f13.net

Everyone has them. The stories are fun to share, and help blow off steam.. just don't let it devolve into a "so this noob with a crappy spec" slap fights.

My latest:

So last night I decide to start gearing-up my newly-80 priest and join the LFG widget and channel.  I make sure to spam that I'm a new-80 so no Heroics or raids.  After a short wait I get a group for HoL, normal.  "Great" I think, no heroics, no raid shouldn't be a problem. 

So they summon me, and we zone in and I immediately notice that most of the first room trash is clear.  Their previous healer must have bailed on them, so I begin to feel tense, amplified by the fact the first boss is still up and I've seen 3 groups of bones from the entrance to the first platform.  We run up to the first boss and the DK tank proceeds to deathgrip it before I'm done drinking from buffing and we're all together.. WHILE he still has his lightning charge.  First Death as I struggle to keep up healing and we wipe.

So we run back, and find the ret pally hasn't run back.  "Can I get a rez, plz"  he says when he sees us.  While i'm thinking "wtf" the shadow priest has already finished the rez. 

This time the tank waits after her guildmate says "wait.. wait.. backup.. wait.. ok now." and we give a legitimate engagement on the boss.  During the fight there are a few spikes on the tank that drove her down to 500hps that have me worried.  Maybe, just maybe, I'm thinking, this was a bad idea. The ret pally's repentance being resisted and both adds deciding the healer looked like a nice squishy plaything lend to this idea.  The tank obviously can't keep aggro on multiple targets.. something I can't fathom as a DK myself.   I die to one of the adds OOM from binding heal as they kill the boss, and the ret pally and shadow priest keep the rest alive long enough to down them. Death two.

So we start the charge through the earth elemental room, after explaining "don't stop, just run to the end and tank them there."  We make it through, me living because I'm spamming my AOE dispel for the armor debuff and binding heal on the tank.  Because of this, though, the ret pally dies.

 We rez him and begin on one of the stair packs.  You know.. the ones with a knockback.

Yes, you guessed it, tank gets knocked-back into the other group, we have 8 mobs, we manage to kill 3 but die because I've got too many on me and the tank runs down the stairs... into the earth elementals.  "Wtf, I thought we  killed those" is the first thing typed after my 3rd death, group death #2, followed by "what happened there anyway?" 

We explain the knock-back and that the eles respawn on the run back and buff up at the entrance to the ele room.  The ret pally hasn't released yet , and asks for another rez.  :awesome_for_real: I think, this jackass is going to do this all night because he's too good to run back or something.   So we run through, kill the eles and rez the pally.  While rezzing the tank runs back DOWN into the ele room after typing, "Ok, let's kill these guys."  :ye_gods: :uhrr:

So we live, despite me having 4k mana when she did that.  I'm irritated at this point and begin to wonder just how many deaths I'm going to tolerate while manaing up.  My upper limit is usually 4, but we're not that far in. Surely I can tough it out for a little while longer.  Maybe I'm just being an elitist prick.

  The tank says "Hey let me beat on them first so I can get aggro before you lay-in guys. I can't hold aggro like a pally!"  I think "oh shit." and she rips into the mobs, no pestilence, no blood boil, no D&D dropped.  I find myself using binding heal very often as mobs beat on my cloth-wearing aggro-generating ass.   To her credit, she did keep her back to the wall for a bit and we managed to kill the first group on the stairs. I'm seriously considering dropping, though, because I'm tanking as much as the tank it seems.

So we go up the stairs and tackle the first group there.  Again, no D&D, or pest & BB.. but the shadow priest backs into the patrol AND the group behind us.  After my death I just leave group, camp and decide it's "old world faction grind" night for my DK.

Nice one.

I try not to pug to much, but the other day myself (DPS DK) and 2 friends, (Druid Tank, Holy pally) decide to run Heroic Nexus and no one else is around to run it with us. We grab a pug shaman, and he asks if we need a rogue too as he has a rogue friend online. We say sure, invite the rogue and hit Nexus. After zoning in and start moving through the trash, the rogue says "hey does anyone have recount?", and I reply that, yes, I am running recount. He then says "Ok, can you reset it in 5 minutes since I am playing with one hand while I eat and and want to see how leet my DPS is when im done".
So after about five minutes of putting put about 400dps, he asks if I could reset it, and I figure why not. I say ok its reset and he says "ok, now keep posting it, cause you are going to see some leet dps".
I should also mention that the shaman was elemental.
After clearing several trash pulls to the first boss I post recount for them. It looked something like this and pretty much stayed the same through the entire run.

Recount - Damage Done
1 - Me - 2600 dps - 65%
2 - Druid Tank 1400 dps - 24%
3 - Rogue - 800 dps - 7%
4 - Ele Shaman - 450 dps - 3%
5 - Holy Pally - 50 dps - 1%

Turns out the rogue was 14 years old, and the shaman was his 12 year old uncle. The two where so completely bad that it was funny. But it was nexus, and we cleared it with ease. It was really amazing how bad they where. Oh yeah, and both of them had hit 80 that evening right before the run.

I try not to PUG too much, mostly because of disasters similar to what Merusk first recounted (except in BC, when heroics were heroics, and made you damn well remember that.)  My relatively minor experience with PUGs though has led me to be extremely wary of rogues; they truly are (at least on our server) the new huntards.  I thought it would be DKs, but I haven't seen as many DKs with absolutely horrifyingly bad DPS as I have rogues.

Hunters seem to be by and large competent at the class, which is sort of nice.  You still see the occasional idiot, but for the most part the hunters I've PUGed with have been able to produce decent dps.

I will admit to complete bafflement on the shaman though.  How could you possibly do 450 dps.  I can push out 600 dps as a holy paladin by pushing two or three buttons...

That time I bitched about horrible pugs, someone ragequit the guild and called me an unreasonable child.  :heart:

I could probably do 450 DPS just using SW:P and my wand as a holy priest Oo

I did a heroic VOA recently where it resulted in around 4-5 wipes and I ended up leaving.

The first two attemps Archavon ended up in the hallway.  Most of the other attempts the tanks just kept him in place after jumps instead of moving him out of the gas clouds.  Just about every melee DPS ended up (voluntarily? heh) dying to the gas clouds.  Once a few DPS died, he would end up hitting the enrage timer, that's if the tank actually managed to live.

Only 5 of the DPS were north of 2K DPS in full fucking raid buffs (3 were DKs).  More than half of the DPS was lower than 1.5K.  A handful were under 1K DPS in FULL RAID BUFFS.  I think I can autoattack to 1K DPS. A hunter, pulling under 800 DPS???  How the fuck does that even happen?  This is like the easiest fight in the world for you.  This is one of the times, where I say if you have some special snowflake spec or are some fresh off the boat 80 that can't even manage 1.5K DPS being buffed out the wazoo, can you not offer yourself up as DPS?  Well.. unless you're a warlock.  Summoning really helps for all of the lazy shits that take 10 minutes to get there.

Did a regular HOL a week ago for a new 80 tank in the guild.  Managed to die 5 times on the first boss.  Everytime he was engaged while charged.  Most of the time I would have the first add down and the tank would just drop dead.  Healer just couldn't keep him up.   :awesome_for_real:  Still, nothing like a WOLK instance taking as long as a Heroic Bot run.

And.. two nights ago, well, I got to bag on my guild for this.  Epic wipe time on Patchwerk 10 man.  I don't know if the bugger was glitching or something, but it was pretty sad.  Just about every time I would eat hatefulls 5-10 seconds after I engaged.  A minute in usually all melee were dead.   "Keep hots on the offtank." /facepalm  Tank and hateful taker weren't going in together.  MT would just pull without a ready check.  Ugg, it was just crappy and each attempt got progressively worse.  The guildleader was main healing it,  and I don't think she understood the mechanics of the fight at all.  One of the druids was battling food poisoning, and even at full strength he's one of the worst WoW players I've seen (nice guy though).  Thank god it hit time for me to sleep.

Yeah, VoA groups have been getting progressivly worse. I think people are just joining after WG on alts now for free badges and gear.   I ran one tuesday where a DK was pulling 800dps and a rogue was at that 400 mark noted above.  People were standing in clouds, 2nd tank had no idea about taunting after lunge.. it was horrible.

I do PUGs to make me appreciate my guild has good players.  Some days you wipe and wipe and wipe on things and begin to bitch about people you genuinely like.  It's a nice reality check, plus I do manage to find good people that way.

Archavon has an enrage timer?  :ye_gods:

Five minutes for Archavon's enrage timer, I believe.

You can hit Archavon's timer easily if 3-4 of your dps are tards and die right off the bat in a PuG. In a regular group you could 20 man it no question.

But the thing is that people on alts should be fine, since they've done it a hundred and a million times before on their mains. That kind of thing only hurts on bosses with enrage timers.

I think what you're seeing is that people who had even an ounce of a clue and no 8pm bedtime had leveled up weeks or months ago, and kids who got the game at Christmas have recently managed to level their hunter after school.

One of my most annoying "Kids!!!!!!!!" stories was a 12 year old hunter in a Naxx 25 raid. He was actually in the guild that was hosting, which is like the third ranked Alliance guild on the server.

He continually pulled aggro on Stalagg before Thaddius, wiping the entire raid. When asked why he didn't stop DPS when everyone was asked to, or why he refused to feign death, he replied "FUCK YOU ASSHOLES THAT SHIT WILL LOWER MY DPS".

But really, there are too many stories to get into any of them. H Oculus was a fertile ground for funny/incredibly annoying stories.

I could never really grasp the difficulty people had with learning three new buttons.

But I think the worst shit ever was trying to PUG 25 man Patchwerk the first couple months. Honestly, my fuck. STOP HEALING THE MELEE. HEAL THE TANKS. HEAL THE TANKS!

HEAL THE TANKS!!!!

MOSGSNI HEAL THE MOTHERFUCKING TANKS!!!!!!!!



jesus tapdancing christ it's another wipe











































DON'T RELEASE








DON'T RELEASE YOU.... fuckers

I had absolutely no idea Archavon had a timer.

I haven't actually been in a PUG where I didn't know SOMEone else in it yet (this expansion). That's actually really weird for me, in TBC I was one of the only people in my guild that would PUG at all.

Patchwerk - We were in the middle of raid recovery when someone aggro'd the slimes in the preceding room.

I got to hear about this one last night.  10-man OS.  Raid starts, 4 people have done it and done it well.  The rest are competent.  It was taking so long to get to the boss, the trash was respawning.

wow

Whoa.

I got brought into a 25 man OS on the last boss where the trash had respawned. But thats' a whole other level of suck.

Did anyone reply that BEING DEAD LOWERS IT EVEN MORE?

Guy I used to raid with always said "a dead rogue does no damage".

No one seems to get that.  Which is why I am the master of backing off in a boss fight.  I rarely ever die too ;-)

Oh, there was quite a long argument in ventrilo. Mainly because it happened like five times before he left.

He repeatedly refused to stop DPS or feign death. Like, he just flat out wouldn't.

Trust me, wiping repeatedly and having a twelve year old scream and swear in ventrilo about how he flat out won't watch his aggro because it might hurt his spot on the chart makes you VERY happy that you're not all playing in the same room. I assume the judge would frown upon a two hundred pound man beating the everliving fuck out of a twelve year old because of a video game.

Find a judge who raids.

Get a jury of gamers. I'd let you off in a heartbeat.

My hunter was in this boat when he first hit 80. The main problem, I worked out, was my pet. A ravager is now a completely gimp choice for a dps pet, where in BC it rivaled the cat. My pet, when I started checking with recount, was outdps'd by a gorilla for fucks sake, a tanking pet (why the other hunter brought a tanking pet to a boss fight I have no idea). When you are a BM hunter and recount says your pet accounted for 20% of your dmg you know you have problems.  I dumped the ravager and picked up a cat like every other fucking hunter in the world and my dps soared. This was with the now obsolete readiness build.

Another problem I had was I missed the change to Careful Aim. Prior to WolK this talent was kind of marginal, topping out at .45 of int as atk. Now at 1.0 it's pretty well manditory imo. When I respec'd to put points in this I think my atk power jumped by almost 1k.

Just abandoned a hc Oculus group with this guy (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Kilrogg&n=Zazuki) and his rogue buddy (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Kilrogg&n=Rayts) each doing ~700 DPS....

Spellpower and haste is not the way to min-max as a DK

Fast main hand, slow off hand... on a rogue with two points in sword spec...  Aye ya.

Happened this weekend:

Guild leader and his Wife were out of town at a wedding, so one of the officers and I were left to organize our raiding for the weekend. We've been mostly clearing naxx for about 5 weeks now, we got our first Sapph kill 3 weeks ago and our first KT kill the week after (Fucking amazing tanking everything in the room at once), so most of us who have been showing up most weeks have nearly everything we want. We've been talking about getting into 25 mans for a while, and the officer decided "Okay, I've got the day off work. I'm going to go recruit as many people as I can so we can get a 25 man started this weekend". We go in, and since we had 8 of our usual people with us, we figured "Let go do Patchwerk, he got lots of cool loots and will let us find out who sucks ass at their class so we can make sure we can clear this tonight (we do ~6 hours in an evening, and will clear naxx 10 in that)".

We get into the wing (about 1 1/2 hours late, had to pug about 8 people), and make the first pull. Second pull, everything is fine. We're going a little slower than I'd like, but we're getting there. We clear the second room, and while everyone is eating/drinking, the other (well, one of the others. For some reason we had 4 tanks including me) pulls all the slimes. I get in my Pally position, standing in the doorway dropping consecrate. Then, some ass hat mage decides it would be a good idea to blizzard since its an AOE pull (of sorts). That would have been awesome, if he wouldn't have thrown it on the far side of the consecration, with all but 1 slime immediately running at him. I try and recover, but its a no go. The more sensible dps see them pass by me and throw everything at them, and by that time my consecrate isn't doing anything to pick them back up. Complete wipe.

Zone back in, have to rez 5 people who won't walk, and start making sure everyone understands "Don't DPS until all of the slimes are in the consecrate!" Of course not. Not the same thing, but they dps too early, and 5 people die because of it. Ok, no big deal. We go into the next room, and start clearing stuff. A couple of bad pulls later, and we've got another 5 people dead. Two of them release, and it turns out the slimes have respawned again. No warlock, so with have to clear the room again... Three Raid Warnings later, the mage does the same thing and wipes the raid again. We lose 3 people who have "other stuff", and decide to continue (with more pugs). With not too much bad stuff, we clear to patchwerk. Its decided I will take hatefuls, so the other well geared tank pulls. The next couple seconds are a bit of a blur, but as far as I can remember the sequence goes something like this:

Pull.
Throw Shield.
Run into Range to start my crazy high DPS (I hear pally tanks doing 3k on him in 25 man, I want a piece of that).
That's the point things get... Strange.

Patchwerk runs 45 yards away to where one of the other tanks is, and promptly hatefuls the closest dps, instantly killing them. 5 seconds later, the "MT" has control again, and things aren't so bad. But wait, there's only 10 people left! Total wipe, combat lasted a total of 19 seconds.  The tank who ended up pulling said "You shield got missed", although it seems more likely that he thought it would be a better idea to taunt.

At this point, one of the Mages (A new recruit to the guild) decides to start whining about how hard this is, and how we should go do spiders. It takes about 20 minutes to get back in place for a second try. At that point, the mage ups the whining, and we vote on it 14-5 (several abstained) to do patchwerk. We get in place, and 5 people leave (not the spider people...). The raid falls apart.

I spent the rest of the night, and all evening sunday teaching all the new recruits naxx. We were able to do everything but Thadius and 4h, but barely. I was consistantly top 3 in dps, and lost the top place on Patchwerk by around 40 dps (as a side note, I'm confident on the next real 10 man we do I can break 2.5k).

Later that night we take the complaining mage and a few of the regulars to go do OS. We're rocking along, until we go to do sarth (we decided to leave a drake up to give it a try). A DK (one of the new guys) DCed on Shadron, but we just went on without him. We get to sarth, and sit there for a few minutes, when all the sudden we see a flying DK. He jumped onto a vortex, flew across the fire pit, and aggroed Sarth as soon as he got back... After the wipe, we come back, and in the middle of buffing, the mage decides to see what these vortexes are, and does the same thing. We go kill the drake, then sarth, without further events. At this point, the mage says "Oh, cool. Another guild accepted my application. See you guys. /gquit"

The next day, I see him in Dalaran yelling "Geared Mage Looking for VoA H. 2.3k DPS". I go back and look at the couple of parses I had from him. He did 2.3k on the 19 seconds we were engaged against patchwerk, hardly a good representation. On all three drakes and sarth, he did 1.6k. I LoLed, and went back to playing Naxx tour guide for the newbies.

That's a long story, but tbh even though ppl were sucking, for your first foray with a PUG into Naxx you probably don't want to do Patchwerk first from a leadership standpoint unless you've farmed it before. People just don't get into a rythym for some reason that early.

Also, lesson learned about whiney douchebags. If someone is a shitheel the first time you bring them, they will only be bigger shitheels later.

Yeah, patch 25 is nothing like patch 10, for your first forays into 25-man stick to OS, Spider and Plague.

I don't do pugs.  A fraction through most of these stories and I was looking for the quit group option.  I have no time for that noise.

Please tell me your not talking about the "ranged only" slime pack that move really slowly and *should* be AE'ed down in the doorway by everyone?

Yeah I was a little surprised by that part of the story myself.

I just saw this in a heroic OS-25 pug last week. Rogue with gear close to equivalent to mine, maybe a little less, same combat build, and he was way below my dps, down around 15th in the group. I was kind of puzzled until I paid attention closely to the fact that he had a slow fist in his off-hand, a fast sword in his main hand. I gently suggested (honestly) that he reverse it (both were one-hand, reversible) and he sent back a /tell, "F*** OFF". Whatever.

I usually respond to people that don't like critiques with, "You're right. It's gotta be some grand conspiracy that you're being out damaged by the tanks. It couldn't be that you're fundamentally wrong or lazy. Alert the media!" ./boot

If you're the leader, once you question what someone does and they fire back the expletives, you can generally assume they are annoying teenagers and boot them. If they aren't teenagers they are just idiots, and you can also boot them. It's better to get a quick replacement than deal with their crap.

Also, never pug unless you are the leader.  :grin:

Yes, I am talking about that slime pack. To clarify what happened though, the mage was not AoEing in the doorway. He was casting blizzard so that it was entirely in the other room, with himself standing just outside of the doorway into the other room. In other words, it looked something like this:

-------------------
Blizzard----------
-------------------
-------------------
------Door------
-- Pally Tank--
------Door------
-------------------
Mage------------
-------------------
-------------------


The net effect was blizzard got 3 ticks on the slimes, they squirm towards the mage, consecrate gets 2 ticks, mage Frost nova, dies, and then start wailing on the only people in range, the healers (for whatever reason they were standing there...) I'm sure I could have done something better, but with consecrate on an 8 second cooldown and only castable where I am standing, it makes things very difficult to pick up and hold slime when they get split up like that.


On a side note, we made a second try for Naxx25 Tuesday night. With our regular raid leader on, and a few days of "WTF were you thinking" thrown at the stand in from the weekend, we did Spider and Plague wings. Everything went fine until Loatheb. We state before we start how we usually do the fight "Everyone stand on the green circle, and don't touch the spores". As we pull, someone yells out "If you see a spore, kill it!" Throughout the raid we yell at people to stop hitting the spores and stand on the circle, the tank will get them if you do. The idea is that since you have a paladin tank, who is using consecration anyway for dps, if you don't touch the spores they will get into the circle, and everyone will be within the 10 yards range, so by the time 6-7 spores spawn, most people in the raid should have the debuff and get their 50% crit. Instead, we have a ret paladin who is running around outside the circle only using judgements to damage the boss, and then running towards the spores and killing them as soon as they spawn. A mage and 2 hunters join in on this, and people stand outside of the circle. At 75k health we wipe, because 2 of the healers were new and didn't quite understand the healing thing. We go back in, and make a point about the Spore thing. We sit there until everyone says they understand not to touch them, and then pull again. Ret paladin and mage are doing it again, so we yell at them, and the ret paladin stops. The mage isn't listening, so when the second spore spawns right behind the tank, he hits it again. The tank (me) is now sitting at 400k threat, unable to generate more, with everyone except him and a sub-par mage still generating threat. We over it though, by having the warriors generate as much threat as they can, and I taunt off them (since I am block capped I take very little damage for the fight. In this fight I took the 8th most damage, even with the boss on me 99% of the time). That is, until a mage comes out of no where in threat, and pulls off me. He gets crit for 16k and drops. At 100k, we kick the mage and finish off the boss (he kept killing spores the entire fight. The only difference was that by the time another dps got anywhere close in threat, the 130% was a large enough window the warriors were able to get over it.)

Glad to see the common sense ruled the day that time. You started with the easier wings, and you removed a complete dumbass who wasn't a team player. That alone will always improve your chances of success. It's odd that your problems centered around dumbass mages, though. I've had many more problems with melee dps types than mages in terms of not getting with the program.

 I agree that you need to not contradict the raid leader's announced strat right before the pull--it's better to do it one way, and if it doesn't work, then you gently suggest there's an issue.

However, the stacking strat on Loatheb requires the DPS to go get the first two or three spores away from the tank while the tank builds aggro, because once you allow the spores to come, the MT is going to get zero further threat. Plus in 25-man, you've got to open up with heavy DPS and keep it throughout, so it's important to have the DPS acquire the buff as soon as possible by going in five-person groups to the spores rather than waiting for them. If you've got a raid of people who know what they're doing, it's probably better to have people acquire the spore buff in a coordinated way and then to make them responsible for keeping it up by watching the timer, while having an OT-type keep an eye on spores that might be getting too close to the MT.

Loatheb is tauntable and he won't one-shot anyone for the most part so it isn't super hard to recover from the tank getting an early spore.

if all the raid stayed behind loatheb at max melee range and everyone stacked on top of eachother the tank should never get the spore buff since their explosion radius is fairly small.

One roaming OT or a lock can taunt them in or toss a small dot on the spores as well. But yes, that's generally the best way to approach it.

I was sad to discover they were immune to death grip. :(

I dunno, I still prefer to have dps get the buff as fast as possible and then to be responsible for keeping themselves buffed during the fight.

Ever since Paladins got a real taunt this is how we did it in 10 mans. I'm not sure why it wouldn't work in a 25 man. Yes, it makes things marginally harder for the healers, since it raises the chance of someone grabbing aggro and getting 1-hit, but since our DPS is usually topped by a pair of warriors and a DK, that isn't really a problem.

As far as melee vs. ranged people, our ranged always have problems. On Heigann, they have about a 90% chance of dying each dance. Healers seem to have about a 50% chance on each of the first two, and after that if they survive they'll go all the way. Our melee dies more often on trash than anything else, especially in the Death Knight wing. We will frequently chain pull most of the way to Raszuvius, only stopping to rez the dead rogues/warriors, they always die eating the whirlwinds.

Priests can also aggro them with Mass Dispel.

As long as your dps can find their ass without both hands and a flashlight, they should be able to keep themselves buffed on Loatheb without any weirdo aggro gyrations on the spores. Not a huge deal, but come on. It ain't hard.

As for the military wing--heh. Those WW DKs are a damned nuisance. More anti-melee horseshit from Blizzard. However, I do find it amusing to watch the rogues/dps warriors take it in the neck on these. As an enhance shaman, I learned some time ago to stay the hell away from those groups. Drop a magma totem on them, get the hell out of Dodge, then chain-lightning the bastards. Works wonders--for me, anyway. The guild operational philosophy on these are to stun-lock the DKs. In practice this works about half the time. The other half, I wallow in shamanistic smugness.

Our raid leader is a Rogue, and made me tank Heroic Gundrak for the leather (pants, I think) off the last boss. There's that room between the colossus and Mammoth boss with several whirlwind mobs. We never made it through that room without him dying. Eventually we decided it wasn't worth the little bit of extra rep and started skipping it.

The Warrior who tops DPS is the same way. He died 3 times in the death knight wing because of whirlwinds last run.

I get hit with 'em but don't die.  Let's hear it for plate DPS that doesn't reduce their armor values/ increase damage taken to DPs! Woo!

Basically I just hang back on the trash until Raz on my rogue. The only reason to be in there pouring on the dps is obsession with the meters.

But really, I wish there was something *like* a whirlwind on ranged.

I was in a PUG Naxx25 this weekend on my elemental shaman, where the Patchwerk tank died 4 attempts in a row, *on the pull*. No matter how many times it was explained to the tank group how to do it, he just kept suddenly running up and pulling while people were out of position, so Patch would just fly in and hit/hateful him and then go crazy on the raid.  :uhrr:

The best part was every time, 2-3 people would have to go repair afterwards, so it was like 20-25 minutes per 30 second attempt. Ahhhh, PUGs.

I got sucked into a guild/PUG 25 naxx this weekend.  They had downed almost 3 wings, but couldn't take down Thaddius.  I was a little nervous about this, as I could see the writing on the wall, but I went anyway.

We wiped multiple times, mostly because people could not handle the jump, could not move properly during charge changes, and we'd lose 3-4 people on the first charge, every time.  This isn't what annoyed me.  Then we had a wipe, with a semi-recovery, but people were being held in combat by something.  So we release, try various ways to reset the combat, no go.  Finally, everyone's asked to zone out in order to clear it.  I just closed the window, and did something more productive with my time.

As it turned out, it took them three hours total to finally down Thaddius, and it took switching out people for them to do it.  They then went and failed on Raz repeatedly, mostly because one of the priests they were trying to do the encounter with had never done it before, and is only recently trying to actually become a decent player.  With mixed results.  According to my friend who stuck with it, next time Raz should be doable.  I remain skeptical.

Raz is hard for someone who really hasn't done much mind-controlling. I think it's totally legit for priests to find that a difficult encounter at first run.

I was in a OS-25 pug this week that was just so terrible in every way. The people leading it for some reason decided to start clearing trash on the right rather than the left.  That's fine: no reason to go the other way, just it's what every group I've ever been in does. But the raid leader just went over and started whacking on the group of 4 without telling anyone he was going to, and some people got killed. Afterwards, he was like, "nubs!" So someone said, "You might want to call the pull and mark", and he said, "That's for nubs, but since we've got nubs, that's what we'll do". So the trash-clearing and drake killing went fine from there on in, except that the OT (same guild at the MT) had to be reminded by the non-guild people in the raid to go through the portal on the non-egg drakes. (The guild who formed the raid wanted to leave 2 drakes up...no fucking way am I doing that with a pug).

So then we get around to Sarth, and the tank insists on bringing him down to the little island where you first hop across to Sarth's area. I've seen this done, I know it's part of some drakes-up strats, but the guy got the positioning wrong in that he had Sarth right well into the fire tsunami, so that melee were not in the gap at that end. There were maybe six people in the pug who hadn't done it before, and he just said, "Don't get caught in fire" and started the pull. Total chaos. The MT could not hold aggro, so Sarth was turning around a lot even when dps slowed considerably. The OT on Vent called the fire tsunamis from the wrong side twice early on. And the MT raid leader kept screaming about everyone was a nub. Naturally it was a wipe. They set up and did it again, same problems--the positioning was just awful, melee had to disengage and step back a good ways to get to the closest gap, and run an abnormally long distance to get to the farthest one. The OT kept insisting that nobody needed to bother with the adds, "just keep dps'ing Sarth".

I've done Raz on my priest with my own guild on 25 and that is no fun at all.  We did it with 2 priests total, but it was a very close thing after 2-3 wipes.  We just did it again with 3 experienced priests last night and got it the first go, but still with some pain.  I cannot even imagine trying to do that with a pure PUG.  No thanks.

It often sucks a lot, although the group that I failed Patch with over and over and over and over managed it on the first try. You are really at the mercy of whether or not the priests have done it on 25.

I did 25-man Raz this past weekend for the first time ever on a priest who has 0 epics and another priest who was playing his alt instead of his Mage for the encounter.  It wasn't hard after someone suggested we keep the MC target as our focus and use a "/cast [target=focustarget] mind control" macro, instead of having to switch back between it and Raz.

My reaction was:  :uhrr: "Why didn't I think of that.. "

So then we got him down on the 2nd attempt, making sure to drop MC then recast right after the other priest dropped.  So yeah, not hard if you think just a little and have some +spellhit.  Remember this!

I've been around for my guild's awful Raz attempts, but I'm never around when we down him.  We had 4 (3 shadow I think) priests at one point and either they weren't hitting bone barrier before taunting or the healers just weren't keeping up with the healing because they (the understudies) were all going down rather quickly.

It's somewhat sad that I've also been on 2 failtastic 10 man attempts also.  Each time, one of the tanks just couldn't grasp his head around the encounter.  Hell, one tank couldn't even realiably use the stupid device to mind control his understudy.  He said he kept bugging out, but this is the same terribad druid that has been since exiled to healing.

6,5,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4

recast MC

repeat until dead.

