Tank like a girl

This BA shared topic caught my eye immediately. As tank, we have a near symbiotic relationship with our healers. With a healer behind you, you become an unstoppable force, ready to fling insults at ginormous bosses and have them whack on you. Without a healer, you are squished in mere seconds, in most cases. I love healers, as a tank, and when I am playing my shaman, I hope my tank loves me just as much when I keep them alive. I am very grateful about the opportunity to play both in heroics and raids.

Nigiri from Adventures of a Priest asked for views of non-healers what kind of healing they prefer.

Now me, I am a non-discerning tank. Any heals: awesome in my book. Of course we have preferences. All through TBC I felt safest in the hands of a holy priest. I just got awesome heals from them. Tasty Greater Heals, Renews, few scary moments. In WotLK the whole healing scene shifted a bit. There are very few moments that the glowy white ring of a Greater Heal is around me. Now glowy laser heals are coming my way. It’s the time of the fast spells, be it Flash Heal, Flash of Light or Lesser Healing Wave. My personal preference is for Discipline Priests, followed by Paladins. They’re made for tank healing, and you can tell. 5-mans or 10-man raids, I assign one of those to the tanks, and I feel safe. My least favorite healer for 5-mans would be druids. I know some awesome druids, but at times I feel my health drops way lower with a druid as healer than with any other healing class. HoTs do not make me feel as safe as big numbers do coming in on the left side of my screen.

As a raid leader for 10-mans, I care about healer balance. We have had two paladins, our wonder twins, heal Naxxramas, but in Ulduar I am looking for a balance. Great tank healing, solid raid-healing, versatility. Here I feel all healing classes as solid, as long as they’re the right mix. I am sure you can do Ulduar-10 with three druids or three shamans, but would I feel as good about such a combo as I feel about priest, druid, paladin team? Probably not.

For further opinions about this Shared Topic, check out:

• Secret Agent Cat
• And Two Rogues
• Aggro Junkie
• Welcome to Spinksville!
• Achtung Panzercow!

 
So what about you other tanks out there? Any preferences! As always you are more than welcome to share.

This week’s BA Shared Topic comes up with the question asked by Pixelated Executioner: What do you wish your profession could do?

I happen to be a 375 Blacksmith with a specialization as Armorsmith, with mining on the side. At 375 I find it to be one of the most useless, pointless professions to have. There, I said it. What do I, as maxed out blacksmith do with the profession? I make the occasional enchanting rod, adamantite sharpening stones, and the Felsteel set for leveling plate armor tanks. If you do not have access to epic blacksmithing plans, there is no market for blacksmiths. This is a problem. Now you might say that most professions have this problem, but I always find that I do a lot more with my other professions (maxed out leatherworking and alchemy) than blacksmithing.

The Armorsmithing specialization is equally problematic. In my DPS gear, I am sporting the Bulwark of Ancient Kings. Out of sheer desperation I wore it as and the lower version as tanking chest for a long time, for the use effect and the nutso amount of stamina on it. But it’s clearly a DPS chest. None of the few armorsmith BoPs does anything for tanks. How can this possibly be?

I actually have no idea what plans Blizzard has for the blacksmithing specializations in WotLK, but I would hope that it’s a better implementation than in TBC. In comparison, look at tailors with their specializations. You can pick your specialization on what kind of caster you are (frost/shadow, fire/arcane, healing). I would not have picked armorsmithing and would have gone swordsmithing if I had known about the lack of tanking gear this would provide me with.

Now that I have done my share of griping, the good stuff. Blacksmithing did provide me with decent gear while leveling. The Fel Armor set was amazingly good, same for the Adamantite set, and as I got all Felsteel plans fairly quickly, that set was also great. Sharpening stones are awesome. I want to continue to see great pieces of gear you can make for making leveling easier. I am totally excited about the addition of shields. But I think the biggest step is that we get to add sockets to gear. That is great. This will be something of use even at max-level in the profession. Everyone will eventually upgrade gear and will want extra sockets. Especially one that’s colorless. It provides so much needed utility.

From the other Shared Topic bloggers I have seen the same request, and I am endorsing it as well: let us repair our own gear. That would be a killer feature for tanking blacksmiths. Blacksmiths should be able to repair mail or plate armor, leatherworkers should be able to repair mail and leather, tailors should be able to repair cloth armor. That’s the ideal for me. Come on, I can make fancy armor, but I can’t hammer the bumps out of my plate pieces? You could even do it as a bonus, like half-price repairs. Everyone knows that us folks have huge repair bills, and every little perk would count.

As last request, something with a fun factor would be great. Tailors will get a flying carpet in WotLK, engineers get tons of stuff that just screams fun, it’d be nice to have something like that too. I am fresh out of ideas what could be fun smithing gadget, but surely there could be something.

So as summary: do something to keep blacksmiths busy once they’re at 450, something with utility; make blacksmithing the killer profession for tanks by adding the ability to repair armor; and some fun stuff wouldn’t hurt.

Once again I jump onto the Blog Azeroth Shared Topic train. This week’s topic: thoughts on the new Refer-A-Friend program .

The first thought I had when I read about this program was ‘Damn, Blizzard is so smart!’ With this move, they bind the hardcore WoW fan to be even more devoted to them, while Warhammer Online looms on the horizon. Like many others, I think a more correct version of the name of the program would be ‘Refer-yourself-to-multibox’. Even people who never considered a second account are now going for it and multibox their way to glory. In my guild we had people come back from quitting, just so they could have a zhevra mount. It’s a bit amusing to see that people get the most excited about things as mounts or non-combat pets. (As an aside, this is also true for the Spirit of Competition event, or have you ever seen so many Battlegrounds up before?)

I frequent a lot of blogs and LJ communities and left and right you see people describing their exciting multibox adventures. Heck, I considered (and am still considering) a second account for myself, as I have 10 characters on my main realm, and my better half loves the fluff part so much that I could get her a zhevra that way.

Does this actually garner completely new players joining WoW at this point of the game’s lifecycle? I don’t think so. All the friends I have that are interested in MMOs already play WoW, and everyone else is really not interested. I actually did the whole PR spiel on one friend I used to MUSH with, and I thought I had reeled her in, but so far, nothing.

There’s a lot of debate about the leveling speed-up process this whole program brings, how leveling becomes trivial, and how some people feel shafted by it. I don’t actually care that much. I have leveled five characters to 70 and my future number 6 just hit 48 today. It’s plenty easy to level these days, it’s not for everyone though. Let’s be honest, if you actually manage to recruit friends to join, they want to play with you at top level, and if you’re one of the legion of new multiboxers, the leveling changes are right down your alley to make it smoother. It doesn’t bother me, though there are plenty of people who call multiboxing cheating.

To get back on course, I believe the R-A-F program is a smart move. WAR goes live in mid-September and a lot of frustrated endgame raiders and PvPers will jump ship, for fresh content, new classes, RvR. But the dedicated hardcore will remain hooked, because they just shelved out the money for a new WoW Battle Chest for a key, possibly a 2 month game card for the zhevra, which gives Blizzard the buffer of 3 months on WAR. If they release WotLK in that timespan, the impact of WAR on the WoW playerbase will be as minimal as it gets, as even WAR enthusiasts like Tobold predict that the release of WotLK will bring the masses back.

Hats off, Blizzard. Me, I am going to the US next week, and might just pick up that WoW Battle Chest myself. I am weak. I will however not multibox, that’s just not how I roll.

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.