Key warrior tank abilties: the short version

I was inspired by a post Big Bear Butt made where he described the key bear tanking abilities with a simple one line explanation, and decided I’d make my own version of this for warrior tanks.  There are plenty of great in depths guides out there, and most of them can be found over at Tankspot, but this little guide is meant to be a quick reference.  A way to orient yourselves to the vary basics of warrior tanking.  This quick-reference doesn’t involve any theory crafting, number crunching, or long winded discussions of the combat table.  It’s just a quick and dirty explanation of the ability and where/how to use them.

That's right, I tanked it.

I tanked something today for the first time since that horrifying heroic ToC run a few months back.  I was mulling about Dalaran, feeling sorry for myself, wishing I had something to do when I got a tell from someone asking me if I wanted to tank heroic Halls of Lightning.  I receive a lot of tells from people asking if I can tank something, but that naturally comes with the territory of being a tank.  In the past little while I have turned them all down.  Partly because many of the requests are for raids I’m not geared for, but most of the time it’s because I didn’t want to be knocked around like I had been in the ToC run.  So my default lately has been to just say, “I’m not geared for it” and go back to working on the Loremaster.

However, now that I’m done with that, I find myself with nothing to do.  Nothing to do, no one to talk to…sorry, didn’t mean to go down the sad road from my last post again…anyway…while most of the time I would have brushed it off, this time I replied, “sure”.

I’m really glad I did.  There wasn’t anything particularly spectacular about the run.  We got in, moved through the instance, down the bosses, had a few wipes on the boss due to a new and still learning healer, and then we were done.  But it felt so natural.  It felt right.  I thought I would struggle to get the run finished and that I would be fighting for aggro against better geared players.  But I managed it will.  Yes, the first few pulls were a little sloppy, and there were a couple pulls where the mobs got away from me.  Mostly though, I tanked it like I had any other instance.

What I’m getting at is I realized how much I missed it.  I love tanking.  I love the challenge.  I love leading the groups through an instance, picking and choosing the path we take, deciding who to take down, setting the pace of things–I really love it.  Despite all the crap I’ve experienced around it I still have this burning passion inside me.  This fire in my belly that nearly burned out.  Like the episode of Dr. Who where they get pulled into an alternate dimension and it looks like the TARDIS has died but the find a tiny little bit of it still alive.  Ok…wow…that was  super nerd moment.  Nevertheless, I stand behind the analogy.

I’m hoping it’s a sign of things to come.  That things are going to start looking up again and that I’ll be excited to “let the dragon smash me in the face while you stab it in the ass.”  The next step I suppose is to find a new core group of friends.  People like Oz, and Wally, and Trin, and even Adelpha.  And find a new guild, one where I can have the happy social experience without having to be the man in charge.

It’s nice to feel like happy things are possible again.

‘[Insert clever sign off phrase here]“

~Fizz

So anyway….

I haven’t been tanking much lately.  Like at all.  Well, I’ve been running the Headless Horseman every day to get that damn pet and helmet (just got it! yay!) to drop, but that doesn’t really count.  No, the last run I actually remember going on was Heroic Trial of the Champion, sometime in the beginning of September (just after my trouble with Arthas).  So it’s been a bit.  Here’s what went happened (hmmm, suddenly I feel a little like Monk):

I have always been very self conscious about tanking.  Well, in PuGs anyway.  I know I’m a good tank, probably better than most simply based on my awareness of the rest of the group (hmm, you seem to be out of mana…maybe I’ll stop for a sec).  And when I run with guildies or friends I’m always confident and sure of myself.  But many times when I get into a PuG I just freeze up a little and become much more susceptible to criticism.  This is especially true when I get with groups where I know people have run Ulduar.  Whether they say anything or not, I tend to project my own assumptions that since they have run Ulduar they are running with better tanks, more experienced tanks, [insert I'm not good enough statement] tanks.  Most of the time people are pleasant about things and just want to get the run done.  But if anything goes wrong, if they don’t immediately blame the healer, they blame the tank.  Having played both, there is a distinct difference in the criticism.  When I am healing and screw up, if the blame is placed on me typically all that is said is, “Nice heals” (said snarky), or “Next time, heal me”, or “Dude, why the #%!@ did you let me die?”, etc.  And it usually ends there.  But when I get criticized as a tank the comments are much more…thorough. “Dude pay attention.” “Keep them off me.” “I don’t think your gear is good enough for this.” “Are you even def capped?” “Do you even know the proper rotations?” “You don’t know these fights do you?” “What, did you just turn level 80?”

