Sad tank.

Tanks get very attached to their healers. So I am a bit down right now because TLC lost its holy priest healer Suzzy. She had to leave because our raid times were not working for her in real life. I don’t want her to feel guilty about having to leave. It is understandable, but that does not mean I have to like it. /pout

So now I need to see if I can recruit another healer. Suzzy will be hard to replace because (a) she is very good and (b) she is a hoot to play with. I’ve thought about leveling up my priest for raid healing, but that would put Jess out of the raid, and I am not sure Keredria is going to let me do that.

Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!

So I have 33 Badges of Justice. Now the part I hate. I could spend them right now on a shield upgrade, or save them for something else. Ideas? Here’s my current gear. Right now we are working on Karazhan. We can clear up through Curator relatively easily.

Why a warrior/tank?

We’ve been taking a little break from raiding Karazhan, so I’ve had more time to be introspective (well, at least as introspective as my int will allow). Lately I’ve been thinking about why I decided to roll a warrior, and why I ultimately decided to become a protection warrior (i.e., tank). When I created Jessika I decided on a warrior for two simple reasons. One was that in my experience with other games warriors were relatively simple to play and a bit more durable than casters. I was a bit intimidated by the complexity of WoW so I figured that something (seemingly) simple would be best. At the time I wasn’t even sure I would continue to play once my free trial was over. The other reason was that warriors are not restricted by gear. I liked the idea that I could use anything (well, other than caster off-hands and wands) I happened to find.

Around the time I started questing in Darkshore I started making some friends and joined a guild (the same one I am still in today), so I was going to have to stay with Jessika since I wanted very much to keep up with my new friends. Also I had gotten a bit attached to her. So I leveled and allocated talent points without too much thought. I probably made it to 40 without really understanding what tanking was let alone how to do it. I did my first respec to fury in my 40s (after a rather bad attempt on ZF) and started dual-wielding. However I did start to learn how to tank and go “sword & board.” That was largely because of Keredria. She was the first pure healer I had met. Keredria made me want to become a better tank. After running SM and Uldaman with her I came to truly understand and appreciate the role of tank and healer in a 5-man.

I stayed fury until my mid 60’s in Outland. I had heard of course about how protection was THE way to go at endgame, and neither fury nor arms had much appeal to me. When I did instance it was always with Keredria as healer, and I figured that even though it would make leveling harder for me, if she could level specced healing the least I could do was spec protection. It was hard at first. The decrease in my DPS was noticeable. But Keredria and I did a lot of quests together those last few levels and quite a few for gear after reaching 70. It always amused us that although it took a long time for us to kill things, we could do it without much risk to ourselves, including elites and 3+ person group quests. It was actually quite a bit of fun. It would probably not be an understatement to say that Keredria can take quite a bit of the blame/credit for making and keeping me tanky.

So here I am at early endgame (Karazhan). I main tank. It is rewarding to have such a central role in a raid. The main tank is the center of attention, both from the mobs/bosses and the healers (although my healers like to remind me that they own me, not the other way around). I have a little diagram I like to use to explain why I get all tingly about tanking:

mobs -> me <- healers

I guess DPS fits in there somewhere. How could you not love that?

Absolutely bad-asses!

I love the sound of 10 people applying buffs at the very beginning of a raid. It always reminds me of these two minutes from Aliens.

Stay frosty.

Hey baby, spec me out.

Lately I have been giving some serious thought to a minor change in my spec. My current spec is a 12/5/44 which is a classic protection spec with a slight bias toward rage efficiency/generation. But I am now considering a 8/7/46 in favor of some damage reduction via improved demoralizing shout and a 5 sec extension of shield wall.  My thinking is that I am not having trouble with rage efficiency/generation anymore, so it might be worthwhile to get more melee damage reduction from demoralizing shout and a few more seconds out of shield wall. We are currently working through Karazhan. Does this sound reasonable or are there other point allocations that I should consider?

Curator is no longer operational.

So tonight was to be our second attempt on The Curator…one last attempt before the reset. It was a horrible start for a raid. I was very late, there were two partial wipes after the ghosts were accidentally aggroed near the back door, a couple people accidentally ported back to Stormwind thinking a portal was a mage table, and I think somebody fell off the bridge. But we finally made it to The Curator and were standing around the far end of the room discussing strategy when I backed up a bit too close to him and aggroed him prematurely. However we actually killed him! That was only our third attempt on The Curator. He dropped some healing mail which our paladin took for his healing set, and some Tier 4 gloves that were won by our hunter. I was so embarrassed because I had not researched the trash or the next bosses because I figured we’d be spending the night working on The Curator. We worked a bit on trash in the next room. It was a good thing we did because we got two epic BOP drops off the trash: the Boots of Evasion for our paladin (they dropped for me the previous night) and some gloves for our mage (they are for a frost mage and she is fire, but she took them anyway on the off chance she decides to change her spec). Eventually I know we are going to hit an encounter that is going to take us longer to work out. I really thought it was going to be The Curator. Of course maybe we just got lucky.

There’s no business like show business.

