Tank like a girl

With the pre-Wrath patch right around the corner, sounds like the raiding doom and gloom predictions are starting. Aylii over at World of Matticus has posted a summary why she believes the patch will end raiding as we currently know it.

While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the points, I do of course worry what this will mean for warrior threat, and that is indeed looking dire. With a piddly attack power of under 700 in my tanking gear, which has virtually no strength, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with DPS anymore. I guess it’s spotlight for the feral druids until we can get some Northrend gear. Gah. However, I also believe that Blizzard will be aware of this fact. The prot warrior revision isn’t in the beta yet. I shall continue to have faith.

What I am also concerned about is that right as my guild is planning to raid a little bit more often, we might be running out of time. I have bosses left to kill in Zul’Aman still, yo.

My guild’s current progression, if you can call it, is sitting firmly in Zul’Aman. That’s where the real challenges lie for us. On Saturday we started, and I had been hoping to make a serious attempt at the first chest. We chose Bear for that, but sadly we weren’t even close. Nalorakk’s second lookout pull was started when I wasn’t with the group yet, half the raid wiped on it, and then we wiped three or four times on the pull before Nalorakk. We had 3 hunters in the raid that were all struggling with trapping the Medicine Man. The other was chain-feared, which worked nicely. We really need to get a mage in there, sad but true. Nalorakk himself proved no challenge, the only challenge was the rolling for the hunter shoulders that he dropped, as we had three hunters.

Onwards we moved to Eagle. Our warlock died very early in the gauntlet, and so did our holy paladin, but we somehow managed to push through, warlock and paladin ran back and we made it, albeit slowly. Akil’zon himself hated us, people died, it was chaos and it took us five tries to get him down, including a second clearing of the gauntlet. In the final try, everything finally worked very smoothly and he died. He dropped Mojo-mender’s Mask, which our paladin took, and it might be the most ridiculous looking thing I have ever seen.

We didn’t have any problems with the Halazzi trash and soon enough we were standing in front of the Lynx himself. Again, we needed a couple tries to warm up, but on the fourth try he went down. All in all, not bad, we can kill the first three now, in not too much time. We definitely need to work on our execution on Akil’zon and Halazzi though, to reduce the time we need.

As our raid weekends are always two days, we went back in yesterday, with the plan to learn how to kill Dragonhawk without a paladin tank. Our first problem was the trash. No druid, no mage = scout hell. We had super chaotic pulls, and wiped several times on two bigger pulls. The one where they throw a ball at the dragonhawk, and the pull just before Jan’alai. Trapping really doesn’t work so great in that area, it was a mess. In any case, we made it to the boss, painfully, but we made it.

I had been shopping for this day, for the Petrified Lichen Guard, and I put a Felsteel Shield Spike on it. I wore my Darkmoon Card: Vengeance, ate my Stormchops, was as ready as you can ever be.

We spent 13 tries on Jan’alai, our best had him at 39%. In that try, we had gone for the slow approach of egg hatching, which left us with one side cleared and the other untouched. He was at 39%, we tried a DPS stop, but then the tank went down and it was over. We always hit the soft enrage, so healers had somewhat of a strain to keep the other warrior up. I saw she got crushed a lot, but given his increased attack speed, that’s probably one of the risks. So we changed our strategy. We needed to hatch the eggs faster, so that we could focus on the man himself. In all attempts from there on, we would clear the first side in two hatchings. Let me tell you how sad-making that is as tank. I didn’t feel I did too great a job, but no one died from the dragonhawks, so that’s good. According to WWS, the shield, shield spike, Stormchops and Darkmoon Card all procd quite a bit.

However, our problems with the second side are immense, I could use some advice there. It usually went to hell in a handbasket once we switched sides. What usually happened was that just when about 10 dragonhawks were hatched, Jan’alai would use fire bombs, the fire wall would go up, and the hatcher happily hatched every single egg and we couldn’t do anything about it. This happened several times in a row. Would you slow down the hatching at this point and hatch the eggs a lot more slowly? I think that’s what we’ll have to do to avoid situations like this. I am not sure.

The good thing is that we went home feeling better about not having a paladin tank and that we think we will be able to do this eventually. Despite the countless wipes/resets that we did, no one was in a bad mood, and we all felt we learned something from it. Next time we’re gonna get you, Jan’alai, even without a paladin. Once we can get the second side hatched as well, we’re gonna rock this.

And still, all night I dreamt of dragonhawks, chasing after them in my dreams.

Guess what, I now have successfully been main tank for all of the T4 content. Hooray! That would well fit into the category ‘Never thought that was gonna happen’.

My guild doesn’t have enough raiders to fill a 25-man so we have a guild alliance with Straw Hat Pirates, a bunch of casual, great guys. A lot of spouses of the girls are actually guild members there. They’ve been dabbling in SSC and TK, and maybe 5 of our girls regularly join them. Their raid times don’t match what I can make at all, so all hopes of getting the Champion title died a while back.

