Tank like a girl

When I posted about my guild’s progress in Ulduar this weekend when I was all bubbly and excited, I soon got a downer that really aggravated me. A comment was left cheering the badge changes, making such progress as we had this weekend possible. I resented the implication then and I resent it now. I realize the comment was not meant to denigrate our success as a result of patch 3.2 alone, but it sure sounds like it. I hate pats on the back, but really adore genuine congratulations.

Gevlon, the probably most…hated is probably not the right word, but certainly the most contentious WoW blogger out there, was out to prove that skill > gear, and his guild did that by clearing Ulduar-10 wearing nothing but blue gear.

Impressive feat, isn’t it? And it certainly shows that knowing your class, skill in playing in is a lot more important than any gear upgrades.

Now, I won’t lie, I have received upgrades recently. Let’s look at them in detail.

• New helmet. Effective gain: 5 strength, 65 armor, 10 defense, 70 parry, 54 hit. Lost 27 stamina.
• New bracers. Effective gain: 25 stamina, 56 armor, 2 defense, 27 parry, 39 hit. Losing 2 strength, 19 dodge.
• New chest. Effective gain: 36 stamina, 32 strength, 107 armor, 153 block value, 4 defense, 60 parry. Losing 47 dodge, 38 block.
• New gloves. Effective gain: 40 stamina, 9 strength, 66 armor, 17 defense, 56 dodge, 49 hit. Losing 43 parry, 30 expertise, 1 socket.
• New ring. Effective gain: 26 stamina, 34 parry, 26 expertise. Losing 2 strength, 25 defense, 4 dodge.
• New cloak. Effective gain: 9 stamina, 4 armor, 38 defense, 32 hit. Losing 12 dodge, 21 expertise.
• New trinket. Effective gain: 15 stamina, plus a frequent armor proc.

Summary: Gained 10 strength, 298 armor aka a damage reduction of 1.76%, 46 defense rating aka 9.35 defense skill, 148 parry rating aka 3.27% parry, 99 stamina aka 990 health, 174 hit (essentially not important for a warrior tank). I lost 25 expertise rating aka 3 expertise (which hurts a lot more than gaining hit outweighs) and 26 dodge rating, aka .57% dodge.

The most dramatic change is the amount of parry. But this is because Blizzard is pushing parry as a stat, when it previously was the redheaded-stepchild of avoidance stats that no one was actively gearing for as you got the lowest bang for the buck.

Parry and dodge are essentially the same for me now, when previously I had a lot more dodge. I phased out more dodge gear in the last couple weeks. I phased out pretty much all of my T7. Looking at the cold numbers I see that my gear improved, but not so dramatically. My avoidance evened out to include another stat. I was able to re-gem because of extra defense, for more effective health. I did not gain dramatic amounts of armor that would suddenly make me take tiny hits.

Gevlon is right when he says all of us are too focused on purples and numbers. I know that a few of our raiders have been grinding heroics for badges every day. Some haven’t at all. Some got maybe one upgrade. Extra mana, attack power, crit, haste, spellpower, they’ll have helped us, sure! But coordinated damage on elementals, focusing on Detonating Lashers and switching to Eonar’s Gift on Freya is not accomplished by gear. The players behind the wheel do that.

The previous week we did not get Thorim down because we had gazillions of adds in the arena and were overwhelmed before the gauntlet team cleared the Ancient Runegiant. Arena was no problem this week, because we had an excellent melee team, including our extremely skilled paladins. On Saturday we did not get Thorim down because adds would kill the gauntlet healer or someone would die in Shockwave. This has everything to do with skill (in this case I failed at picking up adds) and intelligently responding to things like fire/voidzones/poison/shockwave/all sorts of other crap. On Sunday we had two battle resurrections available because we had two druids, so it’s also a question of composition.

Maybe the ultimate revelation is that my guild runs gear requirements, and there are certain limits that you should have reached for raiding, but the most important delimiter for me these days is experience. Earn experience in Naxx, learn to acquire skill, rock the house.

For more thoughts about this, check out what Gravity has to say, and RJK.

And now it’s time to lean back and to find out if Tobold really turns out to be Gevlon, which would be just as shocking as the Ferraro scandal.

As I have posted before, 5-man content is probably my favorite content. Give me a good guild group, and heroics are the most awesome fun that you can have. Hell, even Suckulus was fun, if really frustrating. WotLK did a lot of great things with 5-mans. The length is ideal, they’re fast-paced, they’re diverse. Good job. On the other hand, I personally find it too easy to get into heroics, people diving on the first day at 80 is common, and for a casual player it takes away some of my personal sense of progression. The latter might just be me.

