Abolish Poison is love. I’ve got Grid set up to turn health bars dark green for poison and dark purple for curses, and it’s just a matter of ctrl+clicking the bar to debuff. Obvious, quick, and easy.
Priests can dispel poison but only on themselves 
To be fair, the entire point of Chill of the Throne is to allow them to consume the item budget on new gear with dodge. If not, they’d have to stick it in stamina or other damage mitigation, which means the bosses would have to hit harder, which means the balance of the encounters has to be different, which means …
So many tanks are screaming “why does this item have dodge? They nerfed dodge! I thought they were getting rid of dodge!” It has dodge so you can build back up to your ToC levels of avoidance.
Has anyone had any luck with Overlord Saurfang? I’ve been in two ICC10 groups that, after getting everyone straight on the mechanics of the fight, keep hitting the 8 minute enrage. It appears that the raid needs to do about 18k dps on the boss to beat the timer, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but becomes a tall order when figuring in time spent kiting and killing the adds, and becomes much more difficult if the tanks don’t switch in time and the boss heals. If a player with Mark of the Fallen Champion dies, enrage is almost a guarantee.
Gratz. We wiped about 4 times before we killed him last week. The second boss is a LOT tougher and the boat to boat fighting seems damn near impossible at the moment.
I got that dagger from the first kill and it is a HUGE upgrade from the TOC 10 Illumination I’ve been carrying around since the first week TOC came out.
I find the Gunship Battle to be the easiest of the four encounters so far. The key is that the cannoneers must spam their 1 key relentlessly, only taking a quick break to hit 2 to prevent overheat. There is little to no cooldown on the cannon firing, so hit it hard and hit it fast.
When the mage comes out to cast sub-zero, send a boarding party over there to quickly dispatch it. In 10 man, we use 2dps on the mage, and a healer and a tank on the ship’s captain. Once the mage is down, have everyone come back and resume cannon fire. You cannot leave a boarding party on the other ship; the captain’s Battle Fury will stack way too high to heal through.
And Dwarves can clear it with Stoneform, I think, but BDL is Horde.
The point of Chill of the Throne is that they had more tiers than they were planning on at the beginning of Wrath (each “tier” is actually split into several, with variations on 10-man, 25-man, and Heroic gear), so we’re way past where they planned on our gear being by ICC. Don’t get me wrong–I’m very happy to have less mitigation + less boss damage. But this is a nasty hackjob fix and no mistake.
Plus, they’re nerfing a stat that we never even ASKED for. They’ve been loading gear with this crap, and no one even really likes it, given that for the current content, most fights are best geared to MaxEH and/or magic avoidance/absorption. Put some more goddamn THREAT stats on the gear, for chri. I don’t even want to think about how low my Hit rating is in my MaxEH gear, the set I use most often. I can only hope they’ll do better with the next expansion–the boss/tank balance has just gotten all out of whack. They throw us tons of pieces of gear stacked with avoidance, and when we use it, we’re avoiding too much, so they have to increase the damage of each individual hit or put in unavoidable (magic) damage, so we have to stack anything that will keep us alive through bad-RNG back-to-back hits and/or favor tanking classes that can avoid/mitigate the damage through CDs or just soak it through a naturally higher health pool… Ugh.
I know, it’s just amusing. And no, they **don’t **want us back up to our previous levels of avoidance. Presumably, they put Dodge on it 'cause it’s the one Avoidance stat that all tanks can use (DKs and Druids don’t Block, Druids don’t Parry), and the debuff seems to work by actually subtracting 20% from your chance to Dodge, as opposed to taking away 20% of your Dodge rating. (So, if you go in with a 25% chance to Dodge, that will turn into a 5% chance.)
Haven’t even looked at the fight. Makes me wanna cry. (Only half-joking.)
