Blood Beast Control on Saurfang 25H

Hello everyone. Anafielle takes over the blog yet again, inflicting yet another novel of a post upon Rhidach’s unsuspecting readers! Ha ha! The ursurper tank strikes again! So let’s talk about Saurfang 25H, a fight that’s been very much on my mind lately, even though Enveloping Shadows has supposedly had it on farm for weeks.

Flashback to the First Kill: July 27th

Our first Hard Mode Saurfang kill occured about a month ago, when Rhidach was gone, an odd week when I found myself main tanking a raid I was still getting to know. Without Rhidach there, I was hoping to very quietly main tank while someone else Raid Led – after all, the main tank doesn’t have to be the raid leader, right? Yet I reluctantly found myself in the driver’s seat. Saurfang was, at that time, progression. I had taught two separate 10 mans how to do this fight on Heroic, so I was without a doubt the resident expert. I also have more than my fair share of “Well, if no one else is going to do it, I sure as hell will” in my personality.

So when we got to Saurfang, I took the lead. We killed him, and it was a point of pride for me that we progressed without Rhi. Many gloating messages and kill screenshots were text messaged to him that night. I do so enjoy misusing peoples’ phone numbers.

Rhidach eventually got his revenge. Somehow Saurfang has remained my job regardless of whether Rhidach is there. My illustrious cotank leads the entire rest of the raid, but when we get to Saurfang, he just waits for me to step up. I envision him sitting back and relaxing when we get to that 4th boss, cracking a beer and calling for his girlfriend to bring him a sandwitch while he lets his overworked and underpaid offtank do all the work for a moment.

I guess part of raid leading is delegating, and Saurfang gets delegated to me! Well, I’m not complaining. Much.

Blood Beast Blues

We’ve killed Saurfang every week since that first kill without too much trouble. So, technically, he’s on “farm.”

However, every kill is messy – and I mean 6 or 7 marks messy. We’ve even wiped a few times. This is the least “farm” fight of any of our farm fights, and that includes more recent kills.

This is totally unacceptable to the relentless perfectionist in me. Beasts are not being CC’d enough and they are not dying quickly enough – leading to dead ranged and thus Blood Power, or ranged who have to kite towards other people, which leads to Blood Nova, which leads to Blood Power.

So, I sat down this week to overhaul my strategy. This meant pulling out my Raid Leading notebook (yes, I keep a notebook next to my desk) and taking a good look at my list of Blood Beast Control Methods – a list of stuns, slows, snares, immobilizations, and general tactics to keep those beasts away from the ranged.

Blood Beast Control: A List

If something on this list is wrong, for god’s sake, comment and let me know. I don’t have every single stun, snare, slow, or tactic for this fight memorized. A great deal of thanks goes to my twitter feed for helping me out with tactics I didn’t know of & clarifying things for me. The idea is to build a useful list for everyone, and here’s my start. I’ll edit as people comment.

Knockbacks

• Boomkin: Typhoon
• Ele Shaman: Thunderstorm, if de-glyphed (every other spawn)
• Fire Mage: Blast Wave, if specced

Slows

• Mage: Slow, if specced (single target)
• Shadow Priest: Mind Flay (single target)
• Shaman: Frost Shock (single target)
• Hunter: Concussive Shot (single target)
• Frost DK: Chillblains, if specced (AoE)
• Hunter: Frost Trap (AoE)
• Shaman: Earthbind Totem (AoE; can be specced to immobilize)
• Fury Warrior: Piercing Howl, if specced (AoE)

Stuns / Ways to Immobilize

• Desto Lock: Shadowfury (AoE)
• Prot Warrior: Shockwave (AoE)
• Prot Warrior: Concussion Blow
• Paladin: Hammer of Justice (every other spawn)
• DK: Chains of Ice
• Fire Mage: Dragon’s Breath (AoE)
• Druid: Roots
• Frost Mage: Frost Nova (AoE)
• Tailoring Nets

Random Other Stuff

• Melee can taunt beasts back towards them.
• Hunters on two sides can trade Distracting Shot.
• Rogues can stick a crippling poison on a weapon, trade it in and Fan of Knives.
• Warriors, Feral Druids and Demo Locks with Felguards can do a difficult-to-pull-off intercept-type stun.

Our Strategy

In general, I like to assign 1-2 knockbacks per spawn, some way to AE slow them all (plus as many single target slows as I’ve got), and lots of stuns to keep them immobilized. A new tip I’ve learned from Matticus: Ranged DPS on the right side should prioritize the left beasts, and vice-versa, so the beasts have a little bit further to run.

I could not imagine doing this without a boomkin – preferably, more than one boomkin – for Typhoon. Ele shammies usually glyph out of Thunderstorm’s knockback; they should reglyph for this fight. Ellies will also only be able to knock back every other spawn; Boomkins can handle every wave.

There are a number of ways to AE slow all the beasts, which is critical. Our Frost DK has a Chillblains offspec and uses it on this fight to slow every beast by 50%. We raid with a shadow priest and 2-3 mages, and I also assign each of them a specific beast to slow.

