Tank like a girl

The Background Downloader has recently started, the PTR changes are thinning out (yay, Devastate buff!), and patch 3.2 is getting closer and closer. It won’t drop today, but it will drop soon. What will we see then? The big heroics rush of 2009! I am looking forward to getting rewarded for running heroics again, aside from Frozen Orbs and Dream Shards. This warrants a closer look at the gear you can buy with Emblems of Conquest, from a viewpoint of being an Ulduar 10 raider. As far as I know, item prices remain the same, so the curious (aka me) want to know how many emblems we all need to blow on yummy new tanking gear. Here goes nothing!

Head:

• Conqueror’s Siegebreaker Greathelm: again, T8.5 available for 58 emblems. Again, not thrilled by shield block value, as block is still all messed up, but it is a big upgrade for me personally, after lugging around the Tempered Titansteel helmet forever and a day.

Neck:

• Shard of the Crystal Forest: very sweet necklace. Hit is still the area where I lack most, so that’s nice to see. It’s just about as good as stuff coming from Ulduar 25, barring the Freya Hardmode necklace. A steal at 19 emblems of conquest

Chest:

• Conqueror’s Siegebreaker Breastplate: the T8.5 chest token is available for 58 emblems of conquest. Given the Devastate change in 3.2 (yay!) the 2pc bonus is looking a lot more attractive to me these days. Still meh about the SBV on it, but I’d take it.

Hands:

• Gauntlets of the Royal Watch: very nice gloves, again with lots of hit on, which is a very neglected stat in T7 content. 28 emblems of conquest.

Waist:

• Shieldwarder Girdle: Only the Indestructible Plate Girdle (the crafted one) beats it, so it’s definitely worth its weight in badges, all 28 of them. Thumbs up!

Legs:

• Wyrmguard Legplates: These are definitely quite yummy. Again, I personally am not so keen on the SBV though. In comparison to the T8 legs (my personal reference): 12 Sta, 7 Str, 22 Armor, 12 Defense, 60 Block. 39 emblems

This leaves out a couple slots where we’ll have to burn our current Emblems of Valor, or downgrade the Emblems of Conquest for it if you don’t want to use Ulduar drops. Noticeably the following slots:

• Feet: Kyzoc’s Ground Stompers for 40 EoV
• Bracers: Bracers of Dalaran’s Parapets for 60 EoV
• Back: Platinum Mesh Cloak for 25 EoV
• Rings: Signet of the Impregnable Fortress for 25 EoV

Grand total of Emblems of Conquest required to be fully clad in level 213+: 380

That’s gonna be a while. Fun times.

In the second install of my version of Twitter followfridays, I would like to put the spotlight on one of the newer blogs that I really enjoy reading. Tada, Pwnwear: tanking and thinking. Gravity writes about all the stuff I enjoy reading about. Tank strategies, raid leading, interviews with hardcore raid leaders and addon reviews.

Gravity is a DK tank, but so far I haven’t found him to be very DK-centric. Great read all around. One of my favorite posts of his is Learning to Raid Lead and if you’re remotely interested in leading a raid sometime, you should definitely have a look.

Keep up the fabulous work, Gravity.

This weekend, I switched from BigWigs to DeadlyBossMods, just so I can say I have tried it. I liked many elements of it, but still am kinda peeved that you cannot move the boss health frame unless you’re actually fighting said boss. That’s just poor design, you should have a test mode for all bars. I actually made an Auriaya video that I need to cut and render, and I am ashamed of my UI, I tell ya, ashamed!

One of the features of DBM is that it plays the voice from Big Bad Wolf to run away whenever you need to. Which seems to be a running theme in Ulduar as tank, because there are very few moments you ever stand still. Tank and spank? Not very much! So far only XT-002 Deconstructor and Kologarn had their tank and spank moments. But I ran and ran and ran on every single other boss we tackled this weekend.

Daughters of the Horde are now 8/13 in Ulduar in our 3rd raid ID, which is excellent progress. I am not counting Algalon, that’s out of reach for us casual scrubs, and that’s fine. But we’ve only done 18 hours of raiding in Ulduar and have killed 8 bosses and gotten the first piece of T8 for one of our raiders (grats, Sawyer!) so overall, I am very happy.

