Blessing of Sanctuary

If you read the official Paladin forums, as I have been known to do when bored on my breaks at work, then you'll be convinced that if you spec as anythign other than a healer, you'll be kicked from your group and told to re-roll. You'll also be convinced that 90% of the playing populace have no idea what a "hybrid" is and will even kick you for saving a wipe by stepping outside the box.

This alone doesn't make it any different than any other class forum on blizzard's site. I read it so that however much I may occasionally angst about stuff, I still have it more together than a lot of the vocal minority of my class.

Just as when I needed respite from the whining masses on the Hunter forum, I turned to TKA Something, I have at long last found a haven for Protection Paladins, Main Tankadin. Like TKA Something, it's a place to get decent info on Pally tanking without the innumerable Buff/Nerf threads.

Zerging FTW!

Last night I did four instance runs with Ulu, each of which averaged one hour in length.

We started with a Shattered Halls run with a Mage, Shaman, Priest and DPS Warrior and we cleared the place in under an hour. Ulu would charge the mobs, use Consecrate to get the entire group's attention on him, then the rest of the group would nuke them down. Totally smooth run thanks to our ridiculously good healer. Almost no deaths and Ulu got a nice trinket.

We were on a roll, so the entire group then went on to Black Morass to get the last part of the Shaman's Karazhan attunement (and also to help Ulu complete a quest). We did the entire instance in half an hour with no deaths, which was incredibly nice. Unfortunatley, due to the crappy droprate, Ulu only got 8 of the 10 quest items he needed. He'll need to go back again at some point.

After that, the Priest and Warrior left, so we got a Hunter and another Priest from Surprised Survivors and went back to Shattered Halls for another zerg. This Priest was a little less experienced than the previous one, so things didn't go quite as smooth. Still, within an hour we were standing at the boss and we took him down without an issue. This time Ulu got some gloves from the Paladin set.

At that point we decided to push our luck and go for a final SH run. The Shaman backed out this time and we got a Warlock in his place. The run was less nice, we were all tired and the server was starting to lag. Still, we got there and got him down in a little over an hour.

At the end of play, Ulu needs 900 rep for the Honor Hold heroic key and 1.8k rep for the Lower City heroic key. Once he has these, I imagine he'll only go back to those instances to help friends. He has most of his drops from the regular instances, and all that remains of interest to him are Heroics and Raids.

Tanked all weekend.

Friday night, Ulu was back in Kara with Chaotic Divinity, we killed Attumen, Moroes, Maiden of Virtue and the Big Bad Wolf all pretty cleanly. Fearing a lack of Healers, I changed Ulu's talent spec to something that allowed me to act as an off-healer when I wasn't needed to tank. Hybrid specs are a tricky beast, and I found myself straddling two fences and unable to comfortably tank or heal as much as I would have liked.

I respecced the next morning back to my old Main Tank spec and enjoyed the fun.

Saturday and Sunday were a blur for me, I think I tanked in about ten instances over the course of two days, including a fun run to the old zone of Zul'Gurub which we cleared in under two hours. I also did a crapload of quests, focussing on my two currentl target reps: Lower City and Sha'tar. As of Sunday night, I'm now Revered with the Sha'tar and 1.8k from Revered with Lower city. One more Shadow Labyrinth run and I'll have my fourth Heroic key with only Honor Hold to go.

Honestly it couldn't come fast enough. For someone who only hit 70 two weeks ago, Ulu's quickly outgearing the regular 5-man content. At the moment if I wear my raid tanking gear in a 5-man instance, then I get so little damage that, thanks to the Spiritual Attunement nerf, I get very little mana back from healing.

To counter this I've created a shield block set of gear. Shield Block is one of the cheaper "avoidance" stats, since it doesn't really avoid damage so much as mitigate it by a set amount. At the moment, I can absorb about 360 damage on a successful block with my block gear, which takes the average five-man mob's damage down from about 450-500 down to a much more manageable number.

In five-mans now, we can pretty much ignore crowd control and have all the mobs on me whilst we nuke them down one at a time. The aggro gulf I can create by using Improved Righteous Fury on myself and Blessing of Salvation on everyone else is almost unassailable.

I'm looking forward to Heroics now, I think Ulu's ready for the next tanking challenge.

In other news, I've shifted Ulu's professions again, dropping mining in favour of Alchemy. Whilst I'll miss the constant supply of Primal Earths Mining gave me, I've decided to become an Elixir Master and keep myself supplied with as many buff potions as possible in raids.

