It is a reference to the first boss. Bronjham is a huge reference to soul music and it's artists.

Honestly, while the track is pretty hilarious, I'm not sure I get your comment. :P

Is there something about the difficulty of Jaraxxus that I'm missing? For us it's a straight-forward twitch-fest. Oddly enough, it is getting people to actually cooperate on NRB for us. Getting DPS to get out of the way so the tanks can move the worms into position when they burrow, and just getting people to understand that poles are not your friend on Icehowl seems to be a much higher skill hurdle than Jaraxxus ever was.

Hoggersbud,

That comment is only partially true. Even the old adage is only partially true these days. Every role seems to like to blame the other roles for their own failures.

If DPS is gaining too much aggro and getting killed, it can also be a trigger-happy DPS not listening to instruction (in our raids, the first few DPS to die all fall in this category). I've been in Ony groups where we say "Don't DPS her until the tank has her in position". Then a hunter does it anyway, pulls aggro, and Ony cleaves half the raid, and tailswipes the other half. Bad DPS can wipe raids too.

The only role, that as I tank, that I will accept scrambling like mad to peel off of is the healer. I know I generate more threat than the DPS, and I use marks to help the group/raid determine kill order when we need one. We ask the DPS to hold off if we need time. DPS that can't even do those two things... well, I'm not going to scramble to save their butt because they will just pull aggro again (because of how taunt works, odds are they are just still going full steam on that mob and not letting the tank build aggro on it at all).

I have to side with you on this one Shizu, another bitter NElf player here. I wouldn't be surprised if the Alliance got more aggressive out of Dustwallow Marsh if Jaina, say, left her position for some reason... or was effectively shut out of talks by Garrosh.

Either way, punch em in their allies to draw them away from the NE front, and push south, and hard. The likes of Garrosh and his buddies have no business in Ashenvale or Darkshore.

Don't really have enough information about how paladins play so far to comment on the nerfs as they stand.

But from the sidelines it seems like they might be the class most in need of a design review for Cat (even over DKs at this point). The constant changes seem to give the impression that making Prot/Ret more viable has made it difficult to balance them with the way the class works currently, and with its current toolbox.

At earlier iLvls, yeah... lately the imbalance has gotten a lot better, especially once you start picking up Uld/ToC level badge gear.

As I mentioned in response to another comment asking for this. The main problem is not even the leveling issues involved, but the fact that these pure tanks/healers would either be better at tanking/healing, or they would have to be even.

When dealing with a tank/healer, a bit more healing = more survivability, and well, a bit more survivability is just that. What the heck would you add to the hybrids so that their lower performance is counterbalanced in a way that you'd not give full preference to the pure tank vs the hybrid tank? Extra survivability is always a bonus, and one that is hard to counterbalance with some other bonus on top of that. Buffs don't make up for it if the tank doesn't benefit from the buff as well (which might make them preferable to the pure tank in that case), and if the pure tank was 'merely even', the only benefit of taking a pure over a hybrid is a benefit to the tank, not the raid (since once in as a tank, the pure cannot be ousted from their role).

When looking at raid makeup, I see tanks being asked to DPS as often as DPS being asked to tank (depending on the tides in that guild at the time). If you introduce a pure tank class (which happens to be the role with only 2, maybe 3 slots per raid of 10/25), then you are also going to put pressure on the hybrid tanks to DPS/Heal instead to make room for the tank who can't and won't switch to something else. I've had this pressure as a tank myself, and it isn't fun. Other tanks refusing to take dual-spec so they can 'force' themselves in as a tank when you aren't in a position to ask people to sit (10 man raid with only 10 present), regardless of their skill level.

The problem with a 'pure' healer or tank beyond the leveling pain they would experience is this:

You can survive with 4% less DPS on a hybrid when filling a slot, especially when the actual DPS put out is so dependent on player skill and gear.

When you only have 2 tanks and 3 healers in a 10-man... guess who's gonna get that slot because they have an extra 4% buffer on making mistakes and not wipe the raid. That 'tax' becomes a "Well, you don't do this role in half the guilds anymore" when you apply it to tanking and healing, where all the classes pretty much need to be balanced in order to not produce extreme favoritism. Otherwise you will always bring the pure healers and tanks, to get that extra 8% survivability for the group.

I can bring a shaman and get a nice buff that helps pure and hybrid DPS alike, or bring a pure for raw DPS. The choice is that I'll want both in my group if at all possible. When it comes to tanking, unless you fundamentally change what a hybrid tank can bring to the raid, and not let pure tanks bring those things, you will only see pure tanks as they will have an extra buffer for mistakes which translates into a huge raw advantage when learning new fights or starting into hard modes.

I personally thought the idea of bodies like the IEEE hammering out standards like 802.11 and so on would be partly to make sure a licensing scheme was in place to make sure any patent owners got paid. It's starting to sound like the IEEE is pretty worthless when you can use an "open standard" with a random chip made by a random manufacturer and still get sued for infringing 'key patents' that make that open standard go.

I'm in a situation where the only reason I still get to tank is because I'm the guild's most regular tank. I've proven myself to the guild as someone who sticks it out in a casual guild when we've lost tanks and recruited new ones, lost those, and so on. And as it is a casual guild, we pretty much take anyone, regardless of spec/etc. And on top of that, I've proven that I can help clear content and help the guild in progression fights to get new bosses down.

Lately, we wound up with an influx of tanks, more than we could ever really effectively use in raiding. But because they are all friends, it was hard to say no. I'm finding myself being pushed into ranged DPS (granted, something the guild tends to lack in a lot of runs), but it isn't what I want to be doing. It is boiling down to: these new folk have only a tank set, or only a tank spec, and so if we need them to fill a spot, they take the tank spot by default. Only if we have extras for the run can we even ask them to sit, regardless of their skill. In some ways it is getting frustrating, because I'm still needed to tank progression, but being asked to DPS on Ony, and Tank ToC makes it that much harder to gear up my feral set when Ony has the current BiS tank weapon for bears.