Project PUG Tank begins.

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

Treeeeeeenkets! Squawk!

Fleetfoot’s bags were looking a little full and I was wondering why. Then I noticed that she’s carrying 11 trinkets. Oh. I took inventory.

Tanking:
Symbiotic Worm
Mirror of Broken Images
Darkmoon Card: Earthquake
Porcelain Crab
Leaden Despair
Throngus’s Finger
Tia’s Grace
Impetuous Query

DPS:
Heart of Solace
Mark of Khardros
Right Eye of Rajh

I have a hard time getting rid of trinkets. Leafie still has all her Wrath-era raiding trinkets. Do you know how long it took her to get heroic abacus? There’s no way she’s selling it. Yeah. Her bags are full too.

Two warrior projects.

Nelf warrior project.

So, yes, alt raid! It went off, and we killed two bosses, Magmaw & Omnotron. I did indeed co-tank it. The other tank, a paladin, made holy his offspec, so he handled the single-tank fights.

We wiped over and over on Omnotron until we made a roster change. The wipes were 100% healing problems. One of our healers was significantly underperforming the others. The healer was a druid, and they were wearing several cloth items. I had thought that people had gotten the memo on armor specializations and Cataclysm, but apparently not. This is a player who hasn’t been on any of our main-character raids, and this was their Cata main, so not a regular raider. Green items, low-level items… not a character ready to be raid-healing. Not enough time in heroics, probably. Our GM swapped to his priest, the druid went boomkin, and we then one-shot Omnotron.

Also noted: interruption on Omnotron is significantly easier if you have a DPS shaman around who can do it.

Magmaw was harder. We were sorely lacking on ranged AOE dps to take down the parasites. (As before, one player was really not ready to be there, and this time the dps loss mattered.) Our solution was to have the two arms warriors swap off Bladestorming on the parasite packs. I am here to say that Retaliation + Sweeping Strikes + Bladestorm == wow on those packs. A little practice and we had the parasites down in time for dps time on the boss. Parasite infection was inevitable, however, so no achievement for us.

No loot for Fleetfoot. Magmaw dropped the leather caster chest, which Leafie has been longing for for several months now. I ground my teeth. At least it went to a good home: the other druid, the alt of our paladin healer. But at this rate, Leafie will have her heroic tier chest before she see that thing drop again.

I ended up drinking the Steelskin flask when I saw after the first attempt that it was going to be a wipefest because of the healing. I switched to the DPS strength flask on Magmaw. I wasn’t willing to spend the consumables on what was obviously not going to work.

I’m also going to have to work on my dps set and shine it up, because I’m going to be DPSing a bit.

Belf Warrior Project

My belf warrior is now level 63 and doing a little Outlands questing and some instance tanking. Tanking at that level is frustrating because the DPS have no discipline whatsoever. They pull packs, pull bosses, run ahead, ignore everything, and bitch when they get hit in the face. Getting hit in the face doesn’t matter, however, because they’re all in heirlooms. And Cataclysm completely broke low-level class balance, as you know, so the instances are faceroll anyway. I wonder if Aegidius could solo them. As a warrior. It’s ridiculous and un-fun.

He doesn’t have heirlooms because my paladin doesn’t have the JPs to buy them. He would be spending the JPs on his own gear if he did. But he can blacksmith up some nice gear for the warrior, and I’ve been doing that.

Mostly I am leveling by archaeology right now. I pile up the rested XP then head out and dig for an hour or so. I’ve been restricting myself to Kalimdor to get mostly Night Elf artifacts until I hit 450. It is unbearably tedious. I’m not sure what Blizzard was thinking with this profession. I guess it could be combined with world exploration and the various fishing achievements, if you’re patient and in the mood for more tedium.

So, of the three ways of gaining XP for the baby warrior, questing in Hellfire Peninsula seems like the least painful of the options. That’s saying a lot. I’m only plugging along with archaeology because I’ve never done it on any toon.

This week in raiding.

We cleared BoT (Halfus on hard) and TotFW again on Tuesday night, leaving Blackwing Descent for progression fights for the rest of the week. Last night we didn’t run because we had exactly 10 signups and then one person had sudden family things to take care of. 9 signups. 9 people logged in. Raid called. This is the danger of having a team that’s only 1 or 2 people larger than the raid size you’re running. Upside is nearly everybody gets to raid all the time. Downside is, if two people are out, you don’t run. Hence the open recruiting.

The current plan is to take our Monday night scheduled raid and make it an alt raid night. This functions as a change of pace for people boring with raiding T11 on their mains and as a way to gear up classes we might want to swap into our main raids. T11 is the tier of take the class, not the player, and if we want to get more hardmodes down we’re just going to have to do it. We’re at a strange place as a guild where the normal modes in 10s were almost too easy for us. We progressed smoothly right through them all. We’ve hit a wall on the hardmodes now, though, even as the normals are becoming boring.

Tanking the encounters or doing melee dps on them would sure make them interesting again for a while. With that goal in mind…

Fleetfoot task list

Aimed at getting her arms gearset polished off & taking care of one or two small things for her tanking set. Mostly I’d just like to have a trinket collection to select from.

• Buy Reaping Gauntlets.
• Craft Kickback 5000.
• Run heroic VP. Hope for Skyshard Ring or Thundercall.
• Run heroic Stonecore. Hope for Elementium Fang or Leaden Despair.
• Stump up for the crafted tank belt.
• Tweak Arms glyphs. Exchange Victory Rush for Cleaving.

