On Talents.

I've seen lots of posts over on Maintankadin about variations on the standard 0/49/12 cookie-cutter talent spec.

These tend to come in two camps:

1. The "Divine Intellect/Improved Seal of Righteousness" spec. People seem to think the solution to going out of mana is to have more of it. Seems like a good idea right? Wrong. In my Boss-tanking gear, I have 119 Intellect. Raid-buffed, that hits about 190. Divine Intellect is therefore worth 19 Intellect to me, or 285 mana. That's barely enough for one Holy Shield.

Tankadins just don't stack enough Intellect in the normal run of things to make Divine Intellect worth the points. And as for Improved Seal of Righteousness, meh, it's ok I guess, but it's not worth speccing ten points away from the Prot/Ret Trees for, especially when we have Improved Seal of the Crusader and One-Handed spec in easy reach of the necessary talents if we need a threat boost.

2. Then we have the "Sanctity Aura" lovers. These people believe it's worth sacrificing some of the Higher-tier talents in the Protection tree to spend 21 points in Retribution for Sanctity Aura. It's impossible to get this talent without sacrificing Avenger's Sheild (the Paladin's only ranged aggro maneouver) and some points from either One-handed Specialisation, Combat Expertise, Improved Holy Shield or Ardent Defender. This will weaken your survivability and threat generation in return for an Aura that gives you +10% Holy Damage when you have the chance to use me. Don't get me wrong, Sanctity Aura's nice, but it's not worth what you currently have to give up.

The sad fact of the matter is, to be a raid level main tank, there are certain talents that are pretty much essential:

Protection (43 points)
5/5 Redoubt
5/5 Toughness
3/3 Improved Righteous Fury
3/3 Shield Specialization
5/5 Anticipation
1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary
2/2 Sacred Duty
5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization
2/2 Improved Holy Shield
1/1 Holy Shield
5/5 Ardent Defender
5/5 Combat Expertise
1/1 Avenger's Shield

Retribution (10 points)
5/5 Benediction
5/5 Deflection

(List courtesy of Kalbear on Maintankadin)

That's 53 out of a possible 61 Talent points in order to do the job of tanking big nasties, with the other eight points down to a matter of choice. As it stands, this side of Wrath of the Lich King and Wow 3.0, There really isn't that much chance for variation.

My own spec pretty much hits all the beats described above, swapping one point in One-Handed Specialization for Blessing of Kings and adding Precision, Improved Judgement and Improved Seal of the Crusader to the mix.

The long and short of this is simple. Smarter people than you have explored the extent of content with a Protection Paladin and found the best combination of talents to do the job. There really isn't enough wiggle room to substantially mess with the formula if you want to do a good job.

On Downings and Gold spent.

Last night, Ulu entered that rarest of beasts for Chaotic Divinity: a partially-cleared Zul'Aman. Too often when Ulu steps in there it's for a zerg of the four animal bosses whilst racing the timer followed a few fatigued attempts at Hex Lord Malcress. However this week we went in on Monday to clear the beast avatars and ensre that Wednesday's run had a clear shot at the last two.

We attempted to go with the same 2/3/5 tanking/healing/DPS set up we'd used on Monday's raid. However the Feral OT decided at the last minute he'd rather go play outside and we were forced to bring another DPSer. Luckily both Malcress and Zul'Jin are one-tank fights.

Surprisingly, we one-shotted Malcress. We then went on to make our first attempts at Zul'jin. Three attempts later, he too was dead at our feet. The feeling was at once totally awesome and pretty anticlimatic.

After that, the night was young, so I lead a group of people through the daily heroic, Mechanar. We wiped once when a Hunter body-pulled a whole bunch of adds, but we cleared the whole instance in about 40 mins. Not bad going, and Ulu now has 110 Badges stored for next patch. That's the leggings guaranteed and only fifty more for the ring.

And now for something completely different:

Back when Wulfsblood was my main toon, I was something of a respec junky. I would constantly rejig my gear and talents to find the optimal setup for DPS. Now that he's a PVPer, I'm specced fine for survivability and burst damage, so there's no need to play around with him that much.

