Last night I bucked some of the conventional wisdom and tried another one of my “bel” builds for tanking.  For some reason I have never had much luck with the canned builds. They have never really produced the results I would have expected, because I guess in many ways they don’t fit my play style.  Many in Duranub can remember the colossal failure that a deep wounds build was for me.

I have heard for years that unbridled wrath has no place in a tanking build, let alone a tanking build of a main tank.  This morning I did some investigating by looking at last nights WWS parses.  Over the course of the night I gained nearly 3 times the rage from Unbridled Wrath that I did from Shield Specialization.  To me that is pretty phenomenal. 

I think primarily what is happening here is that roughly 60% of all attacks are avoided completely.  So more attacks are missing me completely than are being blocked.  So what this is allowing me to do is have a constant font of rage coming in from my attacks.  Thanks to the revenge glyph I am getting a ton of free heroic strikes, which in turn increase my number of attacks spinning the random generator for firing unbridled wrath…  which is turned into rage that I can use for shield slam, cleave, thunderclap, shockwave etc.

So far I am digging the build quite a bit.  While it is not optimal based on the math presented by Tankspot/Elitist Jerks it fits my play style.  So far it works equally well for 5/10/25 man content.  Now we have yet to poke our heads into ulduar, so I might be retracting my praise shortly, but for now I am rather happy.

Yesterday brought us the 3.1.1 patch and with it a spec reset.  I can only guess that this was to help clear out some of the disappearing talent issues players had been having.  Always in the past a free respec was a welcome thing.  However in the world of dual speccing this turns out to be a pain in the ass.

I spent a good chunk of my evening reapplying 2 specs each for 3 different characters, for a total of 6 rapid fire respecs.  Luckily for me I had all of my specs saved in my email box.  Inside of gmail I have a label called “Notes to Myself” which I use to email things I might find useful later.  Habitually this has been the storage bin for all my spec ideas.

The only thing that kept me from pulling my hair out is that Talented has been fixed to apply imports from WoWhead.  So For the most part I could just cut and paste my spec urls into the Talented UI and then hit apply.  Granted in the case of my Boomkin spec this caused me to reapply the spec I had missing typhoon.  I had a “where the hell is typhoon” while in the middle of fighting a mob, only to remember that my earlier spec design had starfall not typhoon.

Okay I think for the most part that the blog is in it’s mostly final state.  I added the amazing Chibi Belghast to the header.  This was drawn for me by my good friend Audrae who is just awesome at chibi-dom.  I figured it was fitting since I am not exactly a “hardcore srsbzns” tank.

On the top we have some nav options, home button, House Stalwart website, Duranub Raiding company website, and the still unfinished about page.  On the side we have a spiffy armory plug-in I found, as well as links divided into several categories.

Now the hard part.  I have to think of something useful 🙂

Starting to encounter an interesting problem brought on by the 3.1 dual spec changes.  There are many raids right now running on my server that use the practice of rolling 200 for main spec, and 100 for off spec.  However more and more we are asking players to switch hit for the raid.  In our “Alt-ramas” run we have already had a Retribution Paladin go Tanky, an Elemental Shaman go Resto, and a Resto Druid go Feral in order to better fit certain fights.  So I am starting to wonder exactly how someone determines what your main focus is these days.

Belghast  my warrior for example is definitely a tank by heart, but when it comes to a run like Alt-ramas…  I was only there tanking it to help stabilize the group.  The only gear that I could actually use comes from the DPS trees.  So for stability of the raid, do we agree to let me roll on DPS items just so that I don’t feel like a pack mule?  I think 3.1 and the ability to switch specs on the fly is going to chip away at the foundation of “class roles”.

I can already see amongst our tanks the ability to alternate the main tank hat from fight to fight so the others of us can don our dps gear and kick some ass.  Doing this will help  to break up the monotony by a wide margin, since most boss fights only need 1-2 tanks.  Are we going to start seeing this same thing happening for healers and hybrids?

What are your thoughts on how best to manage this whole Main/Off spec issue?