Does anyone know if character buffs stack on the jousting vehicle (wolf, raptor, etc)? For instance, can you drink a health pot and it restores hp? Or, for instance, if Well Fed increases the initial health of the vehicle? Or is it ALL vehicle and nothing your class or possessions can give you will change that?
Nothing on the character transfers to the jousting mount. Some vehicles’ abilities in the game will get more powerful the higher the average item level of your gear is, but I don’t think jousting mounts do.
So this weekend, my baby 80 paladin tank finally came into his own. I figured out (partially thanks to advice from you folks–thanks!) what I was doing wrong, and with a combination of your advice and some more from a couple of pally tanks in my guild, I rearranged my bar a bit, trained up some of my skills (oops–no wonder I was having trouble holding aggro!), discovered that for whatever reason Bartender wasn’t catching the max rank of some of my stuff (a guy in a random helpfully informed me that I was only using Consecration rank 6 when the max was 9), and set off to seek my fortune in randoms.
After a couple of false starts, I’m happy to report that things are going swimmingly. I even managed (with great trepidation) to tank heroic Halls of Reflection, that bane of newbie tanks everywhere! All I have to say is that pally tanks are ridiculously OP in there. I won’t go near that place on my DK tank, who’s almost fully ICC25 geared and has about 10K health on my paladin. But we just breezed through with very little difficulty.
Got some upgrades (a few pieces of T9, some 245 badge gear, Rimefang’s Claw) and now my tank set is nearly all purple, with a couple of stray blues I’ll be replacing soon. It was a very productive weekend. Only thing I need now is the shield from normal HoR, which is going to be fun. Tried running it yesterday and there were four paladins in the group–three of whom were after the shield! Yikes. This is going to take awhile.
I too had much difficulty with jousting when I first started out — the earlier suggestions in this thread were probably answering my questions. I have since become very good at it, usually winning my individual matches so quickly that I have to wait for the Heal (5 key by default) to come off it’s 1-minute cooldown before I can use it and start the next match.
Mister Rik’s Jousting Guide
My method depends on using both key-movement and mouse-movement in combination, and assumes you are right-handed (mouse in right hand) and your movement keys are the default ASDW.
Important tip: Learn and practice the “jump-spin”. This means running forward, hitting your spacebar to jump and simultaneously hitting “A” or “D” while still holding down the “W” key. This will launch you into the air, spin you around 180 degrees, and send you running back the way you came. This is essential in jousting. Also, the NPCs never do it, which means it’s one tool you have that they don’t.
Alternative jump-spin method: Rather than using A or D to spin, you can hold down your right mouse button and spin yourself with the mouse.
Starting the Match
Make sure you are healed to full HP before starting.
Make sure all three of your shields are up. Even if all three are up, hit your “4” key again to reset the timer so that you have the maximum amount of time on them when you start. There’s nothing more embarrassing than having all three of your shields drop a few seconds into the match because the timer ran out.
Position yourself so that you are right alongside the NPC you’re challenging, facing the same direction as the NPC, as if you were at the starting line for a race. Don’t challenge the NPC’s face-to-face; the NPCs will always run straight away from their starting position and if you started by facing them, you’ll have to turn around to go after them and you’ll lose initiative. When you line up next to the NPC, back your mount up a bit so you’re actually a bit behind them, maybe 1/4 horse-length.
Fully healed and with all three shields up, challenge the NPC. As soon as you’ve clicked the challenge “button”, the NPC will run straight away from you. Don’t move! Immediately start spamming your “2” button. Your shield-breaker will launch the instant the NPC is at the correct range. As soon as you see the javelin leave your hand, start spamming your “3” button (Charge). You want to throw your shield-breaker, and then initiate your charge the instant the global cooldown expires. Timing is extremely important: if you wait a hair too long to initiate your charge, the NPC will start back toward you — sometimes just riding back, sometimes with their own shield-breaker and/or charge — and they will then be too close for you to charge them.
