WoW: The Meatshield Inn

Death Knights can't even equip shields.

Well that explains that. I guess I would have figured it out eventually had I hovered over an actual shield and seen the word "shield" in red letters. But I hadn't yet, so thanks.

P.S. For anyone trying the blood tanking thing, the guides out there are not all that useful for noob DKs, as they cover moves that aren't yet available.

Enix wrote:

P.S. For anyone trying the blood tanking thing, the guides out there are not all that useful for noob DKs, as they cover moves that aren't yet available.

The basics as I understand it are this.

Use a two-hander. You can't use a shield anyway, and your threat generation will be awful if you attempt to dual-wield instead.

One of your early talents, Blade Barrier, gives you damage reduction when you put your blood runes on cooldown. Try to time Heart Strikes so that you can keep Blade Barrier active (if possible).

Use Death Strike a lot. It heals you. This only gets better at 80 when you get Mastery and it gives you a shield, too. Get in the habit of using it early and often.

Keep your diseases active on your target. Not only do they have nasty effects, but hey, they do damage too, which is more threat.

Rune Strike will be your runic power dump when you get it in the high 60s. Takes a good chunk of runic power, does a good chunk of damage, and generates a high amount of threat. Until you get it, if you have an excess of Runic Power, just chuck Death Coils around.

Death Knights don't really have a rotation because they also get Runic Empowerment in the high 60s, which has a chance to give you back a random expended rune when you use one of your Runic Power dumps. Since you never know what runes you're going to have, you can't really plan a rotation.

I haven't played a DK since Wrath - and didn't tank anyway - and they've changed so much since then that I can't really offer anything constructive from my own experiences. But these seem to be the basics for how it works. I'm sure if any of our DK tanks are actually around, they could probably explain it better than I did.

Thanks, Kel, this helps. Playing a DK tank seems a little like playing a prot and ret paladin at the same time -- use your AOEs to keep your enemies close, then use your best attack among the ones available.

At this point I've got Death Strike, Heart Strike and Death Coil. I think I'll wait till 60 to instance -- that's when I get DnD.

Enix wrote:

Thanks, Kel, this helps. Playing a DK tank seems a little like playing a prot and ret paladin at the same time -- use your AOEs to keep your enemies close, then use your best attack among the ones available.

At this point I've got Death Strike, Heart Strike and Death Coil. I think I'll wait till 60 to instance -- that's when I get DnD.

Enix wrote:

Thanks, Kel, this helps. Playing a DK tank seems a little like playing a prot and ret paladin at the same time -- use your AOEs to keep your enemies close, then use your best attack among the ones available.

At this point I've got Death Strike, Heart Strike and Death Coil. I think I'll wait till 60 to instance -- that's when I get DnD.

Rotate your cooldowns. You get bone shield (20% damage redux for 4 hits) that is on a 60 sec CD. You get vampiric blood which increases healing received for 10 seconds by 40% (I pop a rune tap with this CD), also on a 60 sec CD, blade barrier by 6% when bloodrunes are down, Dancing Rune Weapon for 20% more parry on a 1.5 min CD, Icebound fortitude 50% damage redux on a 3 min CD, plus your plague strike disease and frost fever which both reduce incoming damage.

Once you learn the "cadence" of a boss fight you should try to string your CDs together so that something is nearly always active. Once you have enough threat you can start banking runes for 2x death strikes for burst mitigation as well.

If you are new to tanking business - don't begin with DK. If you are not new and thinking about rolling DK tank - don't.
And this is coming from 2nd blood dk on Quel'thalas EU (at least judging by wowprogress.com).
This is of course if you are willing to pull off some heavy progress (I mean doing HC modes in current gear for example) - not saying that we are gimped in general. Just on this far end of endgame spectrum - we perform worse than shield tank (in general).

It doesn't change the fact that I absolutely love death knight tanking.

It is more difficult, challenging, fun. (I also think warrior tanking is very fun, paladin tanking is extremely boring and bear tanking is ok).

