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.

For those of you who have read the blog for awhile, you will recognize the “blog azeroth” prepend too today’s topic.  For everyone else, Blog Azeroth is an amazing resource for the “WoW Blogosphere”, where various bloggers can meet and share ideas.  One of the constructs of the website is the “shared topic”.  The general idea is that multiple bloggers write on the same topic.  I’ve done a few in the past, but always horribly past the “due date”.

The topic chosen for today is from Spinks over at Spinksville.  Inspired by a post on massively, the basic idea is to take your favorite quest, questline or zone and deconstruct it telling everyone why you love it so much.  I can’t say I will be near as successful as she was, but I am going to try anyway.

Westfall needs Heroes

  I remember back in 2004, I got my first taste of the wow crack with the File Planet sponsored “Stress Test” weekend.  I had been playing City of Heroes at the time, and managed to get into the test with a good number of my cadre of friends.  Initially I had rolled a Tauren Warrior by myself, and while enjoyable, the Mulgore area was thoroughly uninspiring to me.  When I joined with my other gamer friends, we decided to roll humans, since most everyone could find a class they wanted to play there.

Elwynn Forest was a good deal more interesting and we quickly progressed through the starter quests.  Before long we were fighting a curious band of thugs known as the Defias.  The storyline surrounding them was pretty scant but I definitely thought they were a cool villain.  Everyone needs a brotherhood of evil to foil their plans, and as we moved through the newbie quests we started to see some glimmers of an emerging plotline.

A Kingdom in Need

As soon as you cross the bridge from Elwynn into Westfall you are presented with the start of the zones central conflict.  Ahead of you, curiously at the side of the road are Farmer Furlbrow, his wife, and his their horse Blanchy.  Some thugs have overrun their farm, and in the rush to escape with their lives they forgot their most prized heirloom.  Being the consummate hero that you are, you offer to help them out in their struggle.

Low and behold, the “thugs” ransacking their farm house are none other than the Defias brotherhood you had seen so many of in Elwynn.  After making short work of the thieves and recovering the valuables, the good farmer suggests that you look up the militia at Sentinel hill.  On your way across the land, you encounter more farmers that tell similar tales.  It seems that Westfall is not only blighted with a horrible drought but also besieged by the mysterious Defias.

The People’s Militia

When you reach sentinel hill you are told the tale of the people’s militia by their leader Gryan Stoutmantle.  It seems that Westfall is not receiving much help from Stormwind, and quickly enlists you to help him investigate the activities at several nearby mines.  It seems that not only are the Defias pushing back the farmers, but they are also tunneling deep into the earth with the help of the local tribes of kobolds.

You had encountered Hogger the leader of the river paw Gnolls back in Elwynn and as a result knew the fury brutes were nothing to be trifled with.  If the Defias and Gnolls were in fact working in coordination it meant great trouble for the struggling farmers.  After a few skirmishes, Gryan realizes that the Defias are not a band of cutthroats but instead a serious organization.  He determines that you must get to the bottom of this threat.

In Search of the Leader

Gryan sends through Elwynn to Redridge and the town of Lakeshire, where he knows a man called Wiley the Black can help you infiltrate the Defias.  Wiley lets slip that the Stonemasons guild might have something to do with the organization. Upon returning to Westfall, Gryan sends you off again to verify this information with Mathias Shaw, the head of SI:7.

While talking with Shaw you find out that the Stonemasons’ Guild was run by a man named Edwin VanCleef. VanCleef was responsible for rebuilding Stormwind after the orcs razed it in the First War. Apparently, VanCleef and his men were unhappy with their treatment by the King after the reconstruction was complete.  This information fills in a few pieces of the puzzle.

Kill The Messenger

Once you arrive at Sentinel Hill, it is quickly determined that you must find the location of the Defias hideout.  Gryan has scout reports that a Messenger has been seen on the roads between Moonbrook, the Gold Coast Quarry and the Jangolode mine; all of which were locations of heavy defias activity.  The militia asks you to obtain the message he is carrying at all costs.

The message is firm proof that VanCleef is in charge of the brotherhood, and this escalates the need to find their base of operation.  With a stroke of luck Militia operatives caught a Defias thief trying to steal Farmer Saldean’s wagon.  The brigand has offered to lead you to the Defias hideout, in exchange for sparing his life.

You protect the traitor as he leads you along the roadways of Westfall, heading to Moonbrook.  You are ambushed many times by his former allies trying to keep him from revealing the truth.  After fighting your way into the Defias enclave of Moonbrook, he shows you to the entrance to a series of interlinking caverns known only as The Deadmines.

Assassinate VanCleef

You gather with you some stalwart allies and make your way inside the Deadmines.  As you climb through an intricate series of mine shafts, you find the secret entrance to the hideout.  Inside you face greater resistance in form of defias, miners, goblins, and gnolls.  You fight your way through mine shafts, a goblin foundry, and into a great underground dock complete with a warship.

