f13.net

Why does there seem to be a lack of tanks in Outlands?

Seems to be easier to find healers than tanks.  Why?

It's far more fun to zerg around with a big two hander mortal striking in PvP.

because tanking in TBC sucks.  Oh wait make that tanking as a warrior in TBC sucks.

Eh I hate tanking in general. Too much responsibility.

I loved it until TBC. 

I found the same problem but figured it was just because I'm playing Australian evenings.  Heck sometimes we couldn't get a group going because we couldn't get DPS. :P

As a tank that just left WoW... (Granite on the Eldre Thalas server)

This game is about the endgame.  But it is very difficult for a warrior to get a raid spot on a 25 man raid or - worse yet - the 10 man Kara.  Folks will not play their tanks if they feel they do not have a chance at raiding.  Also, tanks are very gear dependent - so once you reach 70 - that is just the beginning of your journey to putting together a gear set for raiding - can be daunting (if a gear check is going to be performed on any player - it is the tank - so tanks learn to be very proactive on this point once exposed to raiding - if they get that far).

Tanks have no problems finding 5 mans - like healers.  Unlike healers, tanks do not stack well - and you need very tanks for the raid content (unlike e.g. MC and BWL of old could at certain locations use up to 5 tanks).

You might think with smaller raids - we would simply have more of them.  But the rate limiting factor here are good raid leaders - and folks willing to put the admin time in to making sure these things run.  People with that time and patience are few in number - so with the smaller raid sizes, the scarcity of such admin/raid leaders has not lead to an increase in the number of raids despite the raid sizes being smaller.   Fewer raids - fewer tanking opportunities.

I see guys rolling tanks to address the problem you note.  But they don't understand the tanking world that waits for them at 70.

And now you see why the Death Knight is going to have tanking abilities. It's always a bitch finding tanks in any MMO; I think it just gets worse as you level and hit endgame since tanking burns people out more than anything else.

The solution here  - along the lines you note - is the EQ one - giving the hybrid classes greater tanking abilities to make up the short fall.  In the end, dedicated tanks will be overkill for most things - and dedicated tanks are already overkill for 5 mans.  For this reason - if I return to WoW at some point - I will drop my warrior and play a hybrid tank class (paladin, druid etc.).

Blizzard did something really stupid with tanking and threat. They gave the dps HUGE bumps in damage from 60-70. They didn't give warriors huge bumps in threat generation to counter that aspect at all. Now, you have to work overtime on everything (including trash) just to stay ahead of your dps. Constantly. It never stops. You can't just relax as a tank and play anymore. In the old days, Threatmeters didn't become necessary until BWL Vael transitions because you could toss 3 sunders up on a mob and everyone else could go to town and never catch up. Now, if you don't have one, you're fucked. I watch that threatmeter more than I watch the mobs just because you're constantly afraid of some crit-happy person catching you in the long haul.

As a Druid tank, I agree with the statement above, but just wanted to say that I hate dps shamans.

That's bullshit. No one is going to quit because they have to work hard at tanking. If that's what makes them leave then odds are they were a shitty tank in the first place.

To be honest, you saw that a lot preTBC. Tanking was really easy, and you could use people who were damned terrible at it with only a marginal loss of progression pre Naxx.

Really though, tanking as any of the classes (I use a warrior mostly, but have both a druid and pally as well) is straightforward. You have x threat generation per second. If DPS does more than a certain amount of DPS they pull agro. If not, they don't. You know how much you can pump out (and this doesn't really scale at all for warriors and pallies and only somewhat for druids) and no amount of skill can increase it beyond this threshold.

It isn't really rocket science. However the major burn out for me (as an Illidan guild main tank) has been the fact that aside from PvE tanking (something I had the capacity for when I was 12), and arena PvP (something I would have found boring, even when I was 12) the game has NOTHING. Farming raid content for 2 nights and then leveling an alt to do the same? No thanks. For most people, getting 25 people who don't suck is why their raiding progression is slow. In order to compensate for this, Blizzard made it so that if you DO have 25 people that don't suck, the game is easy as hell. And there really isn't very much of it. Not to mention that having 3 arena 5v5 teams with a 2000+ rating in one guild means that when we do go PvP we're only pretty much fighting each other.


LOTS OF VARIETY THERE.

Most of the warriors I know simply aren't interested in Tanking. They never were pre-BC either, but 40 main raids requiring 4-5 tanks meant they tanked or they didn't get to raid most of the time.  As soon as they got to respec for BC they did and didn't want to go back.  We've got 4 tanks out of a former 9 warrior mains.  Three others rerolled as Shaman, two of whom want to be DPS rather than healers.

Tanking is like Healing.  It's a pretty fucking thankless job unless someone sits back and takes notice, or you're flashy (like Paladins.)  My pally gets "ooh cool" and "wow nice job" for 1/3 of the work I ever did TRYING (and failing) as a warrior tank pre-bc. All I can figure is because they see me tossing-down concecrates and picking up 4-7 mobs with ease instead of actually watching the mob switching, taunting, sundering, slamming and other shit a warrior has to do.

High responsibility, difficult play, little thanks?  Seems like the same reason for the lack of priests pre-bc. However, Pallies and Druids are able to pick-up the slack easily enough for 5-mans.. provided folks actually give them a chance. 

Druid tanks I found to be extremely effective - almost too much so.  Anyway, I was MT for Kara - but a druid off tank was my number one choice for partner (it is pretty hard for a protection tank to maintain 2nd threat on Moroes if he is not MT).  Druids make a better off tank than warriors I find - and in most cases the game has to offer - are really better tanks overall - until you get to the high end - which I did not reach in this expansion.

Tanking in general requires the tank - even pre-BC - to be on top of the latest strategies used by their guild for the boss in question.  Pre- BC I was a casual tank for MC/ BWL - and because I did not play often enough - I was always playing catch up with any subtle changes to the strategy.  As a healer, while a demanding role in its own right - is not quite as sensitive to small strategy changes so you can get by as a "casual" - but the warrior role is much less forgiving in that regard.

You don't see many tanks because a tank specced class that isn't tanking is one of the saddest things around. It's the one big reason why feral druids are so popular these days.


Being a prot specced warrior or pally but not being the actual tank? Your pretty much dead weight. Your also pretty damn boring to play at that point.

You're an idiot, not even counting the other uber-hardcore bullshit you posted. That's exactly what normal people did. People that didn't have fun anymore with the job because it's a constant demand said fuck it, and they respecced or made an alt. Here's a hint, normal gamers aren't blowing through the content. You may have as an "Illidan Tank" but realize where the numbers on that are. Wowjutsu is a good place to look.

4% of guilds who raid anything have killed a boss in Black Temple.
1% of guilds who raid anything have killed Illidan.

In short, I could care less about your opinion on the ease of things in the game.

I think that difference has more to do with a) the amount of tanks vs. healers in a given raid, and b) the fact that tanking is proactive (You must do X or wipe.) while healing is reactive (You must react to X in Y time or wipe.).

At the end of the day though, tanking is the most proactive of the trinity and thus the easiest in my eyes. A tank that does his job in regards to movement, threat generation, and other miscellaneous reaction issues (stance dancing) is doing all he can. Resto Druids a lot of the time talk about getting lost in the flow of rolling Lifebloom stacks and that was honestly the same experience I had as a Warrior. Outside of dealing with boss abilities (and raid leader crap in my case) I just got into the drone of watching T. Clap and Shout timers and going through my cooldowns every 5-6s.

As a DPSer, on top of boss abilities, you have to watch threat and possibly swap between ability cycles but you are still predominately proactive. Healers are all some combination of whack-a-mole, spamming, and pre-casting so that's about as reactive as you'll get these days. (Pre-BC and infinite mana for the most part, there was a lot more weight on reactive behavior versus sustainable HPS.)

I don't normally side with the Monkey, but he's right on the money here and in his original post.  I'm a tank who enjoys tanking and always has.  Prot for Life and whatnot.  I'll tank anything.

But threat doesn't scale and hasn't done for a godly long while.  Warrior tanks get fucked and fucked and fucked and fucked and it's been a mountain of hard fucking for a while.  Pallies and druids are simply far better these days at generating and holding aggro simply due to the range of multi-threat options that they have.  Warriors, in comparison, are uber fucked, especially when you have to take stances into account.  I've always been a little bemused that a green geared pally can do better than me (when I'm not trying) when I'm geared like THIS. (Hmmm, Armory Europe is fucked at the mo.  I'm the only Silnakh in Europe.  Find me your own damn selves.)

I've put in a LOT of effort in getting the right gear and I actually physically dare anyone to say that I simply don't have the skills :  I really think Blizzard needs to take a look at Threat vs Damage again and have a wee think about how to make the game a little less work for the people playing it.  You know, those people who are not in the top 1% of total retardery.


...

No offence.

Just for info, this is where you lost your audience.  Right here.  In your first opening Salvo.  Because you're so wrong it hurts me inside.

I admire anyone who plays a tank in WoW.  I quit grouping with my Priest because healing in instances was much more work than play. 
Now my Minstrel in LOTR is a lot of fun in group play and I can heal without suffering from stress.

So Blizzard is happy only 1% of their guild playerbase has seen Illidan?  I dunno, WoW's instances just don't do it for me.  I guess I am teh weaksauce but they always seem to be too much trouble for the rewards you get.

In a group, I'll agree with you about the prot pally being dead weight if they're not tanking. Solo?  The only folks who think that are the ones who haven't tried it.   The problem 90% of people have is they try to take on mobs one or two at a time, just like every other class.  As a prot pally, if you're not taking on 3-4 even-level mobs at a time you're being so mana-inefficient that, yes, it'll take you forever to do anything.  It's also a LOT less boring that way.

Reading.  It's a place in England.*

Playing a Solo Prot Warrior IS boring.  I've done it for years and I'm afraid it's true.  That's why God invented the WoW-Playing-Wife.



*This bit is a note for myself, rather than anyone else.  I wonder if that's what confused Merusk..

Who said anything about warriors? Not me, I haven't played one in 10 months.

Um, Fordel did.  The guy you quoted.  You weighed in on the Pally, disagreeing, I weighed in on the Warrior, agreeing.

See how that works ?

There's a danger here which is when you quit WoW out of disgust for the clusterfuck that is the prot warrior spec and your wife the warlock was still merrily running around going pew pew pew and doesn't quite understand why you hate the game so very much.

Indeed.  Surely, however, that merely proves you made the wrong choice in a wife and you should dump the cheating bitch and start fucking your secretary ?

I mean, a wife that won't reroll for you isn't a keeper.

It's much more understandable now that you've edited to clarify what you were disagreeing with.  :-P  The way you originally responded it seemed like you thought I was talking about warriors in my post.

Like I said, I haven't done the warrior thing in 10 months, so I couldn't speak to them.  Just plain logic that it'd suck, because there's no way you can take on multiple mobs - what you're designed to do - and live, what with only potions to rely on.

Speaking of warlock wives... why to so many women play warlocks, anyway?  I think I know more (true) female warlocks than any other class, including hunters.

Just to be Super-Dooper Clear :  My Wife is a Holy Priest.  We 'solo' together because between us we make 1 normal person.

Sigh.

It's all about the Succubus. 

There are no shortage of warriors from 1-69, but there is a general shortage of tanks.

There aren't enough new tanks replacing quitting tanks. I use the term tank instead of warrior because there there are plenty of warriors.

Tanks and healers are the two classes whose rolls change dramatically once they reach 60+. From 1-60 or even 1-70 a warrior is usually specced for dps. When a player decides to respec for tanking, they realize soloing isn't as easy or maybe as fun as it used to be.

If they have never tanked before, and are running pugs, they can easily get discouraged at the difficulty of learning how to tank, not to mention being blamed for everything that goes wrong (for which they often are at fault, being unskilled and undergeared).

Being a decent tank requires researching the best gear & spec, reading forums/guides for ideas and help. Being a decent dps class in most cases requires hitting the same few buttons that you have been hitting for the previous 70 levels. You literally need to re-learn the game to tank well. The lack of grouping opportunities from 1-60 for instance runs exacerbates the problem.

Consequently a large portion of new warriors who level up to 70 end up PvPing, or just re-rolling/quitting, rather than speccing Prot and tanking.

I stopped reading after this retarded statement.  In fact tons of warriors I know rerolled shortly after hitting 70, many of them successful pre TBC raid tanks. 

I levelled to 70 ran around and did all the quests for decent tanking gear, got my 490def, 12k health and shotload of AC.  Because most of it wasn't purple it pretty much raped all my other stats (mainly AP) leaving my threat gen and rage gen  in the shitter.  Meanwhile all the DPS classes upped their DPS by huge amounts and adopted your additude.  I can deal with tanking being "hard" it was the hard+totally unrewarding part that was the problem.  I was able to be a great preTBC 5man tank with the best nonpurple gear I could find, post TBC I struggled to be a mediocre 5man tank with a few purples + the best nonpurple gear I could find. 

Raid tanks didn't get the shaft quite as bad as our single target threat was still decent but 5man tanks got the shaft in a big way.

I still stand by my previous comment.

If you truly believe that tanking is mechanically more difficult than it was pre TBC, you must have missed the fact that absolutely ZERO core tanking abilities have been added to the game for warriors (1 if you count devestate) ZERO for palladins (again, one if you allow for avenger's shield) and... ONE for druids (mangle).

In terms of mechanics, you are doing exactly the same thing you were doing pre TBC. Use bloodrage, shield slam, revenge, sunder,sunder, repeat (not an ideal rotation, but simple for the sake of example). The fact of the matter is that at the end game pre TBC (and even earlier for some guilds) if you were not using every GCD for agro, your dps would be capped by threat, you wouldn't meet the enrage timer and you'd wipe. You could repeat this ad nauseum with  50% stronger DPS, 50% more healing and 2000% more health on the tank but because you were capped by threat, the increase in DPS would just mean that they'd cap out earlier.

Exactly the same thing is happening in TBC. You have a fixed amount of threat which you can produce per second. DPS can not exceed this by more than a specific margin. If they do, they die.

Again, I repeat this, in terms of the mechanics of the game, NOTHING has changed.

In response to Paelos, who seems to think that Blizzard is out to get him by giving DPS the capacity to pull agro easier and that anyone who disagrees is an idiot, I point out that DPS could ALWAYS pull agro from any tank, myself and other included.  I don't understand where you're coming from with the notion that tanking was somehow more fun pre TBC. Seriously, it is exactly the same. You sit in front of a boss, keep shield block up every 5 seconds, and use shield slam, revenge, devastate and heroic strike whenever they're up. For 15 minutes. Pre TBC, this would be all you would do for a lage number of fights, while DPS and healers and whatever would go play with some gimmick. In the post TBC world, you get to play with that gimmick also. If anything, this is more fun and engaging.

The rate at which I or others clear content is irrelevant. The reason you're complaining about it is that you can not get your DPS to hold back on threat, lose agro and then either subconsciously blame yourself for the wipe, receive said blame from other group members or think that Blizzard is out to screw you. Fact of the matter is, tank threat scales slower than DPS because Blizzard balances around ideal raid situations where everyone has all possible -threat buffs. If they didn't, it would trivialize raid encounters. The problem isn't that your threat is too low, but rather that the DPS in your groups do not usually have Salvation, grace of the Air, a PvE -threat talent, and you do not have all the other raid buffs like kings, windfury, etc that increase your threat generation. Typical PuG or entry level raiding DPS doesn't care about these things and goes all out whenever. Paladins or druids have the exact same issues, except for the fact that their scaling is different. This is how the warrior class works.

Stupid people who can't not blow shit up for 5 seconds make the game not fun for others in crucial group roles.

With an amazing conclusion like that, how could you NOT hate me? At some point you might want to refute more of my argument than stating the mere fact that I represent 1% of the player base. You don't refute other arguments by pointing out that the people who make them belong to a marginal fraction of the population.

The notion that the bleeding edge guilds somehow play a different game is false. We play the same game. Same mechanics. Same everything. We just play it more.

If you do not believe that tanking should be an interactive and engaging role, then what exactly do you want it to be? Sunder twice and go grab a cup of coffee?

To apply the same analogy when you play TF2, do you want to be able to shoot your gun twice and watch as everyone around you magically falls dead?

At Ironwood: there is nothing wrong with either your skills or the game mechanics. Paladins and druids are better at AoE tanking. This is great. Warriors have better threat and mitigation issues for single targets as well as some tips and tricks for hard situations. I haven't really found a single point in the game where (playing my warrior) I said that I can not tank this. I can not tank Shattered halls over 3 AoEing mages like I can on my paladin. I accept this. I realize that different classes exist for a reason.

I do not believe that the tanks you want in your instances are quitting because tanking is too difficult. Just like healers aren't quitting because mob burst damage has scaled to the point where heroic trash will one shot a non-plate class. Tanks and healers are no longer doing PUGs because these are unnecessarily stressful and inefficient. They are either just doing guild runs, raiding, or not playing the game because those jobs required near perfect attendance and dedication, which is substantially more pressure than DPS roles.

Seriously, you've stopped tanking because it is too difficult? What about it is more difficult than previously? Please do elaborate. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing.

I still hold by the statement that while tanking is perhaps more stressful than before, it is not mechanically more difficult.

In response to Salamok.

I've already mentioned that threat scales less than damage because damage agro can be reduced by some large multiplier because of Blessing of Salvation AND tranquil air totem. This is the major difference from pre TBC. Pre TBC, tank threat was balanced around DPS only having (ideally) one  of BoS or TA totem. Now, it has to be balanced around DPS having (ideally again) both. This is huge, since it allows about 35% more damage done for the same threat. What does this mean? It means that the DPS in your 5 mans needs to hold back more. This is what makes it "hard". I'm going to say this again: you're not frustrated because your character's abilities are poorly balanced, but because you're playing with idiots. Play with smart people and you have a lot more fun.

The fact that there are more idiots in PUGs now is a different issue.

EDIT: When I make a generalized statement about tanks or healers doing something or other, I mean that the majority of the people that play the class do/do not act based on those motives. I'm sure that of the 9 million people, at some point some healer's mage got one shot by some trash mob in heroic Blood Furnace or where ever.Perhaps that healer decided at that point that "this game is dumb, fuck it". I don't think that this is responsible for the majority of healers who leave. Now if you added the fact that after dying that same mage was a dickface and started whining about not being healed fast enough or some such, and this kept going on for five months during which time the healer was slowly worn down by the pressures of being held accountable all the time for everyone, then yes, I do admit that this is a contributing cause of burn out. It is typically easily avoided by grouping with mages that are less retarded.

Also, that doesn't provide much validity to any counter argument you may want to make. Admitting you have no idea what I said after the first two sentences does not give strength to any additional commentary you provide.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with it (and it would appear that many do not) at least pretend that you read the thing  :-P

Are you even considering Healing Aggro ?  Because it seems to me you're not.

The problem is that is the way I have always played my warrior and without extreme group cooperation he can't tank worth shit.  In a 5man the Paly and the Druid don't take near as much group hand holding so in short warriors are seen as teh suck.  This simply makes the game no fun for a warrior who wants to tank.

