Tank like a girl

I’m in a real pickle these days with Kadomi. Because the other half is a tanking druid, I play my resto shaman with her. My guild runs are mostly in that combo. With Kadomi I have zippo luck finding any guild healers (we only have two at 80). One of them is usually running heroics non-stop or PvPing, the other is super-busy RL and on a completely different schedule from me. So a-pugging I went, normal Halls of Stone, because I really want to do all instances on normal first before jumping into heroics. I am odd like that, but I think my heroics will be more pleasant if I know the mechanics of the fights first.

I hung around forever in LFG, until a level 80 paladin showed up. Healers are a scarce commodity. As DPS we had two enh shamans and a death knight. Welcome to the melee heavy world of WotLK.  One of the shamans had connection issues, so we basically four-manned most of the instance. The PUG wasn’t good or bad, it was pretty unremarkable. On Krystallus no one understood how the Shatter worked, so the healer bit the dust right at the first Shatter. Thanks to Enraged Regeneration I stayed up anyhow. Did I enjoy the PUG? Not in particular. It’s very different from our goofy guild runs. I don’t really know what to do, I think I might just have to keep her on the backburner for a while, and just jump onto guild runs when one of our other healers has time. I might just finish her Northrend Loremaster achievement. About 100 quests left in Icecrown, and then I have to go back to Borean Tundra.

I am however happy with her gear level. After a mining marathon in Icecrown, I managed to hit the magic mark of blacksmithing 440, so now I am the proud owner of Titansteel Shieldwall and Tempered Titansteel Treads. The helmet will have to wait until I have gotten the Wyrmrest chest and a defense enchant on the shield.  545 defense, 21.5k health, 22k armor. Not too shabby! Wyrmrest rep is going slowly, but I am about 70% through Honored, only from doing the three dailies every day. I love the look of the Titansteel Shield. Holy gosh, I hope I can make the helmet soon, because both the default helmet model of Wrath and the Tempered Saronite one are fugglier than fugly.

As I mentioned, I will be going Deep Wounds spec, the latest flavor in the tanking world. Talldar over at warriortanking.com is wondering why people in that spec go ATT 3/3 and Cruelty 2/5, instead of 5/5 Cruelty. Too bad he didn’t get a response yet, so why don’t y’all enlighten me (and him)? I have used Talented to set up my desired spec as template, so today I will head to Orgrimmar and apply that template. Btw, if you really enjoy messing around with talent builds, that addon is fabulous.

For Christmas, I’ll be off work from Wed-Sun, so I am really hoping I can run some of the 80s instances. My shaman should hit 80 in that time as well.