Category: tanks

Yet another fail "tank".

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, general, lfg, paladins, ramblings, tanks

My brother and I queued for the heroic random together, today. I was on my paladin. He was on his hunter. I was healing. He was DPSing.

We get a group, zone into Halls of Stone and I see the tank is a paladin who immediately starts buffing kings. Okay, I buff wisdom and might, even though I have crap might. The tank gives us Sanctuary. I give us kings. It’s all good.

’till the second pull.

The tank takes a crapton of damage.

Like, a CRAPTON.

I’m actually having to use Holy Light.

In general, I’m okay with this. He “only” has 36k health, buffed. That’s fine. He’s using the badge shield. That’s fine. I figure that he’s undergeared and I didn’t feel like taking the deserter debuff. He was prot, at least, using Sanctuary, had Righteous Fury up. It appeared like he was putting in the effort.

My brother says to me, over vent, after a couple more pulls “MAN, this tank sucks! How can he suck so bad?”

“Well, he’s got to be a new tank. Look at his health.”

“He’s got a 5400 gear score.”

“What? Not possible.” I don’t have the GS mod enabled on my paladin (too much lag with it on) so I figured my brother was looking at the DK.

“I’m telling you, 5400 GS.”

“On the TANK? The paladin? The paladin who’s not me?”

“Yes. The tank. The paladin.”

“Not poss…i…ble. Hang on.”

I inspect him.

Sure enough, he’s got good gear. Great gear. But it’s ret gear and arena gear. He has precisely two pieces of gear on him with defense/parry/dodge/block and those are his weapons; the tanking axe out of H HoR and the badge tanking shield.

“Why are you wearing ret gear and arena gear?” I ask in party, as I spam the paladin with Holy Light against one of the big guys.

“Who me?” asks the DK.

“No. The tank.”

“Oh,” says the DK.

“its all i have rite now” says the paladin.

“Then you shouldn’t queue up as a tank,” I reply. Then my brother and I left the group in the middle of the pull.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done it, but I have HAD it with idiots who don’t even make the slightest effort to be a decent tank. Had it! I am DONE with it. This guy, upon examining his armory, was specced thusly: 0/71/0. I wasn’t even aware that there WERE that many points you could spend in the prot paladin tree. His glyphs were crap. His spec is obviously crap (although he got all the good prot talents, he got nothing from ret to help with avoidance, like Parry, nor did he get Seal of Command to help with threat) and his gear was almost entirely DPS gear.

I shouldn’t have left. He was immune to critical strikes by virtue of resilience alone. And I had figured that would probably be the case. And I still left.

Why did I leave? I could have kept him up. Could have been a quick run.

I left because I don’t want to encourage people who don’t put any effort into their roles. I am exceedingly careful to NOT be a drag on any group I’m in, regardless of the role. Kurn was hit-capped before setting foot into a raid. Madrana upgraded her gear ASAP and was still holding on to some Tier 6/BT/Hyjal stuff until better stuff dropped. Lotana’s hit-capped. Katarah can heal just fine with her 4.8k GS and can even pull average DPS when she needs to as enhancement. Cayllan tanks and heals just fine, though it took a little practice and some extra gear at first (when I could NOT keep aggro from a geared, whirlwinding warrior or divine storming ret pally).

To top all that off, I use consumables to bump up my contribution to the group. Tanking on either Madrana or Cayllan? Yeah, I’ll be using Mighty Fortitude and Guru’s Elixirs, plus appropriate buff food (40 agi for the bear, 40 hit for the paladin whose hit rating is somewhat lacking). DPSing on Kurn? Agi/Guru and Mighty Thoughts Elixirs, plus agi food. DPSing on Lotana? Spellpower and Mighty Thoughts Elixirs, plus spellpower food. Healing on Cayllan? Spirit and spellpower elixirs, plus spellpower food. Healing on Madrana? At least a Guru’s Elixir or my Flask of the North, even for random dungeons.

Basically, I work at making sure I’m doing my best, regardless of the group into which I’m placed.

Other people just don’t do that.