You have to time it so that the focused guard has bone shield up.  If not, the healers will never keep him up.  You get 15 seconds of shield on a 30 sec cooldown, so you can't just tank him with one guard.  You have to alternate.  Also, you get MC broken because of all the random damage he throws out to the group.  Get hurt by it?  MC breaks and it can happen in the middle of tanking if you don't watch it.  Having 3 priests just makes it harder to lose control or have a focused guard go down because their shield timer is up.

In the 10 man, you only thing you really need to do right, is make sure the 2nd tank MC's 15 seconds after the first, so you don't end up with both MC's expiring at the same time.

Even this doesn't really matter as long as you stagger dropping and restarting the MC.

Deadly boss mods has a countdown on it that tells you as a tank when your bone shield is exactly going to expire, as well as when your OTs shield will expire. It totally trivializes the encounter if you couple it with a dismiss pet macro.

As for the 25 man version, it's the only fight in the whole damn place that makes me cringe. Our priests have gotten the hang of it now, but it's still one priest forgetting that they can't run out of range from going completely wrong. I really really REALLY dislike putting tanking into the hands of people who never tank. It would be the same way I'd really hate trying to put healing in the hands of the tanks. It's gimmicky and stupid, and they should have removed it in favor of the control orbs on both versions.

Yes, I know about the timing. Somewhere in one of those 4's the other tank has taunted it off and I recasted MC when BS had ~10s left on it's CD.  It really is a trivially simple encounter if you just explain like that and have the macro for it.  I've noticed that the priests I've done it with before usually fucked up because they didn't know the button order.. which is  pretty damn important.

Like I said, me and a mage on alts who've never done it before.  No problem, even with losing the MC once or twice.

The mind control device is really finicky sometimes and will assume you're trying to MC either the already MC'd understudy or Raz and be all THAT CANNOT BE CONTROLLED. I assume it's trying to just pick up whatever is closest, but it's annoying as shit.

Well, there is the odd mob with spell reflect.  Unfortunately, uber large health pools on players have largely trivialized this.  I remember back in the AQ days, the anubisath mobs would often kill one or two over eager mages if they werent paying attention to the spell reflect type.  AP + PoM + pyro crit reflected back at some over eager mage was always amusing.

It would be trivial to have mobs that reflect and multiply the damage on a reflected spell by 10.  Nice 10k crit, too bad you weren't paying attention, you just critted yourself for 100k.

Yah, it would be awesome if that spell reflect also randomly corrupted a file on your hard drive.   :oh_i_see:

Impossible for classes with fast nukes with travel times to react fast enough to that sort of thing - especially if they also proc random nukes outside of their own control (lightning overload.)

Horrifically bad VoA-25 pug yesterday. This cured me from ever doing it late in the week: you've got a bunch of people who haven't done it before, or who have failed at doing it that week, or who shouldn't get anywhere near it until they get a few Heroics done.

We start by zoning in with 25, 6 healers, 2 tanks, rest DPS. Immediately three people say, "I can't find you guys, where are you?" We're like, err, we're right here, are you in Wintergrasp? They're like, "We're in the instance, you're not." We're like, "Um, are you saved already?" They say, "What do you mean?" We say, "Did you run it this week already?" They were like, "Yeah, we went an hour ago, after we won Wintergrasp. Why?" We're like, um, you can't run it again this week. They're like, "No fucking way, that's not fair."

Ok. Drop them, we look for three more. We get two more people who join, come to Wintergrasp and then say, "Oh, I forgot I'm saved, sorry." Finally, when we have 23, raid leader says, let's just do this, we can do it.

One of the guys who joined late keeps yelling out instructions on the trash, most of them vaguely wrong. I notice he's a rogue doing about 1k dps. I notice with more nervousness that in fact there's only six of us doing more than 2k dps, everyone else is somewhere between 1 and 1.5k dps. I figure, "Hey, it's trash, they're not paying attention or something".

So we go at the boss. Some of the low dps people almost immediately die to choking cloud, despite the fact that the raid leader went over the instructions for the fight pretty carefully. The others who survive stay in the same low range as they did on the trash. We get to enrage, and he's got about 10 percent left, everyone dies.

Now a second loudmouth rogue pipes up, who did about 1.5k. "This fucking sucks, you all suck, nobody should ever wipe on this, we do it in my guild and never wipe." I notice he's in a guild that has about 10 members, so at best he's talking about VoA-10, but whatever. The raid leader, who is the MT, patiently says, "Ok, let's just do this again, we'll get 2 more dps and see what we can do". So we do get two more, and start up again.

This time those of us doing more than 2.5k really step it up and dps our hardest, knowing we have to make up for everybody else. As a result, the OT, who was ok but not great, starts to have trouble holding threat after lunge. On about the third switch-off, he can't keep threat and the boss one-shots the top three DPS people, including me. So this is bad. I say in /raid, without looking too carefully, "If someone can battle rez us up, that's good--we need the DPS quick". What I notice right after that is we have one druid. Who is the MT. Who remarkably *does* manage to battle rez me on the next hand-off to the OT.

In the meantime, loudmouth 1.5k has managed to die in the choking cloud. He now starts to scream in /raid, "BATTLE REZ ME ASSHOLES, I NEED BATTLE REZ, THIS GROUP IS TOTAL FAIL NOBODY IS BATTLE REZING, FUCKING DRUIDS. I NEVER GOT PALLY BUFF EITHER, YOU ALL SUCK."

So the thing fails again. This time a lot of people just peel away and give up, it's clearly over. Mr. 1.5 continues to bitch in /raid until someone says, "Hey, jerk, did you notice there was one druid? And that he did battle rez?" He's like, "Who the fuck cares, you all suck". I send him a /tell: "That was a terrible group, sure, but with that dps, you're not entitled to criticize." His reply: "WoWWiki says 1.5 k is good enough, it was all those other losers who made us fail."

Just painful.

Luckily yesterday my guild was done with raiding for the week and was able to get together mostly all guild runs of 25 man VOA and OS.  Really amazing how smooth those went.  I hadn't done Heroic VOA since my last pug disaster.

I can actually raid this week with my wife out of town, and am really not happy they decided to put Naxx25 on for first thing this week.  It's really painful when they've got to bring in folks that are even poorly geared for the 10man because we can't fill the slots otherwise.  It's going to be a wipefest.  They weren't able to get all wings down over the weekend over approximately 14+ hours of raiding.

In a switch from PuG horrors, my guild decided to run OS25 and one wing of Naxx25 with an understrength group (just lack of people on a Monday).

OS goes like clockwork, though it does take some time to drop Sarth as we're rolling with 16 people. One fresh achievment coming up! Then we decide, what the heck, we're going to Naxx. Construct is clearly out of the question with 17 people, but plague sure isn't. We smoke Noth. Heigan buys a farm with no deaths (pretty amazing this, another raid-wide achievement). We tee it up with Loatheb and go 20 dooms and drop his fungoid ass (melee dps had it rough in this one; here's another case where it's good to be the enhance shaman). A good time was had by all.

And there's the rub. With people that are used to working together and focused on doing their best, you can accomplish quite a bit. You wouldn't have dared to do this with typical PuG fodder. In fact, I usually PuG VoA, but there's no way now. Heck, we might 15 man it this coming weekend...

I did a VOA that had a wipe on Monday night, too.  (I'd missed the guild run Wednesday by logging-in too late.)   Apparently Mr. Raidleader/ Tank and the offtank hadn't ever been told "don't stand in the damn clouds."   I'm amazed we'd gotten him down to 10% on the first attempt as most of us were melee dps and dying so quick, or dancing in and out enough to live, but getting pretty damn low before the healers could heal us up again.

Still, I'm somewhat impressed that a quick explanation of "hey, pull him out of the clouds after the taunt" by a few of us was all it took to correct this bad behavior.

I know that loudmouth type, though.  Man you just want to slap that guy upside the head through the intertubes until he starts crying, don't you.

One of my former guildies joined a new guild.  I ran 1.5 nights with them.  They brought four tanks to Naxx, one of every spec, and then ran a DK and druid tank for Patch.  That's right, they ran a two-tank strat when they brought FOUR tanks and equally importantly the wrong two.  DKs and druids are much better at DPSing in their tank specs than protadins or prot warriors.  Convinced they were retarded beyond redemption, I rejected them.

He reported last night that they've successfully killed Sarth 25 3-d and yet still act surprised and angry when their Immortal attempts are ruined by melee dying every week on patch.

DK-Druid might be the best arrangement for 2-tanking Patch25 as they have the largest health pools. I'm not 100% sure though. However, it sounds like they were going about it in a supremely dumb way.

2 tank is pretty pointless when you've got 4 there already, but I'd argue that right now Druids and DKs are the best choices for that, due to higher health pools and the DK's massive avoidance advantage at high gear levels.

What makes it truely inexplicable was the justification when I asked the raid leader why and is something I left out.  He linked me his successful achievement for a 3 minute Patchwerk kill and said that running two tanks was the key.

I run two tanks on my run. A warrior and a druid OT for the hatefuls. It isn't really a problem at all.

That is not the point of the story.  Imagine you have a raid with four tank-specced players, one of every class, all of them geared.  You are trying for the fastest kill you can and you don't want to waste time or gold summoning people back and forth for respecs.  You need two of them to tank the boss.  Which ones should tank and which ones should DPS?  The correct answer is the paladin and warrior should tank because the two of them put together will do less DPS in their DPS set than the DK or probably the druid in their DPS sets.

Now imagine you are seriously trying for Immortal and yet you always seem to have some dead melee DPS on patchwerk.  How many tanks should you run?

I would guess they are running with DK+Druid (I assume the Bear is the hateful tank) because they heard you have to 2 tank it, and they were having problems with tanks dying with smaller health pools. In theory, now that parrybombs are gone, a DK with high parry would be a good choice for main tank on that fight.

But meh, we usually ran it with 3 tanks (we never had a tanking DK).

The biggest thing that people miss is that melee DPS need to wait until the hateful tanks get hit before they attack. Once the first hateful lands on each soaker there is effectively no way a melee can die before a tank due to the mechanics of the fight.

Yeah, but a protadin will be OOM and doing only white-dps and a Prot war not getting hit or dodging/ blocking will probably be rage starved and also doing only white DPS.  Ferals and DKs are better to offtank or DPS, even if better geared, in situations where you've got too many tanks and need more DPS.   Why? Because their special  resource doesn't require getting hit/ healed/ dodging/ blocking to refill.

That's pretty much why I always offtank/pseduo DPS as my DK, even if it's a fight I'm usually better off being the MT. I just feel bad for protection warriors and paladins. :P

23 minute heroic Heigan.  Woo.  :uhrr:

When we're doing Heigan with some new people, we just tell them, "You're going to die. If enough of you die, the people who've done it before will go ahead and wipe and we'll do it again so everyone has seen it and can do it right. We can still win with the people who know the fight, but you'll be bored and you won't really have a chance to do it yourself the right way."

We're verging on a 'no loot if you die' policy for heigan. Some people are just dead weights who die and then go afk for 8mins while everyone else kills the boss.

That's... quite a good idea.

Maybe if you limit it to just deaths via exploding floor. There are other ways to die in that fight that are out of your immediate control depending on your class (disease mainly.)

As long as someone's seen the fight twice or so and they don't have known latency problems, I think it's fair to expect them to survive it *if* disease doesn't become an issue. I've died from disease now and again.

Yes, it is.  Wouldn't fly with the people that just cry "I can't dance. I just can't do it.  So, I'm not going to try."  Normally, you'd expect some backlash, except here it was half the officers crying.

They also spent 30 minutes to an hour trying to see if they could find a way to beat him without dancing at all.  /facepalm

Sure, I've died on it, but at both times it was near the end when I was absolutely loopy after dancing for 10-20 minutes and got turned around.  At 23 minutes, I felt like I was going to collapse.

Can you /follow someone and live?

It REALLY shouldn't be that hard to dance and only get hit once or twice. Healers SHOULD be able to keep most people up. Just find the 4 spots on the floor and move to each one.

Wow, at times I shake my head at the sheer lack of output by some of my members, but at least they know how to move their asses. If we had those kinds of issues on Heigan, I'd just give up and tell them to go back to heroics.

It's consistently this bad also.  At least with 10 man, I'm only dancing for 10+ minutes.   :awesome_for_real:

It just boggles my mind that they'd think we're ready to progress on a 25man primarily when people can't grasp concept like move out of the fire or "don't pop the fucking balloon."

Heigan used to be a big deal for us, but we have it down pretty well now.  We get maybe two deaths and that's just because they are low on the totem pole for getting cleansed of disease (I'm the Pally healer, so I know better than most.)  I only have so much time to cast that many cleanses and if I'm the only one doing it there will be some deaths.

Rarely do we have people die to the dance anymore.  It is usually due to the nasty disease. (3-4 ticks and most non-tank chars are dead.)

No, you can't use /follow.  You will die.  It isn't reactive enough to work.  It's been tried many times.

You also cannot use another character as your way to manually follow.  Your lag is not their lag.  We tried that many times too with many many deaths.

Some people just don't have the computers/connection to handle the dance, but it is minor for us.  I certainly would give feedback to Blizzard to not do that again though.  I still don't find it fun even though I can live through it.

Disease deaths are understandable, especially if your raid is running short on, or without priests or shamen (abolish disease and cleansing totem are a godsend here when9ou precast/pre-place them). During the run clipping the explosions does happen even to the best of us, and as a priest I have no trouble dropping renews and CoH (and instant flash heals from SoL) on the run on people who take a single tick; that I can forgive, I know I do it myself. People who die on the first explosion though annoy me.

We had a 21min kill on heroic the other day, was just 2 tanks, a hunter and the healers alive. We had a single pally healing the tank while 4 priests lolsmited heigan from ~3million hp down.

Good lord, at some point when half the people are dead and boss is still above 50%, it's just faster to eat the wipe and start over.

No, because after 3-4 wipes where it's the SAME stupid, worthless, clueless fuck sticks dying in that 50% you realize you're just going to have to long-timer it or give up entirely and leave the instance.

Choose B.

My first time I watched the video, saw the steps, realized this should be simple, and tried it.  The issue our raid had was that no one was paying attention to the 4 spots you need to move to, even the raid leaders and people who had done it before.  Everyone was heading over to the opposite side of the platform rather than staying right up close to it and moving to those 4 different spots.  Unfortunately the first 2-3 times we tried it, the goo wasn't showing up on my computer and half of the other people's, with massive latency resulting in instant death to everyone.  That was just annoying.  Our DPS could get him to like 65% health before the dancing started, so we figure if we could mostly survive 2-3 rounds of dancing we could beat him.  It was quite frustrating to deal with the lag monster on that one though - I figure with a little more practice we would have it down.

I do this pretty regularly on a connection with a 1100 ms ping once the fight starts.  I occasionally clip an explosion, but barring freakish 9000+ ms pings or complete disconnects I don't die on it.  If you die on Heigan, chances are you are bad.

To add to this, sheepman is not an anomaly that must be studied by Blizz to find out how he does it.  My guild had a number of Brazilians and Australians on our Boston-based server.  They typically did not have any more issues with the dance than anyone else, despite crazy ping and in the brazilians case, very low-end PCs (third world country, etc).

You're oh so wrong. We contraband shit.

Shh, you're brown people, you're not allowed to have nice things.

Is that tech support brown, or valet-parking brown?

Aren't we still using the paper bag criteria to define skin color?

Oh ho ho ho.  I am the prophet of doom.

Net result of two days of 25 man Naxx:
-Plague wing down.
-Construct to Thaddius.

-2 best tanks quit
-Best druid healer apping as a boomkin to another raid guild.  Another solid druid quit when the GMs responded to his questions of raid targets with swearing and insults.
-2 raiders removed due to listing "bad leadership" as a reason they'd leave our guild in their apps to another guild.
-10+ active raiders quit due to various slights and conflicts with officers and lack of confidence in leadership.
-GM freaks out in Vent and quits guild including all alts.

After the 25mans were over a group of us (including several who quit) clear all wings in 10man with only 1 or 2 real wipes and a long dance with Heigan.  DPS is solid, people listen, and input is listened to and taken into consideration.  People are actually able to react and adjust during fights. Lots of mail drops and we have no shaman or hunter in the raid.  :awesome_for_real: 

Night and day.

Wow.  :ye_gods:

You can always server transfer over to icecrown and join my alliance raiding guild! We're less retarded, I assure you! We raid mon, tues, wed, sometimes thur.

Alas, I'm horde.

I'm wondering if I want to try and keep the guild together.  Even if the GM was a bad raider and emotional wreck, she was decent at keeping things scheduled and keeping people busy. And not to be too judgemental, but I hear her kids on vent everytime she speaks; so maybe she should pay attention to them for a while. The remaining GMs are nice people but are not really raiders.  The two main raider type officers both left and have already started a new guild.

But really, all they need is a voice of reason that's communicating and not the silent treatment the GMs/officers are giving this.  I don't even have to play to accomplish this. Sadly, I'm not sure it's in everyone's best interest to keep this juggernaut of failure going.  They will never, ever been competent enough to clear 25 man material without growing pains they cannot bear.

Edit: Of course, the ship may have already sailed.  And I'm just a member and casual one at that, not sure if I'd have much impact.  I just really hate looking for guilds.  Too time restricted to join a real raid guild, yet can't stand the ineptitude of guilds that can't be bothered to not stand in fire.

Could they be happy doing 10?

Even server-first raiding guilds have shit like that happen.

And oddly, the ones that end up exploding to weird dramatic shit end up reforming with the same fucking people leading. They always make some promises about how they have learned from their mistakes yadda yadda and have made adjustments. Then you get a month or so into raiding, and you see the iceberg as the Titanic steams along.

I've had two women who led raids that I was in. One was competant, well-reasoned, and good at communicating. The other was a complete batshit crazy bitch who made personal decisions about everything in the raid instead of basing them on logic. The first one led an MC raid for over a year with several different people rotating through, and the second led an MC run for about three weeks before we told her to basically piss off. The last straw was when she booted my OT who happened to be a guildee of mine because he said she made everything personal and wouldn't shut up.

The key to any raid leader being good in my book, male or female, is to keep everything as impersonal as possible. Also be able to back up your decisions with documentation you made at the beginning of the raid, or facts you gleened from recount, etc.

I'm not sure how it fucking happened, but on the week Ingmar isn't in the raid (we have three tanks, so we rotate sitting), I'm always the fucking leader and I always fucking hate it. At least people have finally, finally stopped re-giving instructions after I have finished doing so. It was getting to be a running gag about how I would give the short version, and then inevitably someone else would give the long, blathery version that just confuses the one person who just needed to know DPS's job for this fight is "kill the dude" instead of what the fucking tanks are doing, etc.

Just wading in here without reading the entire thread (I'm lazy, sorry).

I consider bad groups my penance for refusing to join a guild other than my own, which currently (and for the last 2 years) has nobody in it but my brother (no characters over level 30), my girlfriend (one level 60 but she hasn't played it for months, prefers low levels) and me and my army of alts.

So if I get a group at all it's a PUG and PUGs are like jobs - sometimes you get a good one but mostly they're shit  :why_so_serious:

I was in a bad group the other night. We were doing Heroic UK and failed to get past Kelseleth (sp?).  Must have wiped 5 or 6 times. 3 of the other 4 people knew each other and I think were hoping to get their mage friend some upgraded gear.  The 4th guy was a DK who got infuriated with the mage and left the group after about the 3rd wipe then promptly whispered the leader to get back in the group. 

Eventually we gave up.

I didn't dare mention that I think my lack of DPS was the main reason we failed.   :drill:

I don't know.  We'll see.  Right now everyone seems to be sitting on their hands or in a state of shock.  The group I was in is probably the only one that will have cleared 10man Naxx this week, and after KT no one even really wanted to do Maly.  Stuff is at least scheduled for next week and if they're smart they'll do a 10 and rotate people in (losing active tanks sucks).  25s are really going to be out of commission for a long time unless they form a raid alliance.

If something doesn't happen within the next 2-3 weeks it'll be a slow bleed until guild chat is a ghost town and the crazy GM starts a new guild and and tears a majority away under a promise of a more serious focus to raiding (like she did to form this one, hello Chimpy's comment).

I should probably bail, but it's a good support structure and there are some highly decent folks in the guild that I like doing stuff with. Then there are some nice folks that probably shouldn't raid.  I mean really how many times can you hear "ohh shit, I clicked the wrong person" after someone dies from frost block without going insane?

Fuck me, I just had a rollicking ride with team terrible through OS25. 1/3 of the DPS doing less damage and DPS than any of the three tanks. Two damn goons who got wiped on the first lava wall on each attempt spamming raid chat for brezzes. I mean, how hard is it to not get hit by the fire wall while doing your job, all the healers manage to get through each attempt with zero or one hit between the five of us, and we're having to work twice as hard keeping chuckleheads who can't move alive...

Gah!

I was invited to a PUG Naxx 25 this weekend.  Spider wing down, Plague done up to Loatheb.  I figure this is a reaaaally bad idea, since Patch is the killer of Naxx PUGs on my server, and I've never gotten to see military on Naxx 25 ever, but I figure what the hell.  So I get in, everyone forms up, starts down the tunnel to Loatheb.  Wipe.  Not even a credible effort, just a flat out wipe.  People release, form back up, then it gets confusing.  We start into the tunnel, and suddenly everyone's running back out of the tunnel.  Half the raid dies, the rest are standing around within range of the eyestalks, which locks everyone into combat.  I run back into the tunnel before Heigan's room, drop combat, and start the ress train back up.

About this point people start asking for summons, which baffles me.  I've flown to Naxx more times than I'd care to think about from the GY, I cannot for the life of me figure out why others can't.  So we finally form up, make a third mad attempt to dash to the other end of the tunnel.  Wipe.  People start dropping from the group one by one, til 1/3 of the raid has left.  I figure it's over, but maybe the raid leader will rebuild.

That's about the point where the raid leader calls the raid, and drops.  I figured the whole thing was a waste of time when I had joined, as there were exactly 0 priests in a raid that had to choose between military and construct, assuming we managed to actually down Loatheb, which after seeing the stupidity I was highly skeptical of.  I was just sad that I had burned my chance at Naxx 25, only to down exactly 0 bosses.

I simply do not join OS-25 or Naxx-25 pugs any more for this reason: I don't want my raid ID locked to idiocy. Naxx-25 particularly I only go now with an alliance of my guild and two others. OS-25 I need to know who the "backbone" of the raid is.

Yeah PUG-25s are a scary situation. I'll join my guild's run where we pug to fill our empty spots, but I can't imagine joining a group full of people I have no clue about.

Had a guildie and her husband do that this weekend, though.  He desperatly wants spider wing stuff, but since he works Friday nights when we do it, he's never gotten to go. So he passed and PUG'd on Sunday night where they spent 2 hours in the zone, wiping to trash.   He made her stick with it until the group booted ~5 players.. which ceased all wipes and they proceeded to clear at least 3 wings.  Still, I can't imagine ever caring enough to stick in a zone for 2 hours of wipes.

Had another bad PUG myself this weekend on the priest. Group wanted to do the last boss of heroic A'N, and their healer had dropped. I figured, sure I'll do it it'll be a quick 5 min fight with a chance at some purple cloth and a Proof of Demise completion.  I warned them,  however, that a priest was a bad choice for the group with the evil poison dot, and were they sure. "Yeah, we're fine the pally (tank) will cleanse." erm.. ok.  I should have quit right there, but no I was bored.

I get killed by the 2 adds on the stairs down to the boss.  Just flat-out toasted and I'm still not sure what hit me, I just know that trying to heal myself and the tank wasn't working well.  I get rezzed, and we engage the boss.. the tank isn't using consecrate and the adds eat me on the first submerge.  After the wipe I explain, "hey, yo.. adds are bad can you pick them up." "Oh, ok just stand near me."

2nd attempt, I stand near him, things are going ok, he gets the adds this time but the poison kills the DK.. then me, then the rogue.  Runnig back the rogue says in party "I don't know about you guys but I don't want to wipe 5 times and not kill this guy." Then "Man, fuck this place."  I figure he's about to quit group.. instead the pally passes him leader and I'm kicked from the group.  Erf?

I get no response to inquiries, but seeing as I'm now saved AND in the zone I decide to be a prick right back.  I go hide under the rocks near the Prophet's area and go afk. I come back ~15 mins later to a few "/1 Sab, please leave the instance" and some yells from the boss that tell me they engaged, probably to try and get him to kill me and force a zone-out, but that's it.  I see on who they've left/ logged off.  Buncha asses.

I was going to do a heroic VH yesterday and when I get invited I see it's a full group (the guy was looking for a DPS and tank).  So, looking at the HPs of everyone, I ask who the tank is.  The warrior said he is going to tank it.  He's sporting 19k HP.  Everyone asks him to get in his tank gear and he says something like "I said I could tank it, I didn't say I overgeared it" and leaves. 

 :awesome_for_real:

Granted, he probably could have done it (VH is free badges), but seriously 19k hp?  That's not putting in a lot of effort.  Tank search proves fruitless and I go back to leveling my shaman.  Now that I'm actually leveling him up, my patience for sitting around waiting for a pug to fill out maxes out at about 5 minutes.

The rogue in the PUG 10 person Thaddius I ran last night did 160,000 damage to the raid from polarity shifts. Somehow, we still won. I like to think it was my mad chain heal mashing skills (I had to respec resto just to get the thing off the ground) but it was probably more the actual good healer we had.

So what's the DPS on 160k in a fight?  Did it push him to the top of the charts? ;D

19k isn't trying at all. Warriors have 9.5k base health at 80. That means he only had 1000 stam on his gear. You can get 600 stam on unenchanted, ungemmed blue quest rewards without even tanking into account necklaces, rings, trinkets, cloaks, weapon, OH, and ranged stat stick.

That's very lazy.

I had 19k as a death knight in blue DPS gear.  19k as a prot war is fucking shameful.

My druid had 21k in quest blues from up to Grizzly Hills.  That is pretty low.

I'm a DK and there was another DK in the group.  We both had a chuckle.  He was 4K up on the warrior and I was around 2K up in blood presence and dps gear.

Ohh, I found him: Khargol.  (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shu%27halo&n=Khargol)  Hey, he's up to 21k now and check out those defensive stats  :awesome_for_real:  The guild he's in isn't bad at all. He must be someone's younger brother or think since he had lvl 80 dpsers and healers carrying him through leveling dungeons, that he's good at this tanking thing.  I mean, who really needs HP and defense when you totally pwned regular DTK. 

Wow, just wow. At first glance you think, "He's in all blues, what's the deal?" Then I dug a little deeper. He's a level 80 warrior using a chestpiece from regular Old Temple (74 instance). His shoulders came for a 71 dungeon quest in the Nexus. His rings are 72-74 quest rewards.

He basically looks like he stopped upgrading his gear at level 75. It's mindboggling in fact.

He just needs to hit a blacksmith up for a full set of tempered saronite and he'll be good to go basically. He has the best pre-heroic tanking weapon so that's a good thing at least. (edit) He's way short of the defense cap but the HP total is probably OK for the easiest heroics (Utgarde Keep for example.)

Well except for that spec. That's a bit of a mess.

Well I mean for fuck's sake, a days worth of daily quests would give him the money to basically upgrade everything he has. I mean the rings alone boggle my mind. A JC can make you a better one for 50g worth of mats.

I didn't even look at the spec until now, but there are a few glaring errors. He didn't take improved thunderclap, which is one of your best AE threat generators, and he specced into improved spell reflect which nobody uses in pve.

Which JC ring are you talking about?

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43317 maybe?  A Titanium Earthguard is a lot more than 50g, so that's my guess.

That might be it, although I am pretty sure 2 titanium bars will cost you more than that on our server at least. In any case, that ring will help him almost not at all, since his #1 problem is he's not at the uncrittable cap and that ring has no defense.

Also, I would sort of suspect it is going to be hard to find a JC willing to blow 4 days worth of JC tokens on a blue tanking ring that is only really ideal for druids, when those tokens can be turned into dragon's eyes that sell for 150+g each, at least on my server. Maybe by now the completist types are filling in that recipe though? It isn't nearly as tempting as the spellcaster hit blue ring.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43248 would be easy enough to get though, and that would definitely be better than that dps ring he's running.

Those Stoneguards are routinely under 15g at the AH too, so they're nice and cheap.  On our awesome server, anyway.

Yeah it's a druid ring, but the dude's using a 74 quest reward dps ring. Anything is better. The green would be fine too.

Imp spell reflect is defensible from two limited PVE perspectives.  First, if you genuinely want to absolutely max-out your mitigation, it does let you sometimes resist spells.  He's definitely not approaching tanking from that perspective given some of this other choices; I'd guess he's going for maximum rage efficiency.  The second situation is malygos phase 2.  It works vs the arcane blasts the scions pelt your raid with.  You can take advantage of this depending on strategy.

It's still a bad build that isn't optimized for any task whether that be mitigation, threat, main-tanking, or off-tanking.

I think he's just speccing the way all new tanks tend to spec; they spend points in their tanking tree until they run out of stuff that looks good to them, and then they move on to other trees. All in all this guy just mostly sounds inexperienced. He's actually wearing defense gear for the most part, etc., knew enough to snag the 5% parry in arms, etc. I've seen much worse projects.

