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Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk?
Tank Talk is WoW Insider's new 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. At least, that's what the others said they were doing. I intend to use it mostly as a soapbox to complain. Absolute power tends to......something something.Welcome to Tank Talk. I am your bear Druid hostess for this week, with a topic that occurred to me while reading a recent article here on the site. Eliah Hecht wrote that his guild is facing a not-uncommon tank shortage and that he has considered the possibility of leveling a tanking class to 70 before Wrath, or tanking on a Death Knight afterwards. A number of people on my server and in my guild have talked about doing the same thing, or switching mains once Wrath hits. With so many people playing Death Knights, I think it's very possible that more people will discover they enjoy -- or at least, don't mind -- tanking, and may seek to do so in a raid environment without necessarily knowing what they've really signed up for. From those of us who have tanked raid content in vanilla WoW or BC, here are the 10 questions you'll want to ask yourself if you're considering the possibility of tanking serious raid content:
I love my PvP!
A while back fellow WoW Insider blogger Adam posted his thoughts on PvP, calling PvE the only real game. He makes excellent, valid points as to why he believes this is so, such as the fact that it is quite impossible to level from 1 to 70 through PvP alone. The game was designed around a PvE-centric environment, and the relatively late additions of the Battlegrounds and Honor system are a testament to that. In those respects, Adam is completely correct.Of course, many of you took issue with his statements, even prompting him to publish his personal counterpoint on the matter. As an avid PvP player, I found some of what Adam said to be less than savory myself. It has to be noted that Adam has extensive PvE endgame experience, and his opinions come from a raider's perspective. I will concede his first two points -- you cannot progress in World of Warcraft through PvP alone and that PvP was a mere afterthought. On the other hand, Adam's other points don't quite hold as much water.
New Season 4 items sneak out on live realms
Yes, that pic above is the priest's robe, direct from Arena season 4 (you can click on it to see a bigger version), and here is the priest's helm from season 4. As the story goes over at World of Raids, a player on EU Arathor accidentally deleted some season 1 items, and a GM then accidentally gave him season 4 items in replacement instead. The items were taken right back (duh), but their IDs were activated on that realm, so anyone with a little item ID knowledge could pull up the stats.For comparison, these have boosts almost all around from the season 3 items, which is pretty much to be expected. And while the Stamina is clearly much higher than anything we've seen at the higher levels, the actual damage doesn't compare much to even the Tier 6 stuff. PvP gear in season 4 is all about staying alive -- we've seen a few other items leak out already, and it's the same deal on those.Which is probably as it should be. We should note, also, that this stuff may not actually be done -- although the fact that it's spawnable on the live realms might mean that Blizzard is ready for season 4. I still don't think we'll see it until after the arena tourney, but who knows?
Why Mount Hyjal and Black Temple attunements still matter
The dust has settled on most of the servers, and the Fury of the Sunwell has been a success across the board. One of the lingering issues however is attunement. It has been noted before that Onyxia is now the hardest attunement in the game. This has occurred with the removal of the Karazhan, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal attunements. However this creates a false impression that these instances are no longer worthy of attunements, and thus these quests are no longer worthy of the care and time that's necessary to push forward into them.You want to get your Vashj and Kael vials, you want to complete your Mount Hyjal attunement, and you want to complete your Black Temple attunement. If you're in a guild that isn't running those instances anymore and is focusing squarely on the Tier 6 content, then you still want to go back and get the attunements. Why?I'm glad you asked.
Raid Rx: Are tier token drops fair?
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. People sure can be pushy when it comes to drops. Hands off, ladies. That Netherweave is mine! Today I share with you one of my deepest secrets. There isn't a week that goes by that I don't lay awake at night, seething about the unfairness of raiding drops. Oh, sure, there's always that elusive piece that has a 0.0002% drop rate that every healer wants. Those are pie in the sky dreams of healing uberness. No, that's not what I mean. I'm talking about the regular gear that's supposed to be dropping at semi-predictable intervals every week. Most bosses have a fairly limited loot table, and in the raiding world, most of that centers around the tier token system. You are supposed to have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing your token on any given kill. But what if that goes horribly wrong? And worse, what if it starts hurting progression? Join me after the jump for a tale of woe and angst, plus what Blizzard has been doing to unintentionally fix the situation (sorta).
