Tanking Questionnaire
A little something I’ve found, strangely enough, browsing around World of Matticus’ comments for some post. That pointed me towards Askevar’s post (I love that blog’s name. All tanks should.) and further towards Koriel of Whatisboom and Tarsus of Tanking For Dummies (who had two additional questions about encounters, so I grabbed them as well). Well, since lately the warrior is my most played character, I think I can join as well. So, here it goes.
What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?
Vrethir, protection warrior for life. I’m using a mixed 15/3/53 spec that includes both Deep Wounds (for threat) and Improved Disciplines (with glyphed Shield Wall, for our 10-man hard modes). It’s not the best choice, but it works and saves me gold I would have to use for respecs.
What is your primary tanking environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
All of the above. Raids (10-mans and some more 25-mans recently) and five-man instances are what I do the most, since I’m mostly a PvE player. Running battlegrounds as a protection warrior is also very fun and enjoyable. No arenas yet though, maybe someday.
What is your favorite encounter to tank, and why?
Mimiron (including our tries of Firefighter). It’s a very varied fight, and you have lots of things to do, so you can’t be bored. Hard mode of Hodir is also not as boring as it might seem. Single-tanking the third phase of our Yogg-Saron fight was also very enjoyable.
What is your least favorite encounter to tank, and why?
Loatheb, Vezax (since I’m usually on boss duty due to cooldowns), Ignis (if we’re doing the speed kill and I’m on boss duty again) – from a tanks perspective they are both tank and spank fights that are simple and boring. I have to admit I like to do these once in a while for a change, but I prefer something where I can use more of my abilities.
What is your favorite tanking spell for your class and why?
That definitely must be Shield Slam. It combines a ton of aggro, dispels, and dps in one handy tool.
What tanking spell do you use least for your class and why?
A warrior uses pretty much everything he can, but if I have to choose one of the least used it would be probably Mocking Blow – it’s only useful once in a blue moon if my taunt misses and the boss absolutely needs to be on me right now.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of your tanking class and why?
Mobility, because the Warbringer talent is full of awesome, and I would not like a tanking spec that does not have it (which is also one of the reasons why I have an arms offspec, not a fury one – but that’s not really tanking related ;] ). Single-target tanking comes as a very close second, but none of the other tanks are as mobile as warriors are.
What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your tanking class and why?
AoE tanking. Yes, I can do it and not get the dps killed in a process, but it’s not what I like or what the warriors are good at. Sure, we can get some initial aggro with Thunderclap followed by Shockwave, but at that point we’re waiting till they come off cooldown, flailing wildly at both tab and the cleave button.
In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best tanking assignment for you?
Facing the boss, introducing my big shield to his ugly face (or whatever he/she/it might have instead. I’m not picky). Or picking up the adds, if there aren’t too many of them.
What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with most and why?
I don’t mind tanking alongside any class at all, as long as there is a good player (with his brain mostly intact) behind it. I say mostly, because apparently if you’re tanking, you can’t be 100% normal. ;)
What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with least and why?
Just as I don’t have a preference, I don’t really have a least favourite co-tank. Do your job and you’re fine with me.
What is your worst habit as a tank?
Showing up to a heroic run in my block value gear (which is not bad in itself), and laughing at the DPS I’ve outdpsed afterwards. Usually when I’m looking for another pug DPS to a 5-man instance, I’ll put a message in /trade saying “LFM DPS <insert instance name>, must be able to outdps me” or something similar.
What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?
Non-tanks pulling stuff before me. Do that, and I will just stand there waiting for you to die, and pick it up afterwards. I’m the tank here, if I wanted you to pull something, I’d ask you.
Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other tanks?
Mostly yes, and the current expansion did a lot of good things for protection warriors. We still lack some more decent AoE tools – while Thunderclap and Shockwave are good, once they’re on cooldown we can only tab around the mobs wildly and spam Cleave, which is not cool at all.
What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?
Omen is obvious here. Also Recount is very useful, especially the Deaths part of it and the detailed information about what happened before I died – it helps me to quickly find out if it was my mistake or somebody elses. It could be a bit better though, as it doesn’t show the cooldowns I’ve used, only heals and incoming damage.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?
It’s a bit hard to choose something, so I’ll go with Tarsus – we’re no longer THE main tank. I can do any job in a raid, and while I personally like tanking bosses (and adds to some extent), I’ll go and tank that 15 whelps that just showed up.
Also, there is that ganking thing, since Deathwing-EU is a PvP server. Oh look, a lone warrior, let’s gank him! Well, if I’m not afk, and you don’t have friends, there is a very high chance that this will not end well for you. A chance, because I am of course not invincible (and will most likely lose versus a good PvPer, which I’m not), but I’ve taught enough Hordies their lessons both during my leveling as protection and while running around as a level 80.
What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new tanks of your class to learn?
Use all of your availaible tools. Warriors have a tool for every occasion, learn how and when to use them.
If it can be disarmed, you should do it. If a spell can be interrupted, you should interrupt it. A warlock is doing a lot of threat? Put a Vigilance on him, and Intervene him if you have a chance. A Nerubian Burrower is trying to submerge and there is no blue stuff anywhere near? Stun it, you have 3 different stuns to use.