Woo, new kind of bad group today.  Within 5 seconds of joining I was called a "faggot" and told that my guild sucks by the officer of a johnny-come-lately raid guild (the other 4 members of the group).   If it were something other than H VH, I just would have bailed.   I still out dps'd those l33t raiders.  Heh.

Of course, the guild statement isn't totally inaccurate; just rude.

You're more patient than me, I would have been out of there immediately.

OMG +12 stam to legs? Really?

How ... weird. I mean, even if I thought a guild sucked so strongly that I would have to tell the person I just picked up to fill out my group, I would wait until the group was finished. It just seems a special kind of rude to OPEN the group with "I think you are TEH GAY, which I think is bad, and also your guild sucks."

This reminds me of a time I left a PUG because one of the people in my group (the group leader, natch) kept saying "fag" and "gay" every other word, but the real capper was when our healer ditched and he complained he had about as much chance finding a girl to rape him as a replacement healer. I felt bad, because the other two people left were nice enough, but man, that one guy was a huge douche.

Sorry if this is a bit of a necro, grabbing something from a page or two back, but I am a bit confused.

How exactly does one run a 2 tank 25 man Patchwerk, and still keep mele dps alive?

From my understanding of Patch, in 25 man, you are REQUIRED to have 3 tanks if you want your mele to survive (1 Main tank, and 2 hateful tanks).  Reason being that hateful strike is designed to target the 2 people in position 2 and 3 on the aggro table who are in mele range, whom it then switches between based on Highest HP.

Only having 2 people "tanking" would mean 1 main tank, and 1 hateful tank, which would mean that you would have Mele DPS eating hatefuls every couple of seconds?

iirc, if the hateful tank is healed up fast enough after each hateful, then he will take all of them. I also vaguely remember that it is not position on the aggro list as much as highest HP+high threat, so any time a hateful lands when the soaker is below the health level of the MT should hit the MT.

Yup, Patch hateful strikes the person with the highest current HP who is 2nd or 3rd on his threat list. If you use a geared Druid or DK as a soak tank they can take one or two hatefuls before their HP even gets below that of the next melee. It does require some very tight healing though.

Yes, to what was said on Patchwerk.  Plus, our higher rated DPS people will step into the poison long enough to knock their hps down to where there is no way they are a target.

I learned this the hard way in that, out of habit, I kept healing them.  I got an ear full in Vent to STOP HEALING DPS.  It was so foreign to me that I did stop out of faith they knew what they were doing.

They did.

We healed well enough that nobody past the 3 tanks got hit, but it was amusing.

Having melee jump into the slime was always funny to me. It really is only necessary if your healers are having a rough time of it or as a way to keep your average 15 year old melee-epeener from getting on the threat list before the hateful tanks do. There is a reason why our tanks would always say "hit" when they got hit for the first time, when all your tanks say that, your melee can go nuts.

Patch just has one of those mechanics that creates inconsistency. You can work around it, but bringing in new folks makes things very wrong very fast.

Personally I don't like the melee taking slime hits as they then pick up ProM and CH jumps that should otherwise be landing on tanks.

I"ve been in quasi-PuG Naxx runs (both 10 and 25) where the melee does the slime dip. Two things are annoying about it...

One is there's always a healer that doesn't get the memo and insists on healing you right before the pull, so it becomes an excercise in futility. Two, I"m a shaman. So my mana takes a hit, too, which isn't particularly good a few seconds before a pull. Sure I can get it right back with SR, but it puts me on a two minute stretch right away with no emergency mana recovery. And, no, I've never been able to rely on paladins for any sort of replenishment. Ret pallies are like hen's teeth, apparently. I think I could count on one hand with fingers left over the number I've seen in raids I've been in. Our guild has one that switches between ret and holy (usually healer spec), but far as I can tell he never specs into JotW--or at least not past one point.

What sort of freak server are you on where ret paladins are rare? After you discount all the DKs we can't move for bloody rets on my server.

There is a wide gap between ret paladins, and good ret paladins.  Also, I've glumly respecced back into holy, because of the lack of healers (imagine an infinite chain of swear words, with each word cussing forever.)  I imagine a good sized number of ret paladins have been forced to do the same.  Plus, the initial rush of ret paladins was due to them being ludicrously overpowered initially, now Blizzard has "rebalanced" them to be one of the weakest DPS classes, so quite a number of people have dropped their paladin because of that.

This. A couple weeks ago I was in a PUG raid on my elemental shaman that had 6 DKs and 6 ret paladins.  :uhrr:

It's Whisperwind. One of the highest population servers in WoW. Weird? Maybe, but it's the only one I play on, so that's what I go by.

That's what makes it so frustrating. Literally, you hardly seen ret pallies in raids. Like I said, our guild has one and he's usually holy for raiding. I know of one other that will only roll as ret, but I only see her occasionally in a certain raiding quasi-guild. I've seen three in PuGs since WotLK release. It might be the chronic healer shortage, but ret seems to be rare outside of PvP.

Generally, I don't pay much attention to paladins. What I do notice is raids where I'm continually out of mana. I'm used to it on 5 mans, but I really notice in 10s. 25s aren't so bad, but again, if there's no JotW, I notice (usually after the second or third magma totem). Maybe they don't take the talent. I don't know. I just know I see JotW rarely enough for it to be remarkable.

Welcome to why I don't PUG on my DK. Even if they pick me up, I'm probably wrestling 10 other people for lewts, because no PUG ever, ever wants a tank, and so I wind up DPS, and they only let me roll on DPS shit. :(

Alleria always wants tanks or healers.. never DPS.  We have a shortage of both.

Except that semi pug 25 man naxx I went on. With the one DK and one fury warrior. Where nothing but plate dps gear and 2h weapons dropped. <3

 :oh_i_see:

Here's a good one. Guild mate who couldn't make our Naxx-25 raid we do with one other guild we like decided to pug. He's a DK dps main spec. Weirdly enough, there was only one other DK in the raid (freaky!) who was rolling on tank pieces, in part because he was fully kitted out in the best Naxx DPS stuff he could get. So by whatever freak of randomness, DPS plate was raining from the skies in the first two wings they ran (I dunno which, I wouldn't know anyway, I don't have an 80 plate-wearer). There really wasn't anyone who could use it--the raid was very druid heavy, the only pallies were dedicated holy pallies and they had no interest in what was falling. After my guildie got his third upgrade piece, the raid leader announced that the next thing of that kind that dropped was going to be /roll for vendor, "because it's unfair when anyone gets too many things that are good for them".

I really hate this attitude.  So the prng didn't decide to make everything a fight among 10 people.  Why should we make someone else forcefully NOT get something they can use as an upgrade just because others are pissed that their drops aren't occurring?  I went on many a Molten Core and AQ20 run where this happened: "Well, you aren't part of our normal group or we don't want you to get any upgrades so we're DE'ing everything that you can use even if no one else wants it."  Another reason why I hate raiding.

Man, that is such crap. I would've been happy we had someone along to actually use that shit.

I've never understood that mentality.  I'd rather someone get offspec loot for their alt than to see something sharded or vendored.  Hell, last 10 man Naxx I did the majority of the loot was spell plate and shammy gear.  One guy got a lot of pieces for his holy paladin alt, but the shammy stuff was all shards at the end.

Decided to cut ties with my current guild and move to an offshoot guild that's really only big enough to do 10s at the moment. Of course the day I move over, the guild leader (DK tank) decides to piss off an entire 25man OS pug that was filled with server board trolls.  That might hurt recruitment just a bit.   :awesome_for_real:

We used to pug in a couple of guys to fill our Naxx 10 runs which we ran on afternoons. It seemed like the pugger (who was always a friend of someone we knew but not anyone we really knew) would end up seeing a ton of stuff drop he could use, last time it was tanking and healing plate when our one pugger was a retty alt. Invariably the guys would feel bad about taking gear and we would have to say "look, even if it is not a main spec piece of gear, if you can see a use of having it, take it. We all have enough gold to buy shards if we are that hard up for them."

No piece of BoP loot should ever be vendored or sharded when someone in the group has a forseeable use for it. Even if they end up vendoring or sharding it themselves later, it is pretty fucking childish to penalize them for the luck of the draw.

As long as its not a clear case of abusing the system (refusing to participate in learning the content then showing up when its on farm) if someone has a reasonable use for it they should get.

Hell, even in those cases, if I bring the dude along, and nobody else needs the loot, I'm gonna give it to him rather than destroying the stuff. Of course, I would be disinclined to bring the person along if they behave that way.

I've never had someone pull that on me - or in my presence.  Sometimes people try to deny someone loot, but never that I've experienced destroy it just to spite them, but I've certainly heard of it happening.  If it did, even if I wasn't the person being denied I'd probably drop the group and if it was a guild run, be looking for another guild.

I know if I was in the aforementioned example I'd just shrug my shoulders and say "'kay. Tell the person you get to replace me that if they get "too much" loot that nobody else actually needs, you'll stop giving it to them." then leave.  Though depending on if I was feeling vindictive enough (particularly depending on the attitudes of other people in the raid) I might just hang around in the instance so they can't replace me.

I've been in situations where I favored destruction of loot over awarding it to people.  It involved a retarded DKP system tht didn't charge you any points for 'offspec' gear.

So you wound-up with healers accumulating an 'offspec' dps gear set, holding out on healing upgrades until they were forced on them so they could horde DKP points.  Then at the next content tier they'd declare "oh I'm  dps now" and used their horded DKP to snipe all the loot they could before quitting.  This happened throug two content cycles before anyone would listen to my bitching about it.  :awesome_for_real:

I know we've joked about it before, especially when we had 6 pieces of healing plate drop, and only had one paladin in the raid (Myself, the MT). I walked away from one evening of Naxx with almost an entire set of Epic healing gear, despite the fact that I had never speced holy before (well, not on that character).

If that came up, and I was the only person who could use it, I would definitely say along the lines of: "Lets see, its ~25g to vendor it, so here's the 25g you'd be getting, I want that loot".

That's a very nice argument killer.

Exactly.  Buy the damn set out if people are going to whine about it.

Personally, as long as the person offers to trade  shards  for the loot I'd be fine with it. Most naxx purples are worth about 4x vendor value in shards. At least on my server, abyss crystals sell for over 100g still. I don't really care about someone getting a ton of loot but if I get a new piece that needs 4 abyss crystals and the guild bank is empty it comes out of my pocket.

Said pocket only take a few dailys to fill up. Shards are going for about 60-80g on Whisperwind (assuming a decent supply; asshats keep trying to force it up over 100). Run a few dailys.

I keep 14 shards in the bank and it took only a week of dailys to get it there. Enough on hand for a Berzkering (damn you, KT...) and a powerful stats. Admittedly, berzerking is dear, but I still don't have any real issue keeping the mats on hand from my daily routine. That as opposed to being a douche to someone when usuable loot drops in Naxx (or wherever). Enough stuff gets sharded because NO one wants it, you don't need to maginalize alt-sets or new folks because of a few shards. It's better that loot gets used, even if it's only a little bit, rather than sharded.

That is pure unfiltered jealousy.  It is a childish mentality.  Everyone in a raid doesn't always have to have the same level of disappointment.  There will be winners and there will be losers.  That's true about most anything.  Forcing some kind of success curve on everyone in a raid is sadistic.

And please, the minimal gold you get for vendoring purples isn't anywhere close to being worth being such a prick.  The fact that other people didn't speak up and say that was wrong says a lot about a group.

Of course they didn't speak up. They were probably just as frustrated. It had nothing to do with the guy, and everything to do with the fact that PuGs act like hungry hyenas about loot. There isn't any reason to have loyalty to somebody in the group if they aren't running consistently with you. They are just another obstacle in the way of your purples.

Yes, it's childish and retarded. This is WoW, and in PuG's you're working with people who can't/don't want to deal with a regular group. That means you're asking for idiots.

Hmmm, I dunno.

If I was in a PUG where that shit happened, I'd be vocal, clear and then leave.

Actually, maybe that's why I don't PUG.

Most of us don't b/c we wouldn't want that kind of retarded situation to even emerge. In my book, you either join/create your own semi-consistent group, or you wander aimlessly in the wilderness for achievements. I like a little of both, but I'll never PuG anything.

Honestly you're missing an opportunity. I have had a startling number of good experiences in WotLK raid PUGs. Yeah there have been terrible ones too, but it isn't like it used to be IMO.

Tru dat. Being the tank and knowing the healer helps immensely, tho.

Oh I thought it was obvious.  I don't do PuGs.  I'd have done the same thing Ironwood stated.  I would tell them the obvious and then leave.  I have enough issues with a consistent group of guildies and guild alliances that are tolerable, but PuGs amplifies that by 100.  No thanks.

We do a 1 Need, 1 Use, and 1 Set item rule.  First items are rolled on if you need it for your primary spec.  Next if nobody rolled, you roll if you can use it for an off-spec or you already used your need roll.  For each set piece token that drops, you get a fresh roll on that, but one per person per run.  Now, given all that we obviously have the same issue stated below.  People will run out of rolls and items are left with a possible DE.  At that point, we have those still interested in it, but without rolls roll on it.  We do everything possible to avoid a vendor sell or DE on an item.

We give priority to main armour type, and main weapon type (ranged for hunters, melee for melee), then spec, then offspec.

Does anyone here play a rogue?

I have in the past, but I could say that for pretty much every class in the game at this point.   :awesome_for_real:

I have a 77 rogue on Anvilmar, Horde side.  I haven't been playing him as much lately, because finding a group as a rogue is all but impossible.

Yup. Still play a rogue as my main. It's kind of eerie how few high-level rogues I see now, especially in PUGs.

There's a lot fewer hunters, too.  Both classes were the major rerollers for DKs.

I don't understand that.  Our main rogue that goes on our 25 man raids consistently ranks in the top 5 for DPS and many times tops it.  I know he's not gear capped either.

Hunters still do ridiculous damage and have been outdamaging rogues since before Wrath. People who reroll away from hunters for DK dps were probably bad hunters, will be bad dks, and are stupid for trading a relatively uncommon class for the rogue 2.0 (DK). Everyone remembers how common rogues used to be.

Both those classes, especially hunters, attracted a LOT of younger players. Every single PUG I ran pre-DKs, if there was a kid in vent, he was playing a hunter. Not coincidentally a lot of those kids switched to DK, to the point where I can almost guarantee if there's a kid in vent, he's playing a DK.

My main dude is a rogue, and I also see a lot fewer level 80 rogues out there lately.   Often I'm the only one in the 25 vault.  <3

My completely unfounded opinion is that a lot of them are now playing dual-wielding DKs.

It might be unrelated, but I had a hard time as a new 80 keeping up with the other dps classes in heroics & raids.   I'm ok now, but maybe that broke the spirit of the other rogues, I dunno.

Hunter rerolls were for pvp for the most part. They demolished DPS charts, but a few classes could simply destroy them in pvp without blinking.

Rogues always wanted a reason to reroll, and their horrible wrath damage output was a good one. But rogue forums have always been a flood of "waaah if you let dps warriors come near our dps we should all reroll warriors because then we'd have plate and waaaah"

Rogues don't make sense as a class in regards to raiding. They never really have. It's a melee dps class with shitty armor that has stealth abilities. Except stealth in raiding is absolutely pointless. They don't offer buffs, they don't really offer much utility. They won't have any kind of decent switch with the offer of dual specs. They would have to top the charts in dps because it's their only function, which in my opinion is a pretty shitty one. Every other class has something outside of their dps to offer a raid.

EDIT: I guess my point is that if they keep adding classes to this game, which I hope they don't, rogues are going to get pushed out of raids until they decide to give them something else as a function. That's been the problem since MC though, so outside of a gimmick like the BWL suppression room, it's unlikely.

I think rogues bring a fair amount to the table, personally, especially in a post always-a-warrior-tank world. Sunder/Expose Armor is the single most important buff/debuff for physical dps that there is, and if you don't have a warrior you are going to need a rogue, unless for some reason you have a hunter with a worm pet. The debuff from master poisoner is nice if you don't have a ret pally (elementall shamans are rare), combat brings the 2% (soon to be 4%) physical damage increase which is only otherwise obtainable from arms warriors (lots of those around these days...). Subtlety brings basically nothing unique, but who specs that for pve anyway?

Uncommon class?  The fuck?  Every 12th player on my server was a hunter and rogues were as common as mages.  I guess that's the difference between a pve and pvp server (Which I'm betting you're on.)  No reason for stealth on a pve server other than 'coolness' factor and the hunter was a much better farming/ soloing class.   

Did a PUG Naxx 10 last night just because I wasn't saved yet and figured a few bosses were better than nothing.  They advertised for Plague quarter and of course when I get there Noth is already down and they're clearing trash to Heigan.  :awesome_for_real:

They do a pretty terrible job on the easiest trash in the game and I'm already starting to dread Heigan.  Only one guy hasn't done it so this looks like it might not be so bad.  Well, people start dying right off the bat and at a fairly constant pace.  And then during the start of the first dance portion I end up hitting the dirt.  So, I check my log and I died to the disease not to bad dancing.  Turns out none of the melee died to the dancing but to the disease. At the end of it all, the only people that survive are people that can cure disease (shaman, priest, paladin) along with one druid healer and the tank.  A warlock died to disease while on the platform right in front of a shaman. 

Loatheb was pretty smooth and we had to 9 man it after waiting 10-20 minutes while the shaman was getting wife-owned and eventually had to bail. The gauntlet before was a bit of a mess when 8 of the raid ignored the warrior going in and only I went in with him  :awesome_for_real:

Overall for 2 bosses and minimal trash it took an hour and a half with no wipes.  :ye_gods:  Then to top it off I lose the roll on Loatheb's trinket and the shoulders (I passed on Demise).

Pugs don't cleanse/ abolish or drop appropriate totems. Ever.  This is just a given, but I have recount information to back it up.   One one guild run with ~10 pugs 2 of which were priests and 4 of which were druids the only Disease/ Poison removal and decursing done was by 3 of my guild mates.   :awesome_for_real:

Don't get me started on totem dropping, oh do I have stories <3

Bad thing is that the raid leader/main tank didn't say a thing about it.  2 paladins, a shaman and a priest.  One of the paladins, the shaman, priest and MT were from the same guild.   A base install of GRID will even show that disease. 

Yeah the raid leader needs to be on the ball, especially in a PUG, to get shamans into the right groups for totem coverage and to tell them when they need to drop specific important totems for a given fight. My shamans are probably sick of me reminding them to drop poison cleansing in the MT group for Maex or whatever, but too bad!

There is really no excuse for not dropping totems in fights that need them.  Poison\disease cleansing totems make a world of difference in Naxx (the last boss of the spider wing practically requires poison cleansing otherwise it's not pretty) and pretty much every raid where debuffing occurs through poison or disease.  Like in MC on the one boss where mages and druids were expected to do NOTHING but decurse people, otherwise everyone dies.

I do find that even with pretty good gear that a lot of the times the best I can do is be second or third on the DPS charts. Which is fine, but considering that my raid utility is mostly measured in very subtle terms (tricks of the trade, savage combat, expose armor), at my gear level (and if I can be immodest for a moment, reasonably high skill level), I should really stand out from the rest of the DPS classes because every single other DPS class brings something overwhelmingly desirable to a raid--warlock mints and summoning, shadow priest buffage of +hit plus the occasional special utility of MC, hunter mark, and so on.

Or there should be parts of instances where having a stealth class is overwhelmingly useful in some respect.

 :oh_i_see:

I should hope you are at least standing out from those shadow priests you mention, they are in a pretty bad place right now overall.

I was in a Naxx 25 I-was-the-PuG-in-the-guild-run run last week where that guild's rogue was over 4000 dps on bosses, and his overall average was like 3800.  He was in first place.   I was way down at like 11 or something with I think 2300 or so.

His spec (soon to be obsolete in 3.1 when Shiv can't crit): Combat Shiv.   The fact that I respecced the next day to that is a complete coincidence, I assure you!   I haven't had a decent try at it yet in action, we'll see.

So, question for Rogues. Is there any reason why rogues should have priority on throwing weapons for PvE? I realise rogues probably prefer throwing weapons, but should the get explicit priority on them?

Especially in the case of rogues who do not PvP.

Deadly Throw only works with throwing weapons, but that is pretty much a PvP skill.  You might use it solo to catch a stray runner or something, but no, I don't see why rogues would have any priority over dps warriors or whatever.

Who else even equips them?  I'd call it a toss-up between rogues and warriors, unless it's got +str or +agi on it.

"There was a disturbance in the WOW; as if millions of people got flashbacks of the BWL suppression room and were suddenly silenced."


-- Z.

Here's you're niche: hit vanish and you don't pay 7g a wipe.

That would be sweet if vanish worked. Which it often doesn't.

Yeah, combat shiv is going bye-bye. I haven't tried HAT yet, but it's so dependent on being in a big raid with the right composition.

A PvE rogue is interested in a ranged weapon entirely for its stats, it doesn't matter what it is. You might use it to pull while farming, but it doesn't matter what it does. A PvP rogue wants a throwing weapon for Deadly Throw, though.

Yeah, this is what we figured. We still had a rogue (w/ Nerubian Conqueror) ragequit because he wasn't given Spinning Fate over a fury warrior using some blue quest-reward gun. This pissed us off somewhat as he was one of our better DPS, but also as the only leather using phsyical DPS he was being showered with upgrades for every other slot.

Thanks for the clarification though.

He's a jackass.

Rage quitting over something stupid like that is retarded. But with throwing weapons we always tended to give rogues priority over a fury warrior just because a fury warrior has a far wider of range of gear he can bid on. So unless its a far better upgrade for the warrior i would default it to the rogue.

Good call on me being on PvP Tich. However, relatively, Hunter is still the less common class, compared to DK, across the board. While everyone and their mom probably has a rogue and hunter for what-have-you (stealth/chain) farming, an epic aoe farms better since wrath. This adds to the prevalence of DKs and the uselessness of most Hunters in raids. Currently PvE servers see a good 25% DKs (Across all servers level 55+) according to the wowcensus (for what it's worth).

Including all 55+ is just :uhrr:.  Class prevalence across all servers and on both factions at 80 only because that's all that matters for the purposes of this discussion:

Death knights: 15%
Druids: 10%
Hunters: 10%
Mages: 10%
Paladins: 13%
Priests: 9%
Rogues: 7%
Shaman: 9%
Warlocks: 7%
Warriors: 11%

PVE servers: -1% rogues, -1% druids, -1% shaman, +1% hunters, +some sub-1% increases to other classes
PVP servers: +1% rogues, -1% hunters

For the more graph-oriented, Warcraft Realms also sports graphs of what classes people spend their time playing. Link (http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php) You can pretty clearly see that the classes most cannibalized by DKs were hunters and rogues.

I disagree.

Only looking at 55+ skews things waaaay waaay high for DK's, because just about everyone who plays the game has made at least 1 DK alt, even if it's just to see their starting area and intro quests and the phasing there.

If your not going to look at 80 only, you may as well include 1-79 or the DK population will look retardedly high.

Only looking at level 80 characters is valid because a character leveled all the way to max level is either someone's main character or a semi-serious alt character in a majority of cases.  Sure there are a few hardcore types that will level an alt all the way to max just to be a farm bot, but that's such a rare case overall I'd say there aren't enough of them to be statistically significant when looking at population data.

I'd love to see a comparison to the % of classes at 70 in the BC era.  The pally numbers now look ridiculously high compared to then.

TBC had a huge upswing in the number of paladins, Shaman didn't catch on as heavily with the alliance however.

That said, I don't know how many stayed active at 70. But the BE Paladin was a pretty common sight leveling.

Anecdotally, I still feel like I see a lot of blood elf pallies running around.

If the rogue planned to PvP, I could see him wanting the thing, but it's really a pretty secondary item for any rogue. It's not like a raid leader deciding that a shaman should get Webbed Death or something.

Except Webbed Death is currently best in slot for enhancement... or near to it. I forgot about the recent development with enhance shamans main handing caster weapons though.

Not surprising since it's the only option horde has if they want a pally.  Alliance has humans, dwarves, and space goats to spread the pally love around a bit.  Not to mention blood elves tend to stick out a bit compared to the other horde races, especially in plate.

IIRC near the end of TBC paladin numbers were around 4th or 5th across all US servers. The fall of Rogues is even more pronounced, IIRC they were 2nd behind warriors overall.

I admit I haven't been paying close attention to enhancement shamans in Wrath but I was still under the impression that slow/slow has remained the optimum for them, with the idea that the slow off-hand weapon maximizes lavalash damage.  I can't think of any ppm type mechanics for them that would benefit from a fast weapon, especially in the off hand since I don't think there's an abundance of mail gear with hit rating to really boost the off-hand hit % (although I'm sure getting to the expertise cap is even harder for them since they share itemization with hunters who don't need any).

I could just be :uhrr: though since they're so rare in Wrath that I haven't bothered to pay attention.

Right now they (apparently) go fast/fast with double flametongue weapon, to maximize FT procs and static shock damage. FT is changing in 3.1 to be normalized across all weapon speeds, so that will dethrone Webbed Death but if someone gave it to an enhance shaman a month ago it would have been pretty understandable.

The key to understanding enhancement shaman theorycraft is to accept that it is absolutely impossible to just look at a shaman and have any clue if he knows what he's doing or not.  Sometimes a shaman will wear or use caster gear or weapons, sometimes he wont and all of that will be totally optimal depending on what his other gear looks like.  It's horrible and very newbie unfriendly.
My pet theory: Most of class prevalence is driven by racial choice.  Pay attention to the character creation screen.  You can freely click on whatever race you want which brings up a list of class choices.  You cannot 'choose a class' until you've chosen a race.  This has a lot more impact on new player class prevalence than you probably think.  Here are the classes ranked in order of number of racial choices.

Death knight: 10
Warrior: 9 (all except blood elf)
Rogue: 8
Hunter: 7
Priest: 7
Mage: 6
Warlock: 5
Paladin: 4 (unavailable to n00bler horde without BC)
Shaman: 4 (unavailable to n00bler alliance without BC)
Druid: 2

No matter what race appeals to you, you can click warrior.  That's huge.  There's a strong correlation with BC class prevalence (You can kind of see it on the graph I linked before), but the correlation mostly disappeared with Wrath.
They are.  ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: A lot of people I know rolled one up as a main in Vanilla and BC, but rolled up another class during BC because paladins were so horrible at everything.  Here, >have some numbers< (http://armorydatamine.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/the-nerf-wars-a-report-from-the-front/).  He uses armory searching, so his numbers are slightly different.

Yeah same anecdotal evidence here. Now that pallies are good they've started playing them as prot or ret, but still only a few holys.  One of the amusing things of WOTLK has been the number of all-plate or 4plate +1 other groups I've been in.   DK dps, DK tank, Pally DPS, Pally Healer, Warrior DPS was my last one.  Of course we got all leather/ mail drops.  :awesome_for_real:

 2x Angry Dread w/Berserking  vs.  Cudgel of Saranite Justice w/+63 spellpower (lvl 77 blue) + Last Laugh w/Berserking (tanking axe)

Difference was about 1% in total DPS (60 on 6000), but it just reinforces the bit where an Enhance Shaman could pick up a Butter Knife and a Baguette and put up anything between 2k and 6k dps.  You just can't tell if they've got their shit together until you parse the logs after the fact.  I let our healers pick up the torch of holy fire and rogues pick up webbed death because anything works for me and those items are really quite exceptional for them.

I had a paladin main in Vanilla and ended up rolling a new paladin main in TBC because I decided dwarf females had better casting animations than human males.


Bad pug story:


I live in the US but play on the EU servers for reasons beyond the scope of this thread. Due to time zones, I was always playing during off-hours and if I was lucky enough to get a group I was pretty much guaranteed for it to consist of either absolute hardcore no-life raiders on alt runs or complete drooling imbeciles. There was no middle ground.

Now, I was a early 40s Protection spec Paladin in Vanilla who received an invitation to Uldaman out of the blue. The group had a healing druid, warrior tank, rogue and I believe a mage. I was there to rezz people and maybe off-tank (ha ha) because everyone knew paladins couldn't tank.

The tank didn't speak English. We had to have our rogue translate our chat into Russian and then translate back to us. The mage didn't talk at all and DPSed with Pyroblast and wanding.
Our druid was unaware of what weapons and armor druids could equip. More on the druid later.

Things are going okayish until we kill Ironaya. A loot argument ensues. The amusing thing was the druid was unaware that he could equip staves until he checked some loot site during the roll and then decided he MUST have the stun proccing staff. A great deal of argument goes back in forth in English, Russian, and English over whether procs work in furryform.

About halfway to the dwarf boss, the Russians have to go. Now, this is Uldaman. Even in Vanilla WoW it was nearly impossible to get a group on my server for this place. A tense discussion ensues. Apparently, I will tank, the druid will heal, and the mage will continue wanding down enemies and we'd all hope that we could find people to join us.

