2sense, I was just about to write a whole treatise explaining how you don’t understand effective health, why Stamina was important in Wrath, why avoidance has become more important now, and how a solid grasp of the current state of theorycrafting is an absolute requirement for anyone raiding in one of the world’s top guilds, but then I realized I don’t give a shit, and you’re not going to listen to me anyway. So go ahead and gem Strength and Expertise on your tanks. Have fun clearing Baradin Hold or whatever.
Maybe I’m mistaking your tone but you seem upset. If I’ve done something to offend you I apologize. This is a nice conversational thread and I’d like to keep it that way.
Anyone have a “a six-year old would understand it” explanation for the healing mechanic on Baleroc? Our healers don’t seem to quite grasp it, and no matter if we one-tank or two-tank the fight, they seem to find themselves oom halfway though and making the choice to forget to heal a tank or to forget to heal the dps soaking up torment stacks.
My understanding (healers please correct me if I’m wrong–I’m a tank!) is that the fight is easier if you single-tank it. Healers get stacks by healing the person taking damage from the crystals, so it’s advantageous to have that person take as many stacks as they possibly can before swapping out. Shadow priests with dispersion are good for this, as are DPS DKs and anybody with the Tol Barad trinket. Once that healer builds up a bunch of stacks, they switch to healing the tank (who’s taking massive amounts of damage to go with their increasingly massive health pool) and the other healer swaps to healing the person tanking the crystal (and the raid, if you only have two healers, but nobody else should be taking much damage).
It’s very much a coordination fight–you have to communicate with your fellow healer(s) to make sure everybody knows what everybody else is doing, and the DPS have to be spot-on on their order of swapping out with the crystal.
If you’re healers are going oom, then it may be that they understand the structure, but they don’t have the mana. (or the fight is taking too long for the dps) How many dps do you have taking the shards? We seem to do ok with 5 (one Shadow priest), which shakes out to 3 per shard. Except for the 1st one which has the shadow priest going solo with Defenseive CD. And then after that it’s 9,9,7 - repeat. With only 9 stacks on the shard-dps, you shouldn’t need too many big mana heals. I think since you have 2 healers on him, you can get by with smaller heals to gain more Vital Sparks. But I could be wrong - I’m dps.
Yeah I thought the one tank strat was working better overall, too, but eventually our tank’s health would get so high and the healers lacked the stacks to heal him up enough to survive decimation blade. So our MT/RL decided to switch to the two-tank strat with the idea that the person taking decimation blade would only have 250,000-300,000 health, but then we started losing the non-decimation blade tank even more often (and we lacked to dps to beat enrage, if we were ever to get there). It was pretty clear our healer’s didn’t understand the spark/flame mechanic at all.
Sadly, no shadow priests or DKs. If our dps takes more than 10 stacks of torment, right now you can pretty much expect that they will die.
Do any of your DPS have (or can get) the TB trinket (Mirror of Broken Images)? Popping that should allow them to stay in for at least a few more stacks–they can probably safely go up to 14 or 15 if they’re doing 10 now. Obviously DPS who benefit from Mastery would be the best choice for the trinket since it won’t gimp their DPS as much as someone who benefits less from it.
Hmm, maybe but i doubt anyone has the 125 TB marks handy and with doing Molten front dailies likely won’t have time to get them.
[QUOTE=aktep]
Anyone have a “a six-year old would understand it” explanation for the healing mechanic on Baleroc? Our healers don’t seem to quite grasp it, and no matter if we one-tank or two-tank the fight, they seem to find themselves oom halfway though and making the choice to forget to heal a tank or to forget to heal the dps soaking up torment stacks.
[/QUOTE]
Our group two tanks it and we have two people per shard taking torment. The healers, myself included, do it like this:
Healer 1: Heals the tanks when we pull
Healer 2: Shard
Healer 3: Shard
When the second shard comes out it rotates like this:
Healer 1: Tank/Shard
Healer 2: Tank
Healer 3: Shard
Third shard comes out:
Healer 1: Shard
Healer 2: Tank/Shard
Healer 3: Tank
And when the next shard comes out we start the rotation all over again with Healer 1 back on the tanks and Healer 3 on Tanks/Shard.
Every now and then there’ll be a slip up, I know I forget my place in the rotation now and again, but try separating your tanks/healers into one channel and dps into another. That way the DPS can coordinate the shard rotation while the tanks/healers can call out the healing rotation without worrying about people talking over one another.
I’m a healer and I don’t go OOM on this fight, but I get close sometimes as does our druid so make sure your healers aren’t afraid to use their mana cooldowns.
OK, one more question.
Our healers seem to be unclear about which heals trigger vital spark / vital flame. We’ve got a Druid, a Shaman, and a Paladin. Which heals build the buff?
[QUOTE=aktep]
Our healers seem to be unclear about which heals trigger vital spark / vital flame. We’ve got a Druid, a Shaman, and a Paladin. Which heals build the buff?
