In my personal experience, in-progress groups usually kick ass once they get new people. The people who drop out are frequently those who were screwing up the group.
It does kind of amaze me that there’s people who can screw up on Ick. Even without DBM, Krick’s instructions are a huge giveaway.
Really, there’s nothing to it. You just want to have the tanks face the caster skeletons away from the raid, and try to have a Rogue who can mark traps with flares so you don’t trigger them before you’re ready. When the big guys get triggered out of the traps, you’ll want to have both tanks on them, and face them away from the raid. Oh, and on the first pull, you need to make sure everyone’s through the doorway, or the trash at the door will keep spawning.
That’s it–easy-peasy. If you could catch me before I get saved to ICC10, I’d even be happy to go in with you.
i no rite
Woohoo! Congratulations! And good luck on 25!
Well…I can certainly understand the feeling (and it would probably help me too, since odds are at least one of our group of four would get chosen), but I think the best thing they could do is make the venue larger. I know they like having it in Anaheim because they can use their employees to staff it, but Blizz is making money hand over fist–they could afford to move it to someplace like Vegas to let more people in.
This will be the third year I’ll be going–I even managed to get tickets the year of the Fail Murloc, when nobody got tickets. Persistence pays off, I guess. But having multiple people trying at the same time helps too. I just wish they would make it so that it’s impossible to sell the tickets on Ebay. Not sure how they’d do that, but I get annoyed at the people who buy 5 tickets with the intent of reselling most of them.
I would so be there if it were in Vegas. As it is, I have no intention of going to SoCal if I can at all help it.
Before I completely write off DK tanks as useless/all played by noobs and start dropping group every time I get a DK tank through the LFD tool, can some of y’all maybe explain why DK tanks seem to have so much difficulty doing what paladin, bear, and warrior tanks do so easily most of the time: grab and hold aggro in a sensible manner?
I got into The Nexus on my belf paladin, and ended up with a tauren DK tank. At first I rejoiced — hey, I’ll actually be able to see this tank! (I’ve been grouped with so many bear tanks that I’ve grown accustomed to not being able to ever see the tank, due to the bear’s low profile. Bears, and gnomes.) On top of that, hey, this guy has a 6000+ gearscore! This should be easy! Not. The guy couldn’t hold aggro worth a damn - every single trash pull had mobs running all over the frakking place, attacking the other players willy-nilly. I spent most of the dungeon running around on my one-piece-of-T9 pally pulling loose mobs off the healer. (The healer, clearly a brand-spanking-new 80, did a remarkable job of keeping us all alive, all things considered.) It also quickly became apparent that, despite how geared he was, the tank had no idea where he was going, but that wasn’t a class issue.
Oh FFS …! When they do successfully get aggro, why oh why can’t they stand still? Almost every DK tank I get grouped with pulls a group of mobs … and then continues running around in circles and jumping backward and forward, making it absolutely impossible for melee DPSers and hunter pets to get behind the mobs. Even when I give up trying to get behind a mob and just try to hit whatever’s closest regardless of positioning, I can rarely land more than one blow before my target gets dragged out of melee range again. If it wasn’t bad enough on groups of trash, many of these DKs I’ve grouped with do the same thing on bosses, where there’s just the one guy to hit. It’s just maddening having Keristrasza or Cyanigosa spinning around and around or Loken chasing the tank all over his throne room. Don’t get me started on the way Army of the Dead makes the boss constantly flip around in random directions.
If there’s some rational reason in the DK mechanics for these “techniques”, I’ll be more patient, but … geez. And granted, tanks of other classes are occasionally guilty of these same “sins”, but not as consistently as the DKs seem to be. I only ran one heroic on my human pally yesterday, and it sucked. It was Gundrak, which should have been a piece of cake. The pally tank was having no trouble with holding aggro, but for some bizarre reason he kept getting aggro, getting the mobs all facing one direction, and then inexplicably running forward through the mobs and turning them the opposite direction. Repeatedly. On the same group of mobs. The mobs would be positioned, I’d get behind them, and then suddenly the tank would be standing on top of me and all the mobs are now facing me. So I’d run through to get behind them again … and then there’s the tank standing on top of me again. I eventually decided the tank was just a showoff who wanted to kill everything all by himself, so I started letting him. “You go ahead and wave your epeen around. I’ll just stand over here and collect my loot.”
It wasn’t all bad, though. While doing DTK* on my belf pally, we wall-hugged and bypassed a whole bunch of mobs on our way up to fight the Prophet Tharon (or whatever that big skeletal winged serpent is named). The tank had gone up the stairs and around the corner, and then the hunter, bringing up the rear, somehow managed to pull every single one of those mobs we’d just snuck around (about a dozen of them). I proud to say I managed to keep them all occupied (and the healer did an outstanding job of keeping me alive) until the tank realized something was amiss and ran back to help out. Then we kicked that hunter.
