Tank like a girl

I am honestly still trying to avoid joining the train of people blogging about warrior changes for WotLK, too many changes abound. Also, it’s hard not to feel discouraged when you read bloggers like Tobold posting about DKs being so totally solo-viable and powerful, speaking of doom and gloom for the warrior class.

But one of the many beta postings at WoW Insider got my attention: the first look at blacksmithing plans for WotLK. Now, my warrior is a blacksmith. As it is, I feel it’s one of the weakest professions. Unless you’re lucky with drops of epic plans, it’s weak. Hitting 375 requires very heavy farming, and lucky drops of the Felsteel plate set. I was lucky, I got all three plans very quickly. But there’s a reason I am my guild’s only maxed blacksmithing. Instance drops will almost always be superior to what you can make. The Ragesteel Shoulders are about the only BS piece I can make that is somewhat in demand, aside from enchanting rods. As for the specialisation, I went for armorsmithing, because I thought powerful armor would rock my world. Now don’t get me wrong, I have the maxed out BoP chestpiece, Bulwark of Ancient Kings, it’s a fantastic piece of gear, and the two versions I had before were great too, but they don’t particularly cater to the prot warrior crowd. I did use them to tank, simply because of the superior armor, stamina and for the Last Stand-like use effect. But it would have been nice to see something for the non-DPS crowd as well.

Ah, where was I? Right, blacksmithing. In the beta. This gallery introduces our kind and gentle readers to a level 75 blacksmithing set, including 8 pieces. You will be able to make a shield. How freaking awesome is that? About damn time! I can’t say anything about farming costs yet, but there’s nothing crazy like frost motes (or whatever the WotLK version of Primals is going to be), just bars of new metals. Itemization immediately strikes me as odd, but I guess it’s a taste of WotLK warrior gear: tons of strength for AP, lots of stamina, and good ol’ defense. No sockets. No hint of agility or any avoidance stat anywhere. No block value. Is it possible that warrior itemization will be really boring? Looks like. Not a fan yet.

It also looks like it that current prot warriors with their gear stacked with stamina and avoidance will have trouble tanking in the new age, where threat scales with attack power. Pimp your offensive gear, it’s going to be an interesting ride.

I am excited about seeing blue crafted gear that I’ll be able to make eventually, I love the ability of making a shield, and it certainly was an interesting sneak peek at the new itemization.

The easiest of the Opera fights is Big Bad Wolf. He’s also one of the funniest. I have fond memories of this being my very first Opera experience. That said, he’s certainly not your average tank-and-spank boss.

As the Big Bad Wolf spends so much time chasing Little Red Riding Hood, it is very difficult to hold aggro on him. This will be your major obstacle as tank in this fight. This is a one tank encounter, as off-tank, you will provide DPS in this fight.

Positioning: As Big Bad Wolf will be in the center of the stage as grandmother, you can take your time to position the raid, which is very helpful. We tend to have all ranged DPS and healers by the entrance to the stage. This will give them, especially the healers, some extra time for running away from the Big Bad Wolf if transformed. The Main Tank will talk to the grandmother about how phat her lewtz are once everyone is where they are supposed to be, and she will change into Big Bad Wolf. As warrior, Bloodrage now and the moment you can attack him, Shield Slam to the face. In this phase of the fight, it is important that the only one doing anything is the tank. No heals, no DPS of any kind. As MT, drag BBW to the exit door of the stage. You won’t have much time to build initial threat because after very few hits, he will loudly announce ‘Run away, little girl’ and a random raid member will be Little Red Riding Hood.

Now you get to experience the fun of chasing BBW as he chases a gnome, trying to get some high threat moves in while he runs. At this point DPS still doesn’t do anything. I know, they will likely twitch and be restless. But it’s for the best! Eventually BBW will stop chasing the gnome, and try to tear you a new one, and once you have another Shield Slam (or any other big threat move of other tanking classes) on him, you can give the go sign.

As if you weren’t already running around enough as it is, BBW has a fear effect. If you’re awesome at stance-dancing (I am not) that’s one way to dodge the fear, otherwise, ask for Fear Ward or Tremor Totem, and if not available, you just suck it up.

