From the random observation of Artie, here’s a post that I wish I had seen before attempting my first heroic (which was UP, so probably not a smart move on my end).
In my opinion, deep Frost with 15|51|5 is the way to go, especially starting out. I’m a big fan of Unbreakable Armor and Guile of Gorefiend’s boost to Icebound Fortitude. Can you tank in other specs? Sure! But that’s another post….
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Last night’s random: Trial of the Champion… ugh! The Horde grand champions used to school me in the art of fail… But wait! This is new-and-improved with the LFG tool!
Cheers to my random shammy healer! A good healer makes any tank, an average one like me especially, shine. Rest of the group — just slightly under geared or under skilled for the content. If Skada is to be trusted (and I remembered to reset it after jousting!), then I was top DPS with just shy of 2K for the run. Unholy DK, Arms Warrior and Marks Hunter (with a fuggin’ monkey pet!) were all around 1.7 to 1.9. So…. the fights just took a bit longer.
Tactics? We doan need no stinkin’ tactics!
Maintenance Tuesday… since I can’t login I figured I’d share some favorite macros.
In the heat of the moment, I’m guilty of not always seeing abilities that proc. What this macro does is fires Rune Strike on each cast of Obliterate. If Rune Strike’s not active, the error messages are suppressed. This is good; Rune Strikes add threat… threat is good… My example is for my Obliterate ability, but I have the same macro (substituting Blood Strike, Frost Strike, etc). Your mileage may vary with runic power, so adjust to your own playstyle.
#showtooltip Obliterate
/cast Obliterate
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast !Rune Strike
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
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Long weekend… between business travel and family engagements, was away from the computer and didn’t get much WoW time in… Pop on quick last night for a quick random daily and pull Pit of Saron.
PoS is one of my favorites, so things are looking good. Then, I’m panning around my camera looking for the other members of the group, and they’re all up ahead… Not so good… last tank musta either bailed or been kicked. Things that make you go, “Hmmmmm.”
Apparently, there were a few wipes on the first boss, Forgemaster Garfrost. Well, my tactics for this boss are pretty basic. On the first pull, ensure I’ve got boss’s attention AND all the silly undeads wandering around beside him (sometimes, that gets a bit tricky with pathing because the adds will walk around my patch of Death and Decay and bounce over to a group mate — not good!). Beat on Garfrost a bit till he bounces away to get a better weapon, look for the rock that got thrown at a group member, and hide behind it for a moment to clear Permafrost stacks… While there, beat down remaining adds (if any).
Ding, round 2!
I’m addicted to this UI pack. I just love the look and feel, as well as the flow and organization. This is a full UI replacement pack, so it does have some more configuration than the typical download and drop in the Interface/AddOns directory. Coehl provides a full configuration, including the scripts within kgPanels (which allow clicking on the box in the lower right to toggle the meters, action bars and informational details). Installation instructions are available from the author.
Some times you smash faces, sometimes you get your face smashed.
Last nights daily, Old Kingdom, was simply pure fail. I made the mistake of testing out a dual-wield frost spec (while dual wielding, Artie looks like he’s in a ‘roid rage with all the animation and I just find that cool). However, he was getting hit like a brick truck. 38K health dropped instantly on trash pulls. WTF?? I’m down, group wipes on trash… Shammy heals was frustrated, I was frustrated, the DPS were grumbling….
Was I the only fail and deserving all of the blame? Nope! Arms warrior pulling 1.2K DPS. Destro warlock pulling 1.1K dps. Frost mage pulling… ready? … 800 DPS. I was topping DPS meters as tank with 1.8 DPS. How friggin sad is that?
I log in last night, check my mail, run some dailies, validate my pre-fight checklist, and queue up for a random. Ah, crap! Halls of Reflection… my personal Brick Wall.
I’ve got a priest healer, and pally, hunter and rogue pulling DPS. I’m not ready to toss in the towel, so I inform my group…
Nobody types anything for a few moments. Finally, I see “CC?!? WTF is CC?“
/facepalm
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The current mindset in 5m instances seems to be: tank pulls a pack of stuff and DPS AoEs like crazy till all are dead. The advantage to this is lots of stuff dies fast. The disadvantage is that it’s easy to lose threat if you as the tank are not putting out enough AoE threat to offset the DPS.
The Threat Plates theme for Tidy Plates helps me manage this visually. What it does is beautifully basic: when you are in “tanking mode”, any mob that you don’t have high threat on has it’s nameplate enlarged (I’m slacking off on the Enslaved Proto-Drake). Any mob where you do have high threat is displayed in ‘normal’ view. The AddOn allows for customizations to suit your own personal tastes.
Threat Plates is a theme for the Tidy Plates addon, so you’ll need to download Tidy Plates and Threat Plates to use. The one disadvantage that I’ve run into with Threat Plates is that the settings are global (and therefore not specific to my Death Knight). The way I’ve gotten around this is to deactivate Tidy Plates & Threat Plates within the Blizzard AddOns window at the login screen for all characters, and then activate for only Artie.
With Patch 3.2, Blizzard implemented the fix to the nameplates where you can choose if overlapping nameplates are allowed… When I tank, I prefer to have the nameplates not overlap; it helps select the one that’s getting bigger with a quick mouse click for a Dark Command or Howling Blast (depending on cooldowns) and quickly refocus that straying attention on me.
Bottom line for me: I want to know what has the possibility of slipping away from me and I want that information readily available and easy to see. Kudos to Syronius, the author of Threat Plates!
Artie earned his Perky Pug the other day, which made me reflect on the various instance runs that I’ve taken and some of the problems, challenges and successes.
This, my virgin post on Blade Barrier, shares these with the 2 or 3 people that will find this from Google. Welcome!
These are the out-and-out “bad things”. A problem in a PuG is either preventing the group from reaching the goal (Emblems!) or at the very least severly hampering that goal. The examples I’ve experienced boil down to players either simply not knowing how to play their class (or at least how their class abilities impact other players) or perhaps not caring.
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