't use Challenging Shout that much, I think it's partly because of the keybinding. I have it bound to dash above my num pad, and I jab it with my mouse hand when I need to use it. Were it elsewhere it wouldn't be such a stretch to use. Other than that, I still have the backward mentality that taunting is bad. This, of course, is foolish. Using taunt isn't a sign of a bad tank; taunt is a perfectly acceptable tool and its AoE counterpart is no different.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your tanking class and why?
Mobility and flexibility. Your prot warrior can deal with fear better than any other class thanks to Berserker Rage (and Will of the Forsaken for me, too); we have a reliable interrupt; we can dispel; we channel another player's threat away from them; we have three effective taunts (Taunt, Challenging Shout and Mocking Blow); we can apply three debuffs that reduce mobs' damage (Thunderclap, Demo Shout and Disarm); we bring buffs to improve our team's damage (Devastate and Battle Shout); we can take a hit that should have struck another tank without risking making a mob taunt-immune (Intervene); we can cross a field faster than any other class with Charge, Intercept and Intervene; we have a ranged silence; we can stunlock mobs that aren't immune for almost as long as a rogue... the list goes on. I do not feel we are the strongest main tank figure any more, even though our cooldowns are solid and our mitigation is not to be scoffed at. We are, however, brilliant at dealing with those little oddities of boss fights and, in my opinion, a pleasure to watch when we're Doing It Right.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your tanking class and why?
Sometimes we get resource starved. Not half as frequently as the "down with rage!" ranting crew you can find on the forums try to make out, but when it happens you just look bad. Bloodrage, Challenging Shout, Heroic Throw and Charge are on cooldown. You have no rage. Someone body-pulls. You Taunt one of the mobs and run out to meet it, but you block the first strike it makes against you and gain no rage worth speaking of so you can't snag the others with anything other than your melee swing. Your silly body-pulling ally? Quite possibly on the floor. I've only had this happen twice in my entire tanking life, but it still burns the portion of my memory in which those two occasions reside.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best tanking assignment for you?
The only 25man raids I run are OS and VoA. In OS, I find I'm very good on the drakes and lava spawns, though I can still tank Satharion himself with ease. In VoA, I prefer to main tank Koralon: Vigilance on the off tank reduces the damage dealt to him and gives me such an abundance of threat that the DPS can just pewpew to their heart's content. On Archavon it really doesn't matter. I like tanking the adds for Emalon, as Heroic Throw is great for picking them up, but I'm probably best suited to main tank there as I can zoom in and out of Lightning Nova range with Intervene and Charge.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with most and why?
I have a druid, a paladin, a death knight and a warrior, and the warrior is my favourite. Of course, the warrior is the only one at 80 - the others range from 40 to 73. I enjoy bear most of the other three; Swipe is fun, Mangle the closest to gory this game gets and, let's be honest here, who doesn't like tanking with their face? I always feel slow as a bear though, perhaps because of my big bear butt. Feral Charge is fun, but just doesn't compare to the real deal.

Paladin just feels too passive. Things hit me, I get threat. And yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but that's just how it feels. I stick down Consecration and mobs just run into a carpet of threat; people heal me and my resource pool replenishes; I have an instant full-heal for those ohshit moments. I do quite enjoy the guise of invincibility provided and watching really good paladins, like the leader of my old guild, is quite something. I just don't love it like I do warrior.

Death Knight frustrates me, in part because I prefer DK DPS but never get to do it. I'm good at keeping up diseases and boiling them and using Howling Blast whenever it comes off cooldown, and I'm starting to react well to the odd unintentional pull that previously had me groping stupidly for Heroic Throw. I just feel kinda... passive, though. I stand and my skills zoom out to mobs.

Which leads to why I like warrior. Mobs move, and I zoom to them. Yes, that's right. I love warrior because I can zoom. It really is as simple as that.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with least and why?
Death Knight. I think this may change if I try a different spec - perhaps blood - because frost just bores me, but I dunno fo'sho. It's mostly down to the feeling of being stationary I mentioned above.

What is your worst habit as a tank?
I brood. If I make a mistake, I make more mistakes for a little while afterwards because I'm still focusing on the first one and being bitter about it. As I'm always a leader figure when tanking, this makes for snark in chat if I really manage to stress myself out, or just plain forgetting to mention something if I need to review tactics. This doesn't seem to happen to me when playing healer or DPS: when healing, if I screw up and my charge dies I apologise and then make sure I don't make the same error again; when DPSing I just pull out all the stops to make up for lost ground.

I also occasionally forget to watch a healer's mana. Not frequently, but every once in a while. This is bad because I get really frustrated when a healer insists on calling out every mana break even though I've obviously stopped already. *facepalm*

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?
DPS pulling or deliberately overnuking. I don't care if you're a mate and you think it's fun to push me; I set a good, quick pace through heroics but that doesn't mean I ever pull mindlessly like some of these dweebs do. If you notice that I pull a group, spend a little time attacking it, then pull another, think about why that might be, mister "ololol, Aelys, run here! :D" paladin. Maybe it's because I'm waiting for a patrol to pass. Maybe it's 'cause I want an AoE ability off cooldown first. Maybe because I as the tank want to keep everything under control...!