DPS needs to be careful here. BBW hits hard enough to quickly rip squishies apart, so no one wants to draw aggro. Make sure people are aware of the difficulties of building threat here. Everyone here has to keep in mind that the tank losing aggro likely means a death, as he cannot be taunted back like all of the bosses in Karazhan.

BBW doesn’t have a lot of health, so if your Little Red Riding Hoods all run away well, if you can manage to keep BBW on you in non-running phases, then this is really not so bad at all. Be quick on your feet and try to keep the threat moves up even when he’s running, and you should be all good. Communication is essential, make sure your DPS knows when your TPS is struggling.

Drop-wise, none of the specific things BBW drops are very interesting for tanks. Warriors and paladins might enjoy Eternium Greathelm that can drop off any Opera boss. I still use it as avoidance helmet on boss fights.

This weekend was a Karazhan weekend in my guild. As we have an abundance of tanks, and too many people for one group, but not enough for two, I sat out on Saturday for the most part. One of the healers lost connection at Curator, and so the off-tank switched to her healer main and I was flown in as emergency tank. We only did Curator and Aran that night. Curator was easy as usual. I was amused to see that I actually took less damage tanking Curator than the off-tank did soaking Hateful Bolts.

Aran was not so cool, it took us several tries to actually get him down, but we had new people in the raid so it was all still good. As is usual, we have no one calling out people, no yelling, we raid as friendly as it gets.

That’s why it really hit me very hard when someone new in the raid apologized, professing that she had not fucked up before I joined the raid, really. She defended herself as if I had a reason to be mad at her. I was flabbergasted. Today I hear people new to the raid or less experienced were actually saying they were glad I wasn’t there for the raid because they were scared enough already. (

This is a real dilemma for me. I lead most of our raids, and I think I am friendly, try to explain our strategies as best as I can. I never call anyone out personally. I actually make mistakes myself. I try to encourage everyone, say thanks to people who I think really rocked, try to keep the positive attitude up. Am I always super-nice and sweet to everyone? No. Do I voice my opinion when people do silly things (like replacing superior weapons with inferior weapons because of the look and sound effects of said weapon)? Heck yeah. Am I a perfectionist who tries to play on top of her game and tries to encourage others to do the same? Yes.

Apparently that turns me into the guild version of a nazi, which is a terribly politically incorrect term for a German like me. It really makes me unhappy, as I don’t want to be considered an asshole, don’t want to scare people. I just want to raid successfully, and have fun.

Has anyone here ever been in my shoes or has experienced similar? I could use some advice. :O

On a more positive note, I took my currently favorite alt, my rogue Ardraz, to Karazhan for the second day of the raid, for all later Kara bosses. It was her first Karazhan raid, she hasn’t got any Kara or badge gear, so I was worried if she was actually ready for later Kara content. I haven’t stopped grinning and giggling since I ran WWS:

Guess she was ready. So happy. Rogue DPS is my favorite playstyle aside from tanking, I swear. Awesome sauce. )

Ever since the closed beta started, teh Intarwebz have exploded with news about the beta. Everywhere people are discussing the talent trees, the new skills, DKs everywhere. It’s a bit much to absorb. My guild’s GM is in the beta. Some of my favorite bloggers blog about the beta. But not me.

I didn’t use the opt-in for the beta. The last betas I tried were LotRO and Mythos, and I just found for myself that I don’t like unfinished products. I love Blizzard polish. I don’t like Captain Placeholder. And I don’t like to speculate about talent trees that will probably change a lot until we see patch 3.0 distributed. YMMV.

Do I think about some beta stuff at times? Sure do. What the heck is up with the new Shield Block? Are the rumors true that PvP gear > all for WotLK tanking to get max benefit from Shockwave? (If that’s true, Imma kill someone in Irving). Will I level protection, will I level fury, will I figure out how to create a crazy prot-fury hybrid? Those are burning questions, but I am pushing them back in my mind.

A la maison de tank and warlock, I most certainly don’t talk about the expansion. There are few things that drive my other half up the wall more than talking about WotLK. It somehow manages to boil the blood, talk of the expansion. Not even news of non-combat pets turning into spells to save bagspace caused a cheer. She has 63 non-combat pets, you see.

Today, I have a slow day at work, and I couldn’t help myself and watched a very long preview video over on a German WoW site. I also looked at screenshots. Do want. Heck yeah. It’s so pretty.

