I need to gear up and learn to tank on my DK … I will probably start when I hit 80, that way I have the levels to wear anything that is the proper upgrade…
Well, having discovered that (1) I can either mess around doing heroics for fifteen minutes waiting for a group as DPS or jump straight in pretty much instantly after entering the dungeon finder as a tank and that (2) I’m currently the second- or third-best geared tank in the guild (depending on whether you count the top 2 toons, both of whom are played by the same player), which means that I should probably at least consider tanking our hopefully-soon guild 10-mans, I’ve started spending my Triumphs on tank gear. Picked up Koltira’s Leg-plates of Conquest and a nice level 232 polearm from the Halls of Reflection (more of a druid weapon, really, but it will do for a tanking DK.)
w00t! Finished up The Northrend Gourmet tonight, all 45 recipes, which leaves me just Critter Gitter and Dinner Impossible away from Hail to the Chef! Getting closer to an in-game “Chef” title to go along with my real-life “chef” title 
I also got to Honored with the Wyrmrest Accord, after going back and finally clearing the Wanton Warlord quest that had been lurking in my quest log for way too long, and then doing all three Wyrmrest dailies. I’d done Defending Wyrmrest Temple once before, a long time ago, so I did it again tonight, then flew over to Coldarra where I had to do a few quests to open up the two dailies there. I discovered that the one where you have to capture an Azure Drake Hatchling is painfully easy, and Aces High is painfully painful.
Getting Honored was enough to let me buy the Fang of Truth 1H sword and the Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions. Then I remembered I earned Exalted with the Kirin Tor a long time ago but I’d never purchased anything from their quartermaster. So I trotted up to talk to him and came away with some new gloves: Fireproven Gauntlets.
That’s how it started out for me - then last night Teh Stoopid came out of the woodwork. Left a very bad taste in my mouth.
Sweet baby Moses, I thought this phenomenon was just me and my crappy hotel internet connection. I’ve noticed with this latest patch, there has been quite a bit more “dancing” with MOBs.
Current Fury Warrior grind:
- Pick up 2-3 mobs
- Whirlwind, see that the whirlwind hit everyone (super!)
- Get distracted by something shiny on the TV (ooh! more Tiger Woods!)
- Look down, realize that the mobs have been on top of me the whole time and my autoattack isn’t hitting anyone, so therefore I have no rage.
- Pop a pot and cast Lifeblood.
- Die anyway.
- Swear loudly. Cry. Drink.
- Run back to my corpse
- Repeat
I’ve had mixed results: mostly good, but one classic Huntard (pulled everything, including one time when his pet ran off and aggro’d the nearby boss on top of a four-pull), and a handful of people who have been really impatient with my (admittedly still somewhat noobish) tanking speed.
Here’s another advantage to the new DF system: I put myself in queue yesterday with my 23 Belf warlock. It took about 10 minutes to get a tank. Then I got the dungeon invitation box and clicked ‘enter dungeon.’ As the splash screen loaded, I couldn’t figure out what dungeon it was. Boxes? A wooden room? It looked kinda like the stable in SFK, but no Worgen. Then I ported in and it was (of course)… Stormwind Keep! Cool, on all my toons I had never done the Keep before, and never really considered doing it at-level. (We ended up not finishing due to a drama-filled pug, but still it was nice to see the inside).
Ooh. And deadmines at-level is a reasonable possibility as well, I’d guess. Do Allies have access to RFC now?
Here’s my pug drama from yesterday. It started when we had a couple of bad pulls, because DPS didn’t stop runners from leaving the room and aggroing the next room full of mobs (it happened a few times). Fortunately I had soulstoned the healer so we didn’t have to run back.
A vote kick has been initiated for [Tank]
I vote No. I waited over 10 minutes for this tank!
Vote to kick [Tank] fails.
A vote kick has been initiated for [Healer]
I vote No.
Vote to kick [Healer] fails.