Don’t just stand there and mash Devastate.
Effective Health or Avoidance and why?
EH of course, but I like balance, so I’m not stacking it blindly. Still, it’s needed just to survive things like ToGC, and with the introduction of the Sunwell Radiance-like aura in Icecrown, that’s not going to change anytime soon.
What tanking class do you feel you understand least?
Druids. While I have a druid character, I’ve never really tried the feral playstyle on him – I’ve got a rogue and a warrior, why on Azeroth would I want another?
What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in tanking?
I use a lot of macros that combine different abilities in one button – and even then I’m running out of easy to reach keybinds. Other than that, I use Satrina Buff Frames to have a separate buff bars with important buffs and debuffs – important being the things I have to watch out for, like Sword and Board proc or Demoralizing Shout and Sunder Armor timers.
I also use Grid all the time, even in heroics – it’s much easier to see the healers mana on it, and much easier to choose a dps to Intervene or put Vigilance on it. This gets more tricky in 25-mans, but with enough practice you can do it quickly.
Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
My main gear set is mostly balanced – it has decent Stamina, not bad Avoidance values, almost capped Hit and Expertise. If I need to change something, I carry around other pieces of gear – like the Brewfest Stamina trinkets, which I will equip if the encounter is mostly about high unavoidable (or magical) damage that my dodge trinket will be useless on. If I need more threat, I can switch one ring back to the Emblem of Valor one at a cost of some health.
Soloing as a Protection Warrior, Part 2
This is the second part of a soloing guide targeted at protection warriors. It focuses on raid and dungeon bosses that we can solo and that are either fun or drop valuable things such as rare mounts or pets. You can also read the first part of this guide, and I have at least one more part in writing – which will take us to Molten Core and maybe somewhere else. ;)
Onyxia
Since the 3.2.2 patch changed the old instance into an anniversary level 80 raid, it’s pretty obvious she can’t be soloed right now. I would still advise you to find a group for her and try to get two items which are absolutely awesome for soloing other bosses.
The trinkets in question are [Purified Shard of the Flame] (and its 25-man counterpart of the Shiny variety, which gives slightly more HP5 – you could get both for even better effect) and the [Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman] you can get as a reward for turning in the new Head of Onyxia quest. Of course, the Shard is part of a caster set, so be mindful and please don’t take it from a caster that would like to complete it. Fortunately my raid group had no issues when I told them I want it for soloing, since the only other roll was a shadow priest that maybe wanted it for PvP. :)
Worn together, that’s a decent boost in avoidance and, what’s important to us here, 611 HP5. This means you will regen 244 health every 2 seconds, because that’s how HP5 works. Unfortunately it doesn’t show at all in the combat log, so you have to believe me when I say so. To compare it to a glyphed Bloodthirst – it heals me for about 1600 health, over about 6 seconds. Unglyphed would have about the same regen value.
What it means is that on my gear level (ToC-10 stuff with some emblem and crafted pieces) I no longer need to change my spec for soloing most of the bosses, including Attumen the Huntsman in Karazhan. As said before, with a normal protection spec you are going to kill them before they kill you, and the steady health regen is really helpful.
Attumen, High Priest Thekal and Bloodlord Mandokir, we meet once again.
The first part of the guide was written when my warrior had much inferior gear than he has now – being mostly stuff from heroics and some entry raid epics. That was also before the emblems dropping in heroics changed from Heroism to Conquest.
With all the new gear, it becomes possible to kill these bosses with a standard Protection tanking spec. Having Devastate, Shockwave, Damage Shield and Sword and Board availaible means you’re simply going to try (and should be quite successful at it) killing them faster than they can kill you.
Even the raptor packs before Mandokir are not really a problem – sure, they stack their dot, but with over 30k health it’s gonna take a while before it kills you. It will deal about 1k damage per 3 seconds after it stacks high enough though, so don’t forget to bring some sort of food with you.
Magisters’ Terrace
Equipped with the health regen trinkets I’ve tried my luck in getting the Phoenix Hatchling pet and another mount drop. First run was on normal difficulty to try and see how it goes.
Trash mobs weren’t really an issue anymore – the multitude of stuns and interrupts makes it pretty easy to deal with them. Remember to also use the Magic Dampening Field that the Sunblade Mage Guards are putting down to your advantage – your HP5 doesn’t care about it, but it reduces incoming magic damage by half, which can still be handy.
Before engaging the first boss, aggro all the adds and kill them – if you just engage the boss, they will join the fight as well. Selin Fireheart himself is easy – just ignore the crystals and keep beating on him. Remember that he can use Drain Life, so be sure to interrupt it as soon as he starts channeling it.
Vexallus, the second boss is right after Selin (well, after a bunch of wyrmlings which you can simply pull all and AoE down). On the normal mode he’s not really an issue – just dps him down, killing the appearing sparks with Devastates, as they can’t be damaged by any AoE. You will get low on health here due to the fight mechanics – just use Last Stand with Enraged Regen and continue dpsing the boss/sparks.
