Time to go shopping. Advice?

After tonight I will have a touch over 100 badges. I’ve had my eye on the Chestplate of Stoicism to replace my Vindicator’s Hauberk, but I thought I’d make a quick post before I decide to see if anyone else has some ideas. Check me out on the Armory.

Off-tanking weapon choice?

So as I sit here in the Blasted Lands training-up two-handed axes and swords, just for the hell of it, I am wondering about the optimal weapon choice for a protection warrior for off-tanking. I’m talking about situations where there’s another tank that has aggro so I am just there to do damage. Is is better to dual-wield or go with a two-handed weapon as a protection warrior? Clearly the choice would depend in part on the weapons, but what other issues should one consider? Devastate spamming is only possible with one/main-handed weapons, and it enhances the DPS of other melee classes, but is there any argument to using a two-hander with heroic strikes and slams? I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion of the DPS of dual-wielding versus two-handers for fury and arms warriors, but nothing really for the soloing or off-tanking protection warrior.

Move dammit!

I’ve been spending a bit of time lately reflecting on warrior tanks. Of course there is considerable discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of tank, generally and in given situations. But lately I have been thinking specifically about the different styles of tanking. I think that for any tank to be a good tank, regardless of their class, they must master their own particular abilities and thus their style of tanking. The rest is just statistical.

Lately I have been trying to master my movement-related abilities: charge, intervene, and intercept. Let me summarize them here for a review.

Charge. Charge an enemy, generate 15 rage (at max rank), and stun it for 1 sec. Cannot be used in combat. Requires Battle Stance. I find this to be a good opener if it’s safe to do without getting adds, and some of that rage can be carried over into defensive stance. I also like to use this when off-tanking.

Intervene. Run at high speed towards a party member, intercepting the next melee or ranged attack made against them in the next 10 seconds. Requires Defensive Stance. Clearly this can be used to save the butt of someone that has gotten aggro on a mob that is out of melee range, but I find it useful for just making quick movements from one point to another, provided the point I want to get to is occupied by a party/raid, member.

Intercept. Charge an enemy, causing 105 damage (at max rank) and stunning it for 3 sec. Requires Berserker Stance. This can be used as an alternative to Charge if I want a longer stun (at the cost of more rage). But unlike charge it can be used while in combat so it’s useful when tanking multiple mobs that are spread out or when chasing after a mob that has gotten out of melee range. I find this useful for getting aggro back on a mob that has escaped me or simply moving on to the next target in the kill order, provided I have surplus rage.

These abilities set warriors apart from druids, who have only feral charge which is similar to intercept, and paladins who have no movement-related abilities. Each moves the warrior from one point to another, quickly, but also has one or more side-effects such as damage/threat, rage generation, stun, or the protection of party/raid member. On paper these abilities look great but in practice I find them a bit more tricky to use. The reason is that the correct execution of any of these abilities requires the right stance, range, and rage (for Intervene and Intercept). Unfortunately for the wildlife and ogres of Nagrand I have been spending a bit of time practicing my use of Charge and Intercept to exercise my keybindings and judgment of rage and range. I’ve found the following macro quite useful.

#showtooltip Charge
/cast [stance:1,nocombat] Charge; [stance:3] Intercept
/stopcasting
/cast [stance:1/3] Defensive Stance; [nocombat] Battle Stance; Berserker Stance

This is a combination of two macros. Depending on whether or not you are in combat it will switch you to the appropriate stance on the first click, then on the second click cast either Charge or Intercept and then (usually) switch you back to Defensive Stance. I’ve bound this to the E key, and I have Intervene bound to the Q key (thus near my movement keys and not far from my ability keys). But I’ve also put all three abilities up on a custom action bar so that I can see whether I have the appropriate range and rage to use it and to monitor their cooldowns.

(To be honest I still don’t like the feel of stance-dancing. It feels to me like too much of a kludge. I wish we had something more elegant like shadow priests who simply shift out of shadowform if they try to cast a spell from the holy school. But then I suppose we’d have to make a macro to switch back into Defensive Stance.)