And yet, I’m forced to play with them if I want to jump through the hoops Blizzard has so carefully designed for us. I run my daily on Madrana every day. I’ve missed THREE days, total, since the Dungeon Finder came out and we started getting Emblems of Frost for doing the first random dungeon of the day. That is a LOT of pugging.

I don’t expect people to do as much work on their toons as I do. I don’t expect others to be as considerate of the group as I usually tend to be. But I do expect others to make a half-decent effort. 0/71/0 is not a good tanking spec. Two pieces of gear with defense on it is not good tanking gear. That isn’t even putting in the effort to look up a halfway decent spec, you know?

What I expect of people is this:

– appropriate gear for the instance level. That means a tank who is crit immune via 535+ defense or Survival of the Fittest, NOT via 100% resilience.

– appropriate spec(s) for the role(s) they have selected. That means one that, even if slightly unorthodox, helps you do your job to the best of your ability. And it means that you tank in your tank spec, heal in your heal spec and DPS in your DPS spec. Tanking in a DPS spec, healing in a DPS spec and DPSing in a tank or healing spec will make me want to throttle you.

Even on my priest, who is now 50, I have not signed up as “damage” for any dungeon thus far because I am not shadow! I do not have a dual spec on that toon and am 41 points into disc. Thus, I do not queue as shadow!

Similarly, neither of my druid’s specs are damage specs, thus I never queue up as DPS.

Hell, same for Madrana, she NEVER queues as DPS because she doesn’t have the appropriate spec OR gear.

Is it really too difficult to ask people to put in the base amount of effort? Am I really expecting too much from people who play this game? I’m not asking for tanks with 60k health to heal through my random dungeons every day. I’m asking for a tank who knows the basics of tanking.

It makes me want to get on the druid and tank the living crap out of a bunch of heroics tonight just so that people don’t lose hope in the myth of “good tanks”.

Kurn's Q&A #12

Kurn / / dungeons, healing, paladins, q&a, ramblings, shamans, tanks

I really relish my Tuesdays off. I get to watch Lost and the newly-returned V and get to do WoW stuff that *I* want to do. Which includes writing on the ol’ blog. :)

1) best way to heal heroic falric with a shammy

Well, I don’t know if it’s the best way, but this is how I do it.

The real problem with Falric is the Defiling Horror for two reasons. The first is because it’s a horror effect, so Tremor Totem does nothing. The second is because everyone takes 16k damage. So what I do is endeavour to keep everyone topped up as close to max as possible before he casts the horror.

To recover from it, I cast Riptide on the tank and, using my hasted Healing Waves from Tidal Waves, I heal myself and a caster. Then I’ll Chain Heal off the Riptided tank, which will hopefully hit the tank and 2 melee. Then I’ll RT/HW anyone else who still needs health. Total time, with my crappy haste (400 haste + Wrath of Air) is about 8-9 seconds. I usually have enough time to get everyone to full, or close to it.

Apart from that, try to stay close together and bunched up for Chain Heal to get the maximum use possible from it.

2) choker of filthy diamonds or soulcleave pendant

Choker of Filthy Diamonds has more haste and mp5. Soulcleave Pendant has more crit. I definitely prefer the Choker for a holy paladin or possibly a resto shammy and likely a resto druid, since the nerf to Gift of the Earthmother, leaving the crit to priests. Maybe? I’m not sure how crit is for a holy priest these days, but I know crit is still awesome for a disc priest.

However, the Choker is off Rotface and the Pendant is off Saurfang. Really depends how far you’re getting into 10-man ICC, I think.

3) divine plea timer

Okay, I’m assuming you want a timer to tell you when Divine Plea is back up. For this, and any other cooldowns, I use OmniCC. It was my first-ever addon, as I recall. And it’s the one addon I cannot play without.

If you were looking for a timer to tell you how much of the 15 seconds your Divine Plea is still up for and such, I recommend Power Auras Classic to monitor if the buff is active on you or not.