On Saturday, we did all the mandatory bosses to get to Hodir, with pretty decent success. We had a few new people in the raid, so Flame Leviathan took a lot longer than he really should. We wipe on trash, that was our running theme. Also, we charge on the ramp and then fall through Ulduar. There’s not much underneath Ulduar, I will say. FL himself proved to be no problem, and same with XT-002 Deconstructor. Kologarn is really no big deal for us at all it seems. More of a big deal is the Auriaya trash, we had quite a few special moments there. Imagine 10 girls yelling ‘Don’t touch the balls! Squish the balls!’ Haha.

I managed to snag the two first pieces of Ulduar gear for myself. The pretty amazing Mark of the Unyielding off Kologarn, and Archaedas’ Lost Legplates off Auriaya. I am very torn on the latter. I would have to give up Essence of Gossamer or the Valor Medal of the First War to be able to wear them. Above all, I would have to give up the 4 pc T7 bonus losing the pants. I could swap in my T7 helmet to keep the bonus, but it’s inferior to the Tempered Titansteel helmet. Decisions, decisions. What do you other tanks reckon, are they worth swapping gear for or should I wait until Hodir gives me my token?

We had Auriaya on the second pull, and then just like the previous raid, wiped our way through Hodir trash to Hodir himself. I had made myself two pieces of Icebane, belt and boots, and had farmed normal Halls of Lightning until Loken finally dropped Seal of the Pantheon. That took freaking forever, I have no intention of going there again for a while. We used a single tank, me, and the second tank went for a DPS spec. On Saturday, we got him to like 60% in our best try. We had problems with healing the raid through Frozen Blows.

On Sunday we headed straight through to Hodir and I tried my best to pull very slowly and carefully. It took a while, but we managed to not wipe at all, so that’s worth it for me. It reminded me of slowly having to pull through the ballroom in Karazhan, careful not to get adds from any snowdrift. Then back to Hodir. First few tries were shaky again, but on the third try we nailed it. We stacked the buffs better (zomg, Stormcloud), people moved (for the most part) and pre-HoTing for Frozen Blows seems to have worked quite well. Collective Twitter advice for the win.

 
Instead of trying to tackle another Keeper, we went back to kill the optional bosses we skipped. Razorscale went well enough. Our first try was problematic, the second try we got a helpful strategic tip from Drebian, a mage from a guild we’re friends with, and we got it easily the second time then. Unfortunately, Ignis didn’t work for us at all. I did just about every adds tank mistake in the books: broke roots, had a system crash, after the system crash my G13 didn’t work so molten constructs were just sitting rooted, accidentally targetted Ignis and kept taunting him off the MT while my add ate the healers, and so on and so forth. Many deaths in the crotch pocket, and all in all not very satisfying. Because we were getting frustrated, we did Assembly of Iron instead. After initial issues with the pull, we finally got it. I had an off-day, I think, my interrupts often did not land, and it felt like I should work on hit rating because Shield Bash missed quite a bit. Life as only interrupt made for sad times. Still, we got it, and in the last frantic moments of Stormcaller Brundir’s life, I managed to interrupt Lightning Whirl while finding my Iron Boot flask in my bags, to get that achievement, hooray.

 
All in all, it was a mixed bag. The joy in taking down yet another boss in there, paired with some great mobility on Hodir, followed by some of the weakest tanking I have done in a long time. But you can only learn and grow by looking at your own mistakes critically and working on fixing them.

As next decision, I have to figure out how we can kill Hodir on the first day, and which Keeper to pick as second target. I am tied on either Freya or Thorim. Both require sharp DPS, but I don’t really know which one would be best to tackle. Any advice welcome.

It makes me feel a little dirty, this guilty pleasure of mine. I…like to raid DPS. Yes, I have said it. I’ve had a lot of playtime on my Deathknight lately, and oh boy, does she kick ass. If I could change one thing about her, I would make her an orc, but other than that, she’s mighty fine. Now, I shouldn’t exaggerate, I have only been on two raids with her, but I kicked butt, I did. My best fights were Loatheb with 3.900 DPS and Patchwerk with 3.700. Not bad at all!