Pally stuns are excellent, although pallies will have to trade off. Generally Rhidach and I get one beast, and our two DPS pallies stun another beast. Chains of Ice is also great, although it’s a bigger DPS loss, especially for a frost DK. Obviously having beasts snared is far more important than DPS, but I like to keep these things in mind.

Very important: stuns are safe in melee range; snares which immobilize are not. If the beast is unable to move yet active, it will eat a melee regardless of who is at the top of its threat table. Pally stuns and Prot warrior stuns are safe, and Chains of Ice is safe too because it’s just a glorified slow. But nets, Druid Roots, and talented Earthbind Totem are not safe in melee. You can still use them, but use them outside of melee range.

Taunts should be used effectively. Hunters can Distracting Shot a beast that’s far away, and melee & tanks can taunt a beast getting too close to some ranged. I end up taunting a fair bit, which occasionally bites me on the ass if the beast makes it all the way back to me without dying.

Tonight

We’re changing things up tonight. One of our healers is going boomkin, and everyone has decided not to move near as much to keep that vital 12 yard separation between the ranged. This means those beasts are just going to have to be flawlessly knocked back, stunned, slowed, and killed before they get to a single ranged or healer. I have faith it can happen, especially considering we are working under a 30% buff. And damn the haters, I don’t care if we wipe until it’s right.

I’ve gotten a little bit of flak for complaining about a farm fight, but I don’t care – even a farm fight should be done correctly.

Offspec Tank Loot Priorities

You know, I had a whole string of posts planned for today, but I got completely distracted by something I think you readers might find interesting instead.

Let’s discuss offspec tank gear and who gets priority.

A Story From My Past

Gather round, children, as Anafielle spins you a tale. I’d like to tell a little story about my old guild (called Brand New Day, on Drenden) and our troubles with the very first fight in ICC …. Marrogar 25.

When Brand New Day hit Marrogar for the first time, we used a 3 tank strategy. A lot was going wrong, but a disproportionately large number of wipes were to tank death. The MT and I were fine. But our third tank was a DPS warrior in a pretty weak tank set, and the healers just couldn’t keep him alive.

Our very first Marrogar kill took two weeks and no less than eight battle rezzes. I’m not even kidding. We had eight druids in the raid, and every single battle rez got used on a tank.

No problem. He’ll gear up, right?

But our third tank was DPS main spec – in fact, he would have been our first Shadowmourne recipient – and therefore he was “offspec” for tank gear.

Let me tell you. It’s really painful to face a fight like that, struggle with it as progression, struggle specifically with tank death, and then watch some beautiful offspec tank gear go to a healer’s bank set through the vagaries of RNG.

From Marrogar forth, Brand New Day quietly put an unofficial loot priority system in place. Throughout my time there in ICC25, our “third tank” quietly got priority on offspec tank loot. Several officers made a big deal out of passing loot to him on vent until no one had the guts to roll against him. The MT and I would even pass him sidegrades and make comments on vent like, “He needs this more.”

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Offspec Loot Priority: An Argument For It

When you only have two mainspec tanks, you’re going to occasionally run into a situation where your DPS offspecs will play a major role in your raid’s progression.

In an ideal world, offspec loot gets distributed evenly. Only people who will use their offspecs will bid on loot. But sometimes, that doesn’t happen. Sometimes you have to give someone priority. It really just depends on how many of your raiders are polite enough to distinguish between Druid #11′s fourth set and your raid’s desperate third progression tank.

It may not be entirely fair, but it’s true. If your progression is dependent on someone’s offspec gear, you have a vested interest in making sure that offspec gets geared up.

Offspec Loot Priority: An Argument Against It.

Loot priority is entirely reasonable when it affects your progression. But in my opinion, this is the only time when it should occur. Even if someone is tanking that week – even if someone ends up tanking a whole lot of the time – even if someone is a totally excellent person who I like, and who I enjoy tanking with – my personal opinion is that they shouldn’t get priority over other, raid-capable offspec tanks.

I’m complaining, in a really circular way, about a very minor loot issue last night. Since I’m a super pro Bitcher and Moaner, I decided to hop up on my soapbox – well, alright, I decided to take over Rhidach’s soapbox – and write a big long post about it. Even though it was probably a very minor error or a reasonable part of the loot rules that I just didn’t know.

Anyways. It begs an interesting question!

How many guilds have done the same thing? Prioritized someone’s offspec tank set in some kind of official or unofficial way?

Opinion of the Reader

Am I crazy for thinking this is reasonable sometimes? Am I crazy for thinking this is unreasonable sometimes?

How about you?

Do you have enough mainspec tanks that all tank positions are filled by mainspec tanks, or do your DPS end up tanking a fair bit in raids? Have you ever given certain offspec tanks in your raid priority on loot?

Let’s hear it!

