Well, the “rush-rush” tank I referenced in post #9489 was a Death Knight - but runic power has the same issues as rage in that regard.
My other level 80 is a bear tank - yes, I lose rage when waiting for the healer to mana up. On the other hand, with a fully fueled healer I don’t die as much. That, and I know how to generate rage quickly. Yes, it helps to know how to play your toon.
For a prot warrior, rage shouldn’t be a concern. Be in defensive stance, put shield block up for free, then every block gets you rage, and allows you to use Revenge which (with the appropriate talent points) gives you a free heroic strike. This is all in the low 20’s, I can only assume more tactics will pop us as I level.
Quasi, I only complain about the bad apples - maybe I should come here and talk about the the good ones. The PUG’s were everyone is polite and courteous. Where people actually watch and pull mobs off the healer, or the DPS holds back a couple seconds to make sure the novice tank has a firm grip on aggro, or, with the recent holidays, the groups that make sure those looking for a dungeon elder locate the NPC and have have to interact with it for their quests, even if that “delays” the rest of the them for 2.3 minutes. I’ve been in some absolutely wonderful PUG’s.
Which often is still the case even with the lvl 55 toon requirement. 
I was reading the patch notes yesterday, and saw they were adding a new 10/25 raid under Wyrmrest – rescuing the Ruby Dragonflight or something like that. But I haven’t heard anything about it being today. In fact that might be for patch 3.5, and we’re only on 3.3 right now, come to think of it.
Well, I wiped in a novel way last night while running BRD again. I was doing the “rescue the orcish prisoner” quest, and after starting the quest rushed outside the cell, set up my consecrate, and started doing my tank thing. In the meantime, a couple of the dps and the healer were hanging out inside the cell. Which turned out to be important when one of the DPS (apparently trying to right-click on one of the mobs) CLOSED THE CELL DOOR just when the healer’s nuke heal was about to go off. I didn’t have the presence of mind to lay hands on myself (tank fail) and so I went down, and eventually so did the group despite a valiant effort by the dps warrior to play junior tank.
The dps who closed the door dropped the group as soon as we finished the first boss (and got our goodie bags); the rest of us decided to 4-man as far as we could get and ended up killing 4 more bosses (the earth elemental guy, the arena event, lord infernus, and the shadowforge key quest guy) before giving up after a wipe that followed several near misses; we were just a bit over our heads in terms of what we could handle by that point.
I think BRD is probably my fave instance of all time; I understand why the Northrend instances are all about a half hour long and on tracks, but I really enjoy wandering around a really big instance with a group & slaughtering everyone I meet. 
I’m probably reacting to rumors that have no basis in reality. I need to start watching patchnotes on a regular basis instead of jumping every time I hear about the possibility of a patch…
I wanted to roll another healer to level, since healing with my priest has always been my favorite role. My options were (another) pally, a druid, or a shammy.
I’ve never really liked the idea of playing a Druid, even though they are popular and can be great healers. I was tempted to roll a shammy, but I decided to go ahead and roll a Paladin and level him as Holy spec, mostly by healing dungeons. It’s unfortunate that it means playing yet another Blood Elf (I’m sick of them).
Now I had plenty of extra badges on my main to spring for the chest/shoulder heirloom set. The plate set, however, comes loaded with +strength, +stam and +crit; not great itemization for a Holy paladin. So instead I got the mail set, which give +stam, +int, +sp and mp5. That’s worth using mail instead of plate, isn’t it? Especially since I’d be wearing mail until 40 anyway. With the bonus that if I ever do decide to roll a shammy, I can use the same pieces.
So anyway, I got him up to level 10 in about two hours of playing. Still haven’t decided on any professions yet, though. I’m hoping to get him up to 15 quickly so I can start using the DF.
Another good random pug experience:
I’ve been playing my baby troll shammy (lvl 24) of late, and I was put in Stockades. Rather, I REQUESTED Stockades because I couldn’t run BFD anymore without going Leeroy on the group due to murloc-madness. The group plowed (and I mean PLOWED) through Stocks without any trouble at all. We were all wearing heirloom gear, so it was a cakewalk.
After, we queued as a group and were put in BFD. We all voiced our distaste of the instance and the healer (who was several levels above us) suggested we just “zerg” it (by which I mean we just attack mindlessly without regard to threat) He promised to keep us healed as long as he had LoS. That was the most fun I’ve had playing WoW in a long time. It was also the fastest I’ve ever run BFD by a large margin.
Has anyone tried this in heroics? I’m guessing it wouldn’t work because the armor/DPS ratio drops like a rock at higher levels. It would still be fun to try. Anyone want to roll a toon on Velen and try it with me?
If you’re going to level him through the DF, you might want to skip herbalism and mining, since you won’t be seeing enough nodes to level yourself up. Tailor/enchanter and maybe skinner seem to be the easiest to level without spending a lot of time or money.
