I was doing my near daily perusing of my favorite Blue Tracker and I ran across a little gem. Attunements have always been a place of contention for a lot of people (the recent removal of the attunement for Black Temple and Hyjal being a big one) but along with the proposed one-hour limit on 5-mans, this new change to attunements really does make Wrath of the Lich King much more accessible to people who can’t play the game as a second job.
The only thing that is close to an attuned in Wrath of the Lich King is the Malygos encounter. For that encounter, you need one person who has completed the quest to call him into the fight. It’s very similar to the Nightbane requirement from Karazhan in TBC.
There aren’t any other attunements.
Personally, I’m stoked. I know a lot of the more hardcore raiding guilds are going to see this as Blizzard catering to “casuals” or “carebears” but for myself and my guild this is really great news.
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If you are a fairly active guild with over 40 or 50 active accounts in it, I think it would behoove you greatly to start having monthly guild meetings. If you have a fairly open-door policy during the meeting it will allow your guild members to get a lot of their grievances out into the open and help them feel better about their place in the guild. This is also the best time to tell them about important guild changes such as raiding night rotation, introduce new class leaders, etc.
Here are some tips I suggest for smooth-running guild meetings:
- Have it in-game, in Vent and in an interesting locations. We have a certain floating island in Nagrand that we use each month. When people show up, they can chill by goofing off with emoticons or dueling while the nitty-gritty gets taken care of in Vent. This has also led to at least one comical situation where a PvP-flagged Alliance character happened to come check out our little party. Finally, it is quite heartening to see just how many people have your guild name and wear your tabard.
- Have an agenda lined up. Let the guild members have a system for letting you know what they want to talk about prior to the meeting taking place. This helps keep the meeting running smoothly and quickly. What I do is have members of the guild message me in-game with the subject they would like to bring up. I then keep all of that information in a text file on my desktop that is fast and easy to bring up in the middle of the meeting. In case of a time crunch, the people who email me questions and are added to the agenda get priority over the people who bring stuff up at the meetings.
- Make it respectful. It should be made very clear that the person with the floor isn’t to be interrupted during their initial schpeel. Once they are done open the floor to questions but try very hard to limit off-topic conversation in Vent. Questions should be asked and answered in an intelligent manner; this is not the time for “lawlz boobies” comments.
- Don’t keep people for too long. If people start to get really ansy then don’t be afraid to call the meeting. There is nothing wrong with coming back and visiting more topics in a thread on the guild forums or saving it until next month’s meeting.
That should just about cover the basics. I highly recommend running a meeting or two and seeing how this works out with your guild, I can guarentee you that it will help increase the satisfaction of your guild overall and might help you get people to come forward who otherwise wouldn’t.
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If you’ve read my previous posts about the wild speculation revolving around Revenge and Thunder Clap, look no further for the rumors have been confirmed as fact!
Ghostwalker’s latest post leaves us sad at the change to Armored to the Teeth but oh so excited over the changes to Shield Slam, Revenge and, especially, Thunder Clap. Tanking in the expansion just keeps getting better and better than ever before.
Armored to the Teeth — Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn’t want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It’s still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.
EDIT: I meant 2 AP : 360 per talent point. My point was that we understand 1 Str > 2 AP for warriors.
Farewell Armored to the Teeth, we barely knew you. Still great for the added AP for threat but falling way behind the golden talent it was before since it will no longer help us absorb more damage or raise our SBV.
Thunder Clap — Increase in threat generation. No target limit. Swipe gets the same treatment. With these changes, all 4 tank classes should be able to generate very respectable AE threat. Consecration is still a little higher in threat to account for Thunder Clap’s debuff.
You read that right: the target limit has been removed from Thunder Clap. I can almost hear the rejoicing of all tanking warriors around the globe. My macro for Challenging Shout that screams “I’M A PALADIN!” seems so ironic now.
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We were doing very well in Zul’Aman today trying to get our guild’s first bear mount (which we missed by about a minute I should add but that’s a different story) and after the timed event we went to Zul’Jin where I put on my DPS gear to break up the monotony that sometimes comes with tanking for months and months on end.
It was all going so very well during Phase One where he’s in the troll form when suddenly I was so rudely reminded of the primary reason I don’t like DPSing, and that would be the view…
Popularity: 3% [?]
It’s fun? No really. Paladin healing may seem pretty simple since you only have two basic healing spells; a small fast one and a bigger slow one. It’s all about the choices you make and how quickly you can make them. You are a tank healer so your target rarely changes, you need to know when it’s okay to change targets and when you must spam heal your tank.
Generally as a Paladin you deal with two kinds of damage on your tanks. The first is big spike damage which requires a mixture of Holy Lights and Flash of Lights. With this type of damage you must keep your Light’s Grace buff up at all times. The other type of damage you can see is a steady predictable flow. Once you’ve learned the encounter you should be able to predict how much damage the tank will be taking and you can then spam that heal on your tank. Most fights have a mixture of these two types of damage requiring you to switch back and forth between these healing styles instantly.
