Aegidius the pugging prot warrior is now level 85. (See the previous post!) This means he gets to run Lost City, Halls of Origination, and Grim Batol until his brain dribbles out his ears. I intend to run normals until I have managed to get his Therazane rep up. Right now that requires questing through Deepholm. This is the downside of leveling by instance-running. Fortunately he’s got a nice pile of Justice badgers waiting to be spent when patch 4.2 hits. He’ll be able to snag a tier piece or two immediately.
My goal is to get the full 7 runs in before Tuesday so he has as many badges as he can for the patch. I have only done 1 run all week, however, because I’ve been busy.
Instance: LCOT normal
Gear upgrades: 2
Blood pressure spikes: 0
Good players: 0
Space cases: 0
Jackasses: 0
Group: arcane mage, frost DK, demonology warlock, resto druid
A nice competent group. No wipes, no mess-ups, good aggro management. This is what I hope for when I pug. Maybe it’s pure bias on my part, but I’m always happiest when a druid is healing me. Nice steady health fluctuations, no panic moments. For some reason I spent most of the instance thinking the DK was a rogue. A strange, unstealthed rogue. Don’t even ask! I do note that so far I haven’t had a single nasty pugging experience.
The 2 dungeon quests gave me the Ramkahen Front boots, which are nice starter tanking boots. I also got normal-mode Heart of Solace. It’s a meh trinket for Aegidius’s dps set, but it’s a sight better than the Egg-Lift Talisman it replaces.
Three pure pugging experiences documented for Project PUG Tank. This project aims to find out how long it’ll take for me to lose my temper, lose my sanity, or lose my will to live because of running instances with strangers. The tank is a blood elf warrior, level 84.
And oh boy did it suck.
Aegidius the Project PUG Tank ran five randoms last night. He met two space cases and his first genuine jackass causing loot drama. He also had his first blood pressure spike. He’s now level 84, so my next required goal for him is to open up the Dragonmaw faction far enough to get a tabard.
I secretly have RP-style characterizations built up in my head for all of my Wow characters. I tend not to play a character much if I don’t have a handle on who he or she is. This is true even though I don’t have much patience for in-game roleplay. (I’d be more likely to write a story about them, though I’ve never done that, either.) Aegidius is a fussy perfectionist. He cleans the blood off everything immediately after every battle. Mess with his pull plan and he’ll get snarky. (Contrast with Praetorian, who is a noble idiot who’ll try to rescue any situation.)
Aegidius got snarky last night.
Instance reports within!
An odd little Vortex Pinnacle run yesterday afternoon. The shaman healer seemed completely out of it. My health would drop to 50% immediately on every pull, sometimes dip way lower. I died once to trash. It became an exercise in cooldown chaining for me, counting Shockwave as a damage reduction cooldown. The shaman had, as is typical, the only CC that could be used through the air elemental section of VP. He used Bind Elemental willingly enough, but it was more a nuisance than a help. The bind would inevitably break about 10 seconds into combat and the thing would of course beeline to him.
It got a little better in the second half of the instance, where I asked the rogue and mage to CC a mob each per pull.
I had serious aggro problems. I couldn’t hold anything against the frost DK, who was AOEing on the pulls. I’d taunt off him then lose the skull to the dutiful dps who’d been attacking it as they should. Gah. Since I didn’t have this problem in previous runs, I’ll just blame stupid DPS who don’t know to hold off on front-loaded damage.
The other thing that happened was that I was, as before, utterly unable to get the group to do the grounding triangle pulls properly. Nobody seems to understand that they are safe from all magical damage if they get inside the triangles. Nobody seems to understand that this is also true of the mobs. Nobody follows instructions to CC when the patrolling group is at its far point. Nobody can wait 3 seconds to engage the mobs on line of sight pulls, or those grounding triangle pulls where the mobs need to move out first.
I am spoiled by my raiding guild and my friends and family guild, both of which execute those pulls perfectly.
Gear upgrades: 0
Blood pressure spikes: 0
Good players: 0
Space cases: 1
Jackasses: 0
Healer: shaman
Three more runs for the afternoon. All three of these runs completed with the same roster they started with.
Aegidius the blood elf warrior is level 82 now. He’s most of the way through Hyjal questing, has done enough of Vash’jir to get his seahorse, and has opened up Deepholm. My plan with him is to finish Hyjal, finish Deepholm, and do enough of Twilight Highlands to unlock the Horde dailies there. (Even though I disapprove of the Dragonmaw and am definitely on the side of the Wildhammer on the beer drinking vs beer destruction issue.)