After your charge, as soon as you’re past the NPC, perform your jump-spin. The instant you touch down, hit your “2” key again to lob another shield-breaker. Admittedly, this requires some deft left-hand finger twisting to do correctly, so you may find it easier to use the mouse to spin. If you’re jousting Valiants this step isn’t as essential, since they start with only two shields up. The later Champion opponents start with all three shields up, however. If these opening maneuvers are executed correctly and successfully, you will have knocked down all three of your opponent’s shields in very short order.
Herding Your Opponent
One of the most frustrating things in any jousting match is the tendency of the NPCs to ride clear out of the ring. Do not succumb to the temptation to follow them. If you try to chase them out of the ring, you’ll find yourself getting hung up on banners, railings, and bleachers, and when that happens, you’re helpless. Additionally, if you get too far away from the ring you’re liable to be “disqualified” (a rule that, frustratingly, doesn’t seem to apply to the NPCs), and you’ll have to start all over again. If your opponent does manage to lure you to the edge of the ring and tries to ride further away from it, let them go. Turn around and run for the center of the ring, where you’ll be out of range of their shield-breaker and charge, and they’ll be forced to come back to you.
So you want to do everything you can to keep your opponent inside the ring where there are no obstacles. This is where you start “herding” or “leading” them. The best way I’ve found to do this is to learn to walk backwards while spamming the “1” (Thrust) key.
You’ve opened with your shield-breaker/charge/shield-breaker (2-3-2) and now you’re facing back toward the edge of the ring. By this time your opponent will usually have run (not charged) to you. Draw him/her toward the center of the ring by holding down your “S” key, walking slowly backwards, while spamming your Thrust key. I do this with my left index finger on the “S” and my left ring finger on the “1”. Since this will occupy two left-hand fingers, use your mouse to steer if necessary. Keep backing up and thrusting until you’re close to the center of the ring. (This doesn’t have to be the exact center - I just mean get them into the open space away from the edges.) Once you’re in the center of the ring, stop backing up. Continue to spam Thrust.
At some point your opponent will break away to attempt their own shield-breaker/charge. Let them go. While you can certainly force them to remain in melee/Thrust range and fight them that way, they will eventually get all of their shields back up, and with three shields up it will take a very long time to wear down their HPs. And of course, your Thrust will not take their shields down. So take advantage of their attempts to shield-break/charge you: At the first sign of them running away, stop Thrusting, use your mouse to turn so that you’re always facing toward your opponent, and start backing up again (while the opponent is still moving away). The backing up will open the space between you more quickly, increasing the chance that you can toss your shield-breaker while your opponent still has his back turned. As at the start of the match, spam “2” until your shield-breaker goes off, and the instant it leaves your hand, start spamming Charge. Charge through them, perform your jump-spin, and lob another shield-breaker.
Tip: Toss shield-breakers every chance you get, even if your opponent has no shields up. It still does 2000 or more damage. You can toss shield-breakers at a shorter range than you can charge, so this lets you deal some damage when the opponent is too close for you to Charge but still too far away for Thrust.
After all that, it’s just a matter of repeating the Herd/Let-Them-Go/Shield-breaker/Charge/Shield-breaker pattern until you win.
Tip: Don’t try to break out of melee yourself to set up a Shield-breaker/Charge. You want to always keep your opponent in front of you. As soon as you turn your back, you’re helpless — you can’t perform any of your attacks if your opponent is behind you. It’s much better to let them turn their backs to you, and then take immediate advantage of their moment of defenselessness.
Tip: Avoid jousting with the blood elf and gnome NPCs, if at all possible. They like to ride away from you, but not go far enough that you can Shield-break or Charge them. They like to trot a few paces away, prance around a bit (often putting their shields back up), and then trot back into melee range. They’re very annoying that way. Dwarves are almost as bad.
Tip: Try to get your Tournament jousting done during off-peak hours. Lag has an enormous negative effect on jousting. The lag itself might not be obviously apparent, but you’ll find yourself facing NPCs who appear able to toss a shield-breaker and Charge simultaneously, and even do these things at point-blank range, which they shouldn’t be able to do. They’re not really doing those things, but the split-second timing involved in jousting makes it appear that way: they probably launched their attacks at the appropriate range and with the correct amount of time in between them, but the lag affected how their position was updated on your screen and made it appear otherwise. And the effect is the same as if they had “cheated”: you’ll suddenly find all your shields down in one go.
