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.