Karazhan update.

Some miscellaneous points updates and observations:

• It’s official. We have Shade of Aran on farm. Somehow we just got this fight. We didn’t try anything different. We just somehow got it. This was perhaps the greatest achievement of the last week. Prince is just business. He has some tokens we’d like to have. But Shade…that was personal.
• We finally downed Prince Malchezaar. As Keredria observed I’m a bit sad about it actually.
• We tried Nightbane a few times after downing Prince since we still had some time left on our flasks. Ouch.
• I finally picked up Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch. Nice. This boosts my dodge to over 25%.
• I need to work more on an aggro/dps gear set. As my gear has improved my increased avoidance/mitigation has led to more rage starvation, particularly on trash. Also I do a bit of off-tanking. Things like Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch may have to stay in the pack except for bosses.
• I need to work more on threat generation. Our DPS is generating quite a bit more threat compared to when we first entered Karazhan. Actually Prince taught me quite a bit about improving my rotation. Of course he makes me pretty mad which helps.

Let’s do lots of dailies.

My priest Muriel is nearly 70. She’ll be a healer. I’ve already started looking at what I may need to do to make her viable for Karazhan and heroics as a backup healer. Ugh. Apologies to the Pet Shop Boys.

Reputation (Let’s Do Lots of Dailies)

I’ve had enough of pugging and noobs wiping on the trash
My mount is parked outside, I’m afraid it isn’t fast
I’m looking for a partner, someone who makes more threat
Ask yourself this question, do you want to get rep?

I’ve got the heals, you’ve got the stam
Let’s do lots of dailies
You’ve got the health, I’ve got the heals
Let’s do lots of dailies

You can tell I’m well-geared, I’m done with spamming trade
My specialty is mooncloth, I could be doing raids
I can customize my addons — healbot, grid, and clique
If you’ve got the inclination, I’m your healy chick

Oh, there’s a lot of reputation
If you know where to grind it, you know?
There’s a lot of reptuation
We’ll have to pug I’ll admit
I hate this shit

I’ve got the heals, you’ve got the stam
Let’s do lots of dailies
You’ve got the health, I’ve got the heals
Let’s do lots of dailies
Let’s do lots of — dailies
Dailies

You can see I’m holy-specced, I know what I can do
How’d you feel about it, come tank a run or two
I’m looking for a partner, regardless of your class
Think about it srsly, solo’s a pain in the ass

Let’s — got the heals
Make — got the stam
Let’s do lots of dailies
Let’s — you’ve got the health
Make — I’ve got the heals
Let’s do lots of dailies

I’ve got the heals, you’ve got the stam
Let’s do lots of dailies
You’ve got the health, I’ve got the heals
Dailies

My alternative lifestyle.

Yeah don’t get excited. This is about alts.

I currently have two toons that are raid-viable for Karazhan: Jessika the protection warrior and Aksana the frost mage. Muriel is my priest, currently shadow at level 67 to level but will respec to holy/healing at 70. Jessika is still very much my main but my Aksana has seen quite a bit of action in Karazhan and heroics. I suspect Muriel will too when she hits 70 since we are often short healers. There are advantages and disadvantages to having more than one toon that are at about the same gear level, particularly when those toons can fulfill different rolls in a party/raid. The flexibility is an advantage. I can fill more than one kind of slot in a party/raid (i.e., tank, dps, or healer) depending on what is needed. This is an advantage for me as a person, since I can better help a party/raid and attend more runs than someone with only one viable toon. But this is a disadvantage for my toons because the badges I have earned are spread out between different toons. While Jessika and Aksana together currently have maybe 150 badges, neither of them alone has enough to purchase a decent upgrade. I think maybe my toons are mad at me.

My GUI center.