Still, DotH has managed to consistently get more raiders who are running Karazhan, so I decided just to check if maybe we could shoot for a raid time I can make and raid the two T4 25-mans under our lead. Sure enough, about 18 people expressed interest. A few people had to cancel, but we still managed to bring in 15 of our girls, and fill the rest with people from SHP.

Once we got it all underway, clearing trash didn’t take too long and we ended up facing High King Maulgar and his buddies. Misdirects and tank targets were assigned, everyone was positioned, I was just about to do a ready check and bam, our mage tank already started the countdown. Hats off to everyone that the pull went well even with the sudden start, and HKM and buddies went down on the first try. That was the point where I stopped being anxious, because everyone was relaxed, had fun, it was cool.

HKM dropped two Defender tokens and I actually won the roll, but seeing as the other prot warrior in my guild who was still wearing Warchief’s Mantle for tanking rolled a 6, I gave her my token instead. I still really want those shoulders, but I’d rather see the token go to someone with dire need than me who doesn’t need them that badly.

 

On we moved to Gruul, and oh boy, is he fun when you have never done him before. The first try was over at 52%, the off-tank died relatively early and so Gruul took out all the melee with Hurtful Strikes. The second try was similar, only it was me dying to a Shatter fairly early before I learned that I can already switch to berserker stance while flying through the air, to Intercept back on Gruul immediately after landing. Still, it was a 45% wipe, an improvement. On the third try, I went down at 30ish% for lack of heals and the raid got him to 5%. How frustrating is that? Pretty frustrating. But it was pretty obvious we were getting a lot better at this. Considering that almost half the raid hadn’t been here yet, I thought that was pretty awesome. And thus came try number four, tanking-wise everything went perfectly for me, and at 12 growths he was down. Huzzah! Of course, he was lame and didn’t drop my shield, but I got Gauntlets of Martial Perfection as consolation prize.

 

Three people from my guild left, but everyone else was eager for more, so we brought in replacements and decided to give Magtheridon a shot as well. That was more than I had dreamed of, and I was really woefully unprepared to lead such a fight. Hats off to Farashin from SHP, husband of one of our girls, who was wonderful at explaining the fight, who helped with assigning the cube clickers, and who was totally on top of Blast Wave warnings.

On our first try, I went down like immediately, because I tried to position Magtheridon properly once he was released, and got hit with an 11k Cleave. The second try went well, I really thought we had it in the bag, and then him reaching 30% and a Blast Wave happened at the same time. Very bad, haha. On try number three we had a DPS stop at 35%, waited for the Blast Wave and then burned him down. The raid really executed this so well, it was pretty amazing. As for the tanking, Mag crushes are really painful (10k+, oh my), I had too many of them, but I think my threat output was really pretty good. I did not quite find the ’sweet spot’ Farashin tried to show me and got flung around a bit too much, but overall, it went well.

I got another drop for my DPS set, Thundering Greathelm, which is pretty nice. I was still using the Overlord’s Helmet of Second Sight. Sadly I had only the second-highest roll on the gems, so the shiny Empyrean Sapphire went to someone else and I got a Shadowsong Amethyst. Now I have to look through the Gem Finder to find a good cut for that.

 

Then afterwards we did a very quick clear to Skar’this the Heretic in Heroic Slave Pens. I was a bit on auto-pilot there, as it was going on 3 am for me. Turned in the quest, blinked as nothing happened, but with a bit of delay, there it was, the message I had wanted to hear. Aaaaah.

 

More screenshots tomorrow once I am not as exhausted as I currently am. Short version. HKM one-shot, Gruul in fourth try, Mags in third try, and then cleared to quest giver in H SP. I had a blast, but it was very draining.

Today, I’ll be MTing Gruul’s Lair for the first time. Not only that, but I’ll be raid leader, and I don’t know most of the people from our partner guild that are helping us out. I am still trying to balance healers with DPS in the sign-up. I am beyond nervous.

Ooooommmmm, it will all be good, we will rock the house, I will get the Aldori Legacy Defender and another step to Champion of the Naaru will be completed.

Think that mantra will work? That’d be cool.

Been busy busy, with nothing really. Based on our raid schedule, it would have been time for ZA, but as posted before, that fell through. Instead, it was time for Karazhan, for gearing more people. On first day Karazhan, we had a protection warrior and my partner’s druid as tanks. A lucky bear is now owner of the very shiny Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch, which incidentally was also my very first tanking drop in Karazhan. I was there with my rogue alt, and had a good time poking sharp swords at things. Things I learned were that Curator really sucks ass as rogue. I shall dub my troll rogue Angel of Death, because that’s what it felt like chasing after flares and bringing more damage to everyone in its path.

As amusing anecdote, I proudly proclaimed we would get R&J in Opera, and that I needed Romulo’s Poison Vial, and incidentally, this is exactly what we got and what dropped. I am a very loot-lucky person!

