Joel's Scattered Thoughts

Notes on things that interest me

Posts Tagged tank

Overcoming the Fear of Tanking

Dec 17

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Spinks had a good post on  Overcoming the Fear of Tanking.  This is a great time time to learn how to tank or heal if you haven’t already.  Here’s why:

  1. Tank and healers are in demand! You will have as much opportunity to run instances as your little heart desires.
  2. Effort to find groups is pretty much nil. Click the Dungeon finder icon, sign up, keep busy with the usual stuff till your dungeon pops, run the dungeon and get a free port back to continue on your way.
  3. Tanking or healing lower level instances is easy. If you lack confidence, join the queue for specific dungeons 10 levels lower than you are.  Even if you screw up big-time, you’re still likely to keep your group alive.  Run instances progressing in difficulty till you reach instances at your current level and you’ll be more than ready for those.
  4. If you fail, you can try again. Sometimes you’ll just be off – DPS is AOE pulling every mob in an instance, the healer or tank is sleeping,  or you just can’t remember which button does what.  No big deal.  No-one in the group is likely to remember you tomorrow and finding another group is a cakewalk.  Analyze your mistakes, shake it off, do a few quests, and try again with a new group.

My current goal is to run my death knight through all regular Northrend instances, then move through the heroics.  By the time I finish that I’ll be more than ready to tank anything on him.  Depending on my level of enthusiasm, I’m thinking of doing the same thing healing on my shaman and tanking/healing on my druid.  My warrior and paladin have already done their tanking through instances and I’m not very interested in straight up DPS in a group.

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Dungeon Finder reactions from players

Dec 11

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I was shocked at the Dungeon Finder reactions from players.  Almost all the reactions I’ve seen so far have been positive.  You don’t see that too often when a new feature rolls out.

I’ve only run one random dungeon – I happened to be on my best geared toon and didn’t feel like switching so I gave it a shot.  We got heroic Utgarde Keep and we blew through it.  The only hitch was on the first boss when no-one freed the healer from her frost tomb.  Oops.

I now have four max-level tanking toons (though I haven’t properly geared my death knight and druid for tanking yet) and a max level healer.  If I wanted to I could run dungeons all day long thanks to this feature.  Unfortunately, I’m not really interested in running too many dungeons right now, so I’m not taking full advantage of it.  Christmas holidays are coming and maybe then I’ll be more into random runs.

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Binding Heroic Strike to Mousewheel

Dec 1

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If you are playing a warrior tank, follow this tip: Preventing “The Claw” – Binding Heroic Strike to Mousewheel « Tanking for Dummies.  I did this near the end of tanking Karazhan and found that it helped a lot.   I wonder if they’ll change Heroic Strike at some point?  I don’t know if I’ll be using it in the future as I doubt I’ll be tanking much before Cataclysm.  We’ll see if Cataclysm makes me want to raid again.

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The disappearance of the bear

Oct 22

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Shifting Perspectives has a  fascinating look at The disappearance of the bear.  Allison Robert looks at 8 reasons why bears are the least popular tank class.  I’ve barely done any tanking on my druid as I’ve been more interested in leveling alts lately, but there are a lot of good points here.  I agree that the argument for playing as a druid of a different spec, particularly resto or boomkin is probably the biggest reason why we don’t see more bears.

I’m still planning to gear my druid up for tanking, but I think I’ll start looking more seriously into a resto spec.

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Yakra’s Theories on Tanking

Aug 9

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If you’re looking for a good guide to warrior tanking and you dopn’t want to dig through the mass of Elitist Jerks posts, it’s hard to beat Yakra’s Theories on Tanking.  Yakra does a fine job of breaking down the numbers and concepts behind warrior tanking.   I would have liked to see a scale for ranking items, but I can understand that it would be a pain to keep up to date as well as a subject of endless debates over decimal points.

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Some thoughts on Leveling a Warrior Tank

Jun 8

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Tanking for Dummies points to Some thoughts on Leveling a Warrior Tank. There’s a lot of level-specific advice for leveling a warrior there. If I leveled a warrior again this would be one of my primary resources.