Next set of trash packs is a bit harder – more annoying casters, so keep your Spell Reflect up, use the Dampening Fields and just kill them. Remember that you can skip half of the first room and everything around Delrissa – they won’t join the fight unless you get feared into a pack.
Priestess Delrissa is a simple fight for a level 80, so I won’t write much about it – just look on the enemies, if it has a mana bar it probably does nasty things, so it needs to die first. If you made it so far, you probably won’t have any problems with them. After her it’s only one more trash pack before you meet a real zombie!
Now, you get to slap poor Kael’thas Sunstrider around. This is not as easy as it seems, but it’s mostly annoying. Be sure to kill the Phoenixes and their eggs when they spawn, avoid the Flamestrike Kael does once in a while, and keep dpsing.
After you get him to 50% health, he will start doing Gravity Lapse. If you get to this part of the fight, you have already won, as he stops doing anything else. There isn’t much you can do to him in this phase – just avoid the floating spheres, and when it ends, immediately charge the boss and do some damage. Repeat until he finally dies.
Magisters’ Terrace, heroic mode
Before entering, make sure that you’ve done the attunement quest in the normal mode of the instance. It just requires you to clear it once and loot Kael’thas’ head, so it’s not a big issue at all.
Up to Vexallus, nothing really changes from normal mode. Be aware that the trash casters can and will kill you if you’re not careful and quick enough, or pull too many of them at once. Selin Fireheart is still a pushover, he just has more health.
Vexallus is the first real challenge here. He has more health and will spawn two sparks instead of one – so you will stack the overload debuff twice as fast. The way I did it, I killed first 4 sparks and then popped all the cooldowns and tried to finish the boss before he and his arcane friends finish me. It was a successful tactic, but I ended with about 400 health out of 34k, so it might require a few tries to get some lucky Shield Slam crits.
The fight with Priestess Delrissa doesn’t change much when doing it on heroic mode – she and her adds hit for a bit more and heal for a bit more, but it’s still quite easy.
Kael’Thas is even more annoying than on normal mode. If it takes you too long to get him to second phase, he will cast a 10k shield on himself and start casting Pyroblast, which still does about 40k damage. He will also throw around a crazy amount of Fireballs, each taking about 4.5k of your health if they happen to hit you. None of this damage can be partially resisted by fire resistance, so forget about taking your MC gear and trying to do it slowly – it just won’t work.
What you should do instead, is ignore everything that happens around you (even the Phoenix that will spawn during the fight – leave it after you get to the second phase, as its damage is really low), keep Spell Reflect up, interrupt the Fireballs when the reflect is on cooldown, and hope that you can do enough damage to push him below 50% before he does the Pyroblast. If you manage to do that, you will probably win, unless you fail badly on the Gravity Lapse and dodging the spheres.
Good luck with the rare drops, and what’s most important – have fun while taking revenge on this annoying instance!
Trial of the Grand Crusader Tips and Tricks
Not really a full-featured guide this time, this is rather a collection of tips and tricks our guild put together while doing our ToGC-10 runs.
Of course in this post I’m going to assume that the reader is fully familiar with normal Trial of the Crusader tactics, because the basics of the fight are the same. But since you have to clear the instance before even starting the heroic mode, it should not be a problem, right?
There is also a second part of this guide, talking about the next two encounters – Faction Champions and the Val’kyr Twins.
So, let’s get started.
Northrend Beasts
The main difference in this fight is that all beasts now have a set timer that they will enter the arena. This means your raid needs to have enough DPS to clear each phase in about 2:30, and this means that absolutely nobody can die. If you can kill Gormok, you are probably good enough to go at least up to Twin Val’kyr, as the two next encounters are a bit easier.
Gormok the Impaler.
- The tank with higher HP starts tanking, gets the first Impales and the last which hurt a lot. Gormok cannot be disarmed on heroic mode, so your tanks class does not matter much.
- Turn the boss around, so that the melee dps group will be near the center and the tanks with their backs to the wall. He does not cleave or anything, but it makes it easier with the Snobolds.
- Always taunt after the other tank gets two debuffs. Timing doesn’t really matter as long as you don’t fail (and even with 3 stacks you can still make it), because your current debuff will drop off a second before the new one gets applied. Announce your taunts on vent or you might not get heals. :P
- Do not taunt if you don’t have to. Taunting after two debuffs is already very close to hitting the diminishing returns on taunt and messing things up, taunting any more often will make the boss immune to taunt for sure. Been there, done that.
- Cooldowns usage (at least for protection warriors): first time you have aggro, Shield Block will be enough, he doesn’t hit that hard then to waste a cooldown. Second time, Shield Block and dodge trinket. Third time, Last Stand + Enraged Regeneration. You shouldn’t need a fourth time if you’re an offtank, but if you do, Shield Wall. If you get to the fifth time somehow, the worms will be already there and you will die anyway.