My Huge Ego & Festergut 25H

If Rhidach was here, he’d do a raid report and tell you all sorts of interesting and useful things about our raid last night. I’m sure a lot of people reading this blog would be really interested to know about things like how we turned Heroic Lady Deathwhisper from a tough progression fight into a relatively easy 2 shot, or why Heroic Saurfang suddenly gave us 5 wipes worth of trouble when we’d been farming him for weeks.

Fortunately, he’s not here. Instead, we’re going to discuss something much, much more important.

My Festergut 25H DPS.

Festergut Is My Favorite Fight

I sat in vent a few hours ago and mourned to my raid that I’d never rank on WOL for prot pally DPS because we’re not killing Festergut 25H at the right time. I wish he died earlier. My average DPS would be through the roof if he died before my buff wears off. Unfortunately, we still need 4 minutes and 11 seconds to kill his ass dead, and in that time my average dies along with my hopes of eventually joining the super exclusive Maintankadin Really Badass Paladin Club. They’re having a party at the top of the WOL rankings, and I am totally not invited.

My e-peen suffers greatly from this injustice.

Last night, before we pulled, I basically told the DPS to whoop it out and put on their awesomesauce pants so my ass could rank. They were Not Amused. Some clever wit pointed out to me that whooping it out and putting on pants were mutually exclusive activities. How the hell would I know? Who raids in pants, anyways?

Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about lust. Obviously the optimal time to pop lust is just after the tank swap, although my silly raid seems to believe that it makes the most sense at the beginning (when I am not buffed) or at the end (when I am also not buffed). Really?

Last night, no one called for it and we forgot to pop lust altogether. What kind of unobservant fool was main tanking that raid?

Well, I managed 9k DPS anyways.

Gear Swapping: A Serious Note

I, unlike my 11/12 and 12/12 ICC 25H bretheren, can’t swap out that much gear on this fight.

We still, sadly, have occasional issues with Fester 25H. Very rarely, but they happen. I recall an all too recent enrage timer wipe ending with a single live paladin and a vent full of dry comments along the lines of, “Farm!” “Totally on farm.” “Good thing Festergut’s on farm.” He is on farm. But anything can happen.

If I joke about forgetting to take off my threat gear, I’m lying through my teeth. I have a specific Festergut 25 set. I make each non-survivability-based gear choice with great care, knowing full well that if I die, it’s my own damn fault and I owe the whole raid repair fees as well as an apology for wasted time. Every itemization point I pull out of armor or stamina to devote to expertise, hit, or strength is a bit of effective health that could save my ass if some recruit mage or hunter decides to be go be BFF with the tank healers during a Vile Gas. Yes, I know this. So despite my joking about Festergut 25H and threat gear, I think hard about being conservative.

The major gear changes I recall making from an armor centric set: Bloodvenom Blade, 264 expertise boots (which I usually wear anyways), 277 hit pants (one of the most convenient places for me personally to find hit), some tank neck with expertise on it, the +200 str libram, and DMC:G in place of one of my armor trinkets. This puts me hitcapped and 32 expertise. Nothing special. I could hardcap my expertise if I threw on the TOGC expertise trinket, but Festergut hits pretty hard. I wore the Putricide 10H armor/stam proc trinket instead.

I consider this a poor man’s threat set – regular tank gear with some strength procs mixed in. I dream of wearing a Big Numbers set on Festergut 25H, but my AD proccing at the end of last night’s battle says “ROFL! Not gonna happen.” Look, a girl can dream…

Back To The Details

So I broke 9k dps. This is nothing special compared to the incredible numbers some of my cohorts can muster, but I was fairly happy with it.

On the plus side, I did beat two dps, which warms the cockles of my black and cheerless tank heart. Every time a tank beats a DPS, I fully believe said tank should take a shot. (Hey, tanks with threat sets…. I expect this rule to be followed.)

Good thing I only had Rotface 25H left to do. Big ooze kiting really requires at least one stiff drink. “Hey, you, in the dress, turn around! WHY ARE YOU RUNNING THAT WAY? COME BACK HERE! What, are we doing the achievement and no one told me? OH GOD VILE GAS–” *chug*

I uploaded the logs later last night. When I was done cursing my logs addon at great length for failing yet again to record Halion, I noticed to my great delight that my name was sitting on the right side of the Dashboard. I ranked! I really did! #194, baby!

I honestly thought I’d never do that on 25H. Alright, so it was 194th, but I’m pleased beyond measure that there are only 193 protection paladins among the guilds uploading to World of Logs between myself and Meloree’s extensively theorycrafted and simmed 16k dps in the #1 spot.

What’s that, you say? There are probably no more than 200 different guilds uploading to WOL who are running Fester 25H with paladins as first tanks? Goddamnit. I was just starting to feel like a special snowflake.

edit: I just checked the logs again and between last night & right now, I’ve been knocked out of the top 200. Hold on, be right back, crying in a corner. I’m serious, I almost cried, here at work. I have to do better next week!

Threat Gear and Taunts

Another guest post from Anafielle while Rhidach is gone on vacation! Soon, you will forget this blog ever belonged to Rhidach! I mean, except for the domain name…

I’m working on a true, Wrathy-style threat set.

