Posts Tagged ‘Tanking’

Gearing Up Your Fresh Level 80 Tankadin from Scratch

Based on a mail sent by one of Blessing of King’s readers, and assuming you have leveled as Ret so far, here’s how you can build a basic tanking set from scratch before you even set a single foot into any instances.

The Outer Shell

First things first, get yourself a set of Tempered Saronite gear, except for the Legplates and the Gauntlets. For these two pieces, you’ll want to take Daunting Handguards and Daunting Legplates instead.

Mats you’ll need to get all of this crafted for you:

81x Saronite Bars
15x Cobalt Bars
3x Crystallized Earth

2x Eternal Earth

The Tools for the Job

As a weapon I recommend getting the Hammer of Quiet Mourning from the Zul’Drak Quest “Wanted: Ragemane’s Flipper“. You can get that one from the wanted poster in Light’s Breach.
For your shield, you should be at least honoured with your faction’s main Wrath group (Alliance Vanguard or Horde Expedition), which will give you access to their respective defense shields, Shield of the Lion-hearted for allies or Bulwark of the Warchief for hordies.

The Shinies

For rings, your best choices are:

To get yourself a Stoneguard Band crafted by a JC – requires two Eternal Earths, but is apparently quite popular for JCs to skill up, so you should be able to find plenty at the AH.

To collect and keep the Ring of Misinterpreted Gestures, a reward from the Scholazar quest “Fortunate Misunderstandings” which is part of the chain to align your toon with either the Oracles or the Frenzyheart, something you’ll want to do sooner than later anyway.

For your neck: Try to troll the AH for Torta’s Oversized Choker, a blue drop which seems to be relatively common since there’s always one or two up for auction on my server. Alternatively, you can complete the Scholazar Frenzyheart / Oracle quest chain and pick the Blood-Infused Pendant as a reward for “A Hero’s Burden“.

To cover your back, you’ll want to start with the crafted Cloak of Tormented Skies, which a leatherworker can make for you for 6 Borean Leather, 5 Crystallized Air and 5 Crystallized Water.

Trinkets are a huge problem though, since there’s not a single tanking trinket in wrath which you can get outside of instances. If you have banked TBC tanking trinkets, best hang on to them for a while.

The Finishing Touches

Your Stoneguard Band has a blue gem slot, you may want to put an Enduring Forest Emerald into that slot. Add an Eternal Belt Buckle to your belt and another Enduring Forest Emerald.

The end result will bring you to 528 defense and a bit over 17k HP, assuming you have no TBC defense trinkets. Way enough to grab the next upgrades through normal instances. You can see a mock-up of this equipment here.

And Beyond That?

The only quick to get upgrade from factions at this stage comes from Wyrmrest accord – if you have completed Wrathgate in Dragonblight, you should be pretty close to honoured, which would allow you to upgrade your cloak to the Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions.  You’re now at 532 defense, almost crit immune for normals and heroics. You can run every normal instance in the game with that kit to grab the next upgrades and build your faction rep from there, but you’re probably still a bit light on the HP side for heroics.

A series of potential upgrades:

In Gundrak, Gal’darah drops a nice ring.

In Halls of Lightning, you’ll want the defense trinket off Loken.

In CoT – Stratholme, you’ll find a shield from Epoch and boots from Meathook.

At that stage, it’s going to be enchanting / enhancing time, since further upgrades will pretty much require you to run heroics.

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Tankadins and Patch 3.0.8: Farewell to our Pulling Trinket

For 2 years, paladins wanting to tank (hah! As if anyone’d let us) could body pull.

For 2 more years, paladins could body pull or use Avenger’s shield to pull 3 targets. Blood knights even had a racial ranged pull for casters.

For 3 months, paladins could body pull, use Avenger’s shield to pull 3 targets OR use a glyph to make it single target, with all the downsides.

For 4 years and 3 months, the only other, trusty pulling tool for a tankadin was a little trinket, reward from a long quest chain in Un’Goro, Linken’s Boomerang.

Oh, once you got Avenger’s Shield, it had already become a bit obsolete, but I had kept it in my bank ever since, just in case, you never know, come sunshine and come rain, through respecs to holy and then ret.

Tomorrow, when the patch hits live, the trinket will definitely have outlived any practical usefulness, no longer an almost required complement to the serious tankadin’s arsenal, only a memory of bleaker times, when tanking meant walking 10 miles in the snow, uphill both ways and barefoot, soon to be unknown by new players and forgotten.

