Derptastic question: So I have tank marked as my /focus and I’m also attacking an enemy. For the purposes of abilities that are ‘apply to focus target’ is the tank my focus, or is the enemy my focus? I’m trying to get a good macro going for Misdirect, but when I use it, it still wants me to select with the hand cursor the person I want to use it on. Shouldn’t it apply to the tank, who is my focus target?
If you target the tank and type “/focus” then the tank will be your focus. It’s possible you have the macro borked up.
This will cast Misdirection on your focus if you have one and it’s on your team, your target if it’s on your team, and then your pet if it exists:
/cast [target=focus, help] Misdirection; [help] Misdirection; [target=pet, exists] Misdirection
I actually normally add another option for mouse-over targets for if I need to MD to multiple tanks in a fight, but I don’t remember the syntax for that right now.
Hmm. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but here’s a MD macro courtesy of Frostheim from WHU*:
/cast [@focus,help][@pet,exists] Misdirection
Does that look similar to what you’re using? I had an older one from Wrath, but it was really complex, and this is much simpler. MD to the focus if it exists and is friendly, then to your pet if you don’t have a focus target set.
*macro ganked from hispost about Cata hunter macros
Complicated question. It depends what kind of content you’re running. For progression raids, you should be putting pure Stamina in every slot that doesn’t have an amazing socket bonus. At most, you should be using Stam hybrids in every slot.
If you’re doing five-mans, then you can start branching out into other stats. Mastery is always going to be king for us, because of the wonderful way that Prot Warr mastery works: anything over the block cap gets turned into Critical Block. That means that Mastery continues to be useful for us for a long, long time.
In general, for Prot Warriors, you want Stamina > Mastery > Parry > Dodge. However, if your Parry percentage ends up being more than double your dodge, you’ll want to start preferring Dodge until it evens back out. If you’re having no problem surviving fights and want more threat, focus on Expertise, Strength, and Hit. I wouldn’t ever gem for Parry or Dodge. The only stats I’d use in gem slots are Stamina, Mastery, and Expertise.
There’s no way to rank tanks through logs. What I do is check WoW Progress for the top-ranked guilds, check their Armory pages, and then look at their 85 Warriors for ones that appear to be active raiders and main-spec Prot. Kind of a pain in the ass, but it works.
Oh, and as far as looking at my spec goes, keep in mind that I’ve stepped away from raiding, so my spec right now is heavily focused on five-man content. I’d be using something different if I were tanking progression raids.
Heroic Strike + Incite is great on a single target, especially if you also have Deep Wounds (which triggers off of crits). You’re only using Cleave on packs of mobs, right? Never use it on a single target.
Your focus is always your focus. Your target is always your target. Report the actual syntax you’re using here and we can probably figure out the problem.
Can I see it?
Jinx is where I buy mine and Julian’s (my grandson) WoW t-shirts and they have a place on their site where you can add one of your shots provided you’re wearing one of their shirts.
Mine’s (which you’ve seen before) is here: J!NX
It’s a cool place to buy stuff because they give you “gold” which applies to your purchases. Right now I’m saving up for an Alliance hoodie.
You ladies might like the Murloc hoodie.
disclaimer: I’m ONLY a customer, so this is not spam!
Thanks
Q
I own a couple of their shirts, but I haven’t uploaded any photos. I did, however, just put a comment on yours. (I’m the person who used your first initial, just so you don’t think some crazy stranger recognized you. :D)
Thanks, SFG! 
We have Julian with us for a week, and I am helping him with his character Thundorre, so he and I are going to get D to make some pics of us together and submit those as well. Hopefully, I’ll get that hoodie in time for Fall!
Thanks
Q
I’d love to see those pics of you playing together!
Your wish, etc.
Guy in the middle needs no introduction, right? 
About Julian: I could spoil that little guy really easily. He’s great company for me and, at 11, is a quick learner.
Thanks
Q
Yay it worked! Now I can stop AGGRO ALL THE THINGS!
