Argh! I can’t do it. I’m a tank.

I’ve wanted to try being a DPS warrior. I’m a tank and will always be a tank, but DPS looks like a fun hobby for leveling, grinding, 5-mans, and maybe PvP. I played around with arms on the PTR and really enjoyed it. I have two Gorehowls in the bank just screaming for a Titan’s Grip fury spec. With the ability to have dual specs combined with an addon that will let me save custom button profiles, it will be easier than ever to switch between tanking and DPS. But for some reason I just can’t get myself to to it! Argh! I want to but everytime I get near the warrior trainer Jess starts to pout.

I haz issues.

Nerf raiding.

So after a few days of complete chaos as we respecced and reset our addons and macros, we decided to give the patch a 10-claw spin. Friday night was Karazhan. Saturday and Sunday nights it was Zul’Aman (since it reset Sunday morning). Full clears. We one-shotted everything. I really dislike the use of the term “rape” in gaming, but I guess that’s how those raids could be described. Before the patch we had Karazhan on farm, although the upper-Karazhan bosses would sometimes require a couple attempts if we got unlucky or sloppy. In Zul’Aman we’d only mastered Nalorakk and Akil’zon. We’d made a few attempts on Jan’alai but hadn’t come very close to downing him. Now Zul’Aman is about as challenging as Karazhan was before the patch. I understand Blizzard’s rationale for the nerf. They wanted to give raiding guilds that were stuck before the patch a chance for further progression and to see more content before the expansion. However for small guilds like ours that don’t have the numbers for 25-man content, it leaves us a bit stuck.

We were hooked, and now we are on the patch.

Patches suck. Yes, the new talents/abilities and changes to game mechanics are fun, but there is a significant amount of headache that goes along with having to deal with this many changes at once, particularly if you heavily into addons and modifying your interface. I spent a significant amount of time trying to resolve a couple of problems, so I decided to share with you my solutions just in case one of my three readers was experiencing a similar problem.

The first issue I had was that I desperately needed a new action bar addon. My beloved Trinity Bars 2 was in no way patch-friendly. Fortunately the author of Trinity Bars 2 is developing a new addon called Macaroon that is a (relatively) patch-friendly replacement. It’s still in development but it works, and it is easier to configure.

The other issue that was giving me fits was that I was finding that WoW would not save all of my settings. A couple that I remember is that it would not remember which addons I had asked to have loaded the last time I played, or my audio settings. I discovered that if I exited the game by returning to the login screen rather than just selecting Exit Game after hitting ESC, it would save my settings. This wasn’t a problem for me before. I am not sure if it is due to the patch itself or because the patch moved my WoW directory from Program Files to Users (I am using Vista).

Revenge of the squirrels.

So for the past few weeks we’ve been running heroic Magisters’ Terrace a bit. (Well, ok, who am I kidding? We’ve been running it almost nightly.) Unlike the other heroics it’s still a bit of a challenge and there is some good loot to be had. The first time it was tough, but by the second time we tried it we felt like we had it down. After that we could clear it without too much difficulty except for the occasional butt pull. But lately it’s been kicking our ass. The first boss is cake, but the remaining bosses seem to giving us serious difficulties when before we might only need a couple attempts. We had to give up last night after wiping a few times on Kael’thas (we’d already had a very tough time with Delrissa). It’s been a bit frustrating. We aren’t quite sure why we are now having difficulties where before we would blow through this instance. We do have a theory though. We like to kill the squirrels in MGT. We aren’t normally critter killers (although I do admit I like to harvest a few crab legs for dinner in The Steamvaults), but perhaps out of frustration we like to smack around the squirrels in MGT when running back after a wipe. Our theory is that there is a hidden variable in the game. The more squirrels we kill the harder the bosses get.

I think that after last night’s run we all agree that it is good timing that the patch is coming out today. We’ll take a break from MGT and do some easier heroics to get used to the changes in our talents and the game mechanics before going back to kill some squirrels.

Ugh, keybindings.

The one thing about the upcoming patch that has me the most concerned is keybindings. I spent a lot of time developing my current keybindings, but now I have to accommodate shockwave and three abilities (charge, mocking blow, and berserker rage) that before were built into rarely used stance-dance macros since until now they could not be used in defensive stance. What to do? I currently use mostly keys 1-4 and F1-F4 for regularly used tanking abilities (heroic strike, devastate, shield slam, revenge, cleave, concussion blow, shield bash, shield block), taunt is bound to the ~ key, and my shouts, cooldowns, macros, and less regularly used abilities like shield reflect and disarm occupy number of function keys farther down the right of the keyboard. I do have thunderclap and demoralizing shout bound to the left and right motions of my scroll wheel. After the patch I think shockwave may take the place of demoralizing shout, and I may bind R to charge (putting my whisper reply on T), and maybe use F for  intervene, or maybe the other way around. Perhaps I’ll put berseker rage on 6 next to bloodrage which is on 5. It may be reasonable to have mocking blow tied to a macro like

/use Taunt
/use Mocking Blow

for those cases where taunt is on cooldown or is resisted. Bloodrage and berserker rage could also be used in a nice opening macro combined with either heroic throw, shoot, or charge (hell, three different opening macros).

Ugh.

Anyway I’d be curious about the keybindings of other protection warriors, and how they are going to accommodate the additional abilities.

Bust out the pets.

When we are facing a particularly difficult and frustrating boss, we like to get out our pets. From a tactical point of view it isn’t advantagous, and it can even be problematic given that it clutters-up the screen and can lead to errors in mouse targetting. But they boost morale. We are a tad superstitious sometimes.

The Left Claw has entered Gruul’s Lair.

We finally got around to trying out first 25-man raid in collaboration with some friends in The Captain’s Crew and a few other good friends including Suzzy and Ratshag. We defeated High King Maulgar and his friends in a few attempts, and got Gruul himself down to about 10% on our best attempt. Given that most of us had not been to Gruul’s Lair before, and that the two guilds had not worked together before, it went quite well in my opinion.

A 25-man raid is many orders of magnitude more intense than our cozy 10-man raids. Right now it feels like the morning after a big party — but a fun party. I think I drank too many flasks. I need more aspirin and coffee.

My pre-expansion goals, or lack thereof.

Veneretio from Tanking Tips asked me recently about my pre-expansion goals. Frankly I don’t have any other than to liquidate some mats and mentally rearrange my keybindings. I should explain that we are a very small and tight guild. We have Karazhan on farm (except for Netherspite — we just never got around to him) and are able to do the first two bosses in Zul’Aman but haven’t had the opportunity to work much beyond that. We aren’t even close to having enough for a 25-man raid. We are currently trying to put together something with another guild but even then it has been a struggle to come up with enough people. So I guess that is a goal, but I won’t be devastated (or even sundered) if it doesn’t work out. Thus the timing of the expansion is very good for us. The guild may expand in the future to the point where 25-man guild raids may be viable at 80, but fortunately there will be more content for the 10-man casually-hardcore raids.

Raiders got back.

I’ve written about the fun of facepulls before. Another phenomenon we encounter more often than we’d like but nevertheless find amusing is what we call the “butt pull” (aka, “ass aggro”). This is when someone backs into or, less often, strafes into the aggro radius of other mobs. This is something that is usually done by the DPS or healer(s), but careful positioning by the tank can sometimes help avoid it. Our rogue Atania sometimes needs to ask the tank to move a mob a bit so that her “ass isn’t hanging out.” Magister’s Terrace is an example of an instance where butt pulls are likely.

(I was going to do a quick search to see if other WoW players have used this term, but I think “butt pull” is maybe something I just shouldn’t Google.)