Tank like a girl

As I was busy with RL things, my usual Monday update went missing. Which isn’t so bad, as I don’t have that much stuff to post about.

My personal progress is very slim. I can say that without having set foot in any level 80 instance, I am pretty close to hitting the magic 540, so it’s really not as hard to reach as some said. I am only sitting at 537 defense, 21.3k health unbuffed, 20.5k armor, but I haven’t got a single enchantment, and most of my sockets so far have stamina gems in them. I’m still working on the Loremaster of Northrend achievement, and am really getting there. I completed Sholazar Basin on Saturday and Storm Peaks on Monday, so all that’s left are 140 quests in Icecrown and 130 quests in Borean Tundra. One thing this loremaster attempt surely causes is that it’s making me rich. I spent 7k gold last week to buy Artisan Riding, epic flyer and cold-weather flying for my shaman, and since then I have already gone up 5k gold again because gold is just so easy to come by while questing.

Warrior-tanking still feels a bit too powerful for me. I ran normal Gundrak in a group of mostly 80s, was #2 on DPS again, setting a new personal record of 1.1k DPS, and there were times that I had mindboggling values like 3.5k TPS displayed in Omen, on some trash pulls. I would be pissed if I was a druid. The other half is a feral druid and doesn’t do TPS on trash like that. If tanking classes are to be homogenized, we should all be equally strong on multi-mob tanking. Here’s to hoping for a druid Swipe buff.

I have been very inspired by a lot of postings I have seen at Tankspot, regarding Impale/Deep Wounds builds, and I think I might give that a shot as well. Raid results where Deep Wounds did the same damage as Revenge did sound pretty fabulous. It’s the new cookie cutter spec, so I might as well try it. Who wouldn’t want to do more damage?

I’m currently a bit frustrated and unhappy. Being a member of a casual guild isn’t as easy as it might seem.  I recently did a poll to find out how interested everyone is in raiding, and the overwhelming response was that people want to raid, but are in no hurry. That’s cool, I am in no hurry either. Our most ‘hardcore’ member just gquit to join our partner guild, and I felt her app over there was full of disses hinted at our guild, and so was her farewell posting, in a very unpleasant passive-aggressive manner. I don’t mind people leaving, we’re not for everyone, but at least try to be nice about it.

We have eight level 80s atm. Of those eight, two of them run heroics every day and have gone to Naxxramas with other guilds. The rest of them are mostly questing solo-style, skilling up in professions and seem to have no desire to set up instance runs. Me, I am halfway inbetween. I am setting up runs, have done all instances up to Halls of Stone now. But I am still running instances with the druid/shaman combo first, so I have yet to set a warrior foot into heroics or any level 80 instance. I really can’t form a new raiding team if people don’t have their own initiative and drive to gear up, but if we don’t start raiding soon, we will lose those who are getting bored with us. Don’t know how to fix really. I am probably overthinking it, and things might change a lot after Christmas. I think the ease of soloing in WotLK is biting us in the ass. If you can complete whole zones without requiring any groups, the leveling/questing phase has turned into a big single-player game. I did Storm Peaks all by myself, all 100 quests of the achievement, without any outside help.

Maybe it’s just that I am not used to being on top of my game, because in TBC, the other half and I were the ones who were running instances and heroics every day while the rest of the guild wasn’t. Then again, in TBC we were also the ones who actively helped getting other people there, so we could start raiding.

I was thinking of setting a start date of when we would like to start raiding, maybe that would change things a bit, but I don’t know if that would work for sure. I tell you, being casual raid leader has quite the emo-potential.

WTB patience of a saint to just relax and have fun and not feel like I am millions of lightyears behind everyone else. Taking longer to get there just means less boredom inbetween waiting for future patches.

Setbacks are frustrating, aren’t they? As I mentioned before, my guild has a very light raiding schedule, every other weekend. We are currently alternating between Karazhan and Zul’Aman. My own interest lies in exploring ZA some more. It’s still exciting and fresh content for me. However, our raid balance is very wonky. We have four ZA-geared healers, maybe six geared DPS and exactly two tanks. You see the problem, right?

So while our other prot warrior shall go camping next weekend, we’ll head to Karazhan again. *yawn*

Our dire tank situation is actually quite bizarre, as for our last Karazhan we had, what, 5 or 6 tanks sign up. However, a bunch of them are alts. Alts of our main healers. Who are needed as healers in ZA, of course. My new mission as one of the raid leaders will be to schedule people who actually want to move on to ZA tanking.

Heh, maybe it’ll give me another chance for gearing up my own alt in Karazhan, my rogue.