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A close look at World of Logs

Jun 1

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Tank like a girl takes A close look at World of Logs . This looks as though it could be really useful for raid leaders out there. (Hi Morn and Laulu if you’re reading this!) I recently renewed our alliance’s subscription to WoW Web Stats, but we may want to switch to this tool instead.

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Exit Strategy

May 28

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I found this post on Exit Strategy from Mirror Shield – Yakra’s Reflections on Tanking very much worth thinking about. I think that’s one of the places I failed in raid leading pre-Wrath. We lingered in Kara far too long instead of making a solid push into Zul’Aman. As a non-progression guild, I would up the number of kills to something in the 5-8 range, but there should definitely be a time when the guild is DONE farming a particular boss. If you want to raid it on off nights, go for it but otherwise it’s time to move on.

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Mount farming for fun and… well, fun

Mar 19

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If you’re short a couple mounts for the achievement, Big Bear Butt Blogger has a suggestion in Mount farming for fun and… well, fun. Jaimie and I did this last week and it worked pretty well even with my fury warrior tanking. We managed to pick up 2 mounts and Jaimie’s holy paladin nuked me when we took a poke at the first boss.

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Protecting Your Allies

Mar 17

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Eye for an Eye has a list of tools retribution paladins can use for Protecting Your Allies. Most of these are the standard Protection abilities that I keep forgetting to use as Retribution. About the only one I remember is the taunts to pull aggro away from the healers and hopefully drag the mobs closer to the tanks.

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Distance-Based Avoidance

Mar 6

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Yakra’s Reflections on Tanking has an interesting post on Distance-Based Avoidance for tanks. (In simple terms, stay away from the mob and it can’t hit you!) As I see it, the biggest problem with distance-based avoidance is that your melee DPS will not be able to DPS effectively. Non-silenced caster/hunter mobs would also be trickier to manage this way. If you are tanking a target that does not currently have melee DPS attacking it, distance-based avoidance is a great tool!

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Healing on a Shaman

Feb 27

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With my shaman at 80, I now need to figure out how to heal with a shaman.  The only thing I’ve healed with him is Karazhan at 70 and things have changed since then.

I’ve managed to get a lot of good gear thanks to LootRank, some luck at the Auction House, and my friendly neighborhood leatherworker. (Thanks Hidi!)  My plan is to respec and get into some instance runs this weekend.  I may try to finish off the initial Sons of Hodir questline first though.

Anna has a lovely guide to resto shaman healing spells.  PlusHeal talks a little more about spell rotations for different situations and provides some advice for new healers.  Lodur on World of Matticus has a post on Being the Shaman Behind the Meat Shield. 

It’s been a while since I ran as a healer.  For now the plan is to keep tanking on my warrior as my main role, but it’s good to have options. 

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The Trash Caps – Warriors

Feb 24

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Assuming I remember to make a trash tanking set, knowing The Trash Caps for Warriors will be invaluable. Actually, making a trash tanking set would probably be a good exercise for me.

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My WoW Resume (early 2009)

Feb 23

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resume I was reading Matticus’ post, What GMs Want to See on Your Guild App, and I stared thinking about some of my accomplishments in WoW.  Since many of these were pre-3.0, I don’t have the achievements for them which makes me a little sad.

Healing

  • Raid healed all of Zul’Gurub and Molten Core, and most of AQ-20 at 60 and roughly the first third of Kara at 70
  • Leveled a holy priest from 1-60 in vanilla WoW, then to 70 in BC
  • References: Anath, Legionofone, Balm

Tanking

  • Tanked Naxxramas-10 (Arachnid Quarter, Plague Quarter, Patchwerk, Grobbulus, Thaddius) and Sartharion 0 drakes.
  • Leveled a protection warrior and protection paladin from 1-70 in BC, then to 80 in Wrath
  • Tanked Karazhan and the first 3 bosses in Zul’Aman in BC
  • Tanked BC Heroics with bear druid
  • References: Mazzarella, Beeferino

DPS

  • Progression raided Naxxramas with Retribution Paladin
  • Raided BC farm content on BM Hunter, Enhancement Shaman,  Warlock
  • References: Shamaniac, Jusy

Raid Leading

  • Helped organize a guild alliance
  • Raid led through Karazhan, part of ZA, and Naxxramas-10
  • References: Zurdante, Mornal

PvP

  • Obtained Knight title in classic WoW
  • Hit Exalted with Stormpike Guard back in the days of 12 hour AVs
  • I don’t PvP anymore

That’s all that comes to mind right now.  It’s fun to look back on the stuff I managed to get done.  I would say that raid leading is probably the most challenging part of the game – not the fights themselves but all the dealing with people and their issues, balancing things so that it all works out. 