4) hos divine shield holy macro wow

I haven’t actually tested this out, but this ought to work:

/cast Divine Shield
/cast [@target] Hand of Sacrifice
/raid Hand of Sacrifice is up!
/in 10 /raid Hand of Sacrifice is done!

That’s four lines and should work with two button clicks or presses. I highly recommend that your shield come FIRST in the macro, lest you be ruined in the face by whatever insane damage is hitting your target. Also, your @target could be @focus as well or even this:

[@mouseover,help,nodead]

5) paladin group buffs how to

Oof. Okay. The first thing to know here is what buffs other classes give that are equivalent.

Warriors: Battle Shout is equivalent to unimproved Blessing of Might. Improved Blessing of Might (2/2) requires the warrior to have 5/5 Commanding Presence to be equivalent. That’s in the third tier of the Fury tree. This is not part of a typical warrior build, as I understand it.

Shamans: Mana Spring Totem is equivalent to unimproved Blessing of Wisdom. Improved Blessing of Wisdom (2/2) requires the shaman to have 3/3 Restorative Totems which is the fourth tier of the Restoration tree. However, it leads to Mana Tide Totem which virtually all restoration shammies take.

This is the general order that I, personally, recommend for pally buffs:

Death Knights (DPS): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings
Death Knights (tank): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might
Druids (bear): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might
Druids (kitty): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings
Druids (moonkin): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Druids (trees): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Hunters (survival/marks): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Wisdom
Hunters (BM): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Mages: Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Paladins (prot): Blessing of Sanctuary, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Wisdom
Paladins (ret): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Paladins (holy): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Priests: Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Rogues: Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings
Shaman (enhancement): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Shaman (elemental/resto): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Warlocks: Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Warriors: Blessings of Kings, Blessing of Might

Of course, if you have a warrior in the group, it’s likely more beneficial to have them pop Battle Shout and you do kings than it is for no kings and your might, even if it’s improved. Same deal for wisdom and mana spring.

Alternately, you can buff everyone with Drums of Forgotten Kings and then give physical DPS might and healers and casters wisdom.

6) dk tanking halls of reflection

Note: I am not a death knight, nor am I a great tank. However, if you’re going to do the LOS method on Falric and Marwyn, just drop Death and Decay and hide around the corner. For any casters or the riflemen, Death Grip is great. For the chase scene, D&D is still awesome to use and you’ll want to Death Grip or Strangulate the Witch Doctors to bring them close if they’re a little far out. Blow your cooldowns when you can, saving Army of the Nub Dead for the second spawn of adds at the fourth wall on the chase scene.

7) list of cuts a purple gem can be cut to

Here’s a list of epic, level 80 purple gems. And here’s the list of rare-quality ones.

8) melee dps toravon guide

Hit boss. Don’t touch Frozen Orbs unless there are basically no ranged. Collect loot.

9) shammy tanking gear 3.3

Okay. You can equip a shield. This does not make you a tank. There is no mail gear out there at level 80 that has any kind of defense on it and very little leather, due to the druid changes. You would basically have to stack resilience. The major problem with shaman tanking, apart from the fact that you’re squishy as all get-out, is that a key to tanking is avoidance, like dodging, blocking and parrying. Your parry talent, Spirit Weapons, also reduces threat. Bad combo.

I don’t advise shaman tanking unless you’re doing it for fun with friends OR your tank on Lady Malande on the Illidari Council in Black Temple DROPS and your resident enhancement shaman thinks quickly, throws on a shield, pops Shamanistic Rage causing your raid leader to shout out over vent “ALL HEALS TO DUPER, ALL HEALS TO DUPER!”, which never had been heard before and never would be heard again. Ever. ;)

10) soul shriek aggro reset

Nope, there’s no aggro reset associated with Soul Shriek, as far as I can tell. It IS, however, a silence. Make sure someone is assigned to cleanse this magic effect off your tanks!

Kurn's Q&A #10

Kurn / / cataclysm, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, priests, q&a, raiding, ramblings, tanks

Strangely enough, I get a kick out of random search terms that lead here, so here’s the 10th post where I take a look at who’s been searching for stuff and my attempt to better answer the questions these people probably had.