I should terminate that rant before it goes too far.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other tanks?
The fact that I adore my class makes this hard to tell. I do feel that paladins are pulling ahead of everyone at the moment but I don't mind that much. I'm not being excluded because of my class, after all, although I have had a PuG group rise up against one member who demanded I was kicked so they could bring in their friend "who's a proper tank class." Instead of taking that as a bad experience, I was mostly just touched that the people I'd grouped with before were impressed enough by my previous performance to tell that guy where to stuff it.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?
I keep loose track of how many spells I reflect, how much of the time I keep Thunderclap and Demo Shout active, how frequently I make use of cooldowns and how often I just don't notice a mob to evaluate myself, as well as checking up on Recount to track my interrupts, skill usage and dispels. I also ask healers how easy I am to heal and watch Omen to see how my TPS is doing. Occasionally I'll even play without Vigilance if I feel I've been slacking a bit but generally I feel that, while it may force me to work hard, not making use of such a strong ability is a bad thing to do.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?
That we were left behind with TBC. Yeah, we were the only tanks worth speaking of in Vanilla WoW. Yeah, everyone else finally (and deservedly) came into their own in TBC. Yeah, some people are foolishly calling death knights "warrior mk. II". Our AoE threat is a lot stronger than you realise, our cooldowns a lot more effective, our versatility a lot more worth considering. Just because our rivals are now on equal footing does not mean Blizzard hates the warrior class, nor that it should be left in the dust by the player base.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new tanks of your class to learn?
Spatial awareness. This includes intelligent positioning of mob group and of yourself within the mob group, as well as how you aim your camera and whether you look to make sure everything is in LoS of your party. I notice a lot of new warriors will charge into a group and let one or two of the mobs hide around a corner, so that the warrior is hitting them but the ranged have to move before they can do the same.

Having sat behind someone who was learning the warrior class and watched him run Maraudon, I also noticed how static his camera usage was - while fighting he would stop moving the camera altogether and just stare at his own butt. You need to be constantly vigilant for patrols and for party screwups, remembering that a good tank will see the mage accidentally hit blink instead of pyro and body pull a dragon in time to save his squishy arse, while a bad or mediocre tank will only notice the mistake when suddenly a party member is dead.

Effective Health or Avoidance and why?
I believe that a good health pool is much more important when you're first gearing up. This is because a tank that starts stacking avoidance immediately will get Spiky Health Syndrome (SHS, fo'sho). They'll dodge and dodge and take a hit of a third of their health and block a bit of the next hit and parry and take another hit; because their avoidance is at the "getting there" stage and their health will barely be in the 20k range they will be taking regular hits and those hits will be disproportionately large to the healer, because a 5k smack is actually a fourth of the tank's healthpool. You do not get the near-invincible level of mitigation until much high gear levels so you need the big health pool to soak the inevitable hits.

Additionally, people will judge you on your health. A new tank needs to build up their confidence as much as their gear, so the fewer people sneering at them for having low HP the better. Later on, I feel you need to achieve a balance. Personally, I do still favour health a bit: blue sockets get stamina gems, red sockets get expertise/stamina gems, yellow sockets get defence/stamina or dodge/stamina gems. This is because, while healing, I have had to deal with tanks that favoured mitigation... and I know I would much rather they'd beefed up their stamina a bit first.

What tanking class do you feel you understand least?
Druid. I've never read about their end-game tanking 'cause I don't know any druid tanks at the moment. I think they look wicked cool though! (See earlier paragraph re: FACE TANKING.)

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in tanking?
I have a macro that takes me into Battle Stance, uses Retaliation and then hops back into Defensive Stance when I hit it three times. I usually hit it twice and then smack my Defensive Stance keybind instead, though: too many moments where I haven't spammed as much as I thought I did or have spammed too much and ended up tanking in Battle Stance for a few seconds. o.o;

Other than that, I have no macros. I tried one to use Heroic Strike with Devastate, but that rather removed Heroic Strike's functionality as a threat/rage "throttle" and irritated me so it didn't even last one instance run. My mods are Omen, Pitbull, ForteXorcist, Recount, Quartz, Satrina's Buff Frames, CaelNamePlates, DeadlyBossMods and TicTac.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
I love me some stamina, so once I'm defence capped stamina becomes my best mate. Other than that, I prioritise expertise over hit (although you wouldn't know it by looking at me - somehow I have enough hit from my gear, without enchants or gems, to put me well over the hit cap) and dodge over block over parry. I mostly aim to keep myself balanced, although I intend on creating a threat set, a mitigation set and a health set when I get the gear to customise it thusly.

So yeah, that's it. I tag any tank that sees this and still hasn't done it themselves. Go! Spread the word. The circle cannot be broken.

And... I have internet again!

So, that whole post about how my driver update saved the day? It really didn't. My wireless adapter refused to connect at all until I finally did a total move around of everything in my room so as to get my computer as close as possible to the router.

I don't retract the main thrust of that old post - seriously, do update your drivers - but I was utterly wrong in thinking my wireless adapter was anything other than useless. :( I'll be back to posting soon enough, anyway. I hope.

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.