Since 2.3 with Ulu, I haven't felt the need to respec that much. Most of my desire to micromanage can be taken care of by playing with his gear, and the only time I used to respec was when I switched from a holy/prot hybrid build for PVP/10-mans to a prot/ret MT build for 25mans. That said, on Tuesday it looked like Ulu might need to spec Holy for a Vashj attempt since we were short on healers. It got me thinking about specs again. In the end, I ended up throwing 40 gold to change Ulu's spec from 0/47/14 to 0/46/15. The only shift is switching one point in One-Handed Specialisation (+1% personal damage) for one point in Improved Seal of the Crusader (+1% crit to everyone attacking the debuffed mob). In theory, the slight drop in threat vs the increase in raid damage shouldn't harm my threat lead too much, but we'll see how it plays out in game.

EZ-Mode Beastmastery.

Over the last few days I've been asked by literally two people about Beastmastery shot rotations. In response, I'll point them at the following macro, liberated from TKA Something:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/castsequence reset=1.96 Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()

Replace the 1.96 with your ranged weapon speed after any persistant haste buffs (Serpent's Swiftness, Quiver bonus, etc) and spam away. For best results, use a weapon with a base speed of 2.6-2.7.

New Year, Same Crap

Happy New Years gentle readers! Well, the season's over and I'm back at my desk for a a two-day work week at what must be the quietest time of the year. Ah well.

OVer the Holidays, I'm afraid I didn't get that much WoWing done. I did however go back to complete Mass Effect and did most of Portal in one sitting. Alcohol prevented me from finishing the last few Puzzles, but I'll work up the time to do it at some point.

With the bulk of CD enjoying their family, I only did a few Heroic instances and one Kara clear with Ulu. I did manage to get him a new belt which has better avoidance stats than the other badge belt he'd bought already. Ah well, the old one will be fine for a Threat set, and with the new one, my Effective Health set is nudging ever closer to 16k unbuffed health, which is nice. My next purchase will likely be a trinket to boost Ulu's Block Value even further.

I also altered Ulu's spec slightly. I went from 0/46/15 to 0/47/14. Outside of 25-mans, I found I was often the only Paladin in raids, except for the occasional Retnub. Under those circumstances I found myself missing Blessing of Kings terribly.

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.

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.

Parting thoughts.

Replies to yesterday's comments:

@Galo:

Yeah, the endgame can get a bit tiresome, although with the impending introduction of a second 10-man raid instance, it seems that there's a lot for the casual raider still to do. As a tank though, I find it pretty much impossible to be casual. Tanking is a continuing race to keep your gear as close to the cutting-edge as possible. If the tank can't take the pummelling, then it doesn't matter how good the rest of the raid is.

@Andrew

Where are you?

@BB

I've missed playing with you too dearie. CD ain't the same these days. Ah well, I'm sure I'll be back on ER in a week or two.

On a different note, I made a post after trying to explain crushing blows and gear optimisation to another potential Tankadin recruit.

As I've mentioned there, as well as here in the past, it's mind-boggling the amount of maths and theorycraft required to play an effective Tankadin at a raiding level. I personally don't mind it, since build analysis, min-maxing and gear optimisation fit my personality quite well after eighteen years of RPGs. For someone without those tendancies, I can't imagine how they cope.

The Eternal Balancing Act

Ulushnar has too much gear. No scratch that, Ulu has too much comparable gear.

Thanks to the lousy, unitutive nature of Protadin itemisation, the priority list goes thus:

1. Do I have enough Defense Skill to eliminate Critical strikes? (This is 490 for Raid bosses and 485 for five mans/heroics)
2. If I'm raiding does my chance to Dodge/Parry/Block/Be missed add up to 102.4% with Holy Shield active?
3. Once those two thing are taken care of how much Stamina can I stack?
4. Oh, don't forget to stack in some Spell Damage/Spell Hit where possible to boost your threat output. After all, that's where our hype lies.

So as it stands, number 1 is fairly straightforward. Most tanking gear out there gives some +defense, so you can normally stack 490 Defense fairly easily. Similarly for number 4, before you start getting access to class-specific armor and tier 5 instance drops, the most spelldamage a Paladin can stack is in their weapon, a couple of enchants and maybe a piece or two of the Righteous set. The problem with the Righteous set is that whilst it stacks some Defense, it doesn't have much avoidance, so it hurts priority number 2.

