It’s that time again, another Tuesday, or to WoW aficionados…  maintenance day.  The day where little boys and girls sit by the warm glow of their screens cautiously watching for the sign to enter Azeroth once more.  For the Duranubs, it is another day spent wondering whether or not the server will be stable enough to raid.  For me personally sitting here trying to prepare for the impending disappointment brought by Titanguard  once more being fickle.  I am convinced that this will be one more in the long line of things that refused to drop: Shoulderguards of the Bold, Barbed Choker of Discipline, and Destroyer Shoulderguards.  It is a pattern…  certain pieces of gear hate me with deep dark brooding passion.

Bowing to peer pressure

Well its not so much, peer pressure, but I still feel like I am somewhat jumping on the bandwagon.  It started with Larisa moving from pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com to pinkpigtailinn.com, and then continued with Ariedan moving from wordywarrior.wordpress.com to wordywarrior.com.  It seemed like most of my favorite blogs were abandoning their cheap/free subdomains for the sake of a real domain name.  In a blatant act of following the leaders, I did a quick search and sure enough, Aggronaut.com was in fact available.

I snatched it up as quickly as I could rifle through my wallet for my credit card.  I have in fact had the domain for a few weeks now, but was waiting to make sure that my google analytics was in fact wired correctly and various other house keeping details.  So from this point on, both the original Aggronaut.housestalwart.com and Aggronaut.com resolve to the same location.  Thanks to everyone who has been reading this blog and making it so surprisingly popular.  Had I not gotten the overwhelming support, I don’t think I would have ever “ponied up” for the “real” domain name.

Life and Limb

Ysinnia has been an active support of me and my dumb actions for going on six years.  She helped me to found House Stalwart, acted as a gateway drug into heavy raiding, taught me to love and respect the power of the dwarven priest, and has been a great friend all along the way.  Though she has shifted in and out of the mix due to real life responsibilities she’s always been a great player.  When Burning Crusade was released, she shifted from her dwarven priest to her druid, and with the release of Wrath became one of the best Trees I know.

A few days ago, I added her new endevour to my blogroll, but haven’t really had time to give her a proper plug.  She is currently working on the Limb From Limb druid blog, in which she covers the life and times of a more casual player in wow.  We miss her horribly in Duranub, but real life has forced her to take a step away from the rhythm of the raid life.  She’s hopelessly addicted to the “Get That Achievement” game on the Achievements forum.  While I think she is nuts sometimes for it, she apparently enjoys being made to grind achievements by strangers.

Mostly I added that part in to fluster her, but I think it is a cool source of inspiration.  Limb from Limb is shaping up to be a good blog, and I highly suggest adding it to your RSS feed.  Great player, great sense of humor…  you just can’t go wrong.

Pathfinder

Every so often I write something that might be a bit more than just one of my random brain dumps.  When this rare event happens, it becomes a sort of guide that can be referred back to.  Stealing a page from the book of RollingHots,  I have decided it might be prudent to create a guides page so that it is easier for new folks to find these rare nuggets of wisdom, or at least not horribleness.  If you notice at the top of the site, there is a new link entitled…  wait for it…   Guides.

It took me hours to think that name up.  I hope people find it even mildly useful.  The real reason behind this is that I am working on a new guide for the site.  At the start of burning crusade I found that the groups were not coming as frequently as I wanted them to, so I set out to learn the ancient art of how to pull together a group from out of thin air.  The resulting guide was posted for my guild, and I am in the process of updating it to be more sane.  Hopefully in the next few days I will get it posted on the site.

A Final Thought:  Normalize Repair Bills

In closing I want to through something out there.  I think the time has come for blizzard to seriously consider normalizing the cost of repair bills for plate, mail, leather and cloth.  Last Sunday, I ran Naxxramas with my boomkin.  At one point during the run, I looked down and noticed that all my gear was in the red, so I flew over to Wintergarde keep to repair.  I was expecting the worst, because I am used to the plate repair bills…  and was shocked at a full epic repair bill for the Naxx leather gear I was wearing was only 35 gold.

This figure may or may not seem normal to you, but I will tell you that on Belghast, that is less than two deaths worth of repair bills.  Even on a good night of raiding, I am dropping over 100g in repairs alone.  My worst night ever that figure climbed up to roughly 300g, and in truth it was a little bit over that.  I simply cannot make enough money each week to cover 4 nights of raiding on my warrior.  Honestly this is the point at which blizzard needs to either adjust quest rewards to compensate the difference in armor classes, or look at maybe finally normalizing the costs.

