Tank like a girl

Today’s tank is another healer who has discovered the joys of tanking. An alliance shaman by night, she raids with us during the day as Lashe. Like Shiawase from last week, she is in our sister guild over on alliance side and one of their raid leaders. They actually dared push to 7/12 in ICC now, one boss ahead of us. This cannot be! But anyway, I will let Lashe continue, she of the overpowered threat of Icy Touch.

I started playing WoW the first week it was released. Almost right from the beginning I chose to play a healer. Throughout the years I’ve been playing I became very comfortable with healing, and also fairly decent at dps when I wasn’t healing. But, there was one last role out there taunting me (hyuk) – the ever elusive tanking role.

Tanking had always intimidated me, and seemed like it would always be out of my reach. I am a healer! I don’t take damage, and tanking is HARD. I always had a close bond with the tanks I would heal, but I felt like I would never be able to do the job very well myself. So, I never gave it a chance.

Time went on, WotLK hit, and I continued healing. I still enjoyed healing, but I started feeling like I needed to find something more challenging in the game. I knew that it was time to swallow my fear and give tanking a shot finally.

The thing is, I didn’t plan for Lashe to be my tanky character. I was just playing her for fun, leveling her with my brother. I had never wanted to play Lashe much outside of the realm of leveling. I had heard all the negativity surrounding the Death Knight class and I had always refused to play the “popular class”, or to play the class that others may look down on.

But, I fell in love. Everything about the DK class was so exciting, I loved everything about it. The runes, the diseases, how all the spells worked with the diseases, the self-healing… everything. Every single time I played Lashe, I fell more and more in love with her and her play style.

At one point, someone in guild was putting together a group run of Underbog and was looking for a tank. I figured I might as well give it a shot since they were having a hard time finding one. I had already decided I wanted to tank.. why not try it on Lashe? I scrounged around the AH quickly, made a quick Frost tank spec, and asked for DK tanking tips from my guildies on my way in:

“Keep DnD down!”

That’s pretty much all the tips I got, haha. So, I kept DnD down, and spastic-ly pressed buttons and it was one of the most noob experiences of my WoW life. But I had fun and knew that this was just the beginning.

When I hit 80, I felt added pressure to be “perfect” so that I wouldn’t be lumped in with the the DK’s out there who gave us a bad name. So I was constantly researching, making sure I was doing everything correctly, and tanking heroics whenever I felt the courage. Slowly but surely I finally got up to the point where I could tank raids.

My first raid tanking experience was with DotH. I tanked Ulduar alongside Kadomi, and she made me feel so comfortable.. Giving me lots of tips on how to pull certain groups, whether to face them away from the group or not, etc. I was so nervous going into that raid cause I wanted to do well and was convinced they would ban me from raids forever if I made any mistakes, ha. But the raid went well, I didn’t fall on my face, and it was the start of a BEAUTIFUL relationship! *music starts*

I am currently one of the progression tanks for our ICC runs, and I’ve really settled into my role! I no longer get stressed out about tanking raids, my neck doesn’t have a permanent cramp like it used to while tanking (I was so tense feeling like I would wipe the raid at any moment!). It’s been a blast, and I am having fun discovering new bosses and mechanics with my guild, and working to master Death Knight tanking more and more as we move along.

Now that I’ve beaten a long and flowery path around the bush, I will get down to the whole point of this blog post! Why do I like Death Knight tanking?

Honestly, I could go on and on about it. I love the micromanagement of the diseases and runes. I love that there are 3 tank specs that can suit everyone’s different tanking styles or raid needs (until Cataclysm hits anyway!). I loooove the proactive cooldowns. I have gotten quite addicted to my cooldowns and love hitting them every chance I get. It adds a whole new level to tanking for me: planning ahead in fights and trying to time my cooldowns to help with burst damage etc. Blood’s self-healing goes right along with the same feeling I have for my cooldowns. I try hard to time my heals with spike damage so that I can hopefully help the healers out even a little bit. I love Frost’s AOE (another thing I will miss in Cata). I love having DeathGrip so that I can pull those pesky casters to me!

I also love that I am not a master at my class, I am always learning something new and am constantly working to improve. It is definitely the challenge I was looking for when I was thinking about tanking, and I can’t imagine going back.

I got some very positive feedback on last week’s post, especially from female tanks, so I am very happy to continue this week. Guild tank number 2 I would like to introduce to you is Shiawase. Her main is an Arms warrior, so she’s very familiar with my own class, but she’s also an excellent paladin tank. She’s also one of the raid leaders of our sister guild on alliance side on our realm Bronzebeard, and an all around awesome person I am happy to call my friend. Now, paladins are somewhat the…hm, arch-nemesis of warriors in some respects, as they are so strong in all the areas that warriors are weaker. I have certainly done my share of whining when tanking alongside a paladin, because it can get frustrating. But ultimately, we’re one team, we tank, we rock the house. Enough of my ramblings, I shall let the belf take over my blog now.