Thunderclap is enough to over come healing agro in most situations. There are few pulls where you get more than 4 mobs, and since healing agro is split between them all, rotating through with sunder/shield slam/whatever and keeping up thunderclap will hold agro in 99% of the cases. Before thunderclap was added to defensive, this was substantially harder, yes. However they realized their error and fixed it.

Combine that with good use of intervene and healing agro is usually not a problem. Note, this does not apply to situations clearly meant for AoE. For example, no you won't hold agro on the packs of flayer things (before and after the second boss. The ones with the elf using AE or Blizzard) in Botanica. There you're meant to hold the elite, while some AoE class clears those.

But for most other situations, healing agro can be managed appropriately.

I don't think pallies and druids are better tanks overall than warriors because warriors simply get much better itemization for pure mitigation and have far better single-target threat generation. However, our multitarget tanking abilities suck some shit even after getting thunderclap. I love having a prot-pally or a bear tank as my OT in Kara, because they're just way more versatile, but for anything that hits extremely hard I'm the guy who ends up standing in front of it because I have far more chance of simply not being hit.

Getting geared for raiding fucking sucks if you're not kinda lucky. It's expensive and a pain in the ass to get over 490 defense and 12000 HP unbuffed in blues. Not all of us really feel like grinding that bullshit Netherwing trinket or paying through the nose for a darkmoon deck. I also think that warriors are just expected to do better for some reason. I'm at 11700ish HP unbuffed and 498 Defense at the moment, with okay dodge/parry/block %. I was tanking a Heroic mech run and I just could not keep ahead of this fucking warlock in the pug. He bailed halfway in saying I wasn't "geared enough". Seriously, what the fuck, how about not spamming your more threat-intensive spells while there's no pally or shammy in the group to cover your ass?

Thunderclap ?

Are you serious ?

What kind of Nuclear Fart Thunderclap are you managing ??

Sure, I actually USE it (combined with Piercing Howl and Demoralizing Shout) to keep them stuck to me and, if that fails, not moving very fast, but I'm seriously skeptical that you're going into Illidan and keeping healing aggro control using Thunderclap.

Personally, a Prot Talent that added threat to Cleave would have been fucking helpful.  Sundering Cleave.  That's the ticket.

Okay now see that's not a problem with the game. Contrary to popular belief, in a situation like heroic Mech, where most of the tanking is on single targets, a Prot Pally or Feral druid does not generate that much more threat (in fact, paladins and druids tend to be worse in single target threat generation at that gear level). The major problem there is that the guy is an idiot and doesn't know how to hold back, not that your gear level is too low.

I assure you that if you took any warrior/pally tank in any possible gear set up that they could not keep agro over any DPS class going all out in a 5 man situation. Maybe a druid in T5 tanking an T6 accessories (T6 tanking provides too much mitigation for rage gain). But that's a useless artificial scenario. The game is designed so that DPS classes HAVE TO HOLD BACK. Otherwise DPS would be the most mindless job ever.

edit: to spell gud

I've noticed a severe lack of warrior tanks in our guild.  We have one.  Just one.  He is the alpha and the omega of doing Karaz runs.  It drives me nuts because we have a few other warriors (just a few,) and they are not tank specced at all, nor do they ever want to tank.

My far off goal is to level up a warrior to help, but like sombody else said (Ironwood or Paelos, not sure,) I'm sure I'm way over my head there.  Leveling up to 70 will be just fine I'm sure.  I'll twink like a billionare gold seller, but once I get there, the task of getting good items, rep, heroics, and just learning to tank correctly may be more than I can handle along with all my other alts and interests.

I just recently went back to my Paladin for my main just so we'd have a consistent healer for raids.  Yes, I am playing a Holy Paladin that is geared just for healing and he kicks ass at it.  In groups = awesome.  Outside of groups = painfully slow!

Anyway, that's just how far I'll go to "take one for the team."

Illidan is a single target. No I do not use thunderclap at all on a single target (my OT keeps up imp. thunderclap).

In 5 mans, if you take imp. clap (can't see why you wouldn't) it does ~350-400 threat per target hit every 6 seconds. Assuming you're being hit by enough targets where its necessary (3 or more) you have the rage to use it every cooldown. Combine this with your normal threat abilities and focused DPS and healing agro should not seriously be an issue. For two targets, cleave is just fine(it's not bad threat actually, and doesn't take a global cooldown), along with some tabing between targets and the occasional taunt. For more than 5 targets, yeah you need CC or something. Besides 2 pulls in SH, how often are you tanking more than 5 targets? Even then, with focused DPS it is entirely possible, although you might need to intervene a couple times.

Imp. thunderclap is a staple 5 man tanking skill.

I think tanking is pretty fun as long as your groupmates aren't utterly incompetent, and it's miserable if they are because in the end you get blamed for not holding aggro. The gear part isn't nearly as bad as it used to be...there's tons of great tank gear out of instances, but if you're one of those poor bastards cursed for drops, you'll be doing a LOT of runs. The good news is that even then the game can't deny you some good gear because of rep rewards. At the very least you can get one of the best epic shields in the game (Crest of the Sha'Tar) and the best blue quality tank legs in the game (Timewarden's Leggings).

After that though, it's rough.

That.

Knock Yourself Out (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Earthen+Ring&n=Silnakh)


No idea why my shoulders ain't there.  Heh.

In fairness, I did understand your previous post, I just really, really think you underestimate the amount of target cycling that has to be done and how unfun MOST OTHER people find it.  There aren't that many classes that need to and, in the case of healers, there are UI components that help them to do so !

Why, for example, are tanks never able to have a tanking table like healers with f1-f5 for the different targets in the default UI ?

Seriously, Prot Tank For Life and I'm telling you, I understand entirely why it's now considered deeply unfun.

Warlock is my choice for DPS in groups and, well, solo too.  So so versatile.  Everytime I'm solo'ing/farming with mine I get calls to help with an instance or group.  The other day I got called into a PUG to take down Ruul in SMV.  The enitire time we fought him, I had to keep holding back because I was watching the threat meter and was right behind the tank.  I was able to throttle my output to make sure Ruul didn't come after me, because that's not a good thing.  It is easy with a warlock.  Just stop doing direct attacks and let your DOTs tick.

This was all with a mage in the group too.  :-D  The tank somehow didn't know I was there during the fight and asked where I was.  I said, "Right behind you on the threat meter."

I swear some players think there is some big fictional cookie they get for out DPS'ing anyone around regardless of how many times they cause a wipe.  Perhaps they just sleep better knowing they got a 3500 crit!  It's just weird.

I liked Andormu's Tear but the lack of stamina just fucking killed me. Go get http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28407 from the Arcatraz and replace it.
If you still have it I recommend swapping our your necklace for the Mark of the Ravenguard necklace from Sethekk Halls.
Get the Aegis of the Sunbird off the second boss in Botanica and slap +18 stamina on it.

If you still have it or haven't gotten it, replace the adamantine figurine with Dabiri's Enigma since you're using the Collosus figurine. Popping both trinkets means a pretty much guaranteed 120 HP back every time something hits you.

The boots are the real bitch. The only real upgrade available to you for tanking out of a 5-man is Heroic Mana Tombs, where a very nice pair of socketed tank boots drop. Off the first boss even if I recall.

Your gear is completely acceptable for the level of content that you're doing. I don't think that anyone could argue that you don't have the gear for it. I understand that for some people, cycling through multiple targets may be tedious and frustrating. Personally, I enjoy it and stuff. As for the table thing, I've though about that as well. Why can we only have one focus target? I mean really. For myself, I've created macros which target mobs based on their raid symbols and stuff and that works pretty well when I need it.  But I'll admit that I'm not representative of most, largely because of my focus on the technical aspect of the game (press 5 now, move 2 feet, use item 4, etc)

To be fair though, a large part of the game is tedious (one of the reasons why I'm highly critical of their design system). For example healing is not much more involved than tanking. DPS is even worse, unless the only think you want are the most big numbers in the shortest time period, which typically leads to you tanking the mob for the rest of your health bar.

I'd prefer more situational or reactive abilities - like revenge and overpower but for every class and with about 10 more conditionals added.Or perhaps some combo chains with larger scale effects.  The fact that they won't do this is another matter.

EDIT: If you're doing heroic MT for the boots, grab the ring from the second boss as well. http://wowhead.com/?item=27822 Very nice for any of the slots. http://wowhead.com/?item=27817 is a nice ranged slot as well.

more or less the same specs (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Kilrogg&n=Salamok) I have, looks like i had my max mitigation/block gear on, my AP can be higher than that if I ditch the increased block.  I had fun collecting gear and levelling once it got to the actual tanking part I managed to tank enough to figure out it wasn't me and then just stopped playing.  After 6 months of not logging on I think I am finally ready to cancel my account.


Funny I didn't mind cycling through targets at all preTBC it's the post TBC must complete cycle every 3 seconds that sucks.

In terms of spec, I highly recommend getting 1-Handed Weapon mastery and vitality.

Bot of those are a substantial threat increase over unbridled wrath and piercing howl. Intervene sort of makes howl unnecessary for tanking since you can always intervene/intercept to whatever the mob is going for. Also if you're going into fury at all, I'd suggest Cruelty over booming voice. The extra radius and duration for the shouts is relatively useless (a savings of 5 rage). Cruelty on the other hand is 5% more threat and more rage.

Seriously, where are my fucking shoulders ???

The main reason IMO is that pvp warriors no longer have to tank in order to gear up.  Warrior is the most gear dependant class, and the one that shines the most as their gear improves.  Pre-BC you HAD to raid in order to get good gear, or grind to GM to get the weapons which was hard in itself without getting good gear from raiding.  Now you don't have to step one foot in an instance to gear up for pvp/dpsing so all those warriors that were forced to tank in order to raid in order to get their ass kicking gear simply don't bother with it anymore.  Thats why you see so many feral druid tanks, their ass kicking spec is also their tanking spec, so they simply pick up tanking gear when they can and they can easily play that role for instances and even raids.

Generally, a Warrior's spec severely limits his play options.

Prot specced: welcome on raids/5 mans. Suck at farming/questing, suck at PvP.

DPS spec: Great in PvP, great for farming/questing. Ignored for 5 man runs, say goodbye to heroics without a supporting guild. Generally unwanted for raiding unless your guild is cool and/or has a raid on farm status.

Many tanks spend 100g+ a week on respecs. I generally spec dps on weekends, prot during the week. Takes 1-2 hours a week of farming ore to pay for this. My hunter by comparison generally respecs once every 6 months and does his job well (dps) in any environment.

There is a very very strong bias AGAINST dps warriors when it comes to 5 mans, especially heroics. I don't even try to get into a group as dps when im specced dps. Your not wanted/needed, and you threaten the rolls for the Prot specced warrior if there is one.

Consequently, when I'm Prot specced and tanking, the last thing I want in a PuG is another warrior rolling on plate. Most of the items I want from 5 mans are things I have been farming forever, its not even worth running if I have to roll against someone. I love having a second warrior if he is a friend or guildie though.

DPS warriors are generally not wanted in raids. You have to have a good relationship with your guild already in place to make your main a dps warrior. I have never seen a guild recruiting dps warriors, although I'm sure it has happened.

All these various restrictions placed on warriors based upon their specs tend to weed out people from the class quickly.

I spend 100g a week respeccing on my hunter, and im sure every other class that raids and pvps seriously does the same.  The difference is i can farm on either spec.  Sure i could show up to raids with my pvp but then my guild leader would wonder why i went from top 3 in dps to below the top 10, and i could pvp with my raid bm spec but when my 5v5 drops from 2100 to 1800 id have to explain why i couldnt silence, scatter or frost trap with entrapment.

...I haven't respecced since...Jesus, BC coming out.

Yea I never did much arena with my hunter.

I'll focus on these questions. To answer what I'm trying to tank these days, I've just started our SSC run after farming Kara, Gruul, and Mags. I have all Kara gear with 3-T4 pieces and the Engineer's Tanking Hat. I'm only missing the Breastplate for T4.

I don't think Warrior tanking should be 2 shots and kick back. I do think there is a better balance between being constantly stressed out on simple pulls due to threat not shooting up. Is that a DPS problem? Sure, to a degree. To another degree, there's a lot of frustration when mobs or bosses do a ton of dodge/parry/whatever on your hits. Tanking gear doesn't have a lot of +hit on it, and I think it should.

I haven't stopped tanking myself, as I enjoy the leadership and the challenge. I have watched about half the warriors I tanked with in BWL quit, however. They all went to arenas or solo and never looked back. They simply got tired of dealing with the stress. Life on the DPS side is much easier and incredibly more rewarding in the solo, pvp, and even raid realms if you can get in. Prot warriors only get one choice on where to be effective. These were the same tanks who helped me farm BWL. Only one of them was a bad technical tank, so I'm not sorry he rerolled a shaman. The rest were solid players.

I think you are confusing technical difficulty with stress. I also think it speaks volumes that you admit we're not putting out any more threat than we used to before TBC. Does this not seem insane to you? It completely makes people want to just shrug and say fuck it. It also creates a huge barrier to entry for new tanks. Not to mention most of the stupid designs that Blizzard made with certain bosses being blatant DPS races, and you get a maximum of stress on people. People don't want stress in a game. They don't want to walk away from the stresses of their job or kids or girlfriend or general life only to log into a game to get stressed out on your free time. That last point is where I think the 1% get lost. Those people don't have a ton of stuff going on stressing them out in their life, so they don't have to worry about stress in the game.

I'll take a bit of a shot in the dark as to what kind of person you are, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, which will sort of benchmark your life stresses. My guess is that you are probably in your late teens-early 20s. You are unmarried, in school, have no job or a very flexible 40 hours or less job. You don't go out much during the evenings and your life isn't very scheduled outside of the game. You probably raid 5 days a week minimum, and it's probably for about 4 hours a session or more. Where am I on that? Now, I know there is a tendency here to tell everyone you're a raiding fiend and fucking models, but if you lie to us, we'll know.

EDIT: Oh and I forgot one. You probably don't travel much.

now I'm fucking jealous, can I go back to a time in my life when my greatest day to day responsabilities revolved around a game?  I want to be peter pan ftw!

I think you should take a week off and give my poor newbie rogue some cash!

The concept of "tanking" was built by retards. Who the fuck ever thought it'd be interesting gameplay to make a class's main function be to get the piss whipped out of it by mobs? I mean, seriously, my job is to be a goddamn punching bag? That is not what I think of when I think of warriors, and it's why I stopped playing warriors. It's lazy, stupid gameplay.

It's the one thing wrong you can place the blame squarely on the MUD days.  Hell, a lot had a /tank emote built-into the code base.

/tank

"You agree to tank."
"%n agrees to tank. What is %s, nuts?"
"You say "I'll tank %t"
"%n says "I'll tank %t"  They must be suicidal.

Though, to be honest, the "rescue" command was MUCH cooler than taunt.

This is all very interesting to me, since I'm leveling a warrior strictly to tank right now.

A little history: I had an alliance warrior before, and I was assembling a tanking set, when I got the Hand of Ragnaros drop.  It ruined my life, because I never wanted to be a dps warrior, but when your guild gives you a legendary, you damn well use it.  I rerolled Horde (after the guild broke up twice, and I no longer felt obligated) and leveled a mage to 70.  It's fun, but I really want to just tank, dammit.  So I'm starting from scratch with that idea in mind.  I guess now is when you people tell me to quit now while I'm ahead  :-D

I'm trying to think back 17 years to my D & D days...the Warriors didn't "tank" mobs did they? Maybe in a single mob encounter, yes, but for multiple mobs, I remember everyone had to fend for themselves no matter what class.

You should do great. The people that roll Warriors WANTING TO TANK will find plenty of opportunities to do so, whether casually or hardcore.

Just one word of advice: PLASTICS....err i mean MINING. 5 or 6 stacks of Outland ores a week will pay for all your re-speccing if you decide to go that route.

you will find plenty of opportunities but you wont find them very enjoyable.

They pretty much did, depending on the GM -- your physical types generally placed themselves between the squishies and the bad guys, or used RP mechanics (taunting my calling the goblins mother's bad names, for instance), or simply bum rushed them and the GM decided "Angry huge guy with sword in my face wins out on Bad Guy's 'Who the hell should I wallop' list over 'Weird Looking dude in a robe over there'".

Later on, as you party gained reputation, things changed. Your bad guys tended to learn what the wizard looked like, and that he liked to throw fireballs (so if they couldn't get to him, they stayed close to his buddies to deny him a clean shot). After awhile, the bad guys tended to equip Anti-Biggest-Threat devices. (Did you know shatter spells can seriously fuck over ANYONE who likes to keep his poisons and alchemist's fire in class jars ON his person? Wands and scrolls of shatter are quite cheap).

At least in my games, multiple mobs tended to try to grab who was nearest or who seemed the biggest target -- but my fighter types were clever about keeping themselves in the way, and taking feats and skills that allowed them to shape the battlefield.

For me and a lot of warriors I'm sure, the questions of "What am I getting out of tanking?" vs "What am I getting out of DPS/Spec?" is why fewer people are tanking. I expect casual tanks will become near nonexistent with 2.3 adding S1 gear to BG's.

Yea in a group is what I mean.


If your not the tank as a prot pally in a group, you either get to spam your shitty Flash of Light (which in itself is another SUPER FUN JOB, paladin healing) or you get to auto attack for a pittance of damage.

That's what it comes down to, 5 mans need 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps.

A spell DPS specced shaman, druid and priest can all still heal if need be, so they have 4 possible slots open to them.

A Feral druid, if he has a decent healing suit, can fill all 5 slots.

A Prot specced tank? He can fill 1 slot and only 1 slot. If that slot is already filled, he gets to find a new group or log onto his DPS alt.

It's all about the Succubus. 


[/quote]

I demand the succubus all the time  :-D

I demand the succubus all the time  :-D
[/quote]
My wife's a warlock in game. And I also demand the Succubus. The whip noises + moaning amuse me.

As I spammed repeatedly in beta, there shouldn't be a tanking talent tree for warriors.  You're allowing people to cut off both legs and their  left arm (i.e. ability to do anything but PvE tank) just so they have the strongest right arm (PvE tanking) in existence.  And then they go and balance the PvE game around having a legless, one-armed ubertank available at all times.  OK the analogy sucked but you get the drift.

One reason there's a shortage of tanks because there's a shortage of people who are actually willing to play EverQuest warriors in WoW.  Get rid of the Protection tree, make it so any warrior with skill can tank with a gear-swap and you greatly improve the situation I think.  Fuck, I remember Furor's first review of WoW back before talents even existed, and all he could talk about was how great it was that you didn't have to be a worthless invalid at every other part of the game to be a good tank.  WoW was the bomb before talents got put in.

There's also the fact that tanks are still more important than any other character in a group or raid.  So you need to be/will be expected to be the most hardcore player in your group, which is a lot of stress.  And time.

Same is true of priests too.  Getting blamed for not healing sucks - especially when it's a DPS class overnuking or a Fury warrior not picking up untagged mobs.