I’m pondering getting him to 85, maxing out engineering, then dumping mining for jewelcrafting. Engineering has turned out to be a bust for tanks in Cataclysm, alas. I might not be feeling all that masochistic, however.
My other plan for him is to tank PUGs. Early, often, constantly, and until he’s geared to run troll heroics. Perhaps he will even pug-tank the trolls. I certainly know the instances. Getting a group of irritable strangers to cooperate will be the challenge. When he is geared, I will give Praetorian a rest. Paladin tanking in Cataclysm isn’t doing it for me. I’ll wait until I’m in the mood for it or until Blizzard has changed it up again.
I started this project off right this morning by mining until I had mats for full sets of crafted tank gear and dps gear. The Redsteel pieces are well-itemized enough to replace a few of the hardened obsidium pieces in his tank set. Mastery is just too useful for shield tanks.
Aegidius equipped all his new splendor, posed with it, then queued up. Let the pug tales begin!
First result: a BRC run in progress, midway between Rom’ogg and Corla. Didn’t get to do the Finkle questline. Well, maybe next time. The run was otherwise notable only for a hunter who refused to kite the adds for the final boss and a mage who pretended to be clueless about Corla’s beams. Oh, wait, the shaman healer was the one who kited the adds on the final boss, yes, the healer. And he/she did a fine job of keeping me up.
Second result: a Throne of Tides run in progress, with Uthok engaged and in the middle of eating the party. I couldn’t pull it out, so we wiped. The run was otherwise notable for a shaman who stood in front of Erunak (even though I’d turned the boss’s back to the party) and died from flame breath & not moving out of earth spikes. The shaman also face-pulled some trash. Just generally a doofus.
Gear upgrades: 0
Blood pressure spikes: 0
Good players: 1
Space cases: 1
Jackasses: 0
Healers: shaman, holy priest
All class abilities which place a buff on friendly targets no longer generate any threat.
More 4.2 patch notes from the PTR. This affects a tanking pull technique I use: heroic throw to silence a caster & get them in motion, followed by Battle Shout to get a little bit of aggro on the rest of the group. Once they’re on me, I can use close-range abilities to solidify my hold on them.
There’s a theme in these 4.2 changes. Blizzard is nerfing the aggro mini-game that has been the heart of WOW combat since the beginning. I get why. I understand that they’re doing this to make pugging easier. They’re also making tanking easier. (Though changes like this make it harder in some ways, because we are all used to using the tools & the rules the way they’ve been working.)
Will I still enjoy tanking when it’s easy?
Insightful as always. This time she writes about what happens when BC-level difficulty meets Wrath-era lack of social accountability in the Cataclysm-era instance run.
I can’t hold aggro against my no-self-control guildmates in instances any more. I used to be able to before I did this last push to full raid-tweaked gear. I blame not being able to hit anything any more.
So screw it. I’m building a threat set for Fleetfoot to run heroics in. It’ll be hit-capped for instance bosses and as close to the expertise cap as I can reach. After that, all mastery all the time.
But Leafie, isn’t Vengeance supposed to make threat stats irrelevant? I hear you cry. The sad truth is that Vengeance mostly helps you in raids, not in heroics. The first 30 seconds of a fight, when you have no Vengeance, are still a miserable scramble to build threat faster than no-impulse-control DPS are building it. In raids, you have Misdirect & Tricks to get you over the hump. Once you have Vengeance stacking up, you’re okay. And in a raid, even the trash fights last long enough that you build up quite the head of steam. In a heroic, you won’t build as much as fast, and the presence of the two threat redirects isn’t guaranteed. And you’ll be losing it between pulls unless you’re pulling like a monkey on crack. The only way to build threat faster is to hit more often.
So, two sets. One tweaked for best survival, the other tweaked for threat. One for raids, the other for heroics. Guess which one will be more fun to equip?
Yeah. This is my problem with Vengeance. I hate that it’s made hit & expertise worthless in many contexts. Hitting stuff is fun.
Hmm. I can’t decide between the weapon chain and Avalanche for my weapon enchant. Probably it’ll depend on where my to-hit ends up.