 
DKs are a very peculiar class. You either see real DPS monsters annihilating the meters or you see mediocrity. Which should make it obvious that yes, you can faceroll your way through life and still do decent DPS, but if you learn and understand how to not faceroll, then you can really shine. Which is just the way it is with all classes, I suppose, but none makes it so apparent as the DK class. I originally rolled Hélle to figure out how not to be a faceroller, not just for myself, but fellow guildies.

I sprang some gold on her to grab dual-specs to test all DPS specs on her. Here’s my personal rundown:

Blood DPS:
I leveled as blood for the survivability. I was disappointed that while leveling I was not able to solo most elite quests, unlike on Kadomi, but I am likely just spoiled. When I hit 80, I tweaked her spec to dump some of the survivability aspects (like Bloodworms) and grabbed some DPS boosts from the unholy tree. Blood DPS plays like old-school prot warrior. A very very set rotation that is all about proper execution. If you are blindly poking buttons, you are losing a lot of DPS here.

My rotation:
Icy Touch-Plague Strike-Heart Strikex2-Death Strike-Death Coilx2 or Raise Dead/Dancing Rune Weapon
Death Strike-Heart Strikex4-Death Coilx2, rinse and repeat.

I am looking forward to the DRW change in the next patch. Not having to wait for a full Runic Power bar will be a great help, it means you can always use it within the first cycle already. At the moment I have to wait at times if the RP bar is not full. Common issues that I see from fellow blood DKs is that they do not Heart Strike enough or sit on their RP. Make sure to dump RP in every break while you wait for runes to refresh! Don’t forget to get a ghoul for a temporary DPS boost and use DRW with full RP bar every single cooldown. It’s a fun spec and does great DPS.

Frost DPS:
Aaaaah. The spec I would love to use as main spec. So much fun. I really enjoy the heck out of it whenever I switch to it, but unfortunately I found it does not do competitive DPS compared to blood on bosses. I have talked to my friend at work who has cleared Ulduar-25 as frost DK and he said at my gear level it’s just not feasible to expect it to do more DPS than blood. Like all DK specs, you have a very set rotation, but much like prot warriors and arms warriors you have to watch your procs. It is important to watch them, and I set up several Power Auras triggers to help me not miss any procs. First proc to watch out for is Killing Machine, and Rime procs. KM procs a lot! This can make for some bursty moments as Frost Strike hits hard (at least now, before it gets its 10% nerf). Rime doesn’t proc as much, but free Howling Blasts are cool. Frost feels a lot more dynamic than the other two specs.

My Rotation:
I went for the Howling Blast glyph instead of Icy Touch, and thus went with this 1-disease rotation:
Howling Blast-Obliterate-Blood Strikex2-Frost Strike RP dump
Obliteratex3-Frost Strike RP dump

I had a harder time tracking when Frost Fever falls off, when it does, you need to replace Obliterate with Howling Blast to refresh the disease. Like all specs you do not want your diseases to fall off ever. As this is very dependent on watching procs, you need to add extra Frost Strikes for every KM proc, plus Rime usage. I will admit to not having fully figured out the best use of Rime yet. Always HB when it comes off cooldown? Hold on to them and Obliterate instead? I’ll let you know when I have had more experience with it. I’ll definitely try to improve on it.

Unholy DPS:
This is the spec that I liked the least of all. I know that everyone and their brother runs around with a perma-ghoul, but I just couldn’t hack it. I tried to like it, I tested it in many heroics, and yet always switched back to blood in frustration. My major issue is that it requires too much micro-management. As melee class I had a harder time controlling the ghoul. I think it’s easier as warlock or hunter to see what the pet is doing but in melee range it was just frustrating. The only way I could stand to play was with the ghoul on defensive, and that is problematic at times. Then you constantly have to refresh Bone Shield to keep the damage buff up, also no fun. Nevertheless, it did have its DPS moments and is solid, but it’s just not for me. Like all DK specs, you have a very set rotation, no procs to watch for, but a pet to control.