I cannot wait until an mmo developer replaces the half-assed taunt/aggro mechanic with formations, positioning and collision.  Something that runs past you to get to the squishy behind you should seriously leave themselves open to getting fucked from behind.  NPC AI should be very cautious about letting something get behind them, and very aggressive about taking advantage of someone showing their back

Interesting.  It vaguely reminds me of an ability tanks had in Shadowbane during pvp - "hold the line" - where they could create a "barrier" between themselves and some object if I recall, forcing melees from having immediate access to the casters in the group.

Now I remember. We used miniatures and a big sheet of plastic with a square grid on it. We drew out the dungeon as we explored it, and used miniatures to position ourselves in the fights. The physical classes would position themselves between the mobs and the squishies, and unless the encounter called for mobs comming from multiple directions the DM usually kept the mobs on the tank(s).

Sorry for the late reply, I had class.

I agree with you that it is a stressful job. Every aspect of raiding post TBC has become more stressful. You are correct, in my posts I have commented that tanking is not mechanically more difficult now. I'll agree that the stress may lead to burn out. I appreciate that you've taken the time to respond instead of going TL;DR

As for myself I'm a med student in my 20s, work part time in a hospital and go to school full time (I figure you'd gather as much from med student). My girlfriend also plays this game, also raids, and is in my guild. She's the offtank. We currently raid 2 nights at 4 hours, but that's because this (everything) is now farm content. It used to be 4-5 nights, and for most guilds this is actually on the low side. Ironically, I know of a lot of 'casual' guilds who also raid this much but for various reasons (largely commitment) they are bottlenecked on progression. I'd like to see a fix for that, but I don't think that it's coming. Yes it is a large commitment. It also helped relieve the stress of "ZOMG LEARN TEH BONESES" without the nasty aftermath of binge drinking/drug abuse/whatever. I go out more than I used to now, and have since cut back on my WoW because of 1. Going out really is more fun if done responsibly and 2. There isn't much left to do anymore. I might quit altogether soonish but that would be because my significant other is even more bored with the game than I am (I spend more time trolling forums than playing). And I have no idea how people can raid 5 times a week and keep a girlfriend (unless she also does the same).

Incidentally, no I do not travel much. I could see how doing that often, whether for work or other reasons would make raiding at this level much harder. Hardcore raiding is not for everyone (read, people with serious commitments likely to arise from being past your 20s), and you should probably consult a doctor before starting (they'll tell you it's highly detrimental to your health and physique). I don't think that the 1% (I actually like this way of putting it) are somehow all maladjusted, socially inept losers, but it does take a commitment (largely of consistent attendance) beyond what is typical. This doesn't make them 'better' at the game (no, I don't think that anyone not at the T6 raiding tier is a scrub) but it does mean that they take it more seriously (perhaps too much so, granted that it is a video game). But if you think of the massive amounts of television the average North American watches a week, I'm certain that you can carve out the 20 hours required to raid. Of course, TV doesn't require you to watch it from 7-11 Monday-Thursday like a religion, but that's another issue.

Ok so that pretty much answered my question that you mostly matched the criteria of what I considered to be the target hardcore raiding demographic. I'm honestly at a loss that if you didn't meet those criteria, if you could ever play this game in such a way. I don't think it's at all possible.

It is good that you are shaving down the game time to do other things. The outside world is in fact more enjoyable and travel is one of my cornerstones of happiness. You will rarely find me in my apartment on the weekends. I'm usually at the lake, golfing, ballgames, or various other party type places. This precluded me from raiding at all on the weekends, so that meant I was never involved in any raiding guilds. However, I did create a raiding alliance with people who also enjoyed their weekends, and we sem-hardcore our way through stuff. It's a nice medium I think.

I don't raid weekends. Never have, probably never will. Weekends are for doing stuff with people, or if not that, then cramming for anatomy/pathology/some other course with lots of cramming.

You are correct however. It is very difficult to raid without fulfilling a certain set of criteria. The ones you mentioned are pretty much accurate. Flexible schedule, partner willing to either play with you/not see you for large chunks of time, largely predictable life, etc.

Sounds perfect for retirees. How about it. The next target demographic.

I just did a Heroic Mech run with 4 supremely epic'd out people (mix of Tier 5/6 level gear) as my warrior in 2 pieces of Kara gear (I cannot buy a fucking tank drop from there) and blues. 4 wipes not counting the 3 the shammy accidentally caused with his totems pulling mobs (guess who hasn't stepped foot inside a 5-man in a while). I just could not keep up with aggro, and these players were actually very very good. They tried their damnest to turn the DPS down so they didn't just blow clean past me in threat, and I know this because they were staying just below aggro gain on my threat meter most of the time, which means they WERE watching (otherwise they'd have simply blown clean past me). I just couldn't keep up, because one gigantic crit from the elemental or enhancement shammy and game over, 2k+ aggro spike right over me and there is no way in hell I'm getting it back unless they simply stop all DPS and let the heroic mob pound them for 3-4 seconds while I desperately tried to shield slam and heroic strike it back.

We completed it and they were all really good sports about it (all four of them said they've had far worse groups with far better geared tanks. I hope they weren't just lying to make me feel better) despite the stupid cloth healer boots dropping (no priest), but man, how is that for scaling? I mean, having kara-class armor wouldn't make me generate any more threat for the most part, so it's down to the weapon...would having a tanking weapon with 10-15 more DPS really make me generate that much more threat?

It has always literally amazed me that the same people who created a game as awesome as WoW could sleep at night with the sheer fuck that is the Protection line for warriors.  It's so fucked that even people who like tanking (like me) don't want to spec in it. 

You can argue about tanking mechanics all you want, but they are what they are.  I don't know how you could make tanking more fun that it is, really.  The problem is that warriors basically give up the rest of the game.  There's nothing you can do outside tanking anymore.  There were at one time, some very highly respected tanks, in highly respected guilds who were giving feedback to the effect of, 'Protection is fine.'  These people should be killed.  Protection isn't fine.  It wasn't fine. And it won't be fine until they completely unfuck it.  I love tanking as much as anyone.  It is a lot of responsibility, but if you're okay with that it's fine.  It's not tanking that's broken imo.  It's the cockblock from experiencing anything but an instance after you spec prot.  Threat scaling, I don't know about.  I haven't played in months.

At one time, when they were implementing shield slam into the game, they had it on test with attack power as the modifier.  I thought to myself, "wow finally!  i'll be able to spec prot and do damage with a gear swap."  But then they changed it to be modified by shield block value before it went live.  Those same respected warriors all cried bloody murder at the thought of collecting another set of gear in order to pvp.  (yea, these same guys believed it was fun to pvp as a prot warrior.)  Sp essentially it meant that it made no sense for a prot warrior to collect any crit/ap gear since shield block value was the only thing to up their damage, and gear with shield block value has no crit or ap.  The only problem with that is normalization or no it's real fucking hard to hit something for 200 with your one hander and get enough rage to do a god damn thing.  And when your only source of burst damage takes 4-5 whacks to use, it's pretty obvious at the speed of WoW pvp you're gonna die no matter who you're fighting.

How will they fix it?  I don't know, and I don't care.  I waited for 3 years for them to fix it, and I gave up waiting.

I realize I am the odd man out here.

I love protection as a warrior.  Also - with the exception of arena - I have had considerable success in pvp as a protection warrior - great fun.

Yup, protection warriors are not damage dealers - but as damage soakers - they can lead the charge, and occupy nodes of strategic value greatly enhancing their threat.

Restating my position earlier - generally guys are not going to play their warrior - unless they know they can raid.  And raid tank positions are fewer now thn they were pre-BC.

Someone posted here recently that taunt was changed to permanently put you at the highest threat + 5 or something in BC. Is that true because it should make keeping up with agro a little easier. If your shaman gets a 2k spike you just taunt and adopt all his agro. Or was the person who posted about the change blowing smoke?

10 sec CD on Warrior Taunt; lot of spike DPS can happen in 10 secs, especially with Shamans.

Anyway; if tanks have to spam taunt at every CD, then something's wrong (and yeah, threat scaling for Prot Warriors is pretty fucking bad atm).

In reply to some stuff.

1. Taunt gives you a threat value equal to the highest threat target currently an forces the mob to attack you for the duration of the debuff (3 seconds). In order to remain primary agro after this time, you need to generate 10% more threat than the previous value. A complete explanation of threat and agro mechanics can be found  here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Threat

With extremely overgeared DPS in 5 mans, taunt can be a lifesaver. However by the T5/T6 gear level, DPS has scaled to the point where they require salvation and full raid buffs on the tank to maintain agro parity. Incidentally, this makes 5 mans somewhat harder at a gear level above that which they are intended for. When I do them, I swap out 11  items for DPS gear, which increases both the damage I take (more rage) and the damage I do (more rage). This is not really an option for people tanking these places at the intended gear level, and with non ideal group compositions (read no paladin), this is a flaw in game mechanics.

Then again, they've stopped balancing this game properly for a long time, especially because they're trying to balance both PvP, 5-man PvE and raid level PvE on one ruleset. Recent changes to windfury totem and instant attacks substantially decreased the viability of MS warriors in high end raiding while changing nothing in high end arena - most teams still have a warrior and a shaman, and the warrior still hamstring with a windfury totem up. Not for the proc, but because hamstring is damned useful and heroism is really overpowered in 5v5 arena.

Again, I digress. I've realized that Prot is good only for tanking in groups. It is not a solo tree. It is not intended to be a solo tree. It will never be a solo tree. It is awful for PvP. No really. GOD AWFUL (speaking mostly about Arenas, since AV is a PvE battleground, and in WSG, AB and EoTS ranged classes are largely superior to melee anyways). I've come to terms with this because this is true for most classes. Some classes have shitty specs that are only good for raiding. For example, resto druids, resto shaman and holy paladins and priests can not solo any better than I can (as prot). Prot pallies are just as bad in PvP as I am, and PvP specced DPS classes are clearly worse in PvE by a margin of about 30% (largely because PvP specs don't have threat reducing talents, which is pretty much the only factor that limits DPS at this point). This DOES NOT exculpate Blizzard from fixing the "PvE" only specs.

I realize that saying, "in order to have fun with your character you need to respec twice a week" is not a valid response. Just because a lot of us do it, does not mean we like it. I think the major problem is their attempt to balance PvE and PvP using the same ruleset. They do this at the same time as they make PvE and PvP more and more distinct (ie. Arenas, which create artificial situations for maximum min/max).  I can't say I know how to fix it, but I think WAR (Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning) might be on the right path. If you tie the PvE into the PvP and create different rulesets for both, you might not have this problem of "my tank is useless for anything but tanking". Which is  especially painful when the other two tank capable classes have much more utility: feral druids can DPS and tank with the same spec (and solo very well) while prot pallies can at least buff (extremely well) and retain substantial healing capacity (with the right gear and a willingness to use potions). Prot warriors can...

Okay, lemme float this.

In TBC, DPS can gear up for more DPS better than tanks can gear up for more threat.

So if DPS and tanks both play exactly the same as they did before, the tank will lose aggro.

And the DPS will say, "I haven't changed anything, you just suck!" to the tank, and the tank doesn't know enough about core tanking mechanics and the DPS's build to point the finger where it should be pointed.

Hence the perception that tanking gets harder.

 
This has always been the case. Except now, the rate at which your capacity to outscale tank threat in a non-ideal raid situation increases faster than previously. This is a fundamental problem with how they design the game. They balance it so that when my guild is killing Illidan the fight is not trivial for us. They don't balance it around the fact that when 3 of our DPS go do a pug Heroic mech run they aren't pulling agro with auto attacking.

And this is a problem because I'm certain that there are more than 100 times more people killing Pathelon the Calculator than there are killing Illidan Stormrage. Core mechanics based around a situation which does not occur in the most common gameplay method (5 mans) is going to lead to stuff like this.

I see a lot of people try and become a tank and easily level a warrior to 70, learn the class in prot tanking mode, become very effective then hit the raiding gear wall. Raid composition often denies these aspiring tanks from progressing simply because it is more efficient to poach a prot warrior from another guild than to have one of your existing players gear up. Early level 70 dungeons that are quite limiting on party composition (such as Karazahn, but also some 5 mans) don't make matters easy - especially when the aspiring tank is less geared than the rest of the party. In the raiding guild I was in, I saw a number of people try, get really very good at tanking then fair at the level 70 gear stage. Most are now playing tanking druids that they subsequently leveled, since it was easier to accommodate the druid as a sub-optimal healer and have them collect tanking gear than it was for them to be a sub-optimal DPS warrior collecting prot gear.

So I think that there are many potential warrior tanks out there, but the design of the raiding game is conspiring against them succeeding.

You have to keep in mind that some MOBs are not tauntable. 

What was really depressing on that run is that we had a wipe on one of the Arcane Destroyers because I had to choose between interrupting an ability (Charged Fists. Makes it hit for 3+ ADDITIONAL damage for a period of time, the 3k also hits anyone in melee range) and staying ahead in threat. It casts this spell maybe every 2-3 seconds after my shield slam cools down, and it's a QUICK casting spell (1.5 seconds from the looks of it). Thanks to the Global Cooldown I was constantly missing the interrupt and eating huge spike damage because I just couldn't stop my skill rotation lest I lose aggro. The enhancement shammy picked up the slack on the interrupt and it was okay after that, but good god it was frustrating.

What's funny is that the bosses were largely no problem (ignoring the Nethermancer, who changes targets after blasting the primary aggro on the list with a huge slowdown/knockback) due to the super-exxxxxtreme DPS. Pathaleon was a joke compared to the trash waves before him I could just barely control. He died so hard he barely got to summon his adds.

You know, I've noticed this quite a bit in TBC.  Many times the trash fights before a boss were WAY harder than the actual boss.  Also, mini-bosses before the last boss are often times several kinds of hard while the last big boss is cake.  Black Morass and Mana Tombs come to mind right away, but I know there are many more examples.

Most heroics used to be this way.  Some of the trash pulls in heroic SL belonged in mount hyjal.

Trust me, Mt. Hyjal trash is even worse relatively. 8-12 waves of THE MOST ANNOYING TRASH EVER. So much of it and so much to tank. Makes my eyeballs bleed. Then the boss comes and it's a large trash mob that you beat on for loot. That said, heroic SL trash was brutal without a dwarf priest. The fearing fel overseers were extremely difficult back when we needed to do it to get into TK. Random fears and one shotting MS was a little much. My GF and I eventually learned the hidden timer and got pretty good at predicting when they would fear (90% accurate or so), which eventually led to use running the place 5x each to get everyone attuned. The bosses themselves never posed a problem. That's shitty game design.

Seriously, this was the one part that I loved about Naxx. Please for the love of god do not put trash in instances where the trash makes your players want to kill themselves. If a game designer is reading this (not bloody likely), learn this. Trash should be short, fun and challenging. Not long, repetitive and extremely likely to turn your 110% performance into a wipe because of a  poorly implemented gameplay mechanic (fear).

What you're really saying here is that you don't perform near 100% most of the time and yet you overvalue your mediocrity. :P

There should be no trash in a group scenario. Even lesser encounters should offer significant enough rewards to be valued. There should not be any respawns in instanced dungeons either. File these stupid design ideas along side permadeath, corpse runs and xp loss.

I don't mind long trash if I have to fight it once. The guy that decided to put them on any respawn timer at all deserves to be sodomized.

I meant 110% performance in that there was nothing anyone could have done, proactively or reactively to avoid death. Just like sometimes, when you're fighting Mother Shiraz (one of the later Black Temple bosses) she parries your attack two times in a row and you die (parries in WoW reduce the time until your next swing). They're fixing that, because they realize that wiping because you rolled a 1 on some RNG is not fun.

But I agree, trash mobs are full of lose. Respawns, however, are pants on head (to steal Yahtzee's shtick) retarded. 

Not disagreeing with you but the point is you was you don't spam taunt as it is useless if you are already on top of the threat list.

You wrote this to imply there was something wrong with WoW and yet you had no probably doing it since whenever you started. As old as this genre is I still get surprised when people have their epiphanies, write their epitaphs, and never quite realize that until that point, they were having fun.

More people quit a game and move on before ever finishing it. But only MMOGs seem to compel the need for soap box departures.

Otherwise, everything said in this thread has been very educational. The lack of Tanks is a problem on my server and guild. We're 7th in size by 20-something in progress (families, grandkids, lives, slow summers, rare weekends, etc), and for those not yet raiding, getting a tank to help whether from the guild, the alliance, or just some PUG joiner is almost nigh impossible without a calendar.

I wrote it to imply something slightly different. I accept that fact that once you beat it, it ends. My problem with WoW is that 1. They claim to provide you with content that by definition, should be repeatable and 2. It's designed so that you never "beat" the game. The fact of the matter is, most good games are made to be repeatable/replayable long after you finish the main plot/goal/whatever. MMORPGs are especially likely to have this feature because of the fact that they have no end. It's supposed to be a massive time sink. That's what draws people to keep playing over and over: the carrot that's always dangling in front of you. Hell, look at D2. That game was designed so that it only started after you beat the thing 3 times (once per difficulty). How many people killed Diablo/Baal once and said "fuck it, it's just going to be more of the same".

The reason people write such long epitaphs about leaving MMOs is because they want to keep having fun. They don't want to throw away their toons that they've been working on for 2 years because they've run out of stuff to do. So they keep playing and playing, hoping that it will eventually become fun again. Then if it doesn't pick up after a while, they finally quit for good, bitter, jaded and burned out. And then they go to f13.net and bitch about it for years on end. I'll refer you to the SW:G threads and the general sense of disillusionment that fills this place.

Perhaps if at some point dynamic content was released which was non linear and could offer a new gameplay experience every time you ran it the people who come here would bow before the comming of this new (digital) Robot Jesus.

Don't pay any attention to Darniaq. He's still dramatizing his departure from SWG at least twice a week and that happened like two years ago. :)

You said you had an elemental AND an enhance shaman in that group and YOU were having to interrupt charged fist?

That is 2 dps classes right there that can interrupt it.



On the whole tank issue....I see people talk about not needing a threat meter till BWL pre-BC. I don't know of any guilds on the two realms I played on (one horde, one alliance) that ever used a threat meter, even my guild on Eldre'Thalas that was clearing Naxx.

This whole new idea that you HAVE to have a threat meter to kill a mob shows that either something is really wrong with the game mechanics, or that people are too fucking lazy to not go nuts to the wall from the second the mob goes into combat, or a combination of both.

Of course, I have not done any 25 mans cept a pug Gruul's at this point in BC so I don't know how much it is really necessary. I just know that the whole idea of having a "threat meter" pisses me off more than the e-peen DmgMeter tards that would wipe us on easy fights back in the day.

True but that barrier to entry existed when WoW was launched - the arrival BC has not changed that basic dynamic.  In fact - in some ways it is easier in BC - since resistances are no where as big as they used to be.  Pre-BC you could eliminate a lot of tanks right off the bat because their Fire resistance was awful going into MC etc.

It's mainly game mechanics that require it.  Trash pulls, yeah it's people being idiots. 

