Hm. I should be able to do that. I’d like to give tanking a try, but am also a bit nervous about that; anyone have tips on the difference between tanking a 5 man and off-tanking a 10-man raid? I’m especially nervous about figuring out which mobs I’m responsible for.
BOOYAH! VIOLET PROTO-DRAKE! Woooooooooo!
My achievement tracking also seems to have finally figured out that I got a few Arena Master trinkets back in the day (seriously, must have been two years ago).
Did anybody else have problems with buggy instance mobs last night? I’m not talking the known issue, where they shuffle around and reposition and get behind you even when you’re standing still (although I had plenty of that, too). I’m talking about something really weird that was going on with the adds that spawn for the first two bosses of H-HoR. Normally I don’t have much trouble controlling packs, but this time I just could not keep them off the DPS and the healer. If it were just some random PUG, I’d assume it was that they weren’t giving me time to get a TC or a SW in, but this was a group of my friends. The one who was DPSing on her Ret Pally reported doing things like waiting for the Priest to get to about 75% HP before even touching it, only to rip it right off me with one hit (it’s her off spec, so she does maybe 2k DPS if she’s having a good day), and there were times when I’d taunt a mob off someone, only to glance at my threat meter and see that I had a huge lead on everyone, as opposed to having whoever I’d just taunted off of right below me (as it should be if I just stole all their threat, which is what Taunt does).
Unless otherwise noted, IME runs are always referencing Server Time for the realm they’re on.
At least you figured it out… eventually. 
Tanking in a raid is both harder and easier than tanking in a five-man. It’s harder, because there are often crazier boss abilities, more “fire” to watch out for, and you might be spending part of your time helping to hammer on the boss while you wait for an add to come out, and if you get too focused in and forget to pick it up, it will kill a healer or a DPS. But it’s easier because you don’t have to do the job alone–depending on the group size and the encounter, you almost always have one or more other tanks backing you up.
In trash packs, unless targets are specifically marked, just pick a random few to focus on, while trying to keep AOE threat on everything, and keep an eye out for runners in case the other tank’s chosen group has some overlap with yours, and there’s a mob that neither of you is focusing on. If the other tank has the whole pack, don’t be afraid to taunt a couple off–most tanks (if not all–not sure how DKs work) need to be getting hit and/or healed to generate the “currency” they use to purchase their abilities.
As a tank, you can’t afford to be unfamiliar with an encounter, unless the whole group is intentionally going in blind. Check the boss’s Wowhead and/or WoWWiki pages, and, if one exists, watch a strategy video (Tankspot’s are excellent, and you can find them on YouTube). If you can’t find a strategy video, at least watch a kill video, so you can get at least an idea of the room layout, what the “fire” looks like, etc.
On bosses, your role will always be explicitly stated. While strategies will vary from group to group, mostly in details but sometimes in major ways, the boss abilities they are designed to counter or cope with will always be the same, so if you’ve read up on the boss and watched a strat video, you should have a reasonably good idea of what you’re going to be tanking, where you’ll be standing (or kiting), and what special things to watch out for. Note that in Wrath, “off tank” doesn’t always mean “tank that is picking up adds.” Depending on the boss, your class, and the class(es) of the other tank(s), it’s entirely possible that you’ll be on the boss while someone else is on adds, or you’ll be trading off the boss with another tank, or you’ll each have a boss. Also, if another tank dies, you may be expected to do both your jobs while the DPS tries to burn down the boss or a Druid tries to get a brez off. This is why you should know as much as you can about every encounter–you never know what you’ll be called upon to do. Don’t be afraid to make notes when you’re first learning–when I was going to be leading the raids for the Keepers in Ulduar, I had about a page of notes for each of them, as a reference for explaining to everyone else, and for earlier bosses, I often had smaller notes, maybe just of a few words, about something like what abilities I should watch for to interrupt, or what order to kill a particular boss’s adds in.
Grats! I doubt I’ll ever have the patience to do ALL of the holidays like that.
Also, thanks for the tanking advice.
Nah. DKs just generate runic by hitting things (or using other rune-powered abilities), we ain’t masochists like warriors.
Most of the achievements aren’t *that *hard–at the worst, they’re generally just time consuming. And the really frustrating achieves are the RNG-based ones, but they’ve fixed most of the issues with those.
Anytime!
Thbbbbpt, you lucky jerks. It’s not just Warriors, by the by. Paladins regen Mana by getting healed (or, with Sanct up, avoiding attacks), and I’m assuming Druid Rage mechanics work in a similar way to Warrior ones.
Woohoo! Nice job, nice job.