The reward ratio for running heroics is great. You get Emblems of Heroism, and the gear drops are clearly superior to normal instances, and sometimes on-par with 10-man raid drops. The emblem gear offers a relatively small selection of great items to gear up with, including T7 tokens for the perpetually unlucky or those who’d rather not count on RNG to get their bonuses. I personally was never concerned about the low number of things you could buy for your emblems, I reckoned the emblem vendors would receive fresh gear sometime. It’s here where I was completely wrong apparently.

In 3.1, Blizzard is introducing the Emblem of Conquest. Said emblems will drop in the new 25-mans, that is Ulduar and whoever that new Wintergrasp boss is going to be eventually. People who run Ulduar-10 will get Emblems of Valor off every boss, the currency that’s currently used in all existing 25-mans. Ulduar-10 raiders are supposed to gear up with the Valor reward gear that current 25-man raiders are already wearing. There will be no gear on either the Valor and the Heroism vendors.

What does this mean for the crowd that likes to run heroics? It means that you will sit on a large pile of emblems that you can only use to buy heirloom items for twinks, blue gems (which will likely go worthless when epic gems are released), or frozen orbs. I’m already at a point where I have spent emblems on everything that I wanted and am now only pondering offspec gear. I understand the reason, I do. It’s to fight the battle of complaints from the raiding hardcore, how casuals were able to get gear on par with T5 without ever setting foot into SSC or Tempest Keep. Badge-farming in Kara was hip back then, easy content rushed through for badges. I mean, when WotLK hit I was wearing all the Sunwell badge gear, some pretty great pieces of gear. I am not crying because I want uber-awesome epics for my heroics fun-time. I just want something more, something new for people who primarily run heroics. Fun-toys, non-combat pets, something.

The emblem change has already taken the wind out of my sails in regards to running heroics. I just got the Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement. I could try the heroic achievements for the proto-drake, but that’s about it. I won’t be the only one feeling like that. The raiders certainly won’t want to run heroics at all, why bother? For me it makes heroics pointless, until they add more 5-mans, if that’s in the books at all.

Will you continue to run heroics when 3.1 hits the live realms?

Yesterday, I had a pretty bad day WoW-wise. Rarely ever have I felt so defeated about this game that so many of us play. Through it all, I have come to a couple observations about me and WoW 3.0. Prepare for a lot of QQ, and rest assured that I will go back to informative or entertaining posts soon. But this is boiling inside of me, it’s my blog, it’s got to come out.

1. I love tanking. Above all. Kadomi will always be my first love. Everything else might be fun, but Kadomi is my main. Not getting to play her in raids is breaking my heart and sapping my will to push my guild to raid.

2. I think the easy approach to raiding is totally backfiring, especially for casual guilds like mine. In TBC when we first started doing 10-man raids, none of us had been in Karazhan, other than maybe one or two people. It was this big thing that we did together. Same with Zul’Aman. I still remember the overwhelming feeling of triumph when we first got down Hex-Lord Malacrass together. I loved it. But that’s not how raiding is panning out in WotLK. Right now, we have people who are struggling to get geared but are finally getting there, and then we have people who PUG raids. Stuff like Naxx and OS, but even Eye of Eternity. When we will now finally start Naxx this weekend, it will be with people in the raid who approach raids as something that you PUG for loot, as if they were just bigger versions of heroics, not something that you want to conquer with 9 friends. I am casual for a reason, with a hardcore mentality to raiding, but above all, I just want to encounter new challenges and see content, together with friends. I have spoken to friends from other casual guilds that raid (as opposed to casual raiding guilds), and they have similar feelings. It’s very disheartening.

3. Along with the PUG issue comes another issue I never ever thought I’d see happen to us: people signing up for our raids and then getting locked to another raid’s ID. Isn’t that just great? Screw tanking, Kadomi, your best-geared healer just had to got asked to do the 8-man Naxx achievement with another guild, forgetting about our very own raid, so prepare yourself to be healbot again. Now I am stuck with having to make a raid work somehow, by bowing out of the tanking spot I so badly crave. I am no longer a main tank, I am now a raid healer, not of my own choosing completely.

Edit: Some of that paragraph was written in massive anger and did not reflect entirely how things went down. Valuable lesson learnt, don’t blog when you’re really angry.

4. Three years on a US server, 9 hours ahead of my own timezone are finally getting to me. I am tired of late late hours when I want to run anything. Would most of you guys stay up til 4 am to run a heroic? I think not. I am tired of twiddling my thumbs when I get home from work because the server is deserted. The siren song of my German friends trying to lure me back to picking up my characters on Forscherliga is getting more attractive. But I would miss Kadomi. So many hours, days, weeks, months of my life invested into her. I would miss my Bronzebeard friends. I tried the EU approach before and loved playing in my timezone, but I missed playing Kadomi so much, and my German guild tried to turn me into a four nights a week T5 raider, which was too much for me, so I quit.

