After you’ve created a separate tab, you can take it a step farther, as I did.
I narrowed down the chat window, unlocked the new tab, and dragged it out to set next to the main one. Now I have the important chat on the right (guild, party, whisper) and everything else on the left.
Okay, I’m getting really pissed off with these Zul’Drak quest chains that require me to pilot a “vehicle” or else control some other creature to complete. WTF is the deal with suddenly denying me the use of the class abilities I’ve been practicing with for 79 levels and instead forcing me to learn an entirely new game?
I’m talking about quests like The Storm King’s Vengeance, which requires me to ride on this giant’s head and use his abilities (and then when he gets low on health he starts shouting about how he “… needs storm cloud badly!”, having neglected to mention anything about storm clouds while giving the quest instructions. Or the quest where you have to, while still disguised as a ghoul, take control of abominations and direct them to fight. And the Betrayal where, once again, you have to control some other monster to do your fighting for you.
@#$%^!
No more groups, no more helping someone else, no more guilds, no more nothing.
Tonight we did a group on DM and they kept wanting me to be a “tank”, and I told them I wasn’t a very good tank, but they insisted.
So I led them all the way down the DM to that round platform, and every step of the way I told them I wasn’t sure of what I was doing, but they just kept saying “Go, man!”
So I did and finally got myself killed and then the words flew.
I made the mistake of trying to explain about the AD, but that just made it worse. They all thought I was using that as an excuse and started in on me.
Then they threw me out of the group.
Solo from now on, I swear to OG.
I don’t need this shit. I really don’t.
What really annoyed me about that one was that I couldn’t pull the camera back far enough to see what the heck I was doing. The giant blocked my view a lot, and I felt like I was working blind.
This kind of experience is why I group with my friends from time-to-time (and help guildies with quests when I can), but I just plain flat-out don’t do PUGs (pick-up groups) for instances.
Quasi, don’t let a group of assholes take away from your enjoyment of the game. PUGs suck, period…you rarely end up in a good one, no matter what dungeon you’re doing. If you need help figuring out what the basic roles in a group do (tank, DPS, healer) let us know. I’m pretty sure we can post a primer for you.
JayJay, thanks, but maybe we could do it this way: Let me tell you what I think my role as a tank is supposed to be, and you correct me?
I’m supposed to go in FIRST. At every bend in the path and at every instance where combat would occur.
Then I’m supposed to “draw the enemy onto ME” (and here is where I am not sure what “power” I am supposed to use) so here’s what I’ve been doing:
I click on “Defensive Stance”, and that makes my toon throw out his arms in a “come and get me” sorta gesture.
BUT… when I click on “Defensive Stance”, suddenly all my weaponry goes dark, and then I’m in trouble along with the rest of the group.
So I stopped doing that, and started using the “Charge” option, followed by the Battle. Demoralizing or Intimidating shouts.
And then I wade in with the rest and fight till we call kill that set of bad guys.
That’s pretty much what I do, but I always EXPLAIN that even though I’m level 22, I am very much a noob, and am mentally “challenged”.
We were having a lot of fun until I “died” there at that round platform.
Bottom Line?
I thought I was supposed to be the first into a conflict, tease the shit out of the enemy with the shouts and mocking blows, and then join in the free-for-all.
Maybe I need a higher level (or maybe a higher level brain! S)?
Thanks JayJay
Bill
Keep in mind that Defensive Stance is a mode. A stance that brings up new options. So when you hit def stance you’re given a new bar to fill for your defensive abilities. Go into your spell book, and drag your basic attacking spells/abilities to you bar whilst in defensive stance. Then hit your regular battle stance and your normal bar will pop back up. Read all your spells/abilities and see which ones mention “additional threat” or “high threat”. Use those as much as you can when you tank.
Tanking isn’t my specialty (I do mostly DPS and some healing), but I can tell you what the tank’s role is in the party: keep the attention of the bad guys.
Every time someone hits a mob or casts a heal in battle, it accumulates “threat” in the eyes of the bad guys. They’ll attack whoever has the most threat. You need to shout, stomp, slash, and do everything you can to keep their attention.