I did something similar with my rogue. I was so pumped to get my last two levels that when I hit 80 I completely forgot to not only train up current abilities, but also get my new abilities.
Congratulations! That’s a 310% speed right?
sigh I will be forced to wait until next Halloween because the stupid helm wouldn’t drop for me. Of course, my alt has seen several of the item drop when he did the Headless Horseman.
I’ve had a very rough past 2 days with this. Yesterday it seems every ghost went straight for the healer/dps/anyone else besides the tank, even when they hadn’t started heals/dps yet. I was throwing shields/judging/taunting even blowing my CDs on the trash because it seemed the dps would it something once and the aggro was off of me. I’m fairly well geared, but haven’t tanked every raid boss yet, but this HoR trash waves have been brutal.
Also, maybe I just missed them, but I swear theres a couple of the trash guys that jump into the fight late. I had corraled the group and was plucking along when all of a sudden I saw a mercenary come trotting around the corner, right past me, and 2 shoted the healer before I could even target/attack. It also doesn’t help that their “ghostly” images blend in so damn well with the environment that it’s hard enough to see them. On regular it was similar, but of course, they did far less damage and it wasn’t a problem, but heroic we must have wiped 5-6 times.
Grats on the drake, SFG. I got mine during Brewfest and I don’t think I’ve used another flying mount since. the 310% speed is awsomesauce.
Looking forward to Naxx on Monday (I’ll try to be there by 8). Tom, we may have enough folks who are enough overgeared for Naxx that it will make it a little less stressful for you to tank. But also, the advantage of doing it with the guild is that we are all learning together and no one will mind if you struggle the first time.
The BDL random dungeon run last night was Dire-Maul North. On the one hand, the fights went much faster and we even survived a couple of bad pulls that would have wiped us a few weeks ago. On the other hand we got sloppy once or twice and did have a couple of wipes. But when we were careful to only pull the groups we were targeting, we burned them down pretty easily. I got Kromcrush’s Chestplate which was a nice upgrade for me. If I remember to do it this week, I’ll collect the mats for a DM-North tribute run, so we can try that the next time we go there.
It is done. All that’s left is to log on and do the gquit.
I posted a short, but nice goodbye post on the guild forums. I explained that what the guild wants to be isn’t what I’m looking for anymore and that I’m more comfortable in a smaller guild with fewer people and a more casual approach to raiding.
There are other reasons, some of which I’ve talked about here, but ultimately, I really don’t like the influx of so many new people. Not the particular people, since a lot of them seem really nice and are good players. Just that there are so many new people to deal with, with different wants/needs that it can’t help but change the character of a guild.
I’m relieved actually.
On another note, blizzard should just send epics to my inbox. On my priest, who maybe two weeks ago was in greens and blues, I now have almost all good quality epics, including the hot staff (sounds dirty ooh er) from HoR and 2pc T9 bonus. After this weekend, I can see myself having 4pc T9. I only wish my priestly skills were as good as the gear I’m getting.
Seriously. I doubt it’ll be a cakewalk or anything, but these days it’s almost impossible not to be overgeared for Naxx10 if you’ve been running heroics regularly. I’m shocked at how easy it is to generate emblems since 3.3, to be honest.
Another PUG story: Had a Resto Shammy healing on H-HoR who thought it would be a good idea to constantly top off the DPS while I (tanking) was at 80% health… 50% health… 20% health… :smack: And every DPS in the group had some way to heal themselves (Paladin, Warlock, and Druid).
Yup!
Ugh, those totally RNG achievements are the worst. Did you actually win the item on your alt at all? If so, it would be worth a shot to see if you could get a GM to move the item to your main. No guarantees, but you never know 'til you ask.
Exactly. I’ve only done the fight once before, and we had everyone stacking in the middle instead of LOSing the adds, and I don’t remember having this problem then, even with the adds all spread out.
Do you have enemy health bars up? (The ones that float over their heads.) IMO it’s pretty well impossible to tank without them.
Glad to hear. Always sucks when a guild undergoes a major change that leaves you feeling like you don’t belong there anymore, but at least it’s easier when it gives you a chance you were looking for.
Ew. To be fair, I find myself doing that on occasion. Usually it’s when the enemy does some AOE or briefly targets a DPS and I suddenly see a squishy’s health drop. I scramble to throw some heals on them, and by the time I’m done casting (even if it’s just a couple of spells, 1 Rejuv + 1 Regrowth = ~3 seconds), the enemy’s already taken a chunk of the tank’s life. I’m just glad HoTs aren’t all that Druids have available, so I can usually get the tank’s life back above 50% pretty quickly.
Yeah I did actually. I’m pretty sure I got rid of the item though. Might be worth a shot to check. I’ll open up a ticket and look to hear back from them in a week.
