Tank like a girl

This weekend I reached another personal milestone and earned myself the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. In our second Malygos raid, we managed to defeat the bastard in 9 painful tries. We had 3-4 tries where I learned how to tank phase 1, as it was my first time tanking it. It does take some time to get used to it, and I struggled through positioning and aggro management. It was the closest I ever felt to tanking a boss like Nightbane, where threat after the landing was a persistent issue. It was back this time. Eventually, phase 1 just clicked, we had the sparks in perfect control, I strafe-kited him without much problem, and our two priests healed perfectly. Ciderhelm’s video makes it look easy, but it takes a lot of focusing to keep up on threat against the DPS boosted raid plus you have to keep an eye out for sparks yourself. My tip: use the time in the vortex to locate the sparks, and if you happen to be in range of Malygos, keep building threat, you’ll need it.

We faltered in phase 2 once, again due to aggro issues and people being in different bubbles. But that was just once, phase 2 is relatively easy. Charge one Nexus Lord, Heroic Throw the other, move to the current bubble and watch the Deep Breath timer. Once the Nexus Lords were down, I flew up to slap sunders onto the scions, to help the physical DPS girls.

Of the nine tries, we made it to phase 3 four times. The first try was just testing the waters, the second one we failed to beat his enrage timer. The third time everything went great, everyone was alive, stacks were up, things looked good. Bam. The Wyrmtalon drakes apparently got bored and left to see a movie. We all fell to our deaths. And not a fluke, because our sister-guild alliance side did Malygos-25 the same day and had the same thing happen. Very aggravating! But at that point, it seemed like we had figured it out. We killed Malygos with 35 seconds left on his timer. Close, but good enough. I did notice that it’s not that easy to keep stacks up as I thought it would be, I let mine drop off at 10 stacks, which I find somewhat embarassing to admit.

Unfortunately, drops were disappointing. Nothing anyone could use, and no Barricade for me. Maybe next time. I did enjoy the fight as tank overall and would love to do it again. I am not sure I would be able to successfully 2-heal it, unless joined by a Holy priest or druid, because shamans are kinda useless during the Vortex.

Next day was full of frustration for me. I healed in Naxx-10, and though I generally felt very solid on healing, I managed to eff up all my exuberance by switching to Kadomi for Thaddius, for a shot at the Repelling Charge. Yet again I missed the jump and spent most of the fight on a platform, waiting for the right time to jump again without killing anyone. Tonight I will head to Naxx to look for the ledge that lets you not do a jump, so this won’t ever happen again. Blegh. Of course Repelling Charge didn’t drop, so now I have to farm Seal of the Pantheon so I can actually wear frost resist gear for Hodir.

Naxx went so great, I thought this would be our second one-day clear, but then we hit a roadblock at Four Horsemen. No one had done the fight in the back before but one of the tanks. Our first tries didn’t work, so I decided to head to the back. It still took us three tries, and that was the end of our raid. We only managed to clear four wings in our allotted time, after one-shotting everything else. I was really disappointed. But you know, next time we’ll have more people who have done 4H in the back, and we’ll go back to one-shotting them. I think my biggest failure as raid leader was that I did not manage to keep the cheerfulness up. I was so disappointed that I think it was audible on Vent. I should have kept the high spirits up, but I was tired. Something to improve.

In two weeks, we’ll head back to Ulduar, and then I’ll take a break from raiding. We’re moving to a new apartment in another town, so it might be til early August until I get my broadband up and running again. I will try to prepare a couple blog entries so you won’t have to miss me too much.

I haven’t really done any meaty tank talk post for quite some time. Talldar summed it up nicely a while ago, though I don’t agree with all the points he’s making. It’s not so easy to write about tanking anymore. Tanking feels a lot easier than it did in TBC, at least in my playing field, heroics and 10-mans. Tanking mechanics are very simple. Once you understand the protection warrior priorities, there isn’t much room for fine-tuning. Use the correct priority, be smart about the cooldowns, maybe use smart macros like the Warbringer macro for one button Charge/Intercept/Intervene, and try to spam Heroic Strike as much as you can. There is not much room for technical advice, because warrior tanking is all very straightforward. And it currently feels underpowered and is definitely not flavor of the month. But no worries, this is not about crying about the state of the warrior.

