There be n00bs here. . .

I don't like to throw the term noob around that often. It carries a good degree of social stigma in the world of warcraft. Obviously, not everyone reads blogs, has a level capped character, raids, and has been playing since vanilla. Heck, some people don't know what we mean when we say vanilla. Still, there are some people who make comments so drastic, that you can't help but wonder where their mind is.

The first example came with me DPSing a Blood Furnace run on my mage. We had a couple warriors in the group, a mid 60's one who was prot, and a lower 60's one who was DPSing as well. The prot warrior was having problems holding multi-target aggro. I can understand that, I struggle with that on my Druid. It came out that the warrior was dual specc'd and did not use his prot spec much, he was primarily Fury. The other warrior then asked why he wasnt using a two handed weapon with a shield because as fury he could have titan's grip. For some reason he thought dual spec meant two specs at once and we couldn't explain to him what dual spec actually was. . .

The next example was also as DPS with my mage. We were running Hellfire Ramparts with a Shammy healing. I was the highest level character in the group. Our other members were a blood DK who was tanking, a ret pally, and a rogue. First of all, the group was saying how hard ramps was. I know it can be difficult if you're under geared, but if ramps is a problem, you're REALLY gonna have problems later in the game. Anyways, thats not the noob moment. The mace drops from the demon guy, I congratulate the RESTO SHAMMY. Then the DK says it's more of a paladin weapon. WTF!?!? Maybe if you're holy. He then proceeds to say all shammies want fist weapons cuz his buddy is a shammy and he does good DPS with fist weapons. Wow! I mean I'm not an expert theorycrafter but a ret pally doesn't want a 2h mace, a prot pally would want the shadowrend longblade (which already dropped and we gave to the rogue). That mace is one of the better early weapons for resto or elemental shammies!

The last example is more failtanking than noobness. I saw someone in general ask for a healer for UK. I have been burned too many times by crappy tanks, so I asked "who's tanking for you?". They said 80 warrior. Well, level 80 on a 70 dungeon, that should be a cakewalk right? Yeah, cakewalk for everyone but me. I died about 4 times during the run, at least we had no group wipes. On the last one I said in group chat "no offense man, but you're not holding aggro very well." His reply "I'm 10". My reply "I don't care how old you are, just stop letting me die!"

In summary, I don't like to throw around the term n00b, but sometimes it's unavoidable. I normally try to keep my opionions to myself (thats what blogs are for). It just seems like I have two talents in game: avoiding any kind of tanking drops on my main and attracting bad pugs on my alts (strangely most of the pugs on my main have been really good. . .I know it's not my UBER SKILLZ).

Tanking while leveling: Who's best?

So in my continuing journey to learn how to heal, I am pugging a lot of groups. And a trend that I am seeing is that the only tank class being leveled is the Death knight. Last night, while attempting to run Blood Furnace with my mage, I had a discussion about the best and worst tanks while leveling. As a benchmark, I consider leveling pre-78. After 78, you're running 80 instances and gearing up for heroics and gear starts resembling a lot more what you'll have in endgame. That being said, I believe death knights to be the worst tanks in the leveling phase of the game.

All things being equal (player ability, experience etc) tanking comes down to three things: Threat, Health, and mitigation. Threat because you want the mobs beating on your tough armored ass and not the puny guy with the creepy laugh standing in the back in his sissy robe (lol). You want health because once they start beating on you, even with heals, you need a buffer to stay up, more is better. Mitigation is important because even with a ton of health, you don't want every attack to hit you, you'll drive your healer nuts (TRUST ME!!)

This is how I feel the classes stack up (fairly subjective, although I have one of each, theyre not all the same level and not all geared/speccd for tanking)

Threat: Paladin, Warrior, Druid, DK. Paladins generate the most AoE threat the easiest in the game. They are threat machines. If you have a pally tank and he can't hold aggro, something is wrong. Warriors have a lot of tools for individual threat, and their AoE threat has improved a lot between end of TBC and wrath. Druid threat is based mostly on damage, but they do have Berserk to do massive threat to up to 3 targets or get a sizable jump on boss fights, still when I have tanked on my druid, threat has been an issue. Lastly, Mr DK. Their threat is based mostly on damage, they only really have one AoE threat generator: Death and decay(which they don't get till level 60), and don't get a taunt until 65. Death grip is not a taunt boys and girls. As they don't have a tanking spec they are more a hodge podge of abilities.

