Huzzah, Titansteel
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.
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I dug through the comments on Ciderhelm’s TankSpot-Article today at work (hello, sweet downtime) and it seems that 2/5 is considered sufficient because there’s a lot of abilities that will most likely crit within the 6sec rend duration to keep it up, so it doesn’t seem to increase the effect.
This leaves me wondering if 3% extra crit or ~15-20% extra AP are more valuable. While I totally expect the latter triumphing in multi-mob situations, I’m not so sure about boss fights.
Talldar´s last blog post..What do I miss with the whole deep wounds thingy?
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tPaste Reply:
December 24th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Well crap. I guess I should have read these comments before I posted in your blog.
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Just thought I’d share the nice buff that The titansteel helm is getting in the patch, sockets!
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2008/december/temperedtitansteelhelm.jpg
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Hangar Reply:
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Will that apply to helms crafted before the patch? (can’t access that link at work, so apologies if that would have answered my question!!!)
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Maritime Reply:
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Yes.
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Hangar Reply:
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Splendid news indeed! Thankyou!
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Sorry you’re not getting so much chance to tank. We’re short on skilled healers too – which is slowing our progression. Did all the healers respecc to moonkins & DKs?
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I need to try the build again. I wasnt doing any more with Deep wounds. Probably due to the low crit chance I have.
Darraxus´s last blog post..Weekend Update.
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Most of the tanks I leveled up with got kinda bored with heroics so it’s not as easy to find a tank now as it was when I hit 80. But as I’m sitting on 150 emblem of heroism I’m not sure what to spend on that doesn’t bug me much. And after all I’m leveling my warrior to final get back into tanking business. Dropped engineering on him and got myself a jewelcrafter, nice!
I hope you’ll enjoy shaman healing at 80.
drug´s last blog post..Malygos down
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I hardly ever pug usually we run as: Me tanking, Healer shaman changed melee, DPS fury warrior, druid healer and whoever else wants to go… usually another melee class
I’ve got my “Champion of the Frozen Wastes” title after doing the 25man Malygos and picked up that prot neck peice from the quest for the Heroic Key from Saph (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44665). I’ve started doing heroics picking up dps gear. I hope to get a pretty good set going so I can go full fury instead of 2-1handers.
I try to pug as little as possible if I go with my guild I know what to expect from them and it makes it a much more enjoyable experience. The build I’ve gone with is without deep wonds: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LGMc0bZhxZVItrx0zibszsGo but looking at your spec it might make more sense to do it that way as I do crit ALOT. We’ll see what happens.
Thanks for the post
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I’ll be glad to heal some of the 80 instances for you while you’re off work. You know me, I’m pretty much always around. ;P
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As stated above, your only concern is to have a rolling Deep Wounds up as much as possible. Considering Incite and the extra crit for Devastate and Shield Slam you get from the talent tree, most of your special abilities should have around a 23ish percent chance to crit, pushing more towards 25ish percent to crit with raid buffs. DW = 6 seconds; 4 abilities in a 6 second rotation…so if the world was perfect it would be up all the time, the world isn’t perfect but DW does stay up for the majority of the time on a boss you can constantly attack. It has been as much as 14 percent of my total damage on certain 25 man raid bosses.
3 Points in Armored to the Teeth > 3 points of cruelty, all the time. I haven’t actually tested this but I trust the people at TankSpot that have =D. It makes sense though, AP affects most of your special abilities and also slightly increases Deep Wound damage. Plus AttT will scale with your gear where the 3 points in Cruelty will always be 3 percent crit and never increase.
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Romoreas is very correct in trusting the people at tankspot. They have run the numbers and made them public on the website, and it’s a significant DPS increase over 3 points of cruelty.
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I never pug but our guild has almost 50 at level 80 now. In BC I didn’t enjoy 5 mans. I resolved to get into them in WoTLK and have been running tons of them. Pretty much everytime I log on I have a guildie wanting me to tank something. Getting rep by wearing a tabbard makes it easy. I hit exalted with 3 factions already from mainly running heroics.
Try running the easy heroics like Nexus and Utgarde Keep on a daily basis and you will get your Wyrmcrest rep done in a hurry.
I switched to the Deep Wounds spec over the weekend and my threat and DPS are definately up.
Our guild is short of healers like many are. We are running 25 man raids with 4-5 healers. When we get to a fight where one of the healers has to MC it gets really tough. Some of our officers are trying to level up new healer alts but that will take some time.
Tankette´s last blog post..Raid Successes, 5 Man Frustration
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admin Reply:
December 31st, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Holy crap, your guild sounds very large. We have 10 80s now, are very healer-heavy, so we usually have to get DPS from outside the guild.
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Tankette Reply:
December 31st, 2008 at 7:03 pm
It doesn’t seem so large when you are trying to do a 25 man raid with only 21 people like last night. We don’t require raid attendance so we need a pretty big pool of raiders to get a full 25. We lost several people with the expansion but also picked up several good people from a guild that fell apart.
Our guild has a good reputation for being casual yet able to do pretty decent progression. We turn away a lot of people that want in our guild. We usually only take in friends of guildies – or healers.
Tankette´s last blog post..Naxx, gear, etc.
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