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Ready Check: Raid understudies and how to grow them
Ready Check is a column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Vault of Archavon or Icecrown Citadel, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. As much as I'd like to think I'm an extremely dedicated and reliable guild member and as much as I live and breathe tanking in the end-game content, even I am forced to admit that I sometimes do that thing raid leaders dread most. I flake out. It's not like I'm lounging around my man cave, sipping an incredibly powerful beverage, and just spontaneously decide "I'm not going to raid tonight. Screw those 24 (or 9) other people." It's always a real life thing for me: I run late at work, I'm getting married, my cat's on fire. (I've missed three raids because my cats have caught themselves on fire. Once is funny, twice is a concern, but I don't think anyone believed me the third time.) But no matter how real and valid my reason for missing a raid, the fact still remains that I'm letting down a group of people. (Or, I'm letting down a group of friends if that's the flavor guild you're running.) Even worse, let's say I'm the main tank. Many raiding guilds use a deference-minded loot system: "main" specs get the loot for their role first, before people who only fill that role on occasion. So, not only is the raid missing a warm body, they're missing a warm body who is usually the most practiced at their role and the best geared for that role. It's a conundrum for every raid leader. You don't want to tell your Class A folks that if they miss a single raid, they'll find themselves benched. But at the same time, you're really out a whole lot of power by missing those folks. This problem is especially palpable for tanks and healers. That's not because DPS isn't important (it absolutely is), but because the tank and healer corp for raids tend to be much smaller. If you're missing one healer out of your 10 man raid, you're suddenly down 33% of your healing power. (Best case scenario might be you're putting the two-healer stress on someone, but that's still not great.) The only way you can mitigate your raid loss due to missing tanks and healers is to plan ahead. Let's take a look behind the cut and talk about how you can handle this issue.
Tank opportunities in the late endgame
I've been tangling with the tough issue of tanking again lately -- I have finally leveled up my paladin to 80, and ideally, the plan is to jump in as a dual specced tank and healer when patch 3.3 hits. All LFG all the time, eventually headed to higher level raiding. But Honor's Code has a good post up this weekend about the trouble that many tanks are facing lately -- they say that while there's lots of tanking to be had in the early endgame (every 5-man and heroic group out there needs a tank), the available positions narrow down as you get farther up. By the time you're reaching Icecrown (which I would like to do someday), there are so relatively few guilds raiding there and so few serious tanking spots within those guilds that you either have to be a really great tank, know someone who's in charge, or be ready to switch off to another spec or alt when necessary. In essence, they're saying there's a glass ceiling for tanks. Once you reach a certain point, it's hard to find even the opportunity to be a solid tank.
Some new WoW-related tattoos in our gallery
Time once again for us to update our WoW tattoo and license plate galleries with submissions from you readers. This time around, we've got a few new updates to the tattoo gallery, including Raevyndra of Rexxar's new arm ink above, these two pieces sent in by Tonya, and Sean J.'s pretty elaborate Horde crest. If tattoos are your thing, there's definitely some cool WoW-related ink to check out in there. This is the only new license plate addition at the moment, but if you happen to have a WoW-related plate on your car that we haven't seen just yet (or can grab a picture of someone else's -- just stay safe if you happen to be driving at the time), be sure to send us a note on the tipline. Stay tuned for more tats and plates when we see them. %Gallery-40471%
Forum post of the day: The tank surplus
"Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels."- Faith WhittleseyKazug of EU-Defias Brotherhood is afraid that he will never be able to take on the role of main taink against Heroic Malygos. He pointed out that although tanks are relatively scarce in five man instances, there is fierce competetion for tanking slots in 25 mans. One out of five players must be a tank in five mans, whereas only one in twenty-five can be main tank in a raid. He feels that only the best of the best, the ones with the most time as he defines it, are able to take on the role of main tank.Other tanks are left taking out the trash on single-tank fights. Several posters echoed Kazug's sentiment. Despite a dedication to tanking, they're relegated to the roll of picking up adds in most fights. Others indicated that their guilds rotate MTs or even have tanks roll off for main tanking responsibilities. For some guilds the MT is the MT and that's all there is to it.
Ask a Beta Tester: Shaman, Engineers, and Feral Druids
Welcome back to Ask a Beta Tester, where for one glorious day, we don't have any passenger mount questions! But I know, deep down, there are a thousand more on the horizon.Elmo asked...How are Enhancement Shamans shaping up? I heard silly things like Elemental gear is great for them or 2x fast weapons with Flametongue. Are we really gonna make that much of a turn around? In other words, is my hard earned gear all worthless? Not just the epic gems and Strength enchants.Enhancement Shaman did hit a weird point where that was true, but I don't think it was ever intended that the 'final product' would look that way. There were some Windfury bugs and wonky unfinished tuning that caused that, but as another reader mentioned, the devs are working on getting everything fixed and proper. Things will be a little different from Burning Crusade, but not so much so that Enhancement Shaman are wearing Elemental gear to melee.
Tank Talk: should the main tank position still exist?
