Thanks for looking. I turned off Gatherer when I installed Carbonite I’ll try to turn it on and see what happens.
Have you been doing the heroic daily quest? That will net you some emblems of triumph (2 per day) that can be used for some very nice gear. Also, all heroics drop emblems of conquest now, so make sure you’ve checked out the emblem of conquest quartermaster (at the least you can get two pieced of T8.5 gear just from heroics now - and even downgrade emblems for two other pieces of T7.5 if you’re so inclined). Oh, and the new heroic dungeon (Trial of the Champion) drops some very nice tanking gear - hell, the regular version has a great trinket, IIRC. Really no reason to have to hope for heroic dungeon drops anymore.
If you’re interested in specific warrior tank gear (or spec/rotation) recommendations I’m sure our resident expert SFG would chip in.
The first two points are completely valid, and are probably why 90% of the folks that might want to raid don’t. But #3 just isn’t correct anymore. There is a very good chance that in a raid that you don’t out-gear some loot will come your way. Not every run, but I’d guess at least every other. For example, if you ran Naxx10 (which can be cleared by a good group in 2 hrs, but by a new group in probably 4 or 5) you have 15 bosses, each dropping 2 pieces of loot. That’s 30 items to split between 10 people. Even more, there will only be 2 tanks, and on average more than 2 tank drops. So yeah, don’t avoid raids because you don’t think you’ll get loot.
If you’re happy playing in a non-raiding guild but want to do some raiding that’s the only way to do it. Tanks are generally in demand, so if you get geared up decently you shouldn’t have much trouble getting frequent invites to fill out runs.
It’s Wednesday, I’d like to remind all Burning Dog Legionaires (or anyone else with a Horde toon on Cairne) that the weekly BDL instance run is tonight.
We’ll be starting at 8:45pm server time, and once again we are headed into the Dark Iron stronghold of Blackrock Depths. This time we’ll be starting near where we left off before, and I hope that we might get all the way to the end. If not, we’ll get as far as we can.
Who got a [Burnished Quel’Serrar] last night off of Ony25? Was it me? Oh yes, I believe it was. 
See also: new boots, new shoulders, a new neck, and my 8.5 gloves. I was a very busy bee. A very busy bee who was up for almost another hour past raid gemming, chanting, and reorganizing the itemization of her tanking sets.
There are WoW novels, but IMO they’re very poorly written. I tried reading the first book in the War of the Ancients trilogy, but I gave up after only a few pages–it was like mediocre fanfiction.
Other authors whose prose I can’t stand include Dan Brown and the woman who wrote Twilight, so if you like them, YMMV.
That will actually be getting easier with Cataclysm–no more spreadsheets to figure out what’s an upgrade! 
Until then, I recommend an addon called RatingBuster–it gives a very good breakdown between an item in your inventory and what you’re wearing.
Being above the crit cap is the #1 thing to keep an eye on. Stamina, however, isn’t always going to be the best indicator of how good your gear is. I have, hrm, six different tanking sets that combine my gear in different ways, and my unbuffed HP probably ranges from about 30k to 34 or 35k. (If you’re curious, the sets are Avoidance, Block, Frost Resist, Max HP, Max iLvl, and Threat.) Depending on where your other stats are at, Stam isn’t always going to be the best thing to gear or chant for.
Are you looking at Emblem rewards? You can get your T8.5 head and chest, as well as a bunch of other great gear, with the Emblems of Conquest that drop out of every Heroic and most raids. (The only raids that don’t drop Conquest drop Triumph, which are even better.) If you chain-run Heroics, you can get over 50 Emblems of Conquest a day.
Very, very yes.
See if you can find a raiding guild that has some open slots for 25-mans that you can get into on a regular basis. Being known as a reliable PUG could be a good route to go. There also might be someone on your server who organizes regularly scheduled PUG raids. Checking the official WoW forum for your realm could be helpful for finding these and other opportunities.
Also, to share some triumphs:
My priest got a nice DPS headpiece in herioc ToC this weekend. Up until now, my only headgear has been PvP, so it’s nice to have a PvE piece. Plus I’m only 5 Emblems of Conquest away from the teir 8.5 healing headgear, so I’ll be able to switch back and forth. (Still can’t get that damn mace in H ToC though. Grrr).