The conflict between priority number 2 and 3 is the biggest problem for the low rung Protadin. Protadin's already have the lowest base health of the tanking classes, and the need to stack a massive amount of avoidance & block to reach uncrushable status causes us to neglect more. I've found this thread in particular helpful for noting the relative usefulness of various items in avoiding crushing blows.

For example, at present, Ulushnar has three breastplates available to him:

In an ideal world, I'd wear Breastplate of the Righteous, since with three +12 stamina gems, it gives me a whopping 66 base Stamina, as well as some more spelldamage and a nice set bonus since Ulu already has the Shoulders. Sadly the lack of Crushing Blow Avoidance (CBA) means that I'm forced to relegate this to my five man/heroics set.

So for raiding, it comes down to a choice between Jade Skull Breastplate and Vindicator's Hauberk. In terms of pure numbers, I should almost always pick the Jade Skull. It's CBA is about 0.5% better, and it has 11 more Stamina. That said, sometimes I'd still take the Hauberk for times I want pure avoidance over the JSB's block rating.

I'm also torn on the ring front. If I equip my long-saught Elementium Band of the Sentry over the "well no-one else wanted it Shermanar Great Ring then I lose 12 Stamina and 223 armor, but I gain 0.8% CBA.

Equipping both those items gives me the CBA to allow me to equip my Battlescar Boots over my Boots of Elusion, which whilst they lack avoidance make up for it with extra Stamina thanks to two more +12 Stamina gems.

The grand effect of these changes is to allow me 17 more Stamina whilst maintaining Crushing Blow Immunity at the cost of 223 Armor. I think this is the best balance currently available to me. Of course, being a finicky bastard, I'll probably change my mind in a day or two, or when the next gear upgrade forces me to examine the careful balancing act of my gear.

I'm honestly not sure how much thought non-Paladin tanks have to put into their gear.

Tanking Projects

Feeling a slight surge in interest in tanking again. My experiments with a Holy/Protection hybrid build for Ulu were fine, but ultimately it causes me to sacrifice more health than he can really afford to whilst raiding. To this end I've went to a 10/41/10 build that gives Spiritual Focus (a must for any PVP healer) whilst allowing me Deflection, which allows me to shift some of my Block gear back to Stamina. Currently, Ulu has 14k Armor and 12.5K health. This is respectable, but it could be improved if the current week's Kara is in anyway good to him.

Current projects for Ulu include getting his Blacksmithing up to 375 and collecting the Furies Deck so Ulu can get an imba tanking trinket. As well as that, he's slowly acquiring Arena points at an average rate of around 250 a week. He's just broken the 1k mark, so it's going to be another 3-4 weeks before he can afford the shield.

In terms of drops, as well as some of the nice Kara tanking items, I'd really love Ulu to get his hands on the T4 tanking shoulders. As it stands, they're better than the T5 ones and the avoidance would allow Ulu to wear the gloves he already has. Together, the spelldamage and the two-piece set bonus would give him a substantial boost in the threat department.

Arena Angst and Redoubt Rant

Ulushnar's been doing Arena's now for three weeks, Wulfsblood joined the team last week. We've averaged something like 270 Arena points a week, which leaves Ulu just over halfway towards his new Shield, but Wulf a little under a fourteenth of the way towards his new Crossbow.

The grind's long, no doubt about it, although I've heard a rumour that some of the Hunter-friendly arena weapons may be getting a pricecut to compensate for the fact that we have to buy 2-3 weapons (a ranged weapons and 1-2 melee weapons). I'm intrigued to see if this will happen. That said, i'm also going to sign Wulf up for a 5v5 team to help boost his income.

Rumors continue to abound of an reexamination of the viability of Paladin Tanking in the endgame. A thread has been opened here discussing vital and useless talents in the various paladin trees, prompted by one of Blizzard's own Community Managers.

I only hope the overwhelming amount of Tankadins who tell them that the present form of Redoubt sucks will cause them to rethink it. As it stands, it's useful for a levelling tank, but it's near useless in the endgame. Because it's a proc, you can't count on it being there in boss encounters. As a result, a raiding tankadin has to stack enough avoidance to become uncrushable without it. As a result, if it procs then it's wasted, since you already have enough block/parry/dodge with Holy Shield up that the extra block gets pushed off the table.

Why do I even bother with this useless talent? Because it opens up Shield Specialization, which provides some useful mitigation when we do block. Ah well, it'll all come out in the wash, hopefully no later than patch 2.3...