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Regarding the dailies “Rock Lobster” and “Feeling Crabby”: Why does Wolkie sometimes have a “breath bar” over his head and sometimes not? Tuesday night I did FC and had to surface for air and last night I could have stayed submerged indefinitely during both quests. A game anomaly?
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The Tol Barad battle: Last night was the first time I entered it, and there was so much abuse heaped on me that I finally left the party. It being my first time there, I wasn’t familiar with the terrain and there was so much writing on my screen, I couldn’t see shit. There was a green box with everyone’s name on it and to the left of it was another box (forgot what data was in it), so with not being able to see (I went into interface and deleted my name and the guild name prior to the battle as well) and not knowing what the fuck I was doing and getting yelled at in the chat box, I decided well fuck this shit and left.
But here’s my question about that: When you leave a battle early, does that affect your fighting abilities for a while, and when you leave a battle, why can’t you hearth to your inn?
Fighting abilities: I had some dailies to do with the TB spiders and as I entered battle, none of my abilities would work right away. They just weren’t all lit up as usable. The one that was, was thunder clap. Then in about 10 seconds, rend and the others came up and we could fight again, but for the most part, we just stood there and “took it”.
Hearthing: I could right click on the stone, but all that happened was the rushing sound over and over and us moving our arms round and round over and over. No hearth at all.
Yes, I died a couple of times during that battle, but rezzed fine with no sickness and there was no warning about taking a 25% hit on my gear.
Bad night all the way around in TB for me.
Thanks
Q
When you pick up the quest, the questgiver gives you a 10-minute buff that allows you to move faster underwater as well as breathe. If you don’t do the quest within 10 minutes, the buff expires and you have to surface for air normally.
Welcome to the chaos of mass PvP! All those boxes is the raid interface, so everyone in your raid group (I think TB supports up to 40 vs 40? not sure) will appear sort of like in a 5-man party, but more scrunched up.
For the TB battle specifically, I don’t think there’s a penalty for leaving the battle early. It does teleport you out of TB when you leave the raid group though, which might put your hearth on cooldown. If it doesn’t, then possibly you had already used your hearth within the last half hour (there’s a 30 minute cooldown for hearthing unless you have the guild perk to shorten it).
As a warrior, most of your abilities depend on having “rage.” You gain rage by hitting things with your autoattacks and also by being hit. Your abilities were grayed out because you hadn’t yet built up enough rage (charging and shouting generate rage, as well as one or two other abilities but I don’t remember what they’re called). These abilities will use up your rage, so high-cost abilities can’t be used in quick succession too often.
This could be lag. If you were in combat and getting hit, it could also be pushback from taking too much damage.
For PvP battlegrounds such as Tol Barad, the spirit healer automatically resurrects everyone who died every 30 seconds with no penalty.
Mass PvP is chaos, so don’t feel bad about it. It’s going to be difficult for everyone the first few times until you get the hang of it.
The green box is a raid screen. It’s been popping up every time I enter a battleground since the last patch. Pain in the ass. To make it go away, click the “hide” button in the smaller box to the left of the big green one. Then click the little arrow on the right on the smaller box to make it go away, too.
The TB battle can be more than a little confusing at first. Here is some basic info about the area, and here is a more detailed explanation of the battle. One thing I like to do when attacking, as soon as I get credit for an honor kill, I go grab a tank (vehicle) and drive it to one of the towers, then deploy the siege mode, and go get another tank. Each tower should get two tanks, which will shoot boulders at the towers until destroyed. Destroying towers gives extra time to the attackers. When defending, killing deployed tanks can prevent the attackers from killing the towers for extra time. Otherwise, stick with the mob, fight on the flags, and when you die, watch the chat box–someone will be calling for help at one of the flags. Go there and fight until you die again. Once per week, you can grab the “Victory in Tol Barad” quest–turn it in when you’ve won one of the battles there for extra honor, reputation and commendations.
Oak, thanks. I read through the basic info and the more detailed stuff. No wonder I got yelled at. This seems way more difficult than WG or any of the other BG’s I have been in.
One thing did strike me about all that was written, though: something like, “stay in one base for 25 minutes and you will win.”
What’s he saying here - just stay out of the way and wait it out?