Oh yeah.

At the moment, Ulushnar has taken a rather standard 0/49/12 tanking build in the patch. It works fine for five-mans as a Main Tank. My only concern is mana starvation if I'm required to be Off Tank on a mob. If it proves to be an issue, I may have to look into a slightly different spec, but for the moment, I have a good feeling about this one.

Return to Botanica

Well last night I returned to Botanica, with 3/5 of the group from last night. We didn't have the Warlock and healer Druid from the previous night, in their place we had a Mage and a different Warlock.

I honestly, didn't want to go to Botanica again, but the Warlock wanted to complete his quest there and since I was dragging him away from our quest group to do it, I relented. I would have preferred the Mechanar, since it's shorter and much more fun. (On a side note, the other two members from the previous night's group offerred me a place in the Mechanar run, but I refused. I may be going sane after all.)

Anyway, the run was much smoother. It wasn't perfect, but we didn't wipe and we killed all the bosses first time. The group this time was definately superior, but they also seem to have removed some of the trash mobs from the instance in the latest patch. It's still a long run, but now at least it's a slightly less annoying one.

Speaking of the patch, the changes that 2.1 have brought about to my tanking are quite nice. My Holy Shield ability can now take twice the amount of hits before it's used up. This makes an amazing amount of difference in single mob fights (it almost never runs out before it's cooldown's up). Also, my Avenger's Shield ability no longer has a minimum range. Whist I may not be able to use it as a pull move in certain situations, I can always use it as a close range burst aggro move.

At the moment, I'm getting tired of the regular instances and I'm itching to try Ulu's hand at the Heroic instances. The only problem is rep: I currently need about 2.5k rep with the Sha'tar (1, maybe 2 Tempest Keep runs), 6k rep with Honor Hold (at least three Shattered Halls runs) and 10k rep with Lower City (5 Shadow Labyrinth runs) to get Ulu's final Heroic Mode keys.

First Priority is Sha'tar which I hope to get done this weekend. After that I'll work on Honor Hold before doing Shadow Labyrinth.

Finally reader replies:

To Nibuca:

To be honest, I haven't used Seal of Righteousness since I got Seal of Vengence. SoV does more damage, and the judgement of a fully-stacked SoV is usually 2-3 times bigger than JoR. The only downside to SoV is the 20 PPM, which means I'm usually applying a stack with every other swing.

I like the "2 Hammers" guideline though and I'm gonna suggest that in the future. :)

To Peter:

Yeah, that could work. To be honest, it was easier to handle saps last night than previously. With the change to Avenger's Shield I can now frontload mucho aggro from a safe distance.

The Definition Of Insanity...

...Is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

- Benjamin Franklin

As I alluded to in my last post, I had another run last night with basically the same group who wrecked my spirit in Steam Vault the night before. This time it was Botanica, which is a long and gruelling instance at the best of times. With them, it proved torturous. We had:

*A Warlock who used to lead CD. Likes to be in charge, set pulls, and then steal one of the targets and kite them to death whilst the rest of the group kills the others.

*A Druid who's specced for a mixture of shapeshift combat and healing on main healing.

*Another Druid, similarly specced but slightly better-geared who didn't want to step on the other Druid's toes by asking to be main healer.

*A Rogue, who I have no real complaints about, save for the fact that a Rogue's Crowd Control and Paladin Tank's Pulling moves are pretty much mutually incompatible.

Most of the pulls were the same story. The Warlock would grab one mob and take it for a walk, I'd be forced to try and quickly get aggro on the remaining mobs before they ran to the healer who, by dint of having to keep me, the Warlock and the two meleers alive would be throwing out massive heals from the word go and generating massive threat. More often or not I failed, the healer died and the rest soon followed.

It's sad, because they're people who I consider friends, and ones whose company I reasonably enjoy, but I'm getting to the stage where I never want to group with either of them again. It'll take a better tank than me to hold them together.

Ah well on the plus side, I got Ulu a couple of shineys; new shoulders and a belt, so his tanking gear's pretty much state of the art now.

And tonight sees the dawning of Patch 2.1.0, which introduces some new high end content I won't see for months if at all, a few changes in the way raiding works that might make it easier to get to said content and some changes to the Paladin Tanking toolset.

I'll comment on the latter tomorrow, probably.

Right to Reply.

In reply to Peter's comment on my last post:

I was talking about the Steamvault run on Monday, but the same problems repeated themselves last night in Botanica (with almost exactly the same group).