Now, onto few tips for Enix. Bandit0013 is right with rotating cooldowns. It varies greatly depending on the fight. Different spec, runeforge and glyphs for single target boss fight, and different for some heavy aoe fights (Halfus HC or Lord Rhyolith) it makes a noticable difference.
Feel free to ask for any specific advice regarding tanking raid bosses.

Regarding general dungeon tanking - have glyph of DnD, glyph of Blood Boil, and regarding spec give points boosting blood boil and 9 points into Unholy - 3/3 Morbidity. Throw DnD on the floor, target one mob, Outbreak while running in, do one Blood Boil to keep aggro in case you have some trigger happy dps, then Pestillience and spam Blood Boil - of course you'll need to do Death Strike to get rid of Unholy and Frost runes if you happen to have them. If you have 3 mobs or less - use Heart Strike instead of Blood Boil.
Use some CD when you are beginning the pull. Can be DRW, can be Vampiric Blood or some trinket. I believe there is no reason to keep Vampiric Blood off cooldown, unless using it in some tactical moment - i.e having many stacks on Halfus or tanking Decimation Blade on Baleroc, the Gatekeeper.

Now, that's for the basics, probably you know all of that. The most interesting mechanic of DK tanking though - Death Strike and Blood Shield is also the most fun to get most of it.
The difference between average dk tanks and great ones is timing Death Strike properly. You should try to use it optimally after taking heavy damage. So try to make sure you have diseases up (if you have full hp), that you have two blood runes on cd, that you have bone shield on and you can burn excessive runic power with Rune Strikes while delaying DS.
To give you an idea - normal DS does around 13k heal and 17k blood shield. If you do it after having some 70% of your hp taken in the space of 5 seconds, you can get 50k heal and 100k blood shield. Now say you've been saving runes and you can do two DS in a row and blood shield stacks, so you get 100k heal and 200k absorb. You see the difference.
Of course the numbers are anecdotal, but roughly accurate.

Well, I know no one was asking for this, but I thought I'd share my thoughts on DK tanking for beginners in the time of 4.2. : )

Slupczynski wrote:

If you are new to tanking business - don't begin with DK. If you are not new and thinking about rolling DK tank - don't. ...

I've tanked some on my paladin (when I'm not failing at ret), so I'm not a complete novice. This DK tanking business of mine is more about (a) it's something different for me, (b) I don't want to wait in queues as DPS.

But thanks for the tips -- I'll know I'll use 'em once I actually run some instances (and get most of the attacks you reference above).

One thing to keep in mind about DK tanks; they really only come into their own now when they can afford to stack mastery for having a good amount of avoidance. Starting out, things will definitely be a bit rougher for you because of that, as you'll be lacking the mastery to really shine in the way they're meant to. This is not to say that you won't be able to tank well, just that it's going to be a lot harder than it might be for an equally geared Paladin.

I have to say that I'm not all that worried. DK tanks (starting off at least) do good single-target damage and have some AOEs to do damage and get threat. I've also got a self-heal (Death Strike), several defense cooldowns, an interrupt and a taunt in the form of Death Grip.

In other words, it's close enough to being a paladin tank that I'm using most of the same keybinds. That's not to say it'll be easy or that I'll be any good at it. It's just similar enough to seem familiar.

But, yeah, I've tried to heal some DK tanks in Outland instances. The good ones were a pleasure to work with. But I've seen my share of train wrecks where folks are running dungeons 10 minutes after leaving the starter area.

So Spoticus -- protection warrior at large -- is approaching 85 and I've realized that I should examine his build, gear, etc. with an eye towards contributing to the guild's heroic adventures, etc. My talent strategy has been ... organic (at best, haphazard is probably more realistic). Given I find keeping multi-mob aggro to be the toughest tank-task for me, I think an AOE-threat build is probably what I want. After a little research and experimentation, I am thinking of:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LG0cZb...

Hardly breaking mold I'm sure, but any comments for improvement? Thanks.

wiley15 wrote:

So Spoticus -- protection warrior at large -- is approaching 85 and I've realized that I should examine his build, gear, etc. with an eye towards contributing to the guild's heroic adventures, etc. My talent strategy has been ... organic (at best, haphazard is probably more realistic). Given I find keeping multi-mob aggro to be the toughest tank-task for me, I think an AOE-threat build is probably what I want. After a little research and experimentation, I am thinking of:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LG0cZb...