Working on it. I always say I’m working on it. I’ve been saying this for months.

I keep telling Rhidach I’ll have one soon. That he should live in fear of my threat set because one day, very soon, he will never tank a single trash mob again. The mobs will run away in fear of my threat set. I’ll just look at them meanly and their threatplates will turn from angry red to beautiful, soothing green. Tactician stuns and Vile Spirit silences won’t stop this threat set. Nothing will stop it. His desperate taunts will bounce harmlessly off the omen lead I will have on everything unfortunate enough to be within my melee range.

And so on.

Craving a Real Threat Set

I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill tank set. I have a threat optimized set. Every tank should. By “optimized,” I mean “tank gear gemmed and enchanted for survival that happens to have good threat stats.” This set involves Bloodvenom Blade, DMC:G, and carefully chosen pieces of gear that grant me high expertise and capped hit. I wear it for most everything except progression. Tanking Heroic Festergut 25 in this set “by accident” is one of my favorite things to do.

No, I’m talking about a threat set specifically gemmed and enchanted for the purpose of threat. I want one of THOSE. A real, completely threat-centered set of gear. Wrathy detailed his here, and I’ve had a bad case of tank envy ever since. (This happens to me a lot when I read Wrathy’s blog.)

Look at that badass gemming. Optimized enchants. I want it. I want it badly. I have that post bookmarked. I’ve talked for months about making a set like this.

Yet I don’t have one yet.

I have so much gear, perfect for this purpose. But I … I … I just haven’t quite gotten up the guts to gem with (gulp) strength.

I keep pulling stuff out of the bank, staring at it, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I can feel everyone who ever taught me how to tank, standing over my shoulder, looking down disapprovingly. I look at a red gem, but then, something inside me says, “You’re really going to put that THERE? Really?”

There’s no reason why I’m reluctant. I’m not using that gear for anything else. I have enough gold to experiment with gems. I am smart enough to know when NOT to wear a set like this.

It’s just so… hard. So against the grain.

That voice, in my ear! “Really. You’re not REALLY going to put that strength gem in that gear, were you? Were you, Ana? Doesn’t that blue one look so much more inviting? Wouldn’t this piece be more useful with stamina?”

I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the guts. I just can’t deviate from my usual gemming practices. I’m not nearly as badass as Wrathy. I don’t have the guts to experiment.

I resign my membership from the Cool Tanks Who Experiment With Gear Club.

Who Needs a Threat Set When You Have Two Taunts?

Rhidach will tell you that I don’t really need a threat set, considering how often I taunt trash off him. Vent is always full of my apologies and excuses, ranging from the fairly reasonable to the completely ridiculous.

“I have a quick trigger finger!”
“I saw that one turn red, and I taunted.”
“I totally thought that one was mine.”
“What? Didn’t you tell me to go left?”
“East? What is this east shit? Wait, I need to get out my compass.”
“Shit!! I hit RD on the wrong mob.”
“Well, I was trying to save that poor ret pally!”

I don’t know what happened. I never used to taunt this much. I blame… trash.

The biggest culture shock, coming to Enveloping Shadows from my old guild, was trash. I went from neatly (obsessively?) marked pulls to AE fests full of aggro everywhere. Half our DPS have never heard of an assist macro and the other half seem to take great pleasure in DPSing precisely the mobs we are not currently trying to hold threat on. I find myself always craving assist so I can mark the mob I’m tanking – and I promise, I am smart enough to be paying attention to the logical next kill target – in the vague and completely misplaced hope that the DPS might find it in their heart to kill that one next. More often than not, I spend a lot of time running around.

So I have, somehow, gotten into a habit of taunting way too much on trash.

I’m particularly bad on Blood Wing trash. I usually taunt Rhi’s mobs off him when he gets stunned, which I feel is Appropriate Offtank Behavior. But then, the DPS will have pulled the OTHER things I was tanking off me. I have to chase THEM. Then the Tactician is free, and I taunt him… oh, Rhi’s not stunned anymore? I totally forgot about him.

I recently realized my taunting had definitely crossed the line between “honest mistake” and “really inappropriate”, and started making a serious, serious effort to be really careful not to RD any of his targets.

We were moving through Blood Wing a week or two ago, and vent was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment or two. Then Rhi says suddenly, into the silence, in a really exasperated tone: “Is Anafielle dead or something? She hasn’t taunted off me in a while.”

Excuse me while I go crawl in a corner and die.

Tanking Halion

Another guest post from Anafielle while Rhidach is gone! You get to deal with me all week…. so, like I always tell my 10 man, get excited!!

Several of us popped in to see Heroic Halion 10 last night.

Although the other tank was a DPS on a pally alt, he was the more experienced shadow side tank. He tanked Shadow Side earlier this week & they decided to leave him with it. This left me up in the physical realm.