Throughout the battle you have to fight your way past a number of members of the Defias brotherhood.  Rhahk’Zor the Ogre and his two lieutenants guard the first passage.  Next you are confronted by Sneed and his Goblin Shredder, that tries to make mulch of you.  In the foundry, the master engineer Gilnid turns the fire of his forge against you.  After using gunpowder to blow your way into the docks, you are confronted by Mr. Smite, who attempts to overpower you with his mastery of weapons.

Once on board the ship, you must fight your way past tiers of pirates.  Even Cookie the ships cook, tries to flatten you with his rolling pin.  As you mount the top of the ship, you are confronted by Captain Greenskin and his retinue, who attempt to skewer you with the harpoons.  All of this leading to the top deck, where the mysterious Edwin VanCleef stands awaiting your challenge.

Edwin VanCleef is a very formidable fighter in his own right, as his attacks quickly put your party on the defensive.  Just as you regain your footing and begin to cut through his offensive, you are ambushed by more Defias rogues.  You can’t really expect the leader of a crime syndicate to fight fair after all.  Though the battle is tough, and it taxes your skills, you and your allies persevere and laying before you is the corpse of leader of the brotherhood.

The Beauty of Westfall

This was the questline, that plain and simple, hooked me on the game.  Prior to wow, you had never really seen this level of intricacy and storytelling.  The game pioneered making quest lines both easy to find, and engaging at the same time.  In Everquest, you had to dig with obsessive fervor to be able to find a series of quests and complete it.  But here for the first time, quests evolved themselves in a very organic way.

The Westfall storyline is basically every good pen and paper adventure, distilled to its purest essence, and recast in MMO form.  Your character is drawn into the conflict slowly, and through the series of the quests you are given foreshadowing of the events that are to come.  Each quest giving you a piece of the puzzle leading up to the final reward.  The first alliance dungeon, The Deadmines.

Deadmines in itself was groundbreaking as well.  This was the first time in an MMO I had seen such amazing scripted events.  Each boss unlocked a piece of the dungeon, with its own flavor, giving you access to something new.  My jaw literally hit the floor the first time I aggro’d the ogre boss, and he announced “VanCleef pay big for your head!”.

Later when you collect gunpowder and use it to blow open the door to the docks.  This was a level of interactivity that simply did not exist prior to wow.  Players who were new to the MMO genre really missed the sense of amazement that all of us felt, seeing this content for the first time.  This was truly ground breaking stuff, giving the player a level of immersion into the storyline that we had never really had before.

Improved by Never Replaced

Next to some of the newer content, the Westfall series seems dated.  But in my heart it will always have a special place.  It was the first time I was given a glimpse of what this game could truly deliver, and was the dealer giving me my first real hit of crack.  After playing that first stress test weekend, City of Heroes no longer felt as shiny as it once had.  The bar had been raised, and nothing short of World of Warcraft was going to scratch the itch I now had.

I’ve recently started a new warlock, and while Goldshire is a wretched hive of scum and villainy on a role-playing server, I am dealing with it in order to experience Westfall again for the first time in 3 years.  There is almost a certain amount of giddiness I have at the thought of playing my way progressively through the Westfall quest lines once more.  I might even go so far as to pug my way through the Deadmines, trying to experience all the content as it was intended.

Westfall was to my Warcraft career, as the Dungeons and Dragons boxed set was to my role-playing experience, or Pong was to my video gaming history.  As the game ages and matures, I hope they can keep recapturing the magic of the Defias brotherhood.  With Wrath of the Lich King they seem to have taken the art of MMO storytelling to a new level, and they gave us some equally epic quest lines like the Wrathgate storyline.  This gives me great hope for what the future will bring.  But for me…

…It All Started With Westfall

It’s been a pretty crazy week here, so many of my routines have gone by the wayside including regularly checking Google analytics.  I find that website completely fascinating, and I enjoy seeing exactly where my readers are coming from.  I think its amazing that I have multiple users reading my page in Thailand, Qatar, Malta, some hits from Iraq, and 3 users from the Isle of Guernsey, that until today I didn’t even know existed.  So in the daze of this ending week I completely missed the fact that at some point on Tuesday evening I passed the 10,000 unique visitors mark.

I am completely amazed that in just a few days over a month I have been able to bring that many people to read my content.  I am feeling validated on one hand, but on the other hand extremely expose considering I have had that many people digging around in my head.  For the most part, my blog entries are my stream of consciousness, and expound upon thoughts and ideas I have built over the last five years playing the World of Warcraft.  Regardless of the website showing some signs of success, I still feel very amateur and am still “finding my voice”.

I realize that a good deal of the readership came during the wowinsider bump, but each day I keep getting linked from more high quality blogs, and more regular readers.  I want to throw out a blanket thank you to every one of my readers for the support they have shown.  Also I want to thank the wow blogging community for quickly accepting me into their numbers.  Blog Azeroth has been a great community with tons of good ideas, helpful tips and constructive criticism.

Thanks for the Continued Support