I’ve read a lot of wooly-headed reactions to the Call to Arms goodie bag while procrastinating on real work today. Even in the Wow Insider comment thread, where the average IQ is probably 30 points higher than in the MMO Champ comment thread, people weren’t getting the point.
Tanks do not get a short queue as a “reward” for anything. The short queue is the result of tanking being the least-popular role to play.
DPS isn’t being cheated out of anything. DPS will, Blizzard hopes, be rewarded with shorter dungeon queues. Isn’t that what people have been wanting?
Mount and pet collectors aren’t being cheated out of anything. It’s way easier to solo Strat than it is to tank a heroic full of irritable strangers.
Still pissed off? Roll a tank. Show us all how it’s done.
Why is tanking the least popular role? It’s got the highest skill threshold. By far. I play both a tank and a healer seriously. Healing is definitely stressful work that requires skill and practice. Tanking, particularly instance tanking, is harder. The situational awareness demands are high. So are the demands to know everything about each encounter, each pull, the flow of patrols through an instance, and what each of the other players in your party can do to help you. No other role demands that level of awareness & preparation. The number of people who are willing to work that hard at a game, who find their fun in working that hard at a game, is small.
Cataclysm made the skill demands much, much worse. And Cata shook up gearing enough, while allegedly simplifying it, that most people have no idea how to gear a tank any more. So! Fewer tanks.
But really, despite the skill issue, I think the true reason for 40-minute DPS queues is that the random dungeon finder is populated by assholes. Not every player, obviously, but just enough to ensure that everybody has had a miserable and memorable experience. Anonymity means— well, you know what anonymity means.
I once got raged at by a PUG for messing up a pull moments after I’d gotten him the Karsh Steelbender achievement. Full on four-letter-word descriptions of how bad a tank I was. Yeah. Uh-huh. I vote-kicked him, one of my rare vote-kicks, and went on to finish the instance. I have a thick skin. Somebody else in that position might well choose never to tank for random strangers ever again. I couldn’t blame them for making that choice.
Can Blizzard fix people? Nope. Can they sweeten the rewards for tanks who have to cope with these broken people? They’re trying.
The guild experience & rep rewards for running in guild groups are significant. I ran three instances last night because I was helping us hit the XP cap in our push for level 20. Queueing solo wouldn’t have helped my guild.
Blizzard’s own game systems are pitted against each other.
Let’s change the topic entirely for a moment.
Attendance boss pwns my guild this week. I think we’ll get two nights of raiding in: Tuesday night (clears of TotFW & BoT) and Monday night (alt raid, probably BWD). The rest of the week, we’re running heroics or working on achievements. Leafie worked on Kurenai rep last night, yay Talbuks.
4.1 cannot come too soon. People are losing interest. I’m losing interest. If my guild implodes because it can’t recruit because people aren’t leaving their guilds because they don’t want the reputation grind again, etc, etc, I might be done with raiding for a while.
Summary: Under-represented roles in the dungeon finder queue (this in practice means tanks and sometimes healers) will get a goodie bag on killing the final boss. The bag has a chance at containing non-combat pets and dungeon-drop mounts like the white hawkstrider.
This is Blizzard’s attempt to fix the tank shortage. It might work. It might backfire. Brace yourselves to vote-kick a never-ending flood of useless hybrid classes sans tanking specs clicking the button because they can. But also you might see Fleetfoot, because hey, who doesn’t like pets?
Checklists. I make checklists. Obsessively detailed checklists.
Fleetfoot’s pre-raid checklist for the alt raid Monday night:
My general opinion is that the Steelskin flask isn’t worth the cost. Given the wipe rate I anticipate, it’ll be much cheaper to use 2 elixirs. I can customize them for the fight, too. If I need to be hit capped for Omnotron interruption, the elixir gets me there.
I’m probably better geared than our main tanks were our first night of Cataclysm raiding, but I’m less experienced than they were. On the one hand, everybody will know the fights well and will already know how to move and what to avoid. On the other hand, everybody will be undergeared compared to what they’ve become used to. Healer mana will matter. So I think min/maxing is the way to go.
Also, I think I need a focus interrupt macro. I’m thinking:
/focus [@focus,noexists][@focus,dead][@focus,noharm][mod]
/cast [@focus,harm,nomod,form:1/2,nodead][form:1/2] Shield Bash; [@focus,harm,nomod,nodead][] Pummel