Health: Druid, Warrior, Paladin, Death Knight. My druid at level 70 in dire bear form has around 14k health. At the end up TBC, I struggled to get to 11k. My warrior has around 11k HP and he is neither prot nor even level 70 yet. Again, death knights lose out here. The major factor is most tanking shields have a good amount of stamina, and a lot of death knights focus on DPS gear. With a true "tanking set" they would probably only lag behind slightly just because shield + 1h weapon generally gives more stamina than a 2h weapon.

Mitigation: Paladin, Warrior, Death knight, Druid. Again, shield is the biggy. Paladin and warrior are probably interchangeable here. Paladins will have higher block, but block isn't as useful a mitigation stat as parry and dodge. Death knights have a higher parry and dodge, but no block at all while druids basically get dodge only.

Ghostcrawler has pretty much said they tune classes for 80. We have a death knight tank in our guild who tanks our raid runs. Obviously, there are DKs who are successful despite their lack of tools. My point is they do have a lack of tools. Another thing to consider is that a death knight is normally an alt. How many people who tank on their main roll up a tanking alt? How many people can learn to tank in 20 levels? My answer to both is probably not many.

While there is no clear answer who the best leveling tank is, it is clear that the worst leveling tank is definately the death knight.

Fail-tanking

Well, the theme of wednesday is something near (but not dear) to my heart: Fail-tanking. You know, looks like a tank, acts like a tank, but utterly fails in execution, normally leading to wipe? I have a couple instances of this from the weekend, both as the fail-tank, and as the healer unfortunately stuck with one.



First, I will admit my own tanking failure. With the changes in patch 3.2, I got a significant boost to my tanking abilities. Seal of corruption became even better for threat generation, and I'll soon re-spec to include vindication in my ret talents (any ounce of mitigation can help). Anyways, I can run through H UK and H UP in my sleep. I've run H UP repeatedly trying to get the sword and belt, some of the only drops which are really upgrades for me.



Well, that leads into my fail-tanking. You see, there is another item that is a clear upgrade for me: the shoulders from H Gundrak. I mentioned this, suggested we run it, we grouped up, got into the instance and I realized a problem: I've never run Gundrak. I had run another instance in Zul'Drak, never seen this one. So we plowed through the first boss, no biggie, got to the 2nd boss, the tough one. We wiped when it switched to goo form, I had no idea it was going to happen, was slow pulling it back, it tore through the group. The next time we tried, I made a total n00b mistake and didn't have my threat increaser up, so obviously I couldn't hold aggro at all, group wiped again and we called the run. Yeah I admit, not knowing the run = fail; Not using a basic ability = fail.



The 2nd instance of fail was with me trying to heal an instance on my druid. Basically, I just wanted to get some experience healing and using healbot in general. My druid is level 70, has a mix of lower Northrend, Kara gear, and misc stuff I've picked up along the way. I have decent SP (450ish), but I've mostly stacked spirit, so my regen is pretty good. I got my healbot set up basically to make Rejuvenation, the green one (whose name I never remember), swiftmend, wild growth, healing touch, and lifebloom easy and quick to cast. The statement I'm trying to make here is that I think I have the tools to be effective at the level I'm at.

So I went into LFG for two instances: Nexus and Utgarde Keep. I've run both repeatedly (I got most of the nexus quest drops on my alliance pally, I'm scared to run them on horde because of PvP). I got whispered for a group running nexus, I asked them to clarify that I'd be healing (I usually join as healing, DPS or tank, this one I joined just DPS or heals), which they said yes to. I flew to dalaran and switched out my gear and waited for the summons.

Our group was a 70 warrior tanking, me healing, I remember a 73 ret paladin, a 70 shammy, and I couldn't say who the 5th was. I am pretty sure he was 70 though. Well long story short, I died three times. There was only 1 group wipe. The tank was going too fast, losing aggro, and mobs were peeling off on me. I was having to bomb heals on pretty much everyone to keep them up, mobs would peel off and I couldn't even get off a heal. It's a bad thing when I'm having to use my instant healing touch macro on myself. I remember dying VERY soon on the mage boss.

It's frustrating basically just wanting to heal people worrying about being beaten on and basically having no defensive tools at all. I have barkskin, WOOOO! Resto druids kind of are what they are: healing machines. Even as a Holy paladin (which I played briefly believe it or not) I had bubble, stun, and plate armor so if the tank lost aggro I was ok for a lil bit.

Thats about all my progress. Didn't do much on alts, just tried to get druid a lil ways into Northrend. My guild is hurting for heals if we want to run more than 1 team through heroics, and I've decided I kinda like it. Also, I think it'd be fun having multiple level capped toons for a change.