In the old world, the basic theory was this.  Plate classes had the least reagents to buy, so as a result they had the highest cost of repair to normalize things so that each class had to pay out roughly the same cost for a night of raiding.  However, as gear has increased, the costs of reagents have not increased to a level to keep up with the astronomical repair bills that most main tanks have each night.  I very literally watch my gold reserves draining every single night, and it is very hard not to do the math in your head.

You start to calculate, how many more weeks can you afford to continue to raid.  I’ve had friends help me out with money, but in truth this only serves to delay the inevitable point at which I literally run out of money.  The time has come for blizzard to finally address the disparity in the “cost of living” for the various classes.  So I ask you my readers, what are your thoughts?  Religiously grinding daily quests are not the answer, this simply adds more workload to an already overworked player.  We should not have to work a “second job” just to be able to afford to raid. 

Basically I feel like general motors, looking to blizzard to bail me out

I promise that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.  Quite honestly, as you can probably tell if you are a longtime reader I have been going through a bit of a rough spot.  My posts have become less informative and more emotional over the last few weeks.  This week many things seemed to come to a head and I just flat out exploded on some unintended victims.  While sorting through the rubble I came to the decision point that I needed to take a much needed break.

Life in the Wasteland

So I spent most of the weekend determined not to log into WoW, and for the most part this was successful.  I tanked one minor runs with my closest friends, but otherwise only logged in to do the fishing daily a few times.  I have to say the break was pretty revitalizing.  I needed time away from the politics and emotions that being a guild and raid leader tend to bring to the surface.

Where did I spend my time you might ask yourself?  I aimlessly roamed the capitol wasteland.  I had honestly never really devoted enough time to the game Fallout 3, and used this weekend as a chance to get hopelessly addicted to it.  I was a huge fan of the two prequels by Black Isle, and can still easily replay them with the full amount of enjoyment I did the first time around.

I was more than a bit skeptical about the titles move into the world of three dimensions, but after a few hours the game “felt” like the original 2d click to move adventures.  Granted I am not playing the game like I am “supposed to” in a very quest centric style.  Honestly the quests DO feel different, and I think this is a lot of the issue many of the fallout diehards had with the game.  However if you are like me and just want to equip some gear, and roam the wastelands finding whatever you can along the way, the game plays EXACTLY like the original.

This is my Boomstick

I am not sure what it is about the shotgun, but for some reason this is the weapon I rely on in ALL games.  It doesn’t matter if I am playing Doom, Quake, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, or in this case Fallout 3…  I always end up gravitating towards the shotgun and the glory of one shot kills.  I have laser rifles, sub machine guns, and assault rifles in my inventory and more than enough ammo to choke a mule…  but at the end of the day the ONLY weapon I care about is the trusty combat shotgun, or currently the rare upgrade…  The Terrible Shotgun.

I get perverse pleasure as I draw a bead on a radroach scurrying its way across the floor, and with a single catastrophic shot cause it to explode in a juicy fountain of vitreous. I find that blowing up ants in the many infested buildings is an equally disturbing pleasure for me, as well as the ever present headshot.  I find it bizarre that blowing off a Protectron head exposes something that looks much the same as blood and guts.   I guess part of me just finds it so appealing to blow things to bits with such a relatively simple weapon.  Some previous co-workers can attest to the annoyance of my addiction to this weapon, in our lunch and after work SoF2 matches (which I might add is still probably my favorite LAN game).

Ground Control to Major Tom

Sunday evening my space capsule had a forced re-entry as I had planned to lead a 25 man Naxxramas for alts, under geared guildies, and friends of the guild.  This was without a doubt the most horrendous mindfuck I have dealt with in awhile.  I don’t want the people who participated to think that I was meaning the raid, because it went really well.  I am meaning being pulled back into raid leader role, on a character I had not really played for two weeks, while being barraged by 10-15 tells at a time with each and every person having a valid question or need of me.  To go from the pleasant cocoon of non-interaction that I had wrapped myself in all weekend long, to the stark reality that every single member of the raid needed some of my attention was more than a bit of a culture shock.

We managed to down 3 wings and 2 bosses in the time allotted.  I feel that overall this was a pretty smooth run giving the facts that we had several periods of afk-ness, and scraping around to find extras to fill holes as people needed to leave.  We had more than our share of issues with the Death knight wing.  Most of this really comes from the fact that the assembled group represented 4 different 25 man naxx raids, with 4 different sets of strategies.  In my reeling mind, I was doing a less than adequate job of explaining our intentions.  So many of the fights in that wing particularly took a few attempts for us to come to a compromise as to the method we would handle each boss.