Hardly breaking mold I'm sure, but any comments for improvement? Thanks.

Deep Wounds is unlikely to do a lot for you, although it's certainly interesting to try. I can't imagine skipping Last Stand anymore no matter what, as it's a much more useful "react" cooldown than Shield Wall (if you're already low, gaining another 60K health instantly, plus making Enraged Regeneration is much, much more helpful than lowering how much damage you'll continue to take), and something I often use AoE tanking in raids, since there are so many more hits. Safeguard is unlikely to help much at all; I rarely find Intervene to be of much use as opposed to just charging and taunting (or just taunting, since taunts have 30yd ranges and never miss).

In general, I've found AoE tanking as a warrior to be a lot more about state of mind/rotation as opposed to spec. Rend early, TC on cooldown, SW on cooldown, then tab target focusing on Revenge > Cleave > Devastate. SS only on S&B procs (you want the rage spent on Cleave instead) and even then only when there's nothing else to do. A quick backpedal as you engage usually groups up things nicely for the first SW. Unless he gets a nasty early crit, there's usually no way the pally tank I run with can keep up with me, even on large numbers of mobs. He might pull one or two off, but I'll have the majority locked to me, especially given I get the jump on him with Charge.

For what it's worth, my spec is http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte.... I recently switched from grabbing Drums of War to Blood Craze, which given my analysis of last week's raiding so far, I think I'm likely to keep it that way. Still have more log parsing to do, though my healer thinking I was significantly easier to heal (imagine hearing your healer say she was largely taking Nef phase 1 off) is a good indication it was making a meaningful difference. Admittedly, she's a druid, so she doesn't have to focus cast as much with Lifebloom and Rejuv running constantly, but still...

Edit: Hmm, the numbers don't lie I guess. Blood Craze wound up around 10% uptime, much lower than I had expected. That results in around 120 HPS overall, can't see how that would have actually been noticeable. On occasion, it spiked closer to 20% uptime, but still that's not much. I guess in some ways I could argue that there's nothing else particularly compelling as long as I can save the 10 rage when I absolutely have to interrupt someone, and 150-250 HPS > 0 HPS. Or it's four to five less Healing Touches per fight.

OMFG...

Ghostcrawler wrote:

[color=blue]Threat revisited

One of the fun things about working on an MMO is that the game design will evolve over time, and you have the opportunity to make changes to reflect those design shifts. (And yes, we know that it can sometimes evolve too quickly).

Back in December, I wrote a blog about our vision for how threat should work. Since then, the game and the community have continued to progress and the designers have found ourselves changing our minds about the role of threat.

Why have threat?

Threat's role, just so we're all on the same page, is to make fights more interesting. Tanks spend a lot of effort staying alive, but they aren't under immediate threat of death one-hundred percent of the time. Plus, their staying alive is also dependent on their healers and other external cooldowns. We have always been concerned that if threat was not a big part of tanking gameplay that tanks might get bored just waiting around until it was time to use a cooldown. Likewise, if DPS and healers had no risk of being attacked themselves then the sense of danger facing a powerful creature could erode. Furthermore, every character's toolbox includes some cool survival and utility abilities and the game feels more shallow if those are exclusively used for PvP. It's fun for a mage to Frost Nova an attacker and Blink away. It's fun for a hunter to Feign Death. Yes your life would be a lot easier without threat mechanics, but our goal isn't to make fights as easy as possible. Our job is to make fights fun. Having too much to manage might not be fun, but it's also not fun to be bored.

That's been our traditional argument for threat needing to matter. Here is the case against it:

Why not have threat?

Throttling

As I said in the previous blog, it's not fun to feel throttled. It's not fun for the Feral druid to stop using special attacks in order to avoid pulling aggro. It's fun to use Feint at the right time to avoid dying, but it's not fun for Feint to be part of your rotational cooldown. We want you to spend most of your effort trying to overcome the dragon or elemental, not struggling against your own tank.
Tanks are busy

I'd also argue that our encounters aren't really boring these days. We ask tanks to do a lot -- everything from picking up adds, to moving bosses around, to staying out of fires, to providing interrupts, in addition to the classic tank roles of staying alive and generating threat.