Physical side tanking sucks when you are a massive control freak, like I am. I firmly believe every tank has a bit of control freak in them somewhere…

You get to sit there while the raid wipes on the hardest part of the fight… doing absolutely nothing except staring at raid frames. NOTHING. Last night, I couldn’t even really tab out to complain to twitter or walk away to get a beer (umm… definitely things I have not done while tanking normal 25) because the void zones persist in both phases. God knows the moment I looked away, someone would spawn a void zone under me and I’d die.

Shadow Side Tanking (normal)

I’m going to pause to complain a little here about our Normal Mode strat.

For Normal Halion, the strat we use involves constantly spinning the dragon throughout phase 2 and 3. The tank keeps the single orb we can see on the dragon’s left hip, which means the other orb is over the tank’s left shoulder – this in general keeps the beam at a good angle through the dragon the whole time. But we turn him throughout this phase, not just when the orbs are about to activate.

Learning how to do this was…. fun. Yeah, that’s the word. Listening to Rhidach on vent figuring out how to turn constantly at the right speed certainly was fun. It’s got to be that “talk me off the ledge,” panicked tone in his voice sometimes.

I find it way too amusing when he panics & try to cause it as much as possible. I know, I know, I’m such a good offtank.

Then he left me All Alone a few weeks ago, before we’d killed Halion, and I had to do it myself. I failed miserably. Not going to lie. It was probably the most miserable failure I’d ever encountered in my time tanking. I did just about everything wrong that could possibly go wrong. I even lost threat to some DPS. So embarrassing….

So. End result – our normal mode Halion strat is hard on tanks. At least, hard on these two pally tanks. While the jury is still out on me, Rhidach knows his freakin’ shit when it comes to tanking. When I take a while to figure something out, I assume I’m just slow or stupid. When Rhidach takes a while to figure something out, that something is probably overly complicated. My assumption is that our Halion strat is overly complicated.

But in the end, this is how we learned the fight, and we both have learned how to do it now. So why fix what’s broke? That’s how we do it.

Shadow Side Tanking (heroic)

Unlike normal mode, on heroic our tank doesn’t constantly turn the dragon. Rather, the tank sits still and repositions the dragon as needed right before the cutters activate.

The other tank told me – and I firmly believe it – that this is so, so much simpler and much easier than the constant turning we do on normal mode. In fact, he told me he had no trouble tanking heroic once he’d learned where to watch. Then the raid switched to normal and he had a ton of trouble with our “constantly turns” strat and never quite got the hang of it.

I’d heard from twitter (always an excellent source of information – and I’m not kidding) that most people who do Normal Mode also sit still for as long as possible & only turn when they’re positioning for beam activation.

Boy, that sure would be nice.

Tank Overruled

After wiping a few hours on heroic, we switched the raid back to normal. I wanted to try the “Not Moving A Whole Lot” strat on 10, but the whole 10 man raid nixed me.

“The beam will be in the wrong place!” they said. “You get four reference points on Heroic. It’s much easier. But you only get two reference points on normal. It’s not worth repositioning the dragon right just for the cutters. You’ll tail swipe someone or something.”

I wasn’t leading the raid. I didn’t want to push 9 people into something new, seeing as they’d just wiped in the shadow realm for two hours while I /danced with void zones up top. I shut up and readied my strafe keys.

Honestly, now that I have figured out how to constantly turn, it’s not TOO bad… it still sucks though. I have figured out how to do my normal rotation while turning constantly, which is something I really should never have fucked up in the first place. I still need to practice strafing in a perfect circle. I stopped and started a lot, and it’s a good thing I’m way overgeared because I got hit by the beam at least once.

I really hate this fight.

I want to see Shadow Side on Heroic, mostly because I’m a lazy tank and I can’t wait to sit my ass down a little and rest between cutters in phase 2 and 3.

Team Bravo: A History

Welcome to another guest post by Anafielle! Rhidach is gone on vacation again and forgot to remove my guest posting privileges. Righteous Defense is mine! All mine! Be warned, the beta coverage is temporarily suspended in his absence. In his place, I’d like to talk about one of my favorite topics – 10 man raiding.

I lead a 10 man, something I stress out about on twitter all the time. I actually lead the second 10 man in the guild, while Rhidach leads the first. These raids are called Team Bravo and Team Alpha, respectively. Despite our names, my raid is actually the more progressed of the two.

How did this happen? Oh, this is one of my favorite topics…

A 25 Man Guild with Two Tens

Like many casual-progression 25 man raiding guilds, Enveloping Shadows has long had an unofficial “officer” 10 man. Rhidach leads and MTs it, and mostly takes the officers and a few top DPS. For a long time, this was the only solid guild 10 man.

There was no real second 10 before I arrived. Several of the DPS had tried to start one, but they never quite got enough tanks and ran into troubles. There was, before I came, a fair amount of resentment focused on Rhidach’s 10 as the only successful 10 man. “They steal all the best players,” “They don’t care about the rest of us,” “They have all the guild tanks” (this was true), etc etc.

Enter Anafielle ….. I randomly appeared on the server, a mainspec tank just as geared as Rhidach, and one of the first things I told the guild was, “Hey, I like 10s. Is there a 10 man that needs a tank?” Needless to say, within hours of my server transfer I was approached by a bunch of people about the “second” 10 man.

