Thank you, come again! (Part 2)

Yesterday afternoon, I was convinced to tank regular Gundrak at level 75 by a friend who has been levelling his paladin alt. He said the healer was good, so I agreed, and dragged a hunter friend along (who hit 80 later in the day).

The run was very smooth, and fast even by my standards. I happened to notice that my blessing had 15 minutes left, which meant that we cleared the place in 15 minutes. The healer said, and I quote:

That was stupid fast..

Another perk of being a tank :D.

Granted, it's a team effort - high dps, good healer, but it's up to the tank to get the ball rolling and set a steady pace, without which the party would never get anywhere.

Thank you, come again! (Part 1)

One of the perks about being a tank is that sometimes you can derive enormous satisfaction from tanking. A couple of nights ago, while questing on my 3rd warrior, S, in Borean Tundra, someone whispered me "Are you a tank?" Now I usually don't respond to these messages because sometimes people dont even have the basic courtesy to say "Sorry to bother you, but could you tank xx (instance)?" and just barge straight to "can you tank AN", but on this night, I made an exception (it sounded friendly), and replied:

What of it?

We need a tank for regular Old Kingdom. Would you like to come?

Now I must reiterate that I am a sucker for polite people, so I agreed without hesitation. I join the group, which are all gathered at the summoning stone already, and receive a summon (suspicions start creeping in at this point: Did they just lose a tank?). We go in, we buff up, I ask for party leader, and start pulling. omfgwtfbbqTHEMOBSARENOTDYING starts to run through my brain from the first pull. The second, third, and fourth pull are the same. I chanced a glance at my damage meter and nearly fainted was utterly horrified couldnt believe my eyes.

(Let me say here, that I am not a meter-person. I keep it around just to see how people are performing relative to me. There are too many ways in which the data could be skewed or incorrect.)

To the horror of horrors, I was leading the pack for damage done. Let's be modest, a protection warrior of reasonable gear at level 74 puts out roughly 700 DPS while tanking. Even considering my combat uptime, the DPS had to be really really bad for me to be at the top.

Allow me to sidetrack a little here. Our group consisted of me, a shadow priest, and three others from the same guild, a discipline priest, retribution pally, and fury warrior. Only the shadow priest was close to me in terms of damage done. His DPS was roughly about 1000, but he was still doing less damage than me.

At this point, I resign myself to a long instance. Who asked me to be such a sucker for politeness, right?

After awhile, we reach the first boss. I explain the fight, I pull. First attempt, nobody hits the Guardian add that spawns, the small spiderlings become immune to damage, and my healer dies from them while I could only watch. The fury warrior gets DI'ed near the boss after me, my healer, and the shadow priest die. I run back. Nobody else releases. Are they expecting a rez or something!?!? I explain to the fury warrior that perhaps he could try to shadowmeld after removing DI. He/she dies, and grumbles abit. They all run back in the end. I inspect the fury warrior's damage breakdown and spec. I choke want to /wrist nearly faint again. He/she is sporting a spec something like this (can't remember the exact thing, was too busy fainting), and his/her skill breakdown showed that Bloodthirst was non-existent.

It's 2am in the morning, I didn't feel like offering any friendly advice.

Boss dies on the second attempt. We work our way to the second boss. I explain the fight. I pull. Nobody seems to want to DPS the boss when he teleports. I work my ass off Shield Slamming the boss and the luckily the healer doesn't get incapacitated, and he also works his ass off healing those people. Boss dies in one attempt.

On the next pull, ret pally uses /rw to announce that he is going AFK. WTH? I'm not blind!! I can read party chat!! I keep pulling. Two or three pulls later, ret pally announces he's back... via /rw. I can feel my blood pressure rising. We reach the third boss without incident. I explain the fight, and resign myself to eating the enrages hope against hope that they can kill the adds so I wont have to eat the enrage.

Attempt 1: At 75%, boss flies up, summons add. Party doesn't seem to realise the add is there until it walks to the boss' spot. He enrages, and plants a Thundershock at my location. Everybody was clustered somewhere near me for some unknown reason. Everybody eats 10k nature damage; my healer and the ret pally die instantly, we wipe.

I say again in party chat: Please kill the add, the enrage is really painful.

Attempt 2: Everyone spreads out abit more, but still nobody seems to want to hit the add or even realise that its there. Fury warrior dies at ~65% boss hp due to Thundershock, I press one or two cooldowns at every enrage, hoping against hope that I live. The damage comes in by the (many) thousands. Not fun to see. Boss has 10% HP left, healer is OOM, I am out of cooldowns, and he spawns a Thundershock below me. My HP is at 4000 or so. Somehow I manage to dodge and parry his next few melee strikes and we survive; boss dies.