Would it be best just to continue to ride with the mob rather than trying to drive a siege tank since I don’t know the terrain that well and, well, with my memory issues and tendency to get flustered sometimes?
Also, Headrush042, thanks for the detailed explanations!
Thanks
Q
Staying with the mob is pretty much always a valid option in non-rated battlegrounds. Going solo is dangerous, and if you do not know exactly what you’re trying to do, likely a futile effort anyway.
The “stay in one base to win” thing only applies when defending, and could work in theory–meaning that when defending, if your team can hold just one base for the entire game, you will win. In practice, it doesn’t usually work out that way. That strategy basically concedes 2 bases to the attackers, who will then all zerg the one defended base after capping the other two. All they have to do is capture that last base briefly to get the win. I prefer to run a rolling defense…re-capping whatever the horde just took while they are attacking somewhere else.
Anytime, Quasi! I would definitely recommend sticking with the crowd. There’s usually enough people going for the siege tanks unless you’re playing in the middle of the night and it’s a small number of people in there. Periodically someone in chat will say “ressers to xxxx” – meaning if you’re dead and are awaiting resurrection from the spirit healer, you should head to that place to help attack/defend as soon as you rez. A good beginner strat is fight at the flag until you die, then go to wherever they’re calling for ressers to go – rinse, repeat.
Yay! You guys look great. 
(Also: I own that same Warrior shirt!)
PvP zones like Tol Barad (and Wintergrasp in Wrath) are always nuts. They’re also often full of assholes. In general, you can disregard the hell out of those people. Most of them are obnoxious teenagers.
In a nutshell, for TB, follow everyone else around and attack people you can attack. However, don’t fight on the roads–this offers no benefit to your team. Instead, go to one of the structures that you need to capture or defend, and make sure you’re standing close enough to its flag that the UI element pops up. The element is a bar with an arrow that moves toward the Alliance or Horde side, depending which faction has more people in the area (more or less).
I’ve been doing more TB lately and I noticed that I can’t use flasks or pots during the battle. Is that right? Is it new? If I take a flask before the battle will I still get the effect?
Quasi… adding to SFG’s excellent commentary:
Far be it from me to defend obnoxious teenage assholes, but some of the abuse would have been the fact that the TB mass PvP event is strictly numerically balanced: if there are 22 of you, there are 22 of them. If only 21 of you know what they’re doing, that’s effectively an almost-one-person advantage.
I.e., a learner on the team is an active liability, like it is in other balanced-number PvP BGs. There’s not a lot of tolerance for someone who can’t instantly pick up his slack, OJT notwithstanding. It’s a damn hard place to learn to PvP.
I.e., the standard flag-capture mechanic used in places like EotS, and unlike the cap mechanic in AV or AB. Hold local numerical superiority long enough.
Q, you commented how some of the advice you saw on TB came down to “while defending, camp one flag for all you’ve got”. Blizz rebalanced TB to make that less effective. Some of it is graveyard proximity: attackers have a GY just behind the flag area they died at, while defenders rez at the central fortress and have to run back to the area under contest. Given a straightforward 1-1 kill ratio in a flag fight, the attackers will gradually develop a local numerical advantage because their rez waves arrive back in the fight sooner.
Add to that, the defenders require more time to capture a point than the attackers need to, given equal numbers, and that time penalty scales with how many of the flags are in enemy hands: so if the attackers cap two, an attempt to ninja-countercap by the defense will take so long it’s easy for the attackers to break up. Nowadays, the tactical preference now is mobile defense: meet the attacker zerg with your own, and keep a rapid-reaction force ready to counter attacker ninja-caps at the other sites. Sparing a stealther or two to scout to warn the raid of incoming at capped flags is also a popular tactic I’ve seen; it makes the rapid-reaction force even more viable.
Huh, I never noticed that.
The only obvious mechanic I can think of is from rated BGs and arenas, where the flask effect would be canceled when you enter the battlegroup. Knowing how much Blizz hates writing new code, I would not be surprised they just re-used that capability for TB, meaning your flask buff is gone, gone, gone.
Maybe. I’m just speculatin’.