Thus a second guild 10 man raid was born. The “officer” 10 became known as Team Alpha and my “second” 10 became inevitably known as … Team Bravo.

The Team B Underdogs

We were the underdogs from the start. No officers. Scattered schedules. A rotating roster that never looked the same from week to week. Even our name meant Team B. Fueled by passion and stopped by nothing, full of righteous indignation from months of watching Team Alpha get 10 man progression kill after progression kill, my raid started out like a beat up rebel with something to prove. We had a chip on our shoulder the size of Texas and a nasty streak as wide as the Mississippi river.

The DPS in my raid knew they were good. They had all spent time at the top of Recount. They knew they had the capability to get all those achievements – they’d just never had an organized raid to do it with. I was less a leader and more a guide, funneling their skill into useful accomplishments.

Our First Big Kill

I still remember our first progression kill. I carefully stacked my first Team Bravo raid for Heroic Saurfang specifically because I knew Rhidach’s officer 10 hadn’t downed the fight. (Me? Competitive? Nooo.) I picked out the top ranged DPS I could, spent so much time learning the strat, and carefully assigned CC and kill targets.

When we killed H Saurfang, I went wild with glee. It was a guild first! A GUILD FIRST! TAKE THAT, TEAM ALPHA!

I barely knew Rhidach at this point. He’d just recently trusted me with his cell phone number in case of emergencies. I knew I couldn’t misuse this power. Giving an Internet E-Friend your cell phone number can be dangerous and is definitely a sign of trust. But, in my euphoria, I had to brag to him and he was rude enough to be offline. So I took a screenshot of our kill, labeled it in big obnoxious letters “WE WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!”, transferred it to my cell phone and text messaged him with it.

Man, I’m such an asshole!

Team Bravo, The ES Progression 10

Over the last few months, despite setbacks, Team Bravo has risen to glory. We have gotten almost every single recent guild 10 man first. Most importantly, three weeks ago, Team Bravo achieved Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

It hasn’t been a completely smooth ride for Team Bravo. We’ve suffered from all sorts of ups and downs. I’ve personally fucked up all manner of things, from scheduling to simple Raid Awareness issues to leadership decisions like how we do a fight. Scheduling has really been the worst – our roster has rotated a ton over the last few months. Only now are we settling down into something approaching a regular schedule and roster. And still, I struggle with it… I’ll have to do a whole blog post on this, because scheduling a raid is the absolute bane of my existence as a raid leader.

Anyways. Our glory and success.

Team Alpha vs Team Bravo

I’m under no illusions – Team Alpha has often not run, and has been very casual about the fights they hit. It’s hard to be proud of beating someone who’s not really fighting back. They really only started focusing when we started beating them!

By contrast, Team Bravo was very, very focused. We started basically from scratch, but we had our eye on the goal from Day One. This is probably my fault – I was absolutely obsessed with getting my drake. A 10 man drake was my private dream, and I was not shy about telling everyone that I planned to get it for myself and for everyone around me. The 10 man was my personal vehicle for the drake. I privately thought of it as a fair trade – I would MT and lead for them, and my raid in turn would carry me to a pretty skeleton mount.

We finally made it. It took a lot of work, but three weeks ago we triumphed over All You Can Eat and Heroic Putricide (our last two hurdles) and scored our drakes.

And then, of course, we went back again over the last 2 weeks and killed pretty much every fight a second time to finish drakes for everyone who’d worked with us. I had always been very clear about my promise of drakes for everyone who was there for “the hardest fights”, and I spent a very long time carefully planning our last two weeks of raids to finish drakes for everyone I could manage. A raid is a team, and I was determined not to leave anyone out.

Amazing. Absolutely phenomenal. I look at my raiders and their drake, and despite the 30% buff… it feels like a real accomplishment. I feel really happy to have helped us achieve something really great, something indicative of hours and hours of work!

I have learned a ton about raiding, raid leading, management, and scheduling from my raid. And despite the stressing out I do about leading… my nights with Team Bravo are, without a doubt, the most fun I have during the week.

More Posts!

So, as you can tell, 10 man raiding is one of my favorite topics. While Rhidach is gone, you can expect some posts from me on 10 man strategies and a very long Drake Achievement guide for those of you trying to work your way to some pretty mounts. Stay tuned for more fun stuff!

Threat Decay and the end of the world

Rhidach is on vacation. This week’s guest posts brought to you by Anafielle!

The Cataclysm news continues. GC posted a few times recently on threat generation, tricks & MD, and the possible introduction of a threat decay. Check out the whole string of blue posts – they’re all worth a read.

On threat, one of the changes we’re considering trying out is to have threat decay pretty rapidly. The idea is that a tank should never be able to get so far ahead on threat that they can AFK for the rest of the fight. It might sound like a nerf, but really the intent is to make sure that the tank’s job is never done — that what you do will remain important. [...] The tuning wouldn’t be such that if you missed a couple of swings that the warlocks would pull aggro. The feeling would be more that you have to still make decisions with regard to threat generation throughout the fight.