Most Important Tip: Keep your own shields up at all times!. If they go down, get them back up as quickly as you can.
Hope this helps! Ask away if you need clarification on anything I’ve posted 
Grrr… lots more posts to reply to while I was typing my jousting wall o’ text …
Speaking of AFK …
The Random BG tool put me in Arathi Basin yesterday, and while waiting for the battle to start I (embarrassingly enough) fell for the trick where somebody does an emote that shows up in the chat box like so:
<Playername> has reported you for AFK. Type /afk to clear this.
So, yeah, I ended up booting myself from the BG and ended up with the 15-minute Deserter debuff :smack:
It’s all good, though. Somebody also dropped a Toy Train set in the middle of that huge crowd of people waiting for the battle to start. I’m thinking I didn’t really want to be on a BG team with people who pull that kind of childish crap.
There is a downward adjustment, however, which I discovered when Keliraeda started the Tournament at lvl 77 (instead of waiting until lvl 80 like Eilyssana did). At levels lower than 80, my mounts had fewer than than the max of 50,000 HP.
OTOH, back when I was still doing Wyrmrest dailies and doing the one over at The Nexus, I discovered that if I was in Prot spec, using the dragon mount’s healing ability generated more health per tick (something like +2650 vs. +2500 when in Ret spec). Probably because my Prot spec had a few points in the Holy tree that boosted healing effects.
Is it possible that, at some point, you had your spellbook set up with the “Show all spell ranks” box checked? If that’s the case, you may have dragged the specific “Consecrate (Rank 6)” button to your action bar, rather than the generic Consecrate button that automatically updates itself. If you did that, the button would stay stuck at Rank 6.
Like I said, most vehicles (dragons count too) scale up with your gear level. The better the gear you have, the more damage/healing the vehicle’s abilities will do. It’s got nothing to do with talents, so far as I’m aware. Is your Prot gear better than your Ret gear?
More likely it was the dual spec bug (assuming winterhawk was ever dual-specced). If you train an upgraded version of a spell (say, Consecrate) while specced as Ret, only your Ret bars get updated. When you change to your alternate spec you have to update all of those bars as well.
Hence the beauty of the RankWatch add-on. Although you might want to turn off the whisper ability - some folks don’t take kindly to you pointing out their mistakes…
That might be it. He had a Prot spec but never used it–I ran him as Ret from about 70-80, and only swapped to Prot when I had decent enough gear that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself tanking.
I’ll have to check out that addon you mentioned. I think it (run by the other player) might be the one that informed me that my Consecrate was too low. I’m grateful he did, too, or I might not have realized it!
That’s almost certainly it. I have the same issue with my Feral/Resto leveling Druid (who never actually heals…).
It’s a very nice add-on, but like I said you get lots of guff from e-peens who can’t believe you have the gall to question their play. You’ll get multiple “STFU” and “I’m downranking my Lifebloom to save mana” (:smack:) and all sorts of justifications for every one thankful response. Oh well… just set it up not to spam and notify folks manually if you think they might not know what’s up.
Right, but the jousting mounts, specifically, top out at 50,000HP. They have that when I joust on my well-geared lvl 80 human pally and they have that when I joust on my not-so-well-geared lvl 80 belf pally. I noticed no difference in jousting damage between the two toons.
With the dragon, my Prot gear was worse than my Ret gear (the Prot spec was a short-lived experiment and I didn’t take the time to really put together a Prot set, aside from acquiring a shield and 1-hander). The only thing affected, though was the amount of healing done per tick, and the only reason I could see for that was that my Prot spec had a few points in healing-related talents that my Ret spec didn’t have.
People should make sure to keep in mind your other tip about not being the one to move out of melee range together with this one. Some people will try to get distance to do a Shield Breaker… which will actually do less damage than the melee attack. Charge does max possible damage plus removes a shield, melee does middle damage but doesn’t remove any shields, and SB does minimal damage but removes a shield. So if there are no shields up, and you have a choice between the melee attack and a shield-breaker, you should definitely use the melee one.