What I purposely skipped over about the run so far is the druid is a terrible healer. I had been spending more time healing than showing off my badass Ravager whirlwinds. The reason he was a bad healer seemed to be that he simply could not shut up. And he was incapable of healing and typing at the same time.

Wipes ensue.

I distinctly remember the breaking point for me being when I was tanking several of those clobberer Troggs and didn't receive a single heal (I had used a potion and my LoH was long gone by this point) because the druid was waxing poetic about the Uldaman architecture. Honest to God.

Before anyone asks, my tanking was awesome.

So I left the group, told my sob story in /g, and a 60 prot warrior and healadin took pity on me and boosted me through the backdoor to nab a Stoneslayer for reckbombin'.

Uldaman was a pain even with decent groups. I think that's the instance where I really started to actually 'get' tanking in WoW.

It truly was.  No one ever wanted to do it either.  It didn't help that if you wanted to get all of the quests completed for the Horde side, you had to go into the outer instance area twice and into the main instance almost 3 times to get everything done.  When everything was elite, hit hard, and gave crappy loot, finding groups to do it was nigh impossible.  I was glad my mage quest went in through the back door, so I could just convince someone to tank or heal for me and I could get it done on that one mob right there.

The fucking Tornado attacks.  :uhrr:

Like many early instances, Uldaman's first problem is that it is in the middle of sodding nowhere.

Ulda was a terrible zone. Having to go there to train enchanting was the worst thing in the world.  :uhrr: I had to blow so much cash so I had enough mats to skill through all the recipes the ONE time I went there because I knew it was never happening again.

I loved Ulda. Ran it 4 times while leveling the hunter, and at 60 went there nearly daily for shards. You're all haters!

You're just a crazy person.

I'm not the one still playing WoW :star:

1. Fast/Fast nerfs both stormstrike and lava lash pretty heftily, using daggers (Webbed Death) over same speed axes / maces also cuts AP contribution to 70% of normal.
2. Flametongue doesn't scale as well as windfury (Read: Flurry up-time).  The coefficient on lava lash makes it a decent OH though.
3. Flametongue scales with weapon speed right now. (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=8030)
4. Flurry up-time increases as weapon speeds decrease (procs off instant attacks are unaffected by weapon speed, charges are consumed faster by fast weapons).
5. All of this combines to lead me to believe your guild's shamans are fucking clueless.

EDIT: Forgot something.  Using TBC or later caster weapon as melee is straight-up fucking retarded as weapon DPS is lower than average and extra iLevel is given.  Each DPS on a weapon is worth 14 AP before you factor normalization on special attacks, the difference between a iLevel 213 (lvl 80 heroic raid) caster and melee weapon on the main hand damage contribution is equivalent to 924 AP.

Arbitrary shaman with webbed death (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mal%27Ganis&n=Malan) that I picked out.  I threw him into EnhSim, turned on full raid buffs, wf/ft, final DPS of 5645.  I set his off-hand to 2.6 speed and imbues to wf/wf, changed nothing else.  Final dps: 5611.  Yes, webbed death is a very good weapon even for an enhancement shaman.  The extra flametongue damage and spelldamage really does outweigh the lost stormstrike, maelstrom weapon, and lava lash damage.  This is retarded and thankfully being fixed in 3.1.  Spellpower weapons can work as a stop-gap measure because slow spellpower weapons are available and shaman do a lot more spellcasting than they used to.

If you really doubt me, just fire up EnhSim or Rawr (Rawr is inaccurate, but way more user-friendly) and play around with it for a while.

Glyph for Flame Tongue adds 2% crit, each imbue.
fast fast releases more FT hits
fast fast releases more Lightning Shield hits
Current FT normalization *is wrong*  because FT scales more strongly with raid buffs than normalization in base damage can compensate

Decreased melee damage is not as significant as the increase in spell damage - the big concern is that spell damage does not yet get piped through spirit weapon's threat reduction.  Running 2x FT imbues with the same spell level will cause 15% of FT hits to just disappear, mixing ranks reduces the loss to ~5% overall - more than compensating for the reduce rank on the OH.  That's because an Enhancement Shaman is balanced between spell and melee damage.  When I run melee weapons I'm 45% spell damage, with caster weapons I'm 65% spell damage.  A lot of weapon comparisons are damage neutral because what I lose in melee I make up for with spell damage - and vice versa.  Of course that also means I can't work out an upgrade without a simulator - the target dummies are no good due to raid buff scaling being such an important part of the equation for spell damage.

To pick a Shaman that isn't a regular poster on EJ:
Patchwerk:  5526 dps (http://wowwebstats.com/ojj3vnajz3lo5?s=222582-261431&a=x393f0f4) WF/FT with 2x Angry Dread (2.5 speed) 
Patchwerk:  5595 dps (http://wowwebstats.com/ihu26n5kylfcw?s=416503-447095&a=x393f0f4) FT(10)/FT(9) with Cudgel of Saranite justice (lvl 77 blue caster weapon) + Last Laugh (fast KT tanking axe)

Cudgel of Saranite Justice + Librarian's Paper Cutter can be an end-game weapon set for an effective Enhancement Shaman - and is dead simple to pick up on the AH.  Before they 'fixed' the Brunnhildar Axe (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41752) you'd get 2x FT procs per hit and the BIS end game weapons were White vendor items.  So while it may be fucking retarded, it is also empirically effective. 

The planned normalization will not dethrone Webbed Death, but will remove the incentive to equip a fast caster weapon in the main hand.  There are other normalizations being tossed around on EJ that would dethrone Webbed Death... but there are no reports of a slow offhand in the Ulduar loot tables yet so fast offhand may be here to stay afterall.

We've never had an enhancement shaman in our guild, so this is really interesting to me.

Speaking of my guild, a facepalm moment--a DK in our guild who was struggling with tanking in Heroic AN (is a long time DPSer) decided on our third try on the final boss that it would be a good idea to turn on Path of Frost after jumping down into the hole so she could get out of the Brood Pit quickly.

With one person still falling down behind her. Onto what was now solid ground, not water. The healer, in fact.

I see him die, but I'm already on my way down the stairs to where we buff, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how it was even possible to die there. Took us a minute to figure out what had happened. Sigh.

Every DK in my guild loved pulling that shit. Repeatedly.

I ended up bubbling every time I had to jump down in an instance because I knew one of those pasty windowlickers were going to try to wipe us.

Our shamans loved doing that too, as I recall.

Point your camera directly down (and I think hold your right mouse button, looking down, at the moment you hit the water) if you're jumping into water from a potentially fatal distance and have a water-walk class in your group.  This causes the water-walk buff to be bypassed, it seems, but you can then hop back to the surface of the water and walk on it just fine.  It's apparently some method to detect your intention to dive, even with the buff on.

I really don't trust sims to provide exact numbers, but even the general trends I'm seeing have me wondering what the fuck Blizzard was on.  Also, the way spell damage, weapon speed, and flametongue interact is so horribly broken if what you're saying is true.  Almost as bad as my fury warrior doing 25% of his damage through deep wounds.

You'll probably have to walk/run forward as well, at least that is the way I bypass my own water-walking when I need to dive.

Enhsim is a very good predictor of what enhance shaman should be able to do. It's only quirk is the so-called windfury chasm at 1.5 hasted speed on your weapons (not going into it here, either).

Yes, it's a fucked up class. Most of the blame can be laid on the artificial WF 3sec internal cooldown. This is what causes WF to scale more poorly with raid buffs as opposed to FT. Despite this, I still find the subclass a lot of fun. Of course, whenever Blizzard changes anything in the class, this scaling issue keeps coming back up. It does need fixed and fixed badly. Patch 3.1 (so far) just looks like a partial fix and more institutional-sized bandaids.

I"m one of those shaman that run 2xAngry Dread. I like it that way and I bloody well hate daggers. I probably would pick up a handful of dps with a Webbed Death, but it'd send our rogues ballistic. I could live with their displeasure, but the fact is this situation shouldn't exist and Blizz needs to damn well fix WF once and for all.

Now for the edit for brain-dead spelling errors and the comment that you should not be running 2xWF. The difference between WF/FT and WF/WF isn't huge, but it is significant; moreso than FT/FT vs. WF/FT (at least with my equipment on the sim). WF/WF would have PvP advantages, but Blizz has stated repeatedly that for the cooldown to be removed, they want WF mainhand only. I think even with the CD removed WF/WF wouldn't be outrageously overpowered, but I'm biased and that is their O-fficial stance on shaman imbues at present.

Blizzard really really wants enhance shamans to use slow weapons with WF (for whatever reason) and that 3 sec internal cd was a bandaid fix they added in a patch shortly after the launch of TBC.  They added it because fast/fast (typically daggers) with WF/WF was putting out insane levels of dps and that was the best solution they could come up with apparently.

I mean without the cooldown, I think you could literally proc WF from one of your WF attacks which deserves its own Yo Dawg comment that I can't possibly do justice.  :why_so_serious:

Ahm, back in the day you could.

Sword specialization extra attack procs also could proc on themselves, as could the thrash blade if anyone remembers that one.

The cooldown was due to WF's code breaking on DW. It was already patched to not proc itself earlier than that.

When TBC came out, you would commonly get quad procs of WF (4x mainhand or 4x offhand hits) due to it bugging out. The ICD was to stop that. It was hilarious for leveling though, a quad mainhand proc would practically kill any leveling mob.

That's not correct at all.  The 3 second cooldown was there since patch...1.11 I believe, but shaman never noticed it because they all used weapons with 3+ second swing times.

Edit: Thanks kildorn for reminding me.  They added the 3 sec cooldown when they made windfury weapon stop proccing on itself.  You were getting x4 procs because of a bug involving wf rank 5/wf rank 4; each rank had a different cooldown.

This has jack shit to do with my guild's shamans. The only enhance shaman in my guild is still happily using his slow/slow fist weapons. Go read EJ, I didn't make this shit up. 3.1 is killing it but fast/fast as I described it was working very well. /shrug

That kind of boggles me because I know for sure enhance shamans were going crazy with dual daggers and WF shenanigans right after the launch of TBC (using Prince's dagger and the emerald ripper iirc) and it wasn't until later that a patch or hotfix nixed that practice.  If the 3 sec internal cd was in place in the content patch prior to TBC then using daggers would never have taken off I assume (as it would be dps decrease instead of increase).

I could be confusing TBC Beta shenanigans with TBC launch shenanigans since it's been a while I guess but I don't think I followed the Beta that closely.

The 3 sec windfury cooldown was in place since vanilla, but it was bugged until patch 2.1.  Patch 2.1 is when they finally fixed the bugs with windfury rank 5/rank 4 (which were noticed and widely publicized during beta).  If you had rank 5 on your main hand and rank 4 on your off-hand, each one had an unlinked 3-sec cooldown.

Daggers were a dps decrease in TBC. I really have no clue what you're talking about, aside from the downranking bug. Even with that, dual wielding daggers was pure lose, in the idiom of the genre. WF hasn't been able to proc from itself for a very long time--well before TBC.

Slow weapons were desirable for shaman for two reasons (three now): 1) increased SS damage (it's not normalized, and this also applies to LL), 2) less time under the 3 sec cooldown, and, 3) higher chance of gaining MW charges per swing (WotLK).

The only reason FT is an issue right now if because of MQ and the fact it scales very well with faster attack speeds (too well, really). Also, it flies in the face of what's good for LL, so it throws the shaman community into some degree of confusion about offhand weapon selection, especially if you're running FT on the offhand (and you should if you have EF--which you should since it's a large increase in potential dps).

We have an alliance with another small-to-medium size guild that has a lot of people in it we really like and get on with very well--both guilds are all mature, fairly well-balanced adults, we like to raid but nobody's obsessive. However, they have this one young "I r srs RAIDUR" guy in their guild. We're not sure why they're so loyal to him: he's basically kind of manic-depressive both on Vent and in raidchat. For whatever reason, they always have him go over the strats before each fight. What he does is basically read straight off of WoWWiki's strats, acting as if these are "his" strats that he's come up with himself, sprinkled liberally with tons of insults about how everyone else is on the failboat. If something goes wrong in the subsequent fight, rather than join in a conversation where people try to figure out what happened and adapt, he'll just screech at everyone about how they didn't follow "his" strat, and force us all to listen to him read WoWWiki aloud again.

Just to give one example, we've noticed that when we have a very melee heavy raid in Naxx-25, there are some subtle adaptations that need to be made on some fights. Grobbulus, for example. If there are a lot of melees, the odds that one of them is going to get injected go up. When Grob turns to inject, he then does his slime spray. If he's doing it constantly to melees following behind him, you get a lot of slimes. So the first time this happened to our group, we wiped because the slime OT got overwhelmed. In previous weeks, we hadn't had the issue because we'd had a more typical mixture of ranged and melee classes along. So a few of us saw what was happening and we trying to talk about it after the wipe, and this guy gets on Vent and starts telling everyone to shut up, don't talk over his strat review, and then he does all the "u r nubs, follow my strat", which is again WoWWiki. "Melees stop getting in front of Grob, I told you not to do that". This is not what was happening, everyone but him knew it. He's a healer so I don't think he's even watching the fight, just player bars. Everyone there has done Grob ten or fifteen times before. So the melees just break into a private conversation and what we come up with is for everyone to stay not just behind Grob but as far off to his left side as we can manage. This way when he sprays after injecting a melee, he's already turning back to face the tank and the arc of the spray is off to his right-rear. This works like a charm, problem solved, good players adapting to slight changed circumstances.

Anyway, we really like all the other players in this guild, it's a good situation for the two medium-sized guilds, but this guy is starting to get on my (and my other guildies) nerves just a little too much. I wish they could explain to us why they let him be their voice in these contexts, considering that the rest of them are way more articulate and funny and relaxed, but instead they just get all tense and vaguely butthurt when we try to raise the issue--even though they're clearly annoyed with him too.

Just noting that yes, indeed, they ended the era of windfuries proccing windfuries way, way long ago. Chain windfury was one of those things that could be put into WOW's history of I Win buttons.

Call the guy out in vent. If you do it nicely enough and in a suitably comedic fashion, that will generally get the message across without everyone getting butthurt about it.

I honestly will not deal with someone who reads strats off a webpage. Seriously. This is roughly the Grobulus intro for our new guys:

"The tank will kite him along the grate. Stick with it and kill him. If you get injected, DBM will scream at you, then you have 10 seconds to run somewhere away from the raid before you emit an expanding green cloud. Run somewhere behind him, where he's already been, but not into any of the other green clouds. If raid leader shouts to kill slimes, kill slimes, otherwise just stay on the boss. Don't dispel the injection."

15 seconds. Boom, done. Most fights can be summed up in a few sentences. Some people want to talk about all the different casts the boss can do (if you're reading off of wowwiki or something) but that's completely irrelevant and a waste of everyone's time.

Our Grob callout is "he will inject people, you run to a wall and don't dispel it. Unless you're kild, then you'll just completely suck at this for the entire fight"

God, that was annoying. A bunch of mods interfered with each other and caused me to never know I had it. :(

Folks have poked fun at the strat-reader, but he either doesn't get it or he does and he gets all pissed off and then the other guild's people start sending us /tells asking not to provoke him. He has /raidquit in a huff if he thinks people aren't paying attention to him, or criticizing him. Which is fine by me, but again, the other guild really seems to feel very strongly about having him around. I suspect sometimes that he's related to someone, or an old friend, or that they have some reason beyond "he's a healer and does a good job healing" to be so solicitious of him.

I'm going with; he's the guildleader's son, nephew or an officer who likes the /gkick option.  Either way they need to stop being doormats.

Teenagers are a mixed bag.  Some I've guilded with have been incredibly mature (beyond what I would have been capable of at that age) and competent and others are just destabilizing in nature.   

In guilds where the average age hovers near 30, teenagers don't seem to last long before they quit in a huff or are asked to leave.  In raiding guilds, the little morons tend to get away with a lot more.  You tend to get a lot of college freshman (there are much better things you can be doing, kid. Trust me.), military, and non-college bound in raid guilds and as long as they can show up on time, perform adequately, and read the cliff notes version of EJ: their personality defects are large tollerated (or even celebrated).

I don't think I'd be able to stand it your situation, Khald. I'd fake food poisoning if I had to listen to some idiot kid attempt to raid lead.  Of course, I've put up with worse and probably would if it meant a steady weekly raiding opportunity.

I've seen a 12 year old tank most of Naxx-25.

The one exception to that in Naxx for me was Kel'Thuzad 25. You do have to read off most of his abilities, because they effect everyone. People have to know where he's being tanked, where to stand, what to do during ice blocks, how to deal with the group setups when you're melee heavy, interrupt rotations on the melee groups, tanking assignments on the adds, and CC assignments on the MCs.

That's probably the only fight in the place that isn't a 1-2 trick pony. Probably the next most complicated to explain is Heigan.

You can break it down by class to speed things up, assuming you don't have a ton of new people. It's pretty simple if you just tell someone what THEY need to be doing. Melee DPS is the most complicated, but it's still just

"For phase 1, just stand in circle, kill shit as it comes to you. When Kel comes out, if you're melee DPS, you stack with the other melee at one of 3 points of the triangle. If you're new, just stand on the tank. Stay at max melee range at all times. His frostbolts can be interrupted. Adds come out in phase 3, which the OT will get, but be ready to dump aggro if you're targeted initially."

For Heigan, we just assume they'll die the first time.

"Go on the platform if you're ranged, eventually he'll teleport and then fire will come up in 4 quadrants in a pattern - just stay with the group. You'll probably die but that's OK as long as you pay attention and see the pattern and roughly where to stand for next time. Keep in mind, due to lag 'staying with the group' means actually walking ahead of them a bit - if you stay with the group on screen you will get hit by the fire."

Heigan isn't a DPS fight so even with half your group down you can still kill him.

We have a similar kid in our guild, except he doesn't read out strats in vent. He's too lazy and confines his vent chat to blatent attempts at trolling. He's the son of a long time member and is basically teased, tolerated or muted and ignored by various members of the guild depending on their mood.

He is a very good healer, I should add. Which is not chopped liver. And when his manic/depressive pendulum is somewhere in between, he can be quite funny. But most of the adults in our guild are getting just too restive and annoyed at having to sit through it week in and week out--it's just not what we're there for, we're not srs raidurs who will endure anything to get through the content.

So tell the other guild that they keep him in line or you, and thus they, don't raid?

Ah.. he's a healer.

The bullshit people will put up with from healers annoys me to no end.  It's my only hate against the current DIKU iterations; you need healing, but healing sucks in general so you tolerate whoever will do it.

Same happens to tanks, really. I've exploited my position as both quite a few times.

There's a huge difference between the healer problem and tank problem.

Common ground: They're way more stressful than DPS because you have to pay more attention and much more is riding on you.

Healer Problem: There are number of healers and they are actively competing against a static goal (incoming damage), so it's hard for good healers to stand out.  The job is widely regarded as boring, thankless, and PVP (BG and otherwise) is often unjoyable.  There is an actual shortage of healers.  The shortage could be solved by making healing more fun and engaging, like doing damage comparable to a tank while healing, a more interactive rotation for some classes (PALADINS), etc.

The Tank Problem: There is no real shortage of tanks.  The four most popular classes (a combined 48% of the playerbase) can all tank.  What there is is a huge difference in tank quality.  Going from a good main tank to a bad one is a huge quality of life loss for the entire raid.  There aren't many solutions to the Tank Problem that don't involve just dumbing it down (e.g. removing heal threat, making area of aoe threat builders much larger and stronger, etc).

There should not be a shortage of healers more than a shortage of tanks. There are enough classes that can do it, some of which are Booooooring (paladin players are just too stupid to handle another heal, apparently)

If you're actively competing with other healers against incoming damage, you're playing the meters, or just having fun with friends (we healsnipe each other mercilessly, personally). Healing assignments and libheal make life a lot easier as long as someone isn't spamming fast or instant heals all over the place. Good healers stand out because they allow the raid to comfortably bring fewer healers and clear content faster. Your tanks can usually tell you who the good healers are, the ones who make them feel confident and less jumpy about panic buttons.

Bastard.

You have enough instant heals that you could totally beat me at it, but noooo.

Boring and thankless? Blackmail the fuckers for anything you want. Whoever doesn't agree starts dying. If you get pissed at the group, just let them aggro some mobs and hearth away. I absolutely adored grouping and leveling with my priest.

It's no worse than the bullshit healers have to put up with from DPS

As far as fight strategies go, explaining Malygos to someone who's never done it before is hassle...

Funny, I've never had a group disintegrate or a raid end because DPS had a hissy fit they weren't awarded the shiny they wanted.  I haven't had a guild fall apart because a DPS freaked out and left.  I haven't had a DPS keep other people out of raids because they didn't like that other person.  I have had all that happen because of a healer.  It's far, far easier to replace a DPS than a healer, because short of enrage mechanics you can typically stick any crappy dps in a slot and still come out fine.

  Fuck I've abused it myself a few times on my priest by dropping shitty groups and nearly instantly finding another.  Never been able to do that as a DPS.  Tanks are somewhere in the middle, usually depending on what the healer 'deigns' to heal.  Ah, the days I've been denied a tanking spot as a DK or previously as a Paladin because the healer felt the class wasn't good enough.

I don't really get why people don't like playing healer. It's just as fun to me as any other class.

Er, the F16 UI that is required? 

I have. Also seen all of that happening frequently due to tanks.
You just didn't pug enough.

A group is 5 people. 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps. Two of those slots are important, the others have built in redundancy. That's why you see groups go "ohgod the ___ left"

In the old days, Mages could quite easily pull the same shit in CC instances.

If your guild falls apart because a healer or tank left, your guild has issues. If your healer or tank quits because they didn't get some epic, your recruiting has issues.

Well, we're a long way from Bad Group theory... but on the topic of the Healer/Tank nexus I'll add that the new Dual Spec feature is going to add a delicious new element to the hissy fit.

On the plus side, healers like me get a personal spec (Boomkin) for farming and soloing, and a group spec for shepherding asstard DPS folks through instances.

On the negative side, no more hiding behind spec choices for certain classes.  If you are a paladin no matter how hard-core ret spec you are... at least one of your off-specs can be group support.

I'll also predict a new forum sport of cross-spec gear bitching.  For example, my Boomkin and Tree Druid can perform both roles with one set of gear; no so for a Feral/Tree druid.

Second new forum sport: Off-spec diversity whinging.  It goes like this, How come a Paladin can be a Tank/DPS or Tank/Healer or DPS/Healer while my Mage can only be DPS/DPS?

What flavor of orange would you pure classes like to be?

Don't get me wrong, I'm counting the days until it goes live... after almost 10-years of crushing group dependency I'll be free, Free, FREE.

:sidenote: Let's be honest, the currency of MMO's is death, which hugely favors Solo DPS... as a healer for many years, I had to buy each and every mob death at a horrible exchange rate compared to DPS.  Or group.  Is it any wonder then why I saw all you DPS folks as my minions?  My MOB farming pets?

Although, on the Bad Group thing... I can already taste the tears of failed groups when Billy-Bob jumps in to a new role for which he is a) not geared for and b) unfamiliar with.

Oh yes, Aloysius, in April we will feast. muahahah.

One of my old UO buddies somehow managed to become leader of a raiding guild 3 days after dinging 80. I've been invited to Naxx runs, but... blah. Diku PVE is crap, and I'm not spending a couple hours doing it just to lose a dice roll and walk out emptyhanded. The life of a battleground whore is the life for me. The gear isn't as good as those arena jerks get, but I don't need to rely on anyone, and I make progress every time out.

It's not new.  It has been used by hare-brained DPS as a 'legitimate'  reason to not have dual specs at all since the idea was first floated.

  "But it's not FAIIIIR that those guys can have a Utility AND DPS spec and we can't! What're we stupposed to do?!"
 :awesome_for_real:

Yet another reason to not play one character and only one character, imo.


Almost everything I do is in a PUG.  I just happen to know a lot of tanks.  The inclusion of yet another tanking class in WOTLK means it's even easier to find one than it used to be.

Yes, any guild that falls apart because a healer quits had issues.  I don't think I denied that.  But then a LOT of guilds in the 40 man and BC days had lots and lots of issues.  Not being able to raid for a week or two due to a lack of healing = dead guild PDQ.

Hybrid DPS can always spec  dps/pvp or dps/strawberry dps (different DPS specs bring different buffs, may be necessary dependent on group composition).  Still easy to duck tanking or healing if you really want to and it may be preferrible for those that can't wrap their heads around the different roles.  Personally my DK will be tank/dps, although I can see having an unholy dps/frost or blood dps split could be particularly useful and keep people from being exposed to me trying to main tank anything.  My shaman will be resto/elem with the elem mainly just to keep me sane for questing/farming/dailies.

I don't really think that PUGs will get that much worse.  It may get a bit dicier for desperate OS groups, but VOA should stay the same where the tanking is always pretty goddamn terrible.  I've offtanked it in a DPS spec before and I'm amazed at how bad people are at it.  Heroics will be interesting, but not many of them are any difficult at all.  I'm not looking forward to those 1K dps ceiling dpsers trying out something new.  Still, it'll be better than 3 dpsers sitting around for half an hour looking for a tank and healer.

Sets of gear will be a pain unless you really just spec dps/dps.  Tanks/dps will have massive gear differences (druids are weird, I don't know what druids do).  Heal/ranged DPS will have sizable gear differences (herro hit rating/mana regen needs/crit weighting).   Hell, even different dps specs can need gear swaps depending on stat weights. 

I have enough trouble paying attention to my own health.  You really wouldn't want me watching yours, too.

That's pretty much why healing becomes soooo boring, you spend a majority of your time staring at everyone's health bars.  To a certain degree for healers the game basically devolves from a 3D MMORPG into a really crappy interactive graphing simulator.

If it wasn't such an essential and highly valued role I'm not sure anyone would volunteer for it, unless you have a graphing fetish.   :ye_gods:

In general my biggest problem children personalities in my raids have belonged to healers. I've never had a DPS bitch at me over much beyond a few items, mostly because they know their place. When you are a good dps, you know it by the meters, and you also know where the raid stands. However, they rarely complain about loot to me in a raid. The healers complain all the damn time about fairness and drops.

In essence, I never thought about it that way, but I think it's because they know they are doing a job not many people want to do that they can hassle me about things. That doesn't really work as I really don't give a shit and will toss somebody out on their ass even if the raid has to shut down. People need to learn they no matter what job they do, they are not beautiful and unique snowflakes who can never be replaced by someone else. I can find people just as good if not better than myself to tank or dps. I can certainly find as good if not better people to heal by looking around a bit.

What really drives me crazy is there is often an inverse relationship between how good the healer is and the more bitching that is done.

The big suck I find with healing is you are "useless" without your tank/dps buddy. Mind you, a WoW healer is a long, loooooong way from something like a DaoC healer class, but it is still the same issue.


Duel Speccing should alleviate some of that.

With the change from +heal/+dmg to spellpower for Wrath that isn't really much of an issue anymore for anyone other than possibly holy paladins.  I respec'd my 70 shadow priest to disc and had no problem leveling via quests to 80 with the occassional instance whenever I wanted to run one.

These days healers can kill stuff almost as fast as pure dps and the difference can more than be made up by easily getting an instance group whenever you want one.

It's just the endgame PvE that quickly becomes a snoozefest, that is typically the hardest hurdle to overcome for people considering playing a healer full-time.

Healers get the most abuse from retarded PUG DPS who feel they should be able to nuke away without regard to aggro and survive every time.  So it all balances out.

My holy pally did fine solo'ing.  I wasn't really afraid of anything and could handle mass pulls.  I've been able to solo all of the elites for quests until Icecrown (at the higher levels.) 

While true that my priest can solo, it is not even close to the shadow priest experience.  While I was an SP, mana was not an issue.  Plus, DPS was substantially better.  So, time-to-accomplishment was very different.  Plus, there is absolutely no way my holy priest can solo elite mobs to end many of the quests out there.  Too low of DPS and too squishy.

I didn't mean to imply that holy paladins were terrible for soloing content, just that with limited dps abilities their dps and thus time to kill a given mob would be noticeably lower than other healers who have more dps abilities and those abilities scale better with healing gear.

I'm pretty sure Holy Shock + Judge + lol caster weapon dps is the watermark for boring a mob to death, not that it doesn't get the job done eventually.

My "rotation" is actually Judge, Holy Shock, Shield of Righteousness, Consecrate, followed by (if necessary) Holy Shock, Judge, Shield of Righteousness.  It's rare I need to do more than that, unless it's an elite mob.  Typically I seal wisdom, judge light, and I can go without stopping ever.  I could boost my dps by sealing righteousness, but it would potentially involve downtime.

I probably will dual spec Ret with 3.1, but that's not a given.  While I can burst mobs much faster as Ret, it's also more annoying due to having to heal every couple of pulls, and Holy is a bit more durable, to say the least.

To be fair, you don't get shield of righteousness till 75 and it doesn't scale with healing gear at all (spellpower).  The scaling of consecrate with spellpower is pretty miserable too.   Without actually testing it I still have confidence in my claim that holy paladins have significantly less single target dps than other healers in similar gear and fall further behind as they all gear up.