Furthermore, we are exploring the threat generation of Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade being temporary. That way it would still be useful for initial pulls or when adds join the fray, but wouldn’t be a crutch to keep tank threat consistently high throughout a fight. (Source)

OK, guys, let’s calm down and take a look at this. Ghostcrawler is basically pointing out two undeniable truths of raid tanking and threat generation today:

• Tricks and MD are capable of (mostly) replacing the threat of a disconnected / debuffed / AFK tank.
• Threat generation near the middle and end of some fights becomes easymode due to a huge threat lead. This is especially obvious if the DPS target switches a lot, or if you are being consistently tricks’d.

I’m not sure how you can disagree on either of these points if you’re a tank with omen installed.

Threat problem? What threat problem?

Case in point: Deathwhisper HM Phase 3.

If you’ve ever seen her solo tanked, you have witnessed something that (in my opinion) should not be possible. The tank in this strat is producing zero threat thanks to Touch of Insignificance. 100% of his threat generation comes from rogue tricks and hunter MDs. Solo tanking DW is one of the weirdest feelings I’ve ever had – you’re basically a meat shield with zero threat generation. A non combat pet with 60k HP could do your job. Huh. Sounds like fun.

This Deathwhisper strat made me think very, very hard about how much my threat generation matters on other fights where I’m being tricksed AND producing threat.

What are you talking about? There’s no threat problem.

I’ve rarely seen a raid get threat capped by the MT. Does this happen more in more progressed guilds? I don’t play in a top 100 world raiding guild, but I do play in a guild that’s a solid 7/12 ICC 25 hard modes. Our DPS are no slouches, but with correct threat management they stay below the MT without much trouble at all.

Can you remember a lot of fights recently where you ended up miles ahead on omen? Does your threat generation still matter at the end of a fight? Could you stop doing your rotation for a while and still hold threat? There are fights where that answer, for me, is yes.

The last major meaningful threat decision I made near the end of a fight was to hit Holy Shield and then pick up my nice cold beer. You know I wasn’t producing any threat because I had to take my face off the keyboard to drink. Mmm, Magic Hat #9 – an excellent decision.

Wait for 5 sunders and then DPS the boss!

I think GC was pretty clear about the problem he’s trying to solve. He is NOT talking about making establishing threat more difficult or painful. He is NOT talking about short term threat. He’s talking about eliminating a very, very specific problem – huge threat leads which emerge on a lengthy fight.

Having a slow threat decay makes sure that your job is never done — that you can’t get so far ahead of everyone that hitting Shield Slam at the right time becomes irrelevant for the rest of the fight. If you are already an awesome tank you probably won’t notice a difference. [...] You won’t suddenly notice a massive drop because “decay kicked in.” But you’ll never be able to get so far ahead of everyone else that there is no possibility of them catching up even if you do nothing. (source)

I think it would be really interesting to have to work to keep threat on the boss after the DPS has switched off for a while and switched back on. A small threat decay would work this in nicely without affecting our threat generation in any other way. I like the idea. (Commence the stoning!)

To be honest, I’m more interested to see what they do to Tricks / MD. I think that they’re the larger problem right now.

Anyways, it’s a blue post about a mechanic they haven’t even put in the Cataclysm beta yet. Take it with a grain of salt.

The Off Tank in a Tanking Corps

Hello, readers of Righteous Defense! Anafielle here. You might recognise me from my constant spammy twitter feed, my presence in most of Rhidach’s recent screenshots, or my frequent comments on the blog – I am Rhidach’s fellow tank, the off tank for Enveloping Shadows’ 25 man raids, and the MT and RL of our guild’s “second” 10 man. Rhidach is on vacation for the week, and he had a sudden lapse in sanity and asked me to “off tank” the blog for him.

As the off tank for Enveloping Shadows, I will now subject you to my lengthy thoughts on… off tanking. Please direct all complaints to Rhidach! :D

Am I A Main Tank or an Offtank?

I sat down to edit my Twitter bio the other day (obviously an action of great importance to my life) and as I started to describe what I do – “Off tank for Enveloping Shadows” – I started to wonder… does that really cover it? What exactly do I do in my guild? Should I say co tank? Second tank? Main tank? All these terms seem flawed in some way.

I usually end up describing myself as a main tank, and the offtank for Enveloping Shadows. Does that make any sense at all?

Two of the tanking blogs I respect most have dealt with this topic at length – Almost a full year ago, Wrathy described a tanking corps without a Main Tank. More recently, Gravity posted on the term off-tank and why it has little relevance to today’s tanking corps.

Not all of us off tanks have the opportunity to be a part of a tanking corps like that. I’ll describe a little of my history, before my time with Rhidach’s guild.