1) paladin divinity jol

Yeah, basically, it doesn’t work the way you think it works. For whatever reason, it works on the judging paladin (and perhaps anyone else who has Divinity) but not on, say, a hunter. I know, weird, eh? Still, here are the results of the experiment I did.

2) “stained shadowcraft tunic” “enhancement shaman”

No, no, go get the Champion’s Deathdealer Breastplate. I know it’s mail, but even before 40, you’ll be able to equip it. It’ll be leather, effectively, ’till you ding 40 and then it’ll become mail. Same deal for your shoulders, get the Prized Beastmaster’s Mantle. Apart from anything else, intellect is a good stat to have — not only will it extend your mana pool, but also if you’re properly specced in the 50s or thereabouts, you’ll be getting Mental Quickness, adding to your attack power from your intellect.

3) anyway to keep focus frame through valithria

Not that I’ve seen. >< I use a macro to focus her:

/focus Valithria Dreamwalker

4) blood prince council+holy priest+bad

Nah, not bad. What we’ll typically do is 1-2 holy paladins, 1 disc priest, 1 resto druid, 1-2 resto shammies and a holy priest. The holy priest does very well in topping people off, saving people from their own idiocy. We have the shammies helping on tanks if we’ve just got the one holy pally, so the priest gets his Circle of Hax on and his Empowered Renew blasting through the raid. Works pretty well.

Of course, if you’re thinking their numbers suck, look at their assignments. Are they assigned to the raid with 3 resto druids? Then yes, they will appear “bad”. But unless you’re losing a bunch of people due to lack of heals (and not their own stupidity), your holy priest is probably doing fine.

5) can you remove mutated plague with divine protection

Okay, first of all, Divine Protection is the paladin equivalent of Shield Wall. So no, Divine Protection is not going to wipe Mutated Plague off the tank.

Mutated Plague is the debuff that Professor Putricide stacks on the tanks in Phase 3 of his encounter. Typically, on 25-man, we have Tank 1 take 2 stacks, then Tank 2 takes 2, then Tank 3 takes 2, then T1 takes 1, T2 takes 1, T3 takes 1, and so on until the good Professor is dead.

What WOULD drop Mutated Plague off is Divine Shield. But you DO NOT want to do this (and I suspect that’s why you asked if DP would wipe it off) because if MP drops off any target for any reason, it’ll heal the boss for a certain amount per stack that was on the tank. That includes tank death, that includes bubbling.

So please do feel free to use Divine Protection in P3 of Professor Putricide. :)

6) cataclysm “level 85″+”experience needed”

Okay, there’s like no information out for Cataclysm yet. I don’t think the Friends and Family Closed Alpha is even out yet. However, considering the level cap is moving up only five levels, I would have to presume that those are going to be some pretty epic levels and that you’ll have to get an obscene amount of experience to get to 85. That doesn’t mean that SOME crazy space goats won’t ding in like, four days, though, RIGHT OSEPHALA? ;)

7) divine illumination cooldown add on

I cannot pimp this enough: OmniCC is the best cooldown timer ever. It displays cooldowns by minute and then, at 60 seconds it displays by second until it’s up. This is one of the addons I cannot live without.

8) divine intervention macro

From my Holy How-To #3:

Here’s my “hey, I cast Divine Intervention on someone” macro. Note that you must be targetting the person you want to DI.

/cast Divine Intervention

/script SendChatMessage(“DI: The generous pally’s version of Bubble/Hearth.”, “WHISPER”, nil, UnitName(“target”));

/6 Divine Intervention cast on %t.

What that does is cast DI, then sends a whisper to your target saying: DI: The generous pally’s version of Bubble/Hearth. This can obviously be changed, that’s just my sense of humour. ;)

Then it announces to the healing channel (#6) that I cast DI on my target.