I’ve been steadily working on my GUI to enhance my tanking. In particular I’ve been trying to put as much information as possible near the center of the screen while still keeping it fairly uncluttered. I have now what I think is a fairly nice setup, at least for me. I use IceHUD which is similar to several other addons which displays bars that “bracket” your toon with information like your health and mana/rage/energy, the health and mana of the target, and also the identity of the target. IceHUD includes some other nice features such as castbars for you and the target, and buffs and debuffs. I also use Quartz with castbars for me and my target and a bar for the global cooldown. Recently I started using Trinity Bars 2.0. I placed five very small buttons just below the center of my screen for heroic strike, devastate, shield slam, shield block, and revenge. I did this so that I can easily monitor the availability and cooldowns of my key tanking abilities. Of course there is some redundancy in the information provided by these addons and others that I use like X-Perl Unit Frames and several cooldown timers, but information redundancy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Of course once I did that I couldn’t resist the temptation to start customizing my entire screen.

Edit: I’m having trouble getting WordPress to do a thumbnail, but here’s a link to a screen shot. This is “solo mode.” For raiding I have a few more buttons for special macros and consumables.

It isn’t Prince Malchezaar alone that bothers me, it’s those damned legions he commands!

It had to happen to us eventually: the infamous 1% wipe. It was our third time working on Prince Malchezaar and my first time tanking him. A couple times we lost a few folks to the shadow nova, but usually it was unlucky infernal placement that got us. On the 1% wipe we had an infernal drop between me and the rest of the raid. I had a very nice spot to tank him between three infernals in a triangle around me, but unfortunately I was out of range of the healers. I regret that I hadn’t attempted to run through an infernal’s blast radius to get closer to the raid. I believe we have the gear for this fight. I think it may be a matter of learning how to move collectively to avoid the infernals while keeping the correct distance between the main tank and the healers.

Shade of Aran down, again, barely.

Shade of Aran: “Who are you? What do you want? Stay away from me!”

Dear Shade of Aran,

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice several evenings in Karazhan for whatever it is that you drop. But we think you are crazy to make us tell you who we are. You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a caster, and a hunter, and a rogue, a healer, and a tank. Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours,

The Left Claw

(80’s pop culture reference FTW!)

Holy hand grenade of Antioch.

So since I finished my SSO dailies I have had some time to play around with my human priest alt Muriel between heroics and raids. She was a holy healer for about 10 levels, grinding experience from PUGs in SM, ZF, and BRD. I enjoyed that quite a bit but I specced her back to shadow after PUGs got scarce. I have played her off and on since then, but then one day I dinged 58 so I figured I might as well take her all the way to 70. I do enjoy the unique DPS style of shadow, but since I already have a level 70 DPS toon (my Draenei frost mage, Aksana), and because we already have a good shadow priest in the guild, that I would maybe try a bit of healing. She’s already producing primal mooncloth for the set so I am committed. Currently she is working her way through Terokkar Forest at level 64. Of course many priests, including those who intend to heal at 70, level as shadow, but at level 60 I respecced to holy thinking that I might grind-out some experience in instances again. However I rarely play her when I have large segments of free time so she’s been questing most of the time. Interestingly I’ve found that if one spends extra talent points in the holy tree that enhance holy DPS that a holy priest is not unlike a slightly gimped arcane mage — good burst damage but poor mana efficiency. My typical pull is power word: shield, holy fire, and spam smite till the mob is dead, sometimes finishing it off with a power word: death (I know it’s more mana efficient to wand the mob to death but I love power word: death). I throw-in a power word: pain if I need a bit more damage. So I am running around Outland as a kind of “holy mage” with really good healing, and I really enjoy it!

The holy priest class/spec still feels very fresh and interesting to me, and there is still quite a bit to learn about her. This is something I very much enjoy about WoW. There is quite a bit to learn about content, but there is also much to learn about your toon.

The prince said, “Who is she Molly? What kind of woman is it who believes — who knows, for I saw her face — that she can cure wounds with a touch, and who weeps without tears?” Molly went on about her work, still humming to herself. “Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with her hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough.”