But today, still, it is time to pay a last hommage to this constant companion I have treasured since my mid-50ies and always kept handy FINALLY CELEBRATE THE LIBERATION OF ONE BANK SLOT AND GET RID OF THE BLOODY BOOMERANG!!!ONE!!!

Of course, you can’t really throw a boomerang away, or so they say. It keeps returning…

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Death Knight Macro: Rune Strike Wrapper

Here’s a cool macro template to get your rune strike into your opponent’s face:

#showtooltip Blood Strike
/cast [nomodifier] Rune Strike
/cast Blood Strike

Make one for each of your relevant runic abilities (not RP, only runes) and you’ll be sure to dump RS whenever the opportunity is up.

If you need to conserve RP for Dancing Rune Weapon or a Gargoyle, simply hold down any modifier key and the spell will be cast without RS. Oh, and make sure RS is first in your macro, the other abilities are on a cooldown, which would prevent RS from being cast on the same keypress otherwise.

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First DK Tanking Experience

Last night I logged on and was basically minding my own questing business in the still almost sparkling new (for me) Howling Fjords when I get a tell asking me if I were willing to tank Utgarde Keep.

After trading standard disclaimers (First time in instance, first time tanking on the DK and I don’t actually have anything resembling tanking gear, you guys still OK with this?), I took advantage of the DK’s almost unique flexibility, death gated to Ebon Hold, changed runeforge enchant to add 4% parry, and then went ahead and respecced to a more tankey build for good measure. I stuck to an unholy base build because I’m used to 18-second disease cycles by now and changing that right before trying out a new role was, well, not really a good idea.

And off we went on our merry way.

The group was quite spread out, level-wise. I was the lowest, followed by a 71 mage, a 72 priest, and a 72 and 77 rogue.

And how did it go?

Not that well. Compared to the paladin, DK tanking is a strange affair. First and foremost, I felt a lot more squishy than what I remembered from the tankadin (haven’t actually tanked on that guy for ages), and while gear obviously accounts for a lot (I had 475 defense and 89% avoidance last time I checked), the shield and holy shield with their 45% additional avoidance really do make a difference in terms of how in control you feel.

Speaking of control, the next hurdle is controlling a fight. Long essays have already been written on the relative ease of tankadins, and if you haven’t tried out tanking on a DK yet, let me tell you, there’s a real difference right there. Oh, with an unholy leveling build, you do AoE mobs all right. In a normally well controlled setting. In this UK run? Not so much. I felt, for instance, as if I were almost constantly with runes on cooldowns and no buttons left to push. For all the fuss over Righteous Defense, when you’re lacking a snap AoE spell like consecrate to pick up things like Prince Keleseth’s adds (I have either Death & Decay, using 3 runes, which is a rare commodity in mid-fight, or Unholy Blight, dependent on having some RP left), having a 3-mob taunt would sure have come in handy.

Then there’s the other thing which just became quite worrying in the patch notes, the nerf to Icebound Fortitude is something which would bug me in the future. The oh crap button this represented to give me a small health cushion when stuff started to get hairy will definitely be missing once it’s down to 20% instead of 50%.

In short, lots of room for improvement in my gameplay, and quite some adjustments I need to take. I’m quite frankly wondering whether I should just make sure to now level the paladin and the DK pretty much in parallel and use the pallie for tanking on invites and postpone any further experiments on the dead guy till endgame after collecting some decent and appropriate gear for the task.

On the other hand, I’m no quitter. We’ll see where this leads.

And how did the run go itself? Trash to first boss, no real problem. First boss: 1 rogue disconnects, we attempt to 4-man it, wipe, get another rogue, healer disconnects, get a balance druid accepting to heal, wipe a second time then kill the bastard. Next boss pair, the mage remembers that you need to kill both pretty much simultaneously after we wipe. We call it a night. A blue cloth hat dropped for the mage.

Funny factoids:

  • After summoning, one of the rogues and my DK are found unguilded (since Steptoe isn’t back to actually invite my toon to our 2-man operation). 5 seconds later and our PUG has become a guild run :)
  • To my surprise, one of my brand new guildmates remarked that I was the first DK who’d actually accept to tank since the release. That’s really unexpected. Oh, sure, there’s the non-tank rerollers who might not be too keen on experimenting while leveling, I can understand that. On the other hand, before I started to lag behind the leveling curve, you barely couldn’t take a step in Outlands without treading on another DK’s clown shoes. For some reason I just can’t fathom that nobody else would have taken the chance, tried it out and then stuck to it. Heck, before dual specs, no other tank can change enchants and respec as conveniently as a DK. I’m really surprised here.

