Tank like a girl

Originally, I had wanted to post a rant about protection warriors this week, and how tanking in ICC-10 has been so far, but yesterday’s patch changed my tune. Instead of ranting I am going back to being bubbly and excited about prot warriors.

I didn’t have time to play yesterday and had a lot of issues with the loading screen boss, but I managed to run VoA with my shaman and then test the warrior changes.

As quick summary, here are the changes that affect protection warriors:

• Revenge: Damage done by this ability (base and scaling) increased by 50%.
• Thunderclap: This ability now counts as a ranged attack, granting it double damage on critical strikes instead of 150% and ranged miss chance, and still cannot be dodged or parried.
• Improved Revenge: This talent can no longer trigger a stun, and instead increases damage done by Revenge by 30/60% and causes Revenge to strike an additional target.
• Vitality: Now boosts Stamina by 3/6/9%, up from 2/4/6%. Strength and expertise benefits have not changed.

Now, I don’t love every change. I am still torn about Improved Revenge. It kicked ass in the one heroic I ran yesterday, but this will do absolutely nothing for prot warrior DPS on bosses. Admittedly, the old Imp Revenge didn’t either as 99% of all bosses were immune to the stun. But it would have been nice to get something like that.

So how does this play in action? I queued up for a random with some guildies last night and we got H Halls of Lightning. First thumbs up: I was finally able to break 40k health unbuffed, sitting at 40.8k now. This is a big deal for me as I had been hovering at 39k for weeks now, well behind the other tanks in our guild. Yay!

I lost aggro to the pug warlock on maybe two pulls, the rest was smooth sailing. Damage was definitely up for me, hitting 3-4k most pulls. Revenge hits like a truck, like a huge truck. I think I giggled a little when my crit tracker displayed the delicious line: New Crit Record! Revenge hits Loken for 10383! Yes, you read that correctly, it broke 10k multiple times on that run. Now imagine this with full raid buffs. Muahahaha. The cleave effect of Revenge was also pretty nice, and will definitely help in heroics and AoE tanking. But it’s not enough to make us stop spamming Cleave and Thunderclap.

Last night I felt pretty awesome tanking. Zipping from group to group happily. I love Charge and Warbringer, it’s the ability I miss most on my paladin. Nothing will ever beat Charge.

I am not sure if I’ll tank or heal in ICC-10 this week, but I think the changes will not really affect my raid tanking DPS much at all. I will still be FAIL on Festergut, a fight that I really hate. When it’s not my turn to tank, I am in Battle Stance, lolrending, applying sunders and waiting for my turn. The buff to Revenge won’t do anything for me in that fight because the mechanics won’t allow Revenge procs. We will still be the weakest class to bring in that fight.

We are still struggling on fights in the Plagueworks, often held back by our DPS output, and so every little point of DPS I can add matters.

TL;DR summary: Revenge hits like a truck, Imp Revenge is a lot of AoE goodness, heroics DPS definitely up, so bring back Revenge to your action bars. How this affects raid DPS remains to be seen, but it’s a good change. Let’s go kick some ass now.

It’s been over a month since I last posted in early February. After that post, something happened that I had not forseen, a combination of burnout both as protection warrior and as blogger. My original vision for this blog was to post and share my experiences as a protection warrior in a casual WoW environment, who happens to play a role that is traditionally male-dominated, more than any other role in World of Warcraft. But when I started to not enjoy that particular role anymore, I lost my drive to post. I did not stop playing Kadomi, but I often phased her out, focusing more on my other beloved orc girl, my resto shaman.

Things I have done since I last posted:

• leveled a mage from 54 to 80, getting her fully geared in ToC-10 gear in alt runs – never has leveling and getting geared for raiding been as easy as today. I was practically able to buy my first piece of T9 the moment I hit 80. But I learned a valuable lesson. DPS isn’t anywhere as easy as it looks like, and to contribute fully it still takes skill. My DPS instincts are somewhat lacking, so it’s an interesting experiment.
• ran VoA-10 and 25 just about every week on my shaman, and VoA-10 on Kadomi – my shaman got her T10 kilt off Toravon-10, which made me very happy, because 2pc T10 for resto shamans is hot! Also, it gave me an opportunity to have spectral shoveltusks, who doesn’t love that? Kadomi has been less lucky, because I only got the DPS legs from Toravon? Is this a sign? But no, it can’t be. Prot warrior for life, yo!
• started Ulduar hardmodes – it’s long been my dream to go back to my favorite WotLK raid instance and try hardmodes. Sure, we outgear them like crazy now. But they’re still fun! So far we have gotten Heartbreaker, I choose you, Steelbreaker, I could say that this cache was rare and Lose your illusion. This ‘only’ leaves Freya and Mimiron hard-modes for Algalon. I am looking forward to going back and trying. I had a blast. I did go as healer, and actually scored an upgrade from Hodir hardmode. I had never seen Ice Layered Barrier before, it’s a sweet piece of gear that is replacing gear I got from ToC-10. Crazy world.
• being 5/12 in ICC-10 – Icecrown is going somewhat strangely for us. We’ve only made it to Rotface once, and we got him to 4% on our first night. But we haven’t been able to get back to him, because we are really suffering from lack of sign-ups. Our staple healers are all MIA due to heavy attack of RL, our heavy hitter DPS was not around either. We are struggling far more in there than we really should, which is very disheartening. But we’ll keep at it. Not everyone needs to kill Arthas already, Cataclysm is far away.
• finally started leveling my alliance paladin again – Please meet Leala. She is a paladin, and she tanks like a girl. I think this was one of the hardest things for me to do in my time in WoW. I am such a proud defender of the warrior class, but something in me just broke. Months ago someone sent me an e-mail that they thought I should try a protection paladin because they felt I would have a lot to give to the world if I experienced that tanking style. So I sent the girl heirlooms, leveled her from 67 to 70 and went dual spec on her. My first week was spent panicking. She had barely 10k health unbuffed, not even def-capped for level 70, just a set of Cobalt gear and a crappy stamina/expertise sword I got as a quest reward. But I went ahead, and tanked and was flabbergasted. 5-man tanking as paladin is such a different experience from warrior tanking for me. It basically feels like relaxed, easy-going tanking in slow motion. Nothing could go possibly wrong. The only concern is mana. Where as warrior I still feel compelled to mark a kill order, it feels like it doesn’t matter. DPS not on my focus target? Eh, they’ll stay on me anyhow. My paladin is now almost 76, and I have tanked everything through VH. This makes me think I might want to give those other two classes a shot as well. My druid is languishing at 71, and I could easily go feral on her. I was a feral druid in TBC, and druids at the time felt very similar to how warriors play. My DK is only logged on for cutting gems, and I could grind some T9 tanking gear for her. But I don’t know about that yet, because I know DKs still get a lot of crap in PUGs. We shall see.
• trying to learn how not to be an officer – yeah yeah, I stepped down a while ago, as a combination of too much drama regarding a guild we used to be friends with, and general burnout. I just fear I am totally unable to let go. I still lead raids, I set up raid groups for the weekly quest every week, and I am dying to get things done, when it’s not really my job anymore. So either I will learn to let go, which would be awesome, or I might beg for them to take me back.
• learning how to play without my SO – my partner decided to call it quits with WoW in February. We had played WoW together since September 2005, and we were officers together from summer 2006 until she stepped down last year. Our Yogg-Saron kill was her last raid. Funny how something like this matters, but it does. The game has lost some of its shine, even though I still play a lot and we sometimes even butt heads because she’s bored when I raid. It was the two of us who busted our asses to make DotH start raiding in TBC. She inspired me to be a healer to heal her druid. I miss playing with. I miss talking about the game with her. I miss her min-maxing on her warlock when WoW was not boring to her. I wish there was a way I could magically find her some fun activity in WoW again. I miss you, Q.

So there you have it, the digest version. If you want to hear a lot of blabbering, you should follow me on Twitter. I should warn you all, I can get very ranting there. My guild has had some minor amounts of drama lately, usually caused by my German raging.

I also have a Formspring set up, a way that you can ask me anything, anonymously or not, and in the next couple of days I will go through my queue of questions I still have up. Feel free to ask me more!

Tomorrow, I will post about my impressions as tank in ICC-10, up to Festergut. It’s going to be a rant, be warned, but maybe that’ll entertain some of you.

A special thanks to all the concerned commenters and readers who sent e-mail. I am still here, and it feels good that I was missed. I am here to stay. Prot warrior for life!