I recently had reason to compare tanking of the past to current tanking, trying to help someone with their TPS. Just like my anti-parry gem crusade, it hasn’t quite worked out, which has me quite a bit upset, but that’s another story. It leads me to look at the evolution of prot warrior tanking in WoW. As caveat, I did not raid in vanilla, nor did I tank a lot, so I only remember the basics.

Tanking has changed a lot from when I rolled my very first warrior in summer of 2005. I was full of naivete, wanted to tank, and leveled protection, fool that I was. Back then, you really only had one tanking class, the warrior, and many of them weren’t even protection. Druids used to be resto, back before there were trees, and paladins leveled retribution and went healbot at 60 as well. Back then, the classic expression in 5-mans was ‘hold DPS til 3 Sunders’. The basic tools we still have today existed then as well, they were just a bit more limited. Simpler days. Sunder spam was very common. I am curious what raid tanking was like back then, if any of you oldtimers want to share, please do!

TBC was in the air, and with 2.0 warriors saw big changes. We got Devastate as ultimate talent. Originally best used once you had a full stack of sunders on, later then changed to replace Sunder completely. We got Thunderclap to be used in defensive stance, to help with multi-mob tanking. We suddenly had two very strong contenders for tanking spots, and it was good. Tanking was not easier than in vanilla WoW, and still mostly done with threat coefficients on abilities, not damage. By the end of TBC, the best rotation for tanking was well established: Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Devastate, rinse and repeat.

Since October, we’ve been in the 3.0 tanking world. This was a rather drastic change that requires a complete change of mind, away from rotations, welcome, embrace prioritizing our abilities. Devastate spam is no longer king, instead we try to get in as many Shield Slams as we can, use Revenge, use Concussion Blow and Shockwave, and maximize our DPS for more TPS. You won’t have the DPS output of a well-played and geared DPSer, but you should give them a run for their money. That’s playing your class to the full potential. It’s an awesome time to be a tank, but it can also be stressful, as DPS expectations are very high. In a way, this easy AoE tanking for all four tank classes is a trap. It means DPS expects to be able to start the smackdown without waiting at all, and people looking at Omen get more rare.

What I am trying to say is that we have seen 3 incarnations of protection warrior throughout the different game versions. It’s a new game now, and you’re doing yourself and your groups and your raid a disservice if you are not trying to be as informed and open to the different changes that have come upon us. Know your class. Don’t tell people to wait for three sunders. That’s so 2005. Don’t spam Devastate and ignore abilities that are much higher on the priority list. That’s so 2007. Prioritize your use of Shield Slam > Revenge > Concussion Blow > Shockwave > Devastate, on bosses and trash. That’s so 2009. Just do it. I know you can break old habits.

When I play WoW, I really prefer utility roles. I love to tank, and I have come to love healing. That said, I firmly believe that DPS is just as crucial. DPS can’t just coast along in 5-mans, they can make or break a group. DPS too low? Healer will go out of mana trying to keep the tank up, or group damage will become too much to heal. A tank will eventually run out of ‘Oh shit’ buttons the longer a fight lasts. This is not a grand revelation, anyone who enjoys group play in WoW should know this for a fact. A group with low DPS will fail frequently.

Why do I post this common fact? Because I stumbled over a statement from a DPSer I know that I so violently disagree with that it prompts me to post:

I have never given a shit about where I stand in the DPS meters. If the boss died, and I’m last on the meters, but THE BOSS DIED, who the fuck cares? Out of all the DPS, someone has to be last.

 
ORLY? Give me a group of 5 people, all of the DPS think that way, and watch that group fail fail fail. If you choose to play a DPS class in WoW, your character does damage. That’s the primary purpose. Improving your character means you improve your DPS. You do more damage, everyone benefits. If you do not care about your personal damage and do not want to push yourself to do more damage, what’s the point of playing a damage class in any group environment. I get that a lot of people play WoW as a glorified single player game. I have been there, when I started playing WoW I quested and avoided groups. But as soon as you move into groups, start discovering the fun of instances, raiding and shiny loot, it should matter to you how well you perform.

I am not saying that damage meters are the end all be all. I can’t stand DPSers who spam the meters after every pull or request that you report info repeatedly. But ultimately, you should look at Recount, see your personal DPS, and make sure that you improve and that you perform to the best of your abilities. If that’s not something you enjoy, why play in groups?