Now THIS is tanking

I’m still coming down from the adrenaline high from this…

We’re finishing up the week’s Naxx25, at Kel’Thuzad, on the third attempt. We have two DK offtanks to pick up the adds. At 15% both OTs go down. In a panic I quickly taunt the adds off of my Druid healer focus, Ildara.

And there I am, all four adds plus KT on me. Immediately a feeling of dreads casts over me as pessimistic tidings of doom start shooting through my mind: not enough dps are up, those adds will eventually overpower you with their stacking buff… you can’t see void zones… people are too close, you’re gonna get iceblocked!!

It was quite possibly the longest 45 seconds or so of my life, but we did it. KT went down and the adds fled to whence they came from.

I have no idea how I did it, but I give most of the credit to the healers.

(In case you’re wondering, I ended up third on the damage done chart, with around 2500 dps).

3.1 probable prot pally spec

I’m willing to give the new Divine Guardian a chance. I think I’ll be speccing this way when 3.1 drops.

Choosing professions for your tankadin

Thanks to the new profession benefits introduced in WotLK, your two sidejobs have been that much more integral for min-maxing your character. Certain professions have some amazing boosts (we’re talking about self-only buffs or BOP items) for the common tankadin. Others… not so much.

A breakdown and my recommendations ahead.

Alchemy

• Mixology, which gives you increased duration/benefit from any flask or elixir you can make. This means that–to use the most common tanking flask–the Flask of Stoneblood will give you 970hp instead of the usual 650. Not bad!
• Indestructible Alchemist’s Stone, which gives +75 stam, 50 dodge rating (1.27% avoidance at 80), and boosts the effect of healing/mana pots by 40%.

Blacksmithing

• Two free gem slots, one for gloves and one for bracers. Assuming you add Solid Sky Sapphires, that’s an additional 48 stamina (or 547hp). When epic gems are released, you’re looking at an additional 60 stamina (or 684hp).

Enchanting

• Enchant Ring – Stamina will give you an additional 48 stamina/547hp when used on both rings. Comparable to BSing right now.

Engineering

• Reticulated Armor Webbing adds +800 armor to your gloves, and is the best enchant you can get for that slot.
• The tank goggles are nice, and were definitely what made Engineering godly in later TBC, but nowadays you’ll be replacing the highest iteration with Naxx10 gear. Hopefully this will change in later patches.

Herbalism

• Lifeblood, a HoT that eventually heals for 2000hp. But that’s what healers are for, or yourself while soloing.
• You also have the chance of finding certain items that can be consumed for boosts to AP or SP… at the cost of physical or magical damage vulnerability. Clearly a no-go for a tank.

Inscription

• Master’s Inscription of the Pinnacle is the best possible shoulder enchant for tanks right now. Much better than the exalted Hodir one.
• I have a warm place in my heart for Scrolls of Recall. Alas, cannot be used in combat, so no Bubblerecalling.

Jewelcrafting

• Dragon’s Eye Gems are an amazing boost, for two reasons: because they’re prismatic you can cut three Solid Dragon’s Eyes and put them in any bothersome red or yellow slots, and the net benefit of using three Solid DEs is 51 stamina, or 581hp. Best hp boost from any profession right now.
• The Monarch Crab is also an awesome trinket. If gemmed right (aka Solid Sky Sapphire and Solid Dragon’s Eye) you’re looking at 137 stamina from one trinket alone. There’s no comparison in pre-Ulduar trinkets as I type this.

Leatherworking

• Fur Lining – Stamina looks awesome at first glance (90 stamina/1024hp!) but consider that you can’t also pick up Enchant Bracer – Major Stamina for 40 stamina. So you’re only looking at a net gain of 50 stamina (seeing a pattern here? …pardon the pun).

Mining

• Toughness, which gives 50 stamina. With talents that comes out to an extra 570hp. Pretty nice EH boost, although, unlike the extra health from Blacksmithing or Jewelcrafting, this number will remain static as further patches come out (unless a Rank 7 is introduced).