9) divine shield mystic buffet

Nope. It goes riiiiiiiight through Divine Shield. :(

10) grid show random dungeon tank

Ah, you’re using Grid and you want it to show you the roles of the people in your party, right? To my knowledge, there’s no way to show that in Grid as of yet. Your standard Blizzard UI party frames will show you the roles, though. Or, you can do what I do and that’s click on every possible person in your party who’s a pally, druid, death knight or warrior and pray that the one with the highest health is your tank…

Bonus question: how to tank as a paladin at lvl 20

20 is when it becomes easy. Make sure you have Righteous Fury on (which I believe still goes away after you die, so don’t forget to put it back on!) and judge your single targets. If you have more than 2-3 mobs, drop Consecration. Congratulations. You are now a leet threat machine!

Genuine compliment or not?

Kurn / / druids, lfg, ramblings, tanks

So tonight, my brother hit 80 on his hunter. We did a random heroic (Old Kingdom — which spawned the previous post to the “tanks” of the Bloodlust Battlegroup) and we did regular TOC and I tanked heroic Utgarde Keep…

And then he needed 7 more badges to get the Mirror of Truth. So we queued up again; me as a tank/healer, him as a DPS, obviously.

We got The Nexus and I breathed a sigh of relief, although I was tanking. I know the instance, I know the boss fights, I know how trash works. I had about 29k health, fully buffed (mark, kings, no fort) and off we went.

I swear to God, I thought the DPS warrior was actively taunting off of me. Until I checked his gearscore. 5300 or thereabouts. Mine, as comparison, is about 2800. Still, I was doing okay on single targets. The issue would arise when the warrior’s whirlwind would simply out-threat my swipe.

So we’ve done the mini boss, the caster boss and Anomolous and we’re at trash towards the rock boss, when the warrior says, apropos of nothing:

“UR A DAMN GOOD TANK 4 GS OF 2.8K”

The holy paladin said:

“lol i agree” “amazing”

I didn’t say anything. Were they being sincere? Or were they being sarcastic dicks? You never know with these people.

So at the end of the run, I say:

“Thanks very much for the group, everyone. Apologies for not holding aggro too well on multiple mobs. :)”

The pally comes back with:

“ur amazing”

And the DK said “psh did great”

The warrior had already left the group by the time the pally had said anything.

So I don’t know. Maybe the warrior was being a sarcastic ass, but it seems like the pally thought I did great for my gear and the DK seemed to not mind too much.

If any of them were at all sincere, I really hope that what they take away from the run is not that I am awesome, but rather, GearScore does not make a player. GearScore shows a player’s potential maximum output and nothing else. Like, nothing I could possibly do could help my Swipe out-threat the warrior. At all. But that’s a gear issue. As it was, I was relatively good with single target threat and I didn’t let things beat on the pally and I was super-quick to growl at things or even use Challenging Roar. I like to think that I pushed at the limits of my gear.

I think it really helped that I’ve tanked the instance on regular and tanked it on both regular and heroic on my pally. Damn me if I didn’t miss Righteous Defense something fierce, though. :P

Attention "tanks" of the Bloodlust Battlegroup

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, lfg, ramblings, tanks

To all warriors, death knights and paladins of the Bloodlust battlegroup… please, do not opt to “tank” in a random heroic if you do not have at least 535 defense rating.

To all druids of the Bloodlust battlegroup… please, do not opt to “tank” in a random heroic if you do not have 3/3 Survival of the Fittest.

I know that I’m not a particularly strong healer on my druid. I just dinged 80. I’m not trying to do Halls of Reflection or anything. But I do know that I can bloody well keep up tanks on trash in heroic Old Kingdom. Tanks who ARE immune to critical strikes by mobs.

So if you don’t have 535 defense, or Survival of the Fittest, GET THE HELL OUT OF MY RANDOM GROUPS, dumbasses.

Quick Q&A response!

Kurn / / q&a, tanks

Okay, this search term that led someone to my site CANNOT WAIT until Monday’s regular Q&A post.

“do i need defense to tank regular dungeons”

Yes. Let me say that again. Yes.

Granted, you’re not going to have much defense gear to tank Deadmines, but if you’re talking about regular dungeons from 70-80, or even 60-70, defense does matter.