[/QUOTE]
Direct heals give you the buff. Rejuv and Lifebloom don’t. As a shaman I make sure to keep Riptide on cooldown (mostly because I have 2 piece T12 bonus), the hot may not give me the buff but it gives a little extra healing and procs tidal waves for an extra fast Greater Healing Wave if I need it. I start off with a Riptide followed by just healing wave until the torment stacks start getting high then go with Greater Healing Wave. Same with tanks, I use mostly Healing Wave since the buff will give you super strong heals, unless I’m healing the tank taking Decimations which I’ll bomb Greater Healing Wave once he gets hit.
I’ve only healed it once on my druid, which sucked, and the only hot I used was Rejuv so I could use it for Swiftmend which does give you a stack of the buff. Nourish, Healing Touch, Regrowth, and Swiftmend all give you a stack. I’m not sure about the Paladin, but I’m pretty sure any of his direct heals will give him a stack as well.
We also use Bloodlust at the start, really helps to build up those initial stacks quickly for us healers.
Tanking to get overhauled?!
Blue post
I can’t find any notes that say this has been done today. On further search according to joystiq.com’s wowInsider it says this is going to be a 4.3 thing. Still, it might make tanks more fun and in turn, lowers the queue times for dps in RDF.
:eek:
Easier threat management?
I’m not sure if this is the way Blizzard wants to go. They want to get more tanks playing, but this will totally alienate the existing tanks. After the bribery didn’t work, they’ve just given up and made tanking easier.
Y’know, I would actually be supportive of this, if it was on a toggle. Raids stay with original threat difficulty. Or threat difficulty is only lowered in RDF. That way hardcore can have their hardmode and everyone else can have easymode.
I’m supportive of it. That last reason they give, about new tanks having a hard time in the RDF, is huge. It’s hard enough to learn how to tank being the pacesetter and being out in front without getting dumped on for being undergeared compared to the DPS.
And changes always screw the people who’ve been around before the change in some way or another.
Most raiders would be happy for the change, I would think. No one likes being threat capped. Not the dps who have to hold back, not the tanks who have to yell at the dps to slow down, and certainly not the healers who have to watch that fury warrior get one shot by Majordomo after 2 salvs.
Holy shit, this is insane. I can’t decide how I feel about it. I guess the plus side is that instead of having to memorize two different priorities/rotations (max DPS and max TPS), tanks can just concentrate on maximizing their DPS.
Of course, this is also going to have sweeping implications for even things like AOE tanking, where you can probably start skipping AOE threat talents and still easily hold aggro on multiple targets.
Damn. Seriously wow.
Nevermind. Ambivalent about the changes. More tanks = good. More bad tanks = very bad.
Holy sheee-it. Yeah. I read the whole thing with my jaw hanging open. That’s a pretty massive change. I… uh. Yeah.
Honestly, I’m still a beginning tank, but. blinkblink No more whack-a-mole with watching the threat of DPS unloading into what I’m hitting? No more aggro dump via floor-licking for my DPS war/DK (and the fact GC pointed out those exact classes amuses me)?
I don’t know how I feel about it. I know that, from a DPS perspective, I practically fell asleep in Wrath and dungeons were universally chain pullers-and-out with very little in the way of surprises. But at the same time, Cata runs feel like a far more complex game than Wrath, where everyone has to watch for a ton of stuff. And I do agree with Daed.
Granted, I’m a very casual tank, doing only non-heroic rdf runs once in a while, but I haven’t really had threat problems when the DPS is sane. Yeah, huntards are the bane of my tankadin, but you can’t really fix stupid. That said, I don’t see this really changing much about the way I tank…still gonna be throwing my shield, dropping my consecrate, using my AoE attacks when tanking trash. I guess maybe I can move my multi-mob taunt to somewhere less convenient, and put something else in its slot on the action bar. Gearwise, I expect mastery will still be a priority for tankadins…but maybe look for +crit instead of +hit where possible.
I’m not certain it’ll let more bad tanks in. It’s possible, I guess, but consider:
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The set of tanks right now that can manage their cooldowns, know how to fight bosses and where to stand, but can’t keep up their threat, whether due to not having the right abilities in their priority list or just not being itemized for threat. Right now they’re ‘bad’ tanks, even if through no fault of their own, and after this change they won’t be.
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The set of tanks right now that can manage 2 of those 3 things, but not all 3 at once. They might follow threat and cooldowns, but in doing so forget to watch for the fire, or follow cooldowns and position, but forget about threat in the meantime. Removing the need to worry about threat lets them focus on the other parts of tanking. Are they bad tanks? They’re certainly not as good as the ones running around, but with one less thing to juggle they will be effective tanks.
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Anyone who just can’t figure out cooldowns or positions now isn’t going to be much better after the change.
I’m honestly not sure how it’ll let more bad tanks through, unless you mean in the sense of making the job so easy any idiot can do it. I say, why let DPS hog all those guys? 
But really, if you can do the job, what makes you a bad tank?