- Cooldowns usage on 25-man is a bit different as there are three tanks there, but similar enough. First tank does not need to use anything special, second one can use some minor cooldowns like Shield Block and a dodge trinket, third tank needs to use one of their stronger ones (for warriors that would be LS + ER), because at that point Gormok will probably already have 3 stacks of the damage increasing buff. The next round of tanking is Shield Wall and asking for external cooldowns if you don’t have any of your own.
- For any other tanks – whatever works for your cooldowns, but I can assure that you will need something after Gormok gets 3 stacks of his buff.
- Kill Snobolds, because the faster you kill them, the less fires you get. If you get a snobold on you, run and stand right on top of the melee group. They will have to change their target from the boss, because the Snobolds are immune to AoE (such as Whirlwind or Divine Storm) if you’re not targetting them. The tank that’s not tanking Gormok at the moment can help with that, at least I usually throw a few devastates/revenges when I can, just don’t forget you will have to taunt. :)
- Don’t ever bubble or iceblock the Snobold away – it will go back to the boss, and later to another person, increasing the buff stacks on the boss yet again.
- You shouldn’t need Heroism for this part, but as you’re learning, it might be useful. If Dreadscale is entering with Gormok on about 200k HP (of course on 10-man), you’re good.
- Using Amplify Magic on both tanks helps here a lot with healing, as there is not a lot of magic damage being thrown at them. Just make sure they know to click it off (or use /cancelaura macro) before they start with the other phases.
Acidmaw and Dreadscale
- For the Dreadscale tank: at first you’ll be the only one with a fire debuff. From the start, aggro the worm and run away with it to the right side of the room. Then turn it and kite it slowly towards the other tank. That way you will make some room without the poison cloud for people to run to you. Don’t kite the worm away from the Acidmaw tank, it’s bad and will lead to a wipe.
- Don’t forget to cancel Amplify Magic if you were using it on Gormok.
- Using Heroism in this phase helps, especially right after the Acidmaw tank gets some aggro. The faster Acidmaw dies, the better this phase goes.
- Dreadscale’s Enrage is not a big issue, normally you shouldn’t waste anything on it other than Shield Block once in a while and a dodge trinket if it’s off cd after Gormok already (remember that the extra dodge is of no use on Icehowl since Ferocious Butt stuns you and you can’t dodge anyway).
Icehowl
- No speed buff after Massive Crash, so be awake and run away. If you have a hunter, you might make him change his aspect for faster running, but it should not be needed.
- A little trick that helped me and our priest to do it properly – when Icehowl is jumping to the center, position yourself at a point of one of the little stars (not the big NESW ones). If you do that, you will be thrown to the middle of the wall between two pillars, and it’s a lot easier to strafe away from the boss as you don’t have to lose time navigating around a pillar or a doorway. It might sound silly, but it really helps.
- Ferocious Butt kinda hurts – he usually does it after he comes out of the stun, but not only then. I saved my cooldowns for that, better safe than sorry.
- Healers NEED to heal people that got frozen, and people NEED to properly spread around the boss, especially healers. The Arctic Breath on heroic does 30k damage (20k on normal), so it WILL kill most people. This was the reason of us losing the dps in this phase, and the enrage timer is pretty tight.
- I tend to tank Icehowl on the side of the wall wherever he hits it, or at the doorway where he enters, and not drag him back to center. This makes it a lot easier for melee dps to stay on him, and saves time.
Lord Jaraxxus
First of all, check out the following screenshot, as it makes it much easier to explain.
- Tank him on the wall under one of the Alliance shields, this way you only get portals on the sides of him and not 360 degrees around like you would have him tanked in the center. Dps and healers spread out in pairs in a half-circle from one column on the wall to the other. A good raid positioning is key on this fight.
- If you get targetted by Legion Flames, run away from the raid and then back. If a melee dps gets them, run to one of the columns and back, it should be enough. Remember that you have two seconds before the flames start damaging you, so if you start running as soon as you get the DBM warning, you should not take much damage or none at all.
- Nether Portal and Infernal Volcano that spawn adds NEED to be nuked ASAP. If you let them spawn more than one Mistress of Pain, you might as well wipe. ALL availaible DPS must immediately switch to the portal, including melees – the portals/volcanoes have 189k HP (again, 10-man version) and need to die in about 10-13 seconds.
- While nuking the Portal, be aware that you shouldn’t accidentaly aggro a Mistress of Pain if you’re not a tank. They hurt.
- Mistress of Pain does more damage and have an additional ability - Mistress’ Kiss. Read the tooltip and act accordingly – if you only have one school of casts and no instants you’re screwed, sorry. ;) This debuff can’t be dispelled in any way, and it will silence all your spell schools if you have more than one, so you just have to wait.
- Nether Power stacks need to be spellstolen/dispelled/shield slammed immediately, unless there is a Nether Portal or a Volcano at the same time – in that case nuking the portal is much more important.
- Incinerate Flesh needs more spam healing to take it off, and Burning Inferno almost kills you. Don’t let that happen.
- If you get an infernal coming your way (they do that all the time, turn into a ball and fly to a random person), run the hell away from it, as it will kill you with its hellfire AoE (interruptable).
