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While almost all of my time in-game as of late has been spent tanking low level instances via the LFD tool, I noticed that I’ve picked up a few interesting habits recently that I never used to have. I find this interesting because for the most part I’ve always kind of chugged along and never thought too deeply about how I can improve my playing. Although I still won’t even stick my toes into the murky waters of theory crafting, I am doing a lot more to get a little more performance out of my gear.
Auction House Tanking Gear:
The first new habit I’ve picked up is to check the AH for gear upgrades for my tank after every ding. At this point gold isn’t really a problem and I figure if I can eek out just a little more armor here and there it’ll probably help out the group. While this may seem like a halfway normal practice for someone to do, it should be noted that in the past I never really cared too much for good gear while I leveled because, hey, I’m going to outgrow it as soon as possible if all goes well. As a tank now, it seems that I’m not just playing for myself now. I now have four other people to think about, especially the healer.
Dungeon Reruns:
The other habit that I think I’m going to stick to is running the easier and quicker instances until I almost out-level them, and there are two reasons for this. The first is that since I’m a relatively new tank, if I can power through the mobs a little bit faster it might be a little easier on the healers should things get a little crazy. The other reason is speed. Lately I’ve been running Stockades repeatedly and can now steamroll through the place in about twenty minutes or so. There are often times where I only have an hour or so to play before work, so the quicker instances are much better suited. On the downside, I don’t really need anything that drops from those places when I’m a good five levels or so above every mob there.
Although I am using the dungeon finder, I decided not to use the random dungeon tool too often. The main reason for this is that, as previously written, I can continue to run the same instance over and over without getting thrown into one that is too low or too high for my level. It also works out pretty good in regards to time limitations. Not only are some places longer than others, (Deadmines and Gnomergan) but it also seems that the longer instances are plagued with people constantly dropping group which holds up the group as we have to escort the newcomers to where we’re at. Without using the random dungeons feature I’m able to knock out a quick instance in about 20 minutes and then take of other things if I need to.
Gems and Enchants:
Gemming and enchanting my gear is something that I’ve become obsessed with lately on my two level 80s, the holy priest and fire mage. I find this to be interesting because when I played the mage during TBC I never understood or gave two thoughts about how to further improve my gear. I think this was partly because I didn’t have much gold to pay for them and also because I didn’t follow the many WoW related websites and blogs that I read today.
Now however, I find myself instantly heading for the auction house as soon as I pick up a new piece of gear worth keeping and spending hundreds and hundreds of gold to buy the top notch gems and enchants. I even spent about 45 emblems to instantly reach exalted with Sons Of Hodir just for the shoulder enchants and don’t regret any of it.
To supplement the effect of getting some new gear every level on my tank, I’m also enchanting my gear when possible which helps a bit. I’ve been a little too lazy to do it just yet, but I’ve also been meaning to send some leather armor kits to the tank as well.
As always, thanks for reading Thoughts of Warcraft. Stay tuned for next post.
Brad
In a recent post I wrote about wanting to try my hand at tanking. Well, I did and it’s been a lot of fun so far.
I Tank Now:
The first thing I did ironically enough was delete my old level 22 human paladin. I hadn’t played him in over a year and I hated his name and look, so it’s wasn’t too difficult of a decision. Luckily I hadn’t bought too many bank slots so I didn’t sweat it too much. I then made a brand new dranei pally named Fontasy and loaded him up with four heirloom items, bags, and a bunch of gold. I plan on leveling him by only using the LFD tool. The name of course is from one of my favorite podcasts, The Best Show On WFMU, and it’s a reference to how they thought Gene Simmons would pronounce the word “fantasy.”
Because my top priority was to begin tanking instances as soon as possible, I instantly headed for Elwynn Forest because that’s where I’m most comfortable leveling quickly. Before I knew it I was level 10 and began putting talents into the prot spec. I leveled solely from quests until the very moment that I hit level 15 and then began my journey into the wonderful world of tanking. I decided that I wasn’t going to worry about any professions at first, but later decided to pick up enchanting just for the hell of it. The only bad thing about leveling up was that I had already had a paladin that was capable of tanking before creating Fontasy. Oh well. I know I’ll have more fun with this character than I ever would have on the old one.
The first instance I tried was Ragefire Chasm and I was surprisingly pretty nervous about it. I suppose I thought that tanking was some long lost secret that no one ever taught me. As you may know from previous posts, I tend to get that way until I get used to doing something, and this was no exception. I let everyone know that I’ve never tanked before and then pulled my first mob. At first I was very careful and only pulled one mob at a time to minimize my damage. Lucky for me, most of the mobs were very spread out which I thought was a nice introduction to learning how to tank. After a few RFC runs though I was charging right in and doing some chain pulls.