The first time I walked into a raid to tank was in the days of vanilla WoW, for Zul’Gurub. I was tanking the snake boss on my warrior… and… it was awesome! I had so much fun taking the hits instead of dishing them out for once, and needing to use my abilities to keep the boss’ attention on me and to stay alive was pleasantly different!

Now, that wasn’t actually my entrance into tanking as a main spec, but that feeling stayed by me and it was something I wanted to experience again. That didn’t come until months later, well into The Burning Crusade. I told myself I needed to finally make a horde character that I didn’t abandon at level 20 and see what life was like on that side of the fence.

Today, that character is Shiawase, my blood elf paladin. At a glance, you wouldn’t think that she could hold up against a boss like Onyxia. She’s so tiny! Surely the dragon could just eat her? Thankfully, Shiawase has holy magic on her side. At least, that’s how I explain it.

What I enjoy so much as a paladin in a raid is that tanking doesn’t have to be my only job. I have a wide variety of abilities that are useful in particular situations – many of which come up regularly over the duration of a raid. Hand of Salvation for that Arms Warrior (because, bless their aggro-loving souls, they have no threat drop short of death); Lay on Hands the other tank when her health drops frighteningly low during an enrage; Blessing of Protection on that healer that attracted a couple too many adds.

Something I enjoy is feeling like my character is useful. I leveled up a druid in vanilla WoW so I could help heal when we were low on healers. I play an Arms warrior that gives some useful physical damage buffs (bonus: more fun to play than Fury (imo haha)). My paladin offers tanking to a guild that needs it – but with it I also have an arsenal of abilities that are unique to paladins that I can use to help my raid and maybe even save it from a wipe.

While tanking… I can multitask. That’s pretty awesome! It isn’t only related to raiding either… while doing heroics, I can easily tab out and chat in AIM since I have so much AoE threat I’ll probably never lose aggro…

…okay actually I’m sort of kidding on that last one.

But seriously, heroics on my paladin are a breeze, and that makes them fun. I have a warrior and her offspec is Protection, but you pretty much have to pay me (or be my sister and guilt me) to tank a pug on her. Just thinking about it makes me all stressed out and we’re not even at the point yet where none of the DPS are bothering to assist. My paladin takes the stress factor away. I’m consecrating, Hammer of the Righteous-ing, and Seal of Vengeance-ing myself to the second spot (well, sometimes the first) on the damage meters most of the time and I enjoy it because staying on top of threat doesn’t feel like a chore.

I originally leveled Shiawase to see what the Horde thing was all about. I decided I wanted to try out tanking. At level 80 I bounced between three specs, had rubbish gear for all of them, and didn’t know what to do with myself until finally I said to myself, “Hey you know, my guild needs tanks and you are halfway there. You liked this in the last expansion. Let’s do this thing.” I haven’t looked back since. It’s a good thing that Shiawase has that holy magic to protect her slight form from being immediately gobbled up by a dragon, because I intend to have her on the front lines, tanking the biggest and baddest bosses, for as long as I am playing World of Warcraft!

There aren’t really a multitude of addons out there that are specifically written to assist tanks. Today’s reviewed addons however are most helpful if you are a tank. I have been using them extensively for a month or two, and I fully endorse them. Originally I had wanted to make a companion video, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

Step 1: to use this, you need to run with name plates turned on. Press ‘V’ and enjoy seeing nameplates over the head of all neutral and hostile mobs.

Step 2: Install Tidy Plates, which is basically an addon to skin the default nameplates Blizzard gives us. TP’s default skin is extreme fug though, if you ask me.

Step 3: Install Tidy Plates: Threat as theme for Tidy Plates. You need to have both TP and the threat module enabled. Runs out of the box, but can be adjusted. You can turn off display of nameplates for neutral mobs, e.g., or adjust size, opacity for the various threat levels.

What does the skin do overall? It makes the nameplates respond based on the amount of threat you have on the mob. If you set the addon in tank mode, nameplates of mobs you currently do not have aggro on, are large and red. Mobs that are aggro’d on you but another player is just about to snag them off you will be framed in yellow. Mobs you hold safely have green frames. The less threat you have, the bigger the nameplate. Especially in AoE situations, this makes actually locating stray mobs very easy, and you can just click on the large nameplate for targetting. You can freely define the threat threshholds that will have the color and behavior of the nameplates change.

In my example screenshot, I have full control over the pull, all mobs are on me. I managed to frontload a lot of threat, the closest party member is only sitting at 4% threat. All green, all safe. But the less threat you have, the bigger the nameplate would be.