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BBB on Ferals in Wrath

If you’re interested in Wrath analysis and in things shapeshifting, the Big Bear Butt Blogger has a very in-depth analysis and commentary on Bear tanking here.

Only avoid reading it in case you don’t want to be Wrath-spoiled, of course.

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Muckbeast on Raiding Design

Cambios is a game dev who may just have started his blog recently, yet posts interesting stuff from day one. Taking on some of the more visible flaws in raiding in current MMOs, he writes:

So 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 people work together to mindlessly clear trash, follow their little script of brain disconnected button pushes to beat the boss, and now he drops 2 or 3 pieces of loot. This loot will often be useful/needed by multiple players present, so someone loses out. The same item might drop many times in a row, resulting in certain classes feasting while others enjoy famine. Or sometimes loot will drop that nobody can use, and it just gets blown up or sold to an NPC Vendor. NEVER is the entire group happy with the loot that drops or the way the loot gets distributed.

Indeed. One of the major issues at heart of the old Welfare Epics feud of 2007 lies with the difference in loot distribution between PvE and PvP. I think Blizzard recognized the issue when they started expanding the badge system, but I also think they need to make it really pervasive. All instance drops should be token-based in some form, and there has to be in-game rewards for participation for every raid member (as opposed to out-of-game only systems like DKP).

So may elements of boss encounter design are absurdly arbitrary. I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny. I have fought raid bosses that were immune to all sorts of standard abilities for no apparent reason other than to make you feel impotent. I have participated in raid encounters where mages had to tank a boss… just because. People don’t make mages because they like tanking, folks. They make mages because they like to make things go boom. I have fought bosses where they you have to interrupt some of their spells, but not all of them, because being too good at interrupting their spells triggers some kind of Uber Spell. If the boss possessed the ability to perform this Uber Spell, why isn’t he just doing it all the time? Why punish people for being GOOD at a core mechanic (interrupting spell casting) with this arbitrary result?

In their currently stated best intentions, Blizzard claims to be trying to design designing new encounters more for roles and less for specific classes:

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as improving the raid viability of specs such as Arcane mage, Survival hunter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 available specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this problem. One is that there are 25 mandatory specs and 5 that shouldn’t be raiding. Boo. A more fun, interesting and ultimately fair direction is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Imagine running a raid with no warrior tanks at all. :)

These are good intentions, though. Designing encounters in a way that any combination of these 30 specs can successfully fill the roster in broad categories like tanking, healing, dps, CC and decursing will probably require quite a lot more overlap between classes than we see in TBC. And the first raid to put that theory to the test will be the new Naxxramas. Because unless memory fails me, frost and shadow-heavy builds for mages and warlocks respectively didn’t exactly fare well in there.

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About the Difficulty to Write Steady Wrath Beta Commentary: DK Tanking Talents

Wrath Spoilers WarningI probably should have known better. I actually used to.

With the latest beta build, DK tanking talents appear again to spread across all three trees. Again, not much of an issue in general (except that now you actually will have to make some choices as currently not every single of them can be picked anymore), just that with the rate of changes, the class is currently too unstable to try and predict much about it.

As I said: I should probably have known better. I actually used to.

That being said, on the paladin front, not only do current tanking and healing specs look very interesting, it also appears even lower level gameplay may be smoother, making leveling another one a more interesting prospect than before. Looking forward to that aspect – provided it doesn’t get nerfed until live.

As others have noted, class-specific glyphs (inscriptions) have been introduced. See the same MMO-Champion link as above for all details, but some of these just sound too good to remain untouched.

To wit, some of the pallie glyphs:

  • Glyph of Blessing of Might – Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.
  • Glyph of Holy Light – Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target.
  • Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom – Your Blessing of Wisdom causes your target to also regenerate health at the same rate as mana.

These three appear pretty much quite powerful.
Or Shammies?

  • Glyph – Chain Heal 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) – Your Chain Heal heals 1 additional target.
  • Glyph – Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) – Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the healing effect when you heal someone else.

Can you say battle healer? :)

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Some Blue Posts on Tanking Design Philosophy for Wrath

Wrath Spoilers WarningLooking through recent Blue posts, here are a few interesting tidbits regarding Tank design for Wrath.

The Summary:

  • They haven’t yet a clear notion how threat handling / management will happen at level 80
  • They want to keep each tank with its own specialty but improve overall viability (ie blurring the difference between classes)
  • They want to make it perfectly possible and viable to raid without any one definite cookie-cutter tank spec
  • They want to look at any formerly “must have” talents and integrate most of these into core mechanics to foster more varied spec… flavours instead of one single cookie-cutter approach.