Here’s the deal. If you want to tank, figure out what level the end boss is in the instance through WoWhead. Say you’re 74 and you want to tank regular Violet Hold. Well, Cyanigosa is level 77. You never want to tank mobs 4 or more levels above you, due to crushing blows becoming a possibility, but 3 levels is about average. So you can do VH at 74.

But what defense do you need? The number you are looking for, when you hover your mouse over your defense rating is the chance to not be hit/critically hit by 5.6% for a boss 3 levels higher than you, 5.4% for a boss 2 levels higher than you, 5.2% for a boss 1 level higher than you and 5.0% for a boss of your own level. This is because bosses (all mobs, really) have a base 5% chance to crit and this number increases by .2% for every level the creature has above you.

If you don’t have the required numbers mentioned above, try real hard not to go to an instance with mobs that are higher level than you.

The numbers at 80 are:

535 defense to be NOT critted by a boss 2 levels higher than you (heroics) and 540 defense to be NOT critted by a boss 3 levels higher than you (raid bosses).

If, of course, you are a druid with 3/3 Survival of the Fittest, you cannot be crit unless the mob is something like 5 levels above you, so you do not require any additional defense. You CAN, however, be crushed by mobs 4 or more levels above you, so stick to 3 or fewer levels of difference between you and the mobs you’re tanking.

It’s part of why I actually enjoy tanking on my druid. I know that as long as I go to a level-appropriate instance, I can’t get crit. :)

Druid and Priest levelling

Kurn / / druids, facepalm, healers, lfg, priests, ramblings, tanks

I spent a little while running a few random dungeons on my now-level-72 Disc priest over on Eldre’Thalas on Friday and ran a couple randoms on my level 73 resto/feral tank druid today, with my brother on his level 72 hunter.

Some observations:

1) Priests are excessively squishy. Like, ow.

2) Also on the priest, I ran with a tank who refused to allow the hunter with us to tame a wolf in Utgarde Keep. That’s the bad news, that he (or she) didn’t read party chat AT ALL. Or if they did, they didn’t understand English. The good news is that every single time the hunter pulled the wolf he wanted off the tank, the tank would Death Grip it riiiiight back. So… good tank. Except that they didn’t read party chat.

3) Mass dispell is pretty freaking phenomenal. Properly specced (with 2/2 Focused Power) that’s a .5 second cast. Awesome. And the area of effect on it is HUGE.

4) I’ve only cast Greater Heal a couple of times. PW:S + Flash Heal + Flash Heal, with a Renew already there… Honestly, it works well. I’ve used Power Infusion on myself a couple times for a hasted Prayer of Healing and I always forget about Prayer of Mending for the first few pulls, but I think I’m starting to adjust to disc healing.

5) I was strongly expecting to tank on my druid on Saturday afternoon with my brother tagging along as DPS on his hunter, but apparently, healers were in demand today. So we got Nexus. With a tank so dumb that… that I lack a witty punchline that would properly convey his stupidity to you. I’m okay with doing things slightly different here and there, but when you go RIGHT down the Nexus hallway from the start and then clear to the entrance of Anomolous’ wing and keep going for HIM, INSTEAD of going to Ormorok, then I’m going to question your sanity.

The other hunter in the group died at some point. I can’t remember why I didn’t rez him. I think he may have released and zoned back in while we were still in combat. But because of the direction we’d gone and the seriously SCREWED UP path we took through trash, he died twice more while coming to us.

I actually feel badly about this, but I vote kicked him for not staying put and letting us come to him. We got a mage who promptly got himself killed by going left and not seeing the trash. Then he died again while trying to invis through trash to us. What on EARTH is so complicated about “Stay there. We’re coming to you. Don’t move.”??

We eventually wound up killing all the bosses, but the run took close to 45 minutes.

6) My brother dinged 72 while in The Nexus and I was four bars from 74, so we requeued and got Azjol-Nerub. With me healing. Again. Considering how rarely I get to heal on any toon who can tank, I was confused.