And speaking of vote-kicking, I’m really starting to think that something is interfering with my ability to initiate a vote-kick. I don’t initiate them often, but when I do … nothing happens. I’m left thinking for a minute that everybody voted “no”, but then shortly after my apparently-failed vote, the box pops up asking me to vote on kicking the same player. So clearly, others are thinking the same thing I was when I initiated my vote-kick, but for some reason mine isn’t going through. Unless I’m misunderstanding how the thing works.
I dunno, man. I have the least experience with DKs of all the classes. But it may simply be a quality of the people you’re unfortunately repeatedly encountering; I’ve run into enough solid DK tanks that I no longer curse when I see one.
Speaking as a DK tank who doesn’t suck, here are my comments:
It is much easier for paladins and bears to get and hold initial aggro on large pulls than it is for DKs. (I think it’s true of warriors too). The current best DK tank spec is Blood, which is great on single targets and OK on groups–IF the DPS will just hold the hell off for a few seconds and let them gather up the group! Not a slight on you at all–it’s just that DPS in random dungeons seems to be trained to open up on the mobs the second the tank pulls. DK tanks have a lot of tools to deal with groups, but they have to have time to use them. If you open up as soon as the D&D goes down, you’re going to pull.
The reason they dance around (and this is true of any tank) is that they’re trying to get as many of the mobs as possible in front of them. There’s a bug in the game that makes mobs annoyingly try to get behind the tank, which is a bad thing. So tanks constantly shuffle around to keep everything in front.
I’m not defending your tanks–it’s entirely possible that they were bad (there are a lot of bad DK tanks out there). But it’s the DPS’s responsibility to do things like hold off on AoE, hit the tank’s target, etc., too. Lazy DPS is as bad a problem as bad tanks.
Another element here is that it’s harder for a DK tank to keep DnD up than it is for a pally to keep Consecrate up, since you have to time both (1) Death and Decay’s timeout and (2) the regeneration of one rune of each color.
(Also, Frost tanks are way better at holding group aggro, though I understand they’re not in vogue compared to Blood tanks. My own tank is kind of half-abandoned, mainly because I rarely feel like expending that much mental effort when I play after work.)
Yes, quite true. Even talented, D&D’s cooldown isn’t as short as Consecrate’s.
Yep, exactly. Frost is probably a better tank spec for heroics (due to its increased AoE utility), while Blood is the preferred spec for raiding DKs. Since my tank is a raider and I really don’t want to have two different tank specs, then I muddle through with Blood. Although I rarely do heroics on him anymore. Too much stress.
Cheers on both the Blizzcon tickets and the Sindragosa kill! Both are awesome in their own way. And yeah, the RP after the vanity item quest turn-ins is pretty awesome.
Cheers on the title and finally killing the Lich King! I know it was just guild issues holding you back for so long, so glad you got that sorted out. How close are you on PP? Soon you’ll be tanking Heroic LK, and having your face smashed in (which is a lot more fun than it sounds). Good luck!
Hooray for Hammer of Justice! Soon as I see the priest starting to cast his heals, smack Oh no you don’t!
:smack: I see the light 
On my pally, I usually follow right behind the tank. But on the first few pulls I hold off on doing any damage until I see and get a feel for:
a) how quickly is this particular tank (of any class) able to grab and hold aggro?
b) is this tank going to be turning all the mobs around, or will I need to run through the mobs to get behind them? (Hopefully, they’ll be consistent from one pull to the next.)
Once I get that feel, I’ll time my own DPS accordingly for the remainder of the dungeon. Also, Consecrate is the third ability I use - I run in, drop a Judgment, then Crusader Strike, and then Consecrate. That way, if I do accidentally pull aggro, it’s just one mob, not all of them. When I’m on my mage, it’s not such an issue - for AoE on groups, the time spent waiting for the tank to gather the mobs in one place (so that I can see where on the ground to target) and then the cast time on Flamestrike usually allows ample time for the tank to establish threat. For single-targeting bosses, I usually open with Pyroblast, which has something like a 5-second cast time, which is usually plenty of time. With either class, I’ve very rarely pulled aggro off a tank onto myself. The aggro thing is also my primary reason for using GearScore - I like to quickly check the tank’s GS at the beginning of the run. If I severely outgear the tank, I know to allow him more time, if he way outgears me, I know I can start my DPS a bit sooner. Generally speaking, of course.
I’ve heard this several times, but I don’t see the other tanking classes having this problem nearly as much. Warriors and paladins, in particular, generally seem to plant themselves, and I don’t see this thing with mobs trying to get behind them. These DKs I’m encountering literally never stop moving around in the first place. I could understand if they stopped, and then moved when mobs get behind them, but they just don’t stop. Unless the problem is that various latency issues are making me see vastly different positioning than what the tank is seeing. But then why would it just be the DKs (most of the time)? I wonder if some DKs are depending entirely on Death and Decay to hold threat? Because when they’re running in circles and jumping around, they’re certainly not hitting anything.