Huntards:
The Dinosaur Huntard
One thing that I found to be extremely surprising is that so many people pulled groups of mobs before I could, and effectively ruined my threat generation. I thought that it may have just been a low-level thing, but it turns out I saw it pretty consistently until I hit about level 25 or so. Make of it what you will, but the main culprit was always a hunter. And, for the record, you can’t rain Misdirection until you’re a level 70 hunter so they obviously weren’t trying to help me. What made things even stranger was that even after I and other members of the group warned them, they still continued pulling. The most extreme case of this was in Deadmines where the whole group decided to let the huntard tank a few mobs if that’s what they really wanted to do. They quickly died and ragequit and we continued on our merry way.
However, I can’t say that I’ve never done this before myself. There was a time during my first 5-man instance, Deadmines, where I pulled before the tank because I wanted to help out and didn’t understand threat mechanics. In my mind, I felt bad for letting the tank do all the work and simply wanted to help him out. At this point in time I had no concept whatsoever about what threat was. After getting yelled at a bit in chat I instantly fell back and played the role of a good DPS. What I’ve been seeing lately though just seems to be pure ignorance and unwillingness to cooperate.
Lazy Rogues:
Another one of my pet peeves as of late is rogues not doing anything in instances. It seems that every time I look over at the rogue as I’m in mid-fight, he’s just standing in the corner cloaked not attacking anything. In another case the rogue pulled groups of mobs before I could, which led to more of the problems that I mentioned before. I haven’t brought up recount yet to confirm their slacking, partly because I’m too busy and also because I wouldn’t really even know what good DPS at level 26 would look like. I will say however that it’s gotten pretty old already and gives new meaning to being carried through instances.
Well, thanks for reading the blog as always. I plan on running almost exclusively with this tank and I can’t wait to get him up to heroic level. I’m sure the learning process will be pretty interesting and should provide for some good stories, which I’ll of course relay here on Thoughts of Warcraft.
Until next time.
Brad
Dotonbori in Osaka
It’s been a little while since the last update so here’s what’s been going on lately in WoW and life for me.
The Big Trip To West Japan:
Over the Christmas break I took a trip to west Japan just like I did last year. We bought something called the Seishun Juhachi Kippu which I highly recommend. Basically it’s a ticket to ride the slow local trains all you want for five non-consecutive days, and it’s only about $100 which is great. We went to Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto and spent about a week traveling. It was great fun and certainly something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life, however if it didn’t pan out I think I would have been pretty happy just to sit at home and play WoW for a week and relax.
Some of the stories from the trip are a little too wild to blog about, but let’s just say that a good time was had by all. Some highlights include crazy times at karaoke, eating miso katsu in Nagoya, and being covered in pigeons in a park.
Now for WoW stuff.
My priest, Truckspank, is now geared to the teeth from emblems and although I enjoy healing heroics a ton, there is now little to no incentive to continue doing so. I even spent about 40 emblems or so to get exalted with the Sons of Hodir for the shoulder enchants. One thing I like about that is that the enchants are BOA so I bought two and sent one off to my mage, Chipdipson. I suppose I could try to keep doing one heroic a day for the emblems of frost seeing as I’m only about 6 days away from getting a new cloak. I suppose I just don’t really care too much about it.
I guess I could convert some emblems down and get more heirloom chest pieces. Maybe I’ll give that a shot. So far most of my heirloom pieces are only from the Wintergrasp shards that drop from the bosses occasionally.
Despite the long wait to queue for dungeons as DPS, I’ve managed to get my mage pretty well geared up which is nice. There is still a lot of room for gear improvement, but in the interest of time management I think I’m just gonna let him sit for awhile. Although he’s a lot of fun to play, I’d have to say that I prefer to plays priests now. It may sound a little strange, but sometimes I feel more pressure to pay attention when I play a DPS classes which may be the result of having an overgeared priest. Usually I can just throw a couple heals out and just chill.
As for WoW in general, one problem that’s happened to me a few times now is instant boredom and overall lack of interest once I feel that my character is “maxed out” with gear. Sure there’s always raiding to do, but I’ve never really had the time to devout to that even on a very casual level. So I decided to level up on my alts and put my two 80s on hold for a little bit until whenever I feel like playing them again.
Partydoctor?