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I said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a good day to be a Protection-specced Warrior. Blizzard is giving us so much love that I hardly even notice the nerf to Vigilance.
This was a post about the Glyph of Resonating Power which in past builds was going to double the amount of targets Thunder Clap would hit from four to eight and I was excited but this is something else:
It’s not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that’s another topic.
Ghostcrawler here is telling us that it’s been changed to increase the radius of Thunder Clap and seems to be eluding to the fact that they are going to be removing the target limit from Thunder Clap. This is amazing news!
This next post is about the fact that no one seems to be using Revenge anymore in tanking rotations on the Beta servers. Apparently Devastate procs Sword and Board so much (and Revenge’s damage hasn’t been buff enough) that Revenge, previously our best threat-to-rage ability, is sitting around not being used. Blizzard solution:
We will probably add Revenge to S+B to make sure it gets used more (and might buff it’s AP coefficient a tad).
Revenge possibly proccing Sword and Board for even more Shield Slams!? Finally we’re going to be bashing stuff with our shield continually. I love it!
All of these changes are really making me excited to stay Protection-specced in the expansion.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Note: This post will be obsolete come the next beta build. Armored to the Teeth has been changed from Strength to Attack Power, making a decent threat talent but no longer giving any of the previous survivability bonuses.
With all of the changes coming out in 3.0 and the expansion, it’s a great time to be a protection warrior. We’ve gotten a lot of buffs, tons of our old problems are being solved and we’re getting some neat tricks to use.
Recently we’ve seen the addition of Armored to the Teeth which is a talent that all warriors, regardless of spec, are now drooling over. With 3/3 points in the talent, we’ll be getting three points of strength for every 400 points of armor. Since strength is going to be on all of our gear and nearly every single tanking ability will scale with attack power, this could mean huge gains for us protection-specced warriors!
If you look at my armory page you’ll notice I have 18,415 armor unbuffed. If you take 18,415 and divide by 400 you get 46 (rounded down), multiply that by three and you get 138 added strength! That’s more damage absorbed during a block, more attack power which means more threat and more damage output. Keep in mind this is only looking level 70 T5/T6 gear levels, T8 and T9 are going to get down-right ridiculous.
If we look at the armor difference between the Tankatronic Goggles and the new level 450 Engineering goggles, the Armored Titanium Goggles, you’ll see that there is a 71% armor increase between the two. Now, if we assume that this is the normal armor increase from level 70 gear to level 80 gear then we’ll see an approximate 236 stength assuming the warrior is in gear equivalent to what I’m wearing now.
Those are huge increases, it means great things and for a measly three talent points? Yes, please.
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Short answer: Because I was bored DPSing, our guild needed another tank and Polgera wanted me to level a character with her.
Long answer: When I started playing on Uldum I leveled up a Troll Hunter to 70, got him prepped for Karazhan and not long after Starfish Lovesong started making some serious headway there when the majority of us hadn’t done any raiding in the past. It was new and exciting, I was topping the DPS meters (althought Plastered and Sechymonkey made it hard enough to keep that title) and everyone was having a great time.
At the time Starfish Lovesong was a small guild and we didn’t have the numbers to move up into the realm of 25-man content. We did a number of Gruul and Magtheridon runs with other small guilds but it quickly became clear that our main tank was getting burnt out doing the same content over and over. Around this time I was getting bored raiding as a hunter because spamming a macro over and over just wasn’t that exciting to me anymore, I wanted to be more involved so I stepped up and rolled a new warrior.
The rest is history, really. I love being a tank because of it’s dynamic between everyone: the DPS, the other tanks and especially the healers. I love having to make split-second decisions on what abilities to use in what situations, it’s frightening and exciting the fact that 24 other people have put their virtual lives in my hands.
It sure as shit beats spamming “~” over and over until a boss dies. 
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I am frequently asked what I feel are “must have” tanking addons but it isn’t quite that simple. I use a number of addons during a raid or a five-man and they are pretty much broken down into two catagories: tanking and raid leading and some of the mods crossover between the two.
Without further adieu, here’s my list:
Eavesdrop – Eavesdrop is a combat log “replacement”, if you will. It is absolutely fantastic for seeing incoming damage, incoming heals and outgoing damage in a very simple and easy-to-read format. Gives you a nice little summary after a fight has completed and it stores information for a long time so you can go back and see why you died. Was it a series of crushing blows? Didn’t get heals? Someone step in Flame Wreath? Remember that you can shift-click on a line and paste it into raid chat. I cannot recommend this addon enough.
Omen – You all saw this one coming but I have to write it up anyway. Omen is a threat meter so you can see just how quickly the DPS is catching up and it’s perfect for fights like Void Reaver or Bloodboil where you need to know exactly where everyone’s threat is at the time. Do not log into WoW without this addon.
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This is the inagural post of the Orly Factor blog. This site is going to be written by two people who play WoW; a healer and a tank who are also a couple and live in the same house. We are going to give out tips on how to tank and heal, problems we have faced as officers in our guild, tips for a smooth raid and any number of other things we feel is worthy of writing about as long as it relates to World of Warcraft.
Popularity: 8% [?]