Yep. Nowadays they can regen mana/rage through shields. (same mechanism for prot pallies)
Prot pallies are a bit different. They regain mana by being healed, and shields only prevent damage, making them require less healing. A fully talented/glyphed disc shield will return some mana when it expires or pops, but it doesn’t even come close to making up for the difference.
For the adds in Ahune, my prot pally doesn’t have much trouble keeping them all on her, but so far everyone’s had the good sense to either stand on the consecrate or move so the consecrate is between them and the new spawns. That, and I save my HotR and AS for new spawns, as opposed to just letting hammer fly on stuff I already have threat on when it comes up in the rotation (just for this particular fight). And lots of Righteous Defense on the healers and AoE people. <3 RD.
I think the icons confuse people; they automatically assume that purple diamond is a mob. I tend to right-click on the tank’s portrait and set him as a focus.
That’s odd…it must vary by server. I’ve never heard anybody complain about marking the tank–except maybe if you put a skull on him. On my server (both of them, actually) Skull, X, and Square are the traditional mob kill-order icons. But any of the others are fair game. We usually mark tanks with Circle (which everyone seems to call “Condom” 
) and Star.
working on the exploration achi’s b4 Cataclysm. Was a pain beofre a guildie advised me about the tarck options on those achievements. Now it’s straightforward. NR done, Outland nearly done, then the fun part of doing old world on horse back. Will still be queueing for instanecs as well.
In the raids I attend the tanks are normally marked with circle and/or star, and special people (slime kiter on Rotface, for example) are marked with moon. Skull, X, and square are the kill order. This can get confusing if an addon (like DBM) does its own automatic marking (like spore carriers on Festergut) and we have to be careful which marks we choose so they don’t conflict.
Eek eek eek eek eek! I dinged 69 and the random dungeon finder switched me from Burning Crusade random dungeons to Lich King random dungeons! Mommy I’m not ready yet! Can I make the random dungeon finder make me Burning Crusade randoms again?
Just a WAG, but I think it’s still looking for both. It’s just that a lot more people are running LK dungeons than BC dungeons.
Besides, I’ve run Utgarde Keep with people level 68-70 and did fine. It’s not a really hard instance.
Socketing,
Should I be matching socket colour to get the bonus, or just gemming for stam stam stam?
Defence up to 523.
Outland explored. On to Kalimdor!
Unless the socket bonus is very good(and it usually isn’t) ignore the socket colour and just gem what you need to activate your meta and stamina after that(or def if you need it of course).
Yup, put me in Utgarde and it was okay, we wiped once on Ingvar. Nice dungeon though.
It didn’t give me an emblem, even though the random dungeon finder said I would get one. 
Edit: And I got a letter from an Archmage dude telling me about what the emblems do, so the game registered stuff about emblems for me.
enfuring eyes of zul it is. defence up to 527
For tanks, you should ignore socket bonuses and slot Stam gems (except whatever it takes to make your meta work–Nightmare Tears are good for that, since they count for all three colors). If you need to gem to get your Defense up to 540, though, make use of the socket bonus (especially if it’s Stam or Str) to do it.
In other news, I had a good weekend raiding! Friday night alt raid was very good to my tank–I got Sindragosa’s Flawless Fang (goodbye, 200 trinket!) and Devium’s Eternally Cold Ring. I also got the 277 Bile-Encrusted Medallion, but I ended up giving it to the other tank since I’d won three things that night and he passed the trinket to me. I’m at 9/50 Shadowfrost Shards now, and am currently the best-geared Horde DK tank on my server! (3rd overall–and the two top guilds on our server are both Alliance–one has killed LK 25 heroic already). So my tank is in pretty good company. 
Strange - I can get to all my alts on other servers but I can’t connect to Cairne - I’m just locked at the “Connected” message on the login screen.
Open your Character window (“C” key) and click on the “Currency” tab. You should see some “Emblems of Triumph” listed there. Emblems don’t appear in your bags.
