Tank like a girl

My very casual guild has a very light raid schedule, Saturday/Sunday on alternating weekends. Based on this schedule, it was our last ‘official’ raid weekend before WotLK hits the shelves. I wanted to do something special for this last weekend, but it didn’t quite turn out as expected. Due to lack of numbers doing T5 or even T6 content for shit and giggles was out of the question. Let me tell you, I sing the praises of 10-man progression, bring it on.

Then old-world raids came up as alternative. Everyone loves to complete achievements for old world stuff. My guild recently co-hosted a Molten Core adventure, so I had my eyes on bigger goals. AQ40! Bug mounts for everyone, and seeing C’thun, that was my goal. Now, I have been sick with bronchitis for over a week, and on Saturday I just didn’t feel like leading a raid and tanking. Never mind that we had only 19 people signed up, not all of them 70. It just seemed a recipe for disaster. A friend and raid leader from our allied guild took over and I brought my boomkin for facerolling DPS.

Very few people in the raid had ever been to AQ40, so it was mostly a brute force approach, subsequent wipe, visit to Wowwiki and then a second try getting the boss down. I think the only boss we one-shot was Prophet Skeram. We wiped once on all other bosses. The bug trio was a bit chaotic, so was Battleguard Sartura. I have no words to describe the bug tunnel and wish I had taken a screenshot. If you can’t stand bugs, do not go there. Ever. Grossest gauntlet ever. We weren’t done with the gauntlet yet when someone already pulled Fankriss, but we got him down. I am not surprised that people went nuts with nature resistance for Princess Huhuran, she was pretty nasty, and like all princesses in the game, pretty ugly.

And then came the Twin Emperors. Oh. My. God.

Here’s where things went down the toilet pretty fast. After the first couple wipes, one of the physical tanks had to leave and so I brought in Kadomi after all to pick up Vekni’lash after the teleport. On the first try with me in I promptly messed that up. On all other tries from there on I picked up fine, though it sucked when the teleport timer was a little bit off and I moved in too early, hit with an Arcane Barrage. Still, Warbringer really helps here, a lot. The damage you take there as tank is a joke, every trash mob in a heroic hits harder.

And yet we wiped continuously. We just didn’t have the numbers, especially when it came to healers. The warlock tanks just weren’t kept up and as soon as one of them went down, shit happened. Eventually we called it. Hats off to those of my readers who actually did this content at level 60. I have no idea how you did it, because it sure made places like ZA and Karazhan look like a joke.

Welcome back to my addon corner. I am currently pondering moving this column to a Wednesday, as weekend reader numbers are traditionally very low. This means that the next addon corner might be happening in a couple days already, as I am trying to work out a posting schedule at the moment.

Today, I’ll talk about addons that will pep up your minimap. There are several different ways to spice up your minimap, from being able to move it around freely to using different shapes, etc.

I am currently using PocketPlot. I only recently discovered this gem of a minimap addon. This addon is very lightweight. Or what would you call an addon that’s 0.5kb in size? Really small. Why PocketPlot? I recently went back from having my minimap in the lower area of my UI to back to the default position. I personally don’t need fancy skins. I really enjoy the custom ‘blips’ that I like more than the default Blizzard ones, I like the clock underneath the map, I like the positioning of stuff like mail, LFG, tracking, etc.

What might take some people aback is that the addon has absolutely zero interface for setting it up in-game. And still, it’s very easy to set up. It requires you to open the pocketplot.lua file in any text editor and follow the simple instructions that Seerah provides in the comments.

As example, this is what my setup looks like:

If that’s all too minimalistic for you (which is the point of the addon), there are several great alternatives. The latest one on the scene is SexyMap by Antiarc (of Omen and Chatter fame). It seems aptly named, because the textures that come with it look gorgeous. If you are looking for a very shiny minimap, this might be for you. I am more tempted by such ’sexy’ additions as minimap buttons all gone unless you hover over the map.