 
If you’re strugging in larger pulls, this is a fabulous visual aid, and I wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. On top of that, it has a low memory footprint and won’t tax your resources. Give it a spin or discuss it on Tankspot, as the author is specifically looking for feedback from us.

P.S.: if you are not of the tanking kind, the nameplates have a DPS mode, which means they would be all green for you, if your threat level was safe, and go yellow as soon as you gain threat on the tank to your personal warn level. Big and red when you have pulled aggro. Could be useful, right?

I got a 24″ widescreen monitor for Christmas, and it’s been since TBC since I discussed my whole UI, so expect a dissecting the UI post very soon.

P.S.S.: Another player who tanks like a girl made a demo video. Enjoy, and thanks for the link, Gabbu. Another review can be found over at Pwnwear.

I recently had reason to look over my achievements, and it’s really interesting, to kinda read my guild’s raiding story via achievement dates. My guild started raiding in Ulduar in June. Every second weekend we would venture into Ulduar, plodding through. In mid-June we had our first bigger success, clearing both Siege and Antechamber for the first time. We moved on to the Keepers and managed to get Hodir for the first time a month after first clearing Antechamber. Another month later, we got both Thorim and Freya. Yet another month later we got Mimiron, killing all Keepers. Vezax we killed the first day we worked on him, and since then we’ve been working on Yogg-Saron. We extended twice, re-cleared to him, extended again.

On November 29, we killed Yogg-Saron for the first time, earning us the Secrets of Ulduar achievement. Five months after starting. It sounds like a long time, but it doesn’t feel like it took us that long, because that’s 20 weeks, meaning 10 raid IDs or less. We used the extension feature (am very grateful to Blizzard for implementing this) for Mimiron and Yogg-Saron to squeeze in an extra raid day to work on them.

From a tank perspective, I feel Ulduar offers a lot of very interesting fights, and it’s still a fresher raid to me than Naxxramas will ever be. Despite the relative urge of ToC I can only urge all up and coming tanks to try and go see this beautiful raid instance.

My personal favorites:

• Hodir – It’s a very dynamic fight that requires a lot of movement, maneuvering him around to benefit from moonlight, while still busting ass to keep a threat lead and use of cooldowns for Frozen Blows.
• Thorim – The gauntlet is fast-paced good fun and I enjoy tanking in there. I have yet to tank the arena, and that’s alright, I think DKs and paladins are universally more suited to excel there.
• Mimiron – Another exciting fight where as a tank I feel I can shine. Use cooldowns properly for Plasma Blast, run out safely for Shock Blast, tank the head in P3, and then bring it all together in P4. Getting that first kill was exhilarating, and our first one-shot of him felt awesome.

I generally prefer fast paced fights that are not tank and spank, require movement and smart use of cooldowns. Where I have to struggle to stay alive and ahead in threat, without having to switch targets like crazy.

Fights I do not like that much:

• Ignis – This is mostly due to personal failure on Ignis. I suck at tanking adds in this fight. By the time I have gotten one add Brittle, another is already eating healers for breakfast. As we have an OT who easily handles all adds himself, it must be me. I still find Ignis tuned stupidly for his placement in the raid. Thumbs down from me.
• Freya – The whole area kinda blows. A little bit too much trash, and the encounter itself is kinda aggravating. I think I finally figured out assignments to make the elemental wave no issue, but the Elementals usually made or broke that encounter for us.
• Auriaya – The difficulty of an encounter should not be based on ‘Can you pull her safely or not?’ Also, too much standing around waiting if you miss the perfect time for pulling.

Love-Hate relationship: Yogg-Saron

This has been the most complex encounter of my raiding ‘career’ and I can now understand why guilds broke up over Vashj and Kael. It took us 66 pulls to get him down. 65 wipes. A little over 12 hours of tries. Out of those 66 tries, we got to P3 around half a dozen times, around that number, so that should tell you everything you need to know about this fight. P1 can go horribly wrong, but it can also be executed perfectly. But oh boy, did I contribute to some horrible moments. With three guardians up, I couldn’t see the clouds around me and spawned lots more. There were a couple Leroy moments where my boss mod just went wild alerting me of guardian spawns. P2 was by far the hardest to learn. When we killed Yogg-Saron, we had perfect brain and tentacle DPS. It was the first time ever that we actually had downtime without a single tentacle up. There were no tentacles going into P3.

P3 itself had me shaking with sweaty hands and I was unable to spare a second of attention to pushing my Push-To-Talk button. Others had to do the talking, I was too busy tanking, trying to pick up Immortal Guardians before they oneshot someone. Unfortunately I failed and so our ret pally and our tree druid bit the dust, and we still pulled it off, in a 12 minute kill.