The healer’s job is to keep you alive. You shouldn’t have to worry about anything but fighting, and keeping the mobs off of everyone else. The DPS (damage per second) crowd (mages, rogues, kitty druids, warlocks…) need to pay attention to the threat they’re generating and never get more than you have.
If you die, it’s the healer’s fault.
If the healer dies, it’s your fault.
If the DPS guys die, it’s their own damned fault.
Not necessarily. In many cases, mobs in a dungeon are in groups, and if the entire group attacks you right away, that’s not good. Each dungeon run should include a group leader who has done the dungeon before, and he’ll tell the group how to “pull.” Often this means hanging back and letting someone with ranged weapons or spells grab an enemy and bring him to you instead of the other way around (this way you don’t pick up extra “adds” you can’t handle). If it’s a tough pull, your group will want to incapacitate one or more of the mobs at the start of the fight. This is called crowd control. A rogue could “sap” one of the mobs (stun him temporarily), a mage could turn one into a sheep, a priest could shackle an undead mob, and so forth.
Taking this one step at a time…
Not necessarily, although at your level 99% yes. Sometimes it’s better to have a hunter misdirect (MD) the mob onto you. You always should call them to you, rather than plow into them, which takes us to…
Your ranged weapon: throwable, a gun, bow or crossbow. For low level toons, a throwable is better as you don’t need ammo. For higher level, the ammo-eating weapons normally have better stats than thrown ones.
Charge is another option, but only in instances that have been designed for it (many of the ones in Northrend, but definitely not DM - DM is for throw; heck, any instance before Northrend is for throw).
Each of your stances gets a different action bar; you need to spend some time in a quiet place putting icons in each of those three bars (at your level you don’t have Berserker Stance yet). Keep in mind that not all skills can be used in all stances. I like putting stuff that I can use in all stances but won’t be needing much in battle (like my food) in the other bars, the ones that won’t change when I change stance.
Put taunt in an easy-to-reach spot, it’s for when someone out-threats you.
You’re using the shouts just fine.
Some of your best tools for “keeping agro,” at your level:
In DM, anybody is a newbie; not always a noob. At DM levels, even if you’re on your tenth toon you’re still learning the class.
QFT, and I say this as a hunter, frost mage, Prot/arms warrior, shadow/holy priest and a whole other roster of smaller folks. If I’m DPSing and I die, it’s because I wasn’t doing what I ought’a do.
Strange, before, people complained that all quests were one of ‘Kill X number of Y’, ‘Collect item A, that drops from mob Z’ or ‘Pick up X number of item B from the ground’. When they add some variation someone comes along and complain about that. Blizzard can never win no matter what they do, can they?
And for the record, Storm clouds are mentioned in the tool tip for Gymer’s Gymer’s Grab ability.
I see your point, but you may be missing Mister Rik’s point.
There have been a lot of new quest mechanics introduced in the last two expansions. As with anything else, people will love some and hate some. Personally, I enjoyed the bombing quests, lore quest chains (the epic battle in Dragonblight that takes you back to the capital cities rocked!), helping the seals mate, catching the dragon in Coldarra, rescuing villagers in Dragonblight, and a lot of the others.
But there are some I’ve really disliked. I feel like many of the “vehicle” quests are very hard to control, you can’t pull the camera out, your view of what you’re doing is often blocked, and–as Rik said–it’s frustrating being in battle and not being able to frost nova, blink, polymorph, and so forth.
Warrior tanking is all about the Defensive stance. Most of the best tanking abilities are only usable in defensive stance. Which leads to the general warrior stance primer:
There are three stances. Each has its own primary action bar, allowing you to set up a specific array of abilities for each one. This is important because, while most warrior abilities can be used in multiple stances, the most powerful ones are all stance-specific.
You start with Battle, which is the neutral / two-hander stance. Its signature abilities, that you can only use in Battle Stance, are Charge and Overpower. It’s a straightforward smashy stance, good for killing enemies that are attacking you back.