My weekend. . .

I'm a little delayed in my usual monday posts because I was out sick yesterday. I went to the gym on saturday, struggled to get through my workout and pretty much went downhill from there. However, Wow isn't exactly the most strenuous thing to do, so I got plenty accomplished in that area.

First, I the thing I am most proud about, I tanked through heroic UP and UK with no group wipes. It wasn't a slow run and we didn't have overpowering DPS, I really felt like I was pulling my weight and things went mostly like they should. I did have one issue in the trophy room in UP, we killed one of the middle bosses too fast, so when the next one came up, my shield was on cooldown, that kinda sucked for the guy who started DPSing immediately and died before I could say anything. I didn't get any loot (the only reason why I'm repeatedly running UP is Skadi's belt and the red sword, neither of which I have ever even seen drop and everyone in my guild who wants it has the sword already :-( ). I seem to have really bad luck with tanking weapons. Please blizz, let my blacksmith make one, I don't care how many titansteel bars it takes, I just want a cool looking tanking sword that is garaunteed.

I also started working towards the Crusader title so I can pick up a BoA chest with champion's seals. I have actually gotten into a routine of doing threat from above, foot of the citadel, and the kill quests every day. I am semi slacking on the Ebon Blade dailies because since I hit exalted with them, the only thing I get out of it is gold (easy gold, but still). I reached exalted with Silvermoon city, finished the Oggrimar valiant chain, and failed miserably at the trial. Have I mentioned how much I despise 1 on 1 jousting? And I don't know if they changed it with the patch, but when my friend tried helping me, the challenger was vanishing and making me re-start. SOOOOOO frustrating! I just want to finish them out so I can get Crusader and get the stupid BoA chest to speed up my leveling, blech.

Obviously there are other paths to BoA gear, and I'm working on them as well. I could care less about the weapons, what I want is +20% XP on all my alts. There are three sources for this, Champions seals (which I'm working on), shards, tokens, whatever they're called (when you run instances and hold wintergrasp), and emblems. Now, I currently have 100 something of the PvP ones (200 for gear), 16 or so emblems, and 20 something seals. Hopefully I should have enough to buy 3 pieces of BoA gear within about 2 weeks. My problem is what to buy? Currently my alts are as follows (not counting 80 pally): 70 DK, 70 Druid, 67 Warrior, 62 Warlock, 62 Mage, 34 Shammy and a priest and hunter who I don't really see leveling. I've been swapping the leather shoulders off between Warrior, Druid, and Shammy, thats not an issue. Chest complicates things a little bit. My druid and warrior are both wearing GREAT leveling gear. Warrior has the adamantite chest with blue quality northrend gems, druid has the drop from BF, also with blue quality gems. I will probably be able to afford 3 pieces of gear. I know I want cloth shoulders. The mail chest is caster mail not DPS so it won't help warrior or DK. The leather probably loses too much for the warrior to wear it, but it does help druid and shammy. Shammy could also probably wear cloth chest, but that screws druid. Maybe leather and cloth chest? I dunno, as I said, I'm conflicted. It's all stats vs +10% XP.

Speaking of leveling, I powerleveled tailoring on my Mage, 1-350. Took him to Northrend and found out they raised the level requirements for Northrend crafting. Totally makes sense, but darn. Now I have to level my Warlock and Mage (I did a lil, both hit 62, 3 more levels to go!). In the course of leveling, I realized something about the lock: I really like the Felguard, he's hilarious. "Too pathetic to fight your own battles?" Yes felguard, thats why I summoned you and you're my bitch, now go kill them while I spread some DoTs and look like I'm paying attention. I have tried every tree they have access to, and demonology feels the most warlocky. I did like affliction and all the dots are nice, but Felguard > Blueberry. As for my mage, I like him, I really do, but I'm starting to get tired of 111111111111111. Portals are great, teleports are great, I am planning on making some spellfire gear for him, I'm just tired of frostbolting everything to death. Instances are a ton of fun if the tank can get enough mobs for me to blizzard. That time in ZF was the most fun I have ever had with any character.

My Druid hit 70 and I bought the tome of coldweather flight for him. Man that is nice. Getting from place to place is easier and not having to worry about pesky mobs or being ganked is great. I am planning on healing a couple UK runs, but I want to pick up the FP in Dalaran first so I can more easily go get the healing gear. I am a little apprehensive about it for one reason: Dark Smash. I know I had plenty of problems with it when I was leveling Pally and say what you will about DKs in endgame, they're scaled for 80, not lower levels. Having gone through the TBC instances as a healer, I prefer pally tanks because they have enough mitigation and no problems holding threat on multiple mobs.