The real win of the night however is the fact that we only walked away with 4 Abyss Crystals.  That means that many items found new homes in much needed main and offspec sets.  Any night you down a good number of bosses, see a lot of loot, and very few of the pieces go to DE is a massive win in my book.  It helps to justify the fact that we did in fact have a need for a Naxxramas 25 man run.  In the case of Duranub/Stalwart, we have been in need of some fresh blood, but the majority of our good prospects were not geared well enough to be able to perform adequately in Ulduar.  It was my hope that by running a few weeks of this, that we would manage to fill out the gear sets of these players.

Getting Council-ed

Since the events that lead me to take a break happened Thursday evening during our raid, and I never got up the “oomph” to make a post Friday, I missed my normal Thursday night raid synopsis post.  We started the evening doing a little bit of cleanup, and going after Razorscale.  In stark contrast to last week, we pulled off a near flawless victory, with the only mishaps happening during the very tail end of the fight.  It was just a combination of me with too many debuffs, and I believe healers transitioning to the second tank before he had aggro.  However this bobble happened at 10% and really had little effect on the overall outcome of the night.

We proceeded on to the Assembly of Iron, otherwise known by almost everyone as the Iron Council (blame black temple and the Illidari Council).  On our first attempt we made some solid progress getting Steelbreaker down to under 60%, which made me very hopeful for our shots at downing the encounter.  We made some adjustments, and over the course of 3 more attempts we managed to push our way through Steelbreaker, and down Molgeim and Brundir as well.  Other than Flame Leviathan this was without a doubt our fasted time to learn a new encounter.  I don’t want to jinx us, but after the pure horribleness that was weeks 4 and 5, week 6 redeemed the raid as a whole and I think maybe signals us finally being back on our game.

 

will add loot later – since our lootmaster neglected to upload the file and my memory is crap this morning

More Indestructible

Iron Council also managed to drop us our 6th Runed Orb, and in the hopes of increasing my general “not dying-ness”, and the fact that I put in the first request…  they went to craft the insane new tanking belt.  During one of my trips into wow to do the daily fishing quest I managed to catch one of the crafters on Argent Dawn that actually have the pattern (thanks Riotus).  Special thanks go to all the people I pinged in the guild to do titansteel transmutes, and Rylacus who is freakin amazing for helping me with half of the bars I needed to craft the final product.  I love you man, and I totally DON’T want your Bud Light.

Indestructible Plate Girdle with 3x Solid Sky Sapphire for max stamina

Hopefully the week ahead will go smoothly, and I will be able to maintain the “better” mindset that a weekend of NOT playing Warcraft awarded me.  For anyone that I have had an unnaturally short fuse with these last few months, I want to post a very public apology.  I am hoping that the fact that I realize how much of an asshole I have been lately, and taking a bit of a break, will allow me to back down from the Raid Nazi mode I have been slipping into.

I couldn’t wish for a better group to raid with

Last night in Duranub it was a mixed bag, as is often with the night patches are released.  We pulled together the raid with plenty of time to spare and actually had to turn people away for the first time in awhile.  Our push to recruit, along with some of our less than regular raiders showing up last night forced a quite a few people to be left out.  For the folks riding the bench, it was probably a pretty horrible night, but for the health of the raid as a whole it was a good thing.  The officer doing invites kept track of the players who were ready and willing, but without room, so we will get them worked into a run as soon as possible.

Murphy’s Law of Patch Day

The shortened version of what I am coining, Murphy’s Law  of Patch day states that if a patch is applied to the client or server, Argent Dawn will eventually go down.  In the case of last night, we got a royal flush of horribleness.  The server was up and seemingly stable, but around 8pm server time lag started setting in.  Was there a problem introduced with the patch?  No…  Blackrock was down.

For those of you not familiar with the epic Argent Dawn versus Blackrock battle, the short of it is that the populace of the Blackrock PVP server finds it amazingly fun to try its best to crash our server when theirs is down.  This childish act started shortly after the release of the game and continues today as their version of a “proud tradition”.  While Blackrock is down our cities are flooded with an army of gnomes spamming memorable phrases like “Poop comes from the butt”.  Other piece of information you need to know is that without a doubt, Argent Dawn has the most lazy GMs of any server.