Another staple is Chinchilla by cknight (of Fubar and Pitbull fame). I used this for a long time, and it’s very solid. Drag and drop your map, use several different skins, display coordinates, this minimap can do it all. Its only fault is probably that it can do too much and feels a bit bloated.

Simple Minimap falls into the same category. It seems as feature-rich as Chinchilla. Maybe a bit more modular, so you can delete all the features you don’t need.

Minimap buttons:

There are several addons that specifically deal with the problem of buttons cluttering up your minimap. I am using MBB, which stands for Minimap Button Bag. What it does is that it creates one button on your minimap that when clicked will show you all other buttons from other addons. Those can still be used normally, MBB just keeps them out of sight. If you want to have specific buttons not hidden by MBB, Ctrl-Right clicking them will put them back onto your minimap. In my above screenshot, I have one button moved outside MBB and have the rest happily hidden away. It does seem to have a problem with something called DagAssist, so if you use that, MBB might not be for you.

Another alternative would be to use Minimap Button Frame, which creates a frame with all your buttons that you can place anywhere on your screen. It’s a neat idea, but I prefer the buttons hidden completely when I don’t need them.

Bigredkitty (who really should be called Bigredgorilla these days) posted a screenshot of his showing him in November 2006, and then he challenged people by asking if they had screenshots from 2006 or older.

The oldest ones I was able to find were from early 2006, and now you get to experience a very young Kadomi in all of her youthful vigor:

 
Ah, to be level 24 again and stroll through the southern Barrens by sunrise. I then spent maybe an hour looking at more screenshots and am very happy to have my characters well documented. I found screenshots from my first visit to just about every 5-man out there, back when killing Archaedas in Uldaman seemed like an achievement already. I am looking forward to taking more screenshots in Northrend, and I will have to finish uploading just about all my others to my current gallery. Which I am still not quite 100% happy with, I might ditch Plogger and go with something else. Anyone want to recommend something?

As bonus screenshot, you get something we will never ever see again in-game: Kadomi who had just hit 40 meeting one of her heroes strolling through Desolace: Rexxar + Misha.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was very surprised to see that the new itemization also affects all former tankadin badge gear, offering us even more options to blow badges before Nov 13. I reckon I am not the only person in the world who was not aware of that change, so here I am, boldly looking at badge gear I never looked at before.

Chest:

Previously, there was only one plate chest for warriors purchasable with badges: Chestplate of Stoicism. This is one of the SSO badge items, costing 100 badges.

Its two contenders that previously were not itemized for us:

• Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian for 75 badges
• Shattrath Protectorate’s Breastplate for 100 badges

Let’s assume you are currently wearing Panzar’Thar Breastplate or below. The cheapest badge chest is surprisingly powerful, but with its chunk of dodge, it’s an avoidance chest. Of the three available chestpieces, I personally would still go with Chestplate of Stoicism because it has dodge for avoidance and SBV. I wuv SBV, and I personally value it higher than the hit rating on the former tankadin 100 badge chest. Which also is very nice, no doubt about it, a very solid threat piece.

Feet:

• Sabatons of the Righteous Defender for 60 badges
• Blue Greaves of the Righteous Guardian for 75 badges

More gear with pompous names for us! We went from 0 badge boots to two very solid pieces of gear. I can’t praise the 60 badges boots enough, they were a very pleasant surprise. In these days where we’re pressed to remain def-capped, it’s nice to have defense and very nice threat values plus two sockets available in that slot. The 75 badges ones are a bit disappointing compared. You lose 18 defense, 7 SBV and a blue socket, but gain 108 armor, 14 strength, 13 stamina and 4 hit. Basically, it’s a zero gain when it comes to SBV and stamina, and I am not sure the 108 armor and 4 hit are worth an extra 15 badges.

Hands: Nothing to see here, no extra gear in that slot aside from the already available Bonefist Gauntlets.

Head: Also nothing new here.

Legs:

Previously, we had Unwavering Legguards for 60 badges and Sunguard Legplates for 100 badges.