And that will be it for now. On our last tries, my guild stopped at Twin Val’kyr, so I will update this post when we progress further. We’ve killed some more and we’re now working on getting Anub’Arak down. The second part of this guide explains more about the Faction Champions and the Twin Val’kyr – check it out as well!
Introducing Angry_RaidInviter
What does a programmer do when he has to do a repetetive, annoying task that’s quite time-consuming? The answer is simple – he writes his own little tool to do the work for him.
That’s exactly how angry_RaidInviter started.
Back in the middle of the summer, I’ve started leading our 10-man raids more, and with that I got a few additional annoyances – inviting 9 other people, making it a raid group of a right size, not forgetting to turn master looter on… At the same time I’ve seen our guild master having exactly the same issues with leading our 25-mans, but on a larger scale. Especially figuring out who are we missing, by manually comparing the phpRaider approvals with the actual raid, was a pain in the ass. Fortunately we can use addons… if only there would be one like that. Well now there is. :]
First thing you need to know about writing addons is of course a knowledge of Lua, or at least some sort of scripting language. As I come from writing stuff in Perl, PHP and Ruby, Lua was not really a problem. After all, once you learn to code, you can pick up any language pretty fast, as the basics are mostly the same everywhere. And if needed, Lua has a nice resource in form of Lua 5.1 Reference Manual, as well as quite a lot of WoWWiki pages (Lua functions is a good place to start).
The real challenge here comes in form of Ace3 and it’s “documentation”. I use quote marks because all of the good information is very well hidden, and unfortunately the general type of help one can get from the Ace community seems to be “look how others do it”. Of course, there’s nothing wrong in looking at existing code and figuring out how it works from that, but it’s not really something a completely new person wants to see. In the end, I had to do it anyway – figuring out how to properly do the options panel for example was one such thing. The documentation for AceConfig only has one most basic example, so I’ve looked through quite a few addons to see how they do it.
Of course I don’t mean that the Ace3 set of libraries is not helpful – even with the annoyances, it’s much easier to use it instead of doing it all by yourself.
In the end, the month I’ve spent on making was quite fun, even if it will be ever only useful to me and my guild master. Of course, there is a good chance it can be useful for someone else, which is the reason why I’ve uploaded it to WoWInterface for all to download.
How you should NOT do the Twin Val’kyr speed kill.
Faction Champions, ToC-10. I switch my warrior to Arms to provide MS debuff, since nobody else in the raid has it. We kill them pretty easily.
We group up for the Val’kyr, so I switch back to my tanking spec, one of the healers switches to dps in order to get the speed kill easier, ready check, we pull them.
I notice dps pulling aggro off me very early, which usually doesn’t happen. Oh well. Grab the boss, devastate it a few times so it doesn’t go off me again, pull it closer to the other one. Then I notice something weird – my shield slam button is greyed out and when I press it, it doesn’t do anything.
I look at the character tab and see that I’m still in my Arms gear. With a 2-hander and a blue pvp trinket.
“Guys you won’t like what I’m about to say.”
I quickly switch the weapons around, since that’s all I can do while in combat, and we proceed to kill it. Fortunately the normal mode Val’kyr hit like sissies, even with 418 defense + 20 resilience.
(And yes, I’m still alive and kicking.)
Soloing as a Protection Warrior – Part 1
Being a bit bored about a month ago from a lack of raiding, I’ve decided to see what can I do to amuse myself. I knew I was able to solo the Tiger boss in Zul’Gurub, since I’ve tried it some time ago, but one boss is simply not enough, even if he has a chance to drop an awesome mount.
After a bit of searching around the Internet, I’ve found a nice warrior spec that gets Bloodthirst alongside some prot talents, and it turned out to be a very nice and easy (can’t say efficient since I’m doing about 1k dps in that spec) way to kill bosses.
Preparation
Talent spec I’m using for this is 5/31/35 with Glyph of Bloodthirst. Unfortunately taking Bloodthirst makes it impossible to take the awesome end talents in Prot, so it’s not really recommended for doing anything else. Glyph of Bloodthirst is not optional, but for the other two you can do well with any of these: Glyph of Enraged Regeneration, Glyph of Shield Wall, Glyph of Last Stand and Glyph of Heroic Strike.
As for gear, my warrior wasn’t the best geared one around when I started doing this (BoEs, crafted stuff and some parts of heroic/Naxx-10 gear) and I’ve still succeded without too many problems. If you can tank Naxx-10, you can pretty much farm yourself some nice mounts. For Onyxia, I’ve also had some fire resistance gear prepared, but I’ll talk about it later. Of course it gets a lot easier once you get more gear – what you can get right now in 3.2 with the Emblems of Conquests is completely sufficient.
Last thing you need for doing this stuff is of course a raid group. The way I do it, is I invite some guildie’s alt to a party and then convert it to a raid. After this that person can freely log out or relog to another character – their offline alt will stay in the raid. In fact, the raid group doesn’t even disband if you yourself log out, so you can send yourself some pots or stuff from another character. Also, don’t forget to turn the loot method to Free For All to skip the annoying greed/need roll windows from appearing.