I really enjoy the complexity of the encounter. I love that it’s so challenging as solo tank, which is what we did, going in with six DPS. On the other hand, I felt more pressure than usual on me, because if you fail in P1 and someone dies, it’s basically a wipe. If you spawn too many guardians, it’s a wipe. If you don’t watch your sanity in P2 or suck at watching Brain Link, it’s a wipe. In P3 you need to be ready to pick up Immortal Guardians in that tiny window of 10 seconds, establish quick aggro and hold it against the DPS who are trying to get the guardians down quickly.

Yogg-Saron rewarded me for our diligence, I suppose, because I got the Royal Seal of King Llane that kill, which is amazing luck. Not sure if it will replace the Black Heart or the Brewmaiden trinket. Probably the Black Heart.

This is the first time that we have ever been at a point that we have beaten all raid encounters currently in the game. We haven’t done any hardmodes, but we have beaten all the normal fights. That’s a great feeling. I am looking forward to  new challenges in Icecrown. Right now I need to figure out where we’re going raid-wise in the meantime. Probably that one-room instance that I don’t enjoy so much. Hate Northrend Beasts so much. Or maybe Ulduar hardmodes.

Here’s to hoping Icecrown will be as satisfying as Ulduar was to me.

Thanks for all the support of you friendly readers, I got some great feedback for Yogg-Saron, and all your encouragement to keep at it and not succumb to burnout. Rock on!

As I mentioned a while back, I was interviewed via e-mail for an article in the Swedish magazine Level, about my guild. Daughters of the Horde and its Alliance counterpart Daughters OfThe Alliance on US-Bronzebeard are as far as I know the two largest girls-only guilds in the world. I have been an officer in DotH since 2006, and was interviewed as representative of DotH.

• How did the idea of an all female guild emerge? Why just girls? Tell me about the background.
  
  Daughters of the Horde was born in the Livejournal community wow_ladies. This is currently the biggest WoW community in LJ, with 7k+ members. Back in the day, when WoW was still young and fresh, wow_ladies was the refuge where girls were able to talk about WoW with other girls, as the game was absolutely male-dominated at the time. The percentage of female players is a lot higher now than it was then. It all started with this post. Basically a guild of community members, all female, a haven. They ran a poll, horde won as faction, and Daughters of the Horde was created on Bronzebeard-US. A short time later, Daughters of the Alliance was created on the same server, because some people preferred the ‘prettier’ races at the time. Many DotA players are also members of DotH and vice versa, and I am close friends with a bunch of them. I think we have maybe one original member left from back then, our former GM Tryna, who led DotH through the first couple years until recently.

  Originally, most people rolled alts to play in DotH, with their mains on other servers, and when dealing with boys got too much, they came to chill in DotH. This, to some degree is still happening today. Many members raid more seriously on other servers and hang out with us when they just want to relax and have some light fun. But there’s also a core of people who have made Bronzebeard their main home. I have tried playing on other servers, for example a realm with RL friends, but I always
  miss my home on Bronzebeard.

• What (if anything), apart from the all-girl-thing, do you think differs Daughters of the Horde from other guilds?
  
  I think we offer more diversity than the typical WoW guild. If you look at guild structures, there’s usually leveling guilds, social guilds, and guilds that raid. While we’re not exactly a leveling guild, we are extremely alt-friendly. All of us love to play alts, and it’s not uncommon that our members have all character slots full on Bronzebeard. Our guild is also very social, there’s always some chatter going on in gchat. We also do some light, yet successful raiding, so you can really do anything in our guild aside from dedicated 25-man raiding.
• What kind of mood or atmosphere is there in the guild?

  I think it’s usually very light-hearted and fun. Some of our members are crazy funny, like the world’s sexiest orc DK, Fangril. I am probably one of the more serious people in DotH, because I tend to take PvE progress very seriously.

• I’ve heard a lot of preconceived notions about girls in WoW-guilds. That having a girl in a guild can cause more drama and so forth. What are your thoughts on that? Is there a lot of drama in Daughters of the Horde.

Ah, the drama question. I think that drama can happen with girls in a guild, but it can happen with guys in a guild as well. Loot-drama is not based on gender. I think it’s just a stereotype that girls in WoW mean drama. It’s not my experience in DotH at all. In my 3 years as officer, there were moments that had some drama, but they’re very rare and unusual. I have seen some people join who could probably be classified as ‘guild princesses’, always more interested in taking than giving to the guild, but people like that usually leave fairly quickly, because gender cannot really be used as an advantage when we’re all the same.

• How do you solve conflicts that arise in the guild?
  
  We don’t have a GM and officers, we’re more an officer council. We rotate different duties amongst officers, including the GM hat. We regularly run a Suggestion Box in our LJ community, which allows people to voice concerns which only the officers can read. We encourage people to approach the officers if there are any issues, but in all honesty, we’re not really asked that often about problem situations. I think girls might have the tendency to just swallow certain issues, in hopes they’ll go away. There really is very little conflict that we’re made aware of.
• What does the recruitment process look like? How can you check and know for sure that the one applying to join is a girl?
  