And only three more teeth needed for my ravasaur mount!
Congrats on all the new gear. All I’ve managed to accomplish recently is hitting level 58 last night, so I can finally get my drood out of Azeroth and into Outland. Couple of quick levels, and FLIGHT FORM eee. 
We’re neck and neck on this. I should have mine Friday.
Oh, and I got the “Mysteries of the Marsh” achievement last night. It’s really amazing how much easier leveling in Outland is when you can fly.
I’ve still got 9 more teeth to collect for my ravasaur. Sometimes I just wanna reach in and yank a couple more out. Not that I would, he’s just so cute.
Woot! Doesn’t it feel great to be able to dump a PvP piece for a PvE one?
Psh, “all”? I’d say going to a whole new world (ack, begone you horrible *Alladin *song) is a pretty big accomplishment!
Grats! See also: jealous.
… Never have children.
Yeah, and his venomhide hasn’t even gotten to the teenage years yet!
Oh, pff. He’d thank me later.
Looks like we’ve got news on Icecrown Citadel. Three 5-man dungeons are being prepped for patch 3.3 that take place in different wings of the citadel. Oddly, there’s no mention yet of a raid instance, and I find it hard to believe there won’t be one.
Must…get…80…and get…geared…up…
Oh, there will certainly be a raid instance in Icecrown Citadel, if not more than one (depending on how they split it up), but the 5-man stuff is supposed to lay the groundwork for the raid, storywise, so it makes sense that they advertise it first. Also, the game’s had a history of people grumbling about how everything added was just for raiders, so it never hurts to avoid the appearance of that. It wouldn’t surprise me if they even put out the 5-mans before the raid(s).
That said, here’s hoping they’re taking the time to make Icecrown knock our socks off. TOC, both the 5-man and the raid, are incredibly disappointing. They really scream a quick hack job that serve little purpose but to fulfill the long-ago promises to have an “unnamed instance bloc” between Ulduar and Icecrown. They’re lorelol and the fight mechanics are mostly recycled and undertuned old gimmicks with rewards far beyond their difficulty. After the awesomeness that is Ulduar, it’s a real letdown. We got server-first 10-man Tribute to Insanity this week, and it didn’t really even feel like an accomplishment - we’re effectively done with TOC already, and yet we still haven’t downed Algalon or Yogg-0, despite Ulduar being out much, much longer.
I’m glad they’re doing it that way. I may not be 80 and able to find a raiding guild by the time 3.3 hits, and since everyone will be hitting Icecrown I’m not likely to find many people for Naxx and Uld and such. But if the 5-mans are dropping ilevel 219 items, that suggests they’re probably doable with ilevel 200 items, no? 200 seems pretty easy to gear up with by myself through crafted items and PUGging heroics, then 5-man Icecrowns shouldn’t be hard to handle. Then I can upgrade to the ilevel 232 stuff from the heroic versions, and that should be raid-worthy, no?
Man, reading over that paragraph illustrates to me just how psychotic progression raiding can be, and yet I want in so bad.
I’m at this point not certain that I’ll be able to kick Arthas in the face until after Cataclysm, when there should be some bored level 85s looking to do nostalgia runs.
That surprises me. I haven’t read those books myself (didn’t even know they existed until yesterday), but I see they were written by Richard A. Knaak, who has written a number of Dungeons & Dragons novels. I read his Dragonlance “The Minotaur Wars” trilogy, which came out in 2004 & 2005, predating his WoW novels, and thought they were very good. I wonder if, perhaps, Blizzard rushed him on the War of the Ancients books, or if it was an editing issue, or simply the difference between creating his own story (the D&D books) vs. novelizing a story created by somebody else (the WoW books).