I'm curious how your guild did fights in BWL like Vael without a threat meter. Broodlord was a lot easier with one too, because of his threat reset.  Vael, however was designed to completely fuck people over if anyone but the tank pulls aggro, with the way he kills tanks and his breath weapon.  You had to make sure the next tank was up there in threat and make sure that no DPS (who HAVE to DPS hard to get the fight done before you run out of tanks.) get Vael to turn and breathe on the raid.

Broodlord was simply easier, because since ranged classes (other than hunters) didn't have a full aggro-wipe, they needed to watch themselves during the knock-back he's got that also reduces tank threat.  Ranged DPS too high on the list, and he comes blast-waving & cleaving through all of your healing and DPS, one-shotting most of them.

Threat meters were required raiding tools in my guild from MC on.  If you fucked up and pulled a boss off the tank and didn't have KTM installed, you were ridiculed and kicked from the raid.  We had a few really dumb mages and warlocks who loved to spam their spells until they were out of mana and couldn't understand why the raid leaders were pissed when the mob stopped attacking the tank and went straight to the row of cloth wearing artillery in the back.  For some reason I never had this problem as a mage because I knew that I generated aggro like mad and held back.  I can see having the threat meter up if you are a bunch of people who don't know each other very well or don't understand the game mechanics, but it is still no guarantee that someone isn't going to spam DOTs all over the place and cause grief for the rest of the group.

Three simple words which should have been used on any and every boss fight (which I found when I switch to alliance almost no one ever did): Wait For Assist.

On Vael, the infinite rage and energy meant that the only people who had a chance of pulling aggro were rogues and warriors. All rogues vanish at 23%, then go to town. Every non-current tank is execute spamming like mad. The fight really was not that hard for us, we learned it in 2 nights.

Broodlord was all about positioning for us.  If the tank was backed to a wall, there was no aggro lost from the knockback because you never actually got knocked back. Only casters who could pull aggro on that fight were warlocks, and they would just wand for the first 20% usually. This was back in the 8 debuff slot days, so dot-happy warlocks were not allowed. Mark+Sunder+CoS+CoE were the "allowed" debuffs on bosses for us.

I guess us "old time" horde raiders just don't understand why people seem to need threat meters because we all learned how to manage our aggro without having all this extra graphical math stuff getting in the way.

Because at the time, as a tank, it took the guesswork out of where you stood in relation to the other 4-5 tanks in Vael. Also, it simplifies your life and gives you a good benchmark on who is being retarded in your raid as a leader. Also, it takes away one aspect of leading by having to constantly manage everyone else's DPS. They can see it on the meter and know when they are supposed to back off.

In a word "simplicity." This game is long enough in raids without wiping due to idiot dpsers.

I don't know about his guild but my guild mainly just relied on individuals to have a feel for their own threat on vael. It took a while to learn it but we got it down in a  couple of days of trying and rarely lost a vael fight after the first kill. Mainly if I recall correctly our rogues had to learn exact positioning so as not to chain cleaves.

Same with Broodlord though broodlord took a lot less attempts due to no one wanting to have to reclear that fucking guantlet every attempt.

Bigwigs helped a ton as you got notice of when he knocked back in it and could feign/back off dps.

I believe our leaders relied on target's target addons for that. It took forever for our raid leaders to remember to set the target for ktm when enough of us had it installed. Of course with Omen you don't have to rely on a raid leader to set target. I like omen, and ktm, but the fact is many guilds got along pretty well fine up to naxx without really using it.

double post sorry :(

I know. This has been going on for years, at least as long as the time since I wrote my own at Crossroads of Britannia :) And I'm sure they were writing them in newsgroups prior and BBS's prior to that.

My point was that you had fun for a time. Blizzard doesn't claim anything. Players convince themselves repeating the same godblessed thing a hundred times a year is actually worth something. It's those same players that convince themselves something is worth time at all, and then by extension, cash instead of time. So blaming them for some faulty decision making in a game you willingly paid into for a far longer period than any other genre ever gets, well, it just seems silly.

I'm not condemning it. You've done more in WoW than most I know will ever see. And even at my just-about-Kara stage, I've done way too much to hit the Delete button on my Mage. But I've already left once, took a break, looked around, had some good times in things like Eve, LoTRO and a few betas, then went back to check it out. I've done that with a number of games. The games change, grow, all that thing. They're never finished by design so never finishable by players. So worth leaving and coming back to occasionally.

You may be done for good or just done for now. I just don't see how that's anything Blizzard did. Now, SOE, yea, they have a habit of finding ways to actively kick out players :)

Yepper. Like Decursive was almost a requirement for MC itself (not the whole thing, just, err, two of the bosses I think it was). Some hardcore VoIP dedicated Raider will yell opposingly, something about having to practice, put in the time, strict training, that sort of thing. But in the end, these tools make it less likely people will make one wrong move that fucks up the cumulative invested time of 40 people. Basically, they're stress reducers, relatively speaking.

People running Naxx before I stepped foot in MC, well, I don't wanna hear it :)

I want to say a couple of boss fights were actually built around the idea of everyone having decursive.

Decursive was a great tool. It simplified the monotonous and brain damaging role of a healer. Then they made fights like Chromagus in BWL and Noth in Naxx based around the assumption that everyone had decursive. Just like the latter fights were balanced around threat meters.

Trust me, threat meters are a GOOD THING. With them, your DPS can maximize their damage without going over (and causing a wipe from frontal cone attack number 4561) or going under (and causing a wipe because the boss hit the WTFPWN enrage timer). They are not stupid, not elitist and not superfluous. You are a better DPSer because you have and use a threat meter intelligently.  Just like boss mods and timers are extremely helpful. In fact, almost all bosses now are designed around you having timers and threat meters now. Blizzard assumes that you have and are using these things, otherwise the bosses would be too easy for people who did. That's pretty much the way the entire game is balanced. Assume that the players are pushing everything to the limit so that the 0.001% who actually do don't get bored. If it negatively impacts 80% of the rest, fuck them because in the end, the raider is king, amirite?

When I tank I pay attention to my TPS and it's really helpful for improving my threat generation, as my mage I don't pay attention to it really because I use Omen which gives you a big "STOP DPSING YOU RETARD" warning by making your screen pulse red. I love threat meters. I don't see a lot of reason to keep the thing on screen the whole time unless you're doing a retard watch and figuring out who keeps overaggroing and when.

I like how people complain about addons making the game stupid when the game is precisely so awesome to be because of the UI modification. I will never play another MMORPG unless it has as robust a system for UI modification as WoW.

We required certain mods for raiding -- mostly bare bones stuff that WoW has since installed as part of the base UI, warning stuff for the various boss moves so the MT/Raid Leader didn't have to waste time yelling "Okay, back up now".

I never used a threat meter, but I raided with my Hunter. I kept target-of-target up and if it ever became me, I FD'd out or took the death if it resisted. I rarely pulled aggro though, because I (and the rest of our raid) were smart enough to handle the "Wait for the attack call" command. Our tank usually had a lot of aggro.

Now the PuGs I've five-manned with -- threat meters would come in handy there, simply because most PuG tanks aren't all that good at maintaining threat.

Funnily enough, that's one of the first things I have to beat out of new Hunters in the age of everyone dancing just under the big *Aggro Gain* bar. (If you FD, it'll head to next highest on raw threat, which likely won't be your tank if your DPS are doing their job...)

Ah yes, what was the joke? "Feign Death Kills Priests"?

My take it on it -- and the take the groups/raids I'm in is that I'm only responsible for my own aggro, and since I don't have a big honkin' shield to hide behind, it's not worth the priest's mana to try to keep me alive when I have someone on me (this for bosses and such -- not your average trash). I'm not up to playing 3 second speed bump for a rampaging boss that's going to tear through my pitiful mail in about two hits -- mages can iceblock, priests can shield -- FD is all I have in terms of survival when the Big Bad comes knocking.

I don't get complaints on it, mostly because (at least in five mans) I'm very good at picking up stray trash with my pet (who, if I want, can snap aggro off of most of your average five-man tanks) and placing traps for stressed healers to hide behind. I find that makes your priests happy. "This ice trap is for YOU. You stand on it, and if something comes running at you, let it hit the trap". Saves wear and tear on the healers.

Raids are a bit different, of course, although I generally do see it as part of my job to help yank trash off the squishes -- especially the healers.

Ok I'll put it this way. Maybe the raiding guilds didn't use threatmeters up until TBC was released. Do they use them now? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I won't be the first to say this expansion was inspired all the way up until the raiding game. My god the new leveling areas were the best I've seen. Things actually made linear sense with quests and items and tradeskills. The leveling wasn't hard from 60-70, the new zones looked great except for the "let's make everything the same color" decision in a few, and the kicker is that the xp was fantastic.

Then, they broke all the raiding gear up to that point with blues and greens.
And, they knocked down everything to 25 man content, while adding a ninth class to everyone.
And, they made it so you had to go through a weeklong 10 man to get to 25 man content.
And, they made the first boss of Gruul's Lair harder than Gruul.
And, they made it so you had to have ridiculous amounts of potions just to get by.
And, they gave DPS insane gains.
And, they made warlocks the best goddamn solo class in the game.
And, they fucked hunters.
And, they made is so melee dps ate shit weekly on raids.
And, they DIDN'T SCALE THREAT FOR WARRIOR TANKS.

A lot of those things got nerfed out. A lot more will be nerfed out or fixed later, but until they address them it's a wash on the greatness of the leveling side. That lasts 1-4 months. The endgame is much much longer.

They're idiots for even letting it get that high in the first place. The last thing you want to beat out of them is using their aggro-wipe, since if they're anywhere near decent at DPS they'll hit top spot quickly.  Instead tell them to Feign 20-30s into the fight and every minute after that. (Or every 30s if they're getting "resist" problems.)  A rotation to have every hunter misdirect to the tank (or two hunters to the tank and offtank for things like Gruul and Void Reaver) every time it's up.  Makes everyone's lives MUCH simpler.   

As to using meters before TBC, plenty used them.  Who the fuck do you think wrote KTM in the first place? Some random idiot who was having problems in a PUG? No.   Instead we're getting forum dick-waving here that's pretty pathetic.  Everyone used some kind of mod, from lazy emergency-monitor-spam healers, to decursive happy pallies and mages to threat meters.  If not, then there were an amazing number of downloads for 'nobody' using them back then.

I'm finding this thread fascinating, because I've not yet played any tank class (my 19 bg warrior doesn't count).  I haven't raided since pre-TBC, and didn't do much then; I saw MC and BWL.  I didn't even know there exist such a thing as threat meters.  Handy!

The part about warrior dps not scaling cracks me up - I believe you guys, but really, warriors in the battlegrounds (who don't appear to be tanks, given their huge 2handed weapons) seem to do plenty of dps combined with stuns and many ways to prevent me from doing ANYthing before I'm dead. 

I know you're talking pve, which is a different thing entirely. But for pvp, warriors are OP, and this is coming from a lock. 

The game to 70 and the game at 70 are completely different.  I was very struck by this yesterday, when I played my daughter's hunter from 40 to 42 - wow, is she powerful!  Wow, is her pet powerful!  Elites?  No problem!  My hunter at 40 was not nearly so strong almost 3 years ago.  And I recall my warlock a lot more powerful pre-70 vs. other pre-70s than now vs. geared 70s.

Derailing from warriors and their problems for a second - can someone please explain to me how pallys and druids can be more effective tanks in 5mans than warriors?

I agree. Think I said before too, but I love the education from this thread.

Threat Meters
I was recommended Omen. That good enough or is there better?

Threat wipes
I was just told last night that Mage Invisibility also wipes aggro. I did not know this. Too much soloing in BC. Can someone confirm this?

One reason is that both classes have better AoE aggro-gaining abilities than warriors. Conventional wisdom holds that Warriors are the best single target tanks (re: raid bosses), while Pallies and Druids are both better than warriors at establishing threat on multiple targets (re: 5 man runs). Also remember that Paladins begin each fight with a full "rage" (mana) bar, and that with their reactive damage abilities/spells Protection Paladins are constantly generating threat as they get hit.

Correct me if I'm wrong please.

Warriors have no multi-mob taunt.

They have to cycle through enemies using the TAB key.  There is no set function to make say, F1 through F5 be the nearest enemy, the next nearest enemy and so on, the way healers can hit F1 through F5 for party members.

That totally sucks.

Omen is currently the "king" of the meters.  It doesn't need to be reset for each mob, AND it tracks multiple mobs.  KTM/KLH only tracks aggro per-fight.  So while you may be over the top on the KTM meter after the 3rd mob in a multi-mob pull, you're probably still below the tank.

Invisibilty was a change after BC went live, IIRC.  Yes, it completly wipes aggro for mages now.   As of right now the ONLY pure DPS class that doesn't have a complete aggro wipe as a base ability is a 'Lock.   (Yes, druids, shadow priests, and shaman I know you don't have any but you're not pure dps class.  I'm not saying you don't need it, though.)


 You're both right and wrong.  They have ONE multi-mob taunt, but it caps at like 4 mobs and it's on a multi-minute cooldown. (I think it's 5min.)  Yes, it sucks.  Yes, they have to tab through enemies making sure to get a sunder/ hit on them to keep their attention.  Yes, it TOTALLY sucks.  It's why I stopped tanking as a warrior, despite my traditional love for the class.  I just wasn't any good at tanking that way, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  (Fuck I know plenty who suck at it but insist they're great and keep on trying.)

 Tanking as a Pally, on the other hand, is so easy it almost feels exploitive at times.   I can't imagine even trying to tank Shattered Halls with a warrior and not having the instance take forever.  It takes me roughly 1 1/2 hours on my paladin with a good healer, because I can just aggro whole rooms and tank them.  Heals keep my mana up so I can keep on spamming concecrate and holy shield.  Aggro on the first mob or two MIGHT be tricky, but after that they've all done so much holy damage to themselves while beating on me they're not going to get pulled-off.

While warlocks don't have a complete aggro wipe, soulshatter cuts the threat they've generated so far in half.  So, as long as you don't go all out in the very beginning, with some attention paid to your position in regards to the tank, you can manage aggro pretty easily.  It's also a great "Oh shit!" button, as it's an immediate aggro dump and it rarely gets resisted.  Mage invis, however, has to fade you into invis all the way to get the aggro wipe, else you get little help from it.  Which doesn't do you much good if you crit yourself ahead of the tank's threat.  As I am informed at least, I've yet to level a mage that high.  As my gear's improved, I've actually had to start watching where I am on the threat meter, and also use soulshatter alot more. 

As to paladin tanks, some of my best PUG runs ever were done with a pally tank.  We did Shattered Halls in maybe 45 minutes with a pally tank and lots of AoE.  It's awesome to watch them get to do their thing.  Unfortunately, everyone I know who has a paladin has respec'd holy for raiding.  Noone wants them to tank, really, past 5 mans. 

Adding to Merusk's point:

Advanced warrior dancing involves the same dance BUT - there is one CC target in there (shackle etc.) so you have to be careful your TAB does not hit this CC target (for 5 mans you would AoE and pass on any CC - but in Kara - you might have a few elites with shackle - and then a bunch of minions that need to be danced with).  There is a macro out there - which I forget - that allows you to TAB without accidentally targeting a CCed target.

In 5 mans this dancing - for PUGS - does not normally work.  Guys just pour on the dps at the outset of combat - so you no sooner get 1 or 2 targets under control - before working on the 3rd - before losing control of the first two.

In the end - warriors are responsible for party discipline.  And you re-live that experience every time you do a fucking pug.

It's the only aggro wipe for mages. Contrary to popular belief, ice block does not wipe threat.  It just causes mobs to attack the second person on the threat list until you become vulnerable again.  Often, by that time, you've been bypassed on the list.  But if you were to break out as soon as you went it they'd come after you again.

What about invisibility potions?  Do these also dump aggro?

The nice thing about the Lock agro dump is that is has an area affect too.  I use it sometimes to help get agro off of the other ranged DPS'ers in the group.  It basically helps keep agro down for the backline members.  You just have to remember to watch your soulshard inventory as it uses one per.

No, they aren't agro dumps. I am not even certain you can use them in combat. They were almost exclusively used by non-stealth smiths to reach the Dark Iron Forge in BRD. I'm certain if they were an agro dump, raiders would be buying them up by the truck load.

This: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22871 will reduce agro though.

It's about threat not scaling not dps (dps is a factor of that but not the only factor).


Improved Thunderclap was upped enough in threat so that it is considered about the same as a sunder on 4 mobs.  Unfortunately it also breaks CC so groups need to retrain themselves to pull the mobsout of range of CC'd stuff.  Unfortunately there are so many non warriors out there that seem to "know everything about tanking" that it makes it next to impossable to form a PUG and deviate from some nontanks ideas on tanking.  So the TC changes sort of work but groups are unwilling to change playstyle to account for the changes.  


The ability for a pally to aggro unlimited #'s of mobs w/o breaking CC as long as their mana holds out is sick.  

How is a pally not breaking CC when a warrior is?

Consecrate breaks sheep just as well as Thunderclap.

I thought they could generate some decent aggro through healing as well.

Not really.  And they can't tank while healing.

my bad then, my pally tanking knowledge is scarce as I don't think there were many competent level 70 horde pally tanks at the time I quit.  I just remember seeing alot of posts saying they were the best tanks when it came to aggroing large numbers of mobs.

Well yeah they are great at aggroing great numbers of mobs, but it has more to do with their captain america shield that gives them a lot of initial aggro + consecration + holy shield that returns damage to the mobs hitting them.  You can't block attacks while healing and pali tanking revolves around blocking basically.

Pally heals are in fact, the least threatening of all the healing classes, but a huge margin.



Pally's are the best at AE tanking due to HolyShield and Consecrate. Mostly Consecrate.

Unlike Thunderclap or Swipe, Consecrate has no target cap. It also scales up with spell damage, like all pally threat.

A decently geared pally tank, makes a non-heroic 5man pretty much 'EZ-Mode'. As long as your healer can keep you up, you don't need CC and your DPS can pretty much go nuts and cut loose. The more things beating on a Prot Pally, the better it works. It's why pally's have an easier time in SH then warriors/druids. A dungeon full of mostly melee mobs in manageable packs with plenty of LoS walls to bring in the few casters? Sign me up. You almost never have to worry about 'strays' peeling off onto your healers/dps as a pally tank and you are almost never 'over geared' like the rage tanks.


The downside is Prot Pallies have to jump through all kinds of gear hoops to tank heroics/raids. There isn't much actual prot pally specific gear outside of the tier sets, and you need to reach a unusually high base avoidance level to be uncrushable, and your mitigation and HP will be lower in the end regardless (though they are fixing some of that with the new patch changes).

In late beta almost all threat was taken off pally heals. It just has enough to pull a unagro'd mob onto the pally now. It's not that hard to heal in combat with the 70% non interuption talent though, or it didnt seem to be back when I played my pally seriously.

You can heal while being beat on, but you cant block while casting a heal, hence the "they can't tank while healing" comment.

This is exactly the kind of muddied thinking that keeps the present status quo going."Oh, they are overpowered in PvP, they don't need any buffs to skills which would have no damn effect in PvP in the slightest." you see this form of argument daily in the WoW forums.