The red bar by Overlord Saurfang’s portrait isn’t his health, it’s his patience with you.
flee
Saurfang is really a pretty straight forward fight. There’s only two things to focus on that are key to killing him. First, the tanks need to swap him around promptly when he puts a debuff on his current target - it makes him heal from attacking them. It’s significant healing, even with a mortal strike effect, it’s better to simply not have to deal with it than try to plow through it. He does this rapidly, about every 20-25 seconds, so tanks need to not be lazy. The other is that his blood beasts need to not hit anyone. Ever. Don’t tank them. If you’ve got less than attentive tanks, they might wind up hitting the beasts on their spawn, and that’s self-defeating. Every time the beasts bite something they juice up Saurfang, and you don’t want that. It’s a great time for ranged to demonstrate that they know what they’re doing - they need to kill the things while kiting them, which is a skill sorely underused in Wrath PVE.
Tanks stacking avoidance is pretty helpful, but mainly it’s about the beasts. This week, my group was about 15 seconds away from killing him before he powered up enough for the first Mark, and that makes the fight vastly easier.
Regarding Chill of the Throne, I guess you weren’t around for Black Temple & Sunwell. The Unbalacing Strikes and Impales these days tend to skew things toward health pools, but back in BC we all got a good taste of what extreme avoidance was like. With trinkets activated, my paladin could not be hit by Illidan at all, and that’s a bit silly. To compensate for this, they made the bosses hit like mountains. If pre-nerf Brutallus landed both main and offhand hits on you at certain times you were just dead, period, and no amount of stamina would save you. Which meant even MORE avoidance stacking to try to stave off the RNG screw-you, and that’s -with- the Sunwell Radiance dodge debuff in play.
Chill does not make dodge worthless. As long as you’re over 20% (and any tank that’s stepping into Icecrown already is, by far) then you’re still getting value out of dodge. It just makes the diminishing returns harsher. It’s still worthwhile, and in the case of Saurfang they’ve made at least one fight whose gimmick is avoidance based rather than soaking huge hits.
Yeah, that’s what we’ve been doing, but I get the feeling i may not be in groups that put out enough deeps to win the fight before the enrage. Usually our range will avoid the beasts just fine, but one of our healers will pull aggro on the rooted one while we’re killing the other, the root breaks, and the beast goes to eat on the healer, who just stands there healing away, and it takes a bit to generate enough aggro to pull the beast off. Distracting shot would be nice but we don’t always have a hunter.
We’ve cleared the four ICC bosses on 10-man and 25-man both weeks, and speaking as someone who initially despised Saurfang, I will say that having a Disc-specced Priest will help IMMENSELY in preventing Blood Power gain. My old spec was Holy-main, Shadow-secondary, and during that first week, we spent the majority of our raid days banging our head against the wall, tweaking our strat, and getting overrun by Marks of the Champion. (We had most, if not all healers, focusing on the tanks, and then as a Mark would pop up, a healer would peel off.) The second week, I had the idea to change my secondary spec to Disc, and we one-shotted him, with only a few Marks popping up. Granted, if you do this on 25-man, your Disc Priest will mainly be playing Whack-A-Mole with shields, and actual healing being a lesser priority. Also, if you use Grid or some other raid-display, it can help a lot with identifying debuffs.
Yes…Cleanse…it does more than just remove poison. Just let me know ahead of time on when to be vigilent to use it…I try to use it in between fights since I’m usually DPSing like nobody’s business.
Another question, can I just repeat instances over and over until I learn them inside and out, or do I have to wait a set period like with Raids before they reset? It’s amazing I’ve had this game for as long as it’s been on the market (longer, technically, thanks to the beta), but never really bothered with grouping due to poor experiences with previous MMOs, so i don’t know this stuff. 
Oh, and I’m retarded. I had re-set my talent points this morning—or so I thought—only to find I did SFK completely talentless. No wipes or deaths, and I managed to keep aggro 90% of the time, but yikes, that’s embarrassing. Not to mention I forgot I have abolish curse (I was playing my level 25 druid bear) as a spell and the enemies in SFK use them quite liberally. 