New on the scene: Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor

That’s a helluva lot of dodge on those legs, making them a fantastic avoidance piece. However, in two weeks we’ll start leveling, and dodge will do little for us. The Sunguard Legplates are more well-rounded because they have expertise as threat stat on them, aside from the dodge. Me, I remained with the Unwavering Legguards, because of the nice chunk of SBV.

Shoulders: Aw, come on, Blizzard, why did you never make tanking shoulders available via badges?

Waist:

We previously had two belts available: Iron-Tusk Girdle for 60 badges and Girdle of the Fearless for 75 badges.

As new option: Girdle of the Protector for 60 badges. Much like the Sunguard Legplates, this belt is well rounded, in both dodge and hit, with a widdle bit of defense. I would still always go with the Girdle of the Fearless. More defense, and the very attractive expertise make that one still a winner.

Wrist: Nothing. But why would we need anything but Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx anyway?

As summary, we get a couple more interesting gear options. Variety is never bad. Most previous warrior gear still comes out on top. Your mileage may vary.

Opinions? Share them.

Despite the name of this post, this is actually not fully about the zombies and the scourge invasion in-game. Fooled ya, didn’t I? Though I feel I should express my opinion about them, and do my usual Monday morning rambling about stuff I’ve recently done in-game. I played around with being a zombie a bit in phase 1 of the event, thought it was fun and very different and then went back to my regular playtime. However, I also read stuff like wow_ladies, and it was quickly becoming apparent that people either LOVE this event or HAAAAATE it. There does not seem to be any middle-ground. What got me most is the argument I have seen used by the haters over and over: the event stops them from doing the important things they need to do in-game. Like grinding, and trick or treating. Sounded like some people have a job instead of playing a game, which I thought was extreme.

I do however understand people with lowbie characters who are upset about griefing and that’s clearly gone on. Zombies bring out the little kid in most people, the annoying brats who just want to disrupt other people’s gameplay and defend it as fun.

Other than arguing about the zombie event, I spent most of the weekend tanking some more. I finally feel that I have a good handle on things, and it’s really possible to just blaze through heroics now. I am trying to finish the heroics achievement, because that’s one that actually matters to me, as opposed to most other achievements. I still have quite a bunch left, as the only ones that were retro’d in were the ones I did for the Trials of the Naaru quest chain. I’m about halfway done.

As I am running more heroics now, I accumulated quite a few badges. I finally broke the 100 badges mark and was ready to buy Sunguard Legplates. I then changed my mind, because I didn’t feel they were a huge upgrade to my Unwavering Legguards. Or rather, I am not fighting the kind of bosses until 80 where the avoidance bonus of those pants would matter. Instead I blew my badges on Sabatons of the Righteous Defender as way superior threat upgrade from my Boots of Elusion. I hadn’t realized how awesome all the former paladin prot gear is now for prot warriors as well. These boots used to have spell hit on them in the past. I’m happy about the change, more gear options are good. I blew the rest of the badges on a Crimson Spinel and an Empyrean Sapphire for the sockets of the boots. As bonus, I am now looking very Amani-style, with all the ZA-style badge gear and ZA drops I am wearing.

Yesterday we blazed through ZA, but we only got three chests again. Seriously, you guys who got bears in the past, hats off to you, even on ezmode we seem to be too slow. We had 1 minute left before pulling Halazzi, which wasn’t really sufficient. Do you guys loot the bosses or do all of the looting after all four bosses are dead? A lot of people got very nice upgrades yesterday, which was pretty nice to see. Nothing for me this time, but that’s quite alright. The only stuff I am now still looking for are the shield and maybe the axe off ZJ. Executioner finally dropped, so it’s time to get my King’s Defender enchanted with that.

After ZA we hit Karazhan, to check out the new Scourge invasion boss. Okay, vampire blood elfs. I always had my suspicions about those crazy loons, I tell ya. The boss himself was…different, and to my shame I kissed the floor when he was at about 35%. I think by the end of it we had only half of the raid still up. Those red balls of doom are nasty business. Also, really stopping DPS during the blood siphon thing helps with people staying alive! The rock star guitar axe went to our ret paladin, who rocked out for us, and we all enjoyed the cute widdle bat everyone in the raid gets as reward. Along with two badges, that is. Fun stuff. I bet Karazhan has lots of rooms where you could slap new bosses. How many of us have actually explored Medivh’s quarters e.g.?