Blizzard needs to steal character customization Ideas from other MMORPGs
The idea of being able to customize your character's look and feel beyond choosing one of 4 or 5 basic face and hairstyle choices at character creation or upgrading to a new piece of loot is one that's near and dear to me. I'm an RPer, so I like to think of each of my characters as a unique person with unique quirks, ideas, and fashion sense that I can't always express as I'd like to due to the limitations of WoW's mechanics. I've even had some very good friends quit WoW because their characters weren't customizable enough. The idea came to the front of my mind a few weeks back when I was visiting my brother. We played EverQuest together, but when it came time to move on from that game, he (and most of our EQ guild) chose Everquest 2, and I chose WoW. So, of course, he ribs me about it quite often, and since I was visiting, he decided to load up EQ2 and show me what I was "missing." Now to be honest, I'm still a bigger fan of WoW, but that's a subject for a different article. One thing I will say for EQ2 is that I was very impressed with the wider range of options to customize your character and show off your character's accomplishments. There's a few ideas related to character customization from EQ2 and other games that I'd really like Blizzard to continue emulating in future patches and in the WoTLK expansion that I believe would deepen the game experience for me and my friends, and for many other players as well.
Series 3 action figures incoming!
Toy News International reports that the World of Warcraft action figures from DC Direct are coming in the last quarter of this year. I love my toys and I love WoW so this comes as great news, particularly with the new selection of figures -- a Blood Elf Paladin named Quin'thalan Sunfire (hell yeah!); Tamuura, a Draenei Mage; an Undead Rogue called Skeeve Sorrowblade; and a Human Priest, Sister Benedron, who can probably cure your allergies. As with previous World of Warcraft action figures from DC direct, the sculpts are mostly based on existing armor sets that players might recognize.Tamuura sports the Tier 6 raid set Tempest Regalia, while Sister Benedron is depicted in Tier 5 Avatar gear with exaggerated shoulder wings; Skeeve Sorrowblade appears to be wearing a highly-detailed version of Deathmantle, the Rogue Tier 5 set; and Quin'thalan Sunfire looks... well, he looks like he's a generic Silvermoon City guard whom you ask for directions. It's a bit disappointing, personally, although I guess it's cool to have a Silvermoon City guard. It would be kind of like having a named Stormtrooper or something. Historically, DC Direct's action figures have appeared in the World of Warcraft comic, so expect one or more of these new figures to make an appearance in the Chris Metzen-approved canon comic series.More pictures after the jump. So clickety-click, toy lovers (and uh, WoW fans)...
Are hybrid tanks going to *be* left behind?
In the wake of Alex Ziebart's recent post for Hybrid Theory, we received a number of comments from paladins on their ability to main-tank a 25-man raid. Behind the scenes, the subject was equally controversial; many of us here play tanks and we all feel passionate about our classes. An email discussion started about hybrid tanks in general, and it got to be so interesting that we were threatened with being fired if we didn't post it we were asked to share it with our readers. Warriors? Druids? Paladins? And the people who love them? This one's for you. Now, I've previously fielded complaints that my posts are too long, so far warning; if you're not in the mood for a pretty thorough look at the current state of hybrid tanking, you'll probably want to keep moving. If you play any tank at all, just want to know more about them and the people who choose to play tanks, or are considering rolling a tank class, I hope you find the following to be of interest.Please note that the headers below are not, as in portions of Matthew Rossi's post, quotes from anybody involved; they're just a means of helping me organize my thoughts and translate our email conversations into the blogging format. I'm attempting to condense the content of multiple email conversations.My perspective on Alex's post For reference, my main is a tanking feral druid in a Tier 6 raiding guild. Our main tank is a protection paladin, and we're on Reliquary of Souls at the moment. This guy main-tanked Vashj, main-tanked Kael for a certain period until we found out his computer settings made it really tough for him to see Flamestrikes (so we substituted a warrior for that reason, not because of the pally/warrior divide), and has main-tanked most of Hyjal and a fairish amount of Black Temple.More past the cut.