Threat stats aren't fun

We put threat stats (hit and expertise for the most part) on tanking gear, because without those, tanks would be limited to choosing from among mastery, dodge, and parry. (In the current state of itemization, you are rarely choosing more Strength, Agility, Stamina, or armor.) Druids can't parry, and even for the plate users, there is a tight relationship between dodge and parry, and even mastery for the warrior and paladin. That gets us dangerously close to the old model of stacking a single uber stat (like Stamina or defense), which makes gearing choices too simplistic for tanks. Did something drop? Okay, put it on. (Contrast this to a DPS caster who might want more or less hit or might favor haste over crit, etc.)
We want threat stats to be interesting, but the reality is that they aren't. Any decent tank will usually choose survivability stats over threat stats. Back in the day when taunts and interrupts could miss, you could argue hit was marginally useful. But in a world where hit is really just for generating threat, it isn't very exciting and tanks get understandably emo when we put too much on their gear. (DKs are somewhat of an exception in a good way -- more on that in a sec.) We do see some players try and get excited about threat stats or even proud of their ability to generate threat, but overall we feel like threat stats are a trap, and it's usually the case that improving your survivability will have a better net impact on your group's progression.

We don't need a more complex UI
We have threatened for years (see what I did there?) to build in some kind of threat tracking tool into WoW. But is that really good for the game? Do we really need yet another UI element for players to look at instead of looking at the actual game world? We know many raiders in particular use third-party threat mods today, but that has really been borne out of necessity rather than a sense that watching threat is super compelling gameplay. (When we say "super compelling gameplay" you can mentally replace that with "fun.")
Dungeon Finder

I know this bullet will be a point made by players critical of this change, but I would feel remiss in not bringing it up. We want it to be a positive experience when Dungeon Finder matches experienced players with newer players. The skill and gear of the former can help make up for that of the latter. Who better to teach you boss mechanics than players who have done the fights before? Even better, the gear of a veteran tank can make up for the less powerful gear of a beginning healer (which doesn't necessarily mean a noob -- it could be the alt of a very experienced raider).
However, this system fails and often spectacularly so when it's the tank who is the undergeared player. Even if a competent healer can keep the undergeared tank alive, the fully raid-geared DPS spec is going to constantly be on the verge of pulling threat. That's not an issue of skill. It's just numbers. It's also not a problem that is easy to overcome for either the overgeared DPS or the undergeared tank -- it's just not a lot of fun for anyone.

So now what?

Given all of that, and watching how tanking has unfolded in Cataclysm, we've gotten over the concept that threat needs to be a major part of PvE gameplay. We have therefore decided to buff tank threat generation in 4.3 to where it's generally not a major consideration. We expect the community to gradually stop using threat-tracking mods as players realize they don't need them.

It's an important distinction that the concept of "aggro" will still exist. If a DPS spec attacks an add the second it shows up, then the creature is going to come at her. However, if a tank gets an attack or two on a target, then the target should stick to the tank. Worrying about who has the creature's attention should generally only be a concern at the start of a fight or when additional creatures join the battle. Worrying about a warrior or DK (the classes with nearly non-existent threat dumps) creeping up on tank threat after several minutes will almost certainly not be an issue any longer. (And if it is, we'll have to make further adjustments.)

We like abilities like Misdirect. It's fun as a hunter to help the tank control targets. We are less enamored of Cower, which is just an ability used often to suppress threat. We like that the mage might have to use Ice Block, Frost Nova, or even Mirror Image to avoid danger. We don't like the mage having to worry about constantly creeping up on the tank's threat levels. The notion of aggro (who the target is attacking) is a keeper. The notion of threat races (who is about to pull aggro) is going to be downplayed from here on out.