Well anyway, I was in a PuG for heroic ToC.  I had run regular ToC over and over and over again.  Not only that, I had run it almost every day since the patch came out.  I say this as a preface to establish that I had run it before, on heroic, and had been successful many times.  But on this particular day the run was not going well.  We were having trouble with the champions.  We had a warrior, rogue, shaman combo (which in my opinion is the hardest combo).  The rest of the group greatly outgeared me, so I was having trouble holding threat against their high dps.  We wiped once.  I told them the issue, and said, “if you just slow down a little with the dps, we’ll get past this.”  They scoffed a little.  We went again.  They didn’t slow down.  We wiped.  The first thing the healer said to me was, “You aren’t geared enough for this.”  And not in whisper, in party chat.  Apparently that left it open for the rest of the group to rail into me.  It was crazy.  It was as if they had decided to let out every nasty thing they had ever held back but had wanted to tell their tank.  I won’t repeat what they said, as most of it isn’t appropriate for PG audiences.  Or even PG-13 audiences.  At first I let it go, cause I’ve had people rail against me in the past.  But after each person got in a good shot and then they started in for another round, I started to defend myself.  That seemed to just draw out their venom even worse.

And then they booted me.

It really shook me up.  Normally I can shake these off after a few days.  But with my string of unsuccessful events tanking during that time just made it impossible to get past.  And combine that with the great success that I was having on my shaman–why should I bother to put up with tanking where everything is negative, unsuccessful, and unappreciated when I can go heal where I am valued, appreciated, and dare I say, needed?

I don’t know as if I’m really going anywhere with this.  I guess I just felt like getting this off my chest.  I’m not posting this to give some dramatic announcement that I’m retiring from tanking forever, or that I’m making my triumphant return to daily tanking.  Mostly I just feel like venting.

And you know, I feel much better now.  Thanks Internet, for listening.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]“

~Fizz

The (de)evolution of my UI

It’s been quite a while since I started playing WoW.  In that time the way that I interface with the game has undergone some significant changes.  I started out, as most everyone does, just having the default settings on the game enabled.  Over time I discovered there were a number of options I could change.  The day I found out I could have all my action bars displayed at the same time was almost as exciting as killing Kael’thas for the first time.  And when I figured out I could re-size the chat window?  Man, it was like I had lead the Gnomes to victory in retaking Gnomeregan!

Eventually I learned about the glory of addons.  I had started out very skeptical of addons because my roommate was seriously opposed to them.  But I finally got over my initial doubts and took the plunge.  My very first addon was Auctioneer.  It was totally awesome.  I won’t go in to why now, but it got me hooked.  From there I got Questhelper, and Cartographer, and many more.  It really enhanced my game play, and made my game-time much more productive and enjoyable.

However.

Recently everything has become so darn cluttered that it’s been difficult to keep track of which addon is doing what; not to mention all the Lua errors I’m getting.  And I’m tired of seeing this message in the chat log: “Interface Failed Because of an Addon.”  So I have decided to strip out every addon I have ever installed, delete my WTF, Interface, and Cache folders and start rebuilding my UI/addons from scratch.  Well, sort of.  I’m not going to be programming any of these addons, but you get what I mean.  And if I’m really feeling adventurous I might get rid of, and re-do all my key-bindings.  But that’s a separate topic altogether.

Along the way, I thought it might be interesting to chronicle the process and share what I learn about the addons I try.  Cause we learn when we share right?  Sometimes I may review one addon and delve deeply into all its settings and how you can get the most out of it.  Sometimes I may compare a bunch of addons that I’m trying out and talk about their pros and cons.  And if anyone has comments, advice, critiques, other addons to suggest, better ways of configuring, etc, then by all means share them.  Even if you come across these posts months down the road.

But before I do that, I think I’m gonna do a bit of a pre-post.  You know, talk about addons in general, act like I have some sort of knowledge.  I shall wax philosophic in a verbose and pontificating affectation upon the thesis of the variegated methods of managing and customizing the user interface.  (I’m gonna talk about addons & U/I’s.)

Speaking of hating Arthas (aka what makes a bad tank?)

In my last post I talked about a very unfortunate Culling of Stratholme run that went south because Arthas bugged out.  But I got to thinking and I realized something.

Arthas is the worst tank ever.

Well, ok, maybe not the worst ever, but he’s not exactly going to be front running any top-rated guilds any time soon.  He does lack some serious skills as a tank.  He runs off all wily nilly, giving no thought or heed to his group mates, pulling mob after mob without waiting for anything.  And even when he does give a ‘moment to clear your lungs’ he doesn’t actually give you all that much time, and half the time he doesn’t actually stop–he pulls the closest zombies, often keeping you in combat so you can’t eat or drink

It got me thinking, what exactly makes a bad tank?  I’m sure everyone has run across a few doosies, each tied to unique and often very entertaining stories.  But in each story there was something specific the tank did or didn’t do that caused the disaster.  So I asked my guild mates to see if they had any insight on what tanks do that make them ‘bad’.