The Quiet Typical Offtank

When I first learned how to tank, in my old guild, I had a main tank who was also the raid leader. He was very much in charge and very much in control of everything in this raid. This is the guy who marks every trash pull carefully. I never, ever ran in to pull a group of mobs – he started every pull. It was almost a shock to me to learn that most guilds chain pull and the OT pulls as much as the MT does.

My off tank experience pre-ICC had mostly consisted of taunt trades, taunting adds, tanking the “less hard” boss, twiddling my thumbs for half the fight, or disgustedly putting on a DPS set for a single tank encounter.

To be fair, this made perfect sense at the time – I was extremely new, and for much of WOTLK he was teaching me how to tank, and I was messing things up in spectacular ways. I wasn’t in a position to be sharing roles with someone who had nine years of experience through two different MMORPGs, and who was also the raid leader to boot.

I educated myself though, and to be honest I think I educated myself (and still constantly educate myself) with a care that borders on obsession. He, for example, never really understood my love of having multiple gear sets, and I always had to be quietly careful with my threat set on farm bosses so as not to pull off him.

Case Study: The Festergut First Tank

Festergut (with my old guild) marked a change in how I viewed my traditional role. I remember hitting it for the first time, and my MT told me to take the boss first. “Oooh! Is this because my threat is good? I know we’ll have trouble with the enrage.” I was always pretty proud of my threat, and I thought my MT might have handed me this boss so I could take advantage of the damage buff. Nope, he went on to say, he just didn’t trust anyone else but himself to tank the third inhale. In other words, he didn’t trust me. Pretty silly since both inhales are, well, exactly the same.

It was a blow to my confidence. But hell, I was going to take advantage of a fun fight where I got to tank first, position the boss, and DPS with a cool damage buff. I was going to do it exactly right with the extent of my knowledge of my class and the encounter. I put on my slow threat weapon just like I’d learned, went behind the boss when I wasn’t tanking, and popped my wings with care. I watched my survivability and scoured the logs, and carefully adjusted my gear for threat as I could without sacrificing armor. It was one of the coolest moments in my tanking career when my old MT pointed out disgustedly on vent that I was beating half the DPS, and we needed to move hero post-tank swap to boost my damage. When we finally killed him, I was extremely pleased with myself.

Now that was a kind of off tanking I’d never, ever done before.

Being The Offtank in Icecrown Citadel

From my perspective, ICC brought all kinds of new toys to the table. I might be alone in this, but Plagueworks has always been my favorite ICC wing as the off tank. From positioning the boss on Festergut, to slime tanking Rotface, to riding the abom on Putricide, Plagueworks gave me interesting and challenging things to do – arguably more interesting and more challenging, in the first two cases, than what the boss tank is doing. I can’t be alone in feeling this way. When I came to Rhidach’s guild, he and I were both used to slime kiting on Rotface – we used to roll for it, and the loser had to tank the boss.

Sure, off tanking BQL is boring, but it’s fascinating for me because it’s one of the only boring encounters the off tank gets. And the gear requirements on BQL make it interesting in an entirely different way.

I have a limited amount of experience tanking. I don’t know much about the raids that came before Naxx. I’d be curious to know whether the readers of this blog think that ICC is more interesting to tank than the raids that came before it – in my experience, it certainly has been.

A New Guild, A New Role

In retrospect, I think the change in my perspective has less to do with what I was tanking and more to do with the environment I’m tanking in right now, with Rhidach and our guild Enveloping Shadows.

In Rhidach’s guild, which I joined about 2 months ago, I find myself in a guild where I am definitely a member of a tanking team. Even if it’s a tanking team of two! Rhidach and I play the same class, we read all the same blogs and websites, and we both keep ourselves very well informed on tanking strategy and theory. He might be the raid leader as well, but I always feel open to speak my mind about a strat or talk about who is better suited to what role. We switch up the roles often. We’re both equally suited and fairly equally experienced with all the different tanking roles that ICC requires of its tanks.

There have even been rare times when I’ve found myself with more knowledge of a strat, or knowledge of a different strat, that he has then used with success. With Rhidach gone this week, I’m fully prepared to take the lead – and several months ago I would have been in a panic about doing that.

Off Tanking as part of a Tanking Corps

For me, the term off tank doesn’t mean “the tank doing the easier jobs.” It’s a description of my role in the raid with regard to Rhidach’s role – he’s the main tank, I’m the off tank. I choose this role from the position of a tank that is part of a team.

I think of the terms Main Tank and Off Tank as a description of our roles in the raid, not of our roles in that specific encounter. Even if he’s the one tanking adds, or if I’m the one taking the boss first, I always think of him as the MT and me as the OT. I like it when a raid is organized and someone’s the leader. I like to have a good idea of who’s in charge and, while I’m perfectly capable of main tanking, when he’s around I’d much prefer it be him.

It’s also fun and amusing to watch him stress out.

So I wear the label I set on myself with pride. I’m a main tank and an occasional raid leader, but I’m the off tank for Enveloping Shadows. Off tank in a 25 man raid is the position I choose for myself and the label I apply to my role, and it makes me happier than anything else in this game.

Now, it’s time to main tank my 10 man raid tonight…