Skinning

• Master of Anatomy, +25 to your crit rating (or .54% crit chance). Nice for threat I guess, but overall you want to be focusing on EH or avoidance/mitigation for buffs.

Tailoring

• There’s really nothing here for tankadins, as you would imagine. The one slightly interesting thing was the Lightweave cloak embroidery that would proc sometimes for an additional 1000 to 1200 Holy damage. Great for threat I suppose, but it’s being changed in 3.1 to proc for additional spellpower instead.

Overall, looking at all the benefits above, the best profession combination for a tankadin is Jewelcrafting/Blacksmithing. Right now Mining would be marginally better by 2 stamina, but eventually when epic gems are released, BSing will become better by 10 stamina. So it’d be better to hang onto Blacksmithing and reap the benefits in a future patch.

What professions do you deck out your tankadin with?

Craziest OS25 pug ever

One of my huge gear goals recently has been to pick up my Valorous set gloves. The reason being two fold: (1) it was the last iLevel 200 item I needed to replace (best in slot to boot!) and (2) I really wanted that Epic achievement. I’m an achievement junkie, I know.

So because the guild hasn’t been running any 25mans aside from VOA and Naxx as of late, I queued in the LFG menu for a pug. Usually this is a recipe for disaster, and I girded myself for the worst in advance. I was fully prepared to wipe about 15 times, have the Bag of Spoils ninjaed, and then get jumped on the way out by a rabid pack of Alliance. Murphy’s Law was not catching this Pally by surprise. No sir.

Mercifully Ildara and Cendra (the super resto druid/surv hunter duo that I oft adventure with) said they’d come along and joined the pug as well. At least I’d have someone to gripe to when all went to hell!

As I was hightailing it over there, the raid chat was abuzz with the normal pre-raid stuff that pugs struggle to sort out. People were asking who the tanks were (I was refusing to volunteer myself initially, I didn’t want to step on any toes), how many healers we had or needed, and if we were leaving any drakes up.

It was decided to leave one drake up (gulp), and if that didn’t go well, we’d kill it and finish the encounter normally.

The MT and the OT get sorted out and I finally peep up “oh I can OT too, I’m prot.” No one said anything, so I shrugged, getting ready to do some sweet shield slam deeps. Zoning in though, someone caught sight of my gear and said “holy crap look at Rhidach… he should MT!”

Er, no thanks. (How embarassing).

Everything gets settled and immediately I must have been pissing off the tanks because I’m ripping aggro off of them left and right with Hammer and ShoR and Consecrate. I honestly felt bad, I wasn’t trying to show off.

In any case, someone asks which drake we’re leaving up and another says Shadron (terrible idea!) and I volunteer that the one in the back should stay up. It’s the easiest to deal with. That was also a bad idea, because the raid leader then asks me to explain how to do +1d before we engage Sarth.

Whatever. We clean up the trash and the two north-south drakes and line up in front of Sarth so I can give my little pep talk. I tell them the usual, drake lands in back, tank up front, etc. I thought it was pretty thorough but we then careened into a spectacular wipe on the first try.

The DK main tank turns Sarth incorrectly and the raid’s getting tail swiped left and right. I pick up the drake and the little whelps, which was a mistake. Lava wall takes out a bunch of people. It was chaos.

However, surprisingly, everyone was resolute. RL asked me what went wrong, and I pointed out the obvious issue with tail swipes and that the warrior OT should grab the drake and I’ll focus on whelps and the fire elementals. So instructions are given out, the DK has a better idea of positioning and we re-engage.

This time we as a raid were successful, but ironically, this attempt was about thirty times more chaotic. We got the drake down in short order, and a stray whelp didn’t eat anyone, so the warrior and I did out jobs. We then moved to controlling elementals and I watching Sarth with anticipation as his health moved down.

At around 50% it started getting nuts. Flame walls took out a few people and for some reason the DK compensated by beginning to pull Sarth eastwards across the lava. Wut.