I am getting excited about my next project: Go go Champion-title! It basically is a concerted effort to get a Gruul and Magtheridon kill, two bosses that my guild couldn’t possibly raid on its own. But apparently they must like me that much after all that we are going full-force, filling the rest of the raid slots with friends from our guild alliance. I should note that even though we have a 25-man raid alliance, few of the girls regularly go. Excited! Now gimme all your advice for Gruul, okay? I have off-tanked in the Highking Maulgar fight once, which was not so exciting. Tanking Blindeye the Seer was not the highlight of my tanking career.

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. :))

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.

Yesterday we continued trying our luck in ZA, and it went quite nicely (from a very super-casual raiding standpoint). On our third try we got Halazzi down, and there was much cheering. I am so proud of my girls. For a bunch of girls who only raid every other weekend we’re pretty good, if you ask me.

Our problem in previous attempts had been that DPS went down very quickly in phase 2, due to range problems. Once we made all DPS hang out in the back where the lynx was tanked as well, maximum zappage from the totems was avoided, the healers rejoiced, and Halazzi went down. My tanking must have been a bit sloppy as I ate 8 crushes, but other than that, I was pretty happy with my avoidance on this fight.

We then moved on to Jan’alai, tried him over and over again, and got him to like…75% in our best attempt? Something like that. Our raid composition is not ideal for Jan’alai as we currently have no paladin tank. Tank-wise our tanking corps for raids is four protection warriors and one feral druid, and only two tanks are ZA-ready, protection warriors. Our lone raiding paladin is holy-spec, an amazing healer with a decent tank set, but we really need her heals. We did try to have her put her tank set on and tank the dragonhawks, but then there was not enough raid healing. I think next time we might consider it again, but swap me out for my druid so I can provide healing instead of lame DPS. It just sucks that we’ll have to stack the raid differently for one specific boss, but that’s the world of raiding, I guess.

The biggest problem I had while tanking the dragonhawks was that I was completely unable to see the fire bombs. When you have the huge blob of angry dragonhawks on you, it’s really hard to see the ground. Tricky. Anyone here a prot warrior who has successfully tanked the dragonhawks? I used Stormchops and Darkmoon Card: Vengeance but I am not sure it made a difference. I certainly was completely unable to hold the dragonhawks against AoE damage, despite tab-Devastating like crazy.

In other news, I managed to complete part one of my rogue’s honor grind for Merciless Gladiator’s Slicer. The next project is to get the honor for Merciless Gladiator’s Quickblade. It’s half the honor of the main hand, so it shouldn’t take me too long. I respec’d to a Shadowstep build, which is ridiculous amounts of fun, both for farming and PvP (if you can call the later fun). I am excited about the prospect of taking her to Karazhan very soon.

In yet more news, my guild lost our two best-geared mages in one fell swoop. The first one transferred off, the second one decided to switch her focus to her newly 70 resto shaman on another server, to raid there. I am disappointed, especially about the departure of the latter mage, as I was very fond of her, and she was the most-skilled frost mage I ever had the pleasure of playing with.

We could use more druid mains, more mage mains. We haven’t got a single raiding druid main, they’re all alts of raiders whose mains we need. We have one mage who will start raiding soon, and that’s it so far. Strangely enough, our alliance sister-guild (they’re 5/6 in ZA) has tons of druid mains, also a lot more mages than we have.

We managed to have the good times as we celebrated our guild’s 3rd anniversary. I’ve been with Daughters of the Horde for more than two of those years, and our parties always rock and always have me in stitches.

This year’s anniversary location was one of the pirate ships off the Barrens coast. The only game purpose is the horde rogue lockpicking quest, there are no mobs, the ship was ours!

As party organizers, the SO and I had set a pirate theme, so most guildies who arrived were in costume. Some even completely matched. The turn-out would likely have been better if it hadn’t been the long weekend, many people were out of town.

We hosted a pirate triathlon. First part was a fashion show, second part a pirate performance, and third part an impromptu pirate poem. I can honestly say that I was in stitches all through the triathlon, it was fabulous.

We also had some fierce fishslapping duels, even though you cannot see the fish even equipped. Lame! Give us some fish!

After some shoots of group photos, we decided that real pirates need bounty, and we decided to storm Orgrimmar.

Like a train we rushed through Durotar, arrived in Orgrimmar and began summoning Infernals and even a Doomguard, to demand plunder. Some people actually walked up to us and offered us gold (which I found hilarious).

Ultimately, this party renewed my love for my guild. Sure, sometimes I get frustrated, sometimes I wish we raided more, sometimes I wish that there were more mains and less alts, but in the end, I have never had so much fun in WoW than at the side of this select group of girls. Best. Guild. Ever.