So we blow through AN, which is my brother’s first time there. I’m seriously getting used to druid healing. The way I’ve got my Clique setup means that it’s almost like playing the piano. Ctrl-click that, alt-click that, shift-click that. I don’t even know the binds by heart, but it flows really naturally when I’m playing. And I love that I rarely have to use Regrowth or Healing Touch, although I did use Tranquility once in each instance today.

7) Standing in Hadronox’s poison is bad, just FYI. If you are glowing green, you are standing in poison that is going to kill you. Sorry.

8) Okay. Tanks, listen up. How to avoid Anub’arak’s POUND ability and, as a special bonus, Ingvar’s DARK SMASH/SMASH abilities:

Three words: Run through him. Neither one changes direction once the cast is coming. Watch the cast bar. If you see DARK SMASH or SMASH for Ingvar or POUND for Anub’arak, run directly through the boss until you are on his other side.

You may then want to turn around so they don’t beat you from behind when they’re done casting.

We’ll all miss one here or there, but knowing how to deal with these abilities is seriously important in both regular and heroic versions of Utgarde Keep and Azjol-Nerub.

My druid is still 73, 2 bars from 74 and yet I have this overwhelming urge to throw bubbles at people…

Dear DPS…

Kurn / / druids, dungeons, facepalm, lfg, ramblings, tanks

Dear DPS,

I know we’re in levelling content and that you’re anxious to get your bonus XP from the random dungeon and move on to another one. I get that.

I further recognize that, as it’s levelling content, people’s gear basically sucks and so DPS can be low.

But these two facts do not combine well. If you want to get out of the dungeon faster, please do not pull. Let your tank pull. Please do not CC mobs when your tank is trying to move them or execute a line of sight pull. Please do not stun mobs randomly for extra DPS (ret pallies, I’m talking to YOU about Holy Wrath) because it’s really freaking annoying. (Similarly, anyone with a knockback, if you use it, I will kill you.)

The fact that I have to go around chasing things that didn’t follow me because you CCed it or stunned it does not make for a faster run. The fact that I have to blow Challenging Roar because you ran into a group of mobs and dropped Consecrate ALSO does not make for a faster run.

To continue, Mana Spring Totem is secondary in terms of priorities when your healer is a priest and your ret pally doesn’t know where his Cleanse button is. Drop Cleansing Totem, please, shammies. Pallies, LEARN TO CLEANSE. Every paladin who doesn’t cleanse magic, disease or poisons when their healer is unable to cleanse one of those and there’s no totem, is IMHO, a FAIL. And you make me embarassed to raid as a paladin.

But perhaps you’re just unaware as to who can cleanse what. SO LET’S CLEAR THAT UP, SHALL WE?

1) Paladins can dispell: Diseases, Magic Effects and Poisons with one button – CLEANSE.

2) Druids can dispell: Curses and Poisons with three buttons – Remove Poison, Abolish Poison, Remove Curse.

3) Priests can dispell: Magic Effects (both offensively and defensively) and Diseases with three buttons – Dispell Magic, Mass Dispell and Abolish Disease.

4) Shaman can dispell: Curses, Poisons and Diseases (and can purge Magic offensively using Purge) with 1 button – Cleanse Spirit. Plus the Cleansing Totem removes Poisons and Diseases on a pulse. (Note that all shaman have Cleansing Totem and all shaman can remove poisons and diseases, but only resto shammies can remove curses.)

Do the math. If I’m a paladin tank with a priest healer and 3 non-cleansing DPS classes and I get poisoned, I WILL CLEANSE MYSELF. Get Decursive. Learn to cleanse when needed, people.

Please do not boast to me about your DPS numbers. I do not care. As long as the boss dies or the mobs die, and I can get the hell out of your group, that’s all that matters.

Having said that, the next time I have to tank Jedoga Shadowseeker and my DPS fails to kill the volunteer not once but TWICE, thereby buffing her damage 200%, I will be very, very cranky. Let’s just say I’m happy that I have Barkskin.

First volunteer: Barkskin, Survival Instincts.

Second volunteer: Enrage, Frenzied Regeneration, Lifeblood (go go herbalism) and Barkskin when it came back up.