I'm not knocking them at all I'm just suggesting that they are probably the only healer left that still feels a little behind the curve w/o a dps or tank buddy, especially when it comes to leveling.

The solution to that is to level as ret.  When I switched from holy to ret at 73, the difference was astounding, and even infuriating.  Killing mobs went from drudgery to tolerable, or I daresay, even fun.

Geared out at 80, holy is... ok for doing dailies, or grinding through quests.  It's worlds above what holy was at 70, I assure you.  Especially on the blasted island.  Stupid mana draining mobs.

I do imagine it's still sheer drudgery for leveling though.  Particularly since quests are faster than instances when it comes to leveling, and who wants to heal sub 80 instance PUGs?   :ye_gods:

As a holy priest in semi-decent gear I do ~1.3K DPS on stuff like dailys. It's enough not to warrant respeccing every time I want to grind something.

Really?  1.3k dps?   :heartbreak:

After some tinkering today, I top out at 1.1k dps, and this is in mostly 25 man gear, with 10 man filling the rest.

Blizzard has some 'splainin' to do.

Got 1.1 on the heroic dummy with 2150 SP and ~19% crit. Daily mobs are a little higher due to having more CDs up and being lower level I guess.

Normal mobs don't need very much hit rating.

I seem to always get in the worst Naxx pugs.

Some Naxx pug with a bunch of raider alts and various others had 4 horse and Construct left.  I sent a tell saying they could have my shaman (elem) or DK, and they chose the shaman even though I told them the DK does at least 1K (or more depending on the fight) dps more on average.  They were a bit caster heavy so that may have played into their decision although I also told them my shaman has been 80 for 2 days (crafted epics and good luck have helped make him decent fast).

Since they only have 2 healers (yes, pug nax with 2 healers) I end up having to heal the OT in the front of four horsemen and they decide to start on the right leaving me having to heal Thane Korth'aaz and his fucking meteors by my lonesome for a few switches since our DPS is terrible. The OT is some shaman's alt and quite frankly stinks. So I end up biting it on just about every attempt. Luckily it only takes about 3 to get them down.  There's also 2 folks from some guild (DK and shaman) on their mains that can't seem to take any direction in Vent and keep doing dumb shit that causes wipes or slows down the dps considerably.

This pretty much persists throughout.  1 wipe on Patch. 1 on Grobb. OT kept dropping fart clouds in the middle, it was a miracle we got him down.  At least 5-6 wipes on Gluth because of trouble with the kiting.  The paladin MT couldn't do it and they couldn't keep the OT and a DK up during decimates. Finally we got a combination that worked (OT managed to kite it with his shaman).

1 wipe on Thadd's trash.  One shot on Thadd  himself after the terrible enhance shaman nearly wiped the raid because he didn't know his right from his left (there was even a demonstration beforehand but the guy couldn't even understand "you're on the wrong side, move").  And I decided to sleep at 3am instead of seeing what fun we could get into with Sapp and KT.   It took over 3.5 hours for just those bosses. 

That wasn't even the bad part.  The paladin MT this entire time was going off on anyone that messed up at all, except for the mage alt of some guy in the guild he likely wants to be in.  He was the kind of player that says "Good job. Congrats on sucking" after wipes.  I recognized his voice too from back in TBC.  I'm pretty sure he was kicked from my bad casual guild at the time for just being a wanker.  He wasn't even a good player.  His tank had gear, sure, but his positioning on Grob was some of the worst I've ever seen (he was moving him large distances at a time, wasn't long before clouds were overlapping).

At least I got a few upgrades.  :why_so_serious:

Edit:  But at least the paladin got yelled at for allowing me in his Vent.  Apparently one of the guild leaders or officers doesn't like much or something from our times together in another guild.  Beats me, but it's kind of funny when you hear a muttered "fucking Rasix" followed by "Asshole Paladin, one channel down, I need to talk to you".

Pug Naxx <3

I've done it Once, and it failed right where I thought it would: monumental inability to not suck at Heigan. Like, half the DPS dead on the first goddamned dance, and the other half only alive because the two priests were pulling heroic level shit just to heal them while dancing.

Mine was the opposite though. Pally tank was solid and knew the fights, but kept getting fucked up because the mage raid leader would try and have her switch tactics mid fight. So we'd be healing through locust swarms, then suddenly he'd bitch at her to kite, and the healers would wind up having to chase someone while healing because it was too late to start kiting, etc.

I like guild runs. At least for the most part those aren't irritating and make me want them to end. I keep that from being a "never irritating" because, you know, fuck comcast.

My favorite pug story involves a warrior who 'tanked' a live strat run using nothing but charge and thunderclap, circa march 2005. It was a 10-man pug, and aggro was all over the place; some dpsers were dying almost every pull. When we noticed what he was doing, and asked about defensive stance, he said "never did quest lol". Our feral druid 'healer' silently took over tanking at that point, and somehow we prevailed.  :awesome_for_real:

More recent: I've been in naxx precisely once so far, on my holy priest. It was a guild-run naxx10 with two pugs (one of them me as healer #3), so I figured I'd get to see some bosses and stuff. Then the raid proceeded to wipe 6 times on anub'rekhan. The warrior tank would try to kite anub, but still eat every single tick of the swarms, and invariably die on the second, since I'd have to use guardian spirit to keep him up during the first one (and burn almost all my mana gheal spamming him, since the other priest mostly just spammed COH at the spider offtank and the druid HOTs weren't enough to keep him from dropping). Nobody said anything other than 'oh wells let's try again', then the tank/leader called it. Good times.
Of course this was fairly early into WOTLK and most of those people have champion-of-the-frozen-wastes titles by now. Even though I'm probably geared enough to run nax10/25 without problems (from os25, heroics, voa, etc), know how to not stand in fire, etc, people aren't willing to take pugs without a full-clear achievement. Somehow, I think this is a blessing in disguise. :drill:


-- Z.

Anub wiped my 10 man group when we started at the beginning more than any other boss in the place. If given the choice between equally geared tanks, druids generally fare better at that fight than a warrior, and a pally simply should not tank that fight due to silences.

What killed one of our priests in that pug attempt was both priests chasing the tank, and getting clipped by a silence. *sigh*

We tended to use a DK tank when first dealing with that fight. Since then I think anyone's been able to tank it with our better gear, but IBF always being ready was a lifesaver for hanging out through the swarms. I have pain supp now, though! <3

During the kite just have a priest pop GS or PS on the tank and you can more-or-less forget about them while you reposition.

Long qqing rant inc.

So Ulduar's out now, which automatically makes Naxx25 ezmode, right? Following that logic, I see a group LFM for a mostly cleared Naxx; this was yesterday, 2 days before reset, and the only thing I need out of Naxx25 really is the Betrayer of Humanity. Upon further inspection, it appears to be a joint run between two guilds, which (to my niave little brain) makes it better than the average pug, so I assumed an easy win. Boy was I wrong.

I find out they have both 4h and Thaddius up, which set off an immediately flag: they didn't just wipe once on either of those bosses and call it, they wiped on one, then cleared through an ENTIRE wing to the next and failed there too. When they started asking about flasks and food, I just sighed. Who knew there were still guilds for whom Naxx25 was progression content? So, we clear the trash to 4h, explain the fight, get into position, pull. We get Thane to about 25% when someone in the back dies and Lady B starts going apeshit with the AOE. Wipe 1. Repeat, Wipe 2.

Next pull we get Thane down, then when we try to tag out from Rivendare to the back the tank drags the Baron back there with us. Wipe 3. After that we finally get the first two down with minimal hassle, then the 10 of us who knew how to count to 3 and switch targets manage to down the last two.

After that, we move to Thaddius, who, it is becoming very clear, the majority of the people here have never downed. First pull we wiped during tank toss because the rdps clustered on the ramp and he lost Tesla Link. We gave him three more attempts thereafter, with an average of two people missing the jump and 3-4 dying to the first polarity shift. Our last, most "successful" pull we had him to about 60% when we hit his enrage timer. "Wow, good try guys, we almost had him. Next time we'll get him, everybody release." Sigh, /leave.

Being masochistic, I went back today to similar results. Now, I'm not in a real guild at all; we have 4 level 80s, about 10 people total who are mostly RL friends. I'm not exactly used to super fast clears where we try for achievements. But I've PUGed Naxx 10/25 for the past few months with MUCH more success than this "guild" run.  :uhrr:

RISE!

So, who'd have thunk that putting an ilvl 226 BOE drop in a repeatable daily might cause some drama?

Here's a replay of the events:

Warrior: Alright, everyone roll need on the mace.
*Two people had already rolled greed, including myself.
Warrior: Shit, everyone greed.
*Paladin needs and wins mace.  There was one other need (hunter).
Warrior: Ok, everyone roll again.
*Everyone rolls again.  Warrior wins with a 95.
Warrior:  Pally, can you give me the mace.
*Pally is afk.  A minute or so goes by.
Pally: No, my alt needs it.
Everyone in group: it's BOE.  You don't need for BOE and you only roll for your own toon in a group.
Pally: I'm not giving it back, I won the roll.
Hunter: Fucking ninja, I'm going to spam trade when I get into town.  (same hunter that needed on a stam trinket "for pvp")
Warrior: GIVE ME MY FUCKING MACE.
Me (on my shaman):  It was a mix up, there were need and greed rolls.  We rolled again and the warrior won.  I don't remember if you rolled, but roll and if you beat his roll you can keep the mace.
Pally: No, I won, I'm keeping it.
Me: This isn't worth ruining your rep over.
Hunter: How's this macro: "/2 Nuksukow is a ninja.  Do not group with him.  He just ninja'd the Tankard O' Terror in Direbrewfest."
*repeat the above for about 5-10 minutes*
*Paladin finally rolls and loses.  Argues for another 5 or so minutes and then hands over the mace.
Pally: I'm so fucking pissed right now.  I can't afford buying that on the AH.
Me: You'll live.

Apparently the warrior gave him the mace later.  I have no idea why, other than whatever that mace is going to end up being sold for at the end of tihs event isn't going to be significant to a lot of people.  Hell, I might pick one up.

This quest has a lot of people just needing on everything or greeding on shit they can't even realistically use.  Hell, I tanked one on my DK (horrid tank gear + frost presence + randomly hitting keys + boss that hits like a gnome) and two of the dodge trinkets dropped.  I didn't win either one as everyone in the group greeded on it including a hunter and resto druid(which I understand). A paladin was going to give one to me (after I made a sarcastic comment), but he was a nice guy during the group and I told him to keep it.

On my server I have never killed any VoA boss in 10 or 25 man in any pug I have ever joined.  Enough said.

I haven't done one in like 4 months.  My gear is so behind the curve, and I don't need some raider alt bitching about my DPS.

This is why I love my guild.

A warrior trinket dropped, and with me being 74 I asked the warrior if he could use it, so I just passed.  It dropped again, so I got this one.  A third weird, but eventually useful for me, trinket dropped.  Someone else got it, but they were just going to sell/DE it, so they gave it to me.  Now I've got two purple trinkets for when I hit 80.

Reached 75 last night, so hopefully I can actually do the daily now.  It gave me the breadcrumb, but wouldn't allow me to do the actual quest.  :x

Can't do that quest yet (stupid level 69), but now that makes me wonder if my standard loot behavior is acceptable:

I need shit that I plan to equip on the toon I'm playing -- either equipt it right away  or, sometimes, after sockets and enchants. I won't need on something that I am more than a level short to wear.

I greed on anything BoE that I don't need, since I can sell it, give it to an alt, or sometimes melt it. Either way, I figure anyone that needs it will, you know, use the "need" button.

I pass on all BoP that don't fit the "need" criteria above.

That's generally a solid way to act concerning loot.  I don't think anyone should ever need a BOE unless they're with friends/guildies, because everyone can sell a BOE item.

With the ability now to trade BOPs within your group, there's never an "oops" that can't be resolved.  Unless the offending person is stupid and/or a dick.

I got my brewmaiden on the first run I did on Direbrew. That's all I really wanted, so I'm not setting foot in that snakepit again.

And why, oh why, was a paladin rolling on the tankard, if not to sell it? It's not like it does a protection pally (that knows how his class works...) much good. Furthermore, the thing is a glut on the Whisperwind AH and they're not selling for 4k gold (last I looked there were like 20 up for sale). I predict 400g buyout by the end of next week.

Edit: Just checked our AH minutes ago after running my JC daily: Tankards down to 2k buyout. Some having starting bids well under 1k already. 400g by end of brewfest, mark my words.

If it gets that low I'll buy 2 just to have.

I'm hoping to get one since Kali can use maces.  I'm also hoping I'm able to run it tonight since I wasn't yesterday, and probably won't be back on until next Monday.

Aren't you a druid? Staves/polearms will likely give you a better bang for the buck.  Plus, there's several easy ones to get you won't have to spend money on.  

Don't be THAT druid.  Well, unless you're just going for aethetics.  Then knock yourself out.

Because of how stat distribution works with 2h weapons vs. 1h weapons and the fact that druids can't dual wield, there's basically no real use for a 1h mace as a feral other than looks. 2h maces are in the conversation with staves and polearms though for sure.

Its different on the healer/caster side of druids because there are actually off-hand items with useful stats for them.

I'm THAT druid in the sense of aethetics.  My bank is overflowing with clothes and weapons I deemed cool looking.  I certainly wouldn't need on it, and probably wouldn't use it regularly.

Maybe on my Oomkin, just so she always has a bierstein in hand.

The Mug wouldn't do a Moonkin any good.

On the other hand, if it is just for aesthetics there are lots of other 'mug' weapons (and I think offhand items) out there these days, many of which I actually think have better models personally.

You get a Mug for just showing up to Brewfest.

Roll need if you need something, no matter who says what.

Then if you're feeling charitable, you can give it to whoever you think needs it more than you.  Now that you can trade BoP's for two hours or whatever, there's really no reason not to.

Off topic, but is the tankard a decent prot pally weapon?  I'm raising one now and wondering if I should bank a tankard now. 

It's statted like an enhance shaman weapon - AP, agility, haste, crit, stamina. And not that much stamina. I'm pretty willing to endorse using dps weapons in place of traditional tanking weapons but this one would not be my first choice.

The only two classes that can reasonably use the tankard weapon are enhance shaman, and rogue.

I want to skullfuck any person that says their alt "needs" something.

Yup.  Been in one too many groups lately with this attitude going on.

The alt thing is older than dirt.  Been going on long before WoW, I'm sure.  It's the "I'm gonna roll Need on this, because I could use it on my dual spec" thing that's getting on my nerve.

If you want something for your off spec, then play your fucking off spec, or say so up front, and don't roll on shit for your main spec.  Get that shit a lot with feral druids wanting casting rings, trinkets, etc for their boomkin off spec.

So I just won a Mug o' Hurt on my rogue.  Three other people in the party really didn't seem to care one way or another about it, the fourth just didn't want to find it on the AH fifteen minutes later.

As for alt stuff, the DPS DK's and ret paladins indignantly demanding that the healer or tank not roll on DPS stuff when they're given the courtesy of being forewarned that that is how it's going down is pretty retarded.

It's a joke weapon. Granted, it has good dps and decent stats, but it's still a beer mug (and an il226 from a 5-man boss which can be 3 manned easily, which is puzzling). Arguably, the battlestar from HToC is just as good, and with a lot less AH-related drama. Makes me wonder what's in store for us at Halloween with the headless dude.

Its also a reasonable pvp weapon for a protection warrior.

Yah, that crap is getting annoying. I did a heroic VH a few days ago on my warlock when a enhance shaman said "mind if I need for my offspec" for the spell hit trinket. I had already hit need. My reply was "I'm on my main spec." He still needed, won and left without a word.  I don't care enough about PVE to really raise a stink, but that is some really idiotic stuff.

This direbrew stuff is really bringing out the inner retard in a lot of people.  Sure the tank is eventually going to win a stam trinket and a dodge trinket.  Doesn't mean you should roll against him when he has neither. I'm also seeing a bit more of everyone saying they have the summon and then one person remembering he doesn't have his summon after we've done the boss 4 times or just DCing intentionally.  Annoying bush league shit just for a chance at a mount.

Yeah I just ran into two "Oh oops, I forgot" asshats in my group last night.  I'm doing this shit with friends and guildies from now on.

I dunno, I don't raid anymore, but I've specifically made myself feral/resto on purpose so I can fill any role a group needs me to in a 5man situation.  I don't really consider one to be my "main spec" and one to be my "off spec" I just do whatever the group needs, so if there is an upgrade for any of my 3 sets, I feel compelled to want it, because it WILL get used, not just sit in my bank or something.

That being said, I basically only run instances with my guild mates, and I pass any needed loot to our main raid team.

Good way to scare off prospective group members: put on master loot and start talking like you all know each other personally.

For the moment, I'm doing instances as Oomkin, but I'm feral 99% of the time.  I actually do need both sets (once I hit 80 anyways), but since I've only been doing this with guildies, I'll defer to the actual 80s who can use the stuff.  I've still gotten a ton of trinkets out of it since he's some kind of purple trinket pinata.  I don't see why anyone needs to be a jerk about it because you will get the trinkets you want if you run it with a group a few times.

I haven't been doing Coren with anyone other than guildies and ex-guildies.  Mostly because they want to run it for mounts and remotes.  (brewfest kodo for me, yay!)

I have a dream of creating an orc shaman dual wielding those mugs, but the price seems to not be going much below 1500.  Seems kind of steep, and there are other mugs I could use anyway.

What we've been doing is getting friends/guildies, then bringing in 1 or more 75's that we round up in org.  This way, we don't feel bad about ninja'ing the mount if it drops, the lowbies complete a quest they might not otherwise have been able to complete, everybody wins!

The mug thing makes me wish dwarf shamans were in the game already.

I admit my Dwarf priest kept a mug for a lot longer than he should have, simply because it was a decent item for healing but mostly because it was a mug.

Dwarves running around in dresses with beer tankards are what WoW is all about.

I never run in a group of people I don't know well without ML on, and me as the leader.

Ok.  

This is 5 man content.  You know, really serious stuff.

To expand: I expect master looter in 10/25 man content. In 5 man stuff, it's just creepy.

The only 5 man I Master Loot is H ToC. Way too much of the 'need for dual spec' bullshit going on in that zone.

I blatantly refuse to PUG Direbrewfest.

It doesn't matter, if there are purples involved in any set of content you put ML on in my book. If people looting shit in a stupid manner bothers you, that's the failsafe solution for pugs.

Its hard to think of any 5man content as serious business enough for ML to be honest.  Maybe its that I quit raiding a while ago, and when im playing WoW regularly I do the 5man stuff so often that I know I'll see things again, or maybe its the years of raiding where the only loot that mattered was raid loot.  Either way, if someone ninja loots, I just think its funny and put them on ignore. (which is a rare occurance for me, since i run w/guild a huge percentage of the time, and the rest of the time you rarely run into ninja looters).  In fact, more often I run into people that make sure to ask  5 times before looting so they don't come across as a ninja looter, cause it can really ruin your reputation on the server.

He is an unguilded dps death knight named 'bonecarver'.  Sound sketchy?  Wait'll you see his armory.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=The+Venture+Co&n=Bonecarver

Notice:

-The caster DPS trinket
-The mixture of tank and dps gear
-The PVP gear (take particular note of the  +4 to all stats in his WG boots)
-Assuming I understand DKs, his serious lack of +hit
-The mostly DPS talents with a few random points in tank talents.

When I called him on it at the start of the instance(UP), he replied that his spec was about 'big dcs'.  Naturally, he was substantially below me, the tank, on the overall damage meters and didn't beat me by much on the bosses.  In a crowning moment of retardation, he attempted to death grip the last boss to himself.

Edit: True to his word, he played the original (it was something like 5/8/blah) by just spamming the shit out of death coil, his damage done went white damage -> death coil -> diseases.  He is now wearing full dps gear with an amazingly terrible 50/21/0 spec.  I'm severely tempted to group with him again, on purpose, just to see how he plays this new spec.

Unless the person looting in a stupid manner is you.  The other randoms have to trust you on that.  A 5-man ML is either an fine upstanding gentleman or a ninja, no middle ground, and you don't get to find out until something good drops.

I've been known to not heal people who pull such stupid antics in my groups.

Not so much a bad group as a clueless noob.  Doing the brewfest boss last night.  Get in a group with four.    Group leader picks up a 78 priest as our last DPS slot.  Everyone else is well geared so the fifth is just filler and an extra summon.  I do notice he's not in shadowform, eh dual specs.  We get there and proceed with the first summon.  First whirlwind disarm thing and wouldn't you know it but there is a giant fucking angel there.  Well, guess he's not dual spec'd.  I laugh and tell him to not stand in melee range.  Second and third summons, I notice he's still stooging around near melee range and on the fourth one, there's that giant angel again as he gets whirlwinded down yet again.  Turns out that they guy is completely clueless.  It says something about the game that he could get to 78 with 68 points in Holy.

A couple of nights ago was an absolute clusterfuck.  I spent over 150g in repairs over the course of three pugs, H ToC, Gundrak and UP.  Gundrak was that not bad, just one wipe when a guy mistargeted on the rhino boss and pulled the trash we skipped.  H ToC was a clusterfuck though.  How we got through it I have no clue.  Faction bosses see two wipes on the pull.  Going into the third pull the pally tank says "I'll use holy shield more".   :ye_gods:  Apparently that was enough and we got them down.  Now comes the Argent Confessor.  We proceed well but something goes horrifically wrong when she summons the shade.  Side note, where was there a murloc boss?  I don't ever remember one.  Anyway, that was a disaster.  Not enough DPS to get through the renew ticks.  I did not even know there was a renew.  Second try, failed again.  Pally tanks pipes up after I died the second time in this second fight and wonders why I am not running back.  Note that I had already committed two deaths to this single attempt.  So, because I have temporarily lost my sanity, I donate another two deaths to the cause.  Four deaths, one failure.  Third time was the charm though.  At the end of that one the mage chimes in with "Spell steal is great!"  So how, through some unknown beacon of sanity we one shot the Black Knight.  Though the warlock did spend most of the fight dead before he decided to zerg it.  That was the only death.  

Loot was also a cluster fuck.  Mostly because tank pieces kept dropping.  The tank helm drops and we spend three minutes waiting for the dumbass tank to decide, no this ilvl 219 hat which is really fucking well itemized is worse than his Tempered Titansteel hat.  After we force the fucking thing on the moron by passing it from the shaman to dumbass because he decided to greed beacuse "Need gets me kicked from people's groups and people kicked from mine."  :uhrr:  And the Black Knight drops the tanking neck.  Mind you he has the better itemized conquest badge neck, but he decides to need on this one after another fucking eternity deciding.  I get back to Dalaran after a really annoying bird ride and jackass is going off in general about how he is "finally ready for H ToC."

After that fucking nonsense, I should have just called it a night.  But no, I am still insane and see a call for H UP which is the dungeon daily and I want me some more badges.  Things proceed slowly but unexceptionally until we get to Svala.  In the middle of the fight, the rogue says "Lets do the achievement" and clueless DK buddy DGs a hulk to us.  Tank understandably completely misses it in chat and kind of freaks out and decides not to tank this hulk that appears from nowhere from what he can tell.  We manage to get it down without anyone dying and continue the fight, but no achievement.  Second sword thingee comes and wouldn't you know it but another fucking hulk shows up.  By now the tank is starting to ask where the fucking adds keep coming from.  We all die.  We proceed again without much fanfare through to gauntlet guy.  Dumbass rogue decides to do the shoot him down in one pass achievement and starts parceling harpoon duties.  The rest of us just give up and go with it.  Suffice to say, the whole thing went poorly.  No coordination on the harpooning.  Most of the group failed at running away from the whirlwind.  Next attempt gets it down but two people still fail at running away from the whirlwind.  I've always thought this guy was a jump.  He just seems to die instantly.  I never had figured out what he is doing at those boats.  Well now, I know.  There was no DPS at all unless he was casting Bane.  Then it was DPS Ho! time.  Three tries again to get him down.  Sanity was restored by this time and I called it a night.

Wailing Caverns final boss.

Bad on my side last night.

Tanking H ToC after healing on Ulduar 25.  I have a lock in the group, and he's just burning up the threat meter on me.  I'm at a loss.  No clue what's going on.  No wipes, but in the middle of Eadric's trash, I notice that I forgot to put on Righteous Fury.

...

One of our officers, who is a absolutely great player, and has been with the guild since it began, for a long time in BC would ALWAYS forget Righteous Fury.  It finally got to the point where before boss pulls people would shout it over vent to make sure he had it on.

Sounds like almost every paladin I've ever played with, apart from my tag-team partner for my rogue.

High five! I did that just the other day. It was just the Brewfest boss so it weren't no big deal. At least it stays up all the time now, I just need to remember to put it back up after switching my spec to protection. :P

Deadmines and Blackfathom Deeps too.

I've been aggro splatted twice fairly recently by paladins forgetting to do this. I wonder if I even have soulshatter on my bar.

Also face planted when a warrior decided that gaining aggro on a boss you need to burn down fast is highly over rated.  Pro-tip, at least FUCKING SWING AT IT.

Good times. :)

I actually took my 69 Hunter to Blackfathom. Post patch lag was so horrendous that I didn't dare do anything risky, so I ran Brewfest then headed to Blackfathom because I wanted to tame the elite turtle in there. I suppose any turtle would have done, but I was feeling nostalgic.

I killed that damn murloc for good measure. Then I hearthstoned, and ran around Blackfathom for another 8 minutes before the hearthstone actually took effect. Damn lag.

I had one guy last night in UK that kept walking near groups and aggro pulling them.  He would then proceed to type very slowly about increased aggro ranges instead of tanking said pulled mobs.  Hooray for chain heal.

 :uhrr: :ye_gods:

He's got low hit for ANYONE, never mind a DK.  He's below the hit cap just for special melee attacks and 11% or so below the spell cap.. which is kind of important if you're focusing on Death Coil as it's a goddamn spell.

I don't even know where to begin on his spec.  I think he's trying for some bastardization of a Blood survival/ tanking spec but then I look at it again and, well. No.   If he's still trying to max DC damage, then he's skipped so many RP generation abilities and fucking Sudden Doom that I can't call him anything but retarded.

His gear might be good if he pulled into three different sets, or maybe four.  He's got reslience, dodge, strength and crit on different pieces.  It's like he's trying to assemble a tanking/dps/pvp set.

Looks to me like he's just scrounging for anything that happens to be purple. Just for it's own sake, don't you know.

Regardless of why, his dps has to suck and suck bigtime. Sadly, this is pretty much SOP for DKs, especially the DW fobbits.

This occurence was just too good not to share:

A few days ago I do a Heroic VH and notice immediately that the tank is someone people have been bitching about on the boards.  Well, we down the first two bosses, and we got easy ones so that wasn't too unexpected.  He was slow to find the portals (keyboard turning wasn't helping him), bad at holding aggro and couldn't figure out how to gather some of the dragonkin packs.  We were surviving and honestly the weak link was probaby the feral doing 1100 dps.

Then out of the blue, in the middle of fighting a single, the paladin healer just drops dead.  Turns out, after later inspection, that he DI'd (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=19752) someone.  Feral is slow to react and we die on the inevitable dragonkin pack that follows. 

I take partial responsibility, because I didn't use a soulstone.  But honestly, you wipe in VH and it's a done deal, and who expects the healer to pop off of trash like that.  How does one even have their UI configured where accidentally DI'ing someone is a possibility.

I'm sorry, that's just hysterical.  Who even has that ability hot-keyed?

I did when I was a healing pally.  It wasn't a simple one click key, though.

Blessing of Protection  was, though.. and I wiped a group once by clicking on the tank and it's key instead of freedom.  Whoops.

I think part of the problem with pugs is that is the only experience you have with the person.  If you did that and you were a pug, basically everyone would think you were an idiot.  But if  you are playing with guildies you've (possibly) known for years, and he does that, well, its just a mistake that they barely ever make and they hit the wrong key.

If its a guild mate, I just sigh and run back, if its a pug, it may be enough to make me ragequit the group.

It made the lone competent DPS other than myself ragequit and the group fell apart.  Who wants to come in for a 1 badge HVH? Heh.

As for guildies, I can fondly remember a Kara run back in TBC where a priest hearthed when she was attempting to rez someone.  She promptly moved her hearth to a different spot on her button bars.  She got shit for that well into Northrend.  

Gal was a guild killer on her own. But that's a different story.  :awesome_for_real:

I have DI on my paladin bars but it's off where there is no way I would do it accidentally. Which means the few times I would actually want to use it, I lose time trying to remember where the fuck it is.  :drillf:

71 Tanks with 12k health that stand in Ingvar's Smash are super.

But that's how they get rage!  :why_so_serious:

My favorite wotlk pug story so far involves a warlock during an utgarde pinnacle run; he did about 500 dps, and need rolled everything including the "on melee or ranged attack you can proc X damage" trinket from ymiron (vestige of xxx). When the hunter outrolled him, he broke out in a tantrum, spamming 'NINJA' and various obscenities in party chat for about 20 seconds.

