Joyeux Noel!

Well, we're almost at the end of Wulfsblood.com's second year.

I haven't really updated much on CD's progress of late, but we've scored kills now on the first two bosses in Serpentshrine Cavern, and we had started some good training on the third.

Here's a shot of us over a very dead Lurker Below:



That said, the training will have to wait for a few weeks since the Christmas break has seen members scatter to the four corners of Europe.

After tonight, I too shall be joining the Diaspora as I dissapear to deepest, darkest Fort William for a few days of "relaxation" with my family.

Have a nice holiday period you all, I shall leave you with a festive message courtesy of Ulu:

Ulu's Tankadin FAQ.

1. How much unbuffed health do I need to main tank blah?

Very roughly:

Heroics - 10.5k
Karazhan - 11.5k minimum, 12.5k for the Prince
Zul'Aman/Gruul's Lair - 14k
Magtheridon/SCC - 15k

These numbers are a guideline at best, and chasing health to the exclusion of all else won't really serve you best as a tank. Look at your overall stats, don't sacrifice too much avoidance, mitigation or threat generation for the health goal. Experiment with your gear (heroics are great for this) to find a balance that works for you and your healers.

2. Are the Justicar (Tier 4) Handguards worth it?

Not really no. Try to get the Gloves off of the Maiden of Virtue. I only use mine when I need to get one of the T4 set bonuses for extra threat.

3. What gem should I put in x?

Assuming crit immunity and uncrushability aren't issues, then +Stamina gems are the way to go. For a more detailed guide, check here.

4. What should I enchant x with?

Generally, if there's a stamina/health enchant for that slot, then go for that. If there isn't, then look at an avoidance enchant. If there isn't one of those available, or your avoidance has already made you crit and crush immune, then get a threat enchant.

5. How do I get my Guild to like me- let me tank?

*shrug* I dunno. It depends. Does your guild have enough active tanks? Were you recruited as a healer? Are they just opposed to the idea of a non Warrior/Druid tank?

If the answer to the first two is "yes" then I'm afraid you're shit outta luck. The tanking team is always the smallest part of any raid group, and if you were recruited as a healer, then it's because the group needed a healer, not a tank. Your options are to either ask them to consider you if a slot ever opens or to apply to another guild as a tank.

The question of prejudice is a trickier one. The only way you can get around that is by being exceptionally good. Try and get your guildmates on side with some imba heroic runs, make sure your tanking gear's top-notch. Do everything you can to show your GM you can do it. And if they still don't want you to do it, look for another group that will let you. Your guildmates pay their money the same as you do and you can't force people to change their mind.

6. My mana and spelldamage go down the plughole as I get more Kara tanking plate to replace my Righteous pieces.

First of all, with the exception of the shoulders and chest, the Righteous set is awful for raid tanking. (I has mp5 on it fercrissakes!)

In Karazhan, with the preponderance of Undead and Demons, you don't need much spelldamage to get threat (love your Exorcism button!), and you'll normally do fine with a spelldamage weapon and 1-2 pieces of spelldamage plate. Once you've farmed Kara to death and got ready for the entry-level 25-mans, you should have been able to grab some of the nice tankadin items available from heroic badges.

As for Intellect, there's no real use for it. If you find you're running out of mana then either your healers are slacking or you're massively ougearing your content. All some extra int will do is give you is more mana at the start of a fight which might give you one more Consecrate or Holy Shield.

Really what you wanna do is downgrade your spells if you find yourself regularly going OOM. On farm content, Ulu normally uses Consecrate Rank 4, which does about 30 damage/tick less than rank 6, but at nearly half the mana. I upgrade to rank 6 only on hard-hitting bosses when I know I'll have the mana income to support it.

Teh Spoilz

This isn't a Wow-related post, but it has something to do with computer games, so I'll toss it here.

My life has been taken over by music from a game I haven't even played.

I intend to pick up the Orange Box sometime after Christmas to try it out, but in the meantime, I'd like to direct folks to this fan video for the closing song. I have located an MP3 for the song, but it is like some delicious sonic candy, I find myself having to use the stop button exactly as the track dies to prevent myself hitting repeat and consuming again.

I should point out to anyone who plans to play Portal and hates spoilers, the song contains some.

Avoidance vs Effective Health

There are two schools of thought about what to prioritise when tanking: Avoidance or Effective Health.