Anyway … I’ve got today, tomorrow, and Saturday (longass workday on Friday) to find a PUG to take on Direbrew. I tried to solo him with my lvl 80 human pally a couple days ago … what a joke that was. As I was approaching the instance, I was hailed by a lvl 67 draenei (can’t remember his class) who wanted some help. I assumed he wanted help with BRD, and told him I really couldn’t help, as I had never run that instance myself. It turned out he was trying to run a lvl 49 friend through the instance, but those lvl 80 Dark Irons just inside the instance were aggroing on and killing the lvl 49 as soon as he zoned in. So they just needed me to take out those 80s for them. So I went ahead and did that, then waited around while the lvl 49 zoned in. I stayed grouped with them for a few minutes (forgetting that I needed to ungroup, leave the instance, and then re-enter on my own) as they ran off into the next room.
Good thing I did - they went into the room with all those hounds and found themselves mobbed by a huge number of hounds and Dark Irons. I had glanced at their portraits and saw the lvl 49 was already dead and the lvl 67 was down to 1/2 health. So I ran to them, though I wasn’t in time to save the lvl 67. I took down all the mobs for them and then rezzed and healed them both. Then I waved goodbye and left/re-entered the instance to go after Direbrew.
I’m really don’t know what happened after I insulted Direbrew. Before I did it I buffed up, ate some buff food to give me +40 STR & STA. Then I insulted him, and for reasons I could not identify, my HPs dropped to 50% before a single blow was thrown at me. After that they started hitting me and I was dead in about 2 seconds. Any clue what happened to my HP?
So anyway… I can forget soloing him.
It’s been a very bittersweet few days for me, WoW-wise. My guild, one of the oldest guilds on our server and formerly the #1 in progression (during BC days) finally succumbed–the last straw was when our main tank took several of our best raiders and left to form his own guild because they didn’t think we were concentrating on hard modes enough. The sad part was that every officer agreed with him, but we were having recruiting troubles and had to do some normal modes to get the new recruits geared. But anyway, that was the last straw for those of us who remained, and our GL decided it was time to pack it in. It was a very sad evening when we all stood around the Dalaran bank and divvied up the guild funds among the folks who were left. The guild remains, but it’s a shell now, with alts in the officer positions.
That was the bad part. The good part was that our GL brokered a deal for our core raiders (the rest of our officers and one remaining main raider) to join the current top guild on our server–which happens to be chock-full of folks from the guild I was in prior to this one, which means they already know me, like me, and know I’m good. They welcomed us to the fold and we’re already attending their raids–two of our folks were along when they got 25-man Firefighter last night (server first) and then the rest of us went along to rip our way through ToC-25 and get several achievements, followed by stomping Onyxia. It felt so good to be raiding again, and after being second in command of a raiding guild that despite all our best efforts was circling the drain, it felt good to just DPS and not have to worry about anything else. Our GL, who’d started getting fairly difficult to deal with toward the end, is back to his cheerfully sarcastic self.
All in all, I think the positives outweigh the negatives. It still hurts to see our old guild go, though.
Oh, and I got my 4-piece T9 bonus, including 2 25-man pieces, which was quite nice too 
Uh-oh. This does not bode well for the BDL run of BRD tonight. We may need to change plans!
Well, there’s a few things. First, the quality of franchise fiction is usually fairly mediocre. Even the good stuff is usually not high quality. Franchise fiction is to genre fiction as genre fiction is to literature, I find. I actually like most D&D and M:tG novels myself, and I suspect I’d probably enjoy the WoW novels, but I’m not surprised they’re looked down on pretty often.
Second, when you say he created his own story for the D&D books, that’s not quite what happens with Wizards of the Coast. They don’t take original submissions. They’ve got a stable of writers, of which I presume Knaak is one, and when they want a book written they go to the writer and say, “We want a book written. It should focus on Characters X, Y, and Z and their travel to Location Q. Be sure to include Artifact A, too.” And then the writer churns out a novel to Wizards’ specifications.
This may be more true for the Magic novels than the D&D novels, since Wizards wants the novels to follow along with the story in each new card set, but I believe it applies across all their franchises. Even Ed Greenwood, who originated Forgotten Realms and turned out his own books before Wizards took up the D&D IP, is now in Wizards’ stable. I was kind of disillusioned when I found all this out, myself. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard does something very similar.
Missed the edit window. After thinking about this, I realized that we can easily use one of our 80-alts to clear the Dwarves away from the entrance, so this won’t be a problem. I’ll park my priest outside in case we need him.