The Trick is to be a Prot Paladin when doing that.

I kick people for that from my parties.  And no, a DPS of 500 does not require someone coming in to take their spot.  The instance continues as if nothing had happened, minus one idiot.

I think I'm to the point where the primary enjoyment I get from pugs is sampling all the various flavours of bad.

I do enjoy that.  It's fun to see how bad some people are.  Like this Boomkin that kept blowing the mobs away from the pally tank and was causing threat issues with mobs running around.  He thought it was funny and no one else in the group said a word to him about it.

Has anyone noticed that whomever it is telling Ick what to do in Pit of Saron has some thrilling evil overlord level stuff going on?  He tells you what he is about to do each time he starts something and even suggests how to get away from it?  Turns out my group this evening could not figure that shit out.  Poison Nova apparently means stand there right the fuck by the boss.  Little red riding hood?  Also, stand there right by the boss.  Purple bombs?  Find as many as you can.  About the only thing they got right was to not stand in the green shit.

That would be Krick.  A gnome that is riding on Ick's shoulders.  I am still waiting for the video edit of a Krick + Ick conversation with the Lich King, where Krick threatens Arthas with a Saronite Embargo.  "Who Run Ice Crown?  Louder!"

I had about the same experience with that fight the first time i did the Pit with a random 4 person pickup group.  Wiped about 5 times to Ick after one shotting everything else in Forge / Pit because people just could not handle moving away from bad stuff.   Best part?  Watching Ranged DPS like mages and hunters stand there and die to Poison Nova.   I mean, honestly, you would think by now that most people who play WoW would at least have the basic concept that it is BAD to stand next to a boss casting ANYTHING with the word "Nova" in it's name.  I can maybe understand that from a healer when the attack isn't telegraphed and they are busy healing tanks and whatnot, but any DPS who plays the game without cast bars turned on for targets deserves the repair bill.   Our Druid healer also thought that standing still while being persued was a good idea (appearently a bigass hunters mark over your head and the boss slowly traveling nearly 20 yards to kill you was too much to cope with).

I've had a generally hot/warm experience with PUGs.  I got less-rabi on Tuesday on my warrior in a stone-cold pug.  I got the 'no one hit by icicles' achievement in the new 5-man with a total pug.

My only bad experience so far has been a tank who was so slow and terrible that we just started pulling stuff Nexus without him.  At first we had the hunter's pet tank it, then our rogue had the brilliant insight that he could just use tricks of the trade on the tank, run to the next pull, tricks it to him, and run back.  Since a tank's mitigation isn't meaningfully different whether he's actually paying attention or not, we cleared a number of packs like that before the tank finally got pissed off and left.

can just vote to kick people now too.

Gobbeldygook is definitely of the "poke them until they lash out, then make fun of them" persuasion.

 :heart:

I've done the completely random PUG once on the paladin, got HHoS, cleared it pretty fast.  The only annoyance was we had a mage drop after downing the first boss, which put us back into the queue.  The concencus was that he wanted one emblem, and then bailed after getting it.

Tried it on the 74 druid, got DTK.  It didn't go entirely smoothly (tank didn't do very good pickups on the mobs the second boss summons, so I had to drag them to him, and this LOS'd me from the people in the stairs, which led to the dps dk dying, he left, went back into the queue, got two more dps, they were ported in, ran to where we were, and downed the boss.  cool_story_bro.jpg goes here.)  After that, we managed to clear the rest of it fairly quickly.

I'm also left a little baffled as to why people hate on lifebloom.  Admittedly, the bloom itself isn't something you can easily control, the scaling is not as good as other spells, but it is something to do with GCDs that puts up yet another hot, and one that returns mana to boot.  I'll probably change my mind once I get nourish though.

Lifebloom doesn't *really* give mana back. It used to cost X; now it costs 2X but returns X when it blooms. This makes it awfully inefficient when you're rolling a stack of it, since you're paying 2X over and over and never getting your X back. It turned from a must-cast-all-the-time spell to one that is very situational when they nerfed it. Still good against dispellers in pvp, etc.

EDIT: I guess you could argue it as one of those 'higher throughput/lower efficiency' choices that GC says are a goal for Cataclysm healing, but I think it straight up loses out to nourish spam right now?

yeah, cross-server random pugs are :awesome_for_real: in every sense of the word. Sometimes I'd get people with starcaller titles and i258 gear, other times fresh 80s. My personal curse seems to be the "you are tanking no matter what". I just queued for a random heroic and got h-dtk with a 18k hp [in frost presence] non-defense-capped DK tank who hasn't trained his 80 skills yet... I had to take over after the 3rd pull 'cos he was getting gibbed even with the holy pally HL spamming him. /sadface

Well, yeah, my principle assumption is once I hit level 80, I'll be able to use Nourish, instead of lifebloom.  I'm only level 75 right now, so that's just not possible.  It's probably crazy talk, but it might be worth rolling lifebloom on a target for an additional 20% healing effect on nourish?  (I'm guessing no.)

I had a warrior like this once (I may have mentioned it here.)  20k hps, around 500 def, could not maintain aggro to save... well, everyone else's life.  So of course he was trying to tank HUP.

I left after the third pull, because I could not keep him alive, the dps warrior was doing more tanking than he was (and I could not keep him alive much better) and I had stray mobs beating on me as well, which IIRC, led directly to my death on the third pull (the first one with four mobs.)  It was a circus.

If you had a TON of mana regen, maybe. Otherwise lifebloom will run you out of mana if you try to do it for too long or on too many people. There are a couple spots where it would be better to toss a lifebloom than a rejuv for a raid heal, too, like if you just can't wait the couple seconds for that first rejuv tick (and you don't have the tier set bonus that makes rejuv have an up front instant heal) and can't stop moving (or are unable to) to nourish.

I use Lifebloom for when I can't stop long enough to cast or I have an Omen proc.  Usually that's been in PvP, so I guess it still fits what Ingmar said.

Nourish is pretty rad. You can't spam it forever or anything, but I haven't really felt I've had to in any five mans I've healed. And in raids I'm HoT Bitch.

Curse you and your T10 bonuses!

 :angryfist:

WTB real bonuses for paladin T10.   :cry:

Yeah I should have mentioned that, with an omen proc it actually becomes a mana gain, so that can be useful.

I love Lifebloom.  I don't understand the hate or dislike (my mana regen hasn't been a problem in a long while).  Last bad PUG I was in the druid would ONLY use Rejuvenation to heal with.  It was horrible, many deaths.

Was in a TOC5 heroic group yesterday with both the tank you are describing (20k hp, under def cap) and the druid healer you are describing (seemed to be not actually doing *anything* most of the time).

After a few wipes I swapped my Shammny to resto spec to help out, but 2 healers meant not enough DPS and the tank still couldn't hold agro. Only my 2nd failed random dungeon so far, the other being a HoR run that I was unable to heal.

Take a warrior tank at your peril in HoR. That's coming from a warrior tank.

The place simply isn't designed remotely around our skillset or cooldowns. I can beat it with my friends, but your average Pug? Expect heavy delays.

Then again, a farting pally would probably clean up.

It's no walk in the park for bear druids either... sure, they have a ton of hp and armor, but no way to silence / pull casters, no reliable interrupt on a short cooldown (my bear is not talented for reduced CD on bash, but even that'd be too long), etc.

Swipe.  You win, warrior loses.

Yes, swipe is good for keeping aggro, but not so much in preventing casters from tearing my face off, especially at range. :p

e: I'm not complaining that druids are bad tanks [they aren't], it's just that they're not really optimal for HOR either

Um, what? We have quite good tools for that dungeon, really. Good snap aggro, a ranged silence to bring in stray casters, shockwave is great on the run-from-LK section, multiple ways to interrupt, a fear break for those stupid priests. I'd tank it 10 times on a warrior before I'd want to try it as a druid.

EDIT: Also between gag order silences and multiple stuns we can stop the mages from ever splitting/teleporting, which is really really good. Oh and spell reflect was absolute gold in there.

Yeah, given equal gear, druid would be dead last on my list of tanks to try it with. It's not that druid tanks aren't <3, they just don't have as many "shit, shit, fuck you caster, shit!" tools.

It takes a good druid to tank that place.  Our druid tank was pretty good at keeping things under control, but she said the exact same thing you just did: lack of "fuck you caster!" options can really ruin things.

And the first tank I ran it with was a warrior who didn't have gag order...

Did you have group reflect tonight, or is that just in your PvP spec?

We had a druid tank and it went fine for the most part.  (Only one time did a mob get away from him to pwn the healer) Our real difficulty was staying alive because our healer was a little overwhelmed on the mana side and kept going OOM on the last wave.  Our 2nd shammy went resto spec as backup leaving just me and a rogue to DPS and we were golden.  Not a strat I'd recommend for pugs, though, due to the uncertainty of competent dps.

I didn't, but I sure wished I did.

And I'd take a pally or DK 10 times over a warrior. It's not about if you can do it, because it's obvious we can. It's if you can do it without being absolutely eye-bleedingly annoyed by the dungeon, or if the very average warrior tank can handle it when trying to get gear upgrades. My guess on the last part is a whole-hearted no.

I don't see myself going back anytime soon.

Part of the problem is that all the druid caster tricks also make it so the caster doesn't move, so you have a harder time gathering them up and stuff. And I'm used to having it easy with DG and strangulate on the DK, so I am extra uncomfortable with the thought of tanking there with my druid.

I'll fuckin' heal that place all day on my druid, though. I love healing on my druid.  :heart:

I found it a lot of fun, personally. I don't really think pallies or especially DKs have significantly better tools for it than we do, either.

It is nice, I think, to have a fight where we really get to stretch and use all our abilities to make the difference in the fight. I'm going to treat is as my own personal Danger Room. Getting a little soft, need to sharpen up? Time to hit HHoR.

I had the misfortune of running into Iamcyborg (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Velen&n=Iamcyborg) of Velen this afternoon, in UK, thanks to the new lfg tool.  The priest thought they could cover his inadequacies.  At least for about 5 pulls.  Along with his awesome gear choices, he apparently hadn't discovered things like Taunt, and so on.  My boomkin, and the DK tanked most of the fights.  Then we voted to kick him to the curb.

That's my bad group for the week.  

Oh geez!  Did he mean to click a pally at character creation and hasn't noticed his mistake yet?

I started playing my healing priest again, since getting groups is now instant and I don't have to travel.   I expected my x-realms ignore list to be filled with fail DPS, but I'm finding that I'm loading it up with Control Freak, asshole tanks who treat everyone in the group like they're 5, but can't hold aggro for shit themselves.

Ronburgunde (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Hellscream&n=Ronburgunde) is the latest one after I died twice in H. Occ.  Starts off with "I want a fast run, do shit on your own time" and proceeds to RUN down the corridor.  He tosses one concecrate under the whelps, then runs to the dragonkin. He stood at the dragonkin until they were dead, and then ran to the next group.  Everyone's taking aggro, including myself.

I'm running at 5-10% mana by the 3rd group and wind-up dead.  Coming back, he's bitching about the dps and I say "Protip: not all healers are TOC geared, slow down."  So what's he do as I begin drinking/ eating to get my health back up? Runs into the last group, leaving me at 30% mana and 10% health as I spam binding heal to keep both of us alive.  Fucker.

Hit the boss and he fucking stands in the middle as the bombs are going off around us, no movement at all. "Just heal through it" seems to be his strat.  Yes, this little ilevel 200-213 disc priest is going to do just great at that.  We finish with everyone at about 5% health by luck alone. 

Once we're on the drakes, instead of killing the dragons he lands on the first platform and yells at us for killing them.  I finish off the one the 2 dps are on and fly over to the twit, not noticing the 3rd dps apparently didn't catch it.  He pulls a drake on us after we've dismounted, group wipes.  The tank starts getting mouthy again, I leave group and have another ignore list add.

I've added 3 guys with the same combo of low gear + overinflated ego + horrible skills in the last week.  I'm going to need more than 50 slots.

A druid likely can do that without too much issue.  A shaman or a priest is going to have much more difficulties doing this.

There is seriously a problem with the tanks I've noticed.  Every DPS has been competent and healing has been good.  But I always get tanks who either (a) don't know the instance and thus do stupid things like pull every mob at once or mobs that are off in the corner that 98% of every heroic group skips or (b) are horribly undergeared and don't use their basic skills (DK's not using D&D EVER or paladins not using Consecrate until all of the mobs are almost dead).  When the tank single target focuses only, it makes life difficult for me as a healer because I WILL get aggro.  On most heroics it is easy to jump into the mobs, toss a consecrate\D&D\stomp and have aggro on all of them for the fight.  These tanks will use a throw weapon or use a single spell to pull one mob, waiting for the melee to come to them and the spellcasters in the back (conveniently outside of any AoE tanking abilities) and then everyone start to freak when the healer gets aggro and gets a caster or two on them while the tank complains about people not playing well.  And these tanks DO NOT take any kind of advice at all.  Tell them to throw AoE down, they either get mad and say "I do that!" (not when it matters you don't...) or they ignore us.

Nice to know my server doesn't have the market cornered on crappy players.

I'm beginning to wonder if it's DPSers who have caught-on that queuing as a tank gets them in faster. (Often times instantly, where DPS often has a wait.)

 I do it in my DK, but I have actual tanking experience, I worry about aggro instead of dps and my gear is only a tier below my DPS set.  I'm not queuing up as a tank thinking I still need to out dps the rest of the group.. which I've watched many tanks try to do.  :uhrr:

That's exactly what is happening. There are even people who Queue up as a tank, but then once in the group go "lawl I'm DPS, whose tankin?".  :awesome_for_real:

Ha! I tried signing up for the forge on my ret pally but didn't realize it auto signed me up for ret and prot since prot is my offspec. of course my paladins prot set is lacking so...hilarity ensued.

I did a HoR reg yesterday with a hunter that didn't break 1K dps.  :awesome_for_real:

Man, he would have been epic 4 years ago.

That gives me something to do tonight - go up to a dummy and see what my autoshot damage is.  Its gotta be close to that...

I did an OK run and my shaman was #1 DPS at 2100.  The next highest was 1100 (DK tank), then 900 (Hunter)... then 500 (druid caster... in Tauren form the entire time.  I think he just Moonfired over and over).  I kept asking what was the deal with everyone (including when I would take aggro from the tank after a stormstrike and earth shock) and everyone got upset with me for being elitist and started blaming everyone else for all the wipes...  And one person said I was "too overgeared for this instance and shouldn't be here."

That group fell apart 2 bosses in, I got into a Nexus group where I was #1 with 3k, and the next highest was 1400 (warrior tank), then a 1200 (DK), and finally a 850 warlock.  This expansion sure has brought out the lack of player in some people.  I know numbers aren't everything and I shouldn't judge too harshly, but dammit even with mostly ilvl 200 purples and blues a DPS class should be able to pull out 1500-2000, or at least beat the tank!  When you sit down below the 1k mark, I just get the feeling you aren't trying.

I've seen my share of 1200-ish DPSers in epics (and I'm usually in the top 2 as a tank, occasionally #1  :awesome_for_real:), but the most annoying pugger I've seen so far was a ret pally who did decent damage (~2600 dps), but was using the hand-of-reckoning taunt almost every cooldown for extra damage. Yeah, that made tanking bosses fun. In retrospect I should've let him die, but eh.

I have seen stupidity from ret paladins trying to use HoR for extra damage at ALL levels of play.  Case in point, a very well geared Paladin Tank who i swear was using HoR as part of his rotation durring ToGC 10 on Goremok.  Needless to say, when they called out for me to pull off him for impale stacks, i usually eneded up going through at least 3 taunts before i could actually pull off him, because the first two almost always came up "immune".

While I enjoy complaining about the random noob as much as the next, I often try to remind myself of two things:

1) Many MANY of the players in this game are under the age of 15.  They log on for very different reasons than us MMO veterans. 

2) Most people don't understand MMO gaming mechanics as well as the folks here.  Hell, I don't understand the mechanics of WoW as well as most of you and I consider myself a pretty avid reader of elitest jerks. 

Not trying to be an ass here... just trying to offer a larger view.

Yeah, that's why I don't really have a problem with people doing bad damage, standing in the fire, or anything like that (or at least not enough of a problem to do anything other than maybe leave the instance if it gets very bad). However, in my case, the dude was very much aware of what he was doing - he was in a raid guild, had high-quality raid gear, 'proper' enchants from what little I know about ret pallies -, he was just being an arse and making everyone's run harder just to inflate his personal 'dee-pee-ess' numbers. That's much worse than lacking class/game knowledge or keyboard turner tanking, imo...

What's interesting is I've never cared much about dps--to the point of never running meters. I usually know if I'm doing well on damage output. I don't need the specifics. Admittedly, it's interesting, but it's also distracting.

Moreover, there's no need for it in 5mans. Things often die so quickly I never get a chance to get an attack cycle in, or sometimes barely time to hit a target before it dies. I daresay dps is "enough" in that case and epeen waving is pointless and stupid.

I haven't done any of the ICC 5mans yet. Sounds like I have a few things to look forward to...    :ye_gods:

I agree.  The only reason I even looked with those two groups is that things were taking an awful long time to die (the 15m random dungeon timer expired before the first boss died) and I was ending up tanking Bonegrinders in OK and even the both bosses we actually managed to down.

DPS is only really need to know in the form of "are you even trying" and certain dps race style fights.

Just be aware that lower DPS means the tank and healer have to work harder, since there will be more total incoming damage. Essentially, fast DPS means less healing needed, slow dps means more healing needed.

And your rotation for bosses vs trash should be slightly different on a few classes, due to time to kill versus time to complete a rotation. I don't CoE random trash, because it's not worth the GCD. But for the most part destro lock rotations don't change much, they just restart a lot (more immolates, less incinerates!)

So, I got in a Onyxia 25 group yesterday on my Ret pally. I hit 80 with him some time ago, then never bothered to really play him much. So for the last week I have been gearing him up in ToC and now the 3 ICC dungeons. So I have been doing a lot of pugs.

Anyway, I am in pretty much full 219+ epics, and when I went in to this Onyxia kill, wow did I feel pathetic. I finished 16th on the DPS meters with a total of 3600dps. That was a slight blow to my ego. The number one and two spots where both Rogues with the number one guy putting out 9500dps. It seems they might have gone overboard on the new rogue poison buff as 45% of both their damage was Instant Poison.

Some of that is probably inflated by mass applying instant poison to giant packs of whelp adds via Fan of Knives.

Rogues always did those sorts of numbers on ony.  If they were combat, blade flurry+AR would make the whelps melt.  If they were Ass and had enough crit, they could spam FOK non-stop.

My mage does that on Ony-25.  It's the AoE from the whelps.  Any other fight and she's 5500-6500.  3600DPS is not poor by any stretch, but it's middle of the road with geared out 258+ raiders in your group.  Especially on a fight like Ony where ranged and AoE shine and melee gets to sit back for 1/3 of the fight and take out guardians.

Ret paladins also lack multiple stacking cooldowns to abuse with AoE for maximum hilarity.

Onyxia is a bad fight to make any call about damage output. The whelps cheese the meters on any AoE heavy class. Throw in a lot of movement for melee types and it's a hash, dps-wise.

Again, as long as you're not obviously screwing the pooch and she dies in a reasonably efficient manner, it's all good. Blatant slackers and underperformers are always annoying, but as long as the boss goes down without too much drama, I can't say I care all that much. I might make fun of you in /gu, but that's about the extent of it.

I'm always conflicted on the appropriate time to rage right the fuck out on people.  Generally when they die to the very first stage one cleave twice in a row it's a good sign though.

I grouped with a pally who was a member of a raiding guild my guild at the time was merging with. We were running UD Strat and he decides to constantly spam consecration. Me being the tank, my group gets pissed and tells him to stop fucking things up. He wipes us, but due to him being a future guild member, i bite my tongue. Eventually we get into it, he talks shit about me to his guild, lies to my guild masters about me slandering them, and gets me blacklisted.

And I didn't get shit from the instance.

Random PoS group this morning, something seemed off, the tank and 2 others were being really shit. Body-pulling extra packs, not waiting for me to drink afterwards, really playing very poorly (Baluu was the tank).

(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/9690/badgroup.jpg)

I enjoy how the AFK school kids outnumbered you and prevented the votekick  :awesome_for_real:

I know! I felt out of place, I left them to it  :awesome_for_real:

So far, three random groups, no drama or hassles. I'm ahead of the curve. None had another Whisperwind denizen in it. Not sure what that says, but there it is.

I suspect karma is waiting for me around a blind corner with a baseball bat. With a nail in it. A rusty nail.

I've had pretty solid groups for the most part.  Though last night I did run into someone ninja'ing the frozen orb (need roll after everyone had greeded it).

Lol he's probably from my server (US Stonemaul). We've been needing on Frozen Orbs since they came out, we just assumed everyone else did too. Now it's become a sort of server pride issue. I've actually stopped, because now that frozen orbs are worth just over the vendor price, whats the point?

Yah.  We had a need roll on a frozen orb last night. Guy admitted it was a mistake.  I just shrugged it off. 

Only need roll wonkery I've seen is typical shit.  "Mind if I need for my offspec?" after someone rolling for their obvious main spec has already hit need.  Grow a brain.

I noticed a serious uptick in DPS queue times last night, went from 6 minute to an 11 minute queue.  I don't know if it was a factor of reset day or perhaps people dropping out after completing their achievements.  I am getting a bit bored with the rotation though.  I seem to have a better than even chance of getting stone or lightning.  I've only seen UK once and DTK twice.  Gundrak seems to be the instance of choice for the system of my lowest geared groups.  

I have more orbs than I know what to do with.  And I have dream shards coming out of my ears.  I want more essences.  

Hmmn, I think this is an increasing grey area.  With dual spec and random queuing I don't have a problem with folks rolling need on upgrades to either spec.

Since 3.3 went live, I've queued every night as Heal/DPS... one of these days I'll get a dungeon as DPS.

Now, one could say... "only queue as DPS if you want DPS gear" and that would be rational... but I don't think it would make the game more fun.  I recognize that some of the pure classes have fewer roles and therefore fewer options for loot, which makes each piece that much more important per roll; but by the same token, they have 1/2 as many slots to fill as those of us who are willing to go support for the greater good.

I can see both sides of the argument, but my own bias has always been in favor of open looting vs. preferential treatment.  An upgrade is an upgrade and your contribution to the success of the dungeon is not more important than my contribution.  It is also one of the reasons that I simply prefer badges - you get a badge, I get a badge we buy what we want.

I had my only bad experience last night with a tank who entered Nexus and proceeded to run straight to the first boss without stopping, pulling every single thing on the way and then kept going to pull all six groups in the boss room and *then* whined when we took down everything anyway except for the boss and two mobs before dying. "U SUK, KEEP UP", and he quit the group. We just requeued and got a new tank in about 2 minutes.

Groups have been smooth so far.


See on Eredar (having discussed with a number of same-server randoms) server etiquette is to roll Need of the Frozen orbs.  Never even thought about it until someone in a pug pointed it out.  I just had them reroll and was going to trade to the winner (didn't have to because it was me again).  Since then, I watch to see what everyone else does and then I pick.  Greed does seem to be the way on other servers.

I literally don't pay attention to drops in heroic.  Outside of need on Orbs, I DE (if available) or Greed everything.

I'd rather see something go to an offspec than getting disenchanted or vendored.  But my understanding of the system is that "greed" and "disenchant" are equal priority. They should have some intermediate category (want? offspec?) for this (they can put "it's an upgrade that I'd love to roll need on but Blizzard's system won't let me because the item isn't my preferred armor type).

Yeah, on Crushridge-US pugs used to roll need on orbs. However, with the addition of the 3.3 LFG system people are slowly starting to roll greed instead; personally I just wait until everyone else rolls and roll greed if they all rolled greed as well.

I have noticed a slight increase in queue time for all non-tank characters, actually; even my priest had to wait for 2 minutes (oh noes! the world is ending) and if I queue as dps, I might as well check the AH or do a daily or two. My druid tank's getting instant queues still, though.

(Also, is it just me, or are disc priest super-uber for the new instances? Shields to mitigate the 'omg incoming burst' abilities and cheat the "thou shalt not heal" debuff, shackles, more shields to keep everyone alive easily even if they get aggro from the ghosts in HoR, magic dispel against that 6 sec stun (that must be so fun as a shaman) and some other nasty stuff... the only thing I was missing when I pugged through the new heroics was some kind of decurse, but you can't get everything!)

I'm being relatively shameless about gearing up both my DPS and my Tank spec on my warrior, mostly because my tank gear was so out of date (my guild usually wants me healing) that trying to tank anything would have been bloody well awful for everyone involved.  So I figured I'd tag along as DPS since it wasn't quite so awful and slowly gear up both.  That said, if I was in as DPS and the guy actually doing tank duty rolled need on something, I'd give it to him.  I just will be damned if I lost an upgrade to someone disenchanting/greeding it.

We determined that it was just easier to ignore this debuff and heal him a little (DPS still stops when they get the debuff of course.)

I'm still struggling to find out WHY folks are Needing on the orbs, or even want to loot them.  I've given away more than I've sold or used in the last few months.  I still have 4 rotting on the bank character, in fact.

Where are these mystical servers that still use the entry-level crafting mats in such a great quantity?

The very populated servers always have a demand and the very underpopulated ones never had a supply really.

JCs use one per day to make their free gem thing, which can result in epics (and/or dragon's eyes).

LW needs 'em to make leg thingers too.

It's odd.  I've got 5 stacks of them across 3 different characters.  I have never used one for anything.  But most of the PUGs I have been in, everyone rolls greed.  Except last night, on 3 different occasions someone waited until all 4 of us had rolled greed and rolled a need followed by "thanks, see ya" and left.  I personally don't care, but it seems pretty selfish and shitty (oh, anonymity on the internet makes people assholes?).

It seems to be mixed in my battlegroup - some servers have always rolled Need, some (like mine) have always rolled Greed. They're so cheap now that it doesn't matter any more but I now say upon entering the dungeon "All roll Need on orb at the end" and it avoids any confusion.

Pretty much the same with heroic loot drops. It's so fast and easy to get groups for heroics now (much faster & easier than normal dungeons in fact) that Needing for off-spec is very *shrug* whatever. Miss a bit of loot you want? You can run that dungeon again 3 times in one evening if you want, so who cares really.

Personally I just want drama-free groups.

Oh and I want groups to stop wiping at the exact same places every time, like the top of the steps before the mushroom boss in OK. Pulling 2-3 groups there = wipe yet people still keep doing it... and still keep standing in the bloody flamestrike  :uhrr:

Having been part of a wipe there in a group of Ulduar/ TOC geared guildies, I'll say that it can be a tricky pull.   The aggro radius on the two groups at the bottom is pretty decent, and if the pathing caster stands in the wrong spot to blow a spell at you, he'll pull them both.   Ditto if you try to Death Grip, Counterspell or otherwise pull them when they're anywhere near those groups.    I don't think I've ever been in a group that hasn't pulled at least the pat and one other cluster.

Totally agree, it's a nasty little spot. This is why I've taken to saying before we get there "careful here, pull to top of steps". Still get ignored by the new breed of psycho tanks half the time  :oh_i_see:

First boss in Gundrak makes me sad as a 77 druid in a PUG.  I invariably end up dying.

I would just like to say, if you are a tank, and havent done the 3 new ICC dungeons yet. Please dont jump in to a pug heroic for your first time. Do normal a few times first. Ok thanks.

I'm now 0-for-4 in doing Violet Hold on my 76 mage in PUGs. Every other thing I've done on any character has gone fine, but I'm somehow cursed in VH on that guy. I have yet to have a tank in there who actually knows what any of the bosses do - and of course there's little time to explain them because you don't know what is going to spawn right off the bat. 3 times the run has ended with a wipe on the 2nd boss, and half the group drops because, well, there's no point in rerunning the first 12 portals without loot from the first boss when there's no lockout. Getting annoyed to the point where I may just level him to 78 to dodge that bullet (assuming it won't just send me there anyway.)

I had a wipe in VH w/druid on boss number two, we re-ran the first 12 waves, and the first boss did drop loot again.  I was pleasantly surprised.  So far I haven't experienced utter failure in VH, but I'm sure it's coming.

HoS was fairly easy, although the PUG tried to make it harder by pulling multiple packs, plus the rogue who loved aggro.  The final boss was completely  :awesome_for_real:, we nearly wiped.  I have no idea what I could have done differently.  The debuff stacked, the damage went WHEE, and I simply couldn't keep up.

My first group as a DPS yesterday was ToC. "Cool" I thought, easy run.

Yeah, no.   Two of the DPS and the healer died during the joust part.  They then sat there without releasing as the tank and I chewed through the waves until the faction bosses.  I commented, "Y'know, you can release and run back in."   

The response "Nah, I don't want to die again, I'll just wait until you kill them."

I dismounted and disbanded and ran dailies for the next 12 mins.  Seriously, wtf.