All in all, great weekend and I got a lot done.

Add-ons. . .

Add-ons have become more a stock part of most player's UI than the blizzard default. Why is that? Well, frankly, blizz's version is pretty basic and not as helpful as it could be with a lot of things. I use the add-on's below to help with that.

Advanced Trade Skill Window: This is my newest add-on and one I wish I'd discovered previously. Want to see only the glyphs you can make for paladins? How about only leather items that will get you a skill point? No more scrolling through seemingly endless lists of recipes to get to the one I want. I also like the ability to queue up items to create later. Although I haven't used it, I could see this being very handy.

Auctioneer: This seems to be a standard for just about anyone serious about the AH. I am not what you would call serious, but I do like to recognize a good bargain. Obviously, it has some weaknesses, and isn't easy to use to it's full potential (like anything else, it's a tool, only as good as it's user). Yes, on patch day I bout some level 70 epic gems because it said they were a good deal, and I bought them out before realizing they were essentially useless. oh well.

Cartographer: This add-on shows the whole map. I semi-understand why blizz doesn't do this (all the way back to the first warcraft, if you havent been there, you don't get to see it), but come on! In the age of instant info, statgey guides and complete maps on blizzard's own website, the least they could do is make this a standard feature.

Deadly Boss Mods: I picked up this add-on for one reason: Dark Smash. I was tired of getting crushed in UK. It has become very handy knowing when bosses are about to unleash the nasty. Not that it has kept me from dying, I just know ahead of time, lol.

Dominos: I love this mod more than life itself with one exception, but I'll get to that. One bar of icons just isn't enough, especially past say level 30 when you have a tendency to use 8-10 abilities constantly and many more you use conditionally. I normally have about 4-5 bars on my screen at once, and put temporary quest items there too, just to make it easier to use them, its great. My only complaint is with warriors and druids. The forms you're not using are on bars that you can switch out, but they have to be someplace, even if you can't see them. This can sometimes get in the way and is pretty annoying. I've also unknowingly removed icons. I know you can lock the bars, but I like being able to switch things around if necessary.

Gatherer: This addon marks resource nodes on your mini map that you've gathered from. Its convenient for me for when I'm trying to decide to take a direct route, or a more roundabout one which includes some nice gathering.

Healbot: This is another one that is new to me. I had originally thought it was just quick mouseover healing, I was wrong. It also includes unit frames which makes healing a lot easier. Now I can more easily see who's taking damage and quickly apply whichever heals are necessary.

Omen: Who wiped the group? This addon tells you where you're at with aggro, and it works with pets too. You get a nice flash of red and sound telling you that you pulled aggro. When tanking, it lets me know where everyone is with the caveat it is mob specific, so if they're DPSing outside kill order, you'd have no way of knowing (gee, if only there was a way you could mark mobs to tell players which to focus on in what order).

Pally Power: (amidst my protests) I don't like this addon, and it gets in my way 95% of the time. I mostly solo things, and the last thing I need is more useless crap on my screen. However, our guild has a ton of pallys (we can have up to 6 in a 10 man group, 2 prot, 2 ret, 2 holy, more normally we'll have half that), and managing all the buffs and auras can be a pain, so this is "required" when raiding.

Quest Helper: This mod has become so widespread, blizz has included many of it's elements into their default UI. Love the quest tracking, love the routing, pretty much love everything about it.

Titan Panel: This is one of the first addons I got, and still one of my favorites. It gives you a little bar at the top of the screen customizable with all kinds of useful information. I currently have coordinates, bagspace(used/total), gold (which if you hover will give you total on that server not in the mail), and I'm sure a few things I'm drawing a blank on at present. Again, super customizable and convenient, I REALLY miss this when it's not around.

Which one is my favorite? Well, if I could only use one, it would be dominos, I absolutely can't play without it now. All the others do what addons are supposed to, make life just a lil easier in game.

Happy Patch day!!!!

Well, it is a happy patch day, with some changes I'm eagerly anticipating, some changes that are meh, and some WTF?

The good:

Shaman totem bar: Yes, I'm still gonna have a ton of bars with random stuff on them, but a button to drop my 4 fav totems all at once, goodness. Now I just need to decide on Mana Spring or Healing Stream.

