Indeed. I’m definitely glorying in the fact that our tiny guild finally has enough 80s who show up to avoid pugging strangers for 10s. It’s had a very nice effect on our raid progression – we just downed Festergut last night and are focusing on getting a tree/priest ICC geared so that we can have extras.
(Apparently Fester is a pain in the ass for tanks - one of our tanks told me afterward that he was still coming down from the pressure of managing the tank switches especially since taunts have a chance to be resisted)
Question about rep tabards: How do they work? Does simply killing mobs in heroics give you rep with whatever faction, or just killing bosses? My main was already exalted with every NR faction except Frenzyheart and Ashen Verdict before she ever set foot in a heroic, and so I’ve never seen her gaining even the default faction rep for the various dungeons.
I ask because I want to have my BDL pally, Keliraeda, put on her Argent Crusade tabard and run heroics until she’s exalted with them, mainly to get access to the heirloom vendor at the Argent Tournament so she can set up some of my lowbie toons there.
You get a small rep boost for each creature (about 7 or 8 now for regular mobs, a bit more for some of the bigger ones, such as the abominations in UP) and a bigger rep boost (it used to be 250 and is now somewhat more) for each boss you kill. Also, if you’re not wearing a tabard you get rep boosts in the Northrend Horde (or Alliance) factions.
Tom is right, but also don’t forget you can buy heirlooms from the emblem vendors in Dalaran too. If you’re chain-running heroics you’ll be swimming in Triumph emblems pretty quickly.
Taunts do *not *have a chance to be resisted on Fester, but they *do *have a chance to miss. There are a couple ways around this:
1.) The tanks should glyph their taunt. AFAIK, every tanking class has a glyph that will add 8% hit to their main taunt ability. (For Warriors, this is Glyph of Taunt.) They can either keep that glyph in full-time (I do these days, since there are a lot of fights where a missed taunt can cause a wipe), or keep stacks of that and an alternate glyph in their bags and swap as necessary.
2.) The tank shouldn’t wait for the last second to switch. On Fester, even with my Taunt glyphed so I never miss, I still taunt at 8 stacks instead of 9, just in case. Getting a good bossmod is essential to efficiently tracking things like this. Personally, I use DXE (Deus Vox Encounters), which gives me an alert every time another stack of the debuff is applied, which tells me who it’s been applied to and how many stacks they now have.
3.) If one taunt misses, use another. Every tank has multiple taunts. For example, Prot Warriors have Taunt, Mocking Blow, and Challenging Shout. Your first taunt misses? Use another ability.
For me, the stressful part of Festergut wasn’t the switching, but dealing with the heavy damage you take when he’s at three inhales. Pre-SoW, that required constant CDs on the tank being hit through the entire section of the phase (e.g., I’d blow Shield Wall just as the inhale finished casting, and when SW wore off, I’d get an external CD like Pain Suppression).
Hmm! Thanks for the information - I might have gotten that wrong but I could swear that he said ‘resisted’. I’ll pass on the information about the glyphed taunt, though. (For the record, he’s a prot war) It sounds like this will be super useful with many of the ICC fights.
All I really had to do on Fester was stand there, pewpew, and pop healthstones/pots occasionally – I was definitely awed by our tanks and healers on that fight. O.o
Heh–funny you should say that. I’ve DPSed (on my mage) and tanked (on my DK) that fight, and I find tanking much more boring than DPSing. When I tank, all I have to do is watch the stacks, taunt at the right time, and hit the cooldowns to make sure I don’t get flattened, then swap over to Blood Presence and whack on him for the rest of the fight. I don’t have to move around to get spores or anything. It’s great.
In Drak’ Tharon Keep, there was a Fury warrior who decided I should be spamming Death n Decay or something. I’m honestly not sure he actually knew it was on a fairly long cooldown, which I why I drop it just before pulling trash. Sure, I made mistakes - I’m not perfect, and I’m still figuring out things like tanking macros and . Sometimes I’m a little slow on the draw, or in the chaotic madness of the fights with multiple mobs overlapping and attacking and flinging poo I can’t see squat. I almost always manage to pull everything back even if it somehow gets off my threat and goes for a DPS. I almost always save my Death Grip (I use first on ranged mobs where I want to pull the group of 'em back to a DnD spot). I know enough not to wipe on the trash that everybody wipes on for stupid reasons (the Troll Death Knights in Drak’Tharon, which love to drop fear on people and send them to pull the next group).
He apparently thought that wasn’t good enough. After bickering for a a while, I finally told him to go tank and dropped into Blood Presence. We wiped immediately after failing to killa single mob… of spider trash I was able to kill solo. After that, I didn’t get much of a peep out of him again and he just shut up and let me tank. We went through without a problem. Not surprisingly, he knew precisely jack about AoE tanking and was just spouting off. I didn like the image of the Fury Warrior trying vainly to tank after I said “OK, go ahead. I don’t want to hear it, so go show us how great you are.”