My Rotation:
Icy Touch-Plague Strike-Blood Strikex2-Scourge Strike-Unholy Blight-Death Coil
Scourge Strikex3-Runic Power Dump

AoE rotation: Icy Touch-Plague Strike-Pestilence-Death&Decay-Unholy Blight

This is bound to change with the next patch as they’re nerfing Unholy AoE capabilities, including changing Unholy Blight completely.

I definitely recommend playing around with all three trees. Every tree feels very different, subtle tweaks for a different experience.

Some great references if you also want to stop button-mashing:

• Skeleton Jack (yo, Bronzebeard represent!)
• Elitist Jerks as ultimate, theorycraft-heavy reference
• DK Wowhead forums

Just about a year ago, in one of my first posts, I talked about my weaknesses, the biggest one being a keyboard turner. I have since graduated from the school of keyboard turning noobs to G13 pros. It was a long, hard road in which I switched back and forth between my old-school playing method and my G13. Especially on Kadomi it was really difficult. But now it’s become second nature, and I can’t imagine moving any differently now. It helps as tank, as healer, as melee DPS, as ranged DPS. I really recommend breaking the habit.

But now I have another habit to break that I have inherited from my old days of TBC multi-target tanking: tab-targetting. Never was it more apparent that I need to figure this shit out than when I did my first excursion to Emalon in VoA-10. It was a motley group of 7 guildies, a friend plus two pugged people. As the better geared tank, I tanked adds. I’ll be frank, it didn’t work out. We only had 40 minutes left on the Wintergrasp timer when we started, so we had 25 minutes of attempts before heading out dejectedly. We had a couple issues, but we are fast learners, so I am convinced next time it’ll be a kill. If only Horde had Wintergrasp more often on Bronzebeard. It’s usually in Alliance hand as we’re heavily outnumbered.

My particular issue was targeting new adds and targeting the one that would blow up. BigWigs was so kind to mark the growing add with a skull so I just cycled through until I had the right one. Unfortunately I was hitting tab so frantically that I often missed the skull and had to tab some more. But that really wasn’t the biggest issue. The biggest issue was grabbing the new add. As it would pop up next to Emalon where we had the paladin tank and a couple melee DPS, I tried to click-target, but sometimes would miss or click on a raid member instead. In that time the add would often make for the next healer, and I was fail enough not to Intervene often enough. Add to that that my vigorous tanking killed two adds at the same time and you see a problem. I now know that I have to switch adds a lot more frequently to keep their health at just about the same level.

Veneretio did one of his Back to Basics posts recently about targeting, and he preaches clicking as the best way. I know he’s right. I zoom my camera out a lot on all fights, I know how to turn the camera angle, and yet…

As always, I am determined to master the target issue, so bring on the feedback, guys. Don’t be shy.

My blog recently had its first anniversary. Go me! However, it’s time to post more again, so I am trying to structure my post schedule a bit (again, I know).

On Twitter, followfridays are quite common. People just tweet the names of people they deem worthy of following. I decided to do something similar in my blog, which also allows me the chance to actually clean up my blogroll. It also gives me a shot at testing ScribeFire, but that’s something else entirely.

Blogrolls are a tricky thing. Blogs come, blogs go, and sometimes awesome blogs come and go and you miss them entirely. I just did a massive overhaul of my blogroll, removed blogs that died, but added a lot of fresh, great blogs as well. Every Friday, I will pick a blog from my blogroll and will tell you just why I think it’s awesome to have in your feedreader.

Today, I present *drumroll*: Naissa’s Rage!

Naissa plays a Moooooo cow, is a protection warrior, loves to run heroics over and over, and pugs a lot of raids. She writes very entertaining blog posts, takes lovely screenshots and is just a very interesting read. One thing I love is that she’s always positive about her chosen class, someone who truly loves to play a protection warrior. If you’re looking for an entertaining blog written from a tank’s perspective, definitely pay her a visit.

Naissa is also one of those fabulous examples about the blogging community. Months ago she sent me an email, and since then we sometimes bounce mails back and forth or she sends me artwork of Kadomi she’s done (which I really need to slap into a new banner!) A year ago I never had a clue that I would be in touch with the likes of her or Veneretio regularly.