I never talked much about tanking while in Naxxramas because, let’s be honest, once you have understood how a fight works, a trained monkey could do the job. I mean, there are a couple challenges, but basically, it’s tanking bootcamp for basics. Here’s the run-down of things you learn in tanking bootcamp there: tanking and spanking. Kiting to get away from a boss while keeping the raid safe. Not standing in fire, acid, frogger, poison, void zones. Building threat on the move. Strafe-kiting if you’re good. Knowledge of when you need to use your cooldowns (if you ever really have a reason to use them outside of Faerlina, Maexxna and maybe Patchwerk). I guess you could add AoE threat to the list, because trash tanking is really a joke, coming from the background of 10-man raiding in TBC. Bring back the Karazhan trash and it’s different abilities you needed to be aware of. Or the brutal trash gauntlets from Zul’Aman.

But that was Naxxramas, and now is Ulduar. Wipes on trash, hooray! Nowhere was the difference between Naxx and Ulduar so evident for me as in the area leading to Hodir. So much trash. Surprise worms from snowdrifts! Hard-hitting giants! Wheeeee, a pat! All with different abilities. Wiping for an hour, learning every pull the hard way. Or entering the Antechamber, where our warlock got to use Banish. I wish we needed more CC. Seriously, bring back CC. Not like Magister’s Terrace, where you needed the right kind of CC or you were doomed to failure. But really, in raids CC is fine, we should be forced to use it. Intelligent use which gives us more control over a pull than AoE spammage.

I have tanked seven bosses in there so far, and all the stuff that was learned in WotLK tanking bootcamp comes in very handily. Razorscale is a weird amalgation of several Naxx fights into one boss. You have Noth-style adds that the tanks need to control. In phase 2, you need to kite her the way you learned to on Grobbulus. And you need to watch your debuffs and swap aggro like you did on Gluth. To me this fight is a perfect example that tanking in Ulduar is a lot more complex, and I love it. I get very stressed out on Razorscale, because she also hits a lot harder than anything I’ve dealt with in Naxxramas. XT is a great fight to see how aware your raid is to debuffs, and the right response to it. Not that challenging as MT, but definitely fun as adds tank. I felt very proud at myself when I take out a pair of bots all on my own until the next heart-phase starts. Kologarn and Ignis I find strange. I would expect Kologarn to be as difficult as Ignis is, based on his placement, and I find Ignis still a lot more difficult than a boss in the first part of a raid should be. Again, you get to be mobile. On Kologarn I had the personal challenge of running away from the eyebeam while still tanking elementals. Interesting times.

Assembly of Iron is made for a warrior tank. Stressful at times. Reminded me of Aran in a way, but that’s probably just because of interrupts. Here our arsenal is fabulous as Stormcaller tank. He casts? Shield Bash. Casts again? Move away then charge! Next cast? Heroic Throw! Next cast? Intercept! Or maybe Concussion Blow. Or Shockwave. And then you do it all over again! It’s a fight to make you feel extremely versatile, because we have more options on this boss than any other tank class. At least this once. The only tricky part I found was to move him out of the runes when both Shield Bash and Heroic Throw are on cooldown, but just stunning until they’re available again works.

Ulduar fights are fun and challenging enough that I really recommend to anyone who hasn’t gone to jump on a chance and go there. Bring your a-game, be ready to use your abilities to their fullest. Don’t be afraid of using your cooldowns. Just bring it. Especially if you’re bored of T7 content, be ready to move on. If you do well in Naxx as prot warrior, you have the skillset to do well in Ulduar. Me, I am still stoked. We’re going to work on Malygos this weekend, but I really am so excited about fresh tanking content.

I’d love to hear more warrior stories from Ulduar because we really deserve to hear good stuff about warriors at the moment.

I called it, didn’t I? Back in March, when Blizzard announced their 3-tiered Emblem plan for 3.1, I posted my critical view of their plan, and how it would kill heroics.