Upcoming changes

Here are the specific changes you're likely to see on the PTR for the next major content patch, 4.3:

The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done.
Vengeance no longer ramps up slowly at the beginning of a fight. Instead, the first melee attack taken generates Vengeance equal to one third of the damage dealt by that attack. As Vengeance updates during the fight, it is always set to at least a third of the damage taken in the last two seconds. It still climbs from that point at the previous rate, still decays at the previous rate, and still cannot exceed the current maximum.
Long-term changes

You could argue that once threat is very easy to manage that a warrior tank could just go AFK. In reality, given today's boss encounters, an AFK warrior would end up standing in the wrong place, missing a tank transition, or otherwise do something or fail to do something that wipes the party or raid.

That said, we ultimately don't want tanking to be just standing there soaking boss hits and we would like to have more stats on gear that tanks care about. To solve those challenges, we want to shift more tank mitigation to require active management. We'll still give all the tanks emergency cooldowns like Shield Wall and Survival Instincts. However, we want to move the shorter cooldowns like Shield Block, Holy Shield and Savage Defense so that they work more like Death Strike. Blood DKs have a lot of control over the survivability they get from Death Strike, but as part of that gameplay, they have to actually hit their target. The other three tanks will get similar active defense mechanics. This doesn't mean everyone needs to use the DK model of self-healing, but they can use the DK model of managing resources to maximize survivability.

Death Strike consumes resources to help the tank survive. We toyed at one point with the paladin Holy Shield being a Holy Power consumer and we think we could do so again. Heck we could make Word of Glory the thing you're supposed to do with Holy Power, so long as we balanced all tanks around that idea and didn't feel it infringed too much on the DK mechanic. We could make Shield Block cost rage, and change Protection warrior rage income such that they had to manage rage, the way Fury and Arms warriors now must do. If tanks generated more rage from doing damage and less from taking damage, then hitting a target becomes very important, but for mitigation, not threat management reasons. This is a bigger change than it seems though. We don't want a model where the Prot warrior ignores Shield Slam, Devastate and Revenge (since threat isn't a big deal) in order to bank all rage for Shield Block (because survival is). Imagine a rage model where you always had enough rage for your core rotational abilities (they could be cheap or even generate rage), so that you could funnel most of your rage into Shield Block when survival mattered and Heroic Strike when it did not. Redesigning Savage Defense to make it a rage sink is an even bigger change, but we think there is an opportunity there to make the rotation more interesting for druids (and all tanks really). Their rotation would help them achieve the goal that usually matters the most to tanks: living.

This is the kind of design for which we're really going to need a lot of feedback once it hits the PTR. We can implement and verify empirically how much threat a tank generates, but it's hard for us to replicate the experience of all of the various raiding groups and dungeon parties out there. We invite you to try out the immediate and eventually the long-term changes when they are available on the PTR and then in the live game and let us know how they feel. Do you miss the threat game? Are you bored when tanking now? Conversely, with the changes, is tanking more fun for you? Does this new implementation of Vengeance feel better? Some systems design calls we can make just by processing numbers, and some are more squishy and involve a lot gut checks and wishy-washy "but how does it FEEL?" language. Messing with this kind of thing is definitely somewhere in the middle.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, and lead eater at the dinner table.[/color]

This really removes one of the neat things about tanking. I'm pretty positive that I absolutely hate it.

I've never really considered threat management to be an interesting part of tanking. Tanks don't get a lot of tools for explicitly managing their threat, since it's mostly just tied into their damage. Threat just punishes poorly-geared tanks, any DPS player who gets an unlucky string of crits, and every non-tank who plays a class without a threat dump ability. You can argue that DPS players should be responsible for managing their own threat, but in general that just amounts to either pushing your threat-dump button on cooldown, or using a sub-optimal rotation to make sure you don't do too much damage. As it stands it doesn't really add much to the game.

Fail tank is still fail. Like the DK the other day who used Death Grip on every single pull. I spent a lot of time chasing adds because DnD was apparently beneath him. Or something.

Really, though: How much is aggro even an issue these days?