We proceed to the last boss. I explain the fight. Ret pally goes "Cool" when I reach the insanity part and starts linking all the gear that the boss drops. My patience is wearing very thin here. Attempt 1: I kill off my adds, and help two other DPSers with theirs (!!). Healer goes OOM during second insanity, the boss' Mind Flay is too pain, we wipe at 9%.

Attempt 2: The PUG shadow priest kindly provides us with Guru's Elixir. I kill off my adds, and hope against hope that I get transported to my healer's realm to help. I don't. After helping one DPSer, we go to the healer's realm. Joy. At start of second insanity, healer has 70% mana. I am confident we will down him, and we did.

Its finally over; timestamp reads 2:45 AM

Recount at the end

To be honest, although I was exasperated, I felt pleased and satisfied at myself for having successfully led this bunch of people through a more-difficult-than-normal regular instance. As for the second picture, number 1 is me, 2 was the shadow priest, and 7 was my holy priest. In case you're wondering if this was made up, its not. I won't waste my time justifying myself here. All-in-all, an interesting experience, though not one I care to repeat (yes I've had many of these already, and yes I seem to always land such groups), but don't count on it.

Edit: I didn't save a screenshot of that Fury warrior's damage breakdown, but I did notice he/she had 42 immune Hamstrings and some Thunder Claps, which meant that he/she was DPSing in Battle Stance some of the time (!!?).

Whose fault is it?

Theoretical situation 1:

You are tanking a pack of mobs with a clearly-defined kill order. A DPSer focuses on your primary mob but his AoE pulls aggro from another mob, causing his death. Whose fault is it?

Theoretical situation 2:

You are tanking a single mob. A DPSer manages to pull aggro from you and dies. Whose fault is it?

Call me wierd weird, but in both cases, it would be my fault, unless the DPSer massively outgeared me, or I was having latency issues. In a perfect, lag-free world, yes, the fault would be mine first and foremost, and the DPSer's second.

Let me explain. In situation 1, it would clearly be my lack of situational awareness that caused me to have insufficient threat on the particular mob that killed my DPSer, while in situation 2, I must have been dreaming or thinking about lunch or something to that effect. Allow me to clarify that this is a more radical, new-school style of thought. The old school of thought (prevalent back in TBC) is that as DPSer, you watch your own threat; if you overaggro and die, its your fault. However, I suppose this is close to impossible now.. monitoring your (DPS) threat on the primary AND secondary targets (think Whirlwind or Divine Storm).

I suppose its this chain of reasoning that constantly makes me strive to put out more threat (read: damage) so as to allow my DPSers to perform at their maximum capacity.

Now, I will admit that both situations have happened to me before, either via mispulls or having my mind wander. There even have been non-fatal occurences of the second scenario. What I'm saying is... Nobody is infallible. But if you can learn from your mistakes so that you can become a better tank... Everybody benefits, right?

DPS as a Warrior (Part 2)

The sole defining talent of the Fury tree in Wrath is definitely Titan's Grip. Having seen a multitude of balances ever since its inception, TG is now straddled with a 10% damage reduction component when wielding a 2-handed weapon in one hand. On the bright side, patch 3.1.3 brought some life back into the Fury tree, namely, reducing the cost of Bloodthirst(BT) from 30 rage to 20 rage, and reducing its cooldown from 5 seconds to 4 seconds.

After some testing on the heroic dummy, I noticed a marked increase in DPS from what I used to have. When the 10% damage reduction to TG went live, many warriors were noticing, and suffering from, rage starvation at some point or another, due to a drop in white hit damage. As in the link in the previous post, GC has said that the rage formula hasn't changed, and the TG nerf did take white-hit rage generation into account, but warrior DPS was a tad too low. Still, it doesn't explain where large chunks of other warriors' DPS went. Now, with this fix, Fury DPS cycles seem to be much smoother, allowing more Heroic Strikes, and rage starvation issues should be a thing of the past. Let's just hope that this is not another band-aid fix on top of what promises to be a great talent for warriors.

A Fury warrior's DPS cycle is somewhat priority-based. Fury warriors have 2 instant attacks, one proc-attack, and a rage dump. Most of the time, it does not matter whether you hit BT first or Whirlwind(WW) first, its just that WW provides a bigger initial damage boost. Bloodsurge procs, however, are a different story. There exist differing opinions on whether to prioritize WW before instant-cast slams, or BT before instant-cast slams, but a good rule of thumb is to fit your instant slams into a free GCD whenever possible. Keep in mind that while you are doing all this, you should also be diligently queueing Heroic Strike, never letting your rage bar fill up completely.