Turns out I was right. Since my DK hit 80, I was able to get her into 3 PUGs. One was OS-25, the other two were H UK and H CoS. It seems easier to PUG 25-mans than to actually find groups for heroics. Thankfully, my guild is accomodating, and so I have been on quite a few heroic runs. Yet whenever I am on and park myself in LFG, nothing happens whatsoever. I click through LFM for all heroics, and there’s a sporadic person or two but that’s about it. I would love to see numbers for this, but I am sure Blizzard has noticed an impact, or they wouldn’t have announced their rather surprising and drastic measure to fix things: bye-bye, 3-tiered system, hello 2-tiered system. I just wish they had done this for 3.1 and not for 3.2.

In an ideal world, Blizzard would have phased out EoHs in 3.1. Heroics and T7 content would have awarded Emblems of Valor, T8 content both 10 and 25-man would have awarded Emblems of Conquest. Both kinds of emblems would have had an option to downgrade to EoH for BoA gear, gems and entry-level raid gear. Does this sound familiar? Oh yes, because that’s exactly what they’re doing for 3.2. It would have solved some fundamental issues that the 3-tier system introduced. At least they’re trying to fix it now. I am really hoping they’ll stick to the 2-tiers for good, whenever they introduce the next raid’s Emblems of Uber-Awesome.

• People would still have had a reason to run heroics, to gain gear of ilevel 213. This would be a step up from EoH gear, but not overly so. At the time 3.1 was introduced, people were already done with their respective content for the most part, so hardcore raiders were diving into ilevel 226 or higher raid gear right away. Not a huge gap.
• Currently, people who are running 10-man content exclusively are looking at a very low ratio of Emblem-to-gear reward. After two Ulduar raids, I have 10 Emblems of Valor, and we are doing a lot better than other guilds who raid casually. Still, my first EoV purchase is quite some time away, and it is often gear that I can actually replace with Ulduar drops. It feels like a thing on the side, not a reward. To maximize your gear, you would still need to jump in on Naxx-25 farm runs, something that a lot of us casual 10-man raiders either do not want to do, or cannot.
• Rewards aside, a lot of WoW players that also raid seem to forget one thing: heroics are something that a lot of people enjoy, for their own sake. Encouraging people to enjoy what used to be the heart of the game is not a bad thing, IMHO.

Reactions about the badge change are very strong, e.g. over at Destructive Reach. There are people who immediately say ‘Hell yeah!’, and those are most often people on the casual end of the spectrum, or people with lots of alts. And Twitter was full of people who were shocked because they are upset that people who might never set foot into a raid instance will have access to Ulduar-25 level gear. I can understand the criticism, it’s a drastic departure from their (not very) old system. One argument that I read was that’s outrageous because people who don’t raid don’t need access to such gear. But who’s hurt by non-raiders having such gear? Egos. Yes, hardcore raiders work hard to get access to gear, but they have access to hard-mode drops, Best-In-Slot gear, the vast pool of Ulduar drops, so how does that hurt them? Assuming you have talented people who unfortunately are just some time behind the expansion time curve, they will now be able to gear up and maybe be recruited for guilds that are already in Ulduar. It’s possible.

The only really strong negative reaction that I have with this change is that it will re-introduce farm raids. Karazhan was farmed to death for Badges of Justice when the Sunwell heroic gear was introduced. I imagine Naxxramas will be similarly farmed. This is a step back for my guild and I refuse to conform to it. While I will still set up Naxxramas raids to gear new raiders, I do not want to raid Naxxramas forever. We have Ulduar to clear, and then move forward to Argent Coliseum, and then to Icecrown.

I am not 100% convinced it will actually go live. If Blizzard changes anything around, I do still hope EoH are phased out for EoV instead. We will see. But all I am really asking for is that people look at the change as a fix for something that Blizzard really broke, instead of the slap in the face that Ulduar raiders perceive it as. Also check out Aurik’s view over at /hug, it’s a view I pretty much agree with.

Three weeks ago, my guild had its first trip into Ulduar, as a farewell present to our raid officer who’s now in the frozen north until August. As I am in her footsteps now, I decided to return to Ulduar, after our failed attempt at killing Malygos two weeks ago. I didn’t really post about it, because phase 3 is full of fail. He’ll die soon enough.