I've been working on honor hold faction lately and the difference between a Warrior tanking and a protection paladin tanking it is night and day. Half the warrior tank groups I've done in there break up and disband around the 7 pull just before the sewers while prot pally groups say fuck crowd control and zip on through. Unless the warrior is really fucking good I  may just start quitting groups for shattered halls before I waste any more time there with war tanks.

Increasing base warrior threat on abilities has no effect on pvp.
Giving warriors a better aoe taunt/aggro ability has no effect on pvp.

And yet, here we are.

Having had my turn at trying to tank with a Pally the only drawbacks I saw was:

- Can't limit your agro very well or easily anyway.  It is either go all out with lots of mobs or pull way way back and slow your progress down considerably.  Consecrate and the shield toss will pick up anything close by.

- Can't pull groups very well at all.  The boomerang trinket works ok, but you lose a trinket spot for any good stats for it and it has a long cooldown.  The shield toss can be used, but again, it agros everything in a wide swath.  That should be ok if you have good CC, but many times you don't need it.  It is just annoying, not game crushing.

- The equipment thing.  Somebody already mentioned it.  You can find tons of strictly tank plate everywhere.  You can't find any good Pally Tank gear very often.  You basically have to sacrifice Int and that really hurts your time between sitting.  Although there are some blessings, etc. that will help with this too.

- We are squishier than Warrior Tanks.  You have to have a really good healer to stay on top of heals or you'll go down fast.  No matter how we spec or gear up, we are nowhere near the stam, hp, defense level of Warriors.  This makes for lots of drinking on the Pirest/Druid/Healadin's part.

- We don't have much DPS.  You have to balance this with other dps chars in the group.  Not a big deal but can be a pain.

I gave up on tanking with my paladin mainly for the equipment reason.  I'm purely a healadin now because that gear is very easy to come by and I can help my guild out more this way.  We are short on healers.  Tanks are short too, but that's what my druid will be doing once I get him to the appropriate level.

Warrior's don't get much wiggle room when they are on the top end of both PvP and PvE though, despite difficulties in the non-heroic 5 man's (and really, only when your DPS are over geared and/or cock mongers) they are still the default tank in all other aspects.




Only for Goblin Engineers but http://www.wowhead.com/?item=23836 is way better then the boomerang  :-D

Another reason I stopped liking my protection warrior.  The better my "tank" gear got (with the exception of weapon) the more rage starved I became and the harder it was to aggro mobs.  This is a very fucked up mechanic that has been in the game since day 1 and reached critical status with TBC.


Warriors are a sub par tank in ANY multi trash mob situation, I would say that exceeds your classification of "despite difficulties in the non-heroic 5 man's".  Also, If your tanking ability inhibits the rest of the party from playing as an "over geared cock monger" then your presence as a tank is inhibiting the amount of fun they can have.  Yes you can do it, no it is not near as fun as when they make the run with a pally or druid.  It is no fun to play a warrior when the act of tanking as well as you are able to makes you feel like a charity case for the party that is letting you do it.

Pallies also don't have as much raw mitigation in abilities or in itemization. Thunderclap/Demo Shout/Disarm on appropriate mobs is a godsend. Getting your CC classes to make sure they CC mobs away from the group can be tough in pugs but if they do it's easy to hold up to about 4-5 mobs as long as DPS focuses on your main asset. Thunderclap is plenty good enough to handle healing aggro outside of a priest spamming Prayer of Healing.

Really, the worst multi mob tank is a druid these days, thanks to Swipe nerfage and Thunderclap boosts.

But what I mean about being overgeared and/or being a cock monger, is any DPS'er worth anything, can pull agro at will, it doesn't matter who is tanking. It is as much on the DPS'ers to hold back and manage as it is for tanks to keep the mob aggressed (is that even a word?). Being overgeared only magnifies the responsibility of the DPS'er.

I am not sure how you managed to pull that out from anything I said.

If the tank takes game play up to non sustainable levels AND the group has it's shit together enough to concentrate fire and not to have to sit and have a fucking discussion/marking frenzy on each pull then a warrior can keep aggro on multiple mobs in the face of extreme DPS.  On the 1 hand it is miserably not fun because of the carpal tunnel but on the other hand it is fun for the EQ flashback fuck it lets keep pulling and killing as fast as we can without making a science out of it aspect.  

My hazing/initial interview to get in the last guild I was in consisted of "we are going to shadow labs and if you lose aggro you can look for another guild", I was able to maintain aggro mostly because I didn't have to wait around for anyone to med or mark or any of that rage decaying bullshit.  I was also allowed to charge way more than most groups would have allowed.

Yes, the problem I was addressing was, "I FD after I've pulled aggro." That's bad.

FD'ing early and often though is fantastic (just like getting Rogues to Vanish at a certain point in a fight and not when then they pull).

It is possible to tank these places. However I think I understand what people are getting at here better now as I read your posts (and make some comments of my own).

Right now, I'm going to be honest. Tanking Illidan requires the same amount of  effort and concentration as tanking a heroic SH. The difference is that heroic SH requires that you do this for 40 minutes straight and Illidan requires that you do this for 18 minutes. By this analysis, heroic SH is 2x harder than Illidan. I'm not even kidding. I go into a 5 man, and I'm using every global cooldown for threat, every rotation for maximum agro, taunt typically down, etc. I do this in T6 gear and using a thunderfury (I got it a week ago, largely for this purpose). In a 5 man. With mobs that equally level DPS can 3 shot. Why? Because while the DPS can 3 shot the mobs, the mobs can 1 shot them. Sure these places aren't very hard anymore, but while any T6 level DPS can be half asleep and AFK and still be doing "WTF HOLY SHIT AWESOME" the tank still has to be trying as hard as he was back when everyone was in dungeon blues.

Tanks always have to be on the ball and actively working to keep agro off DPS. Meanwhile, DPS can do the laziest rotation in the world and still overpreform relative to the instance, and healers can just throw on a HoT or something. Constant pressure is fun for a while, but eventually you end up just wanting to take it easy on a run or two. I'm not saying permanent aura of agro or anything, but maybe some better AoE agro weapons? (hint, my thunderfury is getting old and I've only had it a week or two). WTB level 70 version for everyone, not just raiders.

By your interjection of how kick ass warriors were in PvP in a discussion of their lack of Pve tanking ability. It's like discussing how good a truck Ford makes in a discussion on family cars. :)

I thought Thunderfury's threat got the shit nerfed out of it?

Even if the threat was nerfed (again) the attack speed debuff is still the bomb from what I hear.

Though I doubt anyone MT'ing above Kara would use it simply because the white dmg is so underwhelming compared to the tanking 1h items in BC.

If it wasn't for the proc keeping it close, the 2 tanking swords in Naxx were better than Thunderfury by a large margin. I think even our Thunderfury warrior even picked the one up off widow for off tanking in multi-target situations. But that could have been to lower his repair bill for his deaths :p

I use some combination of: Blade of Savagery (http://wowhead.com/?item=32369) (low rage); Unbreakable Will (http://wowhead.com/?item=30874#comments) (high stamina set) and Mallet of the Tides (http://wowhead.com/?item=30058) for when I need to avoid parries and such (going to be more useful after 2.3). For all around stuff; The Brutalizer http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32254 is where it's at (we've had amazing luck with melee weapon drops, and it isn't like these things are useful to anyone else).

That said, thunderfury is still the best multimob tanking weapon in the game because of the proc (also the only multimob tanking weapon). In Naxx, I was using a different weapon for avoidance (widow's remorce or the hungering cold, one with agi and the other with crusader). I'd never gotten a thunderfury and the only one in guild was on a rogue.  Still thunderfury was damn awesome with the proc (was good stuff back then). I think that it was *the* weapon that defined tanking. Definitely legendary. Glad I finally got one. (5 man garr =so much fun).

Thunderclap the talent got a boost.

Thunderfury the weapon from pre TBC got a nerf.

Hmmm, there appears to be a general consensus that threat scaling for warriors is broken.

Who knew.

I was wondering who you convinced to go to MC as far as Garr.  5 man eh? 

Isn't there some requirement for the ingots that drop off Golemagg too?

I understand how you got the idea that I think that warriors are OP in pvp (they totally are), but you're making a completely unwarranted assumption, which has absolutely nothing to do with me or anything I said.  That jump defies logic.

Which is basically why I asked in the first place - I figured there was a real answer to my question, which was sincerely asked.

Almost back to topic, are there any plans by Blizz to change the scaling of threat for warriors?

Now, back to topic - I titled my post "lack of tanks" not "lack of warriors."  I'm finding that for pugs in the pre-70 instances - Hellfire, Coilfang, etc. - that finding a tank - whether pally druid or warrior - is more difficult than finding healers.  Hell, finding a tank for AV boss is hard.  Horde seem to have plenty of plate in AV; but alliance seems to be mostly ranged dps.

Thoughts on that?

I am not quite sure I follow the argument that threat scaling for warriors is broken.

Shield slam (block) and devastate (damage) both incorporate elements of the weapon - so the better the weapons - the better the threat generated from these aggro devices.  But, their usage really requires a lot of rage - so always usable in raiding - not so much in 5 mans.

Um.  That's unbelievable simplistic.

The main fact of the 'brokenness' is the scaling with the dps.  The DPS is given a lot of new and powerful toys and then the tanks are put in the position of saying 'hey, guys, don't use your new toys because you'll die'.

This is fundamentally unfun.

Even Phunked, who has argued reasonably and well in the face of criticism admits that the solution to the problem is for the 4 others in the party to 'hold back'.

You wouldn't accept that in a whorehouse, I don't see why you should accept it in WoW.

Further, you go get a nice big shield and one hander and then tell me how your threat scales....

Exactly, 5mans or trash clearing=teh broke

Also, the 2 talents you named are only available for warriors that go ALL the way into the protection tree.  I think the consensus is ANY warrior should at least be able to tank a 5 man (heroics too if gear is decent) and protection warriors should be able to do it as well as ANY other class/spec combo.

edit: I can agree that a certain amount of diversity among the boss mobs helps keep things a bit fresher, so I am fine with mixing up boss encounters so they favor a class but trash should not be like that.

Fuck That :  Protection Warriors should be tanking GODS.

Otherwise, what's the fucking point ?

QFT, I TOTALLY AGREE

that said Blizzard fucked up and gave the druids and pallies a taste of OUR cake it would be unfair at this point to take it entirely away from them.

Um, should that be in Green ?  That's not quite the Official Forums Attitude I was trying for...

lol no, i'll stick with the white.  My lil tank has been messed over by Blizzard in so many ways that I just don't wish that on anyone else.  Here, let me show you on the doll:

1 - They take away slam while moving!
2 - They take away in combat bandaging!
3 - We suck for awhile at everything but tanking, I am loving life because there are no warriors but me, naturally Blizz buffs the crap out of our DPS so all the FoTM tards roll a warrior.
4 - They take away my beloved Bloodthirst (never mind I was done leveling and specced out of it, I still loved it).
5 - They screw up the attack power bonus for slow weapons!  F THEM!  RAT BASTARDS!
6 - They nerf ALL my carefully farmed defense gear and make me almost wish I had been collecting valor. ASSHOLES!
7 - They add an epic set of valor that made me wish I really had been collecting this garbage.
8 - I quit for awhile.
9 - TBC gets released and I find out that my protection specced ass is the 3rd best 5-man tank in the game and all PUGs are forever fucked up for me because no one seems to understand.
10 - Not sure when the marking system was added but F YOU BLIZZARD!  Main Assist > Marking any day of the week and 2x on sunday if the noobs can't figure it ouit fuck them too!

This doll has been all worn out.

To get back to the original question, since no one in this entire thread mentioned my pet reason:


Because tanks are the default group leaders, and it sucks to lead groups through the multi-mob pulls that are the hallmark of all those instances except for Arcatraz and Black Morass.

I'm expected to mark the mobs, call the crowd control, and pull.  I have to trust all those idiots to CC their targets and DPS them in the correct order.  I have to maintain constant vigilance and use all kinds of mods to make sure that I'm holding all those mobs, none of them have gone anywhere, the CC hasn't broken, and the healer's still alive.  I have to know the content better than anyone else in the group.  I have to know the difference between Oracles and Sirens so I know which one to kill first and which one I should get CC'd (if I even have CC in the group).  I have to know that I have to pull Random Fearing Trash way down the hall so we won't get feared into the next five-pull.

With a guild group, I know that everyone knows the content.  I don't have to mark (in, say, Shattered Halls or Shadow Labyrinth, I just designate an assist because I know we all understand that concept) and I don't need to rely as much on CC.  And everyone is very well geared for our server, so stuff dies fast and I don't have to waste two hours on an instance that should take 45 minutes.

So that's why I'm one of those elitist tanks who stands around in Shatt with really nice gear, politely declining all invites.  It's not because tanking isn't fun, it's because leading PUGs isn't fun.

No, you're correct.

But why isn't in fun in Pug's is a different question to the more basic why isn't it fun ?

Thunderfury requires the Left and Right bindings (Garr and Geddon) and the essence of the firelord off of Ragnaros.

Sulfuras requires 12 sulfuron ingots off golemagg.

But warriors were not eating the cake  :wink:  Pre-BC, outside of healers, tanks were hard to find for 5 mans.  That's why my cadre of RL friends did well - we could put together a 5 man instantly with a tank in our group.  It seemed to get so bad - for some guys they had an easier time joining a guild raid than putting together a 5 man.

Just like EQ - Blizzard has made this move in response to a continuing absence of warrior tanks - and spread these abilities to hybrid classes.  The priest has experienced similar encroachment.

Leitgartis - well said.  I often join PuGs with a sense of dread - am I up for beating the group into disciplined formation again?  This is a strong incentive for tanks to only group with people they know very well.

Yeah, we did it with a druid healer, myself, a prot pally (for the adds) a rogue and an enhancement shaman. After that I got ~15 more to zerg clear it to rag for the other quest item. We've had the elementium bars stockpiled for ages.

In regards to the notion of threat scaling with weapons and shields; I present to you this.

Phunked's Guide to Dead End Agro Generation

Okay so. You're here with us on the raiding scene. You want to hold teh agroes. You see that going from blues to purplez makes your rogues do like 4x more damage. Surely a similar improvement to your performance is right around the corner right?

So you zone into Kara, start killing stuff. At first you notice that while your blue gear has lots of well rounded stats like str, sta, agi and some defense rating, those nasty bastards are hitting you really often and really hard. You realize that there may come a point when a large burst of damage will flatten you before any healer, no matter how good can react. The first time you see this will likely be when you're fighting Prince. Now, because you're not an idiot, and realize that thousands of other guilds farm this bastard weekly, you don't go post on the Raids and Dungeons forums about how Prince is too hard/random/whatever. Instead, you go to the Elitist Jerk Forums and start reading on how2tank better. You notice that all the other warriors are stacking stamina to avoid the previous case of WTFPWN'T. So you figure that it might be wise to take out your 4str/6sta gems and put 12sta into everything. And you do. Then you start looking for items that have the most base stamina, and start wearing those instead of your rounded gear. At some point, you stumble on that avoidance/stamina debate, and figure out that getting some dodge/parry might also be nice. You like dodge more than parry because its cheaper on the item budget. You know you love agility, because it's nearly as cheap as dodge and also gives you crit. But Blizzard doesn't make very many tanking items with agility on them. So you're stuck picking up dodge rating and stamina. Pretty soon you notice that you have less attack power than you had in your blue set. But that's okay, because you're getting your damage from your weapon right? So you grab yourself a King's Defender and for a while everything is nice. You have  shiny sword, you're a brick wall and unless they're really stupid, most DPSers aren't passing you on threat too much.

Now fast forward to Black Temple. You've been following your previous strategies. You take the drops that look like they're meant for tanking. You know this because they have boatloads of stamina and dodge/parry rating and not much else. You keep  putting 12/15sta gems in everything. You have lots of HP. You have lots of avoidance. You might even grab a new weapon. It has ~8 more DPS than your old one. Your shield might have 40 more block value. And in total, you've gained 2000 HP. Sounds nice right?

Except for this. HP and avoidance help you not die. They do not help you generate more threat. Your higher DPS weapons are offset by the fact that the boss now has more base armor. Your sunder armor still reduces the same amount, so in general, you're fighting things which have a higher mitigation now. This means you do less damage. Especially your shield slams, which have a multiplier on the amount of threat they produce based directly on the damage they do, are staying at about the same threat/use, because even though you're doing more base damage, the boss is mitigating more of it. You still have the same attack power as you had in blues. Even though you're passively immune to crushing blows by now, you still generate the same 700 TPS that you were generating before you set foot in a raid instance. The problem is, you can't swap out your tank pieces for more AP/crit/hit/whatever because you're still at risk of getting WTFPWN'T by burst damage. I'm not even going to mention the rage starvation when you dodge/parry every other hit. It'd be like if the more mana a caster had, the weaker their spells would be.

The type of gear required to scale well with both increased damage intake and increased threat output doesn't exist. If it did, it would be insanely overpowered.  But there is zero effective scaling in threat. The gains you get from weapons and shields are designed to keep you at the same level of TPS relative to the boss and his ever growing armor/mitigation/etc.

See, but they fixed the wrong damn thing. Now you have every shitty pally and druid thinking they can tank anything and wondering why they can't get into 25 man raids because you only need 3-4 tanks and 7-8 healers. How many druid healers do you know anymore? How many pallys suddenly got a hardon for tanking over healing? It was freaking retarded to take classes that had healing capabilities and turn them into tanks. What they should have done is make the warrior tank more fun to play with better soloability and less stress. More rage that's not based on getting hit, more viable dps in the outside world comparable to 50% of what the dps classes can do instead of 20%, and more scaled threat on the base abilities. I mean it's not that hard to fix ONE class.

Instead they broke 2 more to do this. Yeah, I said it. I don't like all these hybrid tanks because it royally fucks the endgame. They gear up in 5 mans and Kara, then they bitch about not getting to tank all the time in 25 mans because they don't like to heal. Fuck that.

Partly blame it on me reading your thread over multiple days and forgetting you started it. :) Your post I responded too sounded so much like a typical WoW general post replying saying Warriors were gods in pvp   and therefor needed no help anyway it set me off (I play a hunter main and we get the same damn arguments so I'm a bit sensitive to it).

AV bosses are just another form of PVE fight and so dont really represent PVP much, IMO. When I played my war in AV last year for faction rewards I know it was the same situation, with the bonus of no healers either. I used to be totally shocked when I actually got a heal and managed to live though tanking warmasters. On our server, it seems, a lot of druid and pally tanks have moved up to fill in the games for tankage, and even new tanks.  ( we had a 61 pt protection tank in Steamvaults yesterday who didn't know what LoS was.)

Hell nobody plays Druids now to begin with. Get rid of bear tanks and you might as well delete the class.

If pallies and druids weren't viable tanks, getting a 5-man regular or heroic PUG run right now would be close to impossible. Yeah it creates more competition at the raid level but really - 4 healing classes vs 1 tanking class is not a sustainable design decision, especially with Blizzard going away from straight up tank and spank fights.