What have you guys been up to? Fun with the zombies? Pissed off about the event? Raiding triumphs? I want to hear it all.

Since the patch rolled around, I’ve been spending a lot of time tuning my UI, which I find almost as enjoyable as slamming my shield into the faces of big bosses. For 3.0, I deleted all addons that I had and rebuilt my UI from the ground, similar to what Anna from ToomanyAnnas has done.

My UI is not the prettiest out there, but I find it very functional, very informational, and clean. I use a lot of addons, but for now I will only talk about the ones that are immediately visible, the core UI.

This will be a series of posts dissecting my UI. If you have any questions about elements, ask away. If you know something cool you think I would like, let me know!

Let’s start the show with a snapshot of my UI when I am idly standing around, and the introduction of one of the elements of my UI: Data Broker

 
Data Broker: At the top I have Data Broker blocks, just as I have them on the bottom of the screen. I used to be a die-hard Fubar fan, but if you follow the trends of Ace developers, they are all moving away from Fubar, towards the flexibility of Data Broker. What exactly is Data Broker? It’s an Ace library, short LDB, that allows endusers the choice of what LDB display they wish to use. There are a bunch of different displays that all have a different look and feel. I myself use Fortress to create a Fubar lookalike, but it is a lot more flexible. Every Data Broker addon gives me a block I can freely move anywhere I want to on my screen. If you look next to my chat frame, that’s where I have all my raid modules, e.g. The first time you set up all Data Broker plugins and your display of choice, you might be overwhelmed, because the blocks will be all over the place, but you can simply drag and drop them to where you want to have them, and they dock when you connect them.

LDB displays:

• Fortress
• ButtonBin
• StatBlockCore
• MakeRocketGoNow
• Carousel
• Titan

Yes, Titan, the old resource hog and first information bar is now Ace’d and LDB-ready. Unlike Fubar. Go figure. However, there are two addons that their developers call hacks to make Fubar and LDB compatible. The first is Fubar2Broker which turns Fubar plugins into LDB objects. I use that myself, as I haven’t found native Broker plugins that are as good as a couple Fubar plugins I still use (MoneyFu, QuestsFu, ToFu and TopscoreFu). If you’re a dedicated Fubar user, you might have run into the problem that recent addons no longer provide a Fubar plugin to access it (e.g. Omen, Bugsack, etc.). Those of you can use Broker2Fubar to turn LDBs into Fubar plugins.

As I said, I chose Fortress as display, after testing most of the others. This was the one I could make look the cleanest. I then later added another display. Yes, you can run several displays without any problems. I have set all my informational plugins to be displayed by Fortress and all launchers are displayed in MakeRocketGoNow. Launchers are the plugins that serve like minimap buttons. You click on them to get access to the configuration menu of an addon. Many addons came with native launchers for Fubar, and a lot of Ace addons have switched to LDB launchers.

That's what MakeRocketGoNow looks like in action

You get a Rocket block you can place anywhere, and when you click on it, you get several large buttons of all launchers of your various addons. Clickie, end up in Omen configuration, as on the screenshot. Saves up a lot of info real estate.

If you want to look at what addons you get for LDB, check out the Data Broker category over at WowInterface.

At Tankspot we have a thread about the threat minigame and how broken it was at Sunwell level. Lots of interesting points in that threat. As I am cruising around in 10-man and T4 content, I never knew it was broken, so the vivid descriptions of excellent tanks really struggling and having to use tricks like turning their back on mobs to get the necessary rage was really interesting to read.