Back in the Saddle.

Been on holiday for two weeks. I'm not going to fill you in on all my doings over that time, but I'll go over the key points:

*Wulfsblood completed his Epic Leatherworking set. Along with a few more epic items picked up in Karazhan, he now stands as one of CD's better-geared Hunters. He's altered his talent spec slightly for something that's slightly more optimised for raiding damage whilst still giving him trapping utility and enhanced survivability.

*Ulushnar and Wulf have both joined an arena team with a few folks from Surpised Survivors. We pretty much suck, but we have fun and it opens the door for teh imba purplez.

*Because of a lot of our main raiders being away, CD hasn't done much more than Karazhan for the last few weeks. Since we normally have tanks that need the Kara gear more than Ulu, I've been bringing Wulf more to them. I'm really enjoying Wulf again after months of not being able to stand playing him.

*Ulu's changed spec to a Holy/Prot Hybrid spec. Losing the parry talent means I have to sacrifice some of his stamina gear for block and dodge value to maintain uncrushability. Ultimately he can Main Tank Karazhan fine, but I'll probably relegate him to an Offtank in the bigger dungeons. The side benefit of his spec is he's a more effective healer in Arenas and can probably offheal when not required to OT in raids.

*Blizz announced the new expansion and I'm underwhelmed. Another ten levels, another bunch of new zones and a new profession. The Death Knight Hero Class might be interesting but I'll await more details before I get too excited.

Bye, bye Ret!

After some rejigging of Ulushnar's gear, I've found it's now possible to completely eliminate the need for the +5% parry talent from the Retribution tree. This allows me to invest a full 20 talent points in the Holy tree, giving Ulu the option of being a passable healer.

This is his new spec, and I'm planning to give it a go over the weekend when I start farming arenas with a couple of friends in a 3v3 team.

Comments on "More Heroic Deeds"

Comments on Thursday's post went as follows:

Bluebottle:

For the two weeks prior to this one, I've had Ulushnar saved to the Late Shift. I even brought Wulf to the Early shift last week. Admittedly last week you may not have noticed because I was busy on Saturday and just too tired to raid on Monday. Looking at the amount of tank specs atm, we have two dedicated to the Late shift (Swentha and Ktharious) and two on the Early (Enoad and Naavaparta) with me and Cearran floating between them.

The complaints I've heard about the late shift aren't that the tanks are crap, but that the DPS/CC is limited. I'll be bringing Wulf from this week to bolster that side of it.

Galoheart:

Yeah you don't get much stuff with +Block Value/Rating pre-70, but here's my theory on it's usefulness:

When you're tanking a powerful, hard-hitting boss like High King Maulgar or the Prince, then there's next to no reactive healing going on. The powerful healing spells take 2-3 secs to cast and a tank could honestly die in that time if he's not kept topped up. Avoidance therefore does little good. It doesn't matter if you dodge/parry or are missed, you're still going to get healed as if you'd been hit. By blocking, you remove a significant % of the incoming hit consitantly, healer mana isn't wasted and you build more threat through Holy Shield.

Also, Block Rating is the cheapest way to get crushing immunity, since it's 8 points to 1% Block as opposed to 19 points for Dodge rating or 24 for Parry. This gives you more room to stack Stamina, which we already lack as Paladins.

More Heroic Deeds

Last night, after chasing up a crafter for a few days, Ulu got some epic bracers made. With their acquisition, one of the less-satisfactory gaps in his tanking gear was closed. I also changed a lot of his avoidance gems for stamina ones, and switched in a couple of items that emphasised Shield Block over Dodge/Parry. The end result is that Ulu has roughly 16% Dodge, 16% Parry and 23% Shield Block along with 12.3k health unbuffed and nearly 14k armor.

I've been reading a lot of stuff from raiding tanks atm, who suggest that mitigation (armor, block) and health are better to stack than avoidance (dodge, parry). The theory is that when you're tanking High King Maulgar or Prince Malchezaar, you don't get healed reactively. It's therefore better to work on reducing incoming damage rather than giving a chance to avoid it altogether. In theory it seems sound, we'll see how it holds in practise.

After getting my new precious, Ulu ended up running two heroics in reasonably rapid succession with the same group: Ulu Tanking, A Resto Druid Healing, a Feral Druid switching between DPS and Off-Tanking as required, an Enhancement Shaman switching between DPS and Off-Healing and a Mage on DPS and Crowd Control.