All of this fun aside, we managed to get all our members through the 500 player queue without much effort and prepped to start the Flame Leviathan event.  Clearly things were moving entirely too smoothly for a patch day.  Mere seconds away from us talking to Brann to start up the event, we saw  a dreaded server announcement come across our chat windows.  Yes, Argent Dawn would be restarting in 15 minutes.  So we sat there twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the server to do its business and let us back in to raid.

Thirty minutes later, we finally pushed out way back into the game and started out raid.  Considering we only raid 2 1/2 hours per night, and it took us a bit to get a few healers successfully through the queue we were standing on an hour and 45 minutes left to make some progress.  We pushed through Leviathan like normal and got a few of our members the Heroic: Shutout achievement.  I myself finally managed to finish Heroic: Three Car Garage.  I finally entered the age of modern tanking weapons Monday, when a Stoneguard dropped for us, and I figured that the act of putting Blade Ward on it would surely make the Titanguard finally drop.  Clearly Ulduar saw through my ruse.

Prosthetic Nipple of Doom

We switched up strategies on XT a bit, and after a few attempts managed to down him rather easily.  This allowed us to push on to Kologarn and put in some serious time on him.  Last week we had gotten close, managing to get him to around 10% during one of those slow wipes that happens while learning new content.  Had we around thirty minutes more I think we would haves sealed the deal last Thursday.  However we had to call it and set our sights for him this week.

From out of nowhere, success came back to be our friends.  On our second “true” attempt of the night we managed to pull out a win to the big dumb giant.  Also…  I am convinced that it is not a clasp but a prosthetic nipple, because the lost his real nipple in the war.  It’s an inside joke.

Shoulderpads of the Monolith – Malice – Leggings of the Stoneweaver

 

Dumb and Dumberer

I said earlier that we downed Kolo on our second “true” try of the evening.  One of the attempts featured what was quite possibly the dumbest move I have ever witnessed a player do on a raid.  We were prepping to pull kologarn and over the officer channel I hear one of our mages saying, make sure to click off bunny.  I thought nothing of it, because last I looked down everything was normal.  I tend to play zoomed out at maximum range, and right before pulling Kologarn I ask for the raid to group up on the yellow band at the edge of the room as a sign of readiness.

So I fire my incoming macro, and start running towards the boss only to realize a few seconds later that I in fact was one of the players who had the bunny costume cast on me.  So as I am moving towards the boss with the raid following behind me, I am quickly trying to find the buff and click it off and at the same time screaming a string of expletives over ventrilo at whoever the dumbass it was who thought it was cleaver to apply the buff to the main tank.

For those of you who were not familiar with this effect, the bunny costume is yet another effect that prohibits you from using any abilities while the costume is in place.  So here I stand, the main tank rushing headlong into an almost certain wipe.  We attempt to hold things together, but I am furious beyond words.  Casting this effect in a raid is the single stupidest thing that I have ever seen a player do.  I never in a million years thought that we as a raid would have to put in place a rule to prohibit the use of wands.

To make matters worse, ventrilo was dead silent.  No one was fessing up to doing this or offering any apology.  This is one of those situations where if a player had stepped up to the plate, and offered an apology, it would have faded quickly, but the fact that we had to parse the logs to track down who did it, means that we will be taking punitive actions.  I thought we were adults, but apparently some of our members don’t take progression seriously.

All that said, we managed to still pull out the win and everyone came together in the end.  But that player owes the entire raid a repair bill, and hopefully they think that over carefully the next time they get the grand idea to do something that phenomenally stupid.  As a result we will be adding yet another rule to our stack along side the no trains and dance trinket, put in place only for the sake of mitigating idiocy.

Another joins the fray

Much like Ariedan’s Wordy Warrior inspired this blog, apparently I have in turn inspired one of my guild mates to start his own blog.  Gweninu is a longtime member of the guild, raid, and by no small measure a great hunter.  The blog is titled Out of Ammo and features hunter issues and much like this one, his adventures in WoW.  So far its shaping up to be a great little blog and I highly suggest you guys check it out as well.

I was approached this morning by a friend of mine that runs the druid healing blog, Rolling Hots.  Sylly had this brilliant idea, to interview a bunch of different tanks from different classes and report on her findings.  The goal of the project is to help healers better understand the issues that the different tanks have to deal with and as a result better adjust their healing to fit each class.  So today I am posting her questions and my answers here on my blog.  It is a bit unusual but I was impressed with project.

The Prompt

Dear Tanks,

Thank you so much for your willingness to take the time to answer some
questions for me about tanking.  I intend to use answers from each of you
for a series of posts on my blog intended to educate myself and my readers
about how it is that you do what you do, and how we might best be able to
help you to get it done.