Aggro isn't much of an issue a month or so into a new patch, but at the beginning of a tier it really can be. Tanking Heroics back in December, threat generation was very important. Halfus's drakes were tough to manage sometimes. I can see this bringing back (inadvertently) the AoE chain-pulls of Wrath.

ELewis17 wrote:

Aggro isn't much of an issue a month or so into a new patch, but at the beginning of a tier it really can be.

I won't argue with that, especially since I've seen the inside of more raids (two) than heroics (one). Maybe that's the issue they're trying to address.

But there doesn't seem to be much problem with holding threat at lower levels, which is where I spend most of my time. (I define "low levels" here as everything from Vanilla dungeons through normal Cata instances.) Warrior tanks are extremely OP in the Vanilla instances, for instance; paladin tanks are only a tick below. DK threat seems directly proportionate to skill - blood DKs either use DnD or they don't. And bear tanks? I had one the other day in (normal) Grim Batol. Until then, I thought they were extinct.

Translation... We are loosing subscribers. Tanking is too hard and it needs to be easier. Making it easier will drop the queue times and people won't leave.

Alternative translation... we suck as designing UIs (we haven't changed ours since release!). We don't know how to design one because all of the UI guys are over working on Titan, the best we could get out of them was the Dungeon Journal. As we can't solve the threat information problem, we will create another problem and solve it instead!

I'm also not sure of any priest that used fade as "part of their rotation."

Last nights leveling group managed to pull 4 or 5 different groups in the area before Ozmak (big giant guy) in Stonecore. We predictably wiped (which is what should have happened). With ghostcrawlers new "mechanic" it is entirely possible I could keep Spot alive through cool downs, etc long enough to aoe the whole group down. If he is the only one taking damage the game becomes a lot easier. Just thunderclap and Shockwave and the mobs hit him the whole time? He doesn't have to do anything else? Ranged attacker? No problem, just toss a couple of whatever ranged tanks come with.

Bear in mind that they aren't completely throwing threat out the window. Threat generation is going from 3x damage to 5x damage, with quicker initial build-up of Vengeance. If some clueless DPS is going to town on a mob that the tank only tagged once he's still going to grab aggro. However, it should be a lot harder to pull mobs by AOEing, and it'll probably be damn near impossible to pull a boss off the tank.

Talliarthe wrote:

Translation... We are loosing subscribers. Tanking is too hard and it needs to be easier. Making it easier will drop the queue times and people won't leave.

+1

That's my initial take on this, its a reaction to sub-optimal tanks & healers jumping into the LFD queue, lured by the additional cookies&milk. Having raided across the years as DPS (mostly), tank (some) and healer (not much), I can't see this being a big change to raiding. But it will be a nice change for 5 man PUGs.

Make it easy to grab and manage agro, then the odds that the tank can do his job increases, which makes it easier on the healer (so they don't have to be as good). Which increases the chance your LFD group can complete the instance. Not bad, in that it addresses a significant problem that a large number of their subscribers face, daily.

I'm also not sure of any priest that used fade as "part of their rotation."

I keep shadowmeld keybound for several encounters in Firelands, because I tended to pull threat almost immediately on certain fights. Staghelm and Baelroc are especially bad, because we use heroism immediately on those fights, so I usually lose about 5 seconds of DPS time stealthed because I blow through the tank's threat so quickly.

This is aimed purely at higher level raiders. Last week, on just about any given boss, I could pull threat almost trivially off of our(very good) pally and bear tanks even after giving them a few second lead and a misdirect. And that was BEFORE I got the 4 piece balance T12 and the first stage legendary staff. I was anticipating some major issues this week after I got the upgrades.

This week, with the 4 piece, the weapon, and without a misdirect, I had no threat problems when I wasn't being an idiot and hitting things the tanks weren't.

A thoughtful take on the threat buff from BBBB.

TL,DR: The change makes sense because encounters require more movement and have more gimmicks than before, and tanks still have to chase down all those adds.