Tank: Hey [Healer], someone just tried to vote-kick you.
Healer: Who was it?
Healer: Who was it, just tell me.
DPS1: Not me, it must have been DPS2 or [skammer]
Me: It wasn’t me, I voted ‘no’ both times. Let’s just go.
Tanks: BOTH times? Who else got voted on? ME?
Healer: Just tell us, we won’t get mad.
Tanks: Of course we’ll be mad!
DPS2 leaves
Healer leaves
Tank leaves
Thus far I’ve been lucky enough that the only vote-kicks I’ve seen have been for linkdead people.
I wouldn’t be surprised. (Skammer, you mean the Stockade, right, not the Keep? I don’t think there is an instance called Stormwind Keep at all.) If you choose the Specific Dungeons option rather than Random Dungeon, you’ll see that, as long as you’re within level, both Deadmines and the Stockade are selectable (as Horde, of course, and I assume RFC is selectable for Alliance).
I did more heroics this past weekend that I did the entire previous 6 months. Out of who knows how many random heroic runs, we had maybe two or three that turned out bad. The two I can think of were Occulus and Halls of Reflection (the run away from the LK part).
I was able to get my priest fairly well geared up from gear drops and emblems. I also spent most of the triumph badges I had on my main to buy the crusader orbs I needed to make a merlin’s robe for the priest.
I like the new LFG system.
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On the raiding front, we live in interesting times. As I mentioned before we recruited like crazy and now we have a ton of raiders. But now we have this problem of having too many people who want to raid now with ICC available. I think we would have been better off not recruiting so many and just taking the hit of not having enough to raid before ICC was released.
I’m cautious about the Random feature. It’s certainly more streamlined than a rotating daily quest, but I hate going into a dungeon eyes closed. At least with the daily quest I could look at it and decide if I wanted to do it that day. With the Random button, I could get a dungeon I don’t like or have never done before, and then I look like a tool if I back out of the group.
I’ve used the Random button three times.
First was Forge of Souls on Patch Day, and we might have completed it had the instance servers not crashed.
Second was Halls of Stone, which I’d never done before. We finished, but it was rough and we wiped once on each boss.
Third was Halls of Reflection (we’d done a guild run on all three new dungeons in regular mode to unlock them). We couldn’t even get past the second wave of enemies.
It’s my opinion that the Random button doesn’t like me much.
I think I may just stick to requesting specific dungeons for now. I don’t get the extra Frost or Triumph emblems, true, but even with a daily lockout there’s still a ton of emblems to be had in all the heroics. Once I have more >200 than 200 gear, I’ll probably start to feel a little more comfortable with hitting the Random button.
Yeah, Stockade. :o That shows you how unfamiliar I am with it.
I spent my Triumph emblems on Helm of Clouded Sight which is totally badass-looking.
I usually play on Monday nights, but I realized that I only have about a week left to finish building my daughter’s Christmas present (a big dollhouse) so I may have to cut back on WoW for the next week and a half. I might just do the one random a day for the Frost emblems. I’ll still plan on the Wednesday guild run, though.
Had limited time over the weekend…but made the most of it…8 random Heroic Dungeons…7 of them were successful runs…came up empty on about half of them though, due to crummy rolls, the last second “Need” for off-spec gear by some undeserving schlep, or getting stuff DE (usually infinite dust). Did get 2 Frozen Orbs, about 4 dream shards, 3 abyss crystals, and schloads of inf. dust in the other 4 runs. One time (in the King Ymirmir dungeon), the tank warned us up front, “I’m not stopping guys, just gonna plow through right through, keep up.” We blew through that dungeon in (I’m guessing here) about 20-25 minutes! Kinda glad that I’ve been in that particular dungeon about 3 other times, so I know what to do and what to avoid!