Some people go for avoidance, stacking parry, dodge and defense so that they avoid as many incoming attacks as possible. If you dodge, parry, or are missed after all, you take no damage. However, since it's impossible to get a combined Dodge, Parry and Miss chance of 102.4%, then you have to accept that sooner or later you will get hit, and hit hard.

This is where Effective Health comes in. Simply put, Effective health is a measure of how much damage you can take before you die. This includes Armor and your Shield Block value. The problem with an overreliance on Effective Health is that you tend to become more of a sponge than a tank, requiring your healers to chain their larger, more expensive heals constantly to keep your massive health pool topped up.

In Ulu's regular tank gear, I try to balance both Effective Health and Avoidance along with enough spelldamage to ensure solid threat generation over our sometimes triggerhappy DPSers. I do have specialised sets set up that focus more on either Effective Health or avoidance that I equip depending on the situation.

When deciding what the situation requires, then ask yourself what's killing you. If you're dying to massive spike damage, then it's an Effective Health fight. If you're dying because your healers are running out of mana, then get some more Avoidance in there.

Oh and if you can't be bothered keeping track of all those annoying EH calculations, I can heartily reccomend downloading Tankpoints. Whilst I pay no attention to the actual Tankpoints calculator, it does a great job of calculating Effective Health and uncrushability.

Hammer Time! (redux)

Ulu got his Hamma last night, and with it he broke 400 Spelldamage in his main tank gear (with 15k health and 17k armor to boot).

I'm considering replacing a lot of Ulu's hybrid gems with pure Stamina gems, in defiance of my earlier theory. I may need to secure a couple of alternate sources of Defense before I do this, but the net result should be a profound increase in his health (I've estimated an increase to around 15.5k unbuffed).

There Ain't No Vanity Clause.

Whilst tanking, Ulu wears a bastardised mixture of different sets and asthetics designed to give him the best possible balance between stamina, mitigation, avoidance and threat. The end result ain't pretty, as the cliche goes, but it gets the job done:



However, being something of an enthusiast for the visual, I've collected a couple of cohesive-looking sets from various instances. First up we have "good" Ulu, in a set mainly made up from four-fifths of the Justicar tanking set, with the addition of a cool-looking hammer:



Apart from being asthetically pleasing, I also wear this when I'm required to hit something upside the head with a big hammer rather than tank. Whilst wearing this, Ulu is one Skullet away from looking like the guy in the Burning Crusade opening cinematic.

On the other side, we have "evil" Ulu, in a set made up from a mixture of Karazhan tanking epics, the sword that drops in Heroic Mechanar and the Shield Ulu got from Arenas:



Whilst primarily assmbled for the asthetics, this outfit appears to have some strong avoidance stats, so I'll give it a go next time I'm tanking an avoidance boss (HKM or the Prince).

I Is Can Be Tank Nau?

It may seem like a dumb thing to admit, but I'm finally starting to feel like Ulu is a main tank since 2.3.

Lemme qualify that. He's happily been tanking most instances CD has done, he can single tank Karazhan happily and can zerg any Heroic instance without crowd control. However, pre-2.3 I felt like an Offtank in 25-mans. When you're sitting with 13.5k unbuffed health and the warrior next to you has 15k health in comparible gear, well it's just common sense that I'd let him tank the heavy hitters, since he can do a better job of surviving the massive DPs of Gruul, Magtheridon et al. Since I've acheived health parity with Warriors however, i've managed to do things I'd never done before. I've main-tanked Gruul 2 or 3 times now without dying, and last Friday I finally had a go at tanking Magtheridon.

Maggy's a boss we'd killed three times before. It's a difficult fight which requires some co-ordination. When you start the fight, there are five adds to kill. They don't hit too hard at the start, but as you kill each add, the remaining ones hit harder, and they can crush as well. After a minute, Magtheridon will enter the battle, at which point, your main tank needs to have his add dead and be free to pick him up.

In practise, this means you need three well-geared tanks at least, a main tank on either the first add to pick up Magtheridon after his add's dead, two off tanks on the second and third adds (Feral Druids are excellent for this), and two well-geared tanks on the last two adds. Havind decent, MT grade and crush-immune tanks on the last two adds are important, since the healers will usually have to focus on the Magtheridon tank by the time the third add is dead, which means the tanks need to be able to mitigate a lot of the incoming damage. Druids just fare poorly in this role (they're mana sponges on the later adds).