And now, lets get to the bosses themselves. In this article, we’re going to visit three instances. Lets start with Zul’Gurub – a 20-man raid instance located in Stranglethorn Vale.
High Priest Thekal
Your first target in Zul’Gurub is High Priest Thekal, the Tiger boss. The fight itself isn’t very hard, but you might want to clear up his trash packs, which are annoying. While fighting them, you want to focus on the Gurubashi Axe Throwers. You need to kill them as fast as possible, because they have a chanelled 15 seconds stun (with added damage element), which might very well kill you if there are any other adds around or you are at low health. Also, if you aggro any Zulian Cubs, be sure to kill them first, as they tend to run away and aggro additional packs. Believe me, three Axe Throwers are annoying enough, 9 of them at once will get you killed in no time.
Once you get them out of your way though, the boss itself isn’t that hard. In the first phase he comes at you with his two adds (and two tigers which you’ll want to kill), and they have to die more or less together. After the first one dies you have around 15 seconds to finish the other two before the dead ones respawn with full health. Another thing to note is that one of the add is a priest and will try to heal. You need to interrupt it, which is pretty easy with Shield Bash.
The way I do it is I set the priestess (Zealot Lor’Khan as seen in the picture) as my focus and have the focus cast bar enabled, so that I can easily see when she starts casting the heal, target her by clicking the focus frame and interrupt her. I could probably make it even more easier by setting up a macro for that, but for now I’m too lazy to do it.
Once you kill the annoying trio, Thekal changes his form to a Tiger god avatar and you have to kill him again. That phase is very easy, as he doesn’t hit for much and does not have a heal of any kind. He summons some more tiger adds though, and you might want to kill them as they’re a bit annoying. One thing he does is a knockback, so remember to fight him with your back to the wall or on the hill to your right side.
Gahz’ranka
It’s the second boss worth killing in Zul’Gurub. It has a chance to drop [Tome of Polymorph: Turtle], which still might be sold for a nice price on the Auction House (or be used as a nice present for your local friendly mageling). The fight itself is easy, just remember to fight with your back to the wall again because of the knockback.
You can’t fight Gahz’ranka immediately though – first you need to complete the quest Nat’s Measuring Tape, and have to buy a [Mudskunk Lure] from him (stacks to 20, so I just bought a full stack, saves time). Then fish up 5 Zulian Mudskunks from the fishing schools in ZG, and use the Lure to summon the boss.
Bloodlord Mandokir
Mandokir, or the Raptor boss as he’s often called, is your third target in ZG. Just as with Thekal, you should clear up his room a bit so you won’t get feared into another pack. The adds aren’t very tough – first target is always the Priest, then Champions, then Raptors and save Blooddrinkers for last since they will try to life drain the other mobs in the pack. This is of course interruptable and they can be stunned.
After you have a comfortable safety zone, kill the Vilebranch Speaker and Mandokir will aggro. Take him on the temple stairs, put up Demo Shout, Thunderclap and a stack of Sunders, and start killing him. He has a raptor add with him, which you can totally ignore – in fact killing the raptor first enrages Mandokir for two minutes, which you don’t really want.
He has a bunch of abilities, most of which I totally ignored. Only one you can’t ignore is a fear, which you should get out of by using your Berserkers Rage. Other than that, keep your debuffs on the boss, use Bloodthirst every time it’s up (for me it was about 1.7k healing each time, with 4 second cooldown), and dps the boss. If you get to about half health, pop Commanding Shout, Last Stand and Enraged Regeneration to heal up, and continue. Use Shield Wall early in the fight, so it can be off cooldown later again.
That should be enough to kill the boss if you keep it long enough. Takes a few minutes, but a raptor mount is totally worth it. Oh, and don’t forget to clear the raptor packs around the boss for the pet as you go there.
Onyxia
I went to solo Onyxia simply out of pure curiousity if I can do it, and for some of the rare drops she has (mostly the Orb of Deception, since I cba camping the Dire Maul arena). It was also a test if I can solo the questline for Quel’Serrar, which requires you to forge the sword in her Flame Breath.
To do it, you need some kind of fire resistance. I’ve had 138 points of it, which was enough – 50 from [Lesser Flask of Resistance], 15 from [Drakefire Amulet] (you can skip it, but as I’ve had it, why not use it once in a while), 20 from cloak enchant (I used my [Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions] for it) and 53 from [Inferno Tempered Boots] with [Flame Armor Kit] slapped on them. While using all that silly gear I wasn’t even uncrittable with about 524 defense, but it wasn’t a problem at all. If you have a spare helmet, you can also use the [Arcanum of the Flame's Soul] availaible from Kirin Tor quartermaster for another 25 points, and [Lesser Arcanum of Resilience] for yet another 20 points of resistance on legs. The extra 45 resistance is definitely not needed for Onyxia, but it might help you later if you want to get a shot at getting Thunderfury.