I normally tough out bad groups till the end but I wound up quitting my first ever yesterday.  It was normal Underbog and I'm a resto druid healing away.  I've done the instance a handful of times in the last couple of days and it's a rare occassion when my HoTs can't keep up with damage on the tank. 

Anyway, on the first pull the tank's health plummets to abouto 50% before I get a rejuv on him.  "That's odd" I think to myself, I probably wasn't paying attention.

Second pull same thing happens.  No worries, we're still moving through although I'm having to throw out a few normal heals as well as refresh HoTs.

First boss and the tank's health gets to 25% and I'm really struggling to keep it there.  Burn Tranquility, popping all the HoTs everytime they're off cooldown.  Not helped by the tank standing in the green stuff and we lose a couple of DPS but finally down the boss.

Hmmm I think, inspecting the Tank.  Turns out half his gear is leather and all his gear is +int gear so I say "You're wearing some leather and +int gear there - might want to put on your tanking set".  He says "Nah, check my spec" which I do....ahhh the old tri-spec uber talent build.  That explains a lot. /leave

Had my first unsuccessful pug yesterday.  Doing Gundrak with a paladin tank, paladin healer, me (warlock), a hunter and another DPS.   We do some of the first pulls and I notice I'm pulling aggro pretty quick after conflag.  The hunter is pulling aggro the second he opens fire.

We do the first boss.  First attempt is a wipe, he can't hold the boss at all.  The healer can't keep up with it.  Second attempt we get him down, but two of the DPS eat it.  I actually see people get snake wrapped.  Each attempt I had to soulshatter after my first chaos bolt as the boss beelines toward me.

Then the next set of pulls.  The hunter eats a quick death as somehow his multishot (or volley, I forget) pulls almost the entire pack on him.  I die in the same pull after the paladin can't keep me up and the tank and apparently just casting spells means I pull aggro.

This is possibly the first time I've ever quit a group with somewhat of a nerdrage moment.  "You're terrible at this" as I drop.  The healer, from my realm, thought I meant them and sent tells.  Apparently, the tank had really bad gear. But enough that he was at 33K hp unbuffed, which similar HP tanks have kept my ass spotless.   My gear really isn't that good; I'm still wearing 3 piece of PVP gear and I still have a good amount of ilvl 200.  Heh, maybe a rogue was TOT griefing us or something, I've never seen a tank that inept at holding aggro.

Heh, as I type this, I just did a 15 minute Gundrak.   :awesome_for_real:

edit: On a related note, can I please stop getting Old Kingdom.  jesus. h.

Notice to people getting HVH.  Stop wanking it and get in front of the door. Thank you.

I'm seeing a lot of tanks with lot of HP (30-40k) but no defence and no ability to hold agro. I think a lot of them are just gearing for stamina and forgetting avoidance and mitigation totally because when you look at the group all you see at a quick glance is HP.

Trying to heal a 40k HP tank who gets crit every pull and does nothing to pull mobs off the healers and DPS is no fun at all!

As for the "getting the same dungeons over and over again" thing that's happening to me too - OK and HoL particularly. I think it's the gearscore thing. If I do dungeons very early in the morning I get much more variety so I think it tries to put you in a gear-appropriate dungeon at first and then gives up and goes "Ahhh sod it, you can overgear a DTK group".

If you have 30k health and can't keep aggro it's not your gear.  You cannot get that much health without having at least 1k strength.  They're just bad, likely completely situationally oblivious, possibly also reaction time that can be described as "stunned."

100% certain this is the result of DPS Tanks throwing on their second set for fast queues; no surprise there.

My previous observation is that the PvP mechanic of using _owned_ equipment vs. Equipped stuff is screwing the PvE side.

Heck, I'm afraid to queue as a Tank anymore since my healing stuff is way better and the prospect of being thrown into Pit of Saron as the Tank about makes me wet myself.  Hopefully the next iteration of the DF will take some of this into account.

However, what it positively does show is that having tank gear does not a tank make.

(oh, and DK's are far and away the worst... I hear that they are awesome at edge content... but without massive avoidance and with marginal gear and marginal skill... it's like healing a rogue; even a baby pally will not die in two hits in an Heroic - many a DK tank has... I had a DK tank die with Glyphed Regrowth, Rejuv and full stack of Lifebloom - something I previously thought physically impossible in a heroic - perhaps one of the two swords he was wielding accidentally cut his own carotid artery).

DK tanks are by far the sketchiest tanks in the game.  You can implicitly trust a paladin, warrior, or druid to have a clue what they're doing, but remember that DK tanks come from the same cliched population that wears spellpower trinkets to DPS and complained about /castrandom breaking their one-button DPS macros.  A dual-wielding DK is as sketchy as a van that has FREE CANDY written on the side.

Pretty much.  I'm hoping the class takes a die-off in Cata once some of the newness factor has gone and they have to level up again.

And yet, it was a PALADIN TANK that was utterly inept in Rasix's story.

<leads the DK tank revolt>

Right there is your problem: SAOAFR. DW DK tank = fail. I'd argue even dps DW DK is fail, but it does have some--slight--utility in PvP. It's not so much the DW mechanic with a DK (though you have NO advantage over a conventional 2h DK), but the type of wanker attracted to this build for PvE.

I have to say I love this new LFD tool.  I am in the process of gearing up a third character.  Yay for vacation time.

Anyway, last night I ran HVH with decked out in full spell power plate.  Checking the recount just for giggles made it even better as he was not even apparently using his "spells".  It was all blood strike and melee for his whopping 700 DPS.

I keep seeing this sort of thing, but I've grouped with several DK dual wield tanks who did fine. Some tanks are just idiots. It has nothing to do with the weapons they use.

Not per se, but it seems to attract a certain personality that could be labled clueless douchebag.

I've seen a few--a very few--DW DKs that seemed to know what they were doing. My main objection is the fact there's no good reason to do what they're doing. They'd do just as well with an equivalent i-level 2hander. There's a particular frost DW DK build that is rather nasty for PvP, but it's a niche build for a certain playstyle. In PvE, it's just fail. The only thing you're accomplishing that your 2h brethern aren't is pissing off rogues and enhance shaman when you bogart their weapons. You don't gain a thing by rocking a pair of 1handers in PvE.

My suggestion in that case - check next time to see if he forgot Righteous Fury.  If he swapped specs, it's likely he forgot to recast it.

I'm thinking that, for noob DKs at least, tanking one-handers are way, way more common than two-handers with defense stats on them.  Maybe it's different at higher tiers, but my DK is still tanking with Ye Olde Titansteel Destroyer because there is nothing that drops that's got tanking stats on it that I've run into.

Problem is most tanking 1handers are fast. DW DKs work best with slow weapons. They go fast, they lose damage, sothey lose potential threat which is way bad. DKs have issues with snap aggro anyways; this just makes it far far worse. Throw in clueless douchebag quotient and you have a disaster.

It's just not a good idea, yet, it's FotM and they're a dime dozen and moreover they make my teeth itch.

There's no such thing as a tanking 2h, really.  At least not how you get "Tank-only" 1h weapons.  I believe Blizz said, way back when the Titansteel Protector (or whatever the crafted 2h that was on test) got dropped that they didn't want to make any weapons that were explicit to one spec of one class in the game.  

Instead, that's what you've got your rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle for.   Take the 2hder with the most stam, slap that on it. Bam, tanking weapon.

I think This: Ramaladni's Blade of Culling (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=50798) is the closest you're going to get to a "Pure" tanking 2hder in the current tier of content.

All the bitching about DW DKs makes me want to DW tank again. No, there's no good reason to do it, but there's really not a good reason NOT to do it, especially since they added a 1h version of the gargoyle rune. Oh no, rogues and enhance shamans might get mad at me for "stealing" their weapons. Ohhhhh noooooooo.

In other news, I finally got brave at tanked for two different random groups. I won damage in both.  :ye_gods:

I honestly am not seeing any clear "class divide" (haha) in tanking ability. I've had excellent DK tanks and I've had shitty shit shit warrior/pala/druid tanks. It's totally the player and not the class.

We've just got to the point in my guild where we can start 5-manning some of the Northrend instances. We've got 2 decently geared 80's (tank and healer, yay!), 1 badly geared 80 (hunter), one complete new player with a DK who's just hit 79 and another shaman who's just hit 72. And running places like AN, UK, OK, HoS etc on normal is so much more fun than doing them in random PUGs on heroic it's astonishing.

I love the LFD tool, I love that I can gear up superfast now, but guild groups on Skype will always be >>>>>>>>>> random PUGs  :awesome_for_real:

Please take all the 1h DPS swords, we really have no use for them at all.

Everytime I see a 1h dps weapon, i groan a little on the inside. Mostly because they never get taken.

Yeah, generally speaking, if a 1h weapon drops, we don't actually need it, because our main 1h weapon dpsers farm like crazy to GET those without us because zomgnewweaponyay, so they just get DE'd anyway.

But they might get maaaaaad if I dual wield nooooooooooo.

They are all for my Rogue!  Mine damn you!

I've been healing too much. I now read the word "Rogue" as "Yellow-named fool who's going to either suck up all my mana or spend half the instance dead and bitching about it, or both".

Heh, made me chuckle a bit... I've been healing dozens of randoms on both my Druid and Paladin and can totally see this.  In fact, I have a new category of "bad group" - I call it the DPS Orgy.

Pretty simple, really... Junior just got his new i245 shoulders and is going to use _this_ run as a DPS meter test - multiply that by 3 DPS and voila, Boss ping-pong and Trash on your healer. Trash...on...the...healer - it had been so long since trash had gotten close enough to attack me that, at first, I was confused and contemplated opening a bug ticket: "Dear Blizzard, I'm a healer and today in Utgarde Keep a lowly barbarian warrior walked right up to me and hit me - is this working as intended?"  Apparently the DPS wizards had wonked all the aggro and my fantastic healing was actually pulling healing aggro.  Now, I have my suspicions about the tank... but still he was a secondary problem if at all.

Honestly, though, what really set me off is that I'm the guy who has to make things right.  If I heal my ass off keeping these guys alive we shave about 45 seconds off the total run.  Since I'm in this to farm badges and no-one cares about the awesome 3k HPS output... fuck it - why should my walk in the park be ruined by your epeen... put that thing away and stop waving it in my face or someone's gonna get hurt (and since I control the hurt mitigation buttons, we all know who that will be).

I have a soft-spot for the bad tanks who are learning the ropes, but find I have a heart of ice for DPS who expect me to perform fabulous feats of finger finery to keep them alive in Utgarde Keep.

I politely mentioned this in chat (even used a :) ) and since it was a group with Pally/DK/DK from same guild plus me and a competent Hunter I figured the DK's would ease up on their poor tank friend; It appears I overestimated their capacity for empathy.

So.  I invented a new mini-game.  Here are the rules in the event that you are a healer and want to play along.
1. Everyone gets a free Rejuvenation (hippocratic oath and all that...).
2. Tank is always fully HoT'ed
3. DPS gets heals for incidental contact (I mean, I'm not a monster.)
4. If I see you have aggro from my magic aggro teller bar... see #1 above.

Suddenly my walk in the park was restored; see, the thing is with all the extra DPS in the game now, it turns out that losing one or two even on a boss isn't such a big deal.

A couple times I was even rooting for the guy to pull through as it was a race between rejuv and that pesky trash mob.  Usually the subject lived, but a couple times he died.

A simple, "huh, died to Trash... who'd 'av thought?" was all I allowed myself.

Fairly quickly Death-n-Decay found it's proper time and use, trash mobs followed their ordained paths and Bosses correctly directed their ire at the appointed receptacle.

I'll admit that it was a fairly petty form of passive-aggressive up-fuckery... but while all you folks think that DPS is the name of the game, or that Tanks are the true leaders... sometimes I feel the need to remind you all that Healers rule the world.

It is why we play.

Rogues - good floor CC, or best floor CC?

I should have read your post before running my first ever Forge of Souls, March.

Then again, letting the DPS die would have just meant more deaths to me.  I think the highest output was 2100 on Broj.  I died there, AND the fight took about 3x longer than my last fight according to DBM.   I died so much doing this group (Helm and boots went red)  that I wondered if, perhaps, I simply am way too undergeared for the instance.  However, the lfg tool is what put me there, and damnit there I was going to stay if only to unlock the next dungeon.

Holy hell, though, I wish the DPS or DK tank had learned to interrupt those caster dudes.  When spamming prayer of healing and drinking between every pull is your only recourse, that place just sucks.

It turns out my Renew ticks for enough to keep two casters alive during Keristraza even if they never, ever move to remove the cold debuff.  :uhrr:

After we won, I, of course, felt no obligation to keep refreshing the the renews and got to watch them drop dead, having still not moved for a good 15 seconds after the boss hits the floor.  Apparently the shadow priest was too busy typing NED MACE OK? to, you know, move a pixel.  The mage had no such excuse.

I cackle at the sheer number of spriests that are suddenly leveling.  It's like a plague!

Yeah, Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron are the Lent to my Utgarde Keep Easter...

I used to conspire with my healers to kill annoying DPS on my warrior when tabsunder was the way to tank if you were not prot.

If your healer is getting threat, it's either new adds the tank didn't see coming/didn't have a cooldown up for, or DPS was peeling so often that all the tank's threat gens were being wasted keeping the burn targets off the squishies that a random 3rd burn lost threat.

I did get yelled at on my lock in a random pug by the tank, but it wasn't my fault! I gave him three good whacks, then promptly crit my opening spree for 140% threat. And soul shatter was on cooldown :( Was more a tank gear issue though, I vastly outgeared him and didn't realize it until the first AE pulls. Then it became seed.. count to 3, seed, count to 3...

I thought I said that?   :oh_i_see:


Exactly... as DPS you need to react to the situation at hand.  Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

I'm just seeing that the Random Dungeon is making a lot of strange bedfellows, and I for one am tired of being fucked by strangers.

I've seen a lot of new druid healers lately. They're clearly lacking a healer UI or knowledge of targetting keybinds (they heal the tank, and ONLY THE TANK) and they roll on everything.  I've had to restrict tapping to when I already have a HOT on me. 

Ohh well, hopefully it'll lead to more experienced druid healers, but I have a feeling they'll be going back to their DPS spec once they hit some sort of gear threshold.

Have we met before?

You'd give me a rejuv. I'd hug you for that.

It seems like most times lately that there's a warlock in the group and I'm on my moonkin I have to be the one to heal it, no matter what class is healing.

I haven't had to tap in the middle of a 5 man in ages, unless they're playing with the glyph and using it in a rotation. Mana wise, never an issue.

Raids are a whole different ball of wax, though.

I'm leveling a druid, but I do run a UI (grid), plus keybinds (and clique), and I heal everyone.  Even the people I hate.

You know who I really hate?  The warlock that LTs to 10% of his health right before a pull.  Seriously.  Fuck that guy.  Making me rejuv+SM.  I might need that for the tank!

Hah, I don't trust people.  LTing into the danger zone is not good practice.

I generally don't have to LT a lot in 5 mans. During a gauntlet, yah I do.  Every 40 seconds, yep, I need to get into a habit of having that buff up.  Long boss fights, slow DPS, my own habit of keeping my mana near 100%...  :grin:

If I went back to affliction, which may seem prudent at 4 piece tier 9, I wouldn't have this issue at all. But as destro, I just can't bum rush entire instance without having to drink like some.

Give me a HOT between pulls and go back to ignoring me. I'm pretty much always out of the fire.

If you're lazy/bored, rank 1 LT appears to keep the buff up with a minimal health cost when you don't really need mana from LT.

edit: of course, I think this would require a macro to use given the new "no ranks cluttering the spellbook" theme, and I don't know how much health it saves.

I think it's funny that if I dps as much as possible, as cautious as i can be and die, I get bitched at.  Yet, if I hold back and play safe I get bitched at for not dps'ing enough.

I have yet to have a healer complain about me, most of the time when I die, its because the tank can't hold aggro... or the healer can't multitask and heal more then one person.

It's not always about multitasking.. sometimes it's a combo of GCDs and just not enough gear power.

The RoS group I ran this morning, I was thinking  "Hey I'm right on the cusp of being undergeared here.  I hope this works."  Turns out it did, but barely and because I was spamming a very inefficient spell.  Even then, I still wound up with folks or myself dying.

When everyone is taking damage, sometimes you have to make the call of who gets that next GCD.  When you've just blown your CoH and Prayer of Healing isn't going to cast in time, sometimes that mage who's at 15% is going to die while you spam Binding or Flash heal on the tank and pray for a proc to let you instacast another.

And bare minimum you have to know where the next cast is going and what type it will be while the current cast is still in progress, otherwise your healing slows.  Which leads to situations like when you've got your next two casts planned ahead, your tank eats something nasty, someone is going to die, and you have to decide who in the next half second.

We're making the distinction between a hard HoR/PoS 5-man PUG and Utgarde Keep, right?

I haven't failed on a PoS yet in a pug.  I've had horrible times with HoR though.  Although if you can just get past the first two bosses it's cake.  Hell we 4-manned the last part because somebody went LD and never came back.  The first fights in HoR are easy as well, until you get double mages.

This is exactly how I feel.  I've got 3 raid-geared healers in addition to my main DPS mage, so I run ALOT of heroics with them all.  My main train of thought is "heal tank, heal self, DPS get whatever is left over."  A good tank will keep me from doing much and an aggro-thief will get some attention at first.  Bad tanks require work, and when I've got dumbass DPS that want to see how high they can go and not bother to assist the tank, I will give them marginal heals and hope for the best.  If someone continues to pull aggro and barely survive with me healing my butt off, I start to heal them less and less and let them get the picture.  Usually it only takes a few deaths to trash for most people to get a clue, but sometimes I get bitching about "dammit heal me" and my response is "assist the tank better, the tank is my main focus and you n00bishly pulling aggro is not my concern."

I've had some really bad DPSers who stand in fire, stand in the whirlwinds (UP Skadi, I let them die if they refuse to move away), or just flat out attack whatever they want without regarding to whether the tank has said mob's attention or not.  The warlocks that lifetap down to 10% before AoE intensive pulls get healed seriously only after the fight is over. 

Healers do truly rule the world, but you have to be stupid or dumb to find out with a competent one.  Bad healers are just bad news all around.

If a dpser is actually pulling aggro (this hasn't happened much to me because my dpsers have almost universally sucked ass), I let the healer decide if they want to let them die or not. Usually they do.  :oh_i_see:

I think that pretty much all the DPS/tank/healer problems are down to people not being able to assess a situation. Tank not geared so well? DPS needs to reign in the damage and let them keep agro. Healer not geared so well? Tank needs to slow down with the pulls and let them drink between fights and DPS needs to really not pull agro. DPS not geared so well? Who gives a shit.  :awesome_for_real:

The problems come when when any of the group fail to make an assessment of the groups strengths and weaknesses relative to the dungeon. Just wading in in the same way that you always do without seeing wtf's happening causes headaches.

I actually had a group this morning that when I went in with my paladin (in 50% blues and 50% iLvl 200-213 purps) and said "take it easy folks, my gear is a bit sucky" did it! They slowed down, they let me drink and they didn't bitch once! It was awesome and a really fast and smooth run (this was HoL heroic) with almost no deaths and no drama. Sad thing is that this seems to be becoming a rarity  :oh_i_see:

The boohooing about DW DK tanks is out of date, by the way. DW frost is perfectly viable for tanking now - in fact I believe a good case can be made for it outperforming 2h frost for tanking now.

Man, do DKs have problems getting hit or something?  I had a DK tank in normal CoS last night, and it was taking just about every GCD to keep him alive.

It was very  :ye_gods:.  I'm just glad that I have an illicit love affair with Lifebloom, or he'd have probably splatted all the damn time.

Had my first group wipe last night.  By that I mean wipe which I was definitely the cause of.  Granted I learned from it, but I got to be that person. ;D

The only reason I haven't switched from 2h frost tanking to DW frost tanking is I'm having trouble deciding where to squeeze the extra talent points from.  Going by memory (which is notoriously faulty), I think I need six points to invest in DW (DW specialization and ToT) but only two for 2h (2h specialization).

If it was a newishly geared DK tank, yeah, they can be kinda squishy if I remember right. They've fucked with 'em so many times since I was a nub tank (back in MY day, I had to hit 540 defense without the stoneskin gargoyle rune while walking uphill in the snow! And we liked it that way!) I am mostly guessing here, though.

The problem with DK tanks is most of them suck. The DW thing is just the worst symptom of the basic suck.

Having said that, our guild DK tanks are either blood or unholy these days. Haven't seen much from frost in some time (which I miss, since I could ditch the WF totem talents). PuG DK tanks are a crapshoot. About 2/3 seem OK if they're 2h. About 95% of DW DKs suck bigtime, as in I'll drop the group if I see one, since life is too short to put up with that shit.

I suspect of lot of the suck issue is unfamiliarity with the class and what it can really do. Lack of threat generation from clueless rotations and squishyness from never using cooldowns or using them at inappropriate times. The rest is probably gearing, especially on the survival side of things. Combined, you have a grouping disaster.

This, there are a ton of DK's that don't know what the fuck they are doing.

I've tried numerous times to PuG-tank on my DK, and it's kind of a hassle, actually.  It takes a few ticks of death & decay and a couple of GCDs for the diseases to spread around for any actual AOE threat and if you have trigger-happy DPS firing off every artillery round as soon as they see you've targeted something it quickly degenerates into shit running everywhere.

In an ideal world I'd let the DPS die and learn a valuable lesson but I have the secret backup option of another character, so I just caved and just use him instead rather than bitch at these doofuses.   With the warrior, charge + thunderclap + shockwave gives me the valuable few seconds of being out of range of the morons and shockwave stun time to get some cleaves in for nice upfront spread-around threat, and with him the run of the mill idiots are not really an issue.

What was my point though?  Oh right, make sure you give the DK about 3 seconds before you go to town, or it might be your fault.    :oh_i_see:

Warrior's ability to intercept the fuck away from the morons is a great point.

Except you can cast D&D at the same range, while running up to the mobs. If you really feel the need to build threat quick, prior to ss, it, pesti all firing off, blow a blood on Blood Boil and Blood Tap it back when you need to Pestilence.

Yeah, but some of them just flat-out suck.

I don't mind waiting for them to set up their pull. What I do mind is doing all this then pulling aggro on the first SS/WF crit, because they can't generate enough threat--usually because they don't have runestrike hotkeyed or they're DWing or just plain stupid.

DKs aren't good at snap-aggro generation. But when you can't generate any meaningful threat over an entire encounter, there's something wrong and it's not the fundamental class mechanics. Yeah, paladins can faceroll tanking and warriors are almost as effective in that regard, but a DK can't be a doofus in the same situation. Sadly, most are, since they rolled FotM to level and now think, hey, I'm a tank, too! Not hardly. You can be a dumbass dps DK and won't be any worse for wear, other than people making fun of you in /gu or /trade. As a tank, though, it's just ugly.

Oh, yes, some of them are terrible!  I'm just saying make sure you aren't making things worse.   :grin:

I was actually pleasantly surprised with the single-target threat on the DK (he was unholy and I had read Dire Warnings that it sucked).  The AoE threat just takes a little time to kick in.  But I love love love love love love charge, and that pretty much was the final straw in the 'man, I really should just pick one tank' competition.   Death Grip just isn't the same, man!

Though I could finish leveling a bear, I guess.

Unfortunately it's extremely difficult to try to get up the chain on the left side of the frost tree to get Icy Talons when you're specced to tank.  Just not enough talent points.  Frost DPS has less of an excuse, unless they have a lolwut spec like my crappy DK soloing offspec.  I've heard for a while now that blood tanking is the way to go against single targets (aka: most bosses) but I hadn't realized unholy tanking had made a comeback.

Personally, I like frost tanking specifically because Howling Blast provides more snap aggro than the other two trees.  It may not be the 'best' tree but for what I tank (Heroics or sometimes raid offtanking) it works and it fits my playstyle.

I dunno, as long as I'm using Tricks of the Trade well, I'm not having issues doing 4kdps as a rogue in the heroics. And if you've got a group of 2 or 3 dps'ers doing that kind of damage who aren't totally stupid about threat management, I'm sorry, but it does shave more than 45 seconds off the total run in a place like UK. Stuff dies before it can even do damage in some cases. If you try to hang back and be cautious, you get yelled at half the time by the tank and healer who want to spam pull through the whole place.

Using Tricks of the Trade or Misdirection is by definition not stupid.  But most of the idiots out there don't and so are.

Quick guide to DW DK tanks:
Q1) Are they heavy frost spec? (Y - go to Q2. N - Go to Bad End)
Q2) Do they have two slow weapons? (Y - go to Q3. N - Go to Bad End)
Q3) Do they have Rune of the Nerubian Carapace on both? (Y - go to Q4. N - Go to Bad End)
Q4) Do they use Death & Decay on every pull? (Y - Hooray, it's a real tank! N - Go to Bad End)

Bad End: Accept the 15 minute debuff.

Death and decay is a 30 second cooldown and in a high DPS PUG often isn't ready before the next pull, so not using it each and every pull isn't a sign of tank cluelessness. Three spare points for the talent that reduces the cooldown would be nice, but I don't have the spare points in my tank build.  Spamming howling blast (with glyph of howling blast) is plenty of snap agro. 

Not using death and decay on the first pull is a bad sign though.

Since we're talking about tanking for some reason, someone tell me - is tab & sunder outdated now?  As a warrior tank I usually use my AOE threat abilities and assume the group targets my target when clearing trash, but I had a group tell me that I needed to l2tank. 


Incidentally, this was in Forge of Souls, we wiped, dropped group, then I joined a 2 guildie 2 random group and we one-shotted the place on heroic.  So I think I know the answer but I want to be sure.

Tabsunder is obsolete.  You could try to spread your devastates around a little bit by tabbing through targets, but Shockwave, Cleave, Shield Block + Damage Shield, and Thunderclap should be sufficient unless you have serious AoE in the group.  If you're really desperate for more AoE DPS there are a few decent glyphs, but otherwise you should explain that if they don't like dying they should stop repeating the thing that makes them die.

HOW TO WARRIOR:  Charge -> Thunderclap -> Shockwave -> Maybe a global for shield slam or something -> thunderclap.  If you have some rage from the last pull, cleave.  Your priority queue looks something like shockwave  (if a pull's mostly dead, skip it and save it for the next pull) -> conc blow -> shield slam -> revenge -> thunderclap -> devastate unless shield block is up, then shield slam -> revenge -> devastate.  You should switch off the first kill target before it dies; if you're nervous about losing aggro before it dies, hit it with conc blow or taunt before you switch.  If you use the glyph of devastate, drop revenge and thunderclap from your standard single-target rotation.  If you want to faceroll through trash, glyph of cleave.  15/3/53 is the cookie cutter tank spec unless you're doing 25s without a DPS warrior, then you should seriously consider 5/15 for improved shouts.  Your sustained AOE threat will never be as good as the other tanks, just accept that anyone who opens up with the AOE can pull threat off you if they want to.

---

My only complaint about the new LFG is that the BG mentality is starting to infect it.  I'm getting more and more groups where one of the DPS seems to be a bot.  I'm talking they do 1/5th the DPS I do as a healer.  I've been reporting them, but it depresses the fuck out of me that sometimes these people get emblems out of me before I can boot me.

Thanks.  That's pretty much exactly what I do, except I do have glyph of cleave so I weave that in every swing that I have rage, which is most of them.  But I invented it on my own, which is usually wrong, so I wanted a double check.

My prot spec is 7 / 8 / 56 (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Zul'jin&n=Fenjay), so I'll have to look into what I have different and if it's worth respeccing.  I did spec cruelty out of habit since it used to be a "required" talent in the past, but I've read the numbers at tankspot or EJ or somewhere about how it isn't, for prot nowadays.

You do have some (IMO) mis-spent points in there. Puncture is a pretty useless talent outside of prot pvp builds these days; rage income is no longer really a problem even in stuff you overgear. I would go minimum 12 into arms for impale and you probably want deep wounds. Cruelty is pretty skippable what with all the +15% to this and that talents in prot now. Armored to the Teeth is a better point for point threat investment. Vigilance is also a really important threat tool you're missing. Being able to slap that on the guy in your heroic who keeps pulling off of you is a big help.

My spec (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Doomhammer&n=Thorgrim&group=1).

Bots add the opportunity for comic relief.

Does he auto attack/cast?  Get the tank to taunt a single mob and sit there with zero threat / pop an invincibility shield until / when the bot jumps in.
Does he follow a player?  Strip naked and kamikaze.
Does your group have a rogue or hunter?  Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade.
Does he sit at the door?  Strip naked and kite a mob back there.

Resurrect him, rinse, repeat nine times.

Yeah, it's annoying. I also don't especially like using D&D on every goddamn pull because it eats all my runes and I dislike the way my opening rotation has to work with it. :P I'm frost, though, I can howling blast for an initial smack of threat. I D&D way more often if I am moonlighting as a blood tank.

That's the worst part.  I armory'd him afterwards.  All of his gear was already at 0%, so I couldn't have even griefed him.