And to the ridiculously mouthy, braggy ret paladin from my Old Kingdom group, who, it must be said, buffed us with Greater Blessing of Kings… I am SO glad I put your dumb self on ignore. If you want to tank, GO AHEAD AND FREAKING TANK. Do NOT just attack at will. Also, Divine Storm at the START of your rotation, before some of the mobs have even become aware that I, the tank, exist? BAD CALL, BUDDY. Finally, learn to use Every Man For Himself and your bubble to get out of fears before you pull another Faceless One, kk?

No love,

Your Tank

This post brought to you in part by frustration, annoyance and by the fact that I just tanked Old Kingdom on my druid for the very first time.

Random Dungeon Tank Failure

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, tanks

I had two bad tanking experiences today while running my typical four random dungeons on my four 80s. And no, one of them was not while I was tanking, thank you very much. ;)

The first one was while I was on my hunter. Apart from the appallingly open racist comments from the group at large (three were from one guild and all of them were being racist and otherwise emitting perjoratives), the tank couldn’t hold aggro worth a damn. I mean, I really wonder if the dude was in Defensive Stance. Every class apart from warriors allows you to plainly see if the tank in question has their threat ability on — Frost Presence, Righteous Fury, bear form — but not warriors. Anyways, even after misdirecting mobs to him AND assisting him for DPS targets, I still ended up climbing the aggro list extremely quickly.

Of course, we blew through heroic UK without any real issues, so that’s not a huge failure. Clearly a mediocre tank, though, and I put him and his guildies on ignore so I wouldn’t get stuck with them on this toon again.

Moral of the story: l2threat.

The second tank failure was actually a very good tank, in that he used cooldowns and held aggro. Except that he was a total failure at keeping an eye out for me, his healer (on my shammy). He was basically running off through heroic Forge of Souls without me, not paying attention to either my mana pool (which only dipped low once, but not even a PAUSE before running into the first boss encounter). At one point, I stopped to drink and he ran off and some mob has AOE damage so one of the rogues died before I got there. So I healed, the mobs died, I tried to rez the rogue.

Tank runs off into a room and it takes me forever to get there and I blow my cooldowns. “You realize I was out of range because I was rezzing the rogue, right?”

Rogue who died: “I ran back it’s okay.”

Tank: “y did the rogue die in 1st place?”

Me: “Because you ran off without waiting for me to drink.”

No response, obviously.

Then on the first boss, they didn’t kill the corrupt soul thingy. Which, okay, no big deal. They all needed on the bag he dropped, so I did, too, although I typically greed on that stuff.

Thus far, just another dumbass tank who doesn’t care about anything, right? Nothing to worry about too much if I keep up with him. Well, on the last boss, when they practically killed the tank through the mirror effect thing, I got concerned. I was already hating the tank and the group, but clearly, they didn’t understand the mechanics of this fight if the tank was almost killed by the mirror.

The rogue who’d already died on trash died on the last boss because of the mirror, a little later on.

And so did I, when I got the mirror afterwards.

I think my PRECISE words were:

“Wow, l2 stop dps.”

Not another word after that. I didn’t pop my reincarnation until after the boss died, then started rezzing the rogue.

Whereas I would normally greed on the Frozen Orb, I needed, after they all did. And I hit disenchant for something (and won the shard). And lo and behold, the Needle-Encrusted Scorpion dropped. One of the rogues had it already and automatically passed, but the three others, INCLUDING THE PALADIN TANK, hit Need.

“Well, screw that,” I said to myself, and hit Need. I have an enhancement set and spec and this entire group, all belonging to the same guild, had made the run extremely unpleasant for me.

So when I won it, I grinned to myself and left the group. Turns out I also got the orb, meaning I won everything off that boss. Why can’t my paladin have my shammy’s rolls?

Anyways, I promptly scrolled up in my chat log and put the idiot tank on ignore so as to never group with him again.

Moral of the story: Tanks should keep an eye on their healer’s mana AND their physical proximity to them.

I honestly wonder what the hell I posted about before the random dungeon/LFG feature came out…