I don’t know THAT much about Pally tanking, or tanking regular Nexus - I only started tanking with my Death Knight on heroics. But you should be okay to take on the groups of 4. In the case of the Magister’s room you probably want to pull them out onto the bridge area at the front instead of running in after them; don’t want anyone to accidentally aggro the boss first.
(Also, there’s a patrol that comes into that area occasionally of 2 dogs and a human-type - depending on how quickly your group is taking the groups down it’s probably worth finding and killing them first.)
Sorry if any of these replies are outdated by new posts–I had (gasp!) work come up.
There’s an item drop (in Strat, I think, the original, not CoS) that works like a limited-uses Eye of Kilrogg. And there’s a quest in Netherstorm where you get an imp. I made sure to bug my friend Dan when I was using them, to point out what a better Warlock I was than him.
There are definitely guilds out there that focus on serious 10-man raiding with limited time commitments (two or three raid nights a week). You just have to work a bit harder to find them.
IIRC, WoWWiki has the full text of every in-game book in WoW. So you can always go there and peruse at your leisure.
1.) Do you have a tanking spec? If yes, make sure you’re in it. If not, don’t queue to tank.
2.) Do you have a tanking set? If yes, make sure you’re in it. If not, don’t queue to tank.
3.) Make sure that if you’re a Warrior, you’re in Defensive stance; if you’re a DK, you’re in Frost Presence; or if you’re a Pally, you have Righteous Fury buffed. If you’re a Druid and you can’t tell whether or not you’re in Bear form… :smack:
4.) Decide on a kill order (Skull > X > Circle is what I use, and seems to be pretty standard). Mark targets. Make sure that DPS knows that they CANNOT HIT anything other than the currently marked target, or you can’t guarantee you’ll keep it off them.
5.) CC anything that can be CC’d. If it’s a CC that breaks on damage (most do), be sure that nobody uses AOE abilities close enough to break it.
6.) While keeping aggro on the primary target, be sure to (a) use AOE threat abilities and (b) cycle through your current targets, using one or two single-target high-threat abilities on each of them. For instance, on my Prot War, I will Thunder Clap, Shockwave, and Cleave, while switching among the pack I’m holding, applying Shield Slam, Revenge, and Devastate.
As has been stated repeatedly in this thread, that’s incorrect. No matter how you do a Heroic (random LFG, specific LFG, or with a group put together manually on your own server), you’re saved to it after your first bosskill that day. However, the random LFG feature **may **assign you to a Heroic that you’re currently locked out of, though it will prioritize dungeons you haven’t yet run for that lockout period.
Woo, grats! Of course, you realize that this now means you’ll get into an ICC PUG and replace it in a week.
I know there are, it’s just taking a gamble on server transferring, plus the idea of re-upping a subscription that I’ve let lapse for a rather good reason. I don’t mean to make my own personal struggle with WoW addiction take over the discussion, but I apparently have rather poor willpower when it comes to controlling my MMO time. Regardless, I’ve looked into it a bit, but have yet to really find many promising leads. I’ll probably keep looking during my idle hours, but I’m not desperate to find a guild.
Congratulations to everyone on their accomplishments!
My guild finally got Anub 25 on hard mode last night–nice to have that down, though it was frustrating that I was there all night and we kept wiping (including one wipe at 5%) but then they swapped me out for a hunter (the tank was dying due to some aggro issues on the adds, so they wanted to bring in another MD)…and the very next attempt they downed him! Ah, well…at least we got him.
So…I need some advice from you paladin tanks out there, if you wouldn’t mind.
I’ve got a level 60 paladin that I’d like to set up as a tank. Problems are:
I know nothing about paladin tanking. I’m a DK tank.
This paladin is pretty sad. He was leveled as a triple-boxed recruit-a-friend character (two lowbies, with my main dragging them through instances for XP) so his gear is terrible and I essentially didn’t have to have any skill at all to play him, since he just followed along and collected XP.
What little gear he has at the moment is Ret, not Prot.
What I’d like to do is get him set up with a tank set and a rotation (I’ve got a spec already–did some research on that) and get him started tanking random dungeons right now so he can start getting some skills down. Ultimately, I expect he’ll be tanking alt raids in my guild, but that’s a long way off.
Any advice for a noob paladin tank? Websites to check, things to keep in mind, good rotations, good spots to find tank gear?
I am so guilty of this. Apologies to Kahmu for letting him down on one occasion…
When we were doing Hamburger Hill in Pit of Sauron, I was responsible for Repenting the spellcaster (usually the ‘X’ in the mob) in the back right of the group, either to get there too late and repent him while he’s entrenched with the mobs, or that I spaz out and not re-target the skull mob after I successfully repent the spellcaster only to either do a consecrate or divine storm too close to him, or worse yet, drop a hammer on him instead of the skull mob.
We are trying to get a 10man together in our Doper-driven, Burning Dog Legion on Cairne. We are laid back and are trying to get at least one night a week…probably Monday nights.
I believe there is a site devoted to Paladin tanking - Maintankadin. I cannot vouch for how up-to-date it is but it seems to have been updated at least around Patch 3.2.
It does kind of suck you in, doesn’t it? Especially endgame raiding. Obviously this is something you could easily get around since you control the account, but I’m pretty sure that you can set parental controls to restrict the hours you can actually access the account. Granted, you’d have to stick to it once you set it up, since you’d have the ability to change it at any time, but it would at least set up a primary barrier or reminder.