Failing that, just kill him and leave him where he lies so that he cannot enter combat with the boss and so doesn't get rewards.  Last time I checked if you don't enter combat you get nothing.

Next time I inspect a bear tank and they're wearing PVP blues for HPoS, I'm just going to drop.  Everything has to go flawlessly or you wipe. Took nearly an hour just to realize that any minor mistake on Tyrannus was a wipe.  Everything up to the gauntlet was passable, but once it hit the hard stuff, the wiping commenced.  Had to get the paladin to offspec the tunnel (his tanking gear was laughable as well, and he forgot to put on RF  :awesome_for_real:)

Not that the group wasn't a mess outside of the tank. I was 1k DPS over the second DPS (and threat capped at around 3.2K) and the healer was admittedly undergeared also. 

Horrid group.  Hopefully I'll have better sense next time.

This (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Arygos&cn=Skwigellf&gn=Dirty+Road) tried to tank HoL.  It didn't go well.  After General Yelly McLightning ate his face the second time, I bailed.  There's no way my druid could keep up with the damage he was tossing out.

Waited a few minutes, queued again, got a paladin tanking HoS.  Smooth run.

I'm sort of a fan of the LFG system, and sort of not.   :oh_i_see:

So I've been in the Ulduman loop now with LFDs.  I had a bear tank go right instead of left when entering the instance.  He walked into the dead end and started screaming "WHERE DO I GO? WHERE WHERE?" 

I left that one real quick.

Also hate Uldaman for people that want to back track for bosses "for loot and xp!"  No fucker, do the instance in one quick path, rinse and repeat.  Stop running around for a group of 5 mobs.

Meh.

Thanks.  I originally specced for leveling, pre-dungeon finder, for which Vigilance was pretty pointless. It's a lot more relevant to my life now.

Puncture was just a mistake I suppose. I think with those point savings I might make it to impale/deep wounds which would be pretty nice.

Vigilance is the new blessing of dunce for pugs.

Where I know as rogue dps that I'm in for a rough ride in the ICC 5-mans is when after the first two pulls or so I find I've done upwards of 60% of the total damage. If the tank and healer are good, that's doable, just take a while and I'm essentially going to be an off-tank of sorts using evasion on every big trash pull. If they're not good, and I'm that much over the other two dps, wipes ahoy--esp. after Ick and Krick in HPoS.

I was a bad group yesterday :P I accidentally signed up through the LFD tool as a healer for a heroic PoS instead of normal.  I was in Disc spec instead of my preferred Holy and it was my first time through...hilarity ensued.

I have no idea how we got through but we did and I was the only one to die during the run.

So there you go.  Somewhere on the intrawebs some forum community is linking my armory and claiming credit for teh clear.

Did you die to Ick? I died to him the first two times I did him, to the amusement of my guildies. I really should have learned faster  :grin:

Friend wanted to to a quick heroic daily, I figured why not, but I only had about 20 minutes.  She's tank, I'm healer, we pop into LFG, and about .5s later are zoomed to HHoL.  No problem, I figure.

The dps looked something like this:

Tank:  2500 dps
Rogue:  1600 dps
Hunter:  600 dps
DK:  500 dps.

I left after the second pull, the tank was about 5s behind me in leaving.  I'll put up with a lot, but that's a bridge too far.  Or maybe 10 bridges too far.

Honestly, I'm kind of liking the bad/lazy DPS because it makes my own 2-2.5K in mediocre gear look p.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm not even sure how a DK can be at 500 dps.  That insanely low.

Yea that really is bad. Even using a cast-random macro in blues would yield 1500 or so.

Low dps DK? Blood + shitty gear + auto-pilot = sub 1k dps.

Not just them either. I've seen sub-1k dps on most dps classes one time or another. It's just laziness and you should kick them. 

Autoattack, a bad spec and terrible gear. I'm guessing fast two-hander and spellpower plate.

We usually make fun of people with this type of setup.  Loads of +SP and spirit?  Just makes me laugh.

Cast-random would explain it, actually.  They may not have realized blizzard deliberately broke castrandom macros a few patches back.

I'm sorry, what does this mean ?

There was some way for DKs to catch procs by spamming a castrandom macro which they broke in 3.2 or something.

Castrandom conveniently skipped abilities on cooldowns... so you could pile a bunch of GCD abilities into one macro and castrandom would always cast something that was available. 

Not necessarily optimal, but heck... whenever you pushed the button something was guaranteed to happen.

A cast random macro is basically a list of every damaging DK skill in the game, with a command to cast any of them randomly. It was tested by some of the high end raiders and they found that using it instead of an intelligent rotation lost only 200 dps. However, with 3.2 they changed it so that if a skill called by a cast random macro failed to fire (say, because the appropriate Rune wasn't active, you didn't have enough RP, or the skill was on CD), the macro would attempt it again next time it was called (instead of switching to a new skill).

This is the one.

I collected some tears when it was first broken.

"For starters melee attacks. Wing clip, Raptor Strike, Counter-Attack (if talented) and Mongoose Bite can be put into 1 macro. Thats 3-4 melee abilitys in 1 button. I already have enough ranged attacks keybound to also need to have to worry about. And if your going to be ignorant and claim hunters don't melee then you hav'nt set foot in arena.

Thanks for killing my pvp experience. I went from relying on 20 keybinds to having to use 36+. I just cannot pvp anymore because of it. I only have 5 fingers! Its as simple as that. Hunters need castrandom to minimise required keybinds to pvp effectively. Since the change i have been forced to stop pvping with my hunter. 36+ keybinds is just to damn much."

"So you want mages to not be able to use a random polymorph? Or for players to only be able to (easily) pick one of two random mounts? Both those after he said they wanted players to have that option?"

"What if you don't want to friggin' keybind?! What if you want to use ASDW+QE to move and strafe? I know a lot of people think that's bad, but I've always seen it as more of a playstyle thing. That's a pretty grotesque monstrosity of a game if you have to bind every bloody ability to individual keys just to not suck. Refer to my "perversion of the concept of fun" comment above."

"Well now with the change to /castrandom I feel like a noob tank again lol"

There is a pretty infamous video of a Pre-Nerf DK doing 2v2 arena using nothing but a cast random macro and still slaughtering just about everyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIXYMY4dOmI

This one here just doesn't hold up, as castrandoms still WORK for those things; its just that if the ability selected fails for any reason, next activation of the macro tries it again rather than rolling a new one. I have two very lengthy castrandom macros for mounts (one for ground, one for flying) that both work just fine.

I just use Squire because it's easier than editing a macro every time you get a new mount.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/lowdps.JPG)

And that was after I told them to "please try harder" (before it was like 950 and 800). The DK's gear is a riot. At least the hunter managed to hit 1200 dps by the end of the instance.

I had a DK do 558 in Halls of Stone today. Clearly had just dinged and didn't really know how to play the class - I didn't say anything at all to her as I figured the 5000 gearscore warlock would cover her and then some. The lock ended up doing like 2400 though.  :ye_gods:

Eventually the DK self-kicked when we failed at Brann twice due to wave buildup from lack of damage.

I think my gear has gotten to the point where I'm being put into groups with some players below my level.  I had two random normals last night. Oculus (gah) and Halls of Reflection. 

The Oculus run failed at Urom after carrying the group "leader", a hunter who put out significantly less dps than me (the tank) and we had to keep telling to stop flying in circles on his drake and come to the fight.

The HoR one was not too bad with the exception of one DK who (from memory) did 3 digits of dps. We got the first two bosses down, but couldn't dps fast enough to not get lolowned, several times, by the Lich King's "enrage" (i.e. instagib if you don't keep up) when doing the escape.

I have a feeling if you're running normals on random you'll get a very odd mix. Maybe time to move up to heroics.

Yeah, I'm just doing it for the badges and possibly normal ToC and the ICC 5-mans.  Ideally the normal daily should be a faceroll for me, coughing up 2 badges for a minimum of work, but clearly not always.

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say its actually going to be more of a faceroll to do the heroics, minus a couple of the new ones. All the people with super duper gear are running those, where most people likely to be in random normals are going to be the really undergeared folks and sub-80s. Plus you'll get more badges that way.

Seriously.  I skipped almost every single regular instance when leveling my army and went straight into heroics for badges on all of my characters.  Regular instances just didn't really have much for me, and now all you do is get 2 badges and random strangers in a mix of gear.  Outside of H-HoR, all the rest of the heroics are pretty easy with a decent group provided you aren't trying to tank or heal them in greens...

On a bad group note... what is with all of these tanks chain pulling every single mob in the room?  Granted, we're geared for it these days, but if you don't tell people that you are going to grab 12 mobs, the healer may have issues healing everyone AND the DPS may or may not be prepared for it and end up pulling aggro off of mobs.  It's not like getting the instance done in 20m vs. the 17m of chain pulling is going to make that much of a difference...

Man what? I'm pretty sure I've done better than that when cooking dinner during trash. I have no idea what my gearscore is, but ye gods is right.

Chain pulling only annoys me when I have AE rolling and the tank tosses something at another pack. Yeah, thanks, that aggro totally wasn't my fault when you pulled three more things you haven't built threat on yet into the designated falling fire area ><

For a tank, groups pop instantly. For a DPSer, who has to wait 10ish minutes for a group, saving 3 minutes off a run may not let you squeeze one more in in your playtime for that session, for a tank it can add up really fast.

As the healer who has had trouble keeping the tank alive due to how fast they run: "hey, someone died and I have to res them" or "hey, I have to stand still to cast you know!" to which I've received replies of "so?  Keep up."  My druid healer doesn't have this issue too much since I can just toss rolling 3-4 HoTs on the tank and focus on the DPS, but my priest and shaman tend to have to stand around and cast their heals, leading to tanks running out of range or out of LoS.  And my healers get groups in 30s or less too, so I know it can really add up, but if we spend 10m on multiple times wiping and recovering from dead players, etc, that's 10m that could have been avoided had we been running slightly slower.

And another "lol bad" group.  I was healing AN just now on my priest and the average DPS was 1200.  A warlock did 1900, the warrior tank did 1500, the rogue did 1200, and a DK did 800.  I started ridiculing them after one was bragging about how well he was doing.  We barely beat the final boss since the rogue stood right in the range of pound on the first pull, instantly dying with a "lol sorry" after I told him if he did it he was going to die.  Then I barely had enough mana to manage the rest of the fight, and I've been able to heal ToC-10 and ICC-10 without issue, so I knew it was a bad group.  No add management, they just let the adds beat on the healer and didn't bother to pull them off of me either.

I did a bunch of PUGs on my hunter today, tanks can be total douchebags, it turns out! I am not really surprised since everyone needs the tank way more than the tank needs them. I do enjoy that my hunter is the go-to girl for blame when the tank is failing. I got yelled at for not assisting when I was AEing a pack (I totally waited for thunderclap/shockwave and everything!) and then again for my pet having growl on when it was not, in fact, on.  :grin:

I had to yell at a tank to give me vigilance today in HToC (apparently after 2 wipes you listen to others).  I hope the random dungeon finder dumped him there randomly, because he was only sporting 23k health unbuffed.  Didn't help he was having "internet" problems, which apparently prevent you from targeting the correct mob or knowing when the mob is live.  Once I got him to vigilance me, he managed to actually keep threat on Black Knight without me having to take huge dps breaks or soulshatter (pray it wasn't on cooldown).  Barely managed to get BK down with only 2 survivors (tank died at like 50%).

It's just fortunate that we made it through.  If the other 2 DPS weren't ret pallies and the shaman wasn't completely over geared, I think we would have been hosed.

Extreme combat daggers! (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Hyjal&n=Crustycrab) This winner did 689 dps in UP.  His attacks consisted of killing spree, fan of knives (his main attack) and shiv.

This "DPS'd" in my Occulus group tonight. (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=The+Underbog&n=Talisa)

I'd missed the spirit and the intellect gems.  Not 1, but two of each.

What.  The.  Fuck?!? :ye_gods:

EDIT: My gift, to you. (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Thunderhorn&n=Wolfgar)

Yes, he specced improved thunderclap for a reason.  Apparently he likes to use it.

My memory was right - it was around 800 dps.  My level 71 DK friend is also doing about 800 dps now.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Durotan&cn=Dezii

Also, I learned that some consider our method of doing the escape from Arthas an exploit.  Not that it helped us.

Yah, it was a parade of retards night.  I was going to do one more dungeon just now before bed, but upon finding a dual wield unholy DK pulling sub 1k and spamming plague strike, I just couldn't take it anymore.  I'm just really getting sick of carrying the entire dps load. And every other healer tonight seemed to be half awake.  How exactly do you fail to keep a paladin with 50k health alive in AN?

There is more then one way to do the Escape from Arthas Event?

I'm curious to know what it is myself.  Is Arthas tauntable or something?

Might be a different "exploit," but one thing which was shown to me last night is that right near the beginning of the chase, there's a little cul-de-sac (got a torch thingy on it) which you can stand on where Arthas won't kill you, he'll just walk past.  Once you get behind him, you can kill the monsters as soon as they spawn.  I assume you still have to kill everything before Sylvanas dies, but since the monsters have shorter to run to reach you, it's quicker to kill them.

Ahh, yeah, i can see how getting behind Arthas could change the dynamics of the fight, especially since it is designed so that the event progresses based on based on how quickly you can kill each wave.  Being able to sit right on top of the mobs as they spawn would save a lot of time.   Course, you would be royally screwed if anything ever slipped past you.

Not really, they charge towards the players automatically.

And if you sit tight, it takes longer and longer to reach you, so you have time to finish off waves.  It's going to be patched pretty quickly.

Yes, that's the one I was speaking of. I thought it was the only way to do it.

However, if you don't have the dps to finish the waves in 10 minutes, you get insta-gibbed anyway.

You're a priest and he has a shitload of poison on him and is yelling at YOU to cleanse him.

Happened to me last week.

Or he runs away from you around several corners after a fear.  I lost one a couple of weeks ago to a giant fear.  He went toward the platforms with the ghosts and I ran up the stairs back to the first boss.  Instead of trying to meet me halfway, he just stood there.

Resto druid here.  It was pretty amazing.  The druid himself managed to die on 2 out of the 3 fights.  We did the last two phases of Anub with just me, a mage, and the paladin (retard DK died to pound in the first 5 seconds).

I'm considering just making a macro for when I wind up in AQ or OK or anyplace else with a ton of poisoning mobs.

  "Hi, I'm a priest, not a druid shaman or paladin. What this means is that I CAN NOT cleanse poison off of you, period.  If you get poison on you, and you don't want to cleanse it yourself, then WAIT until it's expired to continue pulling.  If you continue to pull you will die, I'll AFK out because of your stupidity and we'll all be pissed.  Thx."

Oh? I was always under the impression that other then the leapers (who seem to just jump at the nearest target) all the mobs started with initial aggro on Sylvanas / Jaina.

What's kind of awesome about that guy is at some point he put some effort into honor grinding to get that Knight title.

It's the sort of thing a ret DPS could easily handle on the side, but god forbid one of them sacrifice any of their leet deeps in order to have any utility.

I've spent several ANs and HoLs spam curing poison on my moonkin, the priest healers never even say thank you!

Now that it doesn't drop form anymore, they shouldn't have too.


Before when every cure was a fucking shift too, then you best recognize!  :why_so_serious:

The one thing that I hate is a tank who can't hold aggro at all. If I'm waiting a few seconds before opening up, and my opening conflag+CB still pulls aggro off you, it's not your gear. You just suck. >.<

WTB dps that pays attention to what I've hit the mob with, and which one, rather than just waiting a few seconds and assuming it should all be taken care of.

Since WoW by default doesn't have Target of Target visible, it is the tank's duty to mark the mob they're fighting imo. I have Raid Target: Skull bound to a hotkey and just tap it on whatever I'm attacking so the DPS knows what to hit.

Hahahahaha! DPS that pays attention to my marks! HEE HEE HEE. <wipes away a tear> On the upside, all my DPS has sucked at actually doing damage, so I get to be totally lazy. I almost never lose aggro in PUGs.

Or you could target the tank and press F. You're waiting a few seconds anyway. I mark skulls (and have a full set of our raid marks bound) when its REALLY IMPORTANT to, but if DPS can be lazy about pushing one button, I can be too.  :oh_i_see:

I've saved the day dropping Lay on Hands on a tank more than once and never gotten a peep. Fuckin' ingrates.

I don't know what this tank in particular was doing, it was a bear druid who apparently didn't have mangle or swipe or anything on their bar. I usually put the tank as focus and just hit whatever they've got targeted.

They really just need to suck up their own failiure and remove Oculus from the random rotation.

Maybe they were still in healing spec.

Like the duid I had yesterday who couldn't hold aggro and after the first hall was done said "oh, hey. I was in the wrong spec."

 :awesome_for_real:

Um, is that an assist key? I rebound F to 'Follow Target' when I first installed and haven't really looked in the keybindings window.

Fakeedit: yea, I guess it is. I don't have assist bound at all. Of course, when I dps, I do it as a rogue and I just TotT every pull, so aggro isn't an issue.

I'd love for tanks to mark. I don't see it much anymore.  Assisting can be problematic if the tank doesn't decide on a target. I really haven't known what debuffs to look for since waiting for 3 sunders.

Skull and X is all I need. Skull really.

If its a warrior just wait for the 2 explosions to go off (thunderclap, shockwave.) Assuming he didn't miss any mobs you will typically have a hard time pulling off after that. Of course if he doesn't use those... could be a long night.

I wait for shockwave specifically as a DPS. I haven't taken agro accidentally in forever.



Now purposefully ... :awesome_for_real:

Or pallies that refuse to use consecrate... at all.

My favorite so far was a mage who deliberately ignored my marks for an entire instance.  He was actively avoiding DPSing the skull in favor of another target on every single pull.

I just let people like that die.

As dps I wait for the relevant AOE before dpsing (D&D, Thunderclap, Consecrate, <insert whatever bears do here>); however, this doesn't work for an arms warrior. Clicking bladestorm on any trash pull was generally a death sentence, which is the primary reason my warrior is now just an alchy bot.

Bears are a little hard to tell, since their main thing is swipe, which doesn't leave any telltale signs of having been done, and doesn't have any easy to see animation. I try to remember to demo roar after swiping twice as some vaguel clue I've done something, personally.

Wow, nightmare run in H HoS. Had a hunter parsing ~900, dc's twice before we even make it to the first boss, pulls aggro on trash even with her mediocre dps, runs into adds and gets herself killed, etc. The only thing she was missing from the stereotypical huntard was a named like Legolasxx.

When the tank and I realize she's terrible and start talking shit, the healer points out that he and the other dps are guilded with the huntard. So not only can we not votekick the bad, we can't even talk shit or risk being votekicked. The tank's probably safe, by virtue of being the rare class, but as a solo dps? Of course I shut right up. Sigh.

Edit: FUCK it gets worse; the pally tank is using kings on himself instead of sanc.  :uhrr: I was wondering why he was going oom and not consecrating during Brann's event.

So, I go and get my (combat) rogue another epic dagger so I can roll Mutilate.  In the process I find four to five groups where I'm doing 35-40% of the damage.  Fuck me.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're part of the problem. :grin:

(And 'F' is assist because 'F' was assist in EQ. A lot of the default keybinding are identical to EQ).

re: Raid Marks.

Also, wasn't there a change to the icon marking that anyone in the group (? raid?) can do it now? You don't have to be leader or assistant to do it?

Might be amusing to show the tank/healer/whatever that there are still a couple things to learn about creakey ol' WoW!

How? As DPS I use a threat transfer to not pull hate, and as a tank I mark mobs. What, exactly, am I doing wrong?

On keybindings, I've noticed that. I never got why auto-run is Num Lock, instead of something sane like R by default, but I suppose it coming from EQ makes sense. I generally use the same keybinding setup in every MMO, and just spend the first 5 minutes or so logged in fixing it.

Confirmed. As a tank I can mark whether I'm the group leader or not, and others have helpfully chipped in when I was the leader but wasn't 100% familiar with kill order.

Yeah, I've got a key bound to mark skull now and, as healer, I regularly mark targets up so that the DPS can ignore them  :why_so_serious:

Assist doesn't always work, at least with warrior tanks.  I'm often targetting something other than the main target.  Less than pre-Wrath, but still a good bit.   

The good warrior tanks have been trained by the last four years of WoW to be tabbing through their targets constantly.  Don't expect them to stop any time soon.

Ditto with druids; yeah, swipe holds pretty good aggro by itself (at least against heal aggro and ranged AOErs) and glyphed maul hits two targets, but against 3+ targets a bear will be tabbing through things to ensure that all mobs get some maul lovin'. Even against two targets there's some tabbing to keep lacerate up on both (see http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=51269 )

I've found that I got back in the habit of doing so, if for no other reason than to check Omen to see if someone's pulled aggro without me noticing.  If it's the same person over and over - I know who my vigilance target should be.

Ah, but good warrior tanks are rare.
There are, however, a lot of primadonnas who coasted back when warriors were the only realistic tanks and now think "thunderclap + shockwave = time to turn on autoattack and tab back to the porn". For those type of warriors, you do need to use assist.  :grin:

"Why not just boot them?" Enjoy the ten minute wait for a new tank.

Just had a tank that would target the corpse of the mob we just killed while body pulling the next group.  It'd take him 3-4 seconds to even put down his D&D.  I'm hoping he was just lagged, because it was some of the worst situational awareness I've ever seen. And yah, it was a dual wield DK sporting two mugs. 

Whomever it was that mentioned DPSing as a prot pally.  I blame you.  Its all your fault.  I had never seen that before the holiday.  I have now seen three of these morons.

I was in a group yesterday with a DK tank specced Unholy yet he was dual wielding.  He used Army of the Dead every single time it was up, which made it really difficult for me since the taunting moved the mobs every which way and meant I had to Mangle spam instead of Shred.  He also loved using Corpse Explosion which I'd never seen any DK spec before, let alone a tank. 

The other DK was a brand new 80 and likely a fairly young kid.  He refused to get out of Frost Presence and had less than 750 dps.  This was surprising considering all the spellpower gear he had on.  :roll:  His brother, the Mage, told us not to worry about it.  The Mage ended up doing about 900 dps.

Luckily, this took place in Culling of Strath and we still finished it with just one death (the tank; I just shifted to bear and held aggro better than he did the entire rest of the run  :grin:).  It was also a credit to the healer for being patient and sticking it out and also being good enough to heal that mess.

Then she looked at my DK spec and cried for humanity.  True story.

Jeez, this got long.  Thanks in advance for reading it all.

I'm a lurker who's been reading this forum/thread for awhile.  Mainly to prepare myself, as I actually got my main (prot warrior) to 80 and didn't burn out this time.  Being unguilded as I mainly solo, I started running dailies for rep rewards, playing the AH, and raising my BS to gear myself up, to see what this whole "endgame" thing was about that I'd never participated in before.  Oh sure, I PUGged a bit through BC days in regulars and a couple heroics, but raiding and whatnot was never my major thing.

Then 3.3 came and they made the change to dungeon finder.  Well, looks like running the regulars got a bit easier.  I do some tankspot reading, and grab Omen.  I progress through the regs one at a time, making sure to make notes of where the bosses are, what crazy things they do, how to keep agro off of the rest of the party, how to get it back when I do lose it, and trying to ignore the mouthy kids who most always had a complaint about >something< that I did (only once that something being a wipe).

So after a month of this, I hit the 540 def cap last night, 22K hp unbuffed as well.  Check a couple sites - yep, just barely cleared for heroics.  I research online as to where to start, and a few sites agreed : Violet Hold.  Skim some stuff on it, just looks like stronger mobs and an extra boss.  Well, about the same as Heroic Ramps back in the day.  I take a deep breath of courage, and queue for it.  Whoa!  They weren't kidding about tanks on heroics - it was about 3 seconds and a group was up.  I check ready and we all pop in.

First thing out of my mouth in the instance : "Hi guys, I've run this on normal a few times, but not on heroic - yell if you see me doing something stupid.  :)"  I ID the healer, drop vigilance on them (a mistake in retrospect), and the others start buffing.  First DPS : "Uh, if you're new to heroics, you won't be able to hold agro."  I raise an eyebrow, say "we'll see what happens," and make a note to watch this DPS.  The guards charge out of the instance and the first portal pops.

One of the DPS is already halfway to the portal.  I beat feet, heroic throw at the nearest mob, wait for the crowd to approach, and before I can get shockwave off, the DPS has already pulled one of the mobs onto him.  Taunt it back to me, swing around, cleave the masses, shockwave, enrage, shield slam on the taunted mob.  Omen shows me just slightly ahead.

And the DPS pulls it off of me again as taunt fades.  The DPS starts in, "What the !@#$, can't you hold agro?  Are you even in tank spec?"  The mobs get mowed down somehow, and I start to type out "can we all focus on one target and let me pull?"  Too late, the next portal is up and the rogue has gotten something stuck to him already.  After that, it's a repeat of the first pull.  DPS starts mouthing off again.

I scan party mana and health bars quickly, and then the heroic mode boss that I've never seen before pops, and it's Xevozz.  "Oh !@#$," says someone who'd been keeping quiet until now, "I hate this guy."  He activates 2" from my nose, and I actually get full agro on him for a change and start setting up for a long fight.  "Move" appears in my window from the same player, so I start slowly dragging him away from the group.  "Kite him" appears next, so I drag faster.  "No, the other way" as the boss enrages and I faceplant.  The party wipes.

DPS pipes up again : "maybe you should stay away from heroics until you hit def cap" along with other insults.  I reply, "I am at def cap.  Thanks for your concern," and bail from the group, eating the 20g and 10 minutes.

I figure I'll stay out of heroics unless I join a guild going forward.  Possibly regulars too.  I deal with children all day at work, I have no desire to do so when I get home.

In all fairness that is probably the worst boss you can get for that instance.  And yes, you do have to kite him around.  But if you are new, the DPS should have known better and held back appropriately (I always do).  Everyone zerging everything down is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to new tanks since it's making things harder for them than it has to be.

You told them you were new and yet they went after mobs before you had touched them.  My gear sucks, a little less than a month ago but still..., and I still give the tank a few seconds before I start throwing things at the mobs.  Your DPS were idiots.

Hey, dude, you met some assholes online.  I'm a fucking awesome tank and it doesn't sound to ME that you did much wrong.

Fuck 'em.

The good thing about being a tank is you queue up and in ANOTHER 3 seconds you get another group.  Try again.

Don't let assholes wear you down.  There's too many of them in the world for that.

Yeah, that was on the DPS.  When I see the tank is a Warrior I always at least wait to see the shockwave animation before moving in to DPS.

I'd also say that Utgarde Keep or Nexus might be a bit easier to start out tanking.  VH can potentially be the easiest but it all depends on which random bosses you get, and some of the bosses can be downright mean (you got the worst of them with Xevozz).  Besides that, you can't set your own pace in VH which as you unfortunately found out can be annoying.

Thanks to everyone for the support.   :awesome_for_real:

In hindsight, I probably should have expected this sort of thing given all the tales I read here, but it was still frustrating to experience, and quite anticlimactic.  I actually almost went Nexus first due to familiarity, but the straightforwardness of reg VH lulled me late at night.

I know that I'm not a bad tank - just need a bit more experience with the boss fights.  But at the same time, I never took this much abuse in general as a healer before, and I thought that was the most thankless job in any MMOG.  Tanking surprised me with the complexity when I respecced as prot back in TBC - it's generally not as "misclick and wipe" as healing can be, but there's still a large amount of different things to keep your eye on.  Enjoying playing a Mastermind in CoV is probably why I've stuck with the prot warrior so much - there's a kind of zen in the flurry of activity.

A guild of other mature, intelligent players still seems like the best/least painful way to experience heroics/raids to me at this point.  I find that the older I get, the lower my tolerance is for douchebaggery. (waves his cane menacingly, mentions something about his lawn)

You might also try DPSing.  I tried doing three heroics as a tank; finished one and dropped two because of people bitching about my gear before we began.  Figured I'd give up and try again once I'd farmed enough badges in regular for some Conquest gear.  Respecced to an AoE DPS spec and noticed that I was pulling in about 2.5k, figured I'd give heroics a shot as a DPS, and am now doing fairly well in them, rolling on DPS gear and spending badges on tanking gear for later.  Plus, you get to become experienced in heroics without being in a "screw up and we all die horribly" position.

Tanking requires a certain mentality. You have to understand that when you are in a PuG 70% of the time your DPS are going to try to actively fuck you, and then complain that you aren't taking it in the right way. Most of the time, the correct response is that they are reading the wrong meter, and just leave them to stew for another 20m in the queue while you get a new group in less than 5s.

Realize that you are the hot commodity, and anything they do to piss you off is a waste of their time. That doesn't give you carte blanche to be a raging control-freak dick, or to act like you don't have to learn to play your class. However, you can requeue 3 times in less than 20m to find dps who function. They can't do the same.

I am by no means even an ok tank, since my entire experience revolves rolling a dk and tanking Ramps at 60 - but see that part, right there? Yea, let that dps die and then to resume tanking normally. After a few times they will usually either catch on, or ragequit.

* Edit, ten levels lower, lol.