  We actively recruit maybe once a year, in wow_ladies, but of course we’re always taking in new members. Joining us is pretty easy. There is no application process. All that they have to do is to /join our recruitment channel and give us their LJ name. We then check their LJ. Sometimes it’s very easy to tell that it must be a girl, but sometimes it isn’t, and then we do Ventrilo checks. Just a quick chat, to verify it’s a girl via voice chat. That’s usually the point that weeds out the most guys trying to sneak in, because the amount of people who mysteriously do not have a microphone, or it’s broken, or they can’t install Vent nor use in-game chat, it’s ridiculous. As we were originally born in a Livejournal community, we require an LJ account for all our members. Basically our forum replacement. We post everything regarding guild business in wow_doth.livejournal.com
• What kind of char is most common within Daughters of the Horde? Are there a lot of males? Which class is most popular?
  
  We have quite a few male characters, but the overwhelming majority plays female characters. We have very very few tanks, to my own sorrow, not as many healers as one would like to think, and used to have mostly ranged DPS. Lately, this has seen a bit of a shift that mirrors the general WotLK tendency, with a lot more people playing melee DPS after DKs were introduced. Based on statistics, hunter is the most popular class, closely followed by deathknights. When TBC was released, our guild grew exponentially, in what I would like to call the ‘Belf Invasion of 2007′. They’re still by far the most popular race, outweighing everything else by a huge margin, which makes me sad. Only the few and the proud like me play orcs. It’s a running joke in DotH that Thrall will kill a kitten everytime someone re-rolls a bloodelf.

  I play the least-played race and class combo, orc warrior, what does this say about me?

• Another preconceived notion is that girls usually prefer to play healers or support classes — do you agree? How is the balance between the classes in your guild?
  
  As mentioned before, we are usually short on healers. I mean, we obviously have enough to raid with, and more healers than tanks, but DPS classes hugely outweigh anything else in DotH. We have some fantastic DPS in DotH, so that preconceived notion is really not true for us at all.
• The male writers in the magazine want to know if there is much giggle and joking around on your vent-channel.
  
  That is a really funny question. I know that it’s common in many guilds to hang out in Vent at all times, but we don’t do that. We mostly use Vent for raiding or when we have a social event, and even then, it’s few people talking. I try to talk as much as possible when I am in Vent, but some girls really aren’t comfortable with talking much, while they type novels in gchat. I think most of us love to be silly, but not the gigglish type.
• What kind of comments do Daughters of the Horde usually get? Do people like the idea of a guild consisting of all girls? Do they think that it’s wrong to exlude and include players based on their sex? And what is your reply to people who gets upset about it?
  
  We’re one of the oldest guilds on our server at this point and have seen many guilds rise and fall. A lot of newer players actually have no clue that we’re all girls. We don’t go out and flaunt it, we just assume that our guild tag is obvious enough. I think old-school Bronzebeard respect us, and everyone else just assumes we’re all male. Whenever I pug as a tank and talk strategy on bosses, people always refer to me as male. Because, you know, girls would never tank, haha. We used to have one guy
  who long transferred servers, who hated both DotH and DotA and loved to slander both guilds in the realm forum. But as he was the realm clown, no one took him serious at all. He actually tried to sneak into our guild under a different name, and then in protest formed his own ‘all-girls’ guild that failed dramatically.

  Other than that guy, no one’s ever had any problems with us for being exclusive to girls.

• World of Warcraft is a game that has a big female audience, at least compared to other MMO:s like Eve Online, Warhammer or Age of Conan. Why do you think that is? What does WoW have that the other games lack?
  
  WoW has the most intuitive interface and you only need to play a couple of hours to get into it. I think the learning curve is probably more steep in other MMOs. Also, I think girls prefer PvE more than PvP, though we have a couple die-hard PvPers and arena players in DotH as well. I think AoC probably has very low appeal for girls, because the core of it is so sexist. I mean, they only recently fixed that female characters hit just as hard as males. At least I hope that was fixed. I wouldn’t call WoW easy, but it’s fun, colorful, very easy to learn, and yet hard to master.
• I’ve received a couple of mails from girls who are considering WoW to be a sexist game and who thinks that Blizzard is objectifying the female characters, and that complains about being harassed ingame by “horny 15-yearolds”. What are your thoughts on this? Thoughts on being a girl and playing WoW.
  
  My general advice for any female player would be to not flaunt their gender. I mean, realistically, if you look at things, no one really needs to know if you’re a boy or a girl behind the computer. Just play at your best. That way you get to avoid the teenage hornballs that no doubt exist in WoW. Yes, WoW has objectifying moments, though there are a lot fewer models these days that make me shake my head. My alt mage is currently running around in thigh-highs, and my warrior used to wear
  plate-thigh highs and a plate bikini in her 40s, stuff that looks like a shirt and normal legguards on a male model. But you know, it’s harmless stuff. No one’s boobs are hanging out, and considering the amount of objectification happening in advertisement, TV, and movies, it’s really minimal. It doesn’t bother me.