Ooh, good advice. Skinning, definitely - it’s easy to level and will bring in a little extra cash. And doesn’t it give a +crit bonus? I already have two tailors and a max level enchanter though. If I’m skinning already, maybe I’ll just take leatherworking; I can send stuff I make to my enchanter to d/e.
yeah you get Master of Anatomy or somesuch at 75, 150. Haven;t made 225 yet so i’ll see if it gets rank 3 when i get there
Yep, I’ve done it in heroics - you have to choose with a little care, but a group in Ulduar level gear with decent skills can steamroll through the likes of Heroic Utgarde (either one). I’ve been on a couple PUGs like that where the healer stops healing (for the most part) and joins the DPS team. Hell, I think my raid-geared Shaman could solo some of the lower level heroics at this point, if I wanted to bother. Soloing instances can sometimes result in boss-fights of epic length requiring precise rotations. I’ve tried it. It was interesting, but not really my thing. For a truly epic example of dungeon soloing read this.
And you can be the only pally healer on the block wearing mostly leather healing gear.
If you mean run a heroic without a tank (4 DPS and a healer), then yes I’ve done it. It’s quite a lot of fun, but wipes are always a possibility and DPS deaths are likely. I’ve also run many heroics with the “tank” not actually wearing tank gear or using a tank posture - in those runs threat bounces around pretty crazily but with an OP healer in something like H:UK it doesn’t really matter.
I’ve also run heroics without a healer (although with a tank and some DPS that could off-heal or self-heal). That’s a bit scarier, but quite doable at current gear levels.
It does. And I dinged Rank 4 when I hit 300 Skinning last night.
I found a video someone had made on how to set it up, which gave me a very good grounding in “okay, this is what the hell all these options do and where they’re located,” after which I could go ahead and tweak it however I liked. It’s great!
Heads-up, if you haven’t seen it yet: as of right now, on the next patch, leaving the dungeon early will get you a 30-minute debuff, up from the current 15-minute deserter debuff. Sucks when you’re the person saving yourself from repair bills, but at least it’ll also punish those jerks who drop as soon as they see they got assigned a dungeon they didn’t like.
That’s why I always hated, hated, hated Violet Hold. They put *just *enough time between every portal for me to lose all of my Rage.
1.) At max level, you run into problems with Rage generation when you overgear content. The latest version of Shield Spec (generating Rage on a Block/Dodge/Parry) is a huge improvement over the past, but it’s still not perfect, since the majority of Rage generation still comes from taking versus avoiding damage.
2.) Shield Block has a cooldown–it doesn’t stay up all the time. (IIRC, fully talented, it’s a 12-second duration with a 40-second CD, which would put it as being active only 30% of the time.)
3.) Revenge only gives you a free HS with the right Major Glyph–it’s not a Talent. And unfortunately, a lot of us can’t spare the glyph slot.
4.) These days, Revenge isn’t as high as it used to be on the Prot War priority list for threat-generating moves. For people with at least two pieces of T10 and no Imp Rev, I think it’s actually lower on the priority than Devastate, which means that you’re not even bothering to use it unless you’re completely Rage-starved and it happens to be lit up. (That may be changing with the Revenge damage buff in the next patch, but we’ll see.)
5.) In order to hold aggro against a group of DPS of comparable gear, a Prot War has to pretty much be hitting every single GCD as soon as it pops up and spamming HS or Cleave for every autoattack. That uses a LOT of Rage. (Especially with HS/Cleave, since each of those turns a “white” attack that would have generated more Rage into a “yellow” or “special” attack that uses it up.)
In summary: Things are a lot more complicated at max level than what you can see from your early 20s.
It makes me a little sad every time I walk in there that I didn’t start playing until TBC. Just the *entrance *to the dungeons and raids is so… epic. The scale is mind-blowing, and the amount of detail… It wow you, it really does. They really don’t make 'em like that anymore.
The next patch is actually up on the PTR right now, which means it’s reaching a final version but isn’t official yet. You can read the PTR patch notes on Blizzard’s site, or you could even copy a character over and play on it to try the changes before they go live.
Well, it depends what you mean by zerging. This is kind of how chain-pulling instances works: the tank keeps grabbing pack after pack, with few rests in between, while the DPS just AOEs everything down. It’s not the same free-for-all mentality you can get away with at lower levels (<20k HP in Cloth can’t take nearly as much punishment as >40k in Plate with damage-reducing abilities and talents), but it can get pretty close, at least in terms of speed and efficiency.
We did it. Sarth3D down and ‘of the Nightfall’ for the people who participated.
cheer
We had two 0% wipes that had people swearing a lot on vent before we finally got him down last night. Another kill shot… another dot tick… ANYTHING! But nooo. What finally worked for us was having our other pally go OT to taunt Tenebron off the MT and then brezzing the OT when Tenebron enraged.
dance Now all that’s left in OS is to 8man him, which should be easy pie after this. D:
Woohoo! Grats! Yup, eight-manning 0D will be a faceroll for ya.
Wow lizard! Nice accomplishment!