Some quick instructions.  If you are a blogger, there is a question where
you can put your blog information and I will be most happy to link back to
your site with your answers.  If you play more than one tanking class,
please answer the questions twice, once for each tanking class.  Answer
only the questions you are interested in responding to, although the more
answers the better!  You will find the full list of questions below.
Please respond to this email with your numbered answers.  Your generosity
with this project is very much appreciated!

Best,
Sylly

The Questionnaire

1.  Your name?

Belghast (Mark Temple)

 

2.  Your blog information if you have one?

Tales of the Aggronaut (http://www.aggronaut.com)

 

3.  What tanking class do you play?

Protection Warrior – I leveled from 1-80 as prot spec.  Yes I am mental…

 

4.  Can you give an overview of the tanking style and abilities of your

class?  How do you get the job done?  You can be as specific or general as

you’d like, but remember your audience is a bunch of healers, so basic is

good here.

Warriors are to tanking like priests are to healing.  They tend to be the jack of all trades tank.  In the past AOE tanking was a true challenge for the class, with our only real option spamming tab and sunder/devastate to hold aggro on multiple targets.  The tail end of burning crusade and the 3.0 patch both redefined the class greatly giving us a good number of ways to hold aggro on multiple targets. 

The true strength of a warrior is the large number of "oh shit" buttons we have.  A good warrior keeps these in reserve and uses them to pad spikes in damage, and periods where healing drops out.  A properly geared warrior tends to have a very predictable pattern of damage intake.  There are several abilities we have to help the healers keep us vertical.

Last Stand
In our bag of tricks we have Last Stand which acts as a temporary increase in our hit point pool, giving us that extra bit of life to survive a barrage of attacks.  The cool down is 3 minutes, but if glyphed you can shave it down to 2.

Enraged Regeneration
This acts as a heal over time giving us back 30% of our total health over the course of 10 seconds. This cool down is 3 minutes.

Shield Block
Shield Block used to be our bread and butter ability to lower our damage intake, but 3.0 saw this ability severely nerfed.  This ability increases out block chance by 100% for 10 seconds.  The dynamic used to be considerably different and it allowed us to keep it up at all times, but now it sits on a 1 minute cool down.  Most warriors hold this in reserve as a minor "panic" button.

Shield Wall
This is the king of the panic buttons.  When used it reduces all damage taken by 60% for 12 seconds.  This ability is by far our best way to curb incoming damage, but it also comes with the longest cool down of 5 minutes.  If talented and glyphed however you can get a version of the ability that only reduces 40% of the incoming damage but is usable every 2 minutes.

Thunderclap
While not an panic button, this is an ability warriors can use to lower incoming damage.  It reduced the attack speed of mobs by 10%, and if talented by 20%.  This greatly reduces the amount of incoming damage and if possible should be kept up at all times.

Demoralizing Shout
This ability reduces the attack power of mobs by 410.  Along with thunderclap it is a good way to reduce the incoming damage the tank receives.

5.  What are your class’s strengths in comparison to other tanking classes

in your opinion?  Your weaknesses?

The lines between the tanking classes have been greatly marginalized, but there are a number of strengths the warrior has.  Firstly we have the most panic buttons of any tanking class.  If properly used this can give us a greater freedom to recover from situations where the damage is either sporadic or unpredictable.  On top of this thunderclap and demoralizing shout give us a solid way to reduce the amount of incoming damage from mobs.  Commanding Shout gives us a strong buff to increase the total hit points of the raid.  Charge gives us a way to move from target to target in battle quickly.  Intervene gives us a strong method of reducing the damage taken by a single target, and Vigilance causes one player in the raid to have their total aggro generation reduced. 

The warrior is the jack of all trades.  They have very solid single target aggro generation, and the ability if talented and glyphed correctly to have some formidable AOE tanking ability.  I personally run dual protection talent specs in order to maximize this potential.  One of my specializations is built to take advantage of all of the AOE tanking tricks we have.  The other set of talents is designed to give me a 2 minute shield wall and last stand and all of the possible survival tricks I can get.

Our greatest weakness is that we often times have trouble with rage starvation.  In order to use our abilities we need to get hit, and as we get better gear we are getting hit less often.  This causes our total rage incoming to drop massively.  While progression content will always give us the ability to keep a nearly full rage bar, as we move back into a tier below our gear or lower we start having issues holding aggro because we are quite literally starved for rage.  My secondary spec has a few tricks to offset this problem, but for a warrior with a single protection spec geared towards progression content they will have trouble handling the lowered rage that older content gives us. 