The return of stamina to tier 6
A few days ago, Eliah mentioned a tragic thing in his list of Undocumented Changes in a recent PTR push: The Stamina disappeared from the new Tier 6 pieces!There was a pretty big outcry about this, and understandably so. The Burning Crusade has made Stamina a very important stat in all areas of gameplay from PvE to PvP. You need to be able to take blows in the arenas, and almost every raid encounter has multiple sources of random damage to the raid. Stamina is a big deal, which brings us to the good news.The Stamina has returned to the T6! Not in the amounts it had previously(unfortunately) but still a decent amount. While not ideal, it has enough Stamina that classes can actually wear these set pieces now. Previously, with no Stamina on this armor, most classes were completely unable to wear them in a raid. I know that I, personally, already have to wear PvP gear for a number of encounters because my raiding gear simply doesn't have enough Stamina on it for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal. New tier pieces with no Stamina at all would be something I could not even consider using, no matter how good the rest of the stats may be. Being one-shotted by environmental damage makes that awesome damage and mana regen a little useless.
PTR Notes: Undocumented changes
Today a big new build went up on the patch 2.4 PTR, and every change that was in the patch notes was detailed here. However, inevitably, there were some changes that didn't make it to the patch notes, and for that we have the intrepid researchers at MMO-Champion and World of Raids. Here's what they've managed to tease out of the realms: Most of the Tier 6 belts, boots, and bracers found in the Sunwell raid have had their Stamina removed, and other stats increased to compensate. The exception is the Warrior tanking set, Onslaught Armor. Edit: And the Paladin tanking set, Lightbringer Armor. The five epic BoP jewelcrafted trinkets we learned about previously have had patterns added; they're available at the Revered level from the Shattered Sun Offensive quartermaster. In what must be a bug of some sort, rank 1 of the Warlock talent Emberstorm now increases the casting speed of Incinerate by 2%, as well as its previous effect of boosting all fire damage by 2%. Other ranks of the talent are unchanged. That's everything discovered so far. Seen anything else that wasn't mentioned in the new patch notes?
When your fearless leader hasn't played your class
Back when I first started tanking 5-mans, there was a particular hunter who pulled off me with irritating regularity. This was partly because the early Druid tanking set at 70 is itemized more for mitigation than threat generation, but partly because he was a young guy, he was good dps, and he knew it. MM-specced Hunters actually do have a lot of control over mobs that get pulled off the tank, and I suspect on some level he made a game out of seeing just how long he could lock something down while the exasperated tank turned her attention elsewhere, usually after bellowing at him in party chat to "DISENGAGE! FEIGN DEATH! DISENGAGE!"Not having played a Hunter at that point, I had a fuzzy notion that Disengage somehow reduced threat and was highly affronted at any hunter with aggro spikes who wasn't using Feign Death over and over again. After starting to level a hunter alt, it quickly became apparent that: a). Disengage was a melee-only skill that still had to "hit" the mob, and b). Feign Death wasn't exactly a spammable ability and could be resisted no matter what you did. I am by no means an expert hunter player, but I have at least learned to bellow, "FEIGN DEATH ON COOLDOWN!" if they're not trapping (and just minding my own business if they are).I am still occasionally reminded of my days as a backseat hunter, and never more so than while listening to my GM trying to figure out what's gone wrong in a raid.