To reward everyone for downing the Maiden of Virtue the other night I took everyone to the opera. So we donned our best blues and epics and head out to Karazhan to catch a late show. We didn’t have tickets so we had to be a bit strong-handed with the ushers and some theater geeks after we snuck backstage (there were no empty seats left in the house). Unfortunately the show was a bit of a disappointment — very derivative. I can see why the New York Times panned it. Also the actress that played Dorothee couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper bag. However we got to keep some props for souveniers: some nice slippers for our mage and a helmet for our paladin.

So after that it was off to meet The Curator. Honestly I didn’t think we would get that far in one evening and hadn’t even extensively researched the trash, but we did make two good attempts, the second of which brought him down to about 29%. As is the experience with most folks I think we need to work a bit on our rotations and gear to get enough mana and DPS for the fight.

We had two other really good drops. The Boots of Elusion dropped for me off some of The Curator’s trash. Not bad at all. Our legendary drop was a shadow priest. She had been running with us for a couple of weeks now and decided that, against her better judgment, she wanted to join TLC.

Hopefully Keredria will have some screenshots up soon.

O hai! U R 4 farm k?

We returned to Karazhan last night for the first time after the last reset. This began our second week of raiding Karazhan. We’d made two runs the previous week resulting in successful attempts on Attumen and Moroes, but a failed attempt on Maiden. We downed Attumen with only a little difficulty this time. There was one clumsy wipe due to a botched aggro acquisition when he spawned. My fault I think — we were doing so much DPS that I didn’t call out for the DPS and healing to stop in time. Attuman dropped the Vambraces of Courage (again!) for our protection paladin Wutan, and the Gloves of Saintly Blessings for our holy priest Suzzy. Moroes was easy. We trap-kited the protection warrior and kept the holy paladin shackled while burning down the shadow priest and arms warrior, and then Moroes. One very lucky rogue got the Emerald Ripper. The other drop was the Belt of Gale Force. It’s more of a resto shaman piece probably but our paladin picked it up to use for off-healing until he finds something better. So we declared Attuman and Moroes as being officially on farm status and moved on to the Maiden of Virtue.

Maiden gave us a very hard time before, but we had a shadow priest in place of a melee DPS (rogue) from the last attempt so we decided to give her another try. There were a few wipes due to some bad luck and some positioning issues, but eventually we got it worked out and took her down on maybe the 5th try with no deaths. This is a tough fight for the healers. Keredria healed me and whomever else she could. Suzzy managed healing and did all the dispels. Wutan put on some healing gear and healed me through the repentance, using Blessing of Sacrifice too keep himself up. This is not a tough boss to tank. The only thing I did differently here was to keep my spell reflection up for when she tried to cast holy fire on me. It just gets a little tense during the 12 seconds of repentance. What was funny was that we did this with only nine people. One of our rogues (Daihiro) fell asleep. Maiden dropped the the Gloves of Quickening for our hunter Niobar (who has been very lucky with drops lately…the Truestrike Ring dropped off some trash earlier that night), and the Bands of Nefarious Deeds which was an upgrade for our shadow priest.

Maiden is still frustrating. My nerves were a little frazzled by the end of the evening. I’m afraid I even snapped at my healer. Before our last fight we were all in position Keredria said “go” and I yelled that only I get to say that. I was genuinely afraid that somebody would strike before I had a chance to get aggro, but I should have known that they all knew better.

Our crew this time was me (protection warrior), protection paladin off-tanking and off-healing, feral druid off-tanking/healing/dps, resto druid, holy priest, shadow priest, mage, and two rogues. All of us pledged to come back every week for the rest of our gaming lives and kill Maiden for giving us such a hard time.

A painful lesson in the importance of shield block.

Every (good) warrior tank knows how critical shield block is to tanking — particularly end-game bosses. Provided we keep it up it and are properly geared and specced it makes us immune to crushing blows. It is perhaps the defining ability of the warrior tank (paladins can also become immune to crushing blows but the gear requirements are very steep, and feral druids cannot become immune to crushing blows). Tanks are constantly spamming shield block throughout a fight to counter any crushing blows. It is something I do more or less automatically now so perhaps I take it for granted. But last night I got a very painful lesson in what happens when you don’t use shield block. We were making our first attempt on the Maiden of Virtue on Karazhan. I wanted to keep her centered in the room so I decided to use my charge stance-dance macro that shifts me to battle stance, casts charge, and then shifts me back to defensive stance. So I did this and died in less than 10 seconds. I thought that maybe I had caught a holy fire DoT that had not been dispelled in time, but when I looked back at my combat log I saw two crushing blows back-to-back that I had not managed to block. Ouch…that is embarrassing. How did I manage to not block two crushing blows? I quickly saw what happened. I had somehow not successfully switched back to defensive stance, and thus could not shield block despite the fact that I was by instinct hitting the key for it (shield block only works in defensive stance). Lesson learned.

Do not weep, Maiden, for war is kind.

As several people who knew the fight observed our group composition was probably not optimal for the Maiden of Virtue in Karazhan. We had four melee DPS (three rogues and a feral druid), only two full healers, and only two ranged DPS (hunter and mage). A protection paladin was standing outside the AoE to help dispel the holy fire DoT and back-up heal. We even tried having someone else tank while I brought in my frost mage to increase the ranged DPS. But as Keredria observed it may not be our time to do this boss, but we will be back.

“Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.“

But that being said I think everyone did well.

Since Karazhan is now reset we’ll likely return to farm Attumen and Moroes for some drops and maybe try a different encounter.