On Sunday, I was MT with my partner being OT again. In the process, she got gear off almost every single boss, including the squicky yet tasty Hentai Staff. Nightbane sucked as usual and took us three tries to kill him. I wonder if other tanks have a nemesis like that. I am literally so terrified of effin’ up on Nightbane that I make really idiotic mistakes. Every landing I end up using Thunderclap too early and I get heartstopping moments of him heading towards a healer before changing his mind in the last second. I don’t know if that’s because of Misdirect or me having a latency of 1200 ms yesterday. Maybe the effect of TC came through very late? I do not know, but Nightbane always manages to successfully use Demoralizing Shout on me in RL. The shadowpriest with the ancient Omen version getting aggro didn’t help with raising my mood.

We had one unlucky wipe on Netherspite, as people kept dying, but the second try was flawless. Same with Prince. Some miscommunication about what direction the raid should run to for avoiding an Infernal and sucky placement. Second try was fast and flawless again. We only had two healers, which can get tight in phase 2, but I was really boggling because I noticed no spikes whatsoever. I didn’t even have to use Last Stand because my health just didn’t seem to budge all that much. And just as I was marveling about the beauty of the healing and praising the healers on Vent, phase 2 was over already.

Afterwards I uploaded WWS as usual and got all happy and excited. Yes, I am just that girly. This number of just one crushing blow is pretty huge for me. Because he’s dual-wielding in phase 2, you can get very unlucky with Shield Block charges getting eaten up, leaving you open for the dreaded crushing blows that can cause very sudden damage spikes. As comparison, when I first tanked Prince, as scrub with little to no badge gear, I ate 20 crushes during our firstkill of him.

Yay for my DotH girls, as this was our fastest ever Prince kill with the highest DPS output we ever had on him, 4502.

On to Gruul next Saturday, I am pretty excited already. We have 16 sign-ups from my guild, two friends who will come for sure, and the seven open slots we will likely fill with *gasp* boys from our partner guild, Straw Hat Pirates. Let’s see if I can remain almost uncrushable on Gruul. Haha, who am I kidding? More like let’s see how long I can survive Growths before he makes mash of me.

After the raid ended, I randomly decided to do dailies on Isle of Quel’Danas and managed to hit Exalted with SSO. I went ahead and bought Dawnforged Defender and Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve, but the latter leaves me unconvinced. The problem is that I am Exalted with Aldor, and the Aldor proc kinda goes against the itemization design of such a threat necklace. Dodge, huh? I am going to give it a shot, but if I end up being rage-starved, I’ll finally save up badges for Brooch of Deftness as threat necklace. I am currently saving up for Ring of the Stalwart Protector, only seven badges to go. I always meant to buy the brooch as I had all other badge gear, and then 2.4 happened.

Now someone find me a list of badge picking order for rogues, much like Veneretio’s awesome list, okay?

Out of three possible Opera encounters, I would say this is probably the one best suited for warrior tanks. It requires a lot of coordination from the raid, and good interrupts, plus dispellers.

This is a two tank encounter. If there’s only one warrior tank, she should be on Julianne duty for interrupts. If you have more than one warrior (or none), the better geared tank should be on Romulo.

Assuming you’re on Julianne duty, you tank her normally but pay close attention to her spellcasting. She will cast Blinding Passion a lot, which is a random holy attack with a DoT component that you can just let her cast. If it’s on you, you can spell reflect it (if you’re a warrior). But the moment you see her cast Eternal Affection, you must stop it and interrupt it by using Shield Bash. Ideally, you have at least one more interrupt available, I like sticking rogues on Julianne duty. If you have a second interrupt available, discuss an interrupt rotation. You don’t want to let a heal go through, especially not in phase 3.

 

Phase 1 is over quickly. Julianne is a cloth-wearer and doesn’t have much health. Cue the Romulo tank who has to stand ready to use Thunderclap, Demo Roar or Consecrate to immediately pick up Romulo. It is best to tank him against the wall by the stage entrance. You want your back against the wall to avoid his knockback. He deals a lot of physical damage, so having high armor will help here. If Daring is Purged/Dispelled once up, you shouldn’t have too much trouble. It also helps to have a shaman, druid or paladin remove the poison he applies.

Phase 2 ends with Romulo dead but remain by his corpse. R&J will show up together. Both tanks need to be ready to pick up their targets immediately, by using the usual methods of AoE threat and then start off with a high threat move. You especially do not want Romulo in the raid, he is painful.

Julianne’s health should go down a lot faster than Romulo’s, so it is entirely possible that a DPS stop will be called. If that’s the case, make sure that you as J-tank remain on top of her aggro list, only use Auto-Attack, and Shield Bash her heals. Here’s where having MT frames really helps so that you can closely watch the targets’ health. You do not want them to die outside of that narrow five seconds window. If your raid can time this procedure correctly, those two are very manageable.

Lootwise, aside from the Eternium Greathelm any Opera boss can drop, there’s really only one thing worth mentioning: Romulo’s Poison Vial. If all your physical DPS already has it or are hit-capped, it can make an interesting threat trinket for a trash tanking set.

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.

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. :))