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Posts with tag t5

The one you never win


Recently the guild hit Supremus again -- or, I should say, Supremus hit us. You'd think this would be a fairly easy fight to master. Supremus has two phases: the first is a lot like Gruul except with no cave-ins, knockback, or Shatter, and during the second phase, he aggros random people and tries to reach them while moving at the approximate pace of a snail. Oh, and he sprouts volcanoes under other players that you have to avoid. These two phases alternate until he's a giant pile of rubble in Black Temple's scenic courtyard.

Yep. Easy.

We can't do it.

The guild's been farming Black Temple for months and most of the usual roster is rocking at least 3 or 4 pieces of Tier 6 -- yet the vast majority of our Supremus fights end with more than half the raid taking a dirt nap. We've reached the point where even this is still usually a one-shot, but it's more than a little disturbing. How can you one-shot Illidan with 24 people still alive...and somehow fail to steamroll the giant McLootLoot?

To be fair, it's not just raids. I've seen players break out in a cold sweat over Talon King Ikiss on heroic Sethekk (which always confused me; the great secret of the fight consists of tanking him in the doorway). Others cite Grandmaster Vorpil, the event before the second boss in Blood Furnace when you don't have a Paladin tank, or Warbringer O'mrogg on heroic Shattered Halls (actually, all of Shattered Halls can pretty much bite me. I hate tanking that place). My own personal nemesis is Vexallus on heroic Magisters' Terrace. I've even taken a group with two mages and a rogue in T5/T6 here and wiped 3 times. What gives?

Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk?


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:

Continue reading Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk?

Are hybrid tanks going to *be* left behind?


In the wake of Alex Ziebart's recent post for Hybrid Theory, we received a number of comments from paladins on their ability to main-tank a 25-man raid. Behind the scenes, the subject was equally controversial; many of us here play tanks and we all feel passionate about our classes. An email discussion started about hybrid tanks in general, and it got to be so interesting that we were threatened with being fired if we didn't post it we were asked to share it with our readers.

Warriors? Druids? Paladins? And the people who love them? This one's for you. Now, I've previously fielded complaints that my posts are too long, so far warning; if you're not in the mood for a pretty thorough look at the current state of hybrid tanking, you'll probably want to keep moving. If you play any tank at all, just want to know more about them and the people who choose to play tanks, or are considering rolling a tank class, I hope you find the following to be of interest.

Please note that the headers below are not, as in portions of Matthew Rossi's post, quotes from anybody involved; they're just a means of helping me organize my thoughts and translate our email conversations into the blogging format. I'm attempting to condense the content of multiple email conversations.

My perspective on Alex's post

For reference, my main is a tanking feral druid in a Tier 6 raiding guild. Our main tank is a protection paladin, and we're on Reliquary of Souls at the moment. This guy main-tanked Vashj, main-tanked Kael for a certain period until we found out his computer settings made it really tough for him to see Flamestrikes (so we substituted a warrior for that reason, not because of the pally/warrior divide), and has main-tanked most of Hyjal and a fairish amount of Black Temple.

More past the cut.

Continue reading Are hybrid tanks going to *be* left behind?

Spiritual Guidance: Priest sets (part two)


Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

The archaic stuff out of the way, in part two of this two-part series we turn to the hot new stuff: the Priest sets from the Burning Crusade. BC made one tremendous improvement in the way class sets were handled: raid gear for off-specs. For us men and women of the cloth, that means Tier 4, 5, and 6, as well as Arena gear, are available in versions befitting both healing and shadow priests.
As before, I'll start with the epic raid gear, T4, T5, and T6, pictured above from left to right. They really went crazy with the shoulders, didn't they?

Continue reading Spiritual Guidance: Priest sets (part two)

PTR notes: Johnny McWeaksauce wants you to have T5

Well, this is certainly an innovative solution. Tonight the Black Temple opened on the test realms. However, Blizz seems to have realized that most people would not be sufficiently geared to test it out. So what did they do? Gave everyone free Tier 5 gear! That's right, if you go to the Terrace of Light (or the banks, or the inns) in Shattrath on the test realms, there is an NPC named Johnny McWeaksauce handing out free boxes full of T5 tokens and comparable items to fill the other slots, along with Black Temple keys.

There's a slight catch: you need to be honored with the Violet Eye. Basically, this means Blizzard is selecting for people with some experience raiding Karazhan. You don't need that much raiding experience, though -- I got Honored clearing through Curator twice. Also, as you might expect, seemingly every single character on the PTR is either at McWeaksauce or the T5 vendors, resulting in horrendous lag and mountains of "This item is busy" errors. In fact, at this time, I still haven't managed to get my actual T5 -- it took a couple minutes of spam-clicking just to get the box of tokens. They tried to fix it by replicating Jimmy many times, but the bottleneck now is the T5 vendors. There's a few more of them, but not near enough.

Anyway, if you're Honored or above with the Violet Eye and want to see what it's like to have phat epics, log on and try it out! Or, to save much frustration, wait a day or so. And here's a few tips:
  • If you want cash for your epic mount or whatever on the PTR, you can grab some boxes of gear from Johnny and just vendor the gear. Free boxes of epics + epics sell for cash = profit.
  • If you're an off-spec (Shadow Priest, Feral Druid), you can grab the box for your class to get the T5 gear and then pick an appropriate other class to get their box for gear for other slots. (Shadow Priests, for instance: grab a Priest box and a Warlock or Mage box.)
  • There aren't any vendors for enchants or high-quality gems.


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