It can also bug out, which gets really annoying for the person it’s bugging on. A friend was running a random with me a few weeks ago, and she had to tell a random party member to turn off his Rank Watch, because it kept telling her she was using the wrong rank of some ability or another (Consecrate, maybe), even though she triple-checked it.
… Thank you for signing on, and the gold’s (4g’s) in the mail!
Here’s what we look like: http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff71/Drummerboy49/wolkiesguild.jpg
The cat’s image is in honor of my own kitty, “Bert” a Maine Coon I rescued from the shelter
And for those of you who rolled a toon just to help me and Da Wolk’, and you don’t want the g’s?
(As we used to say on the playground of Villa Rica Elementary School): “‘Tough titty’ said the kitty, but the milk’s still good!”
Put it in the guild vault (soon as I figger out how to make one), or send it back and I’ll re-contribute it to one of my entry-level guild members.
Anyway, THANKS!!!:):):):):):):)
This is what I have wanted to do ever since y’all have started helpin’ me: PAY IT FORWARD!!!
Yeeeeeee-Hawwwww!:D:D:D:D
AHEM
As you were. :o
Q
Absolutely. I was mainly referring to using it immediately after a charge, before you’ve moved back into melee range. It’s an opportunity thing - you’ve just charged through your opponent and so can’t immediately melee again, so go ahead and toss the spear again while you close back to melee range, cuz any damage you can dish out is good.
Hey, remember my mention of the vanishing abomination bug? I shot some video for fun:
Hey Quasi, there’s a cat pet you can get in the game that used to be called a Maine Coon. They changed the name 'cause they were worried about people being offended (or it ran afoul of the filters or something like that :rolleyes:), but the pet’s still there, under the name Black Tabby.
It’s a bit hard for an Alliance character to get their hands on one, since the enemy that has the best chance of dropping it can only be attacked by Hordies, but it’s something to watch out for. 
Yup. I just wanted to make sure someone else didn’t read just that line out of context–missing the part where you specifically said not to let the NPC be the one to move out of melee–and think that they should be running around to set up SBs.
/woot! Just found out about the bonus I’ll be getting at work this week – the equivalent of over 20% of my annual salary! 
So – my 5.5 year-old desktop is going to be tossed out the window in favor of a new speedy high-powered model. Finally I’ll be able to run WoW with the graphics turned up!
Wait, wait, WAIT!
They took the name off because they were afraid folks would get upset and they re-named it “Black Tabby”!!!
I want some of whatever that guy’s smokin’, Dude!
BTW, SFG: Thanks for the compliment on ol’ Wolk’s new armor, Hon! He looks bad now, huh, not so much a pimp?
There are still some things I wish the game would let him do, such as take Silka to her stall, clean it, rub her down and feed and water her (He’s just that kinda guy, ah reckon!), as well as interact a little closer with NPC’s (Heather, for instance), but wha’frigg - it’s still a fun game, innit?
Thanks
Quasi
You, ummmmmmm, play WoW at work, Skammie???
Dood, I couldn’t THINK of a perk better than that! 
Q
Ahh, no. That would really be a pretty good job, huh?
I’m getting the bonus at work, and using some of the money to replace my own personal PC at home
Whoaaa, that’s a nice chunk o’ change. Of course, it probably means you have some kind of quota thing going on in your job, which I do *not *envy.
Some single-player RPGs are more interactive that way, I know. For instance, I’m completely sucked into Dragon Age: Origins right now, and one of my party members is a war dog. When I’m back at camp, I can pet him and he rolls around happily.
Doing the “Happy Dance” for Skammie!:):)
Sorry I misunderstood, but glad I did at the same time!
Before things went south for me a year ago, I was SO HAPPY to get a brand new sound system for WOW gaming, and now it looks like YOU’RE getting some much-needed SPEED on your PC, and I think that’s just AWESOME, my friend!
ENJOY!!!
Quasi