Strategy is basically the same as for all the bosses – keep debuffs up, use Bloodthirst each 4 seconds, pop Shield Wall on every cooldown and LS+ER combo when low on health. The second phase, when she takes off and starts flying around the room, is the most tricky and annoying one – fortunately she still can be hit while she’s in the air, but you need to run after her to keep close (which isn’t that easy without Warbringer and in-combat Charge). She’ll also summon her whelps, but they don’t do much damage and will usually die after a few Thunderclaps, so don’t even bother wasting rage on Cleaving them. Just keep your health up with Bloodthirst and you’ll be fine.
Also, be prepared for a very long fight, as it took me over 25 minutes to kill her. She didn’t drop anything cool either, but oh well, 40 gold is still enough for my repair bills of that evening.
Attumen the Huntsman
And now the last one of soloable, mount dropping bosses. If you’ve been around in Burning Crusade, I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with this guy. If not, he’s the first boss of TBC’s introductory 10-man raid dungeon, the Karazhan, which is located in Deadwind Pass. You still need [The Master's Key] to enter it, but you might be able to open the doors with high level Skeleton Keys if you’re a blacksmith, as I’m sure they can be opened by a rogue’s lockpick ability. If not, simply ask someone to open the gate for you, they don’t even have to be in your group, and can go back to their business as soon as you enter.
You need to clear all the trash mobs on your way to Attumen, because otherwise they will join the fight and wtfpwn you. They’re pretty easy, but don’t get cocky and don’t try grabbing more than one pack at a time – they can still kick your butt if there’s too many of them. Remember that they have a pretty nasty respawn timer of 30 minutes, so you need to be quick. They don’t respawn once you pull the boss and after the kill.
Once you get to the boss himself, you will see Midnight, the Attumen’s horse standing alone in the stable. Just pull her and start slowly dpsing her down. After a while Attument himself will join the fight and add a bit of damage to the fight – don’t forget to disarm him once in a while to keep the damage lower. There are two annoying boss abilities in this encounter.
First is that the horse keeps using Knockdown, doing about 1.5k damage on top of the normal hits and stunning you for 3 seconds. That makes it really important to use Bloodthirst on every cooldown to regain the lost health.
Second large annoyance is the Intangible Presence. It is used once every 30 seconds and lasts for 12 seconds. Normally you would decurse it, but as a protection warrior you just have to deal with that. It makes keeping your debuffs on targets and regaining health through Bloodthirst a bit harder than on normal fights, especially when you are on a lower level of gear and don’t have a lot of hit and avoidance.
After you bang on Midnight for a while and get her to 25%, Attument will mount her. If you can get to this part, you have almost won. He will still use all abilities from the first phase, but it won’t be so annoying as you only have one target this time. Keep disarming him, keep all the debuffs and best luck with your drop rates!
Until next time!
That will be it for now, as this post already is very late and getting long. Sometimes in the hopefully near future, there will be a part 2 of this guide with even more soloing. See you soon!
Trial of the Crusader Once Again
Just a little update to the post from last week – yesterday evening we took another shot at the instance, and this time we were prepared for the Faction Champions. Having a warlock to completely disable the resto druid really worked very well, but it’s still a bit stupid that we kinda need all the cc we can get, else you can’t really progress through the instance.
Then we cleared the new boss, the Twin Valkyrs. We had two tries at them, at first we hit the enrage timer at 8 minutes as we allowed the Valkyrs to heal a few times, instead of breaking the shield and interrupting the cast. Second try went much better as everyone seen how it looks like and what to do. It was a fun, dynamic fight.
I really hope that the Heroic mode will present us with a decent challenge, though. Right now our 10-man group can possibly plow through the normal mode in 1 – 1.5 hours once we get a grasp on the encounters, and it’s a little bit disappointing. I still like it, mostly because it isn’t boring.
The Cataclysm
Though Blizzcon ended just a few days ago, I’m still not completely sure what I feel about all these announcements. It’s really awesome, but makes me a bit worried in some places. Well, let’s see what we got.
The DirectTV internet stream
It sucked. Well, in the end I’m glad I bought it, because what’s better than looking at the panels? Only going to the real place – and there’s no way I can do that right now, but the stream really sucked. They only had cameras on the main stage (so people watching the stream missed on half of the panels), they cut off the contests the first day right in about 2/3rd, without even showing the winners of Sound-a-like or dance contests (or the machinima contest either – btw the winning machinima is this piece of art by my favourite Cranius and Legs – Don’t Make Me Get My Main. Watch it, its first place is completely deserved). To top it off, the “On-demand” stream is cut into 15-minute streams, but the streams aren’t really continuous – there’s like a 20-30 (or sometimes what feels more) seconds of missing video and sound between them.
Oh, and if I hear their male host once again after this week I will seriously strangle someone. He was just horrible.
The Cataclysm
Well, what can I say here. HOLY SHIT THEY ARE CHANGING AZEROTH.
The new zones look promising, but changing the flow and terrain of the old zones is both awesome and mind-blowing at the same time. When they showed how Desolace, the single worst zone in all of Kalimdor, is being changed into a forest… what the hell are they doing, are they making people want to go there, really? This, combined with the new races, will most likely make me roll more alts, just to see and experience the new zones, quests and all that stuff.