Weird stuff: My mage got yelled at today after an Ahune fight in which everybody except me and the tank died, and both of us had just a sliver of life left. After Ahune was down, one of the dead DPS (the rogue, I think) said:
“U are the most stupid Mage io [sic] ever seen u shoudl [sic] kill ur toon or deleted [sic] it”
I honestly have no idea what I did or did not do to provoke that. This was probably my 18th Ahune run since the holiday started (1/day on both my pally main and this mage, plus one run on my other pally, and one day my main pally did it twice), so I kinda think I understand how the fight works. I did the same thing I’ve done on all of my previous, successful runs (during/after which I’d received no complaints or criticism). Basically, help take down that one elite add, then AoE (Flamestrike) the non-elites as best I can, hoping the tank can sorta keep them grouped together, and single-target them when I have to, then attack Ahune directly when he becomes vulnerable.
In this particular fight, once the healer went down I pretty much did what I had to do to stay alive - I Iceblocked myself at one point, and used Invisibility at another point. I didn’t have much choice - I was down to about 5% health and mana in both cases, my pots and herbalism-healing-thing were both on CD (one of these days I’ll remember I also have that Gift of the Naaru heal thing), and I had to get the mobs off me somehow. Anyway, I came out of the invisibility, saw I was out of combat and there were no mobs near me, saw everybody but the tank was dead. I was about to try to sit down and eat/drink and get back what HP/mana I could , but then I noticed that Ahune had only 1200 or so HP left, so I flung a Fireball at him and took him out (like, “Hey, let’s end this now, before it turns into a complete wipe”).
I stuck around for a bit to see if that dead guy was going to elaborate and perhaps offer some clarification as to what I did that was so “stupid”, but he was apparently content to simply nerdrage, so I decided to not let it bother me too much. Best guess: when I went invisible, maybe the mobs all went after him.
One thing I hate about the Ahune fight: Once the air elementals show up, my mage becomes next to useless. I’ll start casting, only to be interrupted as the air elementals suck me into the middle of the melee (took me a while to figure out what was happening). Run out of the melee, try to cast again, get interrupted and sucked into the melee again …
I had a similar interesting encounter in Ahune the other day. We couldn’t kill him on the first submerge, so during the second add phase the healer started bitching at the mage to shoot Ahune instead of the adds. I started arguing back under the mistaken impression that Ahune was invulnerable when the adds were out. I’m not sure what the mage ended up doing, but Ahune submerged again and we killed him, with the healer bitching and pissing and moaning about how it took so long to take him out. The fight takes less than 10 minutes for 2 Frost, quit your damn bitchin’.:dubious:
Of course, I was wrong, and Ahune still takes 25% damage while the adds are up. But I was just reading WoWwiki, and it seems that the encounter bugs out if you kill him in the add phase. It won’t count as a boss kill and you may not get the loot. So it’s just as well the mage didn’t take him out that way.
You’d think they would have just made him invulnerable if they hadn’t intended him to be killed then.
I posted this on the official forums as well, and the advice I got was that the “conventional wisdom” is that ranged DPS should ignore the adds and simply hammer away at Ahune throughout the whole fight.
That only works if your group overgears the fight and the tank is good at controlling all the adds. I will say that the only time my groups have had problems on Ahune is when the ranged ignore the adds completely and they get out of control.
Also, I’d say about 1/3 of the Ahune kills I’ve had (which are pretty substantial, since I have 3 level 80 toons doing it every day), we’ve killed him during an add phase with no glitching.
Also: Professor Putricide can go die in a fire
Trying to explore Stranglethorn. I have one area outstanding - Zuuldaia ruins or somesuch. It looks like they are just inside the Zul’Arab instance, but I can’t enter without being part of a raid group it says. How am I going to pick this one up?
Altoholic lets you link the professions and achievements of your other characters, and says who has what you’re linking. Half my guild suffers from altitis and the other half enjoys altitis, so it’s pretty much a complusory addon for us!
Yesterday I was doing an nth-alt run of Ahune with some guildies: our GM’s warlock alt, my priest healing, a hunter and the DK of our best warrior tanks. We figured it wasn’t a Good Idea to have him tank, so GM-warlock signed us up to PUG one.
And we got a DK :smack:
Nobody died, almost nobody ate any ice spikes, but maaaaan that was scary! The mobs kept mistaking me for the tank…