He’s yelled at to bring Sarth back, but the DK’s having a merry time out there in the slop. Eventually stuff gets under control, and after what felt like the absolute longest Sarth engagement ever–20%-0% must have been 3 minutes long, I swear, with elementals EVERYWHERE–the dragon finally goes down.

I eagerly skip over to inspect the corpus for what loot had dropped… and to my immediate joy there were two “of the Conqueror” gloves! Ok, among the 8 of us that could use those (yes I inspected everyone’s gear) that gave me 2/8 (25%) odds. Not too shabby.

Gloves are called for rolling and yellowed numbers flying across my screen.

Suddenly, someone rolls a hundred! Aw dammit, one glove gone. My odds drop to 1/7 (14%).

Hearkening back to my post on chance I repeated to myself “there’s no such thing as luck” and typed in /roll.

And I rolled a 100 as well… amazing!

For someone who doesn’t believe in her, Lady Luck sure likes to smile on me.

Divine Guardian returns in latest ptr build

Blerg. Right when I thought this nonsense was approaching something resembling finalization. Now we have a new talent…

Divine Guardian *New Talent* – Tier 4 – Improve the effectiveness of your Divine Sacrifice spell by an additional 5/10% and increases the duration of your Sacred Shield by 50/100% and the amount absorbed by 10/20%.

So 2/2 in this talent would boost Divine Sacrifice to absorb 33% of raid damage when active (or is it 30% damage but up to 165% of the Pally’s health? or both?) and also extend Sacred Shield to lasting for 1 minute and absorbing 600 damage.

Moar bloat plx

Awesome graph: tps/dps gains per talent point

Check out the amazing graph in this thread (first one as you scroll down). It breaks down six threat talents by the gain in tps and dps that a point would provide.

According to the graph, in order, the best talents for increasing tps/dps are One Handed Weapon Specialization > Touched by the Light > Crusade > Conviction > Seals of the Pure > Reckoning.

Against undead mobs Crusade and TbtL switch spots.

This solidifies my decision to spec 3/5 Conviction and 3/3 Crusade.

The inevitable malaise of tier 7 content

The last few months has been my first major raiding experience in the entire (off and on) multi-year period I’ve been playing WoW. In vanilla WoW I mostly quested and only at the end did I set foot in one Onyxia raid and a few UBRS runs (on my old hunter). In TBC I only did 10 man raids and only really got as far as the first four bosses of ZA down.

In WotLK however, I have done all the raid content except for Sarth 2d & 3d (either 10 or 25). Blizz opening up the raid content has definitely benefitted me, and while I doubt I really needed “ezmode” to progress (more like a decently sized and focused guild), I’m very happy with how I’ve done in this raid environment.

Now the guild I’m in, Enveloping Shadows, has been doing 25 man raids since around December and I’ve apparently downed heroic KT 13 times (according to the Armory). I hardly think these are the kinds of blistering hardcore raiding statistics that would foreshadow mass burnout, and yet that seems to be what’s plaguing ES.

As of late we’ve had major difficulties putting together 25man raids. Whereas in the past we had people clamoring to get in, now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and even pugging. Apparently some people have gotten to the point where they got what they wanted from Naxx or wherever and have dropped off the face of the earth until the next content patch–maybe.

One particular holy Paladin joined the guild after pugging with us on a Naxx25 run. She was there for several KT kills, and over time accumulated a Voice of Reason, a Turning Tide, and a t7.5 helm. Each time she won the item over a Pally who was already in the guild. Two weeks ago, after getting the helm, she stopped logging on. And now the original Pally is in the raids, still healing when needed, but with much worse gear.

It’s annoying selfishness to say the least.

In other cases we’ve had players that definitely still need loot in Naxx, but just stopped logging in. They’re clearly burned out at the moment. One player decided to quit WoW forever and put all his possessions in the guild bank and passed 10k gold to the guild leader.

I’m not burned out myself, I’m finding ways to keep busy–be they abortive raid achievement attempts or screwing around with a new mage alt–all while eagerly awaiting Ulduar. Other tasks I’ve decided to pursue to keep myself busy are accumulating the full T2 set, farming a Disgusting Oozling, and laying the material foundations for eventually constructing a Thunderfury.