Later on you learn Defensive stance, which is intended for tanking or tackling big nasties. It makes you harder to kill, greatly increases your threat generation (making it easier to keep enemies on you instead of your friends) and opens up a great deal of specialized defensive abilities, like Shield Block, Taunt, Revenge and Shield Wall. It’s meant to be used with a shield and one-handed weapon, naturally.
Even later on you learn Berserker stance, which is the all-out offense stance, aimed at dual-wielding. You get the potent area-attack of Whirlwind, as well as in-combat charging with Intercept, and your only non-shield spell interrupt, Pummel.
For tanking, you will want to be in Defensive stance the large majority of the time, or all of it, if you’re not good at swapping quickly while fighting. Thunderclap and Cleave are your main attacks for keeping groups of enemies on you, while Sunder Armor, Revenge and Shield Slam are great at working over specific baddies.
Since you’re both taking less damage, and dealing less damage, you’ll have a reduced amount of Rage to throw around attacks with, so you may want to impress on teammates to give you some time to work over the enemies before doing anything crazy. However, if an enemy DOES go running off at someone else, you can yell a Taunt at it, to get it back immediately.
As for staying alive, the general rule for tanking is to keep all enemies in front of you. You cannot parry, dodge, or block attacks from behind you. This is doubly important as a warrior since the Shield Block ability is one of your best ones for staying alive. Shield Wall is very strong also, but has a much longer recharge time. Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout are attacks you use on the enemy, to reduce the damage they deal, effectively also keeping you alive longer. If you have attention to spare, you can also use Shield Bash to stop enemy spellcasters that are winding up blasts at you - these tend to be the most dangerous attacks, since they pierce through both armor and shield. Much later on (level 64) you will get Spell Reflection, which will allow you to use your shield to bounce spells back at their caster, which solves that problem rather handily 
Well, I guess that they’ll be able to cuddle their big, big bags of money for consolation.
I loved most of the vehicle quests, and particularly loved all the ones Rik picked out, particularly the Abomination one - slap one mob, run to one across the room, farting all the time, then go BOOM, then repeat. So fun. The Betrayal quest stood out for me as one of the few legitimately challenging quest fights where I wasn’t trying to solo a 2 or 3 person quest. I guess it would be a bit easier for a pally who could just use the troll as a tank & be its pocket healer, but I at least had to use both the controlled troll’s abilities and also throw in some zaps of my own, while also keeping in constant motion to keep out of Drakuru’s poison slicks. Frustrating, but SO satisfying to actually win.
My main problem with the vehicle quests is that once you learn to use the controls, they’re all a bit too easy.
Quasi hang in there with the PUGs though the vast majority are terrible I have had a few excellent runs with random people I have met. Make sure if you do team up with someone you like then add them to your Friends list, they may be able to help you in the future and it’s fun saying hello if you see them, or they log on (you get a notification). I tried to do Stockades as a healer (I am playing a damage dealing paladin mostly) and caused the group to wipe a couple of times which led to a lot of abuse levelled my way. I merely pointed out this was my first time trying the healer role (which I had told them all at the start) and I am learning. Stay calm and you’ll find the vitriol funny more than anything, it’s a game after all.
Long term find yourself a Guild, I did this for the first time recently and now have too much help if you can believe it, no sooner do I mention a problem and someone is by my side sorting it out for me. Of course I doubt all guilds are as good as that.
I picked up Hammer of Wrath last night - how fun is that? Collecting Pirate Hats in Tanaris last night and I was willing them to run so I could fire off a Hammer when they were a distance away. Great effects too.
When reorganising my action bars to accommodate it I noticed a few spells I haven’t used once - for instance Hand of Protection or Divine Intervention. Now I can see these are more tank or healing abilities but as I level should I be trying to use them? Did any of you retadins use them regularly while grouping or in dungeons? I don’t have enough fingers to handle the spells I regularly use as it is!
It’s easily my favorite Paladin skill.
Over the weekend I was helping my girlfriend get the key to Scholomance, the instance in the Western Plaguelands. This involves killing a level 61 elite lich surrounded by undead. Naturally, being a Paladin, this is my forte. I cleared out some of the undead, but there were still a ton of guards around the lich. I jumped him anyway. During the fight, I hurt him so badly that he managed to root me with a freeze trap and try to run away. I made like Thor and dropped the Hammer on his ass, and he went down like a punk.