Few things make me feel as torn as all the beta infos. How about you?

This is my first contribution to a Shared Topic from Blog Azeroth, as suggested by Breana. I really enjoyed the premise of the Shared Topic, so here goes my story.

The idea behind the topic: What’s the one thing you never thought you’d accomplish in WoW?

For me, it’s the achievement of successfully doing 10-man raids within my guild.

When I hit 70 on Kadomi, I changed specs to full protection, after leveling with fury/protection hybrid build. A particularly disastrous Mechanar experience was the cause. Today I just have to laugh at the idea of wiping 5 times on the robot boss. But when I hit 70, we had maybe 5-6 active 70s. Three were very interested in running tons of instances: me, my partner and a priest. We tried to run level 70 instances, and I remember the frustrations of SL runs where Vorpil seemed insurmountable an obstacle. The priest left shortly afterwards, for greener alliance pastures. Summer rolled around, another priest hit 70, and together with her, my partner and I pugged instances. Tons of instances. Some great experiences, some good, some really awful, but we geared up. Soon I was the best-geared tank, my partner the best geared DPS, our healer the best-geared healer. We started pugging heroics and earned our first badges. And yet, that was the limit. Anything beyond that seemed totally off-limits.

I actually researched transferring off to another server, into a European friendly guild for raiding, but then didn’t, because I didn’t want to lose my guild and my friends there. I re-rolled as paladin on a German server because my co-worker promised me I could raid with them. I wanted to get into that damn tower so badly. In the meantime I continued to try and motivate guild members to gear up, to get ready, to finish the Karazhan quest chain. My partner was doubtful that it would ever happen, while I posted a draft of gear requirements for Karazhan.

At about the same time my paladin finally hit 70 and had the necessary gear to hit Karazhan, my guild finally had enough people who were keyed and geared. We decided that we’d brave the tower, with my partner and me co-raid leading, every other weekend. Our first Karazhan weekend was in mid-November 2007, months behind any kind of progression curve. We made it to Curator that first weekend. Every other weekend we would go back, and on December 30 we had our very first Prince Malchezaar kill. We went from a ‘barely breaking 1800 DPS’ raid to one that’s been clearing Karazhan for seven months now and that’s 3/6 in ZA.

We still don’t have enough people for two groups, though we’re slowly getting there. People have come, people have left, and still, we always get our casual all-girls raid going, every other weekend. I never thought I’d see it happen, and I am very happy that I was able to get something like this off the ground.

My guild has another Karazhan raid coming up, and I won’t be tanking, but I promised our up and coming tanks more guides. Here we go with number 3, Maiden of Virtue. This is for the best!

This is a very fast-paced fight, though in reality, it will seem as if it goes on forever and ever. As a tank, it’s pretty much tank-and-spank, but depending on your healer setup, it might require you to be quick on your feet.

Maiden only requires one tank, this means the off-tank has to DPS here. It’s a very melee-unfriendly fight due to the heavy damage from Maiden’s version of Consecrate, Holy Ground. If you happen to be off-tank here, you do your raid the best service by frequently running off the platform out of the Holy Ground, for using bandages. The term ‘Dead DPS doesn’t provide DPS’ applies for as well.

If you are the main tank, you begin the encounter by running into the center of the room, to tank Maiden in the center of her platform. You will keep her there permanently, so that the Holy Ground damage doesn’t hit the raid. You cannot use Demoralizing Shout here, as Holy Ground causes a Silence effect.

If you have a paladin healer in the raid, you really won’t have to do anything but tank Maiden. In the Repentance phase when the whole raid is stunned but those on Holy Ground, the paladin healer should still be able to heal you, if they have cast Blessing of Sacrifice on you. Some of the damage you take will hit the paladin healer, who will break the stun that way and who can then keep you up until the other healers wake up from their stun.

If you have no paladin healer, things are a bit more tricky. One designated healer has to volunteer to move onto the platform shortly before Repentance. The healer will take Holy Ground damage and hence will never be stunned. As soon as Repentance is cast, the healer needs to back off again to avoid taking more damage while still keeping the tank up.