Whilst the runs weren't exactly flawless, the fact that the group had a lot of versatility really counted in our favour. We went through Mana Tombs first and after struggling with the first boss, we killed the next two easily enough with only a few deaths to carelessness on trash.

After that, we decided to keep the group together and try the Underbog. Once again, we struggled a bit, but almost all the bosses died first time, except for the last. Wasn't many drops of note, but hey, that was seven badges total. Ulu just needs 9 more to get his epic helm.

Raiding-wise, I'm uncertain what to do. Part of me fancies taking Ulu on an early shift run for a change, but the late shift is struggling and needs help. I'm undecided about wether or not to be a "James Blunt" about it or not yet.

It takes guts to do it right.

One thing I've come to realise recently is this: Stamina is good for all classes.

Whilst there's an overwhelming urge for classes to focus on their "active" stats, be they Intellect, Healing, Damage, AP, MP5, etc, there's one universal truth in raids and heroics: sooner or later you will get hit.

Wether it's an AoE, a random targetted ability like a charge or some other trick, most encounters are designed so that the tank can absorb most, but not all of the damage an encounter puts out. If Blizz didn't do this, then all healers would have to do is target the tank, spam their heal buttons and victory would be assured.

In Raids and Heroics, the mobs hit hard, and a cloth-wearer with 5-6k health can easily be one or two-shotted. If that's a damage-dealer it's annoying. If that's your only healer, then chances are a wipe will ensue. Swapping some DPS/Healing gear for some with more stamina can turn a loss into a win. Ideally, a ranged character should have at least 6.5-7k health unbuffed, and a melee character should have between 7-8 to survive in Karazhan or Heroics. Beyond that point I'm not sure, but you can't go wrong with survivability.

102.4%

Had a quick discussion with a ex-Warrior tank friend of mine last night about the comparative benefits of my current Eternium Greathelm vs the Faceguard of Determination from Heroic Badges. Where I was (jokingly) accused of "min-maxing" by working towards the FoD whilst I had the EG.

Whilst it's true that the Eternium Greathelm will outdo Faceguard in the Stamina stakes if it's stacked with 3x +12 stamina gems, in doing so, you lose out on a lot of Crushing Blow immunity over the Faceguard. Whilst this is no big deal for a Warrior, since even the most poorly-geared tank can get Crushing immune with Shield Block (+70% to Block Chance) and can afford to stack up the Stamina from that point.

A Paladin, on the other hand, only has +30% Block from Holy Shield, which means he has to make up a considerable difference in miss/block/dodge/parry to reach the combined 102.4% figure needed for crushing immunity. With 24 Block Rating (+3% to block) and 24 Dodge Rating (+1.25% to Dodge), the Facguard helps with this a lot, especially since I doubt I'll see the T4 Helm any time soon. Plus, it has no wasted points on Strength, unlike the Eternium helm.

Now all I need is another 48-ish Heroic Badges *sigh*. On the plus side, at least the EG is getting a visual upgrade next patch along with the rest of the Karazhan tanking epics. It'll be nice to have a cohesive-looking set if and when I manage to collect them all.

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.

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.

More on the weekend.

It was a busy weekend for Ulushnar. He did a lot of quests, both solo and with groups of CDers and a few instances, some with CD members and some with Pickup Groups. My goal was to stick to my rule of "one level an evening, two a day at the weekend". I very nearly broke that goal, since I got within 10,000 XP of level 47 on Saturday night, and I logged off last night with only 30k to level 49. I'll be playing less this week though, so I should still maintain a good average.

I made a couple of changes to Ulu though. The first was to change his talent spec slightly. Previously, I'd focussed on the Retribution tree to boost my damage output after getting 31 points in the Protection tree. Instead, I've decided to put those spare points into the Holy tree, to give me more mana and to reduce the chance that my healing spells will be interrupted. Should enhance my survivability in those multi-mob pulls I love so much.

I've also dropped Jewelcrafting in favor of Herbalism. Improving a crafting profession is a money and time sink whilst levelling, whilst having two gathering professions can help your cashflow and will give me the resources I can give to CD crafters to make potions, armor and gems at higher levels. Of course I've now got to run around levelling Herbalism, but that shouldn't take more than an evening.