Raiding with 4 friends = fun.

Raiding with 4 pickups = stab in the face.

I realize that MMO's are meant to be social, but there are ways to be social without letting morons ruin my fun during the limited free time I have available.  Why do I even bring this up?  I thought about making a tank for the endgame and thought the better of it.  I am going to solo what bits that I can and call it quits.

You want to bitch about healers, Pae, go roll one.  Really.  It sucks, it's not fun, and there's about as much pressure as tanking. YOU'RE the one getting yelled at by the DPS when they're morons and pull aggro, or when the tank who's just .01% under-geared takes that one-in-a-thousand hit, gets wtfpwnd and the raid wipes.

The entire enjoyment of the raid is staring at 25 little bars, or if you're overstocked on healers the 5 in your group, or the one for your role.  Watch that bar, motherfucker, and while watching it be aware of all the bullshit timers and dancing and movement.. but DON'T YOU FUCKING MISS THAT HEAL even tho you're at 2k HP, and the Arcane Orb just got fired at you.

There's all these hybrids doing tanking now because it's more fun than the role you're trying to pigeonhole them into. 

Fun, anyone remember that?  Probably not, you're playing a tanking warrior.

I've been saying since the beginning that hybrid healers with great healing are a mistake. There should be a healing class that heals and only that role is viable. Oh you can suffer through leveling solo but you won't like it. Think release holy priest leveling. Yeah. Now require 2-3 healers in an entire raid and only that. Some people like to heal, most people seemingly don't. The mistake Blizzard made is luring people to play healing classes with promises of shiny DPS and then forcing them to heal because you don't have enough people who just want to be healers. Hybrid healers should be like those ret paladins that have 3k mana. They can heal themselves between fights and can pop off a few heals in an emergency but otherwise they're not healing much at all.

I actually like healing but yeah, it sucks almost as bad as tanking.  Not to mention people yell at you more than any other class in my experience.  Definitely not any more fun with a sucky raid healer leader who decides to go into bear form and start doing DPS and then yells at you for not healing fast enough...  I've never actually had an experience with people yelling at the tank, it has always been people yelling at the healers for not keeping the life bars filled fast enough.

My first toon was actually a resto druid, whom I level to 60 at release as resto, before the "druids don't suck now" patch(1.5?). At least I was rolling in the (then, and now) absolutely horrible Shardnarion and Nexusrage.

I thought it was amazing fun. I'm sure at that point, I also thought that gouging my eyes out with a rusty spoon was fun. Two frontal lobotomies later, I think my perception of reality is a lot more in tune now. Even still, I've raided with a druid as a healer (and later with a palladin and most recently a shaman) both pre and post TBC in the raid game. Whack-a-mole v.5.0015 is fun stuff and all, but really I can see how people get burned out doing it if they're of a particular persuasion. That being the sane and fun loving persuasion. I wouldn't want the end game to be 2-3 healers per raid though, because that would suck for the class balance. 2-3 healers and 1 tank for 25 people is stupid. Because that leaves a global ratio of 21dps:1 tank and 7dps:1healer.

Try getting an instance run as an enhancement shaman/fury warrior/balance druid/ret pally then. They should make healing and tanking more fun (not going to happen without a massive revamp of the entire game) instead of making end game content require less of each. When your server has 50 tanks and you need 2, it's hard to find one. When you have 10 and need 1 it's even worse.

You're raiding with douchebags then. I love any and all healers I can get and I treat them well as a raid leader. If I die as the MT I don't instantly turn to the healers and bitch. I look at my combat log, check my stats, see what kind of crushing hits I took in a row (if any) and then move on. If I think there was an error, I send a tell asking a question. Also, if ANY dps start complaining about healing on any of my runs, they can ride the pine for the while. STFU DPS, you have the simplest damn job in the game, and you can be replaced very quickly with the cadre of others waiting outside. Remember that before you start whining.

Would I ever roll a healer up to 70? Hell no. That's not saying much though because I'd never roll another character up to 70 again, period. I have one character, with one job. I'm a tank. That's what I enjoy doing even when it's hard to do. That's why I enjoy talking about it on the forums. No, I don't like other classes attempting to do the job at the low or high end. That's not going to solve the problem. Simply make the harder jobs like tanking and healing more fun/easier, and you'll draw in more players. Blizzard is trying to solve problems with other problems. Run out of tanks? Oh we'll just make the healing classes viable tanks. WHAT? Why not worry about the fact that you've got tons of dps roaming around relying on these classes rather than cannibalizing their ranks.

This basically boils down to my hate of specializations. They suck. They aren't fun, and I've never had fun with them. The only people who enjoy fucking around with them are the DPS.

Recount = :heart: (http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Recount#Detail_Window)

X-Perl has a nifty mod built in called Grim Reaper which shows a small graph and list of the last X-number of heals/damage you took when you mouse over anyone's unit frame. Extremely useful for figuring out how you or someone got whacked in a hurry.

It's almost the kind of thing I'd rather not know unless we were stuck on something for a long time.

Gah can we try and summarize the main points?  Quote and edit as you see fit:

1.  Warrior inefficiency on multi-target makes 5 mans a pain
2.  Very few spots for a MT (warrior) on raids and Off tanks already occupied (druid/pally)
3.  Warrior threat not scaling well with DPS in the expansion (5 mans anyway)
4.  Warrior class conflicts/competition with hybrids (druids and pallies) - while the latter are flexible enough to be perform several roles.

More and more I am beginning to think the 25 man raids - ironically - have created many more problems than the old 40 man system.  The warrior tank is a good example of that problem.

Jesus Fucking Christ, that's not a game, that's a job for an Accountant.

I actually find what % of my healing came from certain spells to be rather fascinating to see over different runs. But the death monitor in Recount (or Grim Reaper) is crazy helpful in knowing if a death was caused because of slow reaction time, miscommunication, or if there was simply no way the person could have lived without some fundamental shift in assignments.

The Graph stuff is a little much and never use it.

Hehehe, you didn't tank/play Warrior in EQ I guess, eh? The Steel Warrior forums took TheoryCrafting to a whole, nubba, lebbel and the warriors were generally credited with doing most of the dps/combat analysis. Whacking away for hours on end on light blues that didn't hit back and sending logs thru SPSS and SAS for modelling to figure out the equations. You people in Wow have it easy with your DPS right on the tooltip and mods to show parry and crit %.

N00bs...

;)

p.s. great discussion btw. FWIW, I play lvl 65 orc warrior and haven't been in an instance since Sunken Temple, and that one only once (never Maraudon or Gnomeregan (sp?)) on any of my ~20 odd toons.) Never can find a healer...

Nah, played EQ once and, er, that was one time too many.

It sucked donkeys.

Same with AO.

You also need to be running WoW on DeepBlue to be able to play the game with all the real time graphs up. They totally eat up the FPS. It is a nice little damage/healing tracker though. And it is ace so I can use the lazy man's updater of love.

That doesn't make it fun. That just makes it more a penance for the unfortunate or for people with so much time they heal and raids and have the time to go off and have some real fun.

I say ditch the design convention that requires specialized healers altogether. This is a wholesale rethink of the current endgame system though, so I'm not holding my breath :)

That's exactly the sort of attitude likely to ensure that you end up with some of the shittiest players in the game. The cadre outside are there for a reason - they blow. Who the hell wants to play with tanks and healers who have a chip on their shoulder about always being right?

Who the fuck wants to play with DPS who are entitled lootwhores? Simple truth is I can throw a rock and hit a person who can do 85-90% of what they do on the outside. I'll take that over a person who wants to get upset and bitch in the raid. Note that key point, IN THE RAID. I don't care if you come out later and suggest on the forums in a cool-headed discussion where our faults lie, and we work on them. That's what forums are for. You discuss strategy, you critically look at faults, and you correct them for the next run. If you get pissy or whiney or bitchy about things in a raid, it's chaotic and hot-blooded when wipes are going on. Nobody needs that.

We're cruising just fine through SSC with this attitude. I have a bad attitude about people with bad attitudes, and I have even less patience for people with a bad attitude in a job that has massive overpopulation. And no, those people aren't outside because they suck. They are outside because you can't take that 4th person in the same class for the sake of balance in these 25 man setups. We had 43 people sign up for the last run in our alliance, we're starting a second SSC just to cover the bases.

I had a fun experience last night which ties in with this thread.

I tanked a heroic Steamvaults with my MS warrior 31/30 spec.

It was a guild group composed of:

Rogue
Shaman (healer)
Mage
Boomkin
MS Warrior Tank

I had my tank gear on of course, with 12k hp, 490 defense

Our guild has cleared up to Prince in Kara, and this is reflected in our gear. We have the top 5 man/quested stuff, some pvp gear, some Kara/heroic epics.

My point in bringing this up is that we really surprised ourselves. We only wiped 4 times, twice on the first boss. No one was surprised more than me. Up to this point I had never contemplated tanking a heroic as non-prot specced with the gear I have. This showed me that it is definitely doable, and fun as hell to boot.

I don't think I'll attempt it in a PUG. But this showed me that a dps warrior can tank heroics, top the damagemeters in Kara, and off-tank Kara. Main Tank, Off Tank, DPS.

It was fun as hell, kindal like tanking normal SL with a 2 hander.

My Armory:
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Aggressor (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Aggressor)

Yep, the runs that are the most memorable or most fun are typically the ones where other folks would say "no way we can do this.  /leavegroup"  I did a 2-holy pally (because I'd respecced for arena), rogue-tank, lock, & mage Mechnarr run a couple of weeks ago and it was damned fun.  No way in hell I'd try it with non-guildies, but it was amusing. 

We actually have our Arena-spec'd Pally tank a lot of stuff, all the way through a couple Heroics with no problem. Then again, he swiped a few pieces of tanking gear when we were doing Kara, so that may have something to do with it.

Try priest, mage, mage, warlock, warlock Blackfathoms deep run. Highest character level 22. No wipes, cleared the whole damn thing. Was a blast and a half.

Those runs are fun because not only is everyone on the top of their own game, they are also thinking oevertime into what happens when the usual roles need to blur a bit... as opposed to - "i'm dps, i hit this button every 5 seconds, no more no less,... WHY IS THIS MOB HITTING ME?!?! WHY GOD!?!? WHY!1?!?!?!?!"

IMO game with classes with specific roles encourage inactive brains (or worse, brains which are half-occupied with IMing, watching a show, etc)

I appreciate your comment here but like most tanks this "I" stuff makes a classic error:  What "I" can tank is critically dependent on the strength of healing and the quality of DPS.  Most tanks have a natural tendency to attribute their survival success to themselves (and their death to healers).  Again, this is about tanks in general - not you specifically - I find the double standard logic amusing.

Pre-BC, our main tank on Ebon Roc in BWL tanked her ... NAKED (had Onxyia cloak on but was an MS warrior to boot) - no joke.  Once everyone else gets well geared - and develops skill - the need for solid tanking or a protection tank - diminishes greatly.  In Kara, one of our rogues was reaching the point where he could off tank trash mobs due to the overall increase in party healing/ DPS.

Um.

It's not about Gear.

Have fun at 400 Defense.  Not sure where your coming from Iron - you need to make the gear check as a tank.  If you don't make it - "skill" is not going to make a difference unless the party can absorb the difference.

You just said your tank was naked.

Where did he get the Extra +Def ?

That's my point - there was NONE.  In order to survive - skilled and massive overhealing was required - and solid DPS.  By making the tank naked in the fight (excluding cloak and weapon) - the tank was of course almost at Zero in terms of a gear check.

Tanking is about a lot more than gear. The best tanks can multi-task very very well. They can analyze a situation, have a feel for their surroundings, watch their health, watch their aggro, watch their group, and issue commands. The gear is the most basic part of the job, and at times it can make you overconfident.

I still fail entirely to see what this has to do with anything.  I am, in fact, stratching my head as to your point.

I would imagine that the DPS in particular (with a naked Tank) would similarly have to scale back the DPS to the point at which they may as well be naked also (with possible +Mana Gear Maybe).

Sure, in that scenario your healers would have to be on tip-top form, but whenever are they NOT ?

You have, I fear, merely thrown in a naked tank to totally confuse the point entirely.

For Shame.

I neglected to point out that the healer on this run did an great job. I don't think, however, that overhealing and savvy dps can keep any warm body, however naked, alive on any run. I didn't make the post to advertise any particular skill on my part. Rather, to make the point that warriors who don't want to spec prot CAN tank heroic instances, under the right conditions. This ties into my original post on page 1 that people don't tank because they don't like speccing prot.

Iron - Heh I can't bothered - have a good weekend.

No Problem.  Anytime you want to see a good Tank naked, you just gimme a call, you hear ?

Meanwhile, in a PUG, those idiots will never CC their targets and DPS them in the correct order. Ever. Then it becomes a clusterfuck of attempted multi-mob tanking in a 6 mob pull with the DPS all on various targets of their choice. And WHEN you inevitably wipe, everyone is complaining about YOU.

I tanked for a long time. I used to tank MC and BWL WAY back when. I always prided myself on being a first class tank.

I recently came back and within 3-4 runs of the lowest level BC 5-mans, I've sworn off PUG tanking (I did write "tanking forever", but I'm sure I'll get suckered once in a while against my will).

I'm not sure if this is all just because I've leveled up a prot pally or not, but the AOE/passive aggro generation tanking of the Paladin really does make things effortless and idiot proof. I can HAVE a bunch of 'tards pew pewing different targets, and I don't need much or any CC.

That reminds me of a time one of my friends who played a pally, would heal in 40-mans wearing nothing but his helm & the dance emote.

My brother, on his male dwarf warrior, goes around ganking lowbies wearing this outfit:

Lovely Purple Dress (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22280)
Hallowed Helm (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33292)
Farmer's Broom (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=3335)

And riding his Swift Magic Broom (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33184)

It looks pretty hilarious.

Now that's an awesome outfit!

I now have a lvl 19 warrior (Xanthippe) (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Korgath&n=Xanthippe).  First, she wore the Raider's set (orange/red).  Now, she's wearing the Defender's set (blue).  She looks stunning.

However, stats are laughable - or at least, I got laughed at when I played WSG last Friday.  A hunter asked "how many hps do you have?" and I answered "693."  Both teams were fully twinked (except me), the game last 1 hr. 24min., we finally won for a grand total of 11 honor.

I felt like a little kid at the big kids' table.  Rogues were picking on me.  I cherrypicked as much as I could to end up 11kbs and 20 deaths.

Playing a nontwinked BG would be more fun.  Too bad they aren't segregated.

I can't decide if I want to forgo stats for looks.  I hate the circus-y appearance of most gear.  This is the first toon where I've actually enjoyed what I have on.  (Well, the second - those Leggings of Concentrated Darkness are pretty skanky, and guaranteed to attract attention with a tunic. (http://wowhead.com/?item=31133))

I wish there was an image designer in the game - or at least dye! - so that I could wear what I like instead of what gives the best stat combination.

Now that I've read about it, I'm hoping WoW steals the EQ2 'visible item' slots.  That'd be awesome, because I could run around in my Giantstalker set once more.  (The only good-looking set of Hunter armor, IMO.)

I don't know that system, but I can guess.  A different paperdoll to put items that are seen but not actually worn?  The stats and effects come from the "real" paperdoll, but aren't seen unless you want them to be?

I could dig that.

Imagine the crying that would result from the arena peoples.

Yep, that's my understanding of it.  Sounds awesome.. too bad it's in EQ which has the most horrible armor models EVER.  Seriously, even DAoC beat them.



Meh, pvp in the game is fucked anyway.  It was slapped-on at the end, and it's gotten worse as time has gone on and the dev team cycles through members.

It would be like the old UO days.  Just wear a robe and a jester's cap to fool everyone.

"Hey, look this newb in cloth is attacking me.  What the....  OooOOOoOOOO"

I don't see why, you can't tell shit from the current armor anyways. Shit, some of the non set pieces for 70 gear reuse the level 5 armor models.


The only downside would be every single paladin would wear tier2 for their visible slots, every, single, one.

I'd wear the T3 Warrior Naxx set. I've always thought it was the best looking design by Blizzard.

I would not have my shoulder pieces visible.  I just hate them all.

My nightelf's ears always pierce the pieces, and it looks awful.  My human warlock has these gigantic spikes coming off them.

The best shoulders are the first ones - around level 20.

That'd be a terrible decision. You'd get more dumbasses rolling need on stuff that doesn't help their class at all, but because 'it looks good on my Tauren'.

/guildkicktothecurb

My god yes.  I fucking dispise WoW's shoulder armor and blizzards stubborn refusal to give us a toggle to disable it, like they do with helms and cloaks.  Obscene shoulder armor is why i have never made a male orc, and why i stopped leveling my male draeni mage at lvl 30 (when i got the RFK shoulders and realized "oh boy another LOLSHOULDERS toon").

I like the shoulders and think you have no taste.

I think the shoulders fit the overall style of Warcraft well but in a traditional fantasy sense they're really over the top and I can see why someone expecting a medieval fantasy setting wouldn't like them. I think they're awesome though.

Depends on the fantasy settings you pay attention to and enjoy.  Western Euro rip-offs, Caldwell, 80's D&D stuff? Yeah, over the top.  They fit-in with the Warhammer/ miniature style that Warcraft rips-off just fine though.  They also work if you're into anime fantasy stuff since all of that genre seems to aim for large, garish pauldrons as well.

People hate the giantstalker shoulders, but I thought they were fantastic.  I'm digging my T5-model arena shoulders as well, although the 'floatyness' of them does bother me at times.

The problem with the giantstalker shoulders is that they make an orc look like a table lamp.

I created my orc during the "tiny shoulders" era.  Imagine my surprise when I logged in one day and found two giant frondy plants had just erupted around my head.

There's an option to turn off capes and hats - why not shoulders?

I don't care if other people like them - vive le difference and all that - but bleh I'm so sick of my nightelf's ears poking through them.  My toon looks like a football player.

Probably because they are the only really identifiable thing on your character other than your helm and weapon. Everything else just looks the same from a distance. The option to turn off the helm is because people like to see their face on their toon, and the reasoning behind the cape is that it blocks the visability of your other gear from behind. If you start turning off shoulders, there's not really much point in wearing armor at all.

Still... giving the player more options to tailor their look = good. 

See, I disagree on the shoulder element. That's not really tailoring your look. That's denying it completely. The shoulders are a very telling mark of what kind of player you are, and they are one of the few things that people notice on your character outside of a giant weapon.

I don't play games for other people and I don't need gear to show off what I've done in a game.  If I like the way I look, that's all that matters to me.  If you don't like the way I look... oh well.  You're not paying the bills.  Like I said, the more customization options, the better.  The game is already weak when it comes to character look customization and could benefit from allowing the players to do more to customize their appearance.

I think you're missing my point. I don't disagree with more customization of a character. I disagree with the turning off things as a solution. That's not solving anything. What we should be able to do is customize the gear we collect. We should be able to select features on the shoulders, change the colors of our armor, and create a personal look.

You should have more customization options in the higher level gear you collect instead of less.