Last time, we managed to kill 3 bosses in Ulduar, Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and XT-002. Ignis was more than we could handle. But that was then, and this is now!

Flame Loothiathan actually took us two tries, because the first try we waited too long with the turrets and the vehicles got demolished. The second try was a smooth operation though, so all was good. We then moved on to Razorscale who was 2-shot. The first try we had waaaaay too many adds for us tanks to handle, but the second try was a lot better. I actually like phase 1 better than phase 2, it’s more dynamic. Stressful, but good. Phase 2 is ugh. I hate Grobbulus, I hate Gluth, and phase 2 Razorscale is like that, only on crack. It was messy in the end, with a tank death, but we got her down.

We moved on to XT-002, and that fight was fun, and a flawless kill. I seem to struggle a bit with actually locating the Pummelers, as I was on adds duty. I would find one and miss the other, but Misdirect saved the day. Not only did we kill XT flawlessly, we all got us a fancy achievement as well. Good times.

I decided to skip Ignis and move on to Kologarn instead. Gosh, he was easy. I didn’t really expect him to be that easy. I had read up on him and believed that we had to swap aggro as tanks, but the debuff never stacks in Ulduar-10, so all I did was tanking adds, while running from crazy eyebeam pew-pew. That was exciting. I have to say, Kologarn showing up when you enter his room, that’s pretty fabulous. Another very nice one-shot.

We moved on to Auriaya, which took a godly time, because her trash? Sucks. Just two trash groups, but they kicked our asses and laughed at us. And I loved it. Because lame trash like the trash in Naxx is boring. I would have preferred not wiping so much, but getting those two groups down felt like it would deserve its own epic loot. On Auriaya herself, we managed to mess up that pull. Her kitties pounced, tanks were pretty much dead from the start. Ouch. We were running out of time as one of our healers had to go, so we decided to give it one more try. The second time the pull worked like charm, the kitties went down, and from there on, I tried to gain the Feral Defender’s attention (didn’t work) and popped Berserker Rage when she feared. Not too hard when the pull works.

Amount of tank loot on day 1: zero

The next raid day, I thought it was time to re-visit our nemesis from our initial raid, Ignis. Last time, none of our strategies worked out, but even in our first try, we were already better. It was doable, I knew it. The second try was full of bad luck (adds tank in slagpot), but on the third try, we nailed it. It was very intense, less for me as Ignis tank, but for the add handlers. Our pally tanked the adds, my partner was a boomkin instead of bear that day and rooted them in the Scorch, and our warlock brought them to the pool and shattered them. Felt absolutely awesome to get him down. In my screenshot, you can see that I had to pull out all the stops at the end, and having a 49k health pool there, makes me giggle a bit. Also, whatever that golden glowy stuff is, it’s pretty.

From there, we moved on to Assembly of Iron. Originally, I had slotted myself as healer, but changed that because I wanted to do that fight, and we had no interrupts but me. It took us quite some time to figure out the fight. The first tries were wipes learning to deal with Fusion Punch and Overload on the tanks. Then we had some tries where Fusion Punch would not be dispelled even though it was spammed. The first time we got Steelbreaker down, we quickly learned how to deal with Phase 2, giant green runes of death and positioning. We wiped again, but it was educational, and the next try we got all three of them down. Looking at my WoL report, I have really subpar threat, way too much white damage, but I was so focused on interrupts. I had to set up a giant glowy icon for my cooldowns on interrupts, it was intense. Stormcaller Brundir is definitely made for warrior tanks, with three stuns and two interrupts (if you have Gag Order). The only part I had problems with was dragging him out of the Runes of Power. Those often happened right after I silenced him, aargh.

We then proceeded towards Hodir. I am not sure I can call it proceed. Raid Leader who doesn’t know the trash, plus snow mounds plus pathers with big aggro range = carnage. I think it took us at least an hour to clear to Hodir and we were running out of raid time. That’s some interesting trash there alright. We then tested the waters on Hodir, and we have our work cut out on him. But just like on Ignis the previous raid, I now have the time to analyze our mistakes, and work out a more cohesive strategy. I am full of ideas already.