Generic:

It’s almost impossible at this stage to talk about which class can generate the most threat or has the most survivability at level 80. There are no level 80 characters in beta, and we haven’t done our own testing yet. We want to come up with mechanics we like, then we get the numbers in good shape. I’m not saying don’t talk about it — it’s very useful when someone can point out a potential problem, particularly if it’s one we hadn’t thought of. Yes, that happens–a shock, I know. Just don’t slip down the slope from there by declaring the class dead or breaking out the slaps to the face.

There are 4 tanks in WoW. They all are intended to tank 5-player, 10-player and 25-player instances. They all have their specialties, and the warrior specialty will probably remain as the best tank for single, hard-hitting bosses. But if you only have a death knight for that encounter, or you bring a warrior to a fight with a bunch of adds, you’ll still be able to get purps. This is a slight change in philosophy for us, but one we feel is necessary in a world with 10 classes and several specs getting a boost to raid viability.
(Source)

I also acknowledge that hit and expertise are great threat stats, and expertise can offer a little mitigation to boot. The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game — it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can’t count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don’t have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. (Source)

I know there is a tradition in BC of a prot warrior MT with perhaps another prot warrior or a paladin as OT. If we do our jobs right, there will be some gouprs that run feral MTs with unholy DK OTs in Lich King raids. Crazy, I know, but in the BWL days it was 5 prot warriors tanking, so we’ve already come a long way. :) (Source)

Warrior:

AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We’ll see how that feels.

The old Shield Block wasn’t fun. We think we can make the new one fun. Numbers are the easiest thing to tweak if that’s all that’s called for. So we tend to focus on mechanics at this stage in development. Once we like the mechanics, we can massage the numbers. (Source)

Warriors need to be better AE tanks without eclipsing paladins. Thunder Clap is a good place to address that problem. If Shockwave becomes the ultimate tanking ability than we’re concerned nobody would want to run a 5-player dungeon without it. That’s not the goal. We don’t want to hand out Consecrate to every tank, but we want you to be able to tank groups better. (Source)

Druid:

The design is for bears to be viable, end-game main tanks. The design is for cats to be viable, end-game melee dps. In both cases you are going to need the right talents, good gear, skill and companions who can back you up — I don’t mean to imply raiding will be easy. :)

If you want to do a little tanking and dps, you probably won’t be as optimal at either, though you’ll probably always be better at switching between the two than other classes. In order to be as good at tanking as the other classes, you might have to give up a few talents that maximize your dps, and vice versa. This is a good thing — it lets you choose to actually be a main tank.
Don’t worry about your bears. The armor and other changes were done to fix itemization issues, not to nerf druids. You’ve already gotten the ability to drink pots in bear form and benefit from weapon enchants and windfury. We have plenty of knobs to turn to make sure you can do your job even better than you could in LK. (Source)

Paladin:

Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it’s going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin. I expect we’ll be a lot more active on this forum when that happens. (Source)

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Death Knight Talents Revamped, Tanking Now in 2 Trees

In the newest Beta build, it appears that Blizzard decided to reshuffle tanking talents. Where previously these were scattered over the lower tiers of all three trees, we now find them only in Frost and Unholy.

With that change, it looks like we’re going a bit back from “no talent tree is dedicated to one role”, as blood seems to become firmly the soloing tree (which it already was, according to people who actually play one in beta).

For more, check out the new trees here. And as pointed out by world of raids, at the time of this writing, the trees have a couple of bugs left.

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Quick Glance at Death Knight Tanking Talents

This post contents Wrath Beta SpoilersWowhead (no, I’m still not linking to them) put up a WWI-based talent calculator for DKs. From a quick survey, it appears Blizzard wants indeed not to typecast each talent tree to specific roles, as talents fit for tanking appear in all three.

The good news, though, without having a concrete idea of the impact in terms of gameplay, it does appear that by level 80, all important tanking talents across all three trees are speccable in one single build, and you may even pick up a couple of DPS-boosting talents while doing so.

Of course, in practice this approach changes little of substance compared to some cookie-cutter 0/49/12 (or variant thereof depending on progression) tankadin build of old, it only gives the illusion of variety. Still, from the current design perspective, it looks like tanking talents are at the lower tiers, while all three trees have some interesting DPS talents in the top tiers (once the tanking stuff has been taken care of).

EDIT post release: People interested in looking at what builds and trees are viable on live would be well advised to follow this Elitist Jerks discussion. The current finding is that while blood tanking doesn’t cut it, the jury is still out between frost and unholy. And that’s a good thing IMO.

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