To be honest, part of the problem was the healer druid wasn't specced with threat reduction as well. I'm happy to let the 'Lock commit assited suicide, but when the the Healer pulls aggro, I'm duty-bound to step in.

The other Druid on those runs *was* specced for threat reduction, but didn't want to offer to take over until the end unless the healer took it the wrong way.

I honestly dunno how Warrior tanks cope when they can't apply Blessing of Salvation to the rest of the group.

In a side issue, I hate the way Pally tanks and Rogues work together atm. If you've sapped a mob, I can't use my shield pull for fear of breaking the sap. I also can't use Consecrate if the sapped mob is near, but this is true of other forms of CC. This means I don't get to frontload as much aggro on the incoming mobs and that means the healers will get aggro. Of course as of today, Avenger's Shield no longer has a minimum range, so I can try using it on the mobs early to cement aggro.

Crushing The Soul

Last night, I went into a raid preparation frenzy. I went and got Ulu's tanking chestpiece, bracers and boots all enchanted with the best possible enchants so that I could squeeze the maximum stamina out of his set-up. In the end, he managed 11217 health unbuffed. Not as good as a tanking Warrior or Druid but pretty respectable for a Pally tank.

In the end, Karazhan run didn't happen, so i did two five man runs in it's place.

The first was to Mechanaar, which I undertook with a Priest and 2 Warlocks from CD and a Mage friend of one of the 'locks. It was an incredibly smooth run, with only one wipe before the last boss, which we recovered from quickly. Ulu even got an upgrade to his current tanking chest (which I predicted would drop after I'd just paid to get the old one enchanted).

After that, I went to Steamvault with an entirely CD party (two druids, a mage and a lock), and it was horrid. The kitty druid kept going bear and taking my aggro, the warlock seemed to be going out the way to take aggro from me and I kept on failing to save the druid healer from death. Runs like that really sap my spirit when it comes to tanking. Whislt I can intellectualise that they were trying to have fun and I was probably taking it too seriously, the end result is that I honestly didn't enjoy myself.

Into Karazhan.

Well this weekend was a busy one for Ulushnar.

On Friday, with the help and patient indulgence of his friends, Ulushnar managed to get the last three parts of his Karazhan attunement done. The Black Morass run was a particular favourite of mine to tank.

He'd only finished it for 10 minutes when he was called into the current Kara run and ended up tanking The Big Bad Wolf encounter. We didn't manage to kill him, but raid tanking was an eye opener. I'm used to tough bosses hitting Ulu for 1-1.5k damage in normal 5-mans. In Karazhan, even the normal mobs hit for at least 2k, and they can hit for up to 4k. It was a whole 'nother world, and I wasn't sure his gear or spec were up to it. We didn't manage to kill the boss before we got tired and disbanded.

On Saturday and Sunday, I started work on upgrading his tanking gear. Whilst there are some nice drops that can boost his gear, trying for a boss drop is unreliable and I instead looked into faction rewards from the Cenarion Expedition and the Keepers of Time. It was a hard grind, I think CE required me to do an instance run and two multi-part quest chains to get the rep, whilst KoT required about four instance runs, but in the end, I got a new necklace, sword, leggings and head enchant with about an hour to spare before Sunday evening's Kara run.

We managed to kill the Wolf first time, after which it was a long slog up to the Curator. The trash before the Curator involves packs of mobs that eat mana, which make it a completely annoying fight for a mana-using tank like me.

Anyway, we eventually got past them, and tried the Curator, but sadly our group just didn't have enough fast DPS and we got taken out. A second attempt was precluded by an unlucky wipe whilst ressing (our other tank lagged in the boss' path) and the respawn of the aforementioned annoying trash.

We decided to ignore the Curator after that and try The Maiden of Virtue who was nearer the entrance and much easier to clear to. It's a difficult fight since your tank needs to know what he's doing and how to position and move the boss. Since that tank was me (our other tank had DC'd) then we wiped 3-4 times before calling it a night. That fight needs a lot more practise for me.

A good weekend all in all, if frustrating somewhat. I've beaten my goal with this character (to have him tanking Karazhan by June), but within Karazhan I've found a lot of new challenges I'm going to have to rise to. I just hope the rest of the group has the patience to let me master them.

Death to n00b Nukers!

Tanking has proven to be a fun change of pace in the endgame. Having spent two years as a ranged DPSer, it's been challenging to try something completely different. As a tank, you're pretty much the focus of attention, keeping the mob at arm's length of the rest of the group and focussed on you. Anyone who knows me will know I have no trouble pissing people off, so I guess that's stood me in good stead as well.