The problem has been on the last few attempts is that the only MT-grade tanks were myself and a Feral Druid. Whilst the Feral wanted me to tank the big guy, we agreed that he just wouldn't be able to handle the last add. On Friday however, one of our well-geared warriors showed up in time for our final attempt. He took over my place on the last add, which freed me up to have my first go on tanking the big guy. And he went down first try.

I cannot begin to describe the pride or sense of accomplishment I felt.

They'll nerf it in the next patch...

Apparently Feign Death works in real life.

In Other News...

Chaotic Divinity downed Hydross The Unstable last night for the first time. It's been a long time coming, simply because of the insane resistance requirements for this boss. We needed one Tank in full Frost Resist to tank him during his Purified phases, one Tank in full Nature Resist gear to tank him during his Poison phases and at least one tank (Ulu) in a mix of Nature and Frost Gear to tank the four adds he spawns whenever he switches.

In the end, we started training him last Thursday, continued on Sunday after a quick Gruul kill and then finished him off last night. Not bad going for us, and luckily after this, it seems that none of the other bosses have such insane gear requirements.

Ulushnar's Unified Theory of Gem Sockets.

As a hangover from the days when Paladin's had the weakest health of the three tank classes, Ulushnar's gemming choices could be best expressed in three simple words: Solid Star of Elune. (Well ok, it's four words, but the "of" doesn't really count does it?)

Since 2.3, with the Paladin Stamina boost and the shiney new badge rewards, I've had to rethink this somewhat. The biggest concern with the new badge stuff is the relative lack of Defense on the pieces. As mentioned earlier, Ulu's Defense score is dipping dangerously below the 490 cap for crit-immunity. The Resilience on his PVP shield allows him to remain crit immune, but unlike actual defense, it doesn't add anything to his overall avoidance, which is annoying.

This has caused me to develop a slightly more sophistocated thought process:

1. When raiding, Stamina is still king. No matter wether Ulu's fighting something that does magical damage (Hydross), fast physical damage (Prince Malechazzar) or slow massive physical damage (Gruul), his healthpool dictates how long Ulu can give his healers to land a heal.

2. If the socket bonus offers Stamina, then it's permissable to socket hybrid gems in the non-blue sockets, provided the total socket bonus is at least 3/non-blue socket. (IE, Unwavering Legguards have two non-blue sockets and a +6 stamina set bonus. It's acceptable to put two hybrid gems in those sockets. Wrynn Dynasty Greaves have three non-blue sockets and a +6 stamina bonus. That's only 2 Stamina/non-blue socket and therefore not worth matching colour imo.)

If the Socket bonus isn't Stamina and it isn't immediately useful (ie a few points in avoidance to make you uncrushable or a few points of defense towards the cap) then don't bother and just socket Stamina gems in all slots irrespective of colour.

3. Only ever use stamina-giving hybrid gems for non-blue slots. The shortlist of gems I'd use are:

Red Slot:

Shifting Nightseye - +4 Agility(0.16% avoidance)/+6 Stamina - Crafted
Glowing Nightseye - +5 Spell Damage/+6 Stamina - Crafted
Defender's Tazanite - +5 Parry Rating(0.2% avoidance)/+6 Stamina - Drops in Heroic Mechanar (Unique-Equipped)
Regal Tazanite - +5 Dodge Rating (0.26% avoidance)/+6 Stamina - Drops in Heroic Shadow Labyrinth (Unique-Equipped)

Yellow Slot:

Enduring Talasite - +4 Defense Rating (0.26% avoidance)/+6 Stamina - Crafted
Enduring Crysoprase - +5 Defense Rating (0.33% avoidance)/+6 Stamina - Drops in Heroic Old Hillsbrad (Unique-Equipped)

Obviously the Enduring Crysoprase and and Regal Tanzanite give the best "bang for your buck" as far as avoidance stats go. Unfortunately they're rare drops from two of the harder heroic instances and the unique equipped limitation means you can only benefit from one on your equipped gear at any time. Of the craftable red-slot gems, I'm leaning towards Glowing Nightseyes for my red slots. The avoidance the Shifting Nightseyes give is negligable, but the extra spell damage on the Glowing Nightseyes is always nice as the DPSers get better and better gear.

In summation, 2.3 has been interesting in that it's created new itemisation challenges for the pre-T6 Raiding Protadin. Stamina is still all-important, but it's definately worth balancing that with the need to stack enough avoidance and Defense to get the job done.