f13.net

Normally I off tank but I tried to step in a few times to tank Onyxia (bad night - MT's away).  I had trouble stance dancing to avoid Onyxia fear.

The horde is able to tank this thing (I am a dwarven warrior) without the fear ward that dwarven priests have - so without relying on fear ward - how do you avoid Onyxia's fear effects if she fears before the cooldown / timer of my beserker rage ability is ready?

In other words - my beserker rage timer is not refreshed sometimes by the time she fears.  How do tanks handle this?

In my experience, on nights when we didn't have a dwarf priest, the warrior just runs around and pulls her back into position ASAP.  Her fear is pretty short and she's not like Vael where if she points an eyebrow anywhere but at the MT everyone dies.

Yeah, you can lose aggro on her for a bit and it isn't a big deal, just have a designated backup tank ready to jump in and pull aggro.  Back when I was a l33t WoWer, our rogues tanked Onyxia.

There's a way to set up a stance dance macro, but i've just made sure that i'm ready to hit the dance when the shaking starts. There's time, but it's not a bunch so you have to make sure that you have your bars set up to hit it as fast as possible. I've done a whole fight without dwarf priests, but it's not something I relish. Basically, there's no problem with getting feared as long as she's not WAY out of position.

Something is a bit odd here - when I used to be horde - your maint tank never seemed to get feared.  Maybe I mis-recollect.

The stance dancing is awkward - Hit Beserker, Hit rage, Go back to Defensive stance...I will look into a macro thanks.

You can try something like this in macro:

/script texture,name,isActive,isCastable=GetShapeshiftFormInfo(3);if isActive then CastSpellByName("Berserker Rage()");else CastShapeshiftForm(3);end;

If you are not in Berserker Stance, it will switch you to Berserker Stance. If you are already in Berserker Stance, it'll trigger Berserker Rage. So if you are currently in Defensive Stance and want to use Berserker Rage, hit the macro once, wait for the global cooldown, then hit it again.

If you want to have another macro to switch back to Defensive Stance so you can have it right next to the previous macro, use:

/script CastShapeshiftForm(2);

You might not need that ending semicolon since there's only a single action taking place.

Edit: Info pulled from http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-warrior&T=1072564&P=1 (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-warrior&T=1072564&P=1)

Thanks for those links - fiddling with this now.

Right now I am putting macros on my hotbar.  Is there a way to assign a macro to a key that does not occupy a location on my hotbar?

Thanks again.

You could put the macro on a bar, bind a key to that button,a nd then hide the bar. Otherwise no, there's no way to bind a macro to a key without a corresponding button (without writing an actual addon LUA script).

I put them on the right buttons of my lower left "extra" bar (the one above the one assigned to numbers).  A cool thing about that is that the newest client code marks the button with the key it's bound to.

It's more up to the raid being well trained on the ony fight. If people do what they're supposed to Ony shouldn't pull at all during the fear. I'm the MT for my guild and we have never had a dwarf priest, much to our dismay, but we down onyxia regularly. As long as you avoid every fear you possibly can, you'll still stay well ahead of the rest of the raid, who should be getting feared every time, aggro-wise. If you do get feared and she pulls off you, she'll come back to you with a sunder or two.

Flexbar is really useful for doing this btw.

I'm the MT of my guild, and tank Ony all the time.

They key? Stancedance and a good OT.

I've got my stances mapped to Shift+1-2-3, put Berserker rage in your upper bar, so you can see if it's on CD or not. Get spellalert, her fearing spell is called Bellowing Roar. Simply; shift+3 and click berserkerage. Next to it, make a macro to whisper your OT's, who will be waiting in Berserkstance, "CAN'T BREAK FEAR!!!". They'll break it, and pull her. They run north with her, and you take over once you break out of fear. Very similar to Magmadar, except you just have to react faster.

Pros.: if you don't make the stancedance, you can just spam your macro, and an OT will hopefully pull, instead of a priest who resisted, since he's already in Zerkerstance, ready to click Berserker Rage.

Thanks.  I should make hot keys for my stances - which I currently just click with my mouse - and that can be dicey with lag sometimes.

While we are waving our binds around, I like binding stances to F2, F3, F4.  As a warrior you essentially never need to target your group members, and it's a lot easier for me than shift-stuff.

It's just that I play on a powerbook (yes yes, horrible fps/graphics/etc), and I can't really live with pressing the "fn" button to access the hardware features... Maybe I should.