(Admittedly, half the bosses I've killed as a tank have proceeded to extract revenge on me by dropping Hunter loot, but I've taken that in good humor. For the most part.)

It has, however sharpened my intolerance for sloppiness on the part of damage dealers. I feel hypocritical in part for this, since I can't always claim to have been the most focussed nuker out there, but the difference between good DPS and bad DPS is noticable.

Take last night's Shadow Labyrinth run. As with the week before, it was me tanking, a Druid healing, a Shadow Priest nuking/offhealing a Mage and a Warlock. It was functionally identical to the group from the week before which had had so many problems, with the substitution of a mage in place of a hunter. However, with the exception of myself and the Druid, all the players were different. That difference however was noticeable in their discipline, skill and damage output. In the other group we wiped about a dozen times before calling it quits on the second boss. Last night we killed all bosses first time and wiped only once to a bad pull on the way to the last boss.

It's not surprising. Damage dealers have historically had the easiest role in parties and are one of the easiest classes to level. As long as the tanks and healers are on their game, any amount of bad habits can be masked.

I can heartily reccomend that any damage dealer try playing a healer or a tank for a while. It sharpens your skills and makes you more sensitive to the effect your own role has on the group's performance.

With Great Power Comes Great Possibility

Well, what's new in the wide world of WoW?

Well Ulu's now level 70, and last night, I went back into the Shadow Labyrinth to climb my tanking Everest. The result: all bosses killed first time and I now have the first fragment of the Karazhan key.

I now only need to do runs in the Steamvault, Arcatraz and Black Morass to be able to go to Karazhan. Woot!

In other news, I recently stood for a place in Chaotic Divinity's council and I was elected in with a clear margin of 18 votes. I am now in charge of recruitment, and more importantly, telling people to feck off when they're being arseholes.

In many ways, I feel it is the role I was born to play.

Think of a cool name if you can.

As it stands, Ulushnar is about 200k XP from level 70. A couple of decent quest chains and he'll hit that total easily. However, I undertook a run in Shadow Labyrinth last night with friends and had the wind completely knocked out of my sails with regards my ability to be an effective tank. It was a horrid run with multiple deaths and wipes and a complete inability to get past the second boss. Since Shadow Labs is required to get attuned to Karazhan, Ulu's ability to raid will be impeded until he climbs this particular Everest.

In other news, I hit 30 last night, and I'm considering repurposing this blog slightly. More and more I feel the need to write about other things that interest me, be they other computer games, movies, books, comics or even movies. I'm too lazy to be bothered starting a separate blog for all this stuff, so I may adapt this one to my ends. Or I may not, haven't decided fully yet.

The Happy-Haps.

What's happened since last I posted? Well Ulushnar is now lvl 67 and has tanked his way through quite a few instances. Three more levels to go before the big 70, but there'll still be a while after that before he's ready for raids.

Tanking is possibly one of the most gear-intensive roles in the game. To be raid ready, I need to accumulate about 11k health, 11k armor, +120 Defense skill and a combined Dodge, Parry, and Block chance of 43%. On top of this, I need to make sure he has some Spell Damage, since he rely on that to produce most of his threat whilst tanking. There's a bunch of craftable items and quest/reputation rewards I can get that'll get me most of the way there, and the rest is down to lucky drops in instances.

And then, concurrently with that, I'll have to try and gather a semi-decent healing set so that I can do support healing on fights that don't require me to play tank.

After all that, I have to consider wether or not I want to go raiding. This is a curious frame of mind considering a few months ago, raiding was all that mattered. Blizzard have really buffed the five man content with the introduction of Heroic Mode dungeons, which give players the challenges and rewards of raids in smaller groups that can be completed in an evening.

By comparison, they've really stuffed up the raids badly. The entry-level raiding zone is Karazhan, a sprawling ten-man instance, whilst every other raid is a twenty-five man instance. The two entry-level 25-man instances have only 1-2 bosses in them, which means that most of the raid will walk away empty-handed even if you manage a full clear. And being able to progress to the later 25-man content requires you to complete both Karazhan and Gruul's Lair. As a result, it seems the only groups who can progress atm were the ones who were on the Naxxramas level before the expansion, and as such walked into outland with Gear on a par with Karazhan loot for the most part.

I gather Blizz are retuning their raid content currently, but at the moment, I'm uncertain if it's worth the hassle. That said, when I've finally got Ulu geared to a reasonable standard, I'll probably end up helping folks on raids.