Things can go wrong here. The paladin might be late with renewing Blessing of Sacrifice, or the druid who volunteered shuffled in too late. What now? It’s Repentance and that big chick is hitting you hard, and not in a good way. My advice: put raid-icons on all of your healers and be aware of their positioning in the room. If Repentance begins and all your healers are stunned, you must pull Maiden off the platform, so that her Consecrate will wake up your healer of choice. You have to be quick about your business before you die from lack of heals.

In the image below I have tried to create a positioning that would help with moving Maiden in emergencies. Tank her in the middle, have your designated Repentance healer right behind you, and if your healer ends up stunned, just move back quickly. Equally quickly, move her back to the center once your healer has woken up from the beauty sleep.

If you can figure out how to survive the Repentance phases, and if your DPS gets quick Holy Fire dispels, Maiden of Virtue will be no problem. She has some very nice tank drops: Barbed Choker of Discipline for tanks of all flavors and Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden for warriors and paladins. IMHO those gloves are far superior to the warrior T4 gloves, and they definitely will make a nice piece of threat gear.

I’ve gone over tradeskills in the last post, now let’s roll our warrior and get rocking.

You start as a piddly level 1 warrior with your bread and butter skills: auto-attack and Heroic Strike. Until you get more interesting options, Heroic Strike will be your ‘yellow’ main attack form. It’s not too exciting, but also not too bad. It costs quite a bit of rage, and rage will be your most precious commodity. While leveling we will focus on getting very rage-friendly talents.

At level 2, you learn your first new skill, your first shout: Battle Shout. More attack power means more damage means mobs dead faster. Throughout your warrior career, keep Battle Shout up at all times. Level 4 finds you with one of the most defining warrior skills: Charge! This is usually the point where you first say ‘Zomg, this is awesome!’ At least I hope you do. Your playstyle will change from body-pulling to charging into mobs, for extra-rage. Be careful when you charge though, multiple mobs standing closely together make for a very dead promising warrior. You also get Rend, a very underwhelming DoT effect, but because you have nothing else, you’ll want to use it.

At level 6 you get Thunderclap, at level 8 Hamstring. Basic play-style at that point will be to Charge, Rend, Heroic Strike and if it’s a runner Hamstring. Use excess rage for refreshing Battle Shout after the mob is dead to keep it up on you. If you fight more than one mob, use Thunderclap to slow their pummeling of you down a bit.

At level 10, a new chapter in the life of your warrior begins: you will receive Defensive Stance, and all the tanking skills that come with it. It also means that at this time, you will be able to slap sword and board on and tank in groups. For solo-utility, you will continue to use Battle Stance, and the biggest 2-H weapon you can find. Warriors are very gear-dependent, so try to have max-damage weapons appropriate to your level. While you’re in the capital city of your choice, make sure to visit the weapon trainers and learn all weapons. You can learn all of them, and there will be a time you will find a use for them. Make sure that you know Thrown/Bows/Guns and get ammo if necessary, you will need to be able to pull. As much fun as Charge is, it can get lethal charging into groups.

Talents from 10-19:

10-14 Cruelty – the one talent that warriors of all specs have maxed. More crit = more damage = dead mobs.
15-19 Unbridled Wrath – A chance to get extra rage when hitting a mob. Every little point of rage matters.

While you will still learn a lot of new abilities on your road to 20, few of them have real solo-utility while leveling. Overpower can only be used when your mob dodges. If you miss too many Overpower situations, try using something like Scrolling Combat Text, which will pop up an Overpower message on your screen when it’s available. Use it, it’s nice when you get the opportunity to use it. You also learn Shield Bash. When fighting caster mobs, slap on a shield and bash them to interrupt casting. Every warrior should own Sword&Board, despite leveling Arms or Fury. Get used to lugging different sets of gear around. Demoralizing Shout is a helpful debuff, just like Thunderclap apply it in situations when you are facing multiple mobs, otherwise, save the rage for more offensive skills.

Talents from 20-29:

20-24 Commanding Presence – You want this for its AP boost for Battle Shout. Of course that’s only useful if you keep Battle Shout up at all times. You know you want to.
25-29 Enrage – A must talent as pre-req for Flurry. Again, it boosts your damage, because mobs will crit you while you’re on your own.