Tank Talk is WoW Insider's raid-tanking column, promising you an exciting and educational look at the world of getting the stuffing thrashed out of you in a 10- or 25-man raid. The column will be rotated amongst Matthew Rossi (Warrior/Paladin), Adam Holisky (Warrior), Michael Gray (Paladin), and myself (Druid). Our aim is to use this column to debate and discuss class differences, raid-tanking strategies, tips, tricks, and news concerning all things meatshieldish. Today, dear readers, we might make ourselves hated by the entire population of undisputed, royal-bloodlined, main tanks, but that's OK. We are used to staying at the top of someone's hate list.One of the accepted facts of raiding life used to be that the main tank was the guild's gearing priority. As Adam Holisky's observed, "Everything that happens in the raid eventually makes it back to the tank." Healers undergeared? You're screwed. DPS incompetent or just badly grouped? Buh-bye. Random number generator wreaking all manner of havoc on healer crits and boss parries? Thar be the graveyard. A truly cynical mind would opine that the tank should be as well-geared as possible if only because it makes it easier for the raid to forget that person existed as anything other than a rapidly-advancing line on the Omen screen that: a). always stayed above their own, and b). never died. There are enough random variables while the raid's learning a new boss that the tank needs to be eliminated as one, and in vanilla WoW that was certainly the goal. Raid and offtank damage on most encounters hadn't scaled to the point where you could make a compelling argument in favor of gear equilibrium across your tanking roster. What was the point of something like that when 95% of the damage in a fight was going to be absorbed by a single person?That changed.
Five tips to minimize raiding downtime
I'm a rather avid raider, putting in a solid 20 hours a week on my Warrior. One of the major things about the time spent raiding is that it can be very precious. There is only so much time that 24 other people, plus appropriate class substitutions, can be available each week. It's critical that the time spent raiding is used well.Unfortunately, using raiding time well is about as much of a challenge as is downing Illidan. In preparation for this article, I've spent the past three weeks keeping track of the down time in raids. We raid Sunday through Thursday nights, from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. We experience a downtime of about 51 minutes for each raid, which is about 20% of the time. Down time is defined as the time that my character is standing still, not attacking, not moving, and not being MDed to.Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not really sure. Tip #1: Chain pullingPersonally, I do my best at the main tank to chain pull and push the trash through as fast as possible. This works out 99% of the time, however the 1% of the time it doesn't work out can grind the raid to a halt. Case and point: The trash to Supremus isn't too bad, and is a lot of packs where the MT, OT, and Pally tank each have some mobs to tank. There are also some ranged dragons that the Warlocks tank. These pulls can go very fast, and are very predictable. Pulling slowly we can do this in about 40 minutes, while chain pulling each group, we can push through in 15.Tip #2: Fully self buffed, all the timeIt doesn't take much to buff yourself. Every class has some buff they can apply to themselves, be it food buffs, spell buffs, or shouts. The key here is that you can find a minute or two to always buff at least yourself, if not others. Although, it might not always be possible to buff others as you're going along - and that's okay with most raid leaders for trash pulls.
Vote for the best piece of advice!
Last week I asked you to leave a comment with tips of anti-advice you could give to players. Things like "Be sure to move in the flame wreath so you're not cold when the blizzard hits!" or "Just walk up to Archimonde, he won't agro until you hit him." You all responded in force and gave lots of good tips and pieces of advice. Now for fame and no-fortune, lets vote for the best one!I'll close the voting next weekend and announce the winner on Monday April 21st. Vote now! I did! %Poll-12641%
Nihilum vs Brutallus video
The flag ship raiding guild Nihilum has released a great video of them taking on Brutallus, one of the new 25 man Sunwell Plateau bosses. The video is available from several sources, and the downloaded version is of quite high quality. The version provided above, a stream from File Front, is also pretty good.The video itself is taken from the standpoint of their main tank, Kungen, and runs for just over seven minutes. Most interesting is the additional pieces of information Nihilum provides about their raid setup. For guilds attempting him, looking at a successful raid composition can be a major piece of information. The raid setup Nihilum uses is:
Office management, Azeroth-style
Josh had his leadership role in WoW pop into his mind during a job interview, and he channeled that into an interesting little article about how to convert WoW roles into the roles people play around the office. I think he's really got something here-- stay tuned for how you can buy a ticket to his "Management, Azeroth-style" seminar, which will teach you and your staff how to tackle even the hardest raid bosses projects.We've heard quite a few times before that WoW can help you on the job, but I don't know that I've ever seen the roles detailed so clearly. Josh says the Main Tank is the outside communications person for the project, and fends off managers and other departments to make sure members can get their jobs done. The Main Healer keeps motivation up rather than hit points, and make sure everyone stays on task and working. And the DPS are the meat of the project, doing the day-to-day damage to accomplish objectives. The idea works pretty darn well, actually-- at least until your project manager starts taunting the CEO and your senior producer stays up late one night and catches aggro. But definitely an interesting read if you've ever been given the task of running a team of people, in or out of game.
Guildwatch: A strange form of payback
Imagine for one second that you're an amazing raider (Yes, I know it's hard, but do it anyway). Imagine that a guild working on the Black Temple actually invites you out of your guild to come and raid with them. Would you do it? Would you leave your own guild behind just to go to the Black Temple? That's the choice that one guild's main tank was faced with, and he chose to leave his guild behind. And then they chose to log on to his account, and as payback, as you can see in the movie above, delete every one of his characters.Ouch is right. Not quite sure that was called for (although, as someone points out, since he's got such a clear record of everything that was deleted, he'll probably be able to get it back from Blizzard). Still, not exactly the best way to congratulate your guildie on getting "promoted." That drama, and much more in this week's GW, which starts right after the jump. Want to send us juicy drama of your own? Drop a tip to wowguildwatch@gmail.com.