Cheaper/Faster mounts: This is big time. While not existing in a state of perpetual poverty, I consider myself in Wow's lower middle class. I have an 80, and I have decent gold savings, but I have to carefully manage resources to make sure I don't run out. Not counting my Death Knight or Paladin, I have 4 characters level 60+ with another hopefully on the way. Pre-3.2, to get speedy land mounts for all of them, it would have cost over 3000g. Now its a much more managable 300. I am also super excited about the scroll of cold weather flight and basic flying mount speed increase to 150%. Now my druid can fly around Northrend and life will be easier in general. To this day, I think cold weather flying was the best 1000g I ever spent.

Epic gems: I probably don't have as much titanium saved up as a lot of people, but I can almost garauntee the market will exceed the availability, so prices for the next week or so will be through the roof. I've also saved up all my JC tokens so I can get a few cuts. I will probably focus on Stam and Int as those seem to be the big money makers for me (I almost always sold all my blue quality + int gems immediately). I'm hoping for 2k gold in the next couple of days.

Improvements to seal of command and vengeance: I really like these. I don't like seal of blood/martyr at all. I am considering not putting the talent point into seal of command though because it seems like a waste of a point. I'll have to play with the talent calculators when I get home.

The meh:
Other changes to most classes: it just seems like so much BLAH BLAH BLAH. I didn't think there were problems pre 3.2 with most classes. There is one notable exception, you can see that in WTF.

The WTF:
Frost mages: The major problems with frost seem to be that they are slightly over-powered in PvP, and underpowered in PvE. So what did blizz do? Gave them a PvP buff, and did nothing to really improve them in PvE (making frost bolt .2 seconds faster to cast at the expense of some crit barely counts). Oh, and mana efficiency (never really a problem for frost) was improved. 1111111111111111111111111111111111111 FTW (not really)

On a personal note, when I get home from work, I'll be prospecting some titanium, dropping herbalism on my mage and powerleveling tailoring. My warrior is more than capable of handling herbing duties (I wanted to give him some kind of self heal besides bandaids), and getting him a faster wolf makes it a lil easier on me. I might even consider getting him a flyer to make it easier still (150% speed is tempting for a gatherer).

Oh the goodness, I can hardly wait!

Woweekend in review and other miscellany. . .

Well, I had a pretty good weekend all things considered. I gained a level on the Shaman, burned up his rested XP, getting him ever closer to 40 (I havent gotten to the point where I'm running him non-rested yet). Druid hit level 70 and had some interesting experiences (more on that to follow). Pally barely made it on to do dailies, and I think I missed a couple days worth (I'm about a day from exalted with Ebon Blade, and I've never set foot in an instance with their tabard on).

The druid took up the bulk of my time this weekend. I know at level 68 I could go into northrend and crank out some quests to level, however, I wanted to wait till 70 for a few reasons. First, I like finishing areas. I may not do every quest in an area, but I do the majority. I wasn't "done" with Terrokar Forest till 68, and I had yet to really do much in Nagrand (besides ring of blood). Maybe it's just me being set in my ways, but I always go Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, Terrokar, Nagrand. Normally thats enough to pop me to 70. Whats killing me currently is getting enough Fel scales to get my leatherworking to 350. I remember Mercurial Adamantite was a problem with JC and I don't really recall having an issue with BS after thorium or with tailoring ever. I have no idea how many hours its gonna take me to farm enough, but its gonna be a pain.

I did put in a few instance runs which didn't get my much in the way of experience but taught me a little bit and got me some useful gear. We went into Kara on sat to get one of our members some enchants, she got mongoose, surefooted, and a couple spellpower ones, which were nice. I died a lot, but I did get a couple nice DPS rings and a caster belt. I almost got some awesome boots, but I didn't speak up quickly enough that I'd like them (people don't seem to associate me with a tree). I also got invited to some Northrend instances (one of our 80's was running through lowbies), but due to some personal issues, I couldn't make the UK run. I did find out something interesting. I had completely misunderstood Wild Growth, and wasnt using it correctly. I figured it out and was able to heal us through one of the bug instances (I get them confused). Not bad in outlands greens, although we did have an 80 tanking.

Now, if only I could avoid douchebag ganking I'd be happy.

Anyways, didn't have time for too much else. UFC 101 is sat, but more on that on the other blog. I have been practicing guitar again and was just thinking if I put as much time into that as I did into wow, I'd have been a pro by now. Oh well. Wow is $15 a month, guitar equipment (new amp, pedals, etc) would prolly run more than that, so I've been sticking to the budget alternative. I'm still on track for my new years resolution though (I'm playing some Rage by New Years Eve!!!), modest goals I know, but everyone has to start somewhere.