Damn, it’s fantastic to be a tank. Be it as main tank, as caster tank, as adds tank. My one true love in-game. I will soon speak about my thoughts of Ulduar in the eyes of a tank, later this week. I have more to say that doesn’t fit in this story-time post.

Oh, btw. Tank loot on day 2: zero. Cry with me, tanks of the world.

This BA shared topic caught my eye immediately. As tank, we have a near symbiotic relationship with our healers. With a healer behind you, you become an unstoppable force, ready to fling insults at ginormous bosses and have them whack on you. Without a healer, you are squished in mere seconds, in most cases. I love healers, as a tank, and when I am playing my shaman, I hope my tank loves me just as much when I keep them alive. I am very grateful about the opportunity to play both in heroics and raids.

Nigiri from Adventures of a Priest asked for views of non-healers what kind of healing they prefer.

Now me, I am a non-discerning tank. Any heals: awesome in my book. Of course we have preferences. All through TBC I felt safest in the hands of a holy priest. I just got awesome heals from them. Tasty Greater Heals, Renews, few scary moments. In WotLK the whole healing scene shifted a bit. There are very few moments that the glowy white ring of a Greater Heal is around me. Now glowy laser heals are coming my way. It’s the time of the fast spells, be it Flash Heal, Flash of Light or Lesser Healing Wave. My personal preference is for Discipline Priests, followed by Paladins. They’re made for tank healing, and you can tell. 5-mans or 10-man raids, I assign one of those to the tanks, and I feel safe. My least favorite healer for 5-mans would be druids. I know some awesome druids, but at times I feel my health drops way lower with a druid as healer than with any other healing class. HoTs do not make me feel as safe as big numbers do coming in on the left side of my screen.

As a raid leader for 10-mans, I care about healer balance. We have had two paladins, our wonder twins, heal Naxxramas, but in Ulduar I am looking for a balance. Great tank healing, solid raid-healing, versatility. Here I feel all healing classes as solid, as long as they’re the right mix. I am sure you can do Ulduar-10 with three druids or three shamans, but would I feel as good about such a combo as I feel about priest, druid, paladin team? Probably not.

For further opinions about this Shared Topic, check out:

• Secret Agent Cat
• And Two Rogues
• Aggro Junkie
• Welcome to Spinksville!
• Achtung Panzercow!

 
So what about you other tanks out there? Any preferences! As always you are more than welcome to share.

I admit it. I have a problem. It’s the same, after every raid. The moment I have hearthed, I will alt-tab, and upload my combat log. Thanks to Loggerhead, I always log. And then I upload it, and stare at delicious numbers, for hours. I try to discuss them with my partner, but she really doesn’t give a damn about me only pulling off 54.4% avoidance on Patchwerk. Or about DPS numbers. Or me squeeing about healing meters (which is really a terrible habit but I like being kickass).

But aside from me just loving the numbers, it’s a valuable tool for raid analysis. Without a log, I wouldn’t have realized that all our failed phase 3 attempts on Malygos were a range issue having us all hit by Arcane Pulse. Or I can see that some new DPS has too low hit or never uses 51 point talents.

Today, I want to talk about the latest and best of combat log sites, IMHO. There’s currently 3 sites out there: old-school WWS, WMO and the new kid around the block, World of Logs. I am going to talk about the latter in some detail, as this is currently my log flavor of the year. Why? WWS has pretty much gone down the drain lately. There are no more support forums, it’s not been updated for a while, and it doesn’t account for discipline priest healing, e.g. It’s just not as accurate as other sites. Then there’s WoW Meter Online. Which is a good tool, but I personally cannot stand the Engrish, and I hate the looks. I tried to like it, but I can’t. Along comes WoL. It’s very up-to-date, and changes almost daily. It looks slick. It has graphs that look confusing at first, but offer great information at a glance. You have a powerful log browser. Easy overview of dispells and interrupts. Accounts for mitigated heals, like PW:S. Live reports. What more could you want? In my following description, all sample screenshots are taken from my guild’s last Naxxramas raid.