Yep, that article pretty much sums up my view on things. I pretty much dismissed the threat thing right away as nearly irrelevant. Not that it will have irrelevant affects, but it won't affect my tanking much if at all. I still have to focus on the best way to use all my cooldowns, make sure I'm moving things around appropriately for both myself and dps/heals, etc, etc, etc. For a well geared tank, unless you're way up the curve (like cube's groups), threat only rarely comes into play. This mainly has an impact on each end, allowing well geared dps to just enjoy nuking stuff even if their tank isn't as well geared yet and allowing top-notch groups the opportunity to really shine. It's all about smoothing out gameplay, as opposed to changing up the tanking situation.

What I'm really interested in is the other half of the article, the stuff about mitigation options to make survival a more active process. Having things on a shorter CD than 1 or 2 min to use to manage mitigation as the encounter ebbs and flows would really be something to add some interest to tanking, IMHO. Unfortunately, it sounds a lot like we're waiting until 5.0 for that, but I've sort of always wanted to see a bit more active mitigation work instead of trying to optimize "dps" to stay ahead of certain classes without threat dumps.

This is Blizzard's way of putting WoW out to pasture. Which is fine, it's a 6, almost 7 year old game that now has such a huge audience that the people who play by carefully tweaking everything available are a tiny, tiny minority (both through attrition and dilution).

Project Titan's knocking at the door. It's time for WoW to give up pretense of being much more than a CCG style MMO.

btw -- all of Ghostcrawlers arguments against threat also work against mana.

*deleted*

Upon further reflection, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.

Jesus H. Christmas on a pogo stick.

PUG'd a group on Lil' I (62 blood DK). Not only did the shaman (healer) want to pull, so did the hunter.

The shaman admitted that his main is a tank.

The hunter must have been trying to compensate for a lack of DPS. The hunter was doing just 70 percent of my damage.

Did I mention that the hunter was lvl 69?

Grr.

P.S. On the next instance (I re-queued with them - I must have been high), I sat at the entrance. Took 'em four pulls to realize that I wasn't with 'em.

Sadly, that seems to be the norm these days. Everyone wants to pull, and everyone wants to DPS their own target to be special and show off how awesome their DPS is. Bleh.

AnimeJ wrote:

Sadly, that seems to be the norm these days. Everyone wants to pull, and everyone wants to DPS their own target to be special and show off how awesome their DPS is. Bleh.

I am getting really tired of that, I will even go so far as to mark the one I will hit and want to die first and I will still a different mob attacking a DPS I got so sick of it I just don't mark anymore. Unless I want some CC then I will.

And after all my whining, I got two terrific groups Sunday. The last group was pro enough to let me pull and get aggro, which meant I was cool with pulling three or four sets of mobs at a time. We did the Underbog in about 20 minutes and Ramparts (LFG fail) in about 5 minutes.

Frankly, that last run helped me a lot because I had to pay attention to pull order, which attacks were available, stray mobs and defensive CDs. It'll only help in the long run.

P.S. DK tanking isn't so bad. I miss Avenger's Shield, and I miss having a true finishing move, but my DPS is pretty huge for that level. That I like.

Demonicmaster wrote:
AnimeJ wrote:

Sadly, that seems to be the norm these days. Everyone wants to pull, and everyone wants to DPS their own target to be special and show off how awesome their DPS is. Bleh.

I am getting really tired of that, I will even go so far as to mark the one I will hit and want to die first and I will still a different mob attacking a DPS I got so sick of it I just don't mark anymore. Unless I want some CC then I will.

Yea, my personal favorites are the folks who, when I point out that no one's attacking the mob I've marked for death first: "AoE is my bread and butter". That's fine, but at least be targeting the one with the skull, kids. Nevermind that AoE is nobody's bread and butter since Cataclysm nerfed it all to the ground.

Hello fellow tanks, I am trying to get my item level up to not hold back the levelling group for heroics, and hopefully Raid some day. A quick survey and I landed upon the Bloodthirsty Pyrium gear that should do the trick (e.g. http://www.wowhead.com/spell=76461 ). A bit pricey at around 400 gp/item on AH but I could manage it over time. My question is whether there is someone with a blacksmith on this thread that would be able to make them if I provide the regeants ( elementium bars/ore and volatile this-or-that ).

(sorry for cross-post with levelling group thread, just trying to widen audience a bit)