Like I said, definitely not burned out. I’m probably one of the few dopes in the guild that finds Naxx fun and exciting still. But, nonetheless, wtb Ulduar pronto!

A tank by any other name would smell

I was tagged by Samodean for a fun little meme going around asking where my characters’ names come from. My main’s name is, of course, Rhidach, which is (according to the Irish-English Oxford dictionary on my bookcase) the Irish Gaelic word for “knight”. I’ve been using it for years for various RPGs.

Fun fact: Google “Rhidach” and every result will involve yours truly in some way.

Other character names include:

• My original main, Rhidak the Troll Hunter, with no explanation necessary.
• Draikh the bank alt, whose name is just gibberish that sounds like “drake” when pronounced.
• Edainn the Mage, whose name is kind of based off the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, Dun Eideann. I spelled it incorrectly, though.
• Bhruin the Druid, who was going to be a bear tank (named after mah boys, the Boston Bruins).

As for tagging… I choose Galyan :P

3.1 new epic tanking gear list

Ulduar is chock full of brand-new lewt, just ripe for the taking. I wanted to take a look at everything we have to look forward to getting our greedy little mitts on in one condensed list, so I put together this compendium.

All these items are listed below broken down by slot, with Tier 8 separate, and with iLevels indicated. Some slots seem to have no 219 item, so I suspect one of the 226 items for that slot will turn out to be iLevel 219.

I’ll comment about the gear in a future post.

Tier 8

Conquerer’s Aegis Faceguard
Conquerer’s Aegis Breastplate
Conquerer’s Aegis Shoulderguards
Conquerer’s Aegis Handguards
Conquerer’s Aegis Legguards

Valorous Aegis Faceguard
Valorous Aegis Breastplate
Valorous Aegis Shoulderguards
Valorous Aegis Handguards
Valorous Aegis Legguards

Head

Helm of the Faceless (226)

Ironbark Faceguard (219)

Shoulders

Shoulderplates of the Deconstructor (226)

Shoulderguards of the Solemn Watch (219)

Chest

Unbreakable Chestguard (226)

Wrist

Mimiron’s Inferno Couplings (226)

Flamewatch Armguards (219)

Hands

Handguards of Revitalization (239)

Gauntlets of the Royal Watch (226)
Handguards of the Enclave (226)

Waist

Dragonslayer’s Brace (226)
Indestructible Plate Girdle (226)
Shieldwarder Girdle (226)

Stormtempered Girdle (219)

Legs

Legplates of the Endless Void (239)

Gilded Steel Legplates (226)
Saronite Plated Legguards (226)
Wyrmguard Legplates (226)

Boots

Charred Saronite Greaves (226)
Greaves of the Stormwarder (226)
Spiked Deathdealers (226)

Cloak

Titanskin Cloak (239)

Cloak of the Makers (226)

Cloak of the Iron Council (219)

Neck

Bronze Pendant of the Vanir (239)

Necklace of Unerring Mettle (226)
Shard of the Crystal Forest (226)

Mark of the Unyielding (219)

Rings

Platinum Band of the Aesir (226)
Signet of the Earthshaker (226)
The Leviathan’s Coil (226)

Signet of Winter (219)

Trinkets

Heart of Iron (226)
The General’s Heart (226)

Shield

Northern Barrier (226)
The Boreal Guard (226)

Shieldwall of the Breaker (219)

Weapon

Sorthalis, Hammer of the Watchers (239)

Shiver (226)
Titanguard (226)

Legacy of Thunder (219)
Stoneguard (219)

A bullet dodged

Coming from the latest build on the PTR is this nugget of relief:

Divine Plea now only reduces the amount healed by your Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Holy Shock spells.

Which is a fix in response to the furor that popped up last week over DP being changed to cut in half the healing we were getting from Judgement of Light, Earth Shield, Lay on Hands, Lifebloom, etc.

That would have been an epic disaster if it made it to live. An open hand to the countenance!