…Of course, then his guards swarmed me and I went down like a punk, but still. It was awesome.
Don’t ever, EVER, let someone force you into a group role that you don’t want to do. Just because you play a hybrid class doesn’t mean you need to take on all of the roles. If you want to come into a group as DPS, tell them that’s what you’re doing, and if they insist on you tanking, politely decline. From what you’ve said here, you made it very clear that you had no idea how to tank, they gave you no other option, and then took it out on you when things went south. This is all their problem, not yours. Welcome to the land of the PUG (pick-up group)–sometimes you’ll meet great people, but more often than not you’ll get stuck with at least one moron.
For the record, the classes that can tank are Warrior, Paladin, Druid, and (although you won’t encounter these until later levels, because they start at level 55) Death Knight. Just because someone is playing one of these classes doesn’t mean that they have the gear or the talent spec to tank, though.
/console cameraDistanceMax 50
This command is your best friend. It will increase the distance you can scroll your camera out to the absolute maximum (which may not be the soft max you currently have). Note that it does not actually move your camera there, just opens up the extra distance–you’ll still have to scroll your camera the rest of the way out once you’ve set the new maximum.
No one should get out ahead of you, yes. (I’ve let DPS die before to make this point when they weren’t listening to me telling them to let me pull.) But you *do *want to make sure you’re not doing what’s known as a “body pull”–i.e., getting so close to the mobs (enemy characters) that your proximity is what draws them in. Instead, you should use your ranged weapon (gun, bow, or thrown weapon) to pull them. If you can, bring them in one or two at a time–which IIRC should be doable at the instances at your level with their spacing.
You’re right with the general theory, but how to actually do that is what needs work.
Switching to Defensive Stance doesn’t actually do anything to your enemies actively–it changes you. When you are in Defensive, you take less damage, do less damage, and generate more threat.
Threat is something every character outputs, like damage. Damage (and healing) causes it, but there are also abilities that create extra threat on top of the damage, or reduce the threat being caused. How much threat you put out is what determines how dangerous a mob or a boss thinks you are–the player with the most threat is (more or less) who the boss will attack. This is known as “aggro”–when you “get aggro” or “pull aggro” it means that you are putting out enough threat that the mob has turned to attack you. Tanks have special abilities that allow them to output enough threat to pass the squishier DPS and healers so that the bosses and trash mobs focus on them, instead.
Take a look at the Threat page from WoWWiki–if you scroll down, you’ll see the chart of Warrior abilities. Now, you don’t have all of these yet–some people have been talking about abilities like Devastate and Shield Slam that you won’t see for a while. But there are still a bunch of good ones to use, especially Thunderclap and Sunder Armor.
You will almost always want to open with Thunderclap, because it reduces the damage incoming on you *and generates threat. TC is especially useful when you’re fighting more than one enemy at a time, since it will hit all of them. Your other attacks will mostly affect one target at a time. (Cleave is again useful for keeping multiple mobs on you, since it hits two.) Taunt will be your best friend if a DPS or a healer pulls a mob off of you–it will force the mob to attack you, buying you a little bit of time to build up more threat again.
Your action bar didn’t go dark–it was empty. Each of your stances (Battle, Defensive, and later you’ll get Berserker) comes with its own action bar. Switch to Defensive Stace and hit “P” to bring up your abilities. Mouseover each of these and look at the tooltip–they’ll tell you which stance you can use them in. If you can’t use an ability in your current stance, the stances will show up red. (E.g., “Requires Battle Stance” would show up red when you’re in Defensive stance or Berserker.) Drag everything you can use in Defensive down to your new Defensive toolbar and arrange it in a way that makes sense to you. If you have your other action bars enabled (the ones that go above your quickbar and along the right side of your screen), this can be a good place to put abilities that can be used in any stance, because these bars will NOT change when you switch stances.