Level 20 is a real landmark for the leveling warrior. Dual-wield will become available! Toss out the slow 2-H weapon and get two weapons. Slow speed works better for one-hand weapons for fury warriors, but anything will do to start out with. Don’t be discouraged when DW doesn’t seem like a huge damage-boost right from the start, your miss rate will be fairly high. You will push the DPS once you get to the appropriate talent in the fury tree. More offensive goodies are Cleave, which replaces Heroic Strike when you’re fighting multiple mobs, Retaliation for those moments when you’re really desperate (30 minute cooldown). Intimidating Shout is another useful solo-skill for desperate moments. Got jumped by four mobs? Fear three of them, kill one, run away. Last but not least, you get Execute at 24, another of those skills you never want to be without again. Once the mob is under 20% health, you get to use all of your current rage in a very powerful attack that’s often enough to kill the mob.

Talents from 30-39:

30-34 – Dual Wield Specialization for a major boost of your offhand damage, a no-brainer for fury warriors
35-39 – Flurry is often considered the defining skill of a fury warrior. You will be very crit-heavy (even my prot warrior has over 30% crit), and crits will make you attack faster. Snag it!

Once you’ve made it through the dark and death-heavy 20s, a new dawn is ahead of you, the age of the berserker. At level 30 you will receive a fun quest that sends you to Fray Island off the Ratchet coast, where you will have to best a few fighters in a fight club style setting. As reward you will receive berserker stance. Also, you will receive the Whirlwind warrior weapon quest, which disappointingly favors the 2H weapon warriors, which if you use this leveling guide won’t be of any use to you.

All the new abilities you receive in your 30s are berserker stance abilities. Along with the stance you will receive Slam, the only warrior ability with a cast time. There are some powerful Arms/Fury builds out there that utilize a mix of Mortal Strike and Slam, but for DW-warriors, Slam is less interesting. I might be wrong on that account, I just never played around with it. You will also receive Intercept. Think of Charge but mid-fight, that’s what Intercept does. At level 32, you will learn Berserker Rage. It will make you generate more rage from damage, and you’re immune to fear et al. More rage is a good thing, and the fear immunity makes this very powerful for PvP. At level 36 you will receive Whirlwind, another bread and butter skill for any fury warrior. At level 38 you will receive Pummel which finally means you won’t need a shield for interrupts any longer.

Basic playstyle in your 30s: Charge, Thunderclap, Demoralizing Shout if necessary. Then you switch to Berserker Stance, Heroic Strike, Whirlwind whenever it’s up, all the good offensive abilities. This will get even easier in the 40s, but for now, it’s already quite the nice boost. Combat will feel more fast-paced. Just be careful. Fighting in berserker stance also means you take more damage.

Part III of this guide will cover levels 40-70. Don’t be shy with questions, comments or pointing out blatant misconceptions on my side.

That leveling guide page, it’s been taunting me. I promised I’d write this, and I have to start sometime. My original plan was to level a warrior alongside this guide, but I am full on characters on Bronzebeard and don’t feel like picking another realm. I have leveled three warriors, so I should be able to do this, right?

All the information I am posting here will be compiled on the guide page.

The premise: you want to level a warrior. Your endgame goal might be tanking or DPS or PvP, but you want to reach 70 the fastest you can.

A problem: warriors aren’t that easy to level. They have very few skills that make soloing easier. They have no pet, no stealth, no heals, no totems, nothing to drop aggro once they have it. All a warrior has is a weapon (or two), a relatively large health pool and bandages.

Tradeskills: First Aid is a no-brainer, you have to be on your road to trauma surgeon right from the start. Same for cooking. As warrior, you go through food like crazy, and you will appreciate buff-food from the get-go. As leveling cooking is easiest when combined with fishing, another no-brainer. Yes, I know, fishing is kinda dull, but it’s good free food. Okay, we’ve covered the secondary skills.

Primary trade skills are a bit tougher. At the moment I would totally recommend alchemy as the trade that has to offer a warrior the most. Health pots, guardian and battle elixirs, later flasks. Easy to max, invaluable while leveling. Blacksmithing might seem the logical choice, but in reality, you will not really use much of the gear BS can make until Outland. The top of the line weapons that axe/sword/hammer smiths get are awesome, as is the top-armor that armorsmiths can make (though totally not worth it for tanks). It’s excruciating and expensive to level past 350. If your endgame goal as warrior is DPS, being a weaponsmith can be beneficial. If you intend to be a tank, not worth it. Your mileage may vary.