I don’t have much left to do to finish this character off. If our alt raids start running, I’ll respec to something like this to pick up Vigilance. If they don’t, I suppose I’ll concentrate on leveling Reckless, aka the cute paladin healer.

Otherwise

Other things I could do if alt raids don’t go:

• Get Leafie 9000 achievement points (she’s less than 800 away).
• See what Fleetfoot can solo with a spec built for soloing old content. Warriors aren’t really the class for it, I admit.
• Finish leveling my blood elf warrior. He’s prot/arms, eng/mining, aka a clone of Fleetfoot, but he’s much prettier than Fleetfoot. I love the belf combat animations.
• Play Civ-whatever-number-we’re-on-now.
• Catch up on my reading list.
• Pick up some old hobbies & finish some dusty projects.
• Sleep.

Complete aside

With guild rename services on the way, I wonder if I should find out if anybody else in the guild thinks our name is kinda bleh. It’s actively difficult to search for in-game, for sure.

Alting with yet another warrior.

This weekend was the weekend of leveling alts. I decided to work on a toon in my Horde-side friends & family guild and picked the most handsome belf warrior as the one to work on. Apparently I have a thing about warriors. Who knew? The guild is tiny (5 active players) and only level 3 right now. I thought I’d see if I could drag it a ways toward level 4 this weekend. Which I could not; I only managed about 3% of a guild level for it. I didn’t particularly level efficiently. I mostly tanked instances on my warrior, which I think is not as efficient as questing in Cataclysm. You can quest so steadily and each quest gives so much XP that only smooth, efficient instance runs can beat it.

That Dire Maul East run was the opposite of efficient. Oh my god, people running every which way, refusing to follow me, complaining when I backtracked because they didn’t understand how the instance worked and were apparently incapable of consulting the map… ugh. It took forever. Herding cats would have been easier.

It still weirds me out to be doing Dire Maul in the late 30s instead of the late 50s. All these releveled instances take me by surprise.

Low-level warrior tanking is okay. I have Warbringer now so I don’t have to rely on a charge macro any more, and it’s a huge quality of life improvement. Charge + charge-stun + TC is a jump ahead of idiot dps on getting aggro on packs. Spreading sunders around (and later in the day, Devastates) mostly works. Unless somebody unloads on the one mob in the pack of five that I haven’t yet given personal attention, which they inevitably do.

I also spent a little time on the world’s cutest paladin healer, who is now level 69. I have been queueing for high-level BC instances deliberately instead of Northrend instances, to avoid burnout. And wow, the play level jumps dramatically in those Magister’s Terrace groups. I healed a run through that was professionally smooth. The tank said “LOS” and everybody immediately tucked themselves into the same corner & waited for the mobs to come around and bunch up again. It was amazing.

I assume it’s because you have to want to run MgT and know how to get yourself queued for it. If you’re doing that, you have some experience with the instance, or are perhaps a BC-era player looking for a challenge. Not that it’s challenging any more, really. I healed it last year on Angmark the disc priest as she was leveling and it was harder work. Cataclysm really completely screwed up sub-max-level character balance. So we steamrolled MgT, professionally, and I got a nice little achievement on my paladin healer.

I overheal like mad with her. All of the heals are giant bombs in comparison to people’s health. It’s just that I want them to feel confident & healthy & not in danger, so I toss heals at them that are half wasted. My mana supports it, so why not? I have a lot of tools to handle a pull gone horribly wrong, too. Lay on Hands is an amazing Oh Crap button. I just talented into the group heal but haven’t had a chance to practice with it yet.

A: Angst. Angst angst angst.

Carnac the Magnificent says: what’s the sound made by a pomo duck?

Anyway. I’m having warrior spec angst. I respecced Fleetfoot some time last week. She’s now in a heroics-focused dps-biased prot spec, sans Vigilance. But then I ran with an overgeared shadow priest with impulse control problems and started wishing I had Vigilance. I know it’s way more useful in raids when you can put it on the other tank and get some Vengeance, but I did wish for that taunt refresh a few times when the spriest yanked aggro three seconds into the pull. I started thinking that this spec, with Vigilance and Safeguard, might be betterer.

And then I started thinking about how useful it would be on Chimaeron. I’m fairly convinced that my guild is doing Chimaeron “wrong” in some sense. We’ve killed it every week since we got our first kill, mind you, so the wrong goes into quotes. But we have too many attempts where we lose the tank to Double Attack immediately following a third Break. This is because we tank swap until Break falls off, instead of the off-tank taunting only just long enough to soak the double attack. Most guilds do it the latter way and it seems to me to be safer and less prone to the RNG wiping out your tank because the healers didn’t happen to wind up a big slow heal at exactly the right time. I hate RNG-dependent tactics. I like sure things much better.

And right now I’m thinking about warrior off-tanks and Intervene+Safeguard right at the time of the double attack.

The interesting thing about protection warrior specs is how much legitimate variety there is. So many other classes are stuck with single-obvious-best specs that they can’t deviate from much. Leafie, for instance, is in a spec she doesn’t have much choice about that’s likely identical to the spec used by many, many other raiding resto druids. But warriors have the choice that Blizzard promised, and can spec for the encounters they expect to be tanking.

Except for the prime glyphs. There are exactly 3 prime glyphs for prot warriors, so every prot warrior has those 3. No choice. Which is boring. I think I prefer the angst of choice.