  I think Blizzard understands that this is seen as an issue in parts, and I can’t recall any skank gear in Northrend. I mean, sure, paladin T8 shows off female bellies [edit: the interview was done before Blizzard changed the model], but for the most part, female characters are just as covered as male ones. And that’s a good improvement.

It’s been a while since I have done…story time! The mindless rambling of stuff that I have been doing day to day in WoW and which I used to post on Mondays. However, between the Sunday raiding and having to be at work at 7 am, I just have to squeeze it in this late in the week. So what have I been up to? Not much, and yet at the same time a lot!

First off, my shameful leveling project. It should be a testament to the ease of leveling in general, but in particular hunters when I can proclaim that my hunter just hit 70. I rolled her in the first week of August, and give her a playtime of 3-8 hours a week tops, which is very little for me. Yes, the one class I vowed I would never level because it’s so boooooring. But you know what? Boooooring can be very relaxing. As officer and raid leader, I go through bouts of burnout and stress, and that’s when the hunter comes in. True, I could just send the pet in and auto-shoot my way to glory, but it’s been very relaxing. Tiraxi is currently a BM hunter in absolutely craptastic gear (I have done one on-level instance, Blood Furnace), but at 80 I am looking forward to going Survival and might even raid with my German friends. Maybe. They raid a lot more than I do and are all gung-ho about hardmodes. But who knows? I might fit in. And if not? That’s also a-okay.

On Kadomi, I have drastically reduced the amount of heroics she’s doing. After tanking every single day of the week, in a frenzy to save up Emblems of Triumph, it all kinda deflated after I got the 45 emblems shoulders. I have been trying to get some achievements in while doing heroics, and that is an aspect I still enjoy. If timing wasn’t such an issue, I would be all over an achievement group. Me and mah favorite gals, we keep talking about it, and then never act on it. One achievement I had never tried for was Abuse the Ooze and though we completed it, I can see why people might skip it. Those slimes can get out of control very quickly, sheesh!

I recently finished the Champion quests for all Argent Tournament factions and woohoo, I am a Crusader. *yawn* Those quests get old, I tell ya, but I am a pro at jousting now. As Crusader I am pretty happy, because those dailies are short, fun, and in a nice route of getting nice gold and Champion Seals into my pocket. The first reward I saved up for was the Pony for my squire. After all my squire looks like mini-me (if I’d ever take off my helmet). Adorable! Disappointing that I can only use mailbox, bank or vendor, instead of all three in a timed window. Boo!

Then one night one of our guildies had an interesting bug. She sold something to a vendor and bam, she got the Gruul’s Lair achievement. Bizarre! This started some sighing from people who never got that achievement, and I decided to drum people up and off we were to Blade’s Edge, to re-visit the big guy. 10 level 80s, ready to take on the world! High King Maulgar and friends was an adventure. Our Krosh mage tank didn’t know how, our enslaving warlock couldn’t keep perma-fearing Olm off me, and those ogres laughed and mocked us. It took us four tries before we finally had enough control over the fight that we pulled it off. Not so easy still, that pull. Gruul himself was pretty much a joke. I seemed to have an endless stream of dodges and had fun stuff like -312 (3400 blocked) in my combat log when he managed to hit me. People were happy about their achievements, and I got to rar for justice, because they finally were mine. My QQ post about my SO outrolling me on the T4 shouldertoken is still a vivid memory for me, so when HKM dropped two Protector tokens, I was all over one! Right after the raid my friend Cariad and I went straight for Aldor Rise and then I got on a table to be at her level. Yay, Warbringer Shoulders!

The loot gods are so very kind to me lately. We did VoA-10 and Onyxia right afterwards, and Gleaming Quel’Serrar dropped. I only took it for looks and to maybe be my threat weapon in heroics (stats > unreliable proc), but I also won the roll for Onyxia’s head. Bye-bye Seal of the Pantheon, hello Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman! You might not be the best trinket in the world but in gear sets where I need def over stamina, you will now be my precioussssss.

 
As added bonus, Auriaya then coughed up a shield for the first time, and I won the roll, and am as happy as a tank can be. The same raid ID, we managed to clear to Yogg-Saron within our six hours of alotted raid time, with maybe 30 minutes of tries on Y-S himself. I extended the ID and we will devote a full raid to learning this fight. As our three tries were pretty disastrous in P1, any advice is welcome. Oh god, I want to kill him so bad, and I am so happy he’s such a challenge for us. Killing him will feel super-awesome, I know it.

So yeah, I guess I have been busy. What’s up with y’all? Getting excited for Icecrown?