I thought about doing this…except I toggled it on mid-fight, got flustered and toggled it off quickly. That was the run we were actually able to complete it. I’ll have to try it out next run tonight. On the successful run we were doing the LOS trick and I, as the tank, would stay out in the middle and gather up the melee and then LOS to get the ranged to get them closer.
This guy was doing it the whole run, and when I was at significantly lower HP than the DPS. A healer’s first priority should *always *be the tank or themself. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to find out what the hell he thought he was doing–he dropped group right as I asked why he was healing DPS when I was at low health.
To be blunt, I don’t see how anyone can be a truly effective tank without having enemy health bars enabled. With bars up, you can (a) see the relative health level of each enemy, (b) select a specific enemy quickly without having to tab-target through every single one, and (c) click-target a specific enemy without having to worry about hitboxes (clicking on a health bar will always target that mob; clicking on the mob’s body might click something else if that something else is in front of it, especially if it’s got a big hitbox like a boss, and it can be especially hard to do if the mobs are stacked on each other). My suggestion to you is to start using them all the time and get used to it fast.
Re: my lag and graphics issues post patch -
I checked the Mac Technical Support board at the official forums, and found this post on the WoW Performance Guide for Macs thread:
And a few posts later I found this:
So it turns out it really wasn’t just me. I applied the provided “fix”, and things felt better in Dalaran. Now to see if it fixes the bugs I was seeing with weird texture rendering on the ground (big square patches with sharp edges instead of blending into neighboring terrain - seriously, last night parts of Dragonblight looked like I was flying over farm country, with the ground divided up into square crop plots.)
That’s awesome–and how great that there was a fix for it, instead of it just being some nebulus bottleneck in the network. Hope it solves your other texture issues, too.
People are amazing at finding workarounds. After 3.3 patched, I couldn’t log in at all. I kept getting an error message when trying to enter my password. Poked at the WoW forums, and other people who run WoW in Linux had the same issue. There was already a link to the software I needed to install. Solved before it was even a problem.
It’s great so far this morning, though it’s also before noon here, when things are pretty slow on my server. I’ll see how it is this evening when it’s more crowded.
On to other things … I found a Siren’s Tear (gem) in my Bag of Fishing Treasures, so I headed off to post it on the AH … and here’s the kind of thing that just drives me batshit insane. The price spread on the Siren’s Tears currently posted (number in parentheses is # at that price):
71.79.99
55.50.00 (2)
43.55.59
28.20.00
27.46.56
23.76.57
23.52.80
13.73.78 (4)
6.00.00 (2)
65g price difference from top to bottom! And without an intimate knowledge of my server’s gem market, I have no way of knowing if that top price is simply way too high, or if the bottom price is asininely low. And so, I just hold onto my gem and check back later to see if the prices make more sense then.
Got the Let it Snow! achievement on my human pally, and, as with my belf pally, the last race/class combo I was able to find was the draenei priest. I think draenei priests are even harder to find than dwarf rogues. One thing I’m realizing is that, when a particular class is only available to a single race (per faction), you’re going to be hard pressed to find members of that race in any other class. In the same way you can’t throw a rock into a crowd of nelfs without bouncing it off a dozen druids, or belfs/paladins, you’re hard pressed to mouse over a draenei and find it to be anything but a shaman.
That’s nothing my friend - check out the glyph market some day. Not at all unusual to see one glyph at 60g (probably somebodies default for an unlisted glyph), then undercut to ~30g, then to 5g, then to 2g (or less), often within an hour or so.
Definitely not the market to be in if you’re not a fan of cutthroat undercutting.
As far as the Siren’s Tear I’ve never been able to sell them for much - they can only be turned into the +6 stats gems (and maybe a few other craftables), and I’ve found that the min-maxers always use the +10 stats gem and the casuals don’t use those gems at all.
That’s when you snatch up those low-end buyouts and relist them mid-range.
I’ve had 0 problems in any other tanking scenario to date. Tanking is my offspec so it’s not my main focus at the moment (Even though it seems and random lfg puts me as a tank). I’ve had no problems chain pulling trash in any heroic and I haven’t had any raiding experiences that gave me any trouble. Damn OP paladins! I am definitely going to check out this view tonight if I get the chance.
It’s tough to tell when you’re not familiar with the current pricing scheme. I’m not about yours, but on my server the prices drop drastically during weekends. When I’m not sure what to pay I try to ask some friends or on guild to get an idea on what the price should be. When I’m trying to sell stuff I’ll usually just hang on to it for awhile on my Auction House toon, and then check the prices throughout the week.