The problem is that art is hard I guess despite Blizzard having a gigantic staff of very well paid artists and Scrooge McDuck's money bin.

I'm fine with the amount of armor and models in the game at the moment. I liked a lot of the Tier 0->2 recolors + most of the Dungeon Set 3 despite them intentionally making them all boring compared to the glowly-gigantic-shouldered Tier 4-6.

I'm hoping that WotLK will have a lot of new armor/weapon graphics of a more sane variety since the theme is back to gothic-fantasy and not high-fantasy. Also, they're out of shit to recolor. Tier 0, 1, 2 have been done and done again (Some Tier 0-2 pieces got TWO recolors), Tier 4-6 are recolored/skinned for Arenas, and that leaves Tier 3. I'd love to see some Tier 3 recolors at first but they're gonna have to come up with a lot of new stuff I think. Blizzard will never do it but it would be kinda cool if they made blue+ dungeon drops mildly customizable...like, you can adjust your armor pieces 2-4 ways. Re-arrange spikes/significant features, or what shoulder is bigger, or make it cover just one shoulder, change any glow/shimmer effect colors, maybe a couple pallet swaps.

It'd be nice if random-greens and quest greens got some more love though in graphics. Level 70 random-greens are used as placeholders for a lot of people trying to get geared to raid (or because some random-green weapons and armor pieces can be surprisingly good with the right suffixes), and shit if all the random-greens look AWFUL.

Provided I understand the way PCs work correctly on the model/ video end of things; ultimately the problem becomes, artwork = resources.  An increase in resource requirements = lower end PCs drop off.. sometimes pretty damn fast.

I imagine there's people playing the game who still only have a 64mb vid card.

Well... since there appears to be a lack of tanks, I've decided to level one on the Hoard side when my alliance rogue gets bored.  I was thinking of making a tauren warrior, but would like to hear what you guys think would be the best race for a hoard warrior.  Any suggestions on race and on spec for solo/duo leveling?

Thanks.

Easy answer:

Choose the class you like to look at, because your going to spend 20+ days looking at his/her ass. Seriously though they all have advantages so choose what you like to look at / play.

Min/Max:

Go Tauren if you want to be primarily a Tank. Orc/Troll if you want to primarily DPS. Undead/Tauren if you want to primarily PvP.


Racial Bonuses:

Tauren have an advantage as tanks because of the additional +5% HP they get as a racial, also warstomp (aoe stun), a great tool for pvp

Orcs get additional Axe skill, which helps at high end raiding as dps in that you don't need to stack as much +hit (really helpful for dual wielding, this dynamic is changing however in the next patch, not sure whats changing, sorry), they also get Blood Frenzy, a nice dps oriented attack power buff, also get resistance to stuns

Undead get the ability to eat their victims, helping speed up downtime and save on food (whee), they also get resistance to fear effects, not to be discounted if you enjoy PvP

Trolls get berzerking, which increases attack speed every so often, dps oriented, also get bonus health regen

EDIT:

Forgot to include a spec for you. You will want to level up with dps talents for soloing. You can tank any pre 70 instance without a single point in protection, especially pre-60.

I suggest speccing Arms, and using the best 2 H weapon you can get your hands on. Some time after 20 you can play around with dual wielding. Some people say 2H will be higher dps than DW until you get good gear at 60+. Try both. The spec below is for 2 H Arms.

Here is the spend order for your points, with a focus on dps/soloing (although you can tank fine with this).

There are, ofcourse, many viable alternatives to this:

5/5 Cruelty (5% crit rate)
3/3 Imp Heroic Strike
2/5 Deflection
3/3 Imp Thunder Clap
2/2 Imp Charge
3/3 Deep Wounds
1/1 Anger Management
1/2 Imp Overpower
2/2 Impale
3/5 2H Specialization
5/5 Pole Axe Specialization (farm for many of the great axes available in instances at this level, not to mention your class axe at 40ish)

At level 40, respec to:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LIMcdAio00z (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LIMcdAio00z)

Then from 41 on go up the fury tree as such:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LIMcdAio00zZVV0VMgoV (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LIMcdAio00zZVV0VMgoV)

Again, you might want at some point to use a DW build. There are lots of good guides for this, especially on the WoW Europe Warrior forums.

Good Luck

Weapon  skill hasn't effected to hit since BC came out actually. I don't know why they chose to fuck with it but they still haven't figured out what benefit they want it to have as they are changing it again in 2.23. No idea why they changed it except for the interminable complaints about the advantages of human rogues from other rogues.

I did the same thing (create a warrior because of the lack of tanks, and because I love tanking).  I probably should have gone Tauren, but I went orc because I like Orcs better.  Whatever.

I once leveled as an Arms warrior, years ago, and I have to say leveling as pure fury has been a lot better IMO.  The trees have been revamped though, so YMMV.  I just find it more boring to wait 2-3 seconds for a big 2hander to finally swing, I guess, and fury has all the good dual wield talents.

Couple of points to ShenMolo's post:
Trolls get attack speed and run buff at low health with berzerking.
The axe talent for Orcs is actually +5 weapon skill now, and +1% to crit after the next patch. This is because weapon skill is going to the expertise system.

Thanks for taking the time to offer up the insight.  I made a tauren warrior and will give it a shot.  I'm a bit concerned that the playing the warrior will drive me back to playing my rogue, but I figured it would give me a change of pace.  Having leveled my first rogue to 25 as an undead already gives me some familiarity with the hoard side in the early going.

+ weapon skill racials are being changed to 1% to crit with the weapon type for all racials in 2.3 because of the expertise skill thing. So it will still help for DPS, but not like the haxx +weapon skill stuff in the Naxx days.

Level up in the BE lands -- the new areas are designed better for more efficient questing - less running around - and it seems to me the rewards are better too.  I think you can get quests there at level 5.

  If you're not too intent on staying with this toon, I'd suggest prot paladin as REAL big on the fun factor.  From 34ish on, you can grind on 6-8 mobs +/- 2 levels of my own with no downtime at all.  It's actually almost ridiculous when you see it firsthand.  Prot Paladins do great DPS when they're getting hit by multiples, and even when I tank instances I end up #1 on those stupid DPS meter things.  Not to mention it's incredibly efficient from a group standpoint.  I usually spend the first two pulls trying to explain how assist works, and that it's really okay that I get beat on by 4 mobs at a time, but then people start to catch on and the rest of the instance is cake.
 
  It's very possible this all changes when I get to outlands, but at 48, I am having the most fun in quite a long time, and I'd highly recommend it over the typical fight mob, loot mob, fight mob loot mob routine.  Nothing like hoping the runners bring more adds instead of having the "oh shit" moments.

No, it doesn't really change at all, it only gets better as you start getting plate with spell damage on it.

The issue with prot pally leveling is while your awesome with a pack of melee mobs on you, you really, really, really, suck at fighting casters or single mobs. Not in the sense that your in any kind of danger of dieing, just in that it is slow, boring, and slow. SoV helps alliance paladins on single mobs, I have no experience with SoB for horde folk.


If you put 10 into holy for the healing pushback talent, you can solo just about every quest in outlands that isn't a 5 person one. You can put those points into ret once you hit 70 for the parry talent, since by 70, once you start getting 'real' tanking gear, you'll almost never have to heal yourself, your heals will be incapable of effecting your health pool and your mana pool will be around 4-6k only, with no mana5.

So how do you spec a pally before 34?

I've finally figured out the secret to having fun in WSG - be melee or a shaman with ghost wolf.  I've enjoyed my little warrior, so now I want to try a druid and a pally in the 29 bgs.  (The 19 bg has far too many twinks to be enjoyable - twinks at 19 are like 4 or 5 levels above nontwinks.   At 29, the difference seems to be about 2 levels.)

Been reading this thread with interest. Discussion here has been great.

I have a human warrior I leveled to 70 with arms/prot. Great soloing build with flexibility to tank most regular instances. Didn't end up tanking too much (solo questing ftw), but could if I needed to. I have now, however, decided to switch to protection in order to be a better tank, because they seemed to be in demand, and because I got sick of constantly searching for tanks while leveling my mage.

I think I am an ok tank. Not great, but I am not an idiot either. I do my research and learn fast. I do think I am severly under geared at the moment (the consequence of leveling solo as arms), and would like some of your opinions both on gear to aim for as well as other tips such as helpful add-ons and macros. I would aim for questable +defense and regular instance gear since I need to work on faction and have not completed the Karazhan key quest.

I wish I could link my armory profile, but work blocks it... I am Bjorn on Khadgar.


edit: Oh, one other thing, I heard that there was a change coming on an upcoming patch which would give some tanking love to non-prot specced warriors. I don't know much about it, but WOW Insider posted about it a while back. Anyone know more details about that?

I second this, I ran a Tauren Warrior at level 6 over to Silvermoon and did all the quests there. I just bound myself to the Inn in UC and trained there every 2 levels. It was nice to do something a little different in the 10-20 range, plus the blue 2h quest reward at the end is  :heart:

One other question on the whole "DPS needs to hold back" theme... There are threat reduction talents and trinkets, why aren't these emphasized more? Why is the method to hold back rather than rely on these trinkets and skills to give you the threat buffer to allow your tank to maintain aggro? I must be missing some key mechanic here, so pardon my ignorance.

For endgame stuff at least, those trinkets are considered pretty useless (note, I'm mainly thinking of mages here, where my experience lies).  The conventional wisdom is that if you use one, you paradoxically no longer have the issue because your dps has been gimped enough.  However in instances that you are overgeared for, maybe they could have some use if everyone hadn't trashed them by that time.

In terms of talents, soul shatter (for warlocks) is considered a very important and useful ability.  The mage talents to reduce threat are mostly for arcane which isn't considered to be useful until pretty high in the endgame (2 pieces of T5).  I'm not sure what rogues have.  I would guess that maybe the people who have to hold back DPS could benefit from vanish/invis/feigning, so I don't know why that wasn't covered.

I might be biased though, because personally speaking I haven't seen threat scaling to be a huge issue, but then I haven't done any 25 mans or heroics yet.

Mages only have to hold-back initially.  Their invis is a complete aggro dump now.  The classes that get screwed are; Warlocks, Shadow Priests, Ret Pallies, Fury/ Arms Warriors and Ele Shaman.

 While some of them have aggro-reducing talents, they still have the potential to do more DPS threat than a Tank can ever generate (There's a thoretical 'threat per second cap' because of the way Tank Abilities work.)  Yes, those trinkets might help, but - as Jayce points out - they also gimp your DPS.  DPS is pretty important endgame, becuse lots of bosses have an 'enrage' timer.  If you don't do x amount of DPS then you're never going to beat the timer, and the raid dies.

All of this also gets fucked if anyone ever pulls aggro.  The tank might or might-not have Taunt up, but he's not going to be quick enough to ever slam it at the exact instant someone else pulls aggro.  As the mob wanders over to pummel the new target, the tank is falling farther behind because the rest of the raid also won't realize for a second or two that aggro was lost.  They can DPS without the boss focused on him, the tank needs that focus to build rage and threat both. So as he's blowing all his rage trying to get aggro back, the mob pwns inattentive_DPS_idiot 1, 2, 3 and 4 as well as any shadow priests or locks who had big damage dots up and were hovering too high. 

Whoops.

The answers to all your pre-raiding Warrior gear questions:

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-lists-rankings/ (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-lists-rankings/)

Look in the stickies.

In general, get to 490 defense, then start stacking stamina. A tank starting Kara should aim for 490 defense, 12k+ Health, 12k+ Armor

Tankspot has more in depth info on avoidance, block, etc. The stats above are a general answer to the question "When am I ready for Kara".

  I can completely agree with the caster/single mob problems, it's really difficult to build threat if they don't hit me, and I always try to drag a melee mob with me, or target casters first in instances just for that factor.  Up until 34, I just whipped out a 2h and wacked at them, the BE interrupt/silence helped.

  I'm glad to know that it gets better, I'm really enjoying this char, and if i get terribly bored with PvE, there's always the option to spec holy for arenas, which is another appealing factor for me, esp coming from a healer/priest in every game background.

  As far as the levelling to 34, a lot of people spec ret until they get 5 in reckoning apparently, me personally, I just levelled as prot, being able to heal made the downtime not so terrible.  Once I hit 34? around then, I could start with multi-mob pulls, and the efficiency was there.  Up until then I could do it, but I usually had to heal/pot/panic button at some point.

 

Most of them are simply not so good, and you can always just "stop" hitting it (unless you're an Affliction Warlock or Shadow Priest, and then you have to be a bit more careful and have other concerns in the first place). Blessing of Salvation on the other hand is a big step up in potential DPS versus Blessing of Might as an example, and that is frequently used in group settings by competent players.

problem is this will leave you with 700 ap, producing no threat and hitting like a weenie.  Unfortunately you just need to suffer through that period in order to get your AP back up with heroic and kara gear.

mod wise get klh threatmeter, a bartender type bar mod to organize the 30 or so buttons you need to mash and as always an atlas mod to know where you are going.

So I've been leveling this warrior for a few days now and I've come to one conclusion... the class is SO BORING compared to my rogue.  Does this ever change?  It may have something to do with the lack of tanks.  The class just isn't all that interesting. Please tell me it gets better as you get higher.

No.

once you start tanking outlands it goes from boring to painful. 

I want to have a 70 Tank Warrior in my arsenal of alts really badly, but THIS is exactly why it has not happened.  I can't seem to get past lvl 14 before I lose interest.  EVERY other class is much more interesting, including Paladin.  I know.  I've done them.

My rogue is a joy.  Lots of tools.  Every fight can be different.  My warrior... meh.  I will probably shelve it until my rogue hits 70 and solos everything that it can.  Then I'll level the warrior and try a few group-related things.  I chickened out and made a human warrior by the way.  The class is so gear dependent that I wanted to use my rogue to get it gear and potions for the long road to 70.  I'd like to play the hoard side to 70, but I'm thinking it may be on something other than a warrior.

Here's the Deal :  If you don't group often and well with friends, you'll never get a Warrior to 70 without hating a great percentage of it.

Sorry.

I have one friend that I play with that is leveling a druid.  If that can't get me through it, then I'll just play the rogue until I get bored.  It not terribly invested in the toon, I just wanted to try a few things.  Since I don't like pet classes and got bored with my mage, that left me a limited number of other options. 

Are you 2h or dual wield?

It could just be personality, but my (second) warrior is 54 and rising and I am having a much better time this time around.  I know at least one other person who echoes my sentiments.  The difference for me is that I went arms the first time and fury/dual wield the second time.  I fight like a rogue but with more armor and less sneaky.

I am also a passable tank in most instances without being Prot.  Gear and defensive stance are the key.

Exactly. WoW killed the Holy Trinity by making it the Holy Duality. Healbots and tanks are the two least frequently found classes in the game. This is the one thing I hate about WoW. They had the opportunity to not make fundamentally/absolutelyl/don't-go-otherwise classes but let their encounter team create content that requires it anyway.

With a focus on defense (through equipping the highest tank points), I can see how you would have a tendency to sacrifice attack power, however, isnt part of the tank points equation +hit or threat generated from damage? So, it should somehow balance out sometime, yes?

Also, "expertise" as referenced in the TankSpot thread should somewhat change the landscape a little I would imagine.... Any thoughts on that?



I leveled my warrior largely solo from 40-70. There were painful spots, but most of those are pain I saw in all my characters (mid 40s to mid 50s quests and zones... Felwood - YUK), so I don't think it was warrior specific. It was repetitive to some extent, but then again, aren't all characters when you solo? My hunter was, my mage sure is and my warrior was no different. Charge, shouts, MS, rend, etc. Rinse repeat. My respite from the boredom was guild chat and random PC interactions.

So, Ironwood, I find myself respectfully disagreeing with you. I appreciate your opinions and don't doubt that it was painful for you... I just wish it hadn't been.

no, problem with tank points is it doesn't have a "what are you trying to accomplish variable" in my opinion it rates gear based upon the objective of tanking a raid boss.  In that scenario where you are able to focus on 1 target that is hitting you hard enough to keep your rage maxed then you don't need as much assistance from attack power.  Now if there were a drop down that covered gear selections tuned towards pvp, 5man, heroic 5man and solo play then this tool would be alot more useful. 

edit: lol I would even say tankpoints doesn't rate your gear optimally for the trash clearing trip to said raid boss.

That could be it.  I went 2h because I didn't want the toon to feel too much like my dual weild rogue (which is mace specialty and combat spec).  I may give a respec a try, but I think I'd like to go prot spec before going dw.  If I wanted to play dw, I'd probably just play my rogue.

I leveled as 2h fury from 40-60 and it was a blast.  Of course back then bloodthirst rocked but enrage+flurry+imp slam builds are still viable for solo grinding.

I didn't solo shit from 60-70 as a warrior. I stayed protection and did nothing but instances, all day long, whenever I logged in. I only did quests related to instances and only solo-quested if I was on at an off-peak hour.

In this fashion, the warrior is totally painless to level. In fact, it hardly feels like leveling at all because you are going towards an end-goal in an instance. Only later do you look at the xp gain and think, hmmmm, only three more instances and I hit 64. Of course, this requires a crew that you work almost consistently with, and I recommend setting that up immediately as a warrior if you want to be successful.

I have a 67 warrior I'm levelling up pretty much solo.

The absolute number one rule of warrior levelling is to recognize how gear-dependent they are. Your weapon or weapons and gear must be as top-of-the line as possible for your level. First thing I did before he stepped in Outlands was to buy a Blade of Misfortune, then a Halaani Claymore in case no weapons dropped in instances. Lo and behold... I'll probably have to buy him a Crystalforged War Axe as well the way my luck is going.

Alchemists can be a warrior's best friend. My main is an alchemist and when my warrior was questing he always had Elixirs of Major Agility and Earthen Elixirs. The increased crit and damage reduction was pretty sweet. Also having abundant Super Healing pots is a big plus.

Once my warrior got to about 15% crit and > 900 attack power soloing became much less painful. Right now with an Agility pot he's around 25% crit and just under 1400 AP with food and Battle Shout. I'm killing stuff about as fast as my warlock did at 67.

^truth.

I said earlier in this thread that I'd never pick a warrior for a first character.  Do an EZ-mode hunter, warlock or mage and take two gathering professions.  Get rich, then level a warrior.

Regarding rogue vs dual wield warrior, I mostly want to tank, but I can't imagine pugging my way to glory, and I don't have a crew as Paelos suggests.  A fury warrior is a passable rogue who can also tank, so it works for me.  So I guess I'm saying that "if I wanted to dual wield I'd play my rogue" doesn't work for me - dual wielding is not the real issue, it's whether you want to DPS or tank.

I get what you're saying.  I was more commenting on having fun.  I'm never going to be in a raiding guild and I'm never going to have any gear better than I can get solo or from pvp.  Knowing that, I'm just playing the toons for the pure enjoyment of it.  I want the two classes to feel different enough that I don't immediately think "hey, this is similar to my ___". 

I'm probably not making much sense at this point.

No, that makes perfect sense.  I'm looking from the perspective of someone who's been up and down the leveling treadmill a few times.  The interesting part for me is variations on the journey and what to do when I get to the destination.  The interesting part for you is the journey itself - to which I heartily agree that you should just enjoy it using whatever class you like best.