Yesterday was raid day. We were in the middle of our first real Trial of the Crusader since all bosses were released when our hunter says ‘Hey Kadomi, you’re on WoW Insider!’ I quickly had to check on that and indeed, there it was, discussing the post I made last week of when it’s okay to move to the next raiding tier. Hi wow.com visitors!

As you can tell, I made the decision to schedule a Trial of the Crusader raid just to see how we would do. We had been there before when only Beasts and Jaraxxus were available, and we had struggled with the Beasts quite a bit. But yesterday we just breezed through. Yes, compared to Ulduar bosses, ToC is pretty relaxed. None of the fights has the intensity that I connect to our firstkills of any of the Keepers in Ulduar. The only fights we struggled with were Faction Champions, which is an encounter that fills me with rage. I don’t PvP, so it was very difficult for me as raid leader to suggest any working strategy. We were facing the pretty unpleasant combo of resto shaman, resto druid, shadowpriest, arms warrior, retribution paladin and warlock. It took us forever trying to figure out how to get the healers down, but the first time we got both of them down, the fight was ours. I was busy keeping the arms warrior under control, which was not as easy as it sounds in theory. HATE BLADESTORM! Ugh.

The Twin Val’kyr fight was two-shot, I kinda liked it, but I also thought it was somewhat confusing. Anub’arak took us like four or five tries learning it, but we steadily progressed through it, and thus, 2.5 hours after the start of our first full ToC raid, we cleared. Go us!

As is par for the course, there was not a single tank drop in sight, but our casters got to ooooh and aaah about shiny drops. Most raid members got a drop, which is always nice. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean full-time ToC now for us, next week it’s back to Ulduar. That gives me time to figure out how I can permanently weave ToC into our raid schedule without crippling our Ulduar progress. That one boss has got to fall, you know?

In my current raid gear, I broke 34k health unbuffed yesterday. That was a real high for me. We’re doing great. I have cleared ToC-10, VoA-10 and Onyxia-10, all this week. Our raid is pretty damn successful. It’s a fabulous feeling. Go go DotH.

Despite a writer’s block, I’ve still been playing and raiding as usual, since Mimiron’s demise that I last posted about. In the meantime, I have managed a few firstkills with my guild, namely General Vezax, Onyxia, Emalon and Koralon. Of those bosses I feel the greatest satisfaction about Vezax, who was not as easy as he seems to be in web strategies. It took us quite some time to figure out Shadow Crash and Vapor management, and how not to miss any interrupts. The only part that was no problem were the Surges of Darkness, yay for two minute Shield Walls and Pain Suppression, and fantastic healers. I am also eternally grateful to the many suggestions of putting Heroic Strike on mousewheel. In our Vezax kill, I managed to pull off 171 Heroic Strikes, which accounted for 27% of my damage, versus 43 white damage hits accounting for 5% of my damage. Yay, I think I fought one of my biggest weaknesses as warrior tank successfully.

We didn’t have the time to try Yogg-Saron after learning the Vezax encounter and unfortunately this week had reduced raiding time, so that Mimiron is still up. I have decided that I would rather not extend the ID if Mimiron’s still up, because we will need all the time in the world for Yogg-Saron. My original plan was to down Y-S first before moving on to the next raiding tier, but in this weirdly non-linear raiding world, this might not be what’s best for us. People are eager for the shiny higher ilevel loot that ToC has to offer, and I think given our skill set, we should be able to go ToC 5/5 very soon. We’ve only been there once, in the second week, and managed to down both bosses, so if we can get past Faction Champions, I think we’ll have this. But you know what? It doesn’t feel right to me. Yogg-Saron still lives and is sending his foul tentacles of evil out in the world, and I won’t be done with Ulduar until he’s down.

I am still pretty enamored with Ulduar over-all, it’s a beautiful raid with diverse boss encounters. My probably least favorite encounter is Freya, but that’s because after, what, four kills of her we are still struggling with the *%*!$&$§& elementals wave. We must be doing something elementally (haha) wrong. Once we get the first of those waves down, we kill her, but getting there is making me go gray even earlier. One mob always goes down earlier, comes back and messes everything up. Aaaargh. The Freya encounter always manages to make two things happen: I get really frustrated and I feel like a crappy raid leader.

I enjoy the new Onyxia encounter, but this weekend made the mistake of trying it with 2 healers, which pretty much backfired on me. I felt like a wet loaf of bread, squishy like a clothie. That did not go so well. Again, it’s somewhat hard to find out where in progression this encounter might be based. Lootwise, beyond Ulduar, but not in difficulty in terms of the encounter.