Live and learn, I guess.
This. The spec does not become important until later. But now, with dual spec, it dosn’t even matter anymore. You can have a soloing or PvP spec AND a tanking spec.
Regular instances can be done as often as you like, with a hard limit of 5 resets per hour. When you leave an instance, just right-click your portrait and choose Reset All Instances, and you’re ready to go.
Heroic dungeons, which are only relevant at 80 (unless you want to do the level 70 heroics for some reason), can only be done once per day, with the lockouts clearing at something like 10 am server time. If you use the Random queue, though, you don’t get hit with lockouts.
So I’m at my family’s for the holidays, all set to go all woo-hoo! on Winter Veil stuff, not to mention raiding and leveling my shaman and priest. I’d even gotten into a TOTC10 pug a couple times and gotten to see how frustrating Faction Champs can be for pve players. I carefully back up my desktop installation to an external HDD and pack the lot and spend a few minutes dreaming of little sugarplum KTs and epic lewts.
…
It turns out my venerable laptop (about 5-6 years old) is now in its death throes. I can still do light web browsing and computing, but I get less than 15FPS in the armpit of Borean Tundra with everything turned down and forget any place bigger than a solitary hut in said armpit. So, pretty close to unplayable.
/wrists
I suspect my birthday present to myself this year will be a new laptop.
TOC is the way to go. 3 badges per boss and you don’t have to deal with trash.
Can you use the same tactics you used on Freya snaplashers?
There’s more than just one of them, but yeah. The closest comparison is to the lightning elementals that Runemaster Molgeim summoned when he’s the last one left up of the Assembly. There’s a wide variety of ways to kill things without them meleeing targets, and while the beasts have huge resistance to AOE damage, they’re fully vulnerable to nearly everything impairment wise - stun, root, slow. Probably the easiest way would be to have a frost mage with improved blizzard and all the snare talents, but not frostbite, but we made do with a resto druid rooting one while a shadow priest chain mind-flayed the other, with a little help from an enhancement shaman’s frost shock freeze.
I’m thinking I got dissed this afternoon.
.
With the wife away for the afternoon, figured I might give the new PUG dungeon feature a try. Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t done many dungeons, and none of the BC or WotLK ones, but I thought it would be a good time to get my feet wet, finally.
So I logged on with my level 76 human paladin, who was still carrying around the two Utgarde Keep quests that he’d picked up months ago. Went thru the ‘looking for group’ feature, and made sure that I specified Utgarde Keep at the regular level. I picked ‘tank’ as the role (do you have to pick one of the three roles?).
So in just a few seconds, up popped the invite. I accepted (with some nervousness) and found myself just outside the entrance to the Utgarde Keep instance. There already were a level 72 warrior, level 72 death knight, a level 70 mage, and a level 72 druid. Quests were shared, blessings doled out, etc.
“Who’s going to tank?” one of the players asked. I told them that I could tank, if necessary. I equipped my one-handed weapon and shield (normally I use my 2-handed weapon). One player asked what my spec was - I admitted that I was specc’d for Retribution (which is better for levelling). So I got everything ready, and waited for the group leader to say “go”.
Suddenly, in rapid succession, the other four players all left the group and I was left standing alone outside the dungeon entrance.
Did they take a look at me, and decide that there was no way I was going to be able to tank? I was running a level 76 paly thru a dungeon that’s designed for level 69-72. Most of my gear is (I admit) greens, but I have a couple of blues, and even a couple of purples. I’ve taken down elites in 2/3 man quests solo before; I do know what I’m doing playing a paladin - I’ve gotten one to level 80, in addition to this paladin - but I just haven’t done many instances.
Guess I’m just feeling inadequate – I finally get up the courage to try an instance, deliberately pick one that’s a little below my level to ensure that I’ll have an advantage, and I get dumped even before we start. <Pouts>