Overview of WoL

• When you open a review, you first get an overview of all bosses, in what order, and your first taste of numbers. Duration, overall DPS, Damage Taken, HPS. Each category is weighted, and so you can see at a glance which was the fight with the most DPS, damage and healing. In my example screenshot, Kel’thuzad was the longest fight, Loatheb took the most damage, Sapphiron was the fight with the most damage and the most healing.
• Clicking on your boss fight of choice, in my sample Patchwerk, takes you to the Dashboard of the fight. You can see at a glance that there was a slight DPS spike at the end, that early in the fight there was a huge damage spike that heals didn’t quite cover (our rogue got one-shot by a Hateful Strike), and that damage was done by Patchwerk and our suicidal retribution pally with her wicked belf blood rituals.
• A click on Damage Done takes you to the overview for the DPS hungry. See the fancy graph up there? Right at the start of the fight you see a red line, indicating either a) someone died or b) a hunter feigned. In this case, the above-mentioned rogue ate two Hateful Strikes and bit the dust. The rest of the fight, the warlock and the hunter have some nice damage spikes. If you want to see all of your DPS represented in the graph, just check their names. Interested to look at one of the spikes in more detail? Drag the mouse on the time frame you want, right-click on it, zoom in. Or set the page to selection, then you’ll get a Damage Done overview for that selection. Very nice. For a more exciting graph, check out the one below, from our Razorscale kill. It has feigning hunters, a dead tank (yowza, she hits hard), a Rebirth right at the end there (the orange line). See the blue area on the graph? That’s Bloodlust. Which incidentally did not cause any DPS spikes.
  
• Same is valid for the Damage Taken category. You get to see the two Patchwerk tanks, me and our pally. As Sawyer had higher effective health and just about the same avoidance, she ate the Hatefuls, I just did my tanking thingy, and only had one bad spike. No complaints on my side!
• I want to look at my own performance in detail, so I’m clicking on my name, and end up with several categories. I am starting with Damage Done, to see how I did on spamming HS. That’s 63 Heroic Strikes, and only 22 white swings, so I did some spamming alright. I don’t have the near flawless execution of progression tanks, but I don’t need to. As an aside, Blizzard, please fix HS! Down with the spamming! Ahem. I also went into this fight with my avoidance spec, and probably won’t again. Without a Deep Wounds build, I feel my damage is gimp. If you mouse-over the various abilities, you get nice diagrams, displaying hit, crits, misses, etc. At the bottom, I can see Damage Taken, including how well I did on Avoidance. With two disc healers, there was a lot of absorbing going on, and the amount of dodge and parry seems okay to me.
• Healing Done is in the same vein. If you mouseover a healer (or DPSer or tank) you get a quick summary as tooltip. Both priests were Discipline, and so you can see that WoL estimates the amount of mitigation Divine Aegis and PW:S do, finally showing in logs how powerful discipline healing is.
• Care to know how your peeps died? The Deaths Overview will list the last three damage sources before someone died in the raid. In my example, I kinda moved Faerlina unexpectedly and ran out of range of the healers and then she killed me during the Frenzy. Ouch. Very helpful in figuring out how exactly people died.
  
• Another example to evaluate raid performance is to look for specific occurrences in the log browser. In my example, Show events where event type is Hit and target is Kadomi and spell is Eruption. Whoops, got hit twice during Heigan. Yay for having a big health pool! You can construct all sorts of queries and run them, it’s quite powerful.
• WoL has a raid attendance feature based on the logs you’ve uploaded. It sorts by class and calculates attendance. Very handy. Now if only I could add loot, that would make it even more perfect as raid management tool. Maybe I should suggest that.
• A feature I haven’t tested yet but which I bet is powerful is the live reporting. As soon as you start your combatlog and run the client, your data will be uploaded right as you play, and you can check out data between tries. If only I had used that on Malygos, I would have been able to see our range issue in phase 3 immediately. Next time!
• Add to that a thriving forum with quick responses from the developers, I can put myself behind this tool. It has all that I loved about WWS, but in a newer, slicker design that actually is up-to-date with 3.1.

If you want to test this tool yourself, you can grab a beta key here.