Yet, like other posters, I do miss the threat minigame. Kadomi, what are you talking about, some might say. Let me explain. As tank you traditionally did two things. You fought the mob by tanking it and binding it to you. You fought the rest of the party by trying to outTPS them. Especially in PUGs you were pitting yourself against the group. I am sure DPS never viewed it like this, but it really was a constant struggle, where you as tank had to be on top of your game. I will admit to eyeing the TPS column in Omen a lot, to figure out how much TPS I could squeeze out, and to see if I needed to work harder. I prided myself on being the best tank in my guild when it came to the speed of building initial threat and maintaining it. I patted myself on the shoulder that DPS didn’t have to wait very long before laying down the law. I played the threat game, and I was good at it. There were a bunch of people who could outthreat me, and having them in my group made me work even harder. It was a challenge, I loved it.

The threat minigame is gone. Even against power-crazy retribution paladins, I can snag the threat and run away with it, miles and miles. I can tank through Seed of Corruption flying past me. Threat is all mine. I have read how threat was broken in Sunwell, but it was not at my level of content. Instead of sacrificing damage for innate threat, I now provide excellent damage when tanking. I play with the group instead against it, in a way.

I miss the challenge. Shield Slam crits make me cackle, but not as much as doing 1600 TPS in the pre-patch Eagle gauntlet in ZA did. I will have to find a suitable replacement for the threat game.

A week has passed and I am sure most of us have already given their new warrior builds a spin. I am hearing lots of love of warriors for Arms on the one hand (Bladestorm must be awesome) and of course Protection on the other hand. I’ll try to give you my personal impressions of the new protection warrior.

Invincible. That’s what went through my head the first couple of times I did large pulls of non-elite mobs. The solo viability of prot warriors has gone through the roof. Yes, I was always capable of doing decent protection DPS with dual-wielding Devastate spam, and easily grinded to Exalted with SSO. No big deal, just a slow process. The new protection warrior has it a lot easier. I usually ride around, gather a pile of angry mobs, then dismount and unleash. Atamal Armaments? No problem. Run up the ramp, with 10 mobs in tow. Get an elite dragon add? No problem. Puts a smile on the face, it does. All this in defensive stance. For soloing, I still use DPS gear that’s very heavy on strength, for more attack power and SBV, plus tank items that are heavy on SBV. ZA gear is amazing for this purpose.

Forget about CC. If you’re running heroics or normal instances, CC has become unimportant. As protection warrior you are very capable of holding multiple mobs. Remember that multitank article I wrote a while back? All obsolete now. Run in, gather your mobs, Thunderclap, Shockwave, and tell your DPS to let loose. The only thing you have to watch out for are casters, you can either choose to CC them, or kill them first, or use line of sight to bring them to you. But don’t forget the basics, being an AoE tank does not mean you can afford a sloppy playstyle now. I think a good warrior should still try to to focus as much as you did when multi-tanking was challenging.

Limitless rage. Rage starvation is of the past. You crank out so much damage that even if you queue Heroic Strike on every attack you still have loads of rage. Me not having enough rage for a spell reflect just doesn’t happen anymore. You float from group to group with your rage bar all high. If you don’t, pull faster.

Play smart, use macros. I have two new macros that I use, and I feel they really crank up both my threat and my DPS quite a bit.

The first one is simple, and works under the assumption you have a Glyph of Revenge. If you don’t, what are you waiting for? They are dirt cheap and easily available, and awesome as heck.

Update from Oct 23:
Hats off to Kranmar who provided a better Glyph of Revenge macro than the one I originally posted, kudos, and I hope he won’t mind I reposted it.


#showtooltip Revenge
/castsequence reset=2 revenge, !heroic strike


In the words of Kranmar himself:

I’m using the following macro for the revenge/heroic strike combo. After using revenge it switches to heroic strike, but resets to revenge after two seconds if you don’t use heroic strike (it also resets after using heroic strike):

This basically allows you to mash that button for when revenge becomes active and for the rest focus on your normal rotation with Shield Slam and devastate. On bosses I never seem to run out of rage so I’m spamming HS as well.