Grats to the guild! And for not being in on that–I know how it goes. My new guild just got Alg25 for the first time last night (after finishing the key on Thursday, our last raid day of the week). We had one too many tanks, so being the new one, I had to sit out for a DPS. (Gotta tell you, it was frustrating to sit on vent and listen to them lose people to mechanics I know well enough to keep my ass out of… Sigh.) But hey, we’ll get in there next time, anyway!
1.) If you run straight in to that caster at the beginning of the pull, he shouldn’t have moved from where he started. If the tank pulls the rest of the group waaaay back down, like off the ramp, the caster will move to stay in range, but that’s it.
2.) I have a macro that I use for Polymorph on my Mage that would be useful for any CC. The actual macro is the part I’ve bolded.
Side note: Clicking the button again after your current target is dead, without a new target selected, will clear your focus.
You could easily adapt it to many forms of CC, simply replacing **Polymorph **with Repentance, etc. Using it for a Ret Paladin, you can run up to your CC target, hit the button, then run back to the pack and pick a new damage target. Keeping an eye on the focus portrat, you can easily see if the CC is broken or expired, and re-apply it by running back up to the CC target and hitting the button again–with no need to change your actual target. You just need to be in range of the CC ability (and facing the right way, if applicable).
Can I just say, why have I not been using Divine Hymn before now? I’ve always avoided it because of the high mana cost, but with all the raid buffs last night my mana pool was nearly 30k so I went ahead and used it on every CD.
Oh. My. Goodness. That does an insane amount of healing, especially with crits and talent bonuses. I’ve got to remember to keep using that.
Thanks! And I hear you. I got left out of the realm-first Algalon-25 kill too (on my old server), so I didn’t get the Celestial Defender title. But at least I got to go the following week and get Astral Walker. Hopefully you will too!
Yeah, at least this wasn’t a server-first. And I can’t imagine I won’t get in on the next run. Can’t wait to get home tonight, too–new ICC wing, oh boy!
You have no idea how hard I looked for a typo in that sentence so I could post a correction to it.
I have a couple of macros that I use all the time. There’s one for my Rogue that automatically sets Tricks of the Trade to my focus, and one for my hunter that sets my Misdirect to either my focus or my pet. I could post them if anyone wants them.
I don’t really have any others that I use regularly.
@Yeticus Rex: Mind if I shoot you a PM about the guild? Not sure if I’m willing to commit to re-upping, but I have a few questions, if you don’t mind.
@Shot from Guns: Yes, end-game raiding is basically the reason why I played this game since release (I still think Sunwell Plateau was the best raid instance Blizzard has ever made). I just can’t get behind the design where in order to be a bleeding edge raider, you have to run the same instance 4 times a week. I just find that kind of time commitment to be absurd, and in order to be a member of top guilds, that’s basically what you need to commit to doing. Plus, I found with how the test realms work, that you’re rarely, if ever, actually coming up with and creating strategies as a guild, but instead taking in strategies that have already been proven to work and just executing (which is still difficult, but not quite the same).
I always thought 10-mans were more fun/interesting, because of the fact that there is no room for dragging along people who can’t keep up, especially on the harder achievements (the Keeper HMs in Ulduar, for example). Regardless, we’ll see what happens. It would be kind of neat to raid with Dopers.
I want more macro space what with dual spec, though given the number of macros that I have for BM and MM. So far the kludge I have is to just keep one macro for both and use the UI error clearing, but that’s rather inelegant.
If you haven’t worked with macros much before and want to see what all them whizbang macros are doing, there’s a very nice resource that’ll take c/p’d macros and explain them in English so you can understand what all those conditionals are doing. http://www.wow.com/2009/09/03/the-explain-o-matic-will-explain-your-macros/
Things worked out well today, particularly considering the fact that a case of insomnia that kept me awake until about 5:30 AM (after which I only slept until about 10:00 AM - there’s no sleeping through garbage trucks right outside your bedroom window) had me thinking I was going to skip doing the Threat/Citadel dailies due to worries about my concentration ability. But I did those dailies anyway; grouped with a guy I’ve grouped with a couple other times for those quests, but we couldn’t find anybody else so we ended up 2-manning Chillmaw and the Commanders.
Not long after, I was doing the dailies off the Skybreaker when somebody put out a LFG for Second Chances, which recommends 5 players. I had attempted to solo the quest yesterday, and failed utterly, and also failed to find a group. So I jumped at it when I saw the LFG. So it was me and a lvl 80 DK trying to 2-man it. We tried and failed twice, so I put out a LFM, and found one more player, another lvl 80 paladin. With three of us we were able to kill Archbishop Wossname. I opened the gate for Commander Arete to come through, and we all accepted the followup quest and ran off to do that together. Then the other paladin asked for help with that collection of three group quests that involve killing three elite DKs: The Rider of Blood, The Rider of Frost, and The Rider of the Unholy. Then there was a followup quest that we did after those. So just like that, with two others to help me, I got six group quests out of the way all in one go, and now I’m sitting at 135/140 toward Icecrown: The Final Goal I thought I’d better jump at the chance for the group, tired or not, because I’ve absolutely never seen anybody LFG for any of the Icecrown group quests other than Threat From Above.
for not being in on that–I know how it goes. My new guild just got Alg25 for the first time last night (after finishing the key on Thursday, our last raid day of the week). We had one too many tanks, so being the new one, I had to sit out for a DPS. (Gotta tell you, it was frustrating to sit on vent and listen to them lose people to mechanics I know well enough to keep my ass out of… Sigh.) But hey, we’ll get in there next time, anyway!
I thought I’d better jump at the chance for the group, tired or not, because I’ve absolutely never seen anybody LFG for any of the Icecrown group quests other than Threat From Above.