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How to be a better tank

Feb 15

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Shalandra at Tank Hard! has a post on How to be a better tank . The points she raises are very good ones. I find that situational awareness is one of the biggest failings of new tanks. This has led to me taking worse geared tanks over better geared ones. I want someone I can rely on to keep the adds from munching the healers. There’s nothing like watching the off-tank single-target tank one add while the rest run amok.

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TellMeWhen

Jan 24

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Tank Like A Girl discusses TellMeWhen for keeping track of self-buffs. This might be handy for making sure that I don’t forget to keep commanding/battle shout up at all times on my warrior. NeedtoKnow looks good too, but I’m not sure that it would be much of an improvement over DotTimer.

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Dancing with Heigan

Jan 14

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We ran Naxx last night and I had a blast.  My favorite bit was the Heigan fight.  We didn’t come anywhere close to downing Heigan (our best attempt was around 69%) but I enjoyed myself immensely. 

Part of my enjoyment came simply from not screwing up.  I tend to screw up on movement and positioning so it was great to do it right.  Another fun bit was having the raid discuss whether I sounded more like an optometrist (“Which looks better to you, one or two?  two or three?”), and aerobics instructor (“One, two, three, four. Move!”) or a music teacher (“One and two and three and four”).  We had a newish healer and a different off-tank and things still went fairly smoothly.  One of the main reasons I’m enjoying running Naxx so much is that it’s a challenge, but not an unbeatable one. 

I expect Saturday’s run to involve a lot of wipes – we’re doing Heigan at least a couple times.  If that doesn’t work, we’ll move to Instructor Razuvious or Patchwerk for a change of pace.  I deliberately saved Sartharion for Saturday’s run so that those who can only show up then are still going to get some loot. 

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Alts and the Raider: An Officer’s Perspective

Jan 13

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Sydera at World of Matticus discusses Alts and the Raider: An Officer’s Perspective.  We just went through some of this entering Naxx.  It hadn’t been a big deal before Wrath as we had Karazhan on farm by the time we started to bring in alts to do more than fill in temporarily in key roles.  

With Wrath, we’ve had an overfull raiding roster pretty much every raid night.  Deciding who can come and who can’t has been a major headache for me and has led to hard feeling a couple of times.  Some hadn’t decided on their spec and are willing to respec as needed which then leads to loot issues.  Does a paladin without a declared spec get to roll on DPS/Tank/Heal loot?  We ended up adding a new rule requiring raiders to declare a main toon and spec even if they are not playing that toon/spec at the moment.  Farm content is going to be more of a free-for-all, but we’re a ways from having anything on farm at this point. 

It’s naive of me, but I hadn’t even thought about this till someone brought it to my attention.  Probably one of the reasons I hadn’t thought about it is that the loot didn’t affect me directly.   I had blithely assumed the more alts, the merrier.  With more alts we could have multiple people for any given role and we could pull in different toons to give everyone a chance to play.  I missed considering the politics of loot distribution, especially in these early progression days when one piece of loot can make a big difference to someone’s raid viability. 

epiclewtz

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Raider 101 Project

Jan 11

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Rohan from Blessing of Kings has started a Raider 101 Project. This is meant for people who are new to raiding. The information is not meant for squeezing out every last bit of DPS/Healing/Tanking, but for getting started on playing your role in a raid. Since this has just been announced, there’s not a lot up there at the moment, but there doubtless will be. Raider101

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Ret Paladin

Jan 10

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ret_paladin I’m thinking of taking my paladin ret.  I don’t like tanking with her as much as I do on my warrior and right now our guild alliance has a surfeit of tanks.  I don’t think I’d raid or even instance with her, so it might be fun to try something new. 

If I do decide to pursue this, here are a few resources I’ll be consulting.

I have a pile of toons still to level and our raids don’t need more melee DPS at the moment, so those factors are somewhat of a disincentive. 

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