But to be fair, I have run with some very good DK tanks. It’s just that the bad tanks I’ve run with have disproportionately been DKs.
Yeah that was my pally and it didn’t get any better once you dropped, even with a new healer the tank couldn’t stay alive and we wiped again. We did spend a decent amount of time trying to get Invar down, I was able to DI Kene twice and tried everything I could to keep the tank up.
My paladin is now 70 with a full set of cobalt gear, enchanted and ready to hit the dungeons. Woo.
Congrats! Good luck in 25man!
A bit of a bummer for our 2nd day of ICC10, the offtank didn’t show up and the replacement tank bailed right after we finished Blood Prince trash. So we put in a couple of practice attempts and called it after the second wipe.
ICC25 had me switching from my tank to my Resto druid for Saurfang and, of course, two… TWO protector tokens drop along with Deathbringers Will. Not one single leather or caster drop from the next three bosses. I hate you too ICC!
Grats to everyone!
Little Arhiatlel finally hit 80 as well, and has been busily collecting gear – she’s working on badges for the T9 gloves as she already has the pants. She also picked up a cookie cutter disc spec although I have yet to figure out how to set up her disc spells. Part of it is that I use Shift modifiers for my offensive spells when questing, so those are locked up. (Three bars currently, one for PW:S, Desperate Prayer, Inner Fire, and party buffs; one for offensive spells; one for healy goodness)
In Disc, I guess that my main macro would be PoM/PoH/Penance instead of PoM/CoH/PoH, but how often am I going to end up mashing Penance? I may have to change the modifiers if it’s “more often” because CoH is currently on Alt-5, which can be a tad awkward but I currently use CoH to top up people only. I’m also a little unsure where to put Pain Suppression – does that go next to the OhShit spots?
I’ve also seen suggestions for priestly OhShit macros that consist of Hymn of Hope then Shadowfiend, but given that Hymn requires channeling, that doesn’t seem like it would work out so well unless the other healer is OK with solo healing the duration of the channel.
As it is though, holy!Arh is now capable of healing reg HOR with a good group, but I was very sad to find out that I can’t shackle AND heal. My CC, I wants it.
Well that’s encouraging; combined with my other successful Ingvar fights it makes me think it was more of a problem with the tank than with me. I was already in a sucky mood because of missing my ICC25 run the night before, so those wipes didn’t help.
Yes, Pain Suppression is an OhShit button. Put it where you’re used to mashing the “save the tank’s life now!” buttons (i.e. Guardian Spirit).
Use Penance on Cooldown if nothing else to maintain Grace stacks on your primary healing target. CoH is also a very powerful spell, and I would suggest moving that bind to a more convenient one.
Your main spells are going to be Penance, PW:Shield, Flash Heal and Prayer of Healing (I would use this sparingly as it uses a lot of mana and is a very slow cast unless you have a decent chunk of haste). So, put those in your most convenient hotkeys.
Hymn of Hope requires channeling only to do the mana restore part. Why you use it in conjunction with Shadowfiend is because it increases your total mana pool, and Shadowfiend returns a percentage of that mana pool as it hits. So, you don’t need to channel Hymn in order to get the benefit of using Hymn and Shadowfiend together. However, if you do find an opportune moment, make sure you have Borrowed Time up (put a shield on someone), then channel Hymn of Hope. BT will lower the channel time significantly.
Ah, I meant to ask this during my own Disc question: I currently have Greater Heal nowhere to be found in my HealBot setup (nor anywhere in my hotkeys, which mostly are being used for cooldowns, ohshits, and some dps spells). Is this basically okay, or is there some use for the spell I’m missing?
I don’t use Greater heal a whole lot, unless I’ve fallen behind on my flash heals and need something more. A lot of times if the tank is really low I’ll throw him a Guardian Spirit and then a GHeal or two; or I’ll use it to heal everyone up at the end of a fight or after a rez. It’s fun when it crits for 21k, though.
Yeah, but you’re Holy (and thus don’t have Penance). I’m talking specifically in the case of Disc, and double-specifically for a Disc priest who has Flash Heal multiply talented and glyphed.
That may be what I’m enjoying most about my Holy Light-specced Holy Pally. Holy Light hasn’t cleared 20k on a crit yet, but it’s gotten over 18k and I’m still accruing gear.
Hm, thanks for the input! I’m definitely going to have to review my binds and come up with a better placement.
Do you still use Renew? As Holy, I currently have it talented/glyphed since I use it so much to smooth out spikes and top up a lone DPS or two (if it’s over 2 I hit CoH).
You don’t list PoM, though. Do you not use that every time it’s off CD?