Alts:
Lately I solely been playing my druid, Partydoctor, and getting him leveled up. He’s currently at about 38 and specced for healing so I can get into groups faster via the LFD tool. I had initially considered dual speccing him as DPS or a tank but I think I’m going to save the gold for later. I came to this conclusion for two reasons. The first being that queueing as DPS takes forever and the second being that it seems like leather tanking gear rarely drops. I’m also not too fond of the druid’s tanking mechanics. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about not being able to see your gear and the same animations and I think I’d agree with them.
So far healing as a druid is pretty fun, but vastly different from a priest. I think overall I still prefer the priest, but I have hope that druid healing will become more fun as I level up some new skills. I did however have to do a little bit of research to figure out how to maximize my spells. One mistake I made was I was trying to use Healing Touch (the really long cast heal) as a sort of flash heal when the tank was getting pretty low. The long cast time really makes this an almost useless spell so I glyphed for Regrowth and now use that as my spam healing spell. I’m also pretty excited about healing as a tree in level 80 PVP. It’s been quite a while since I’ve done any PVP so that should be fun.
I’ve also been thinking about tanking a lot lately and have decided to try it out on a paladin. I currently have a level 21 human paladin named Varlant that I hate for several reasons. The first reason is that I give all of my characters funny names that are inspired by podcasts. So far some of these include Chipdipson, Truckspank, Partydoctor, and Phillyboyroy. As you can see, the name Varlant really doesn’t mesh with the lighthearted vibe of my other characters. The second reason is the look of humans in game. For whatever reason I recently took a liking to draenai characters so I think I’m going to delete the level 21 and make a new draenai. The draenai racial healing buff can come in handy as well. With a bunch of heirloom gear to go around, I’m sure I can get a new character up to 21 in no time.
One problem however is that I really have no idea how to tank and it seems a little intimidating. I’m trying to read up on some basic strategies on blogs and hopefully it won’t be too bad. I figure that if I learned to heal pretty quickly, there shouldn’t be too much stopping me from learning how to be a badass tank. I’m mainly interested in tanking to get groups faster via LFD and to learn another aspect of the game.
Well that’s gonna do it for this post. Thanks for reading!
http://thoughtsofwarcraft.wordpress.com
Brad
Here’s an old picture I took after a patch. That’s all.
Yeah, it's kinda like that.
I recently found myself with about 600 stone keeper’s shards on my priest so I decided to buy the heirloom leather shoulders and caster mace and sent them off to my druid in training, Partydoctor. It’s a shame that there isn’t more stuff you can buy with the shards, but I suppose I’ll keep buying heirloom gear for the hell of it whenever I can. So far I have quite the collection: leather and cloth shoulders, sword, mace, haste trinket, and the bow.
So with this newly acquired gear I queued up for a random dungeon and got Razorfen Kraul which was pretty fun. I’ve run the instance a couple times before, but it still felt pretty new to me. It all went pretty well there with the exception of a couple crazy trash pulls. The extra loot reward at the end was also pretty good and I was able to get some blue gloves. I’m not sure if I’ll see it through, but I’d love to run all of the 5-man content from beginning to end on this character. We’ll see what happens.
I’m leveling the druid as a healer to find groups faster which seems to help cut the wait time down a bit. Perhaps it will become more fun as I level up, but so far I’m not really a fan of healing as a druid. At level 27 I pretty much have only three healing spells which feels limiting compared to the arsenal that I have while healing as a holy priest. I know a little bit about some of the later spells you get that can speed things up, but for now it seems pretty clunky and slow to me. Mana is also an issue as well. It seemed I went /oom after nearly every decent sized pull.
NO MANA FOR YOU!!
The second instance I was put in was Gnomergan. It was slow going from the beginning which was a real pain. The tank instantly dropped group upon seeing what instance it was so the other druid in the group tried his hand at tanking for a bit. We later got a tank but there was a lot of confusion as to what to do and where to go and he had a bit of a sour attitude. When we finally made it to the bottom area, the hunter’s pet aggroed most of the room which almost caused a wipe. After this happened, the tank apparently went afk for about 10 minutes at which point I left.
Although it was fun to run some lower level instances again, one thing I noticed was that there seemed to be a lot more drama over loot than usual. As where I’ve seen a lot of people drop group before rolling on loot in 5-man heroics, small fights ensued over gear that would probably only be used for but a couple levels. I can’t really understand it. Sure getting new gear helps, but I’ll remember whether I had a good or bad experience a lot longer than the name of that new piece of loot.
I’m still hopeful that druid healing will be fun eventually since it seems that most druids are fanatical about the HOTs. If I see the druid all the way to 80, I just hope that I can still remember how to heal as a holy priest.
As always, thanks for reading Thoughts of Warcraft. See ya next time. http://thoughtsofwarcraft.wordpress.com.