I do need a better HUD than Icehud. That thing is nicely unintrusive - but it’s so easy to miss I can’t hardly see it in the middle of battle.
I also don’t get why some people seem to frown on others waiting for a rez. It’s straight money savings - heck, I’d be willing to tip for rez’s. Sure, it does slow things down a bit, but it’s better for everyone in the end.
Money savings? I’m pretty sure your armor gets damaged by battle and death regardless, and it’s the spirit healer that causes the 25% damage “bonus”, not running back in. Have I missed something?
Our guild has a “if the healer has to run back, you have to run back” policy, FWIW.
??? I guess I COULD be wrong here, but I’m 99% sure you take the same item damage if you get resurrected as if you run back in. And people get upset because it’s one or two guys sitting around while the rest of the party (or just the healer) runs all the way back from the nearest graveyard.
On the topic of being pwned, last night I went on the weekly raid run with guildies, but spent the fight against XT face down on the floor rather than DPSing. I was the first target to get Light Bomb (and had my rangefinder on so I was away from other members, and scooted a bit more when I got the debuff), then a bit later the tantrum hit, and I hit the floor. No heals at all. Thanks healers! :smack: I declined to go on the VoA run they were planning afterwards.
I often play a disc priest, so trust me, I understand! Then again, I usually have a Renew and/or a Power Word Shield on anyone whose health bar isn’t 100%.
I even sniffle moved a bit more away from others to prevent more damage. sob!
As are basically all the hard-core raiders on this thread.
Speaking of raiding, I did my first 25-man raid last night, a VoA run in which we took down the second boss (working from hardest to easiest) with about 2 minutes to spare before the WG battle, and I confirmed that my poor overstressed computer can’t REALLY handle a 25-man - it was okay for those two battles, where the most complicated thing I had to do was switch to a random add and help burn it down, but I wouldn’t want to try and dodge an OS fire wall, for instance.
The other news of note is that my clothie is now sufficiently OP that he can solo Chillmaw (and friends) without much difficulty - I’m thinking of trying some of the group quests in Icecrown and seeing how they go.
I’m not holding my breath, buuuuuuuut it looks like the new guild is still a potential option. The RL posted to my friend’s app, telling him that he and I should talk to him–he’s one of the people my healer used to run with, and he still remembers my healer as being one of the best he’d ever raided with. Hoorah for having connections!
AFAIK, it’s a miss and not a resist. There is, I suppose, a vanishingly tiny chance I’m wrong.
Yeah, there are a lot of fights with tank swapping where a missed taunt is, at a minimum, a bad thing. That’s why I just leave my Glyph of Taunt in all the time. Since he’s a Prot War, tell him to feel free to pass on any other questions he might have if he wants another opinion on anything.
Wait, *how *is that different from the normal DPS job?
Ahahahaha. Death, as always, is the best teacher. (Well, death and shame. :D)
Try changing the settings. My bars are big and fat, because I have the same problem with needing things really up in my face. (Here’s a recent screenie.) Plus, it’s recently picked up a super-sexy new feature: it shows incoming heals. (Much like Grid can be set up to do, it will shade the health bar to show the projected effect of heals that are currently being cast.)
1.) It doesn’t save any money. It has exactly the same effect as rezzing yourself. Death-related durability loss happens at exactly two points: (1) a 10% loss on anything you’re wearing when you die (not when you rez); and (2) a 25% hit on anything equipped or in your bags if you choose to rez at a Spirit Healer. How you resurrect, outside of using a SH, has no bearing on your durability.
2.) It’s a waste of everyone’s time if they’re running back and you’re not. If all of the rezzers have to run back, or if there are a large number of players to rez in relation to the number of rezzers alive, you’re making everyone wait for you, when the group could have started recovering from the deaths much faster if you’d just run back with the rezzers.
Eh, not all. I’d say it’s been pretty evenly split. That in and of itself is reasonably unusual, though–while there are a lot of women who WoW, we’re not even 50% of the general population, let alone the *raiding *population, and the *hardcore *raiding population beyond that.
If you’re in the market for an upgrade, you should be able to get a pretty cheap computer that can still handle the worst WoW can throw at you–at least with all the settings cranked down to the minimum you need to play effectively. (If you play at the absolute minimum, there are sometimes important boss spell effects that you won’t be able to see, or won’t be able to see well.)
Get them their own accounts. Problem solved!
People mostly head off as soon as they can. You’ll get better gear and probably better experience from the Northrend zones.
Not surprisingly, he knew precisely jack about AoE tanking and was just spouting off. I didn like the image of the Fury Warrior trying vainly to tank after I said “OK, go ahead. I don’t want to hear it, so go show us how great you are.”
Hoorah for having connections!