We’ve recently run into a new problem, and the officers of my guild are currently working on a solution, or rather bridge. As a new 80, it gets more and more difficult (and at the same time easier) to get into recent raid content. It requires determination and pretty much a gear plan to get up there for Ulduar and beyond. We used to run Naxxramas in off-weeks, but that pretty soon turned into farm badge runs for alts instead of introducing newer 80s to raids. It’s going to be interesting to find a solution, but we have a game plan and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes. I am interested in hearing how other guilds handle bringing newer 80s up to speed, so please share.

In some more personal gear accomplishments, I finally managed to a) save up enough Emblems of Triumph to get the Shoulderguards of Enduring Order that are such a significant upgrade and b) I snagged T8 shoulders and gloves in the recent Ulduar raid, so that I can now face encounters like Mimiron wearing the 4pc set for the incredible bonus. Of course, I now always have to make the decision of when to use the T8 gear, in which encounter, so I should really look into that. I am a bit sad I am getting the bonus via wearing the shoulders, when my new EoT shoulders are so superior. Hopefully I can get the legs very soon, via Hodir or Emalon, so I can ditch the shoulders again. And now totally gratuitous, a current look at Kadomi in her orc glory:

   

After all my recent worrying over losing one of two progress-raiding tanks, I have to say that this weekend totally made up for all the worrying I did. Even more exciting, this weekend proved that having two protection warriors in Ulduar means a lot of asskicking too.

On day 1, we progressed very smoothly through Ulduar, downing FL, XT, Ignis, Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya, Hodir and Thorim in 3 hours. That’s 8 bosses, 6 of them one-shots, and the two keepers being two-shot. We had an annoying bug on Thorim. We breezed through the gauntlet, I jumped down into the Arena, ready to pick up Thorim, he jumped down as well and despawned. What gives? Very annoying. I finally managed to score a little bit more Ulduar loot, getting Legacy of Thunder off Thorim. Woot!

On day 2, we started with Razorscale, which was extremely confusing. I have never seen so many Sentinels show up in my life. From there we moved to Freya, who really gave us more difficulties than I thought possible. We are still struggling with the Elementals, consistently downing them at the same time is hard. I must read up on strategies for that, because the rest of the fight is really a breeze, it’s only the two waves of elementals that cause us problems.

And then it was time for Mimiron, who I had never main-tanked. The first two tries were wipes that I caused. I did not realize the first Plasma Blast is so early and was too slow with Shield Walling. The second time, Shock Blast ate me. From that point on, it was P4 just about every try. After six wipes, one of our raiders had to leave. We replaced her, and I set a time limit when we would call it. Those last two tries P1-P3 were a dream. P1 over after 2 Plasma Blasts. P2 done with only one Barrage. No issues whatsoever in P3. We almost had it, that perfect execution.

In the last try of the day, people stayed alive. I called out DPS switches, for our ranged to switch over to the middle, then the bottom. It was looking good. The Leviathan tank died, I picked it up, and tanked it, while continuously spell reflecting the Plasma Balls from the head. Two DPS went down, we had a battle rez, then another DPS death. Numbers were ticking down. I was too rattled to call out more switches, DPS intelligently did it on their own. First part went down, then the dreaded self-repair bar showed up and then, boom!

 
It was pretty deafening on Vent, and I squealed loudly too. I think this moment beats our Hex-Lord kill as favorite raiding moment for now. It was pretty amazing. I am so freaking proud. We don’t even raid every week (though we kinda have since the extended raid lock, more often than not), and it took us 19 pulls spread out over two different raids, to kill one of the two big challenges in Ulduar. Next week I expect us to down General Vezax, and then we’ll pay a visit to Yogg-Saron. I am so freaking excited.

 
We had a fabulous guest raider again, Naissa, who tanked in Ulduar for the first time ever, and did a fantastic job at it. She kindly posted more screenshots, and I totally want her computer. If that’s not some badass screenshots, I don’t know anything.

In June I received an e-mail asking me if I would consider an interview for the WoW magazine of the Swedish magazine Level about my experience as officer in an all-girl guild. I thought, sure, why not, and had a ball with answering the questions about my guild. Then I moved in July, completely forgot about it, and only on Monday did I remember to follow up on this when I saw Ensidia’s Kungen ask around for a copy of the magazine with an Ensidia article in it. Hmmm, they cover Ensidia and MY guild?

One of the cover stories of the current issue is ‘Tjej Guild’ which apparently means Girl Guild! Yesterday I received the layout screenshots, and a copy of the magazine will be shipped to me here in Germany. I just about fell over and died when I saw that my little interview and the couple screenshots I sent are a six-page spread.

Here’s a sample of the article:

The magazine is still on the shelves until mid-October in Sweden. For all us non-Swedes out there I’ll re-post the original English interview once the magazine is no longer on the shelves. If you are in Sweden, you should totally buy the magazine and read about me and Daughters of the Horde. I am totally stoked, this is probably one of the coolest things ever to happen to me.