Tank Talk is WoW Insider's new raid-tanking column, promising you an exciting and educational look at the world of getting the stuffing thrashed out of you in a 10- or 25-man raid. The column will be rotated amongst Matthew Rossi (Warrior/Paladin), Adam Holisky (Warrior), Michael Gray (Paladin), and myself (Druid). Our aim is to use this column to debate and discuss class differences, raid-tanking strategies, tips, tricks, and news concerning all things meatshieldish. At least, that's what the others said they were doing. I intend to use it mostly as a soapbox to complain. Absolute power tends to......something something.
Welcome to Tank Talk. I am your bear Druid hostess for this week, with a topic that occurred to me while reading a recent article here on the site. Eliah Hecht wrote that his guild is facing a not-uncommon tank shortage and that he has considered the possibility of leveling a tanking class to 70 before Wrath, or tanking on a Death Knight afterwards. A number of people on my server and in my guild have talked about doing the same thing, or switching mains once Wrath hits. With so many people playing Death Knights, I think it's very possible that more people will discover they enjoy -- or at least, don't mind -- tanking, and may seek to do so in a raid environment without necessarily knowing what they've really signed up for.
From those of us who have tanked raid content in vanilla WoW or BC, here are the 10 questions you'll want to ask yourself if you're considering the possibility of tanking serious raid content:
I love hotfixes. They're like patches you don't have to wait for. Just posted by Daelo, WoW's lead encounter designer (who I've been seeing a lot of lately, but don't remember seeing much before) is a brief account of hotfixes to Archimonde and the Eredar Twins. For Archie:
We just implemented a hotfix for all realms that makes Archimonde's doomfires no longer be able to move right through him after they spawn. Their movement should now be much more consistent with the previous patch's behavior, and melee should have a bit easier time dodging the doomfires as a result of the change.
He goes on to note that any other problems people might have noticed have been un-reproduceable at Blizz HQ, but they're still keeping an eye on them. As for the Eredar Twins, they "hotfixed a bug in the Eredar Twins encounter that prevent a Hunter's Feign Death ability from working if Lady Sacrolash was alive." Nuff said there. These fixes should, as far as I can tell, be live now on the US and the EU realms.
Maintenance day is underway until 2pET/11aPT and many WoW fans are searching for something to do, while players with day jobs log on to point out that they can never play during these hours. Fortunately, we have lots going on today, as well as some highlights from the past week that you won't want to miss.
Congratulations to Premonition of Alleria on the first kill of the Eredar Twins in the US! From what I hear, it was a tight race to first place yesterday, but Premonition was ahead of the pack.
I must add, it's neat to see some of the old school sets in many of these first-kill shots. They're still way cool, but you can see Blizzard's trend of making things more and more over the top as WoW evolves. I can't honestly say I have a problem with that. As much as I adore Faith, Absolution blows it away as far as style and the smaller details.
This puts the first gate opening time at just about 2 weeks (the patch went live on March 25th, as you recall). If the next two gates come down just as fast, we may see a world first Kil'jaedan kill somewhere around early May. Then again, I imagine Blizzard wants to drag stuff out just a tiny bit so that they don't need to put out a patch 2.5 with new content between now and the release of Wrath of the Lich King.
After writing one of my first articles on an essay penned by Neg, one of Nihilum's resto Shaman, I was surprised and heartened to see him get in touch. We talked about a few matters related to our pieces and I asked him if he would mind answering some questions about what the guild's been up to since we spoke to them last. We hadn't heard much about Nihilum on the PTR (Vis Maior was the guild steamrolling the content this time out), but they've been upgrading and expanding their website, and one of the 2.4 raiding screenshots on Wowwiki belongs to them, so they've obviously been busy. It had also become clear that Awake, arguably their most high profile member, had left the guild, and I was curious about what was going on.
Neg very graciously answered my questions, which you'll find below the cut. Read on for his take on Sunwell Plateau and his favorite boss, Awake's departure, resto Shamans versus holy Paladins, picking up an enhancement Shaman and the class in PvP, various boss encounters, and WoW as an e-sport.
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