If your group is patient and gives the warrior plenty of time to acquire aggro then there is rarely an issue.  However it is important to note as healers that on trash and older content it is important not to front load your heals too much.  You can quickly overtake the warrior in aggro generation with your healing, especially if as a druid you drop all of your HoTs on the target at the same time.  We ride a thin line between too much rage and none at all.

6.  How would you characterize your own relationship with your healers

during game play?

I feel the warrior more than the other tanking classes has a symbiotic relationship with the healer.  Our healers are our lifeline, and when our constant string of healing is broken we can only do so much to stay vertical.  As a warrior, our panic button give us the ability to stay up through bad situations, and as a result we need to communicate regularly with our healing staff.  When we use last stand it is important to let the healers know, because visually it will appear that the heals are no longer landing for as much health since we temporarily have our health increased.  If we use shield wall, it lets the healers know they 12 seconds to catch up on healing and throw out any critical group heals.

Since we have so many gearing options available to us, we can tweak our gear to make ourselves fit the healing styles of the raid as a whole.  Balancing mitigation and avoidance often times makes you easier to predicatively heal, and as a result more conducive for healing styles like that of the druid.  However you can also stack avoidance for those fights where you know your health bar is going to ping pong anyways, making you the ideal candidate for a spam healer like a paladin or a disc priest.  It is very important for the warrior to know what kind of healing he will be receiving so that he can adjust accordingly.

7.  Under what circumstances should healers be paying special attention to

your class?  When are you most vulnerable? (i.e. if a certain tanking

ability fails, during melee/spell damage spikes, etc.)

Warriors are weaker than most classes to incoming spell damage.  There is only one talent that can really offer any sense of protection against spell damage, and the majority of boss attacks are immune to spell reflection.  So this gives us a chink in our armor, and in scenarios where a large frontal breath is going to be a regular occurrence the healers are going to need to time heals at the beginning of the breath so they land and top back off the tank in preparation for the next big hit.

Movement is another weak phase for the warrior.  If the warrior is not skilled in strafing and mob placement, he can easily expose his backside to the boss.  Warrior avoidance and mitigation is a purely frontal ability, so when we need to turn our back to the boss we are losing the majority of our damage reduction.  Stuns will also leave us vulnerable in much the same way.  As a healer if the tank is running away from a mob, or stunned you should expect his damage to increase by as much as 60%.

8.  What is your experience with being healed by Restoration Druids?  Is

it a healing class that you enjoy working with?  Why or why not?

The predictability of the way a warrior takes damage often makes it an opportune scenario for druid healing.  The warrior needs a steady stream of healing, and druid hots are an ideal way to receive this.  In the case where the warrior is the main tank, it is ideal to mix druid healing to cover a baseless of heals per second, with that of a disc priest of holy paladin to cover the spike damage intake.  Druids are the perfect additive healer, in that they help to pad the incoming damage with a predictable stream of health.

9.  Can you give one strong piece of advice for a healer in your group or

raid?

The key to warrior healing seems to be a steady stream of healing.  On bosses like kologarn where we are taking hits for upwards of 20k health, it is very easy to get behind the curve when trying to reactively heal fights.  However through the steady application of predictive heals, the warrior damage in take can be smoothed out so that you only occasionally have to throw a big heal to top off.  Get to know your warriors, each one has a different play style and as a result a different pattern of damage.  Each one however should be predictable.  Encourage your warriors to tell you when they are using panic buttons, so that you can adjust accordingly.

10.  How deep is your understanding of how different healing classes work?

Do you think it would help your game play if you knew more?
 

I’ve played a healadin and a resto druid, but in truth my greatest understanding of healing comes from being healed by various classes.  When you are the main tank you can tell a difference in the way your health bar moves depending on who is healing you.  I’ve always big a big fan of priest healing, so I tend to be biased in that direction.  However with the 3.0 patch the resto ability to keep up with large hits was greatly increased, and as a result I enjoy being healed by a tree equally well.  Paladin healing is still great for its pure spammy nature, but in general I prefer the more surgical healing style of a druid or a priest.  Shaman seem generally ineffective as a single target main tank healer, so as a result we try and push them more into a role of group healing.

11.  Is there anything you’d like to add?

I’m hoping some of the things I have said prove helpful to your readers.  I think this is a great topic, and look forward to seeing the results.