The one failed attempt? The Culling of Stratholme! Why? Because our tank and healer (both from the same guild) wanted us to wait a few seconds after we were tearing it up in town and close to getting the timed achievement, only to wait another 15 minutes before the 3 of us dps’rs decided that we’ve been screwed for some other plan of theirs. Bastards!
This is a known issue and they claim to have a fix implemented (perhaps with the 3.3.0a patch that was deployed today). Hope so, 'cause it’s a royal PITA trying to position mobs when a half-step backwards ends up with them behind you.
As far as I can tell that polearm is pretty much the best two-handed DK tanking weapon outside of raids right now. I’d love to have it, but am still having problems tanking Heroic HoR (hoping my new frost off-spec for 5-mans will make it easier but I’m not sure). Anybody have tips or tricks for tanking this?
Yeah, I’ve had to kick a few DC’ed people, and always feel bad about it. We generally just keep clearing trash (if it’s a DPS of course) until we get to a boss and then do the vote-kick.
I’m facing a bit of the same problem on my main - too many raiders for one 10-man group, too few for a 25-man or two 10-mans… not good times. The result is that I’ve only been in ICC10 once, and that was just to wipe on Marrowgar like 5 times before people started to bitch and say they had to leave. Why do people come to progression raids and then call it after 1.5 hours and only 5 wipes? And why do they come and do ~2k DPS? 
One trick that I’ve heard works is to extend your lockout for a dungeon you don’t want to do. I.e., get saved to Oculus and then just extend the lockout every day. The random feature tries to avoid putting you into heroics you have already run. I can’t personally confirm that this works, but might be worth trying.
Personally I’ve done Oculus 3 or 4 times since the patch and haven’t had a bad run yet. Generally one person drops once they see what it is but those that stay are the ones that know what they’re doing so it goes well (I even got the Make It Count achievement on one of the runs). The place has been seriously nerfed… you don’t even have to know the mechanics a lot of the time.
I have also noticed the gear-matching situation - when my hunter goes in I pretty much always get 40k hp tanks and silly-geared healers and clear the dungeon in 20 mins or so. My DK gets a much wider range of groups, but they come much faster since I can queue as a tank. Total time per dungeon is probably about the same.
Interesting times with the new LFG system. On one hand, it’s awesome that I don’t have to fly out to the place, but on the other hand, I feel like the insta-teleport results in a disconnect from Azeroth’s geography. It feels smaller to me now because I don’t have to haul my ass out from Dragonblight to Coldarra, for example.
My baby hpriest went from 44 to 49 just running instances with the heirloom shoulders on. She’s been lucky, no idiots that made me want to cannibalize anyone alive, just people who d/c for whatever reason. I’m remembering a) how much I like healing and b) how dull it can be. 
But hey, she’s leveling like crazy, and I can’t wait until I get the next awesome set of spells.
I’ve only run H Pit of Saron once, but the Felglacier Bolter dropped that time, which made me a very happy hunter. And I’m working on piling up triumph to get the 232 T9 gear since frost is going to take me a while.
I’m a little sad about the geographical disconnect (and it will be worse in Cataclysm when you’re running instances in places you’ve never been), but on the other hand, the fact that I can actually go run an instance in less than an hour, from starting the game to quitting it, is so huge that I don’t much care, as it means I can actually run instances on a semi-casual basis.
This is another problem I’ve been having with the system. Sure, it teleports you to the dungeon, which is great, but if you walk out of the dungeon, it takes you to where you were teleported from and you have to manually make your way back to the dungeon portal.
I ran into this in Forge of Souls and Halls of Stone when all but one of our group wiped. We ghosted and went back into the instance, where the spawn that had killed us came at us at the entrance (since mobs in a dungeon don’t have a leash like regular mobs do). To preserve ourselves since not everyone was back yet, we ran outside…and I found myself back in Dalaran. Not terribly fun.
On your minimap there’s a group button when you’re in a group. If you click on the button you’ll see the option teleport back to the dungeon.