Raid Rx: I feel the need... the need for speed Part 3
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. Btw, Kil'jaeden says hi! Ok, maybe not... This is like the song that never ends. It goes on and on my friends. Who knew there was so much to say about casting faster? I swear this is the last week of it. I'll find something... anything... else to talk about next week. Just stick it out. You can do it! For a bit of a recap, Part 1 explained how you can reduce casting lag, the first step in getting your heals to land faster. If you haven't read the details, please take the time to do so before you hit up Part 2, the fundamentals of haste. This section covers what haste is, the typical reasons someone would want it, and a breakdown of the common haste healing items as they compare to regular healing gear. This week I'm going to finish the series with an in-depth look at the remaining haste gear by class, including what's available now and what's coming up in Patch 2.4.
8-Piece Sets Return With Patch 2.4 (kind of...)
The frantic folk at MMO Champion are digging up major loot finds in the upcoming Patch 2.4, including what appears to be new Tier 6 pieces -- boots, bracers, and belts. These pieces can be obtained by exchanging tokens that likely drop from Sunwell Plateau. This marks an unexpected return to eight-piece sets hearkening back to the days of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and even Naxxramas (although Tier 3 was officially 9 pieces). Despite the additions, however, the item previews don't appear to show any new bonuses beyond the existing 4-piece bonuses for Tier 6. This comes as a moderate surprise considering Blizzard has said in the past that they liked the 5-piece set format. On the other hand, it's probably a good thing considering there is no official Tier 7, and these pieces cater to set completists as well as giving more flexibility in obtaining (or keeping) the set bonuses.On an interesting note, the Tier 6 Lightbringer's Battlegear or the Paladin Retribution boots, bracers, and belt show hints of what the patch notes state as "Items intended for Retribution Paladins have had their stats adjusted. Retribution Paladins should see an increase in dps as a result." We can see from MMO Champion's screenshot that the raid set has scrapped Spell Damage -- similar to the Vengeful Gladiator's Vindication of Arena Season 3 -- in favor of Haste rating. If all other Tier 6 Retribution pieces -- or even better, all other Burning Crusade Tier set pieces -- will be retroactively changed to remove Spell Damage and add Haste rating, it means a massive DPS upgrade for Retribution Paladins as promised. After all, Retribution Paladin DPS is basically auto-attack plus.
Gear upgrades in 2.4: Engineering goggles, tier 6 armor sets, and more
MMO-Champion reports that their sources have uncovered some news about loot in 2.4. In non-Sunwell news, recipes for upgraded versions of all the various BoP goggles have been found. Mostly, the recipes require large amounts of elemental primals, some khorium, and primal nethers. A peace offering for the recent Rocket Boots Xtreme change, perhaps? We also have names for what appears to be the PvP armor that will be purchasable off of reputation vendors. They're all called "Battlegear," but we're seeing some familiar prefixes, such as "Kodohide" and "Dragonhide" for the Druids, and "Ornamented" for the Paladins. MMO-Champion's sources claim that the new Sunwell armor may actually connect directly to Tier 6, counting for the 2 and 4 piece bonuses on those sets. It doesn't appear, however, that there will be additional bonuses beyond those already in place on the sets, but it should encourage people to get a few pieces of Tier 6 in some of the older content before they try their hand against Kil'jaedan. Finally, a set called Latro's Flurry has been uncovered, with one of the set pieces being the preexisting Latro's Shifting Sword. We'll have to keep an eye out for the other sword, possibly from the Sunwell daily rep or the new 5-man dungeon. The PTRs should be up soon, and hopefully we'll have confirmation on this and more of the news coming in soon enough.
3-man group conquers Molten Core
3-man Molten Core. You read that right. sailoreagle on Livejournal walks us through the run his Tier 6 prot warrior, Tier 6 holy priest, and a "Tier 4-ish" feral druid (along with hunter and mage alts) had in a surprisingly easy Molten Core instance. You'd think they'd have trouble along the way (in fact, they thought they'd have trouble along the way), but from this account, it actually went down pretty easily. From the screenshots, it seems like they just plowed through the bosses-- they ate Magmadar's frenzies, exploded Garr's minions, organized around Sulfuron and Majordomo, and eventually, yes, survived wave after wave of sons to take out Raggy himself.Pretty amazing. They got both Bindings of the Windseeker out of the deal, along with a bunch of other epics that it used to take 40 different people to obtain. It's still not actually easy-- sailor says they burned through some hardcore potions, and clearly their gear helped out a lot (although think what this will be like at level 80), so it was still a challenge.Still, it's kind of sad, in a way. Remember when you went back to your childhood playground and everything seemed so... small? If three people can beat Ragnaros, is he really fit to carry the title of Firelord any more? Thanks, Timeless!