*What Taunt actually does in game mechanics is set your threat equal to that of the person highest on that mob’s threat list and forces it to attack you. Normally, in order for a mob to switch targets, the new person must hit 110% of the leader’s threat if the new person is melee, or 130% of the leader’s threat if the new person is ranged. This means that if the person you just taunted off of keep generating threat and you don’t quickly generate more, they will pull off you again pretty quickly.
If you’re grinding CC rep and running out of quests. try to get AQ groups together. I know for sure the Temple (AQ40) gives a decent amount–I can’t remember if the mobs do it, but I do know that the rep drops off the bosses give both Brood of Nozdormu *and *CC rep.
General is specific to the capital you’re in–Trade is the only channel universal to all capital cities across the old world, Outland, and Northrend. It’s like this on every server, and trying to change it is futile. Unless Blizz makes a global chat channel and puts the GMs in to enforce the proper usage, it’ll never happen.
Trade *can *be used for its intended purpose–you just have to be persistent. Most items will be better sold on the AH; the channel is mainly useful for getting or selling combines, especially high-end ones.
There are some vehicle fights I’ve found annoying, and some I’ve found fun. I *do *find it frustrating that Blizzard has at some points made them mandatory for raid progression (Malygos, Flame Leviathan). Problems like the one you describe, however, can be avoided by making sure you take the time to thoroughly acquaint yourself with the vehicle’s abilities once you’ve mounted–there’s usually not a timed aspect that would prevent this. (Malygos is an exception, since the fight starts shortly after the drop, but the drakes you ride have identical abilities to ones you use for a daily outside the Nexus, so you can practice there, instead.) Make sure you mouseover each ability–practice it if feasible.
I don’t play a Paladin, but I looked these up really quick. Here’s my take as to their usefulness for you while soloing.
Hand of Protection would be good to keep handy (no pun intended) as an “ohshti” button against physical damage. It does **not **prevent magical damage. However, it can buy you some time to heal yourself up if you’re close to death against mobs that deal mostly physical damage.
Divine Intervention is mainly useful only in party situations. (I’m not sure what happens when you cast it with no target–maybe it just suicides you, in which case you’d save yourself the repair cost in exchange for the reagent used.) I wouldn’t worry about using it when you’re by yourself, but be sure to bring reagents for it when you’re running an instance or a raid, and put the ability on an action bar where you can quickly find it. A DI can make wipe recovery much, much faster if you manage to slap it on another rezzing class in time. (Be sure you don’t get too itchy-trigger-finger, though.)
Well, keep in mind that I (and many others) didn’t even start playing the game until after Wrath was out, so I at least certainly wasn’t among those complaining. If people were complaining about the repetitive nature of the quests, then it would make sense to me to come up with new quest types. Like, how about some puzzles that require clever reasoning or putting clues together? What they did instead is analogous to a restaurant (since that’s my line of work) responding to complaints about a never-changing menu by simply replacing all the silverware with chopsticks.
… which I’m trying to read while desperately trying to figure out how to attack because the instant I jumped onto Gymer’s head I was being attacked by 2,000 mobs that weren’t there a second ago.
Another thing about that quest: one of the mobs I have to kill is that Thrym guy, the colossal, hard-to-miss giant dude that I’ve seen walking up and down that path ever since I first arrived in Zul’Drak. Since I already knew where he was, he was naturally the first of the three “bosses” I went after. After three maddening, unsuccessful attempts to find him (losing HP steadily to the little mobs around my feet, which I can’t see) I gave up and resorted to wowhead.com, where I learned that as soon as you start the quest he completely disappears from that spot and doesn’t reappear until you kill one of the other bosses, a couple hundred yards away, and then he spawns practically right on top of you as soon as you’ve killed the other guy. That makes no sense at all.
Exactly. I’ve even got a wide-screen monitor, and Gymer’s head and shoulders still took up the whole damn thing.
I was so happy when I learned that spell! No more of those !@#$% run-for-help mobs! It gets even better when you get to higher levels - there’s a talent that reduces the mana cost of Hammer of Wrath to zero.
I’ve made it all the way to 79 as a ret pally without ever using either of those.