Another option would be engineering. Free ammo, bombs, explosive sheep, and goggles. Everyone loves goggles. Also, at level 70 you get a roflcopter + ezmode mote farming. Not a bad option.

My apologies for the quiet lately, but I’ve been sick with the plague aka bronchitis since Tuesday. I actually didn’t play much, go figure. I am slowly feeling better. I have a bunch of drafts, including my warrior leveling guide, but decided to push through what I began recently, my Karazhan boss tanking guide. Today, everyone’s favorite tower steward, Moroes. Hahaha, right.

Moroes’ trash is just about my least favorite trash section, due to the number of AoE pulls on the way to him. You will want to mark every single lone Spectral Servant walking through the room, and pull them quickly whenever you can grab one. While the MT pulls one, the OT can stand ready to grab the next one. You’ll be better off first handling the two groups of Phantom Guests by pulling them down to the stairs. Make sure your healers are prepared for your Valet pulls, those guys hit like trucks. Once you have cleared enough to make it to Moroes’ ballroom, make sure to mark all the wandering Skeletal Waiters. The only other trash of note are the Ghostly Steward. They come armed with wine bottles, and when they hit you with that, expect massive damage: With the Drunken Head Crack debuff, the tank will become unable to evade, block or parry and each melee attack from the Ghostly Steward can hit him for numbers in the 4000’s. Oh, also immune to taunts. Fun times.

Moroes himself is the first difficult encounter for the raid group, but not so much for the tank. As far as tanking goes, it’s very basic tank and spank, with breaks inbetween while he stealths across the room to Garrote an unlucky raid member. The difficulty of this encounter is to handle Moroes’ adds and yet manage to burn him down before the damage of the Garrote in the raid becomes too much for the healers.

For beginning Karazhan tanks, I suggest you have enough CC that you do not have to worry about any of Moroes’ adds as tank. Having two priests, a hunter, a rogue, or a paladin will make this a lot easier, especially if you’re just starting Karazhan. This means the two tanks can focus on Moroes completely. When you pull Moroes, bring him over to the general area of the wall, as indicated in the screenshot. While your raid handles the adds, you two have the task of a) building lots of threat and b) avoiding a simultaneous gouge-blind combo. When one tank is gouged and the other one blinded, Moroes will head straight for the next healer, no doubt, been there, done that, got the T-shirt. If you end up blinded, it is important that you inform the other tank (best on Vent or TS) so that the other tank can turn his back on Moroes. That way Moroes can’t gouge. At the same time the blinded tank must of course inform the other tank to turn back around once no longer blinded.

The off-tank will have a harder time building threat, due to rage issues, and the raid must be prepared to not ever pass the off-tank threat-wise. If it’s two warriors tanking, my advice is to Shield Slam every CD as off-tank, keep the Devastates coming in, make the best use of your limited rage.

If Moroes decides to Garrote one of the tanks, that’s actually a good thing. Due to a stream of incoming heals on the tanks anyway, and the much larger health pools, it’s a lot easier for healers to handle garroted tanks instead of squishy casters that bleed.

Once Moroes reaches 30% health, he will Enrage, so now is a good time for Oh Shit buttons. Don’t be shy with Shield Wall, and for an ironic trick use Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch once you get it. If you have a shaman in the raid, Bloodlust/Heroism rocks for those last painful enraged moments.

If your raid can handle the adds, burn them down quickly, and then burn Moroes fast enough, while the tanks share the aggro load, then Moroes is not that difficult at all. It’s all about the execution and the crowd control, and you can do your share by always keeping Moroes on you.

Once your gear improves, you should be able to off-tank one of the adds as well, for that little bit of extra-tank challenge.

I’ll try to post links to new warrior blogs I see popping up, especially if they have a tanking angle.

Today I have two new ones:

• Jatheak’s WoW Blog – he’s starting with the premise of rolling a new warrior and guide the warrior to 70, which is always a commendable endeavor. We are prot warriors, we must be legion.
• Big and Beautiful – Arudar’s blog about warrior tanks. Started with a very interesting article about our ‘Oh Shit’ skills, so thumbs up from me.