Free Tier 6 with purchase of shaman!
One thing I love about patches is the ridiculous bugs that come along -- and this one is a doozy. The shaman Tier 6 vendor in Mount Hyjal is now selling the restoration Tier 6, Skyshatter Raiment, for the low, low price of 0 tokens and 0 gold. Of course, you have to be attuned to Mount Hyjal to take advantage of this deal, which requires you to be a fairly progressed raider already -- but enough people have been picking them up to necessitate an immediate Blizzard response. Drysc warned shammies last night that they would be going to "great lengths" to track down the Tier 6, and would destroy any enchants or gems on the ill-gotten gear. Of course, the thread turns into shamans complaining about their class, but there are some good questions: what about people who buy and re-buy the sets and disenchant them into Void Crystals for the AH? Will this ruin the enchanting economy? What about guilds that can suddenly progress due to an infusion of incredibly well-geared shamans? Is this the literal definition of welfare epics? Some people are asking Blizzard to bring the servers down until this is fixed, but that seems unlikely. What do you think Blizzard should do about this?
Tier 6 on Blizzard's game guide
Just in case you haven't seen them yet (and you probably have, because you are a knowledgeable WoW Insider reader), Blizzard has added the Tier 6 armor sets to their game guide.It's an easy little interface, and you can very easily see any of the armor sets (and all of their variants, which makes me think that it might be cool if the different spec variants actually looked, y'know, different) on any race, and even any gender of your choice. Gaze at the beauty of the Skyshatter set! Be in awe of the Warlock's Malefic armor! And puzzle why Paladins got yet another strange-looking armor set. Blizzard should just put ballerina gowns on them next time and be done with it.
PTR notes: tier 6 stats
Wow, those PTR folks sure have been busy. Now we have the full stats for every single class's Tier 6 set(s), which drop in the Black Temple. This came to us almost simultaneously via MMO-Champion and World of Raids, though I have to say World of Raids's versions are a little less irritatingly watermarked. Looks like the names and set bonuses that came out a little while ago were correct, as far as I can tell.Ever one to have fun with math, I decided to add up the total stats on all the T6 gear, so you could compare them with other sets more easily. Here are the results (socket bonuses included):
Mr. Stormrage's Worst-Dressed List, 2007
Tier 6 is out and about on the forums, so it's time for everyone to do their best Joan Rivers imitations (especially the undead, who are halfway there already) and critique the sets. Boubouille has been nice enough to link us to all the Tier 6 skins in his massive 2.1.0 info collection, so I'll be using his skins as the basis for the criticism. Ready to get bitchy? Let's go!
PTR notes: Massive 2.1 roundup at MMO-Champion
The internets have generally been going crazy over 2.1 information every since the PTRs went live, with us being no exception. So if you've lost track of all the new information that's come out, I don't blame you. Fortunately, MMO-Champion has come to the rescue again, with this massive infodump full of pretty much everything we know about 2.1 so far. There's not very much new information, but here's what he has that I hadn't seen before: New loading screens Black Temple screenshots (lots) A couple gear pieces filed under Northrend New gems This as well as T6 graphics for all classes (like the Warlock set pictured above, which is in this blogger's opinion the greatest tier set ever, graphics-wise), new engineering stuff, rep rewards, and pretty much everything else that you're probably curious about, so go look it over. Do you think the wings on the Warlock set are functional? And kudos, Boubouille, I know how much work these things can be to put together.