 
The second macro is courtesy of the guys over at Tankspot:


#showtooltip Shield Slam
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/cast Shield Block
/use 13
/use 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()
/cast Shield Slam
/startattack


This is assuming you have either the Auto Blocker or Coren’s Lucky Coin, or the best option, both! While Shield Block has a great mitigation component, the best part is the huge boost to Shield Block Value. This macro will check if SB is available, use it, check for availability of trinkets in both slots and then use Shield Slam. Prepare for massive crits. My personal best is 5397, I am sure a lot of you can easily top that.

Note that you can use a similar trinket popping macro on all your characters if you tend to forget on-use trinkets.

DPS must work harder. In my guild, there’s always been a bunch of people with top DPS, and also a lot of people who are not as good in their rotations. I was close to outdpsing people in heroics before if they didn’t give it their all. This will become blatantly more obvious now, as I am already doing more DPS than a lot of dedicated DPSers. Work harder for your top 3 spots, because all tanks will crank out damage and give you a run for your money. Now is the time to show if you got it.

All in all, tanking has changed. It’s easier now, which makes it more accessible to people who were not interested in tanking before. It’s tons of fun. We’ll have to see how it’ll pan out in the long run, because right now, the challenge is missing a little, but I am sure we’ll get there. Go out there, have fun, be reckless.

Ever since the introduction of special bosses during holiday events a year ago, I’ve been tanking such events. I have rings off Headless Horseman, cloaks off Ahune, trinkets from Brewfest, but never have I gotten any of the low drop rate items ever. Which is alright. Headless Horseman is always special, because he happens to drop one of the cutest pets, which I’ve been trying to get for the other half since HH first showed up in game.

Yesterday was another day that didn’t see a Squashling drop from about 10-12 summons that we did. But this dropped, and I happened to roll a 97.

Hope the Halloween event is treating y’all as well as it did me.

Guess what, I still live! I got a couple mails asking where I was and what was going on. All’s fine, but I was hit by RL and also spent hours tuning my UI and playing WoW too much. Strangely enough, all the changes brought something about that I didn’t think would happen: blog ennui. Or maybe even WoW ennui.

I am really torn at the moment. On the one hand, the new protection warrior is amazingly fun. It’s just awesome to play. On the other hand, other classes got hit with the nerfbat so hard that I outperform them so much that it makes me feel bad. What the hell happened to warlocks?

I tested my 5/3/53 spec in three heroics. I first went to Slave Pens and Underbog with a group of fairly low DPSers from my guild, and was number one on DPS by a big margin. I then went to Heroic Shattered Halls with some of the best DPSers in my guild, and I was a close third. Zero CC on all runs, and in Heroic SH, all three DPSers AoEd away.

And then I went to Zul’Aman yesterday. Name’s Sitta in the anonymous report. Even when we were sloppy, we just bruted our way through it.

I am joining the ranks of people who are disenchanted with the current state of raiding. The Zul’jin kill wasn’t satisfying at all. I couldn’t even enjoy seeing Lynx and Dragonhawk phases because everything was over so fast. I hope Matticus is right and that things will get more challenging again, because ezmode WoW is kinda boring. I am hoping for kickass delivery in WotLK and stuff that you won’t just blaze through. I heard that the Northrend 5-mans are all really easy, and that’s already a turn-off. I feel extremely powerful now, and I want to get into epic fights again. I cannot be alone with this sentiment. Maybe I am biased. The other half’s main is a warlock and she is very very unhappy. That rubs off. I don’t blame her. I loved what I saw of the new affliction tree, but if you were a dedicated high DPS destro warlock before, the changes are very disappointing.

 
On the flip side, I made out like a bandit in yesterday’s two hour ZA extravaganza. We got three chests, but had only 8 minutes left for the fourth, so we stopped rushing after the third. First chest scored me Pauldrons of Stone Resolve and third chest got me Signet of the Last Defender. Given recent changes, both pieces of gear are extremely awesome. I feel a bit guilty because the other warrior passed on both which was probably brought on by my big QQ session a couple weeks ago.

Give me your opinion, warriors and all other visitors alike. How’s life been for you since the patch? Too OP, too boring, or just right for you guys? Enlighten me.