From that perspective, yes, a rogue and a dual wielding warrior are pretty close to the same, but a rogue has more solo-friendly tricks and PvP usability, so the rogue probably wins.

edit: oh, and I wanted to reiterate - some people like playing 2h warriors, but I can't take it.  I fall asleep between swings.  And fuggedabowdit if you miss.  At least pallys have something to do between swings, like consecrate or heal or something.  So I agree with you there too.

Crap, too much love and flowers and agreement for this community.  I hate you anyway.  There, is that better?

I'm the Leo Buscaglia of this community.  It's ok. 

<Thanks for the info.  It was a good sanity check.>

With whatever melee class (and to some extent caster class if you are good at anticipating latency and missing spell cancellations) this is the one key I have found:

Hopping increases DPS and fun factor.

:)

Say what you will, but one of the biggest downfalls of GW for me was the lack of jump.  I don't know why, but there's something about spamming the space bar with a cartoonish character that gives me great joy.

It's definitely not just you.

It's even better when there's a cool random jump effect.. like Dwarf barrel rolls in EQ or Night Elf flips in WoW. 

Finally went into Kara last week and downed the first two bosses (horse chap and butler) real easy.

This tanking thing is a lark.

Leveling a warrior, or any class for that matter, will get a lot faster after next Tuesday with the release of 2.3.

I suspect there will be a lot more people leveling up alts. I have a shaman, druid, and rogue waiting at level 20 myself. It should make it easier to get instance groups if you want to try your hand at tanking. Instance xp, and at higher levels, rewards, are being revamped.

I have a BE rogue, hunter & priest, and an orc shaman on a new(-to-me) server, all sat at 20-22 with Braxis' Levelling Guide set up in Cartographer.

I also have three four* alts on my main server stuck in the 40-50 rut.


*Forgot my L39 warlock with the  :awesome_for_real: D&D cartoon name.

That might not result in more tanks, though.

25 or 10 man raids require a lot more attention and focus from everyone; the healers have to be on top of the game continuously, the DPS'ers must meet minimum output with all the enrage timers, the tanks must generate a lot more aggro and dance through the certain encounters where aggro gets wiped, etc etc.  I remember the old lazy days of the 40-man MC raid; you guys can say whatever you want about the current end-game and the lack of progression past Kara for most guilds, but the end-game mentality and focus is required at the first tier now (Tier 4) rather than the last.

And so for the casual, there's a lot more effort required for what the "entry level raiding" is, compared to before.

You're playing a warrior for solo play; the focus of the class is groups, so, it won't ever come close to how well a solo-oriented class performs at solo play.  Bottom line.

In terms of difficulty I'd certainly say that Kara requires a lot more than ZG and even AQ20 did for the most part. ZG you could sleepwalk through if you wanted even as a tank. Jin'do was the only remotely complicated fight in the place and he was mostly tough when I got to do him because everyone was in half blues and AQ20/ZG gear. AQ20 was noticeably harder than ZG but just like ZG I think half our difficulty with it was the utterly piss poor itemization of old world WoW. Garbage tanking gear (the best blue tanking chestpiece was a fucking quest reward), maybe 3-4 good pieces of gear total per spec for each class, warrior blues with spirit, gigantic weapon DPS differences between entry level epics and blues, etc.

In BC you can walk into Kara with a raid in full, properly itemized blues (some that rival good epics) and wipe all night if people don't have a clue how to play their class.

The big problem is, a good 2/3 or more of the people I have grouped with in WoW, especially in my time on Alliance, have little to no clue about their class or other classes. And a lot of them end up in groups and guilds because they were one of the loot sponges that were brought along to fill 40 man rosters back in the pre-expansion days.

This "donk factor" as I like to call it, is why at least half the people in the guild I am in are on my "not going to go into any 5 man, heroic or non with this dumbass" list. And this guild has cleared all of BT and Hyjal.

So what the fuck am I supposed to do now ? (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Earthen+Ring&n=Silnakh)

If the armory ever loads I'll tell you! :(

Ah.  Silly me.  I thought he was asking what he should do about the never-ending loading.  I didn't comment because lately he seems even more angry than usual.  I was afraid I'd inspire more than the usual misanthropic Scottish barrage of what for.  After you post I suddenly see that what I thought was even sillier than what I usually think. 

Bitchslap Nightbane till he drops the Panzar'thar breastplate.

Well, kinda.   I have a great many Kara runs to do to gear up the other 9 chaps.

But I feel like I've hit another wall where the purples are giving really, really MARGINAL bonuses and even if I can go to ZA, the 25-40 mans are just not going to happen.

This expansion best hurry.

Spec MS and Arena till your eyes bleed for season 3 gear.  Thats about your only path of gear advancement after Kara / ZA if you cant get into 25 mans.

I have basicly the same problem.  Im stuck with a druid and a mage who are pretty much burned out on Kara, with nearly 0 prospect for further gear upgrades because i hate PvP, and cant get into any 25 mans.

Badge gear provides some fairly decent upgrades, but not a full set unless you're one of the offspecs they were designed around.  But, yes, then you're at a wall of "well, that was fun time to unsub for a bit."

Hey !

I can too get into 25/40 mans.

I'm just not going to.  I have no desire at all to go down that road again.

 :-)

I'm a raid virgin.  :drill:

Better to stay that way. Almost every bit of drama that comes from a PvE MMO is about raiding in some form (ninjas, can't get in, too required, too stressful, polarized classes, alliances, blah blah blah).

At the same time, it really is a good measure of your compatible personality types. People fall into two categories: they can emotionally handle failure or they cannot. Raids bring that out best because of the aggregate time investment. So it builds character, both symbolically and, err, actually, I guess :-)

Yeah, exactly.  I've built my guild up from friends, virtual and RL, that I know can handle it and consider it merely a game.  (You know, the 'grown-up' response).

We have a blast and are enjoying Kara.  Trouble is, I haven't been able to find that many grown-ups....

What server you on? When do you play? I'm itching to try this 'raid' thing.

Europe.

Earthen Ring.

I play all the time.  I'm cursed.  Like Davy Jones.

Europe.  Gah!

Yup.  Thought that might fuck you up.

It's fun, for a while. A short while.

Then you realize that it takes up entirely too much of your time for gear that is only useful in that exact situation. In essence, you're progressing to progress. PvE and PvP gear is totally separated and not interchangeable at all.

For me, anyway, there has to be a little bit more breadth of usefulness to the gear I collect in a raiding environment than that to validate the time I spend doing it. But as a warrior myself, having to collect three sets of gear really pisses me off in the first place (Tanking, PvE DPS, and PvP - all requiring totally different stats).

When you realize that you've been raiding so you can raid better and nothing else, you also start to wonder why the rest of the game exists at all. Unless you're willing to put a massive amount of time into collecting purple pixels.

Ya, I'm really quite over the whole loot thing.  I'm just curious to see the content that I missed.

But I know as soon as I resub I'll be playing FFH2 within the week.  We'll see.

Screenshots.

;p


At least that solution doesn't eat away 6 months of your life.

Heh.  This is true.

I've also been missing my characters.  If that's possible.

Ye Gods, that sounds sick.

Raiding is pretty rough right now at the SSC/TK level. The Kara/Gruul/Mags level is now retuned and relatively pain free if you have a group of people that are 75% geared in Kara stuff.

My group has been doing SSC consistently for about 2 months and we're stuck on Lurker at the moment. We're not uber though, so we don't progress extremely fast at our one raid a week for 3 hours policy. I do admit that a lot of the fights at this level are even more technical than they used to be, and explaining them is a gigantic pain in the ass. It makes you want to pull your hair out when you've tried to explain jobs to people twice and they fuck it up the third time.

What's the problem on Lurker?  He was the easiest boss of all for our group, and he's on "Farm" status while we're still working on consistantly downing Hydross, and haven't gotten any others beyond 30%.   

You might also want to look at doing 'lootreaver' in TK and farm some T5 shoulders.  If you can do VR easy, then Astromancer (the other wing) is equally simple.

As to raiding, yes it takes too long to gear-up everyone, but the fights themselves are interesting while you're learning them... so long as you don't mind losing gold.  (Woo hoo 100g in repairs this weekend as a mail user!)  After that, I agree, it's too fucking tedious.  You shouldn't have to kill a boss for 3 months just to get everyone a chance at their bits (assuming their bits even drop.)

The problem on Lurker is that we've only tried it twice. Hydross is on farm now as we pressed and pressed until we got it right. Nobody clearly understands the objective yet, and frankly I'm surrounded by a few idiots who cannot grasp how to time jumps at all. These are mostly healers. It'll get better, but I usually have to browbeat some people during technical fights because they makes the same fucking mistakes over and over.

Time jumps?  You mean to get back out of the water after a spout, I assume.  Yeah, it can be tricky, particularly if you've never had "platformer training" on other videogames.  ;D   The best is when folks actually get IN the water and the spout still hits them, because they were moronic enough to still be touching the platforms.

But then, I had a shaman drown Saturday night. Yeah.. one of two classes that gets water breathing, and he drowned. Oh it was to laugh.

Yeah timing jumps in and out. Honestly, I know it's a crass generalization, but the ones who have the most trouble with it are a few women in my raid. I have no idea why this is the case. Anyway, people in the raid don't get into the water in time and get blasted, or the don't get in far enough and get blasted, or they take too many whirls, etc etc. It's just gonna take practice.

I like my current raid group a lot. They're all pretty solid players, but they split into two raids not long ago and that messed up our core a bit so now we have to pull random people from the raid alliance or people who don't consistently raid to fill in the odd 1-2 spots. This sucks since we have ran headlong into the brick wall that is Aran. We're still gearing up since the loot gods enjoy granting us the gift of shammy gear, and everyone is so far satisfied with destroying the first 5 bosses in an hour and a half/two hours on day one, then spending an hour+ clearing to chess before we make 2-3 limp-wristed shots at Aran and call it a week.

We're not gonna get past Aran in a reasonably timely manner unless we just invest the sucktime and put a full trash respawn's amount of wipes into him on each run until we get how we need to do the encounter to get him down regularly and move on to the last 3 bosses.

How much melee dps are you tossing at Aran? He's very vulnerable to that, and if you've got lots of casters that can cause problems for a new group trying to kill him.

We usually take the first night up to the Curator and leave it there (casual, see.)

Then the next night we hit Aran straight away.  We had some real bother with him at first, but it's really about a couple of things :

1 - Gear.  Sorry.
2 - Timings.  The drinking and the Elementals.  Jesus, when we first tried we'd get BOTH these events at the same time ALWAYS.  It was like a RAGE outbreak in a slaughterhouse directed by Danny Boyle as written by Irvine Welsh.  Really, it was bad. 

Once we managed to DPS him much quicker and get the Elementals out of the way before the drinky, it became metric fucktons easier.  Also, like any fight, you need a solid raid leader with a nice mod attached to call out 'What's Coming' and to have a macro that screams BURNY BURNY, DON'T FUCKING MOVE !! and spam it.  :)


Your point is interesting Paelos, I didn't know that.  We have 2 ice mages in the group and now that I'm thinking on it, when our rogue isn't there it IS harder.  Hmmmm.

Currently our group is 'stuck' since we simply run out of 'casual' time before the instance resets.  We can manage almost all the bosses (haven't tried prince or the non-beam summoned dragon) and we killed Beam dragon after two attempts because, well, we're kinda grown up and clever.  (seriously, that fight is easy if you have the method.  A total cakewalk.)

Sometimes I wish that players had some input into Raid reset times.  If not shorter, then at least longer.  But, yeah, yeah, entitlement and all that...

I know that melee DPS rapes his face since he has like 0 armor and melee doesn't have to give 3 shits about the blizzard and can largely still DPS during a flame wreath, but we tend to be pretty caster heavy on our second day due to a couple of our melee players having newly messed up work shedules.

Doesn't help we got me (prot-war, worthless at DPS even with my DPS gear) and now a prot-pally (also worthless DPS) for MT/OT instead of a druid who can just put on kitty gear and kick just as much ass as a rogue. We got enough DPS to get him to 40% before he has to drink but not enough to kill him before he has to drink, so we always have to slam on the brakes at ~45% and let him drink so we don't get elementals + the pyroblast.

I think our interrupts aren't consistent either, since I know I have an incredibly itchy trigger finger on mine and I keep accidentally slamming a spell school I'm not assigned to.

We don't even bother with assigning schools anymore, we just have our interrupters alternate. Seems to work a lot better.

Yeah, Chimpy posted what I was going to.  It's worked pretty well for us, as well.

Fab - Your Prot Pally should be taking their healing set into Kara with them, and help heal/ cleanse on Aran and definitly on Prince.  (Cleanse is even more important on Prince, for Shadow Word Pain, since Priest Dispel didn't get extended to 40 yards while Pally Cleanse did. )

99% of 10-man boss fights, if the MT goes down, the OT isn't going to reaquire aggro, so you're all fucked weather the pally heals or not.  Better to have them heal and try to avoid the death.   If their ego is too damn big to put aside their own glory, well that's a bigger problem.  I've got no problems stepping aside as "MTing Pally" on our alt runs when we've got a warrior, but I do notice other folks who Primarily tank do have that problem.

Also, what Ironwood said.  Folks think Curator is a gear check, but he's more of a coordination check. (Aka, leave the curator fucking alone and kill the adds until he evos you fecking noobz. And don't clump together!)  Aran was the big gear check, imo.

Yeah, if you're not getting elementals well before he's close to drinking, it's never going to work well. You need two melee dps minimum, I'm a prot warrior and it's still better than nothing in my dps gear, because those melee can stop certain schools from casting. A warrior pummel makes it impossible for him to cast that next school, so if you knock off frost and fire in a row, it's obviously going to be arcane next. The longer you can keep that up, the less mana he uses and the more time you have to get to elementals.

In the raid I do now for badges, we can 2 warriors, a druid, and a rogue. We melt his face off before he can drink usually. It's really really so much easier with melee.

What is this "drinking" phase you guys talk about?

I didn't get back into the game/start running Kara until it was an alt run for my friends/guild and have never seen Aran do anything special after the adds disappear. Is there some regen phase that comes after the elementals have been despawned for a while?

Not trying to sound elitist, just wondering about a mechanic that I never had to learn about.

When Aran runs out of mana, he sheeps the whole raid and then drinks up.  Like a boring evocate.

Then he starts a super fireball that brings you outta sheep with a lot less health....


But you wouldn't know because you're zomg.

;)

Just out of curiosity, are you interupting EVERYTHING?  Most Aran strats i have seen, and for pretty much all aran fights we do, we try to avoid interupting arcane missiles.  Interupt Ice / Fire, but let him channel the missiles (has something to do with the amount of mana it takes vs damage done and ability to spam, or something).  The general concensus seems to be that if you let him cast AM, and beat on him while he is doing it, you take more of his health off while not letting him use enough mana to get to the drinking stage. Also, since there really is NO tank on aran (he 100% randomly chooses a target) everyone should be in dps gear wailing on him.

another thing i have noticed, is that if you DO have an incredibly itchy trigger finger on the Interrupt button, it is possible to have him locked out of all 3 schools for a brief period, at witch point he runs off and stands somewhere weird, messing up all your dps (especially if he does it in the middle of a flame wreath)

We only interrupt frost/fire, and the healers keep the AM punching bag healed up.

My tanking gear IS my DPS gear.  I do more damage with a solid Shield Slam than with any two handing ability.  Also, it allows me to get my Shield bash in, which I far prefer to Pummel.

Originally, I was the same way. You'll find that over time though, once you get past Aran and killed Prince, you start collecting a lot of nice dps gear just as a side note to keep it from going to DE. Just running Kara for badges, I collected a full set of epic dps gear, not counting the engineering dps helm and the blacksmithing chest. The funny thing is you never really use it that much as a tank, but it makes you more versatile in fights where you don't need a bunch of tanks. And when I need to farm anything that has ridiculous mats, I can just pay the respec fee and get 20 primals in a day or something.

Yeah, I don't disagree.

I suspect as soon as Kara is over and done with, I'll go Arms and do some PvP.

Are you guys jumping in the water as the jet of water gets close?  The way I've seen it done is he takes a deep breath, which triggers a zillion alarms and sounds with all the boss mods out there, and everyone jumps in the water at that time and stays down until it's over.  It's not too hard to heal the water damage.  When we did it, we put those (healers) with great reflexes by the tank, and those with poor reflexes opposite of the tank, at Lurker's tail, so that there was plenty of time to yell at them on vent to jump in the water.

There's no rush to the fight, no enrage timer.  If all of you hide underwater for longer, it just means you'll have an extra couple submerges, no big deal.  The trick is in the pacing, especially for the healers' mana (they can regen while submerged, and can drink a mana potion every submerge, the cooldowns will refresh by the next submerge).  The other trick is with movement: your casters and healers must run the hell away from the naga spawn points (a few of which are by the main tank's normal position) as soon as Lurker goes underwater, so they don't get killed when the nagas spawn.  Only those responsible for tanking the elite Nagas should be close to them, everyone else should keep distance.

Yes, we're trying to stay ahead of it. I'm trying to make sure the two groups to either side of me are in the water automatically, and then the farther groups wait until it comes around since they have some time. The problem is some idiots in the first two groups who can't grasp the simple concept of when to jump out at all.

My DPS set is slowly growing which may help on Aran. I picked up Honor's Call since I hit exhalted with HH, and between duel-wielding it with my KD and the Horseman's Helm/Vanquisher's Legplates/Crimsonforge Breastplate/some odds-n-ends DPS gear I can actually kill stuff pretty quick as a prot-warrior. It surprised me how effective spamming devastate and heroic strike worked.

Exhalted, the state of being knackered after a long reputation grind.

(http://www.democraticwarrior.com/forum/images/smilies/dog.gif)

exaltedI could've sworn I spell that right. Oh well.

Not just you.  Loads of people spell it that way.  It's all over the WoW boards and just doing a search here pulled up a quite a few.  It's so commonly spelled that way on the WoW board that I think people's fingers type it before they engage the brain.  We need fingers with tiny little brains in them.  AND MOUTHS!  Can you imagine how cool it would be if your fingers had little tiny mouths?  With teeny weeny gnashy gnashy teeth?

 :ye_gods:

Yeah, it's pretty strange to see people consistently misspell something by putting extra letters in.  Usually they're taking letters out.

I can only think it's because "exhausted" is a lot more common and sounds the same.  At least it means they know how to spell exhausted!

You would have to provide examples and a chart to prove to me that people on the WoW boards know how to spell exhausted. 

I could have sworn that a while ago I saw it verified somewhere that 'exhalted' is a valid, if deprecated, spelling of the word, but now I can't find it. The 'h' makes it look dumb though.

Exhaulted is worse....and I know at least half a dozen people who spell it that way.

And they give me shit for how I pronounce revered (I tend to say rev-urd instead of rev-eerd).

Don't be silly.  Chimps can't talk. 

I have one of those Stephen Hawking voice box things.

So it distorts the sound of some words.