In an infinite rage situation (think lots of raid damage), all your mainhand attacks should be Heroic Strike. Of course, sometimes there is little raid damage, and your offhand white damage doesn't generate sufficient rage for you to do that. Thats where rage generating talents come into the equation. Bloodrage, Berserker Rage, Glyph of Heroic Strike, and Anger Management are all your friends. Even with such a wide array of tools at your disposal, you might still find yourself short of rage. This is where its time to think about a weapon upgrade, or more Strength/hit.

A standard cookie-cutter Fury spec would look, therefore, something like this.

Gearing as a Fury warrior is relatively easy. You'll want pieces with high strength and crit, while hit, expertise, armour penetration, and haste are mostly secondary. 8% hit from talents and gear will be sufficient, although 3-4% above this number will help to smooth out rage generation. 6.5% expertise is recommended for bosses, to ensure that none of your specials get dodged. Finally, you should be primarily gemming for Strength, anything else is mostly sub-optimal.

As for glyphs, must-have major glyphs would be Heroic Strike and Whirlwind, while the third slot could possibly be filled by Glyph of Execution. Minor glyphs are quite standard; you'll want Glyph of Battle, Glyph of Bloodrage, and Glyph of Enduring Victory.

Next: DPS as Arms.

DPS as a Warrior (Part 1)

Warriors have two DPS specs: Arms and Fury.

A long time ago, Fury was THE PvE spec, while Arms was for PvP. That mostly changed in patch 2.4, with the advent of Titan's Grip and Bladestorm and numerous other changes to both trees.

Along comes patch 3.1, with the nerf 10% damage reduction to Titan's Grip. Many warriors, including yours truly, have respecced countless times into both trees, and, dismayed at the state of Fury DPS at sub-optimal gear levels, switched to Arms instead. To be fair, after reading Landsoul's post, one of the most revered warrior number crunchers out there, I am still at a loss to answer where all my Fury DPS went to. Now, with patch 3.1.3, Arms received a slight boost while Fury seems to be significantly boosted, with the rage and cooldown change to Bloodthirst.

The primary difference between the two trees as they stand now, is that Fury provides a constant damage output with a few highly explosive peaks, while Arms feels more bursty and requires more concentration to watch out for skill cooldowns, debuffs, and procs. All in all, Fury excels at fights with little to no movement, and with adds (think Whirlwind), your typical stand-still-and-bash-the-boss'-skull-in kind of fights. Arms probably has an edge in fluid fights with lots of movement.

Next posts: More in-depth discussion on Arms and Fury DPS.

What it means to be the main tank

Of a progression guild, that is.

As the main tank, more often than not, you will be leading the 10- and 25-man raids. That, in itself, is honestly sufficiently stressful. Leave the DKP to some other officer or the guild leader (if you are not already the guild leader). Your main concern is the successful completion of the particular raid dungeon you are attempting. This means that you will be assigning tanks, healers, and sometimes DPS, to specific roles. This means that you have read strategies for the upcoming boss fights. This also largely means that you will be the main tank on every boss until it finally bites the dust.

Why did I say that you'll be tanking a boss only until your guild gets a first kill? The reasons are very simple.

1) Assume you have been main tanking the same bosses day in and day out for the past month. One day, you burn out/decide to quit WoW/are not free. BAM. None of the other offtanks know what to do, and its back to wiping on a farm boss.

2) Sometimes, being in an offtank role helps you see things in a different light. Why was my offtank the other day taking so much damage? Is it reasonable to have only 2 offtanks catching x-number of adds? So on and so forth.

Basically what I'm trying to say is: As a guild main tank, you should never main tank every single boss every time, but instead, give your other tanks a shot at it. Trust me, it works wonders in boosting their confidence. And, if you were the main tank by virtue of skill, you will be able to let the guild know, after seeing different tanks on the same boss, that you have earned your position by true merit.

Don't pull when your healers are dead

On my old server, we used to have this feral druid. Excitable little SOB guy he was, loved pulling before people were obviously ready, i.e. pulling when 1/3 of the raid was dead, and most of them are healers. This druid also seldom read raid chat, so many a time, we would have something like:

Druid: Pulling.

Raid: Wait. WAIT!! STOP!! xxx ISN'T HERE YET!!!

*The Menagerie is for guests only.*

Raid: Oh shit.

To... minimize this "friendly fire", I never ever put him in a raid leader/main tank position whenever possible.

Unfortunately, this druid also had the nasty habit of rolling on most, if not all, gear that said "cloth" and "leather", which naturally resulted in a lot of misgivings from the officer corps. I mean, come on, do everyone a favour, and don't roll on something you wont use. That poor recruit priest wont ever see any gear upgrades when he's in your raid.

Of course, this little story wouldnt be complete without a mention of -2000 points. -2000 points used to be all that too, with the exception of the lootwhore part. In his defense, he now reads raid chat more and thus causes less wipes and it is easier to get vital information across to him.