The new content looks pretty good as well. While I’m a bit not sure yet what’s up with all these elemental planes, all the stuff involving Deathwing is very awesome. As is Deathwing himself – they haven’t really shown him before, and when they finally did… holy shit. That is one freaking, terrifying dragon, are we really supposed to step up and fight HIM? Can I like, maybe find myself a nice little corner and hide there, no?
Then there’s the new dungeons – after all this time, we’re finally going to see Uldum, Grim Batol and some new stuff in Blackrock Mountains on top of that. They will have to do something really good in the 4.X content patches to do something even better than these. On the other hand, getting heroic versions of Deadmines and SFK is a bit of a letdown. It’s nice, but yeah, oh well.
Item and stats changes
Awesome. Not seeing armor penetration on an item ever again? Where do I sign for that? And haste making energy regen faster is a very cool use for this stat, much better than “you can now swing your weapons 0.45% faster” that it is now. Seeing attack power and defense rating go down as well is a bit sad, but I’m not really bothered about it. Juggling around the defense cap is only fun for a while, and only really doable if you have enough luck with your drops in high-end instances – otherwise it’s just a pain in the ass you have to endure each time you get a new item.
It’s a bit more crazy for the casters, with removal of both MP5 and spell power, so they are panicking a bit more than we rogues are, but remember folks. It’s getting easier, not too easy. You will still have your stats, it will not be HP/MP/POWAH after all.
DON’T PANIC.
Class changes
I don’t play a warlock (at least not yet ;] ), so I can’t comment on that really, but the new shard interface looks fun. About the hunters – well, getting them focus will change a lot, both in playstyle and the talents. And it’s about time, because while leveling my little tauren hunter I’ve been oom a lot, even with constant switching of aspects from Hawk to Viper, and that’s just annoying, so I’m hoping the unlimited, energy-like focus will make it much better. The ammo change looks very cool on the other hand, and I hope they will have lots of different types of it, making it a fun and a significant choice, not only a burden and a money sink like it is now.
Guild changes
It seems that Blizzard wants to make guilds more than just another word for IRC. Leveling a guild and choosing talents, such as mass resurrection or summoning of your raid? Give me that anytime. Guild achievements are another cool idea that should have been here sooner. What I like most is the changes that they are making to the guild interface ingame – right now that thing is absolutely crappy and hard to use.
Ozzy Osbourne
Well. The guy’s a walking legend, and I have a soft spot for that kind of music, even if it’s a walking, 60 years old legend singing, with a bit weird voice sometimes. ;) The first song, Bark at the Moon sounded a bit weird, but the rest was okay. Still the crappy on-demand DirectTV stream ruined it a bit by cutting the songs in half, too bad.
So to cut this long story short, I’m sold right now and I’m so looking forward to the new expansion. Excellent way to make an already great game even better.
Trial of the Crusader
It’s been a while since the release of the 3.2 patch, and we finally made some serious shots at the new raid instance. I have some really mixed feeling about it now. While the instance was on the PTR, I’ve been reading endless whining on the forums here and there, about how easy the raid bosses are. Well, it’s only partly true.
The first encounter, the Northrend Beasts, is easy. If you have the tactics right, your tanks can follow the worms around, and you see on Grid who has what debuff, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will kill it. I like it this way though, it’s a nice refreshment after boring General Vezax. I know most caster-types will disagree with me here but it seriously makes me sleepy. This is easy and quite fun.
Second encounter, Lord Jaraxxus (or Jarraxus, whatever, I called him “Lord Bob” when explaining tactics for my group on Tuesday) is a little bit harder, but still pretty much doable. It includes a really awesome scene at the beginning and the fight itself is dynamic enough not to be boring – with all the adds spawning, moving with the fires and stuff.
And now we have the Faction Champions – the third encounter which was unlocked this week. It’s something completely different. We ended up not killing them after all, but we just couldn’t do it with our group setup. What we were missing was I think a warlock to lock down the enemy resto druid. With one healer CC’d I could then go on the other one and help lock him down/dps as well. It’s also very weird seeing full-time PvE players being suddenly cast into the world of PvP. Half of the group doesn’t like BG’s and Arenas and didn’t have much skill at kiting, stunlocking, and generally doing what should be done.
I now actually want to take my warrior there, just to try kiting and dealing with the arms warrior and ret paladin. These two were the most annoying ones apart from the healers – I think they got most of the kills because of the Bladestorm/Divine Storm. They were also pretty good at peeling me off the healer I’m supposed to lock down – I simply can’t stay on one target when a warrior charges me and either fears me or starts Bladestorming.
I have to say that I’m quite amazed at the amount of programming behind this fight – the NPCs were behaving pretty much like normal players in PvP, fearing, CC’ing and using every ability you would expect from a class to use against you. If you came to this instance expecting 5 fully scripted, easy encounters, these NPCs are here to prove you wrong.
In the end I have really mixed feeling when I try to understand what we did wrong. Maybe we would be more succesful with another setup, or maybe the same setup with simply other players (ones more open to changes, as it’s nothing like your regular boss fight) would be enough. Changing the setup for one fight is of course the easy way, but I’d rather not replace people in the middle of the raid.