Oh right thanks, didn’t know that.
Ugh. As a DK tank who actually knows what I’m doing, I apologize for my idiot fellow class member. It’s sad how many DK tanks suck, but please don’t tar us all with the same brush. Some of us actually know how to use our cooldowns and not act like douchenozzles. 
Ah, Death Knight tanks…
I have had the pleasure of raiding/dungeoning with some really excellent ones, and the the horror of trying to do so with some really bad ones. DK tank seems to be one of those particular rolls that, when done very well, can be wonderful, and when done really poorly, is like having your brains melted and leaking out your ears. Sadly, there are far, far more brain leaking experiences than wonderful ones.
When it comes to DK tanks in the Outlands, here is my theory. 13-16 year old guy got WoW for his birthday and rolled a hunter. Played the Hunter all day, everyday. He forgot to eat and didn’t sleep all summer to level that hunter to 55. Then completely stripped that toon, left it standing in the barrens, naked, and rolled a DK. Once he made it out of the DK starting area he got to Honor Hold and thought, my dps is awesome, certainly every dungeon queue in the world will benefit from my awesome dps!…and then, these queue times suck, I should just tank, how hard can it be?…and thus, DK tanks in Outland dungeons with no idea how to position mobs so they don’t hit you in the back, manage your cool-downs and abilities so as to not terrify the healer, and no clue how to maximize their AoE in their rotation to make certain they keep aggro on everything. sigh
There are good ones out there, though.
Heh apology accepted.
Now not only is this most likely true it’s damn funny 
…is it just me, or has the entire LFD system just collapsed after Wrath? I used to queue up in Wrath and successfully do 3 Heroics in a row. Now I can’t even get through one before the PUG collapses. I just don’t even want to queue any more - I do my Firelands dailies and then go Fishing or Arch.
I haven’t had too much trouble with it, but I’ve been tanking it (I have a current-tier raid geared DK tank and another DK tank on another server who just turned 85 and who’s about properly geared for heroics, and I’ve been running with the same hunter friend (go cross-server RealID friend groups!)) so we get fast queues and can usually carry bad DPS as long as the healer is decent. Only trouble we’ve had so far is in the troll heroics (mostly ZG) because I don’t have a lot of experience tanking them (Venoxis sucks, but if we can get past him we’re usually golden) so I really need a good healer (or at least all good DPS) or everything can fall apart. (Wow, that was a lot of parentheses!)
I do agree that people seem more impatient, though. I can understand not wanting to risk spending a lot of time on a bad group, but still…tanks get insta-queues. DPS don’t. So if a DPS gets a group and the tank/healer don’t totally fail, isn’t it worthwhile to stick it out for a bit and see what happens?
Agreed. You have the DK idiots in spell plate who haven’t checked to see what’s changed since Wrath, and then there’s Mionelol, who is a DK goddess. She soloed LK (mostly. 
). We are not worthy.
I like it on my priest, since I’m healing. I absolutely hate it on my warlock, as it’s a twenty-to-thirty-or-forty minute wait for a queue, and then a crapshoot as to whether the group will collapse. I have yet to run either of the troll dungeons on her, and, honestly, I’m dreading it. The previous heroics, I ran with an awesome friend of mine, and he explained them over Skype as we ran through. Now, however, due to my doing something entirely awful to him–unrelated to the game–that’s not going to happen. Fuck me, I miss him. Not because of WoW.
Anyway.
People are far less patient, and there’s a steeper learning curve. I just chalk it up to coming in late on WotLK, though; by the time I was running those Heroics, everyone overgeared the content by a significant margin. They seem to be trying to avoid that this time. I get what they’re doing, but, really, two dungeons to grind Valor? Really?
And, regarding DK tanks in Outland. . .I think that might be when a lot of people try tanking for the first time. I know that I tried with my DK. That being said, I always made sure to say, “hey, I’m new to tanking, and I probably suck.” The problem I had doing that was impatient DPS. I tried to make careful pulls, because I wasn’t yet sure of the survivability cooldowns and the timing. Then the DPS would start pulling, and was like, look, I know you’re trying to race to the endgame, but I’m trying to learn how to play my fucking class as a tank, I can’t do that while soloing, and you’re not fucking helping. Slow the fuck down.
Of course, it usually came out as, "Hey, I’m sorry for going slowly, but I’m new at this. "
I’m really overgered for Cata heroics and I don’t tank ZA/ZG just regular heroics. And I still run into problems. The other day I went in with one of our pro raid healers and 2 guildies who didn’t know Stonecore and one random person. We wiped twice. In Cata heroics even a DPS can wipe you without really trying. Usually I just solo queue. Not for the bag of goodies which I don’t care about. I go alone so if things get bad I can just drop and not try to grind it out. I don’t mind a death or 2 but I’m not signing up for a painful 90 minute crawl through a dungeon.
Not that I’m elite or anything. Last nite I was the one messing up. My work schedule changed so I dropped out of our raid group for Firelands but got subbed in for Shannox. Our early group has been downing him but the late group, that I joined, has not gotten any FL bosses yet. I come in and offer to take the more complicated role of tanking Riplimb rather than what I do best: sit on bosses and soak damage. I did pretty well the first couple of pulls and maybe got overconfident or just that those were easier for some reason because as the night progressed I regressed.
I was advised not to count on the crystal traps and found out the hard way that other raid members would “steal” them from me by accidentally hitting them or dragging their dog into them so we wiped a couple times. So I started kiting Riplimb more and ended up out of range and died a few more times. We got it right one time and got both dogs down but the main tank died and we wiped again. On the last few pulls I was messing up the pull itself. First I went in too soon and was raped by both dogs and the boss. Then I backed off a bit too far and missed my Faerie Fire and was out of position to hit Riplimb as he went to chew off my healer’s face. And we wiped. On the last wipe I hit him with Faerie Fire but as he was running to me someone else dropped an AoE and he ran off after them. It was dumb dumb dumb. I was embarassed and angry. That was my chance to down a FL boss and I messed it up. Who knows when I’ll get to go again?
fuming
Nothing cheeses me off more than someone who will equip all PvP gear to cheat the RDF, and then wonder why they are getting one shotted and a succession of three healers (Druid, Shaman, Holy Pally) can’t keep them up.
DK was in full 358 DPS PvP gear…with no avoidance stats at all, but wanted to tank the heroic.
and here I am…90 gold in repairs later and couldn’t get past the first boss.
deep cleansing breath…so fishing, you say, kushiel?
Vote to Kick. That is the answer to all of your problems. The idea that you would wipe more than once with a tank in PvP gear amazes me. I would probably kick him before the first pull unless he put on actual tank gear. If not, I’d leave.
ETA: Although I have to say that, as a tank, I get to avoid almost all of the serious issues with RDF. As long as the healer is decent, we always finish.
I should have kicked, but I hate to do that unless it’s just ridiculous…and this was ridiculous, but by the time we (the dps) discovered why the heals was having such problems, it was just easier to leave. No penalty after the group has already begun to disintegrate, anyway. I was just doing my “polymorph, then kill order” jive…guess I should have been nosier from the get-go.:smack:
I used to hang around forever as DPS, but I’ve learned what groups will hang on and which ones won’t, so I bail earlier. I don’t mind going through a bazillion wipes, if everyone is trying their best.
I have only seen the latter part of Heroic Deadmines twice: once when I joined the group after they defeated the Foe Reaper, and then one…just one…time we actually defeated it.
Slowly working my way into tanking Cata dungeons on the Pally. Did Lost City of Tol Vir tonight, with no problems other than my flaky connection disconnecting me on the second to last boss.
Great fun in TB. My first time there on the Pally, got the win as defenders, plus two other achievements–All Star, and the one for killing three siege engines in one battle. Allies actually had healers tonight. What a concept! PVP with real healers actually healing. Gotta love it 
Up to about a month ago we held TB about 95% of the time I would guess but since then it’s a 50/50 split just about, the alliance have started to bring healers to the fight and not surprisingly it’s more even now. More fun too to be honest.
In good news finally got enough korium to make my Turbo-Charged Flying Machine you can even see the little hula girl on the dashboard, nice touch
Well, we finally killed Alysrazor. Probably the best fight in there so far, in my opinion - everybody has a job, and anybody failing at it is hard to recover from. But it’s not so overwhelming that you can’t make progress. Once we were consistently seeing the phases, and our flyer figured out how to get the full buff, a kill was imminent.
The actual kill was kinda scary though, since the add I was tanking was at like 15% going into the second tornado phase - tanking an add while dodging swirling tornadoes was an adventure. Then we lost our second tank during the final “air phase”, but our feral cat went bear and managed to survive while the flier killed the boss.
Might have been my last raid week for awhile, so it was nice to go out with a bang.
Grats on the kill! I was wondering how long the fight took. From what I hear and experienced, 2 flyers can get it done in 2 cycles (Killing in the 2nd burn phase), while 1 flyer makes it take 3 or 4.
We killed it right after the second burn phase - I’d say maybe half-way into that ground phase. Our flyer was at 41.6k and it took 11:38. A second flyer would make it go very fast, I would think, especially if it was one suited for the job (we had a SPriest, and a mage that could have gone up as well). We were at 51% after the first burnout on one attempt (not the kill attempt though).
As a note, there is no 4th burn phase. After landing for the third time there is no more ignition. She just sits there and cleaves, stacking the debuff. Eventually the damage is unhealable. It’s a soft enrage of sorts - we hit it once (because a DPS died early on) and wiped at 5% or so.
ETA: A side note - it’s kinda interesting if you look at the average kill times at World of Logs. By far the highest point is at exactly our kill time 11:40 or so. However, there is a second peak at a much lower number (just over 8 minutes) - these are clearly the “2 flyers” groups.
Not necessarily. Here’s our kill from last Tuesday. We did it in 8:44 with only one flyer. As you can see, though, he had insane DPS (he ranked for that fight). There’s something Fire mages can do that can really increase their DPS up there–something to do with Combustion, but I’m not sure what it is.
I’m not sure I even knew there could be more than one flyer, actually. I don’t think that ever occurred to us.
Picked it up yesterday